First Time, Forever. Cara Colter

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СКАЧАТЬ want to die. I want you to live. We’ll see who wins, Mr. McGuire,” she’d said grimly the first time he’d drifted up out of unconsciousness. One look at those angry brown eyes, ludicrously magnified behind the thick lenses she wore, had been enough to send him spiraling down into oblivion again. But she’d dragged him back, again and again, pitting her faith and her steely strength of will against the shadowy figure with the scythe. Only once had she even come close to losing hope, and that had been the day that his fever had climbed to its highest. He had been delirious, and whatever he’d been babbling, it had shaken her badly. All he could remember of that delusional day and night were two things.

      He’d had wings, and he’d known if he only let himself go he would find himself soaring straight up from the sweat-soaked sheets he was lying on into a colder, lighter sky than the blazingly blue one that hung over the hospital. He’d heard them calling him, and he’d felt himself rising to meet them—

      —and the second thing he remembered was Sister Bertille’s angular face, her mouth working soundlessly, huge tears standing out behind her crooked glasses, pressing a heavy, chilling weight against his forehead and bringing him crashing back down to earth. Just before dawn the fever had broken. He’d opened his eyes and she’d been sitting beside his bed in a golden pool of light from the gas lantern above her, her rosary in her hands and her mouth slightly open in exhausted sleep. He could still feel the heavy weight on his forehead, and with returning lucidity, he’d reached up and removed it. It had been the cross she usually wore around her neck.

      You will know when the right case presents itself…

      She’d been right. He had known. And still he’d done his level best to get out of it. Hell.

      “You’re a stupid man entirely, Quinn McGuire,” he said out loud. “A stupid, bad man. A debt’s a debt, and you must have been crazy to think that you could get out of paying it with a clear conscience.”

      He’d catch her on her way out and tell her he’d changed his mind. She didn’t have to know why, and although the nun was part of it, Quinn wasn’t sure he knew the whole reason either. If anyone needed someone to protect her, though, Jane Doe did.

      Even if only half of what she’d told him was the truth.

      “…know who you are. It was creepy!”

      “It had to be some crackpot. I kept expecting some jerk to look over the stall partition, for God’s sake.”

      The two young women passing his table had taken a couple more steps before what he’d overheard them say registered. Before they’d taken a third, Quinn was up and out of his seat and somehow blocking their way. One of them was a blonde, and she gave a little jump.

      “Hey, you scared me!” Her gaze took him in, and she relaxed visibly. “I think he should buy us a drink to make up for it, right, Kathy?”

      Before her friend could answer, Quinn’s hand shot out and held her lightly by the shoulder. “I heard you say something just now—know who you are. What were you talking about?”

      “Do you mind?” The blonde’s flirtatiousness was instantly replaced by peevish annoyance. “The hand, mister. Get it off me.”

      “It’s important,” he said impatiently, letting her go and curbing his own irritation with difficulty. “What did you mean by that?”

      “We saw it in the washroom.” The blonde’s companion had been watching his face. Now she spoke quietly and quickly. “Those words were written on the mirror over the sinks in lipstick or something. It gave me a bad feeling—”

      But already he’d dodged around them, and was heading toward the back of the room. He elbowed a beefy young man in a Yale sweatshirt out of the way, and heard an aggrieved shout and the crash of breaking glass behind him. He felt a hand on his shoulder, trying to pull him back, and without looking around he grabbed it and threw it off.

      He was about ten feet away from the entrance to the washrooms when the lights went out. The whole room was plunged into pitch-blackness, and he heard a woman’s terror-filled, choked-off scream coming from somewhere ahead of him.

      “No need to panic, people. Sure, and we’ll have the lights back on in a minute. Everybody just stay calm and remain where you are.”

      Someone was trying to stem the panicky hubbub that had started up. The women’s washroom had to be nearby, Quinn told himself in frustration as he fought his way through the crowd and felt along the wall. There was a flimsy, freestanding partition that had shielded the washroom entrances from the view of the main room, so he hadn’t been able to note the exact location previously, but this was where Jane had gone. He came to a dead end, and realized he’d gone the wrong way.

      Her scream—it had been hers, he knew it in his bones—had ended abruptly. That meant that even now she could be beyond his help. What had he told her? Something about if her stalker were serious, he would have killed her by now? Something criminally callous like that?

      If the nun had ended up where she’d hoped, she could damn well bully God into giving him some help, he thought harshly as he felt a knob, turned it and swung the door back on its hinges with a crash.

      Moonlight streamed through high-set, slightly open windows. Along one wall was a shadowy line of cubicles, each one of them open. Along the other wall was a long vanity, with sinks set into it and a mirror stretching its whole length. The place was empty.

      He caught a reflection of movement in the darkened mirror, and instinctively looked around. There was nothing there. He looked back at the mirror, and the same wavering reflection caught his eye again.

      Then he was whirling around and looking up at the ceiling just beyond the last stall and his heart was turning over in horror.

      She’d been hanged by the neck, and even as he realized what he was looking at, her feet stopped twitching.

      “Mother of God and all the saints…” The sickened prayer came automatically, but Quinn wasn’t relying on divine intervention. Already he had smashed open the door of the last stall, was clambering up onto the back of the toilet tank and hoisting himself to a precarious balance on the metal partition. The open ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes, and he grabbed one to steady himself, even as he wrapped his other arm around Jane’s limply dangling body. He lifted her up to ease the pressure on her neck, and her head lolled over onto one shoulder.

      The lights—why hadn’t they gotten the damned lights working yet? Her dress had come undone, most of the buttons that had marched primly down the front probably somewhere below on the floor, and he could feel bare flesh against the forearm he had around her chest.

      He had to get her down, lights or no lights. Whatever was around her throat was no longer cutting off her air supply, but if she still had a heartbeat, he couldn’t feel it. One-handed, he couldn’t fumble with a knot in the dark and keep her supported at the same time, which meant he wasn’t going to be able to get her down the logical way.

      The building wasn’t new. The plumbing, in the washrooms at least, would be either zinc or lead, and neither of those metals was known for its strength. Judging from the trickle of cold water that was dripping onto him, there was a leaky joint only inches away from her noose. If he let go of his pipe, and grabbed hers as he jumped from the top of the washroom stall, the weight of one oversize Irishman would be more than enough to break the join and send them both, pipe and all, crashing to the floor.

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