Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Another door swung open and crashed shut. She felt the vibrations through the stone wall as she fumbled for the third screw.

He was perhaps two doors away. Coming fast, too fast.

The third screw was caked in dust, hard to discover by feel alone, but she found it and jammed the key into the notch.

It wouldn’t yield. It was implanted too tightly in the frame.

The door directly across from this room creaked open.

Cray would look in here next.

She gave up on the third screw, found the fourth.

It was loosely set in its hole, easily dislodged with a few turns of the key. She let it fall.

The door across the corridor banged shut.

She threw away the keys, and with both hands she reached overhead and grabbed hold of the grillwork, tugging with her full strength, and the vent cover, fastened by just one screw, shuddered and pulled free of the ceiling.

It clattered on the floor.

Red light in the room.

Cray, beaming his flash through the mesh window.

She didn’t look back, not even when she heard the thunk of a pneumatic bolt retracting and knew the door had opened.

Into the vent, scrabbling, clawing for purchase on the dusty metal, her legs swinging as she hoisted herself up and bellied in — grunt of exertion and blind panic — she was in the duct, prone in the horizontal shaft, but her legs still hung out the opening, and she squirmed forward, grabbing at the smooth metal sides of the passageway, pulling herself all the way in, and there was pain, pain in her leg, like biting teeth — knife — Cray’s knife slashing her, too late, because with a final effort she hauled herself completely into the shaft and then she was plunging ahead.

She’d made it.

But not for long.

The duct trembled, groaning with new weight.

Cray, lifting himself into the hole.

Following.

Red glare behind her. The flashlight.

She shouldn’t look back, shouldn’t look back, but she did, and there he was, scrambling in pursuit, the flashlight in one hand, knife in the other.

She heard his fast, hysterical breathing, or maybe it was her own.

Forward. Go.

There was nothing for her then but a smeared impression of her elbows and knees in furious motion. Speed and panic and pure darkness ahead, red death behind.

She’d done this before — crawled like this, through this ventilation duct — crawled when she escaped from Hawk Ridge. Only then no monster had been chasing her, and she had crawled slowly, silently, afraid of being heard. Crawled to the midpoint of the ward, the bend in the L, where a vertical shaft intercepted this duct and rose a few feet to an opening in the roof.

Ahead she saw a faint fall of starlight, the roof exit, her one way out, her last chance.

Yards away.

Too far.

Cray was closing fast, and she wouldn’t get there.

She kept going, terror drumming in her chest. She was all fear now, nothing but fear, as Cray was nothing but hunger.

He grabbed her ankle.

With a gasp of panic she shook loose. Drove herself forward, pawing at the shaft, her hands gummy with old dust, the light from the rooftop opening still too far away.

Behind her, Cray sped up.

He had her scent in his nostrils now, the flavor of a fresh kill tingling in his mouth, and with feral quickness he came on fast, chuffing hard, the flashlight abandoned, the knife bared like teeth, and Kaylie almost in range for the final, lethal pounce.

She crawled for the light, the exit, and then the light was gone, blotted out — she didn’t understand how, and there was no time to think about it, because she heard Cray snarl, a low indrawn sound packed full of menace, the sound a dog would make in the instant before it leaped, and she knew he was tensing for the kill.

Directly ahead, something dropped into the shaft.

A human figure.

Twisting toward her — a man — and in his hand, a gun which rose for a shot he could not try, because Kaylie blocked the target.

“ Take it!” he shouted, and he pitched the gun at her, a handgun, sliding along the shaft.

A gun that was just an illusion, like the man himself, a mirage out of nowhere.

Cray sprang.

The pistol completed its slide, spinning into Kaylie’s grasp, and remarkably it was real — as tangible and solid as the gun that had killed Justin many years ago — and with the gun in both hands she twisted onto her back, face to face with Cray as he fell on her, and she fired one shot directly into his heart.

Cray shuddered all over. Kaylie looked up into his eyes in the dim ambient light, eyes that widened with sudden intelligence, the shocked awareness that somehow, impossibly, she had beaten him.

Then she saw darkness filling those eyes, a flood of darkness, extinguishing the light, and Cray saw it too, she knew he did. He saw the dark tide that was fast flowing in to wash him away, and for the first time he was frightened by the dark, afraid like a child, afraid and alone.

She saw all this, in the moment when their gazes locked for the last time, and then the last living part of him was devoured by the dark, and everything was gone from his eyes, forever.

Cray sagged, a limp, dead thing, the knife in his hand as harmless as a toy.

Kaylie let go of the gun. It clattered in the vent with a hollow sound.

She made no further movement. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think.

“Kaylie?”

A familiar voice. She’d heard it before, but when? Oh, yes. On the night of her arrest.

It was Detective Shepherd’s voice. He was the man who’d materialized out of nothingness and saved her life.

She had no idea how he’d gotten here, no strength to ask. Later she would make him tell.

Later.

“Kaylie? You all right?”

He had crawled to her. Blinking, she looked at him.

“I’m fine,” she said, as if it were a summer day and she had merely responded to a casual pleasantry. “Just fine.”

He released a long-held breath. “Thank God.”

“Cray’s dead.”

“I know. Let’s get out of here.”

“Cray’s dead,” she repeated for no reason.

“There’s an exit to the roof.” Shepherd took her hand, gently coaxing her forward, away from the dead sprawl of John Cray. “Come on.”

She eased free of Cray’s loose, boneless limbs. “I know about the exit,” she whispered. “I used it to escape from this place once before. But… not really.”

Abruptly she lifted her head, searching for Shepherd’s gaze in the faint light, wishing to make eye contact, feeling suddenly that it was very important for him to understand about the years of running, the scared-rabbit hiding, the night dreams and daytime fears.

“I never really escaped,” Kaylie said quietly.

Shepherd tightened his grip on her hand. “This time you did.”

“How did you find me?” Kaylie asked.

It was ten days after the events at Hawk Ridge, and she was sitting in an armchair by the window of her hospital room, a book in her hands.

Shepherd stopped just inside the doorway. “No hello? That’s the first thing you say to me?”

“Hello comes later. I have to know.”

“Well, at the sign-in desk the nurse told me you were in room three-twenty-two.”

“I meant that night, when I was in the air duct with Cray. You showed up and saved me. How?”

He smiled, circling the bed to approach her. The day was clear, the view through the window green and bright. He had not expected the grounds of Graham County’s medical center to be so nicely landscaped.

“You mean nobody’s told you in all this time?” he said, teasing her by withholding a reply.

“Nobody seems to know. I was in too much of a daze to ask you that night. The stuff Cray was giving me…” She put down the book and hugged herself. “I was half out of my mind.”