The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  Then the shot rang out.

  Chapter 56

  Nina

  September 1950

  Selkie Lake

  Nina crouched on the shore of Selkie Lake not eight hundred meters down from the cabin, yanking off her boots. She watched Tony snatch the child, saw Jordan and Ian come from the trees, saw the slim figure of the woman now frozen on the dock. There you are, Nina thought, yanking her summer dress over her head. The blue-eyed huntress with her Walther PPK and her scar. Half a decade and half a globe had had to be traveled, but the hunt went on. Only now, who was the huntress and who was the prey?

  Ian was advancing down the dock now, implacable as granite, the American girl at his side just as steady. Tony worked the bolt action on the shotgun, the threat of it echoing across the lake, telling Lorelei Vogt not to run. Your days of running are done.

  Nina straightened, naked except for her slip, the waters of Selkie Lake lapping at her toes, and unfolded her razor. Reaching carefully inside her mouth, she nicked the inside of her cheek. Spat blood.

  Voices from the dock, more camera flashes. The huntress half frozen, half poised to pounce. Don’t kill anyone yet, Nina thought to her enemy and her team both. Wait for me. She waded into the water, warmer by far than Lake Rusalka or the Old Man. The huntress’s scar was calling her, the rusalka’s kiss. You’re still mine.

  A shot echoed into the perfect summer sky, and Nina was pierced by a bolt of pure, clawing, protective rage. Oh, you blue-eyed bitch, if you killed my husband—

  And she dived into the arms of the lake.

  Chapter 57

  Ian

  September 1950

  Selkie Lake

  The shot came from Tony. At the corner of Ian’s eye he saw his partner had aimed into the sky, a flat report making the blue-eyed woman flinch and whirl even as she was still flinching from the flash of Jordan’s camera. “Smile, Anna,” Jordan called out again. Click click click. She’d said there was nothing her stepmother disliked more than having her picture taken, and she was right—Ian could see the woman flinch with every flash.

  He took a deep breath, speaking up in his deepest, crispest tones of authority. “Lorelei Vogt, stay where you are.”

  She straightened at the sound of her name. He hoped she would lunge forward in a panic, let him get within arm’s length and wrench the pistol away. But she stepped back instead, to the very end of the dock, face emptying of shock with frightening speed. Ian had never seen anyone knocked so off-balance recover their poise so fast. The pistol hung loose at her side, but he and Jordan still froze halfway down the dock before she could raise it. There was an odd moment of stillness where the sound of the shot faded and they regarded each other. Ian met the eyes of his brother’s murderess for the first time, and every sound in the world—Ruth’s muffled sobbing from the car, Tony’s voice soothing her, the monotonous slap of the lake against the pilings—faded to nothing.

  Here you are, Ian thought, staring into those blue eyes in wonder. Here you are. For more than half a decade he’d thought of her every day, and here she was. Ian drank her in. He found her lovely. He found her obscene. He found her. “Here you are,” he said aloud, and smiled.

  “Who are you?” she asked, sounding genuinely puzzled, and it made Ian smile again. This woman had loomed over his life like a boulder, blotting out the sun, yet, of course, she had no idea who he was.

  Ian didn’t answer. Instead, he spoke words he’d dreamed of speaking for years. “Lorelei Vogt, you are charged with war crimes.”

  He expected excuses, the defensive shuffle, the whine that always seemed to begin It was so long ago or I was just following orders . . . Lorelei Vogt did none of those things. She merely shifted her gaze to Jordan at his side, steadily gazing through her camera lens. “How did you get here?” Genuinely curious. “Even if you got out of the darkroom at once, you couldn’t—”

  “Magic,” Ian said. That was as good an explanation for Nina as any. Nina, where are you? Ian took a step closer, Jordan at his side.

  Die Jägerin’s pistol came up. “No closer.”

  Jordan clicked off another shot. Ian saw their target wince. “You really don’t like having your picture taken, do you?” he observed. “I wouldn’t like looking at myself either, if I’d done what you’ve done.” Click.

  Another flinch. “Jordan, stop.”

