Grier screamed against the tape that covered her mouth as the gunshots exploded in the kitchen, their echoing blasts making her ears ring and her eyes sting.
She heard two bodies hit the floor, but from her vantage point, she didn't know who had been hurt.
Someone was moaning.
With her heart thundering, she lifted her head and craned her neck. Matthias was no longer in sight--so he must have been hit. . . . She prayed he'd been hit.
Isaac . . .? Her father . . . ?
Caterpillaring along the floorboards, she inched around the island. The first thing she saw was her father upright in the chair. And he was the one moaning as he fought furiously against the tape around his hands and feet.
Where was Isaac?
Ice-cold dread replaced every ounce of blood in her veins, and she knew the answer to the question even before she saw him lying flat on his back just inside the room.
He wasn't moving, his gun lying in his lax, open palm, his eyes staring sightlessly up to the ceiling.
Grier screamed again, her body contracting, her cheek squeaking on the varnished floor, her whole soul and everything in her mind denying what was inescapable. Flailing around, she inched toward him, hoping to help, struggling to cross the distance--
Suddenly her hands were free.
With all her thrashing, she'd ripped them out of their bindings. Exploding into unexpected coordination, she tore the tape from her mouth and dragged herself with her arms to Isaac.
The bullet had gone right into his heart.
It was such a small hole through the sweatshirt, nothing but a relative pinprick with a sooty stain around the edges. Except it was more than enough to kill him.
"Isaac," she said, touching his cold face. "Oh, God . . . don't go. . . ."
His mouth was slightly open, his pupils fixed and dilated, his breathing shallow to the point of nearly stopping.
He had done it all to save her, the change in plans, the turning himself in. After all, that crazed, evil man had had no reason to lie.
"Isaac . . . I love you. . . . I'm sorry . . ."
His head slowly turned toward her, his eyes struggling to focus. As he appeared to lock on her face, tears licked over that frosty stare, one escaping out of the corner and rolling down his temple to fall onto the floor.
"I . . ."
"I'll call nine-one-one," she said in a rush.
Except as she went to jump up for the phone, he caught her arm in a surprisingly strong grip. "No . . ."
"You're dying--"
"No." With his free hand, he reached up to the zipper on his sweatshirt. Even though his fingers were trembling, he managed to grasp the toggle and pull it down. . . .
To reveal the bulletproof vest he was wearing.
"Breath . . . just . . . knocked . . . out of me." With that he took a proper inhale, one that expanded his chest fully and was expelled evenly and cleanly. "Took it off . . . dead soldier . . ."
Grier blinked. Then shoved his hands out of the way and probed the hole . . . where the bullet had been caught and held in the tensile fibers of the Kevlar.
Her body reacted on its own, a bizarre superstrength overtaking her as she yanked him up off the floor and held him to her heart.
"You're a . . ." She started to cry properly as horror and terror gave way to sweeping relief. "You're a brilliant man. You're a brilliant . . . stupid man . . ."
And then his arms were around her and he was, against all odds, holding her back.
All too soon he was separating them, though, and picking up his gun.
"Stay here."
With a grunt, he got up and shuffled around to check on Matthias, and as he went over, she unbound her feet and scrambled to her father.
"Are you okay," she asked as she went to work freeing his arms.
He nodded furiously, his eyes not on her but on Isaac as if he couldn't believe the guy had survived either. And the instant his hands were free, he took over undoing his ankles.
Grier looked around, and then as a precaution in case anyone else showed up or was in the house, she went for the nine-millimeter she'd been given when Jim Heron had appeared.
Assuming that actually had been the man.
Something told her that perhaps what she and her father had seen hadn't really been there at all.
Matthias knew it was a mortal hit and he was glad. Yeah, he'd wanted Jim Heron's gun to do the deed, but Isaac's had worked just fine--and Rothe had been part of the whole survivor problem, hadn't he.
At least he'd gotten even with one of them.
