Fire in the Wind

by Alexandra Sellers

  Something stirred in the Watcher then: a fire that had not troubled him before lighted in him now. It flickered up behind his black eyes as he gazed at the heaving body on the sand. He would not kill her yet, he thought. Not yet.

  The Watcher moved.

  Chapter 1

  Something woke her up. Something frightening, so that her heart was beating as though she had just had a brush with death. Shulamith sat upright in the silent gloom, her ears straining for the repetition of a sound she did not want to hear.

  The drapes and her window were open as they always were at night—she could feel the sea-scented breeze stroke her forehead as she motnionlessly listened, but the noise hadn't come from outside the protective shell of the house. It had come from within.

  It came again, after a long moment when she hardly breathed; and with the sharp grace of a cat Smith turned her face towards the noise, as though drinking in its location as much through her wide eyes, sighless still in the dark, as through her ears. The sound was muffled, certainly not as sharp as the one that had awakened her, but still unmistakably threatening: a noise of quiet scuffle, and single, low-voiced command.

  "Daddy!" she callled wildly into the night. Her voice came out as a whisper, a cat's frightened hiss, but there was no point in calling again—she mustn't waste time. Shulamith ripped back the light blanket covering her legs and was running as soon as her feet hit the soft thick carpet.

  A gleam of light showed around the door to her father's room, she saw when she reached the doorway, and the sight quickened her breathing and her pace, because the door should have been open, not firmly shut. She sped silently around the wide balcony that overlooked the large front hall, terror snapping at her heals, clutching her throat. He should have listened to me, he should have hired a nurse, she thought, and then, I should have argued more, I should have insisted.

  She had convinced him to sleep with his door open, and that was all.

  But the door was closed now, the fine thread of light around its well-cut seams proof, at this hour in the morning, that whatever had caused her to start up out of a sound sleep, heart pounding, had been no nightmare. Smith bit her lip. Why was the door closed. She realized she had already begun a prayer in her head. Prayers were so simple after all. Please, God, please don't let him be dying. Please.

  She was almost crying the last words aloud as she fought for a clumsy second with the door handle, and then the door flew open under her determined, desperate hand.

  And then she screamed.

  It was a pipeline of sound from the deepest reaches of terror within her, an icicle of comprehending-uncomprehending horror that destroyed the close hot silence of her father's room at a stroke. The sream lasted only a moment before abruptly dying, and in its frozen aftermath Smith felt her body begin to shake, felt her muscles quiver, and then a chill sweat exuded from every pore.

  Around her father's bed four darkly clad men wearing black balaclavas stared at her in mute surprise. On the bed lay her father, his pyjama top drenched with perspiration, or water, or both; his face grayly, sickly pale and beather with the same icy perspiration was was forming on Smith's own forehead. His breathing was shallow and fast. For one second there was no motion, no sound in the room. Then, some movement on th eperiphery of her vision released Smith from immobility, and she whirled to see that a figth man, his eyes fixed on her, was replacing the phone receiver in its cradle.

  Ever after she would be amazed at the speed with which her mind suddenly functioned in that therrified moment. In a strange, half-consecutive, half-simultaneous burst of understanding she realized that if the man was using the phone, then the lines had not been cut; that there was a phone in her father's bathroom and a deadbolt on the door; that if she tried to run away from these men down the stairs they would certainly catch her but that if she ran into the room, she might make it to the bathroom before they understood her intent.

  These thoughts were superimposed one on the other in a fascinating ripple, like the individual colours of a landscape painted on separate squares of glass that together form the image. Her brain was so clear that she did not have to make even the smallest glance towards the bathroom. Some instinct told her, with a combined sensation of darkness and space, that across the room the bathroom door was wide open.

