Well, so much for the element of surprise. But one less of the enemy to deal with. And though whoever was left would now understand there was opposition, they wouldn’t yet know who had shot whom. They’d come in here with a plan. Now they’d be improvising. Though in fairness, of course, so was Rain.
And then, somewhere down the corridor, a woman screamed.
chapter
forty-nine
EVIE
Evie crouched behind the cart, staring through the space between the books, her heart hammering. The sound of footsteps came closer. Closer . . .
She felt paralyzed with fear. What if she tried to ram him too early and he got out of the way? Or too late, and it didn’t knock him down the stairs? She had only one chance, just this one chance . . .
She saw brown hair. A forehead. A narrow set of eyes, a stubble of beard—
He looked right at her. Smiled. “Caught you,” he said.
She bunched her shoulders and tensed to shove the cart forward—
Bam!
A gunshot. It had to be. From out in the corridor below. The man turned to look, his hand going inside his jacket—
Evie screamed and blasted out of her crouch, shoving the cart toward the stairs with all her strength. The man turned his head back toward her, seeming to move in slow motion now, his hand coming from inside his jacket, holding a gun—
Evie kept screaming, driving the cart forward like a battering ram. The man’s eyes bulged, he brought up his free hand, and flinched away—
The cart went past the landing and bounced down the stairs, Evie losing her balance now but still keeping all her weight behind it. It crashed into his side with a satisfying crunch and he fell backward, the cart barreling over him. Evie lost her grip and tripped as she hit him, and then she was tumbling down, tangled up with him, everything spinning past her, the ceiling, the lights, the stairs. The back of her head hit something and she saw an explosion of fireworks. And then she felt a giant thud through her body and all the movement stopped.
The man was on his back on the floor right next to her. He rolled to his side. Got his knees under him. “You fucking bitch,” he groaned.
Evie sucked in a huge breath. She saw his gun, on the carpet just a few feet away. And saw him see it.
He started crawling toward it. Without any thought at all, she shrieked and scrabbled onto his back, trying to hook her fingers into his eyes, to tear them out of their sockets—
The man screamed. He shook his head frantically left and right and grabbed her fingers, ripping them away from his face. He reached back, got a hand in her hair, and pulled her forward. She tried to hang on, but he was too strong, and he dumped her over his shoulder onto the floor. She barely felt the shock of impact, she was too focused on his eyes again, on getting her fingers in them. The man shook his head again to keep clear, then reared up, raised a fist—
She saw a shape loom above her. Something arcing through the air. There was a loud crack, like the sound of a home run hit. The man went flying off her. She rolled to her knees and saw Dash, moving in on the man, cocking back a club, no, the leg of the wooden table, like he’d just stepped up to the plate and was about to swing for the fences. The man scuttled back, trying for the gun, and Dash screamed and swung again. The man got his hands up, but the table leg whipped around and blasted the man’s hands into his face and knocked him onto his back. Dash stepped in, still screaming, bringing the table leg back again, but the man managed to grab him around the knees and rolled into him, knocking him down—
Evie tensed to launch at him. But the gun, it was right there—
Dash tried to hang on to the table leg but the man was too big. He yanked it out of Dash’s hands, reared up, raised it over his head like a stake—
Evie grabbed the gun, spun on her knees, and pointed it with both hands the way Marvin had taught her. She squeezed the trigger. There was a BAM! and the gun jumped in her hands. The man twitched—she’d hit him! But he didn’t go down.