12

I hurried toward the harbor, sleet buffeting me in horizontal waves. I guessed it was mid-morning: The gray sky looked as though someone had turned the dimmer switch up a notch. Above the sea loomed a massive wall of cloud, banded asphalt gray and basalt. I thought of Ilkka, of blood in a blank white corridor, and felt dizzy. Horror, but also desolation at the loss of his gift, that terrible eye for the beauty in extinction.

Something shrieked: I looked up to see the same kind of bird I’d seen earlier with Andrés, luminous white against the lowering clouds. It fought against the gale, eerily suspended in place, until the wind shifted and it shot above the rooftops. When it disappeared, I grimly replayed the TV news in my head.

There’d been no mention of how Ilkka and Suri had been killed, or precisely when. I tried to remember what Ilkka had told me before he left—that his wife was in a meeting, that he’d pick up his son at school, take him to the doctor if he was sick. We would have dinner together later.

Despite the cold, sweat beaded on the back of my neck. Was it supposed to be me dead, and not Suri? Ilkka’s office had been ransacked, and a workroom. I’d bet my Konica that among the missing were the Jólasveinar photos.

Yet Ilkka had insisted that not even his wife knew about those pictures.

I stopped at the verge of the busy road beside the harbor. The sky had taken on an ominous, mineral-green tinge. I waited for a break in the traffic and ran through a slurry of snow and grit, kept running until I reached the water’s edge. I picked my way among rocks and tidal pools, fighting panic. Suri claimed she’d never been downstairs. No one had ever stepped foot into Ilkka’s sanctum but me. No one but me knew those photos were there.…

Anton.

What had I told him?

“He’s got a whole Batcave downstairs. Nice darkroom.”

“… someone else who was interested. A guy, from Oslo, maybe? Someone with very deep pockets.”

“Ilkka and I have a deal,” Anton had said. “You might remind him of that.”

Anton hadn’t made Ilkka a better offer. He’d simply offed him, ransacked the place, grabbed the Yuleboy prints, and fled. That, or he’d planned all along to take out me and Ilkka, hiring someone else who’d mistaken Suri for Cassandra Neary.

By now, they’d know they’d fucked up, and that I was still alive. I stared at the mass of clouds that filled the sky above the North Atlantic.

They weren’t clouds. Above the horizon towered a mountain of jagged flint-gray rock, seamed with crevasses white-streaked with snow. No vegetation, buildings, or power lines, nothing but that menacing promontory and the waste of ice and darkness beyond—the beginning of the end of the world.