  “No.” Jordan adjusted something on her Leica. “You and I have said everything that we needed to say to each other, Anna. I’m just doing my job, now. Recording the moment.” Click. “The moment a murderess realizes she’s going to pay for what she’s done.”

  The woman’s voice was calm. “You cannot arrest me.”

  “Yes, we can,” Ian said. “For murdering Daniel McBride. You admitted as much to Jordan in the darkroom a few hours ago. We can perform a citizen’s arrest and bring you to the authorities. Murder is punishable by the electric chair in Massachusetts.” Ian waited for the flicker of her eyes. “There’s another option, of course.”

  “Murder me here, sink me in the lake?” The pistol lifted again.

  “Don’t tar me with your brush, you Nazi bitch. I have no intention of harming you.” Ian felt no fear at all, only a humming tension running through him like wire. Was this how Nina felt on her bombing runs, when she cut the engine? He was gliding down now, falling very fast but very sure toward his target. “Put that pistol down, Lorelei Vogt. I know you can shoot either me or your stepdaughter between the eyes at this range, but be aware of this: the moment you do, my partner in the car back there will shoot you. And even if you get the drop on him”—Ian could see her eyes measuring it—“your time running is done. My article exposing you runs in the Boston Globe tomorrow. Page one above the fold, with photographs.” Ian hadn’t written a word in years, but he flung the lie at her with complete assurance. “There won’t be a reader on the East Coast who doesn’t know your face by the end of the week, and after that, the nationals will pick it up. There’s nowhere you will be able to hide, not one corner of this huge country that will not know your face and recoil. That is a promise.”

  Click. Jordan snapped the shot right as the look of horror rolled across her stepmother’s face. The pistol jerked in answer, not at Ian this time but at her. “Stop.”

  Jordan took a step forward, blond hair blowing. “No.” Click.

  The shot deafened, echoing across the water. Ian lunged in front of Jordan, heart hammering, but the shot went wide into the water, a warning. Jordan never flinched, merely reached into her pocket and began calmly loading a new roll of film. Ian had seen photographers moving under shellfire on D-day in the same intense haze, the world narrowed to a lens that felt like a shield before them.

  “You have Ruth.” Lorelei Vogt’s voice rose. “You have everything. Take it all and let me go—”

  “No. That is not the choice in front of you.” Ian’s voice rose to a whiplash cut. “The choice in front of you is to be charged in Massachusetts for murdering Jordan’s father, or be charged in Austria for war crimes. That is your choice, Lorelei Vogt. That is the only choice you have left in this life.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  There was a moment he thought she was going to crack—a quiver across that smooth face, the even smoother gaze. Then resolve seemed to sheathe her in ice, chin lifting, pistol rising toward her own head, and Ian saw she was going to escape. She would escape justice and courtrooms and the world’s hatred with a bullet, and he shouted without words because her death wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, but even though he was running to close the distance between them, the barrel was already reaching the underside of her chin.

  Then a rising shriek ripped the air, and they all saw what had just crawled out of the lake onto the end of the dock.

  She crouched there for a moment like some giant spider, lake water sluicing off her skin. Ian knew perfectly well who she was—Nina Markova, his lover, his comrade in arms, his wife of five years—but as she uncoiled, she made even
Ian’s heart clutch in fear. She stood relaxed and reptilian, streaked with blood from the corners of her mouth down the sides of her throat, red lines curling down her soaked slip, down her arms, off the edge of the unfolded razor in her hand. She smiled, eyes glinting like winter ice, and her teeth were scarlet as though she’d been tearing at human flesh.

  She rises out of the lake, streaked with blood, and drifts across the surface of the water toward me. Jordan had described her stepmother’s nightmare in the huntress’s own words. And that’s when I wake up. Before the night witch cuts my throat.

  There was no dream to wake from now, as Nina stalked down the dock.

  Die Jägerin did not move. She stood wax white, quivering, a rabbit paralyzed by a snake’s gaze, a Soviet biplane pinned to the sky by a German searchlight. Nina came remorselessly forward, razor outstretched. “Mine,” she was crooning, “mine—” And the woman who had murdered Ian’s brother, and who knew how many others, backed up before her, twisting away in frantic horror. Ian saw none of her ferocious control this time as she brought the pistol back to her own head. Just fear—but he was still too far away to stop her from taking the bullet’s escape.

