“Murder me here, sink me in the lake?” The pistol lifted again.
“Don’t tar me with your brush, you Nazi bitch. I have no intention of harming you.” Ian felt no fear at all, only a humming tension running through him like wire. Was this how Nina felt on her bombing runs, when she cut the engine? He was gliding down now, falling very fast but very sure toward his target. “Put that pistol down, Lorelei Vogt. I know you can shoot either me or your stepdaughter between the eyes at this range, but be aware of this: the moment you do, my partner in the car back there will shoot you. And even if you get the drop on him”—Ian could see her eyes measuring it—“your time running is done. My article exposing you runs in the Boston Globe tomorrow. Page one above the fold, with photographs.” Ian hadn’t written a word in years, but he flung the lie at her with complete assurance. “There won’t be a reader on the East Coast who doesn’t know your face by the end of the week, and after that, the nationals will pick it up. There’s nowhere you will be able to hide, not one corner of this huge country that will not know your face and recoil. That is a promise.”
Click. Jordan snapped the shot right as the look of horror rolled across her stepmother’s face. The pistol jerked in answer, not at Ian this time but at her. “Stop.”
Jordan took a step forward, blond hair blowing. “No.” Click.
The shot deafened, echoing across the water. Ian lunged in front of Jordan, heart hammering, but the shot went wide into the water, a warning. Jordan never flinched, merely reached into her pocket and began calmly loading a new roll of film. Ian had seen photographers moving under shellfire on D-day in the same intense haze, the world narrowed to a lens that felt like a shield before them.
“You have Ruth.” Lorelei Vogt’s voice rose. “You have everything. Take it all and let me go—”
“No. That is not the choice in front of you.” Ian’s voice rose to a whiplash cut. “The choice in front of you is to be charged in Massachusetts for murdering Jordan’s father, or be charged in Austria for war crimes. That is your choice, Lorelei Vogt. That is the only choice you have left in this life.”
Click. Click. Click.
There was a moment he thought she was going to crack—a quiver across that smooth face, the even smoother gaze. Then resolve seemed to sheathe her in ice, chin lifting, pistol rising toward her own head, and Ian saw she was going to escape. She would escape justice and courtrooms and the world’s hatred with a bullet, and he shouted without words because her death wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, but even though he was running to close the distance between them, the barrel was already reaching the underside of her chin.
Then a rising shriek ripped the air, and they all saw what had just crawled out of the lake onto the end of the dock.
She crouched there for a moment like some giant spider, lake water sluicing off her skin. Ian knew perfectly well who she was—Nina Markova, his lover, his comrade in arms, his wife of five years—but as she uncoiled, she made even Ian’s heart clutch in fear. She stood relaxed and reptilian, streaked with blood from the corners of her mouth down the sides of her throat, red lines curling down her soaked slip, down her arms, off the edge of the unfolded razor in her hand. She smiled, eyes glinting like winter ice, and her teeth were scarlet as though she’d been tearing at human flesh.
She rises out of the lake, streaked with blood, and drifts across the surface of the water toward me. Jordan had described her stepmother’s nightmare in the huntress’s own words. And that’s when I wake up. Before the night witch cuts my throat.
There was no dream to wake from now, as Nina stalked down the dock.
Die Jägerin did not move. She stood wax white, quivering, a rabbit paralyzed by a snake’s gaze, a Soviet biplane pinned to the sky by a German searchlight. Nina came remorselessly forward, razor outstretched. “Mine,” she was crooning, “mine—” And the woman who had murdered Ian’s brother, and who knew how many others, backed up before her, twisting away in frantic horror. Ian saw none of her ferocious