The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(19)

“Five seconds!” he yelled over the noise. “Pull!”

I pressed the pads of my feet against the concrete wall and pushed as hard as I could while yanking downward on the cane. The force of it nearly pulled Nueve into the shaft with me. His thin fingers entwined with mine and he heaved himself backward through the doors, pulling me up with him. The hurtling car caught the tip of my foot as I flew through the doors, ripping the shoe off my foot.

The doors closed, and we lay side by side on the cold floor, gulping air while a small crowd gathered to gawk at the old lady and the bloody doctor sprawled in front of the elevator, hugging each other.

A nurse finally said, “Can I help you, Doctor?”

Nueve scrambled to his feet and then pulled me up to mine. He scooped up his cane and gave the nurse an icily professional smile. Not a doctor’s smile—an Operative Nine smile.

“Elevator trouble,” he said. I started for the stairs. We were on the second floor, only one flight away from freedom. He grabbed my arm.

“No, Alfred—Freda—Alfreda, your room is this way.”

He pulled me across the hall to the nearest room. An old man lay in the bed under an oxygen tent.

“Harriet?” he called hoarsely to me. “Harriet—I knew you’d come!”

Nueve ignored him. He strode across the room to the window and pulled aside the curtains. He looked out, nodded, took one step back, and then slammed the gold head of his cane into the center of the glass. The window shattered on impact. Nueve cleared the remaining shards from the frame, then motioned to me.

“Quickly,” he hissed.

“We’ll break our legs,” I said, and then I saw we were directly above the overhang for the emergency room entrance on the first floor. Only a half-story fall, but still far enough to snap an ankle if you hit it wrong.

Behind us, the old man called, “Harriet! Harriet, don’t leave me!”

Nueve’s eyebrow went up. “Well, Harriet?” he asked.

Police sirens wailed in the distance. Somebody must have found the two dead guys in the elevator.

“Jump down, not out,” Nueve cautioned me.

I put one foot on the sill. The old man got mad.

“Always running out on me, Harriet!”

At that moment the door flew open and three men rushed into the room. They wore black jumpsuits and black bandannas across their faces. Nueve smiled and nodded, as though he had expected them: Ah, of course, the ninjas have arrived! The blade leaped from the end of his cane.

“Go, Alfred,” he said softly.

He shoved me through the window. I tumbled into empty space as the old man screamed after me, “Good riddance to you, then, you old witch!”

I hit the roof of the overhang feetfirst, bending my knees at the last second, so I managed to hit without breaking or twisting anything I really might need in the near future. I rolled a couple of times, coming to a stop at the edge, lay on my stomach for a second, then flipped over in time to see one of the ninjas coming through the window.

He landed about three feet away and pulled a tapered dagger from some hidden pocket in his black jumper. I recognized that dagger: thin, black-bladed, with a dragon’s head on the hilt, its mouth open in a silent roar. The signature weapon of Mogart’s private army, the agents of darkness who had chased me from Knoxville to Canada, from Canada to France, from France to England.

“Okay,” I said to him. “You got me. I give up.”

I raised my hands in the air. He came toward me slowly, the dagger pointed at my gut.

“Just make it quick, okay?” I asked.

He lunged forward with a hoarse yell. I had two seconds before he was on me. I used those two seconds to rip the shawl off my shoulders. I dropped the shawl over his head, twisted the two ends to wrap it tight, and then slung him forward with a shot-putter-like motion. He sailed over the edge of the overhang.

I turned back toward the building—where the heck was Nueve?—and saw another dagger-wielding AOD coming toward me. I got lucky with the first one but, based on the past, my good luck wasn’t going to hold.

At that moment sirens screamed to life directly beneath us: an ambulance was leaving on a call. Maybe my luck hadn’t completely run out. I sprinted to one side of the overhang. I had a fifty-fifty chance this was the correct side. The AOD’s fingers tugged on the back of my dress as I threw myself over the side.

I had guessed right: the ambulance burst into the open the moment we went down, and we tumbled head over heels onto its roof.

The ambulance whipped hard to the right coming out of the parking lot, slinging us against the opposite edge. Then it began to accelerate toward the entrance ramp to I-40.

He rushed me. I scooted backward until my butt smacked against the red spinning lights mounted near the front of the ambulance.

We hit the on-ramp clocking sixty at least, and then he was on me. I drove my shoulder into his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. My momentum carried us toward the rear of the ambulance, where he finally went down, his head falling back over the edge. I landed on top of him and caught his wrist just as he brought the dagger around to the side of my neck.

The tip nicked my skin as he tried to force the blade forward. I could feel the blood trickle down my neck and soak into the collar of my dress.

Nueve’s present ... which shoe was it in? The one on my foot or the one lying on top of the hospital elevator? Had all my luck run out or was there still a drop or two left?