Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(149)

“My ears! My ears!” he howled.

Blood ran out of both his ears and down his neck. He pawed at the air like a maddened animal and stared at his bloody hands, trying to grab them as they passed. “My ears!”

“Where are the children?” Nick yelled in Ukrainian.

The guy just reared up onto his knees, howling and gabbling and sobbing. Tam made a disgusted sound, plucked out one of her earrings, gave it a brisk twist. She stabbed it into his shoulder.

He groaned, toppled slowly to the ground and lay still.

They ran on, slowing to listen as a new sound became audible. A baby, wailing behind a door. More than one. The closer they came, the stronger it got.

The door with the screaming behind it was locked and bolted. They threw the bolt, but the lock was a good one that would take an expert hours to pick. He couldn’t shoot it out with kids behind it.

Movement, flashing in the corner of his eye. He and Tam turned, and took off after a big, bulky blond woman who was sneaking out a door and sprinting towards the hole they’d blasted.

Panic made the woman fast, but she was heavy and stubby-legged, no match for the infuriated Nick and a thoroughbred racehorse like Tam, even when the chick was sporting four-inch silver heels.

They caught up with her at the stairwell. Nick took her down with a flying tackle. She grunted as he landed on top of her. She was soaked with sweat. “Not so fast, lady. I want the key to that door,” he told her.

“No understand,” she said. “No speak English.”

A garnet-handled knife suddenly appeared in Tam’s fist. She grabbed the woman’s coarse blond hair and wrenched her head back, and screamed in Ukrainian. “The key, bitch!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

The tip dug in. Blood welled up, trickled down the woman’s neck. “I suggest you figure it out, before I cut off your ear,” Tam hissed.

“No! No cut. I give you keys,” the woman gasped out in English. She struggled under Nick’s weight to get her hand into one of her pockets, dragged out a small bunch of keys. “Here. Keys. Take. Take.”

Nick and Tam glanced at each other.

“We’ll let you open the door, you donkey-faced hell-witch,” Tam said. “If you gave us the wrong key, we can renegotiate, no? Maybe I’ll go for an eye. God knows you can’t get any uglier.”

They hauled the woman to her feet and frog-marched her back to the door with the screaming kids behind it.

“I did nothing wrong,” the woman protested, sounding put upon. “I take care of children, I feed, I wipe bottoms, I no hurt!”

“Shut up,” Nick snarled.

They shoved her up to the door. As soon as the locks gave way and the door handle turned, Tam pulled out her hair clip, twisted a small nozzle, and squirted the woman’s face.

She fell sideways against the wall, eyes rolled to the whites, and slid down. Good. Two down, ready for custody.

Nick blew out a sharp breath, and pushed the door open.

The first impression he got was that there was a single malformed organism, with multiple staring eyes, multiple clutching limbs. Then the mutant being resolved into a tight knot of dirty, terrified-looking kids.

They were scared into silence except for the smallest one, who squalled lustily in the arms of a tall young man. The guy was naked but for boxer shorts, his face battered and bloody.

The heavy fog of piss, vomit, unwashed bodies and rotten food made it hard to breathe. Nick let his gun hand drop to his side.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said quietly in Ukrainian.

A scrawny little kid who looked about ten tried to speak, and coughed. He tried again. His voice was hoarse and scratchy. “Where are Marina and Yuri?” he replied, in the same language.

“Outside,” Tam said from behind him. “The police will take them away and punish them. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

They stared at each other, at a loss. The children were paralyzed with shock. Nick was struck dumb by the squalor of the room.

The toddler wiggled in the guy’s arms. He put her gently down, and she toddled forward on dirty little legs, huge eyes locked onto Tam, who glittered under the fluorescent lights with supernatural brightness.

“Pretty,” the toddler lisped in Ukrainian. “Mama.”

Tam shrank back. “Oh, no. Not me,” she told the kid. “I’m not your mama, little one.”

The kid lifted up her thin arms. “Mama? Mama?”

Tam backed up. Nick had never seen Tam intimidated, or even at a disadvantage since he’d known her, but this two-year-old seemed to terrify her. “No,” she said, shaking her finger. “Not me. Not your mama.”

The tiny girl’s face crumpled with woe. She started to wail.

Tam began to swear viciously, in some thick, obscure language that Nick could not immediately place. “Hell,” she muttered. “Come here, then.” She picked the kid up.

Nick went in and looked them all over. Half-starved and pale but they were all on their feet. Except for one older girl slumped against the wall dressed in her underwear, who looked very weak and ill. The rest of the lot were smaller than the ten-year-old.

“Is Sveti all right?” asked the kid who’d spoken before.

“We got to her just in time,” Nick told him. “She’ll be fine.”