The last surge of her came through, now, and I felt the tingle of the moment when her soul ripped free of her body. It would have bothered me, before, only a week or so ago, to feel it, to feel her torn from herself, to listen to her screaming in my head as she left hers, like the sands leaving her part of the hourglass and coming to mine. I reveled in it now, though; it was twice the rush Charlie had told me it was. My head was swimming with enjoyment; it was far better than the whiskey, and I felt a pleasant hum. “Mmmm,” I said to the air around me. “You don’t taste too bad, Eve. Kinda light. Fluffy.” I looked down in the dead eyes of the thing that used to be her and relinquished my grip on her neck. The eyes stared back at me lifelessly as I stood up and brushed off the snow. I didn’t bother to close them; I just let them stare off into the dark sky.
I eased along the side of the building, and I heard Wolfe’s voice in my head, along with the murmur of silent approval through the thick feeling of euphoria that draining Eve had given me. So good, Little Doll. Three down.
The sense of sweet lightness from what I had done held me so tight in its grip that I didn’t even care that he called me Little Doll again. Why did it matter? This was what I was supposed to be doing. My powers were there for me to use, after all, and these people I was killing all deserved it, every last one of them. I gripped my M4 tighter as I strode along the side of the building toward the open space ahead, and it was almost as though I could hear a little song playing in my head, soothing me, my skin flushed with the afterglow of what I’d done. “Two to go.”
19.
I came around the corner of the building to an open space. The area was well lit, and I could see the plane Winter would be taking as I stayed in the shadow of the building, watching everything that was happening in front of me. It was a smaller model, a Gulfstream, and as the snow fell I watched the massive orange plow with the flashing lights drive down the runway again, spreading salt out the back of it. It looked like a dump truck with a plow fastened to the front, enormous, as though it carried a ton of dirt along with it. I stayed in the shadow, took a deep breath of chill air and smelled it, the scent of cold air itself. The taste of snowflakes was on my tongue, along with a different flavor, something like the last breath of Eve’s soul.
The low hum of the plow reached my ears along with conversation. I looked to the open door of the Gulfstream, which had a ramp built into it, and saw a man, one I didn’t know, getting inside. “We’ll be ready to take off momentarily, sir,” he said, very deferentially, to Old Man Winter, who waited at the bottom in nothing but a thin dress shirt—blue, of course. He wore no jacket, only his trousers and shirt, and had his arms folded across his chest.
Winter turned to Bastian, who stood at his side; Bastian was tall and broad, wider across the chest than almost any man I’d ever seen, and it was pure muscle. I had no idea how much of an edge that would give him in a battle with me; nor did I intend to find out. “Get Eve back over here,” Winter said, and Bastian nodded. He started to turn toward me, but I was already moving, out of the shadow of the building.
I fired eight shots with rapidity, the crack of the rounds cutting through the quiet night and the bare hum of the plane’s engines starting up in the background. Every one of my bullets caught Bastian across that massive chest of his, perfectly aimed. At the last he ended up on the ground, and I fired three rounds at Winter, who staggered from the shots but did not fall.
“I’m afraid Eve will not be able to join you,” I said, crossing the distance between us with slow, taunting steps. I fired twice more into Winter’s chest, and he slumped to one knee, looking up at me with those cold blue eyes. “On account of the fact that she’s dead, in case you missed the inference.”
“It was not lost on me,” Winter said in a low, gasping voice, looking up at me from the distance between us. There was no blood on his shirt, not where I’d shot him. There was, however, a crust of ice hanging out of the holes where the bullets had ripped the fabric, and it seemed to be steadily growing.
“Sir,” I heard in a rasping voice, and looked over to see Bastian still moving, “go.”
I tipped the barrel of my gun toward Bastian but stopped short of firing at him; he had been on all fours in the snow, but something was changing as I watched. His chest was jerking, swelling underneath his coat. I fired at him twice and saw the rounds ricochet. I turned them instead toward Winter, who was still slumped, and ripped off the rest of the magazine at him, but his body was encased in a thick coating of ice now, frozen to the bones. All my shots did was chip away at it.