  Nina wasn’t.

  She flashed down on the huntress like a falling star, the razor coming around in a whistling arc. Lorelei Vogt screamed, staggering back with blood spilling from her arm this time rather than her neck. Red drops pattered on the dock, and Nina reached out contemptuously and pushed her down. Crouching slow and unhurried over the cringing woman, leaning so close they could have kissed, Nina plucked the Walther PPK from the nerveless fingers. “You don’t get to die,” she whispered to the woman who had shot at her across a lake half a world away, and dropped the pistol into the water.

  Die Jägerin’s face shattered. She crawled away, clutching her bleeding arm, scrabbling past Ian to Jordan, and she just stopped. Huddled against her stepdaughter, cringing from Nina, keening.

  Slowly, Jordan bent down to embrace her.

  Silence fell again over the frozen tableau. Nina came to Ian’s side, never shifting her eyes from die Jägerin. Tony came out of the car on shore, shotgun cradled in one elbow, the other arm around Ruth, who clung white faced to his side. The only noise was the muffled sounds coming from the woman in Jordan’s arms. Ian wondered if the children she shot had whimpered that way, as if snapped in half by terror. His heart resounded in his chest.

  Nina had told him once, on the Prater Ferris wheel in Vienna, that one could kill a fear. She’d thrown herself into a lake today, to become a huntress’s nightmare and protect her team. Ian had thrown himself into a plane. Lorelei Vogt, it seemed, could not kill her one fear when it crawled from her nightmares to look her in the eye.

  Not yet, anyway, Ian thought. So hit her hard before she recovers herself.

  Jordan said it before he could. “Anna,” she said, her voice gentle, even though her face hadn’t lost that distant look, the one that told Ian the world was still coming to her through a lens. Her hand rubbed her stepmother’s shaking back in a soothing circle, even as her body remained stiff with revulsion. “You are going to make a choice now.”

  Chapter 58

  Jordan

  September 1950

  Selkie Lake

  She’ll go?”

  “She’ll go.” Jordan sat down next to Tony on the dock steps, where he sat with his sleeves pushed up and the shotgun still propped beside him. Anneliese was sitting just inside the cabin door some distance away, her arm bandaged, hands and ankles bound together, unmoving. Jordan looked away from her. “Where’s Ruth?”

  “In shock. I put her in the backseat of the car, covered her with blankets, let her cry herself to sleep.”

  She’s going to have questions, Jordan thought. What am I going to tell her?

  Maybe for now, I’m here, and I’m never leaving was enough. “Where are Ian and Nina?”

  “Walking down the shore where Nina left her clothes. Our little Soviet popsy did a fine impersonation of a nightmare.” Tony looked at Anneliese’s huddled shape in the cabin doorway. Her shoulders were shaking. “Does she really fear Nina that much?”

  “Nina is the one who got away. It haunted her.” Jordan was maybe the only one who realized how much it haunted her. She hadn’t hesitated to use it, telling her stepmother quietly that she could go to Austria and face trial for war crimes, or stay here and face trial for murdering her husband—but if she refused to go willingly down either path, Jordan would let Nina do the asking. “She chose Austria.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said Nina would never stay in Europe, that she hates it. Anneliese chose whatever continent would put an ocean between her and Nina.” That was how terrified the huntress was of the rusalka.

  Tony blew out a breath. “By letting her choose that, you know you’re giving up the chance of justice for your father. Unless there’s another messy extradition fight over her after her trial in Austria.”

  “If she was tried here for his murder—for which we have much less proof, only my word that she didn’t deny it when I accused her—she might never face justice for Ian’s brother and the Jewish children. That isn’t right either.” Jordan still felt like she was floating somewhere very quiet. “So we do what we have to.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Jordan as hollow inside as a glass.