As the arterial tear in his heart started to leak into his chest cavity, breathing became difficult and his blood pressure dropped, his body going numb and cold. Which was nice. No more pain.
Well, not exactly. That stinging, left-sided agony stuck with him . . . and it was as he lay dying that he figured out what it was: He'd been wrong. It wasn't his heart preparing for a coronary. It was--shock of all shocks--his conscience. And the way he knew that was because as he thought of the fact that he'd killed a relatively innocent man, in front of a woman who loved him, the pain got exponentially worse.
Wasn't this ironic. Somehow, in the depths of his sin, the sociopath had found his soul.
Too late.
Ah, hell, that was okay, though. He was going to be dead soon, and after that nothing mattered. The white light that had come for him before, when he'd coded on the operating table a couple of times, was going to stick around this time. He didn't think it was Heaven. The shit was probably a figment of some ocular malfunction, just another part of the mechanics of dying--
Isaac appeared in front of him, standing tall and strong, his sweatshirt open to show a bulletproof vest.
When he was certain he was seeing correctly, Matthias started to laugh . . . and the pain in his left side abruptly eased.
"Son of a . . ." He didn't get out the bitch as a round of coughing shook him up.
After it had passed, he could feel blood leaking out of his mouth and down his cheek as his heart started to bang around in his rib cage like an animal thrashing in a cage.
As Isaac got down on his haunches, Matthias thought about that tattoo on the man's back. Grim Reaper, indeed. He wondered if the soldier would go and get another notch tattooed on the bottom.
How much you want to bet it would be the final one, too?
Isaac shook his head and whispered, "I have to let you die. You know that, right."
Matthias nodded. "Thank . . . you . . ."
He lifted his frozen hand and, a moment later, felt it encased in something warm and solid. Isaac's.
So weird how things worked out. Back in that desert, Jim had set out to save him, but here and now, in this kitchen, Isaac was giving him what he'd wanted all along.
Before Matthias closed his eyes for the last time, he looked over at Alistair Childe. His daughter had freed him and he was embracing her, holding her safe, his head down next to hers. As if the man felt the stare that was upon him, he glanced up.
The relief in his face was epic, like he knew Matthias was dying and never coming back--and that even though that wouldn't resurrect the son he had lost, it would protect his and his daughter's future for evermore.
Matthias nodded at the guy and then shut his lids in preparation for the great nothingness that was coming. God, he was hungry for it. His life hadn't been a gift to himself or the world, and he was looking forward to not existing.
As he waited out the stretch of neither here nor there, when he wasn't really alive, but not quite dead, he thought of Alistair the night his son had died.
". . . Dan . . . ny . . . boy . . . my Danny boy . . ."
Matthias frowned and then realized he hadn't just thought the words, but spoken them aloud.
They were the same ones he'd said right before he'd put his foot on that bomb trigger.
At that moment, white light came upon him, a product of the numbness . . . or maybe it had walked through the sensation as if the feeling was a door. Upon its arrival, a great, peaceful calm overtook his mind, body, and soul sure as if he had been wiped clean of all the sins he'd imagined or wrought during his time on Earth.
The illumination was so much more than anything his eyes were doing. It was all he saw, all he knew, all he was.
Heaven did actually exist.
And oh, the lovely nothingness . . . ah, the blissful--
In the corners of his nonvision, a gray fog boiled up, at first appearing as nothing distinct, but then expanding and darkening to a blackness that started to eat at the light.
Matthias fought against the invasion, his instincts telling him that this was not what he wanted--but it wasn't a battle he would win.
The fog became tar, coating him and claiming him, pulling him downward into a spiral that tightened, tightened . . . tightened . . . until he was flushed out into a sea of others.
As he writhed against the choking, cloaking tide, he bumped into flailing bodies.
Trapped in an oily black infinity, he screamed . . . along with the rest of them.
But no one came. No one cared. Nothing happened.
His eternity had finally claimed him and it was never going to let him go.