  By the time the receiver in the fifth man's dark hand clicked in the cradle Smith was in midflight across the room. She wasted no energy on imagining pursuit, on listening for a stifled shout or a footfall behind her. She thought of nothing but running, of moving the mass of her body through as much space in as little time as possible; she thought of getting into her father's bathroom and ramming the bolt before those evil animals behind her—animals dangerous with the cunning of men—got their unimaginable hands on her. She thought of the phone with three outside lines, on one of which she would surely be able to dial 0 before they blocked the lines or kicked down the door.

  Then she was through the doorway into the cologne-scented darkness, reaching unerringly for the door with one and then two outstretched hands; she was turning, with a coordination so perfect it felt like slow motion, to ram the door shut. She saw with an unsurprised satisfction that the fith man—the quickest of all, since he had been the farthest from the bathroom—was still only halfway across the room. The other four were in various postures of surprise, consternation and motion, but too far away to be any threat.

  The door, half shut, stopped moving under her weight. Smith's gasp of horror ripped out of her throat as she felt the door run aground, but she cut the sound off instantly. There was no time to waste on fear. Her eyes dropped down from the threateningly advancing fifth man to find what was bloocking the door...

  Her father's bath towel, draped on the doorknob, had caught on the carpet and been ground underneath until the door could no longer move. In one sharp motion Smith pulled the door back off the towel and plucked the material from the knob.

  But the fifth man was too close: she had lost the precious advantage that surprise had given her. In a last, wild effort she flung the giant glue towel—still damp from her father's shower—at the man's head and turned into the familiar darkness to grope for the phone that rested on the broad strech of marble by the sink.

  By the time they had moved into this house, Shulamith had been far too old to sit on the edge of the tub watching her father shave, and it had been many years before that since he had encouraged it. So she had never seen the phenomenon of her father shaving and discussing business on the phone at the same time. In those long-ago days of laughing, sun-filled Paris mornings there had been no business to discuss in the morning, no phone anywhere in the flat, let alone the bathroom, but thgere had been sun on the dusty roofs and pouring through the tiny bathroom window, and the aroma of breakfast mixed with that other constant scent of oil paint and turpentine.

  But still she could reach for the phone unerringly in the dark now, for she had polished the marble countless times and placed the plain black phone back in position. This blind knowledge of the room gave her a momentary advantage again, and she pushed a plastic button and dialed 0 second before a lean bronzed hand, darker in the loom, reached out from behind her to push down the hook and extinguish the tiny orange glow that for a second in time had been a light of hope to her.

  Shulamith St. John, who had committed very little violence in the course of her life, threw the receiver at the man's masked head with a force that surprised her. Not waiting to see it connect, she didged around him to run back into her father's bedroom.

  Two of the masked me were close enough to make any more running futile. She drew up short, suddenly aware that she was breathing in tortured, shuddering gasps.

  "He's got a bad heart!" she choked out as the fifth man came up behind her. Her voice broke oddly on the silence. For the first time she became fully aware of herself, of her flimsy cotton-and-lace nightgown, of her total vulnerability. But that was lay insanity, and she pushed the awareness away and concentrated o
n the gray face of her father, who lay in her line of vision between the two men facing her. No one moved.

  "He'll have a heart attack! He'll die!" she shrieked at them, hating the blank, insensate masks that hid all humanity. Each mask, in a ludicrous attempt to reassert lost individuality, she thought, was trimmed with a different colour around the eyes and mouth.

  "He'll die!" she repeated. "Call the hospital!"

  The red- and turquoise-trimmed masks in front of her blinked emptily, but White Trim, behind her—the tall, fast-moving, fifth man—said quietly, his voice resonating strangely in the room after her high, tense shrieking,

  "An ambulance has already been called. Your father may have had a heart attack. If you—"

  "His pills!" she choked, wishing her voice were not this terror-stricken cry that gave her away so obviously. She pushed between Red Mask and Turquoise Mask, who seemed unsure of what to do and might have let her pass. But the tall man behind her, obviously more in control of the situation, restrained her with a firm hand closing on her arm above her elbow.

