by Robert Young
When he moves again he is still crawling, slowly, dragging a bent looking leg and he shuffles his way round to the front of the van where Frost lays pinned.
'No,' Carla's voice is thick with fear.
I stare at her. Did she wish Roth dead? Was that it? She had brought him into the plan to eliminate Frost and Stanford but did she also plan to add Roth to the list? There was so little I knew of her. Of her motives.
'God no,' she whispers and then I see what she means and why she is so horrified.
Roth hauls himself through the broken glass and twisted metal and he falls upon Frost, taking him beneath the chin and forcing the head back. With his other hand he finds a shard of windscreen and he draws it fast across Frost's throat.
Roth leans down and drinks, taking in all that potent concentrated power that Frost has been accumulating from so many taken lives over countless lifetimes. He takes it all and swallows and swallows and Carla sinks to her knees beside me.
He pauses to lift his head and look back toward the ragged hole in the car park wall, three storeys above and the shape of our silhouettes and in the gloom I think I see him smile.
Chapter 55
A city is a hell of a place to hide in, one so crowded with people and with so many layers and levels of concrete and steel and corners and crannies and hidden, forgotten, closed up spaces.
Fields and hedgerows bring isolation enough but there's no surer way to stand out.
I expect that Roth has reached the same conclusion wherever he is. Certainly as the weeks have passed he has proved as adept at vanishing as he was at making himself the centre of attention. The front pages have found new stories now, frustrated at the lack of a lead. Most have simply assumed that the river has taken him and that one day a body may wash up on a bank somewhere downstream.
How long is it now since I was considering making an end of myself? A month perhaps? Less. Those thoughts sweep in again every so often like storm clouds, black and heavy.
But Roth is out there still and for all the callous, reckless killings that he indulged himself in those early weeks, I know that what he must have become now is every bit as foul and degenerate as the two who made him. Taking what he took from Frost will have transformed him in ways that I can scarcely conceive.
But it was me that brought him back into their range. Me who allowed Frost to be weakened enough to be vulnerable to Roth, slowed down, his sharp edge dulled such that he could not catch and take Roth down in the way I know he could have done. And when there was still a chance to go after them and keep the odds against Frost two-to-one, keep an eye on Roth, I stayed with Carla and she hates me for it.
The two of them have fed upon that tainted, potent blood. Such a concentrated boost of adrenaline that they have power and strength so far beyond my own that I cannot hope to offer a challenge.
But in beating Frost and Stanford, just as I had wanted, the consequences are terrible and they must be faced. Roth will surface again and will slip up somewhere. He is ferocious and depraved and treacherous, but he is careless as well, and no kind of intellect. So I watch for now and wait and wonder if there is anything I can do.
I cling to the faint hope that Carla's anger may abate in time, though it is too raw right now and she has changes of her own to contend with. If I find her again it will be because she has let me.
For now I have the leather pouch and several doses of epinephrine that were her grudging parting gift.
After that, I'm on my own, with decisions to make.