  “We’ll take her to Austria by boat.” Tony rubbed his jaw. “Much harder to escape from the middle of the Atlantic, if she has thoughts of getting away. I’ll see what’s leaving Boston Harbor tomorrow or the next day. I don’t care if it’s a luxury liner or a raft with a paddle.”

  “I’ll cover the tickets,” Jordan said. “Whatever it costs to make it happen fast. I have Dad’s insurance; if we can’t use it for this—”

  “It’ll help.”

  “You’ll have to watch her every minute,” Jordan warned. “We have her tied now because she consented to it if it meant Nina would keep her distance, but she can’t walk onto that ship tied up. Not when legally you don’t have a warrant until you get to Austria. You’ll have to be vigilant every second, until she’s under arrest.” If an arrest order could be procured . . . but Jordan refused to go down that rabbit hole. It was out of her hands; all she could do was trust Ian and his colleagues overseas. “I don’t think Anna will try to run, not with Nina watching. But still . . .” Jordan thought of the woman on the dock with the pistol in her hand, a cornered animal ready to lash out at anyone, and shivered.

  But then there was the woman who had encouraged Jordan to want the world, who had comforted her when she cried for her father . . . who had murdered her father. And none of those images seemed to have anything to do with the woman huddled in the cabin doorway now, clutching a towel to her bandaged arm and shivering.

  “I pity her,” Jordan said. “I hate that. I hate her, yet I still care for her. Why can’t I turn it off, what I felt for her?”

  Tony reached out, tugging Jordan against his shoulder. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t tell Ian that I . . . For him it’s so simple.” Something had unwound in the tall Englishman the moment Anneliese had surrendered. “Do you want to go in with me?” Jordan had asked after leading the tied and shaking Anneliese to the cabin. “Ask her why she did it?”

  “I know why she did it,” he’d answered. “She did it because she wanted to, because she could. No matter what her other justifications might be. And I don’t care to hear those.”

  I care, Jordan thought, staring at the cabin. She wished she didn’t, but she did. Tony’s hand rubbed the back of her neck under her hair, as if he were trying to massage the pain away. She brushed at her eyes. “Thank you, Tony.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. I owe you.”

  “For what?” Jordan gave a half smile. “Using my weeping fit after Dad’s funeral to infiltrate the shop, or sleeping with me?”

  Tony was silent.

  “You were tracking down a murderer.” The anger she’d felt toward him
initially had sunk and died under the tidal wave of today’s shocks. It seemed like pretty small change now, his initial deception. “Getting the job out of me when we first met, that was a manipulation for the sake of your chase. But I have eyes, Tony. You weren’t squiring me around ballet classes and airfields afterward just to get information out of me. You weren’t getting anything out of me for the chase by then. As for what else you were getting, well, if all you wanted was an easy girl, I’m fairly certain you could have found one who didn’t put you to work as a photographer’s assistant first.”

  “I started tagging after you because I wanted to. No other reason.” His black eyes were steady. “I’m still sorry for the lies. More sorry than I can say.”

  “And I still want to hit you, a little bit,” Jordan tried to joke. “But I’ll get over it.”

  “Hit me if you want, J. Bryde.” Tony lifted her hand, kissed the pad of her index finger that pressed the Leica’s button. “You were magnificent on that dock. Like you’d been striding through war zones with a Leica all your life.”

  “The eye took over.” What a strange feeling it had been. Not the right feeling, maybe—surely it couldn’t be right, for the eye with its obsession to capture the perfect shot, to take charge of that moment on the dock and overshadow the more natural things, the more important things: fear, love, worry for Ruth. Maybe it wasn’t right, but Jordan had still felt it. And I want to feel it again.

  Ian and Nina were striding back along the lakeshore, the Russian woman fully dressed and shaking out her wet hair, Ian strolling at her side hands in pockets. They’ll be gone tomorrow or the next day, Jordan thought with a sudden wrench in her stomach. How much a part of her life they had all become, not just in banding together against Anneliese, but before: tea, jokes, reminiscences, the tender thread of Ruth’s music. A brief, perfect friendship. And now, of course, they would be moving on. Another hunt, another chase. Looking at Tony, his black eyes fixed on Anneliese again. Another girl.