  "He has been taken his drugs," he said. "You can do nothing more for him at the moment. If you will...."

  She turned on him, almost spitting. She had never in her life felt such a blinding burst of anger, hatred, helplessness and violence as the one that flamed through her now, a supernova exploding simultaneously in her brain and her stomach, sending its fires through every cell of her being.

  "Get your hands off me!" she commanded, her voice a deep primal growl. "I want to go to my father!"

  Two more men, in yellow- and green-trimmed masks, were still bending over her father in a kind of helpless anxiety; suddenly the three surrounding Smith took on a little of the same confusion, as though she, too, were deathly ill. White Mask's hand on her arm relaxed, and the two men by the bed straightened.

  With an imperious motion that dared them to stop her, Smith crossed to the bed and placed her hand on her father's damp forehead. She drew in a shaking breath: she knew nothing about what to do for a heart attack. Why, oh, why, hadn't he let her hire a nurse?

  There was a whispered colloquy going on among the five men. White Mask crossed to her as the other four started uncertainly toward the door.

  "The ambulance is on its way," said White Mask quietly. "Will you...."

  For some reason their uncertainty made her triumphantly strong. And stupid. In that momentary rush of unthinking elated anger, she rounded on them.

  "You mean you're not going to kidnap my father after all? You're afraid no one would pay money for a dead man?" she burst out, her voice contemptuous.

  "You stupid bloody fools, don't you do any research at all? Don't you know that my father has made it impossible for the company or me to pay a ransom for him?" Her breath was coming in gasps of love and rage and fear. "But he still couldn't stop a bunch of cretins trying, could he?" She pointed to the bed beside her. "That's his second attack in a few weeks. You've probably killed him, damn you! Damn all of you and your damned mindless greed! You...."

  White Mask lifted his hand to touch her shoulder. Through the mists of her rage the gentle gesture seemed unbearable from such a menacingly powerful man. She was suddenly reminded of how strong her father had seemed to her as a child, and how gentle he had always been in that long-ago past, before—Smith's throat tightened, and she shrugged off the comforting hand with animal violence.

  "Don't touch me!" she shrieked. "You're all cheap cowards, afraid even to show your faces! Why don't you at least have the courage of your convictions? Why don't you stand up and show yourselves as men who get what they want by violence and murder?"

  The short burst of a distant siren broke sharply on the air. Four of the men started toward the door again, while the fifth, White Mask, stayed looking down at her.

  Then Shulamith St. John was very stupid indeed.

  "Who are you?" she demanded suddenly. "I want to know who you are!" And without any thought of the consequences she reached up and tore the white-trimmed mask from his head. Only when she saw his face did she understand what she had done.

  "Oh, my God!" she whispered in dismay. Now the silence of the room, threaded through with the nightmarish ululation of the oncoming siren, was electric with danger.

  The man was dark, the skin of his hawklike face bronzed and firm, his black eyes hooded. His hair was black, too, wavy and thick, falling to his ears in two wings from a central parting. He had a high-bridged nose, and his wide mouth was grim as, his eyes boring into hers, he called something to his four masked accomplices. Then he reached for her.

  Smith jumped back from him too late. His iean, black-clothed frame had already moved, imprisoning her against a muscled chest between arms of steel.

  She reacted like a wildcat, spitting, clawing, cursing, but she was slim and light and he had the advantage of height and strength. She fought anyway—twisting and clawing desperately till her long red hair was tangled around his head and her own, the lace of her nightgown hanging loose, and his black sweater gaping at two places—fought with all her strength, and then some.

  It was not enough. The hawk-faced man overpowered her at last, pressing her head back into his shoulder with a hand held over her face so that she could neither breathe nor scream. Then he carried her swiftly and noiselessly through the house, and, as the ambulance men burst through the front door with a clattering stretcher in tow, he moved out a back patio door into the damp, sea-scented air.

