I howled. “Two! There’re two of them in the bedroom!”
“Da, two!” he replied, his deep voice booming. The curving saber blade of Esperacchius rode at his hip and he managed it with thoughtless, instinctive skill as he went through the window. He was back a moment later, with Mrs. Willoughby draped over one shoulder, while he supported most of Mr. Willoughby’s staggering body with the other.
Sanya went first, the old woman hanging limply over his shoulder, so that he could help Mr. Willoughby creep out the window and onto the ladder. They came down slowly and carefully, and as Sanya carefully laid the old woman out onto the grass, the first of the emergency response crews arrived.
“God in Heaven,” Mr. S said, weeping openly as she put her hand on Sanya’s arm. “He must have sent you to us, son.”
Sanya smiled at her as he helped Mr. Willoughby lower himself to the ground. Then he turned to my landlady and said, his Russian accent less heavy than the last time I had seen him, “It was probably just a coincidence, ma’am.”
“I don’t believe in those,” said Mrs. Spunkelcrief. “Bless you, son,” she said, and hugged him hard. Her arms couldn’t have gotten around half of him, but Sanya returned the hug gently for a moment.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you should direct the medical technicians to come back here.”
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, releasing him. “But now I have to go get those ambulance boys over here.” She paused and gave me a smile. “And thank you, Harry. Such a good boy.” Then she hurried away.
Mouse came racing around the side of the house where Mrs. S had just gone, and rushed to stand over me, lapping at my face. Molly wasn’t far behind. She let out a little cry and threw her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, God, Harry!” She shouldered Mouse aside and squeezed tight for several seconds. She looked up and said, “Sanya? What are you doing here?”
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Take it easy.”
Molly eased up on her hug. “Sorry.”
“Sanya,” I said, nodding to him. “Thanks for your help.”
“Part of the job, da?” he replied, grinning. “Glad to help.”
“All the same,” I said, my voice rough, “thank you. If anything had happened to them . . .”
“Oh, Harry,” Molly said. She hugged me again.
“Easy, padawan, easy,” I said quietly. “Think you should be careful.”
She drew back with a frown. “Why?”
I took a slow breath and said, very quietly, “I can’t feel my legs.”
29
It didn’t take me long to talk Sanya and Molly out of taking me to the hospital. The Eebs, as it turned out, had shown up, pitched their fire-bomb from a moving car, and kept going, a modus operandi that was consistent with the earlier attempt on my life, except this time they’d been identified. Molly’s description of the thrower was a dead ringer for Esteban.
I had to admit, the vampire couple had a very practical long-term approach to violence—striking at weakness and harassing the victim while exposing themselves to minimal risk. If I’d been a couple of steps higher up when that Molotov hit, I’d be dead, or covered in third-degree burns. Individually, their attempts might not enjoy a high success rate—but they needed to get it right only once.
It would be consistent with that practical, cold-blooded style to keep an eye on the hospitals in order to come finish me off—during surgery, for example, or while I was still in recovery afterward. Sanya, though, had EMT training of some kind. He calmly stole a backboard out of an open ambulance while its techs were seeing to the Willoughbys, and they loaded me onto it in a procedure that Sanya said would protect my spine. It seemed kind of “too little, too late” to me, but I was too tired to rib him over it.
I couldn’t feel anything below the waist, but that apparently didn’t mean that the rest of me got to stop hurting. I felt them carrying the board out, and when I opened my eyes it was only to see nearly a third of the building give way and crash down into the basement—into my apartment. The building was obviously a lost cause. The firemen were focusing on containing the blaze and preventing it from spreading to the nearby homes.
They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he’d