  "Upstairs—the room where the light is," she heard a male voice call.

  Her heart was labouring from lack of oxygen, and Shulamith stopped her frantic backward kicks at her abductor's legs and tried with her free hand to pull those large strong fingers away from her nose.

  His voice said very softly into her ear, "I will let you breathe if you do not fight me. Otherwise I will force you into unconsciousness." Not waiting for her agreement, he eased his hand down away from her nose, still maintaining his sure grip over her mouth.

  Shulamith dragged in a breath, her heartbeats slowing. With an effort of will she calmed her thoughts, resolutely pushing away anger, hatred and most of all fear, and concentrated on her situation.

  Her abductor was strong and tall. Her toes barely brushed the ground. Her head was being pressed firmly into the hollow of his shoulder with one hand, while his other arm, wrapped tightly across her, held her arms immobile against her own body. Her toes just barely reached the ground. It would be pointless to kick, he need move his hand only slightly to deprive her of air again. His body warmed her against the damp chill of the night air, and mentally she rejected his heat. She wanted nothing from him.

  The man's attention was not entirely on her, she sensed now, though his grip did not relax. She felt an extraordinary stillness about him, as though even his blood had ceased to flow; the rise and fall of his hard chest had become almost imperceptible against her back, while her own breathing was still thin and rapid.

  He was listening. He had not closed the door behind them, and now he listened to the noises coming from the house as though his ears let him to see what was happening inside. Shulamith listened, too, picking up almost nothing until, after what seemed an age, there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps and a stretcher coming down the stairs and moving out the front door. Then ambulance doors slammed, and the sound of an engine roared away down the curving drive.

  There was no sound of the siren, and Shulamith sucked in a shuddering breath. He was dead. Her father was dead, or they would be using the siren.

  "There's no traffic in these streets," said the deep voice in her ear, and Shulamith was surprised by her response to the understanding tone: she wanted to cry. "They'll use the siren again when they reach the main streets."

  She listened intently for a long moment, not knowing whether to believe or not. Then, from down the mountain, a short burst of the siren's shriek made her sag against his body with relief. Her father was alive.

  He moved then, back through the patio door and
across carpet and oak, through the front hall and then out into the night. At the top of the stone steps he whistled softly and waited, his hold on her not relaxing even to shift his grip or ease his muscles.

  Below them, behind the black shadows of fir trees, the lights of the city centre sparkled in the black surround of the ocean, and out on the water the glint of ocean-going vessels beckoned to her, as always, with the promise of distant shores. The scene before her was so familiar that she could scarcely believe all this was really happening. Shulamith closed her eyes tightly: either the familiar beauty of Vancouver at night or her attacker would disappear, she was certain. This was a dream.

  But the man's grip on her body remained real, and when she opened her eyes, so did the city.

  After a moment her ears picked up the quiet sound of an engine, and through the trees along the drive a small van crept, without benefit of lights, and stopped beside them just as her abductor, moving down the broad steps, reached the ground.

  Panic filled her with a renewed force, and, tasting it, Shulamith realized that she had lain quiescent in the stranger's hold for long minutes, as though his silent strength had somehow stilled her wild fear against her will. She cursed herself for a fool. If she had had little chance against one man in the past few minutes, she now had no chance at all against the additional four who were certainly in the van. As the driver's door opened she twisted and kicked with all her might, clawing behind her for any vulnerable area within reach.

  The man swore, dropping his hand from her mouth to grasp her twisting body, her flailing arm. Immediately she screamed.

  "Get her mouth!" the dark man ordered the other, still masked, who had climbed out of the driver's side and was now running around the front of the van to them.

  Shulamith let fly the hardest kick she had delivered since her days on the high-school girls' rugby team, and the second man grunted and went down like a hewn tree. She waited in terror for the man holding her to take revenge somehow, but he was not cruel as he caught her free arm in against her body and put his hand back over her mouth again.