Devil's Night (17 page)

He stopped talking, listening instead to another ominous sound coming from inside the hotel. It was one he hadn’t heard before—a sizzling noise, underscored by a sharp whistle that reminded him of a tea kettle at full boil.

The shingles at his feet seemed to melt away, replaced by licks of orange as the fire officially broke through the roof. Thriving on this new patch of oxygen, the flames leaped high, consuming even more of the roof’s surface.

Henry fell backward, landing hard, the shingles iron-hot through the fabric of his pants. The hole in front of him widened and large chunks of the roof disappeared into the fiery depths.

Desperate to get away, Henry crab-crawled backward, scurrying once again up the roof. The fire followed his path, eating through the areas he had just escaped, making him move even faster. It seemed like the flames were intent on grabbing him, punching through the roof in a desperate attempt to drag him kicking and screaming back into the hotel.

Henry managed to evade each grasp, pushing himself higher and higher. He soon found himself back at the roof’s peak and almost tumbling down the other side. But he caught himself—barely—and sat for a second, mind spinning.

He needed to get off the roof. Immediately. And now that the ladder was no longer an option, he was left with only one choice.

He had to jump.

Henry didn’t want to. There was probably forty feet between the roof and the ground. It was enough to hurt him badly. Enough to kill him. But at least he had a chance of surviving the fall. Remaining on top of the Sleepy Hollow Inn would only lead to one result.

To his right, the fire continued to chomp across the roof. To his left, another hole opened up, spewing flames. He couldn’t wait any longer. He had to jump and he had to do it now.

Hopping to his feet, Henry allowed a split-second glance at the street below. The prayer circle was still in full swing. In fact, it looked like it had grown.

Good. He was going to need all the help he could get.

Exhaling one last, terrified breath, Henry started to run down the roof. His mind, no doubt coping with the prospect of imminent death, shot off in strange tangents. He thought of the Ring Cycle again and Valhalla burning. The only production he had seen—at the Met, during college—had used shreds of fluttering orange silk to represent the flames. Skipping amid real fire now, he realized how realistic they had been.

His thoughts jumped to Gia, his wife, dead going on six years now. He flashed back to the accident that killed her. The same one that caused his first round of scars. Then his son entered his thoughts. His unborn son. The child snatched away from him before he could leave the womb.

His thoughts leaped again. To Deana, of course. And how good she smelled when he held her in bed. How soft she felt in his arms. Then, oddly, to Kat. Her smile at the diner that morning. Her awkwardness the first time they met.

Henry was jerked back to the present when a new hole opened up in the roof, right beneath him. Only momentum allowed him to clear it, his legs seemingly skimming on the air. Then he fell forward onto his stomach. The force of the impact knocked most of the air out of his lungs. The undiluted terror he felt evaporated the rest.

Yet he still moved, sliding downward on his stomach, hands out in front of him, the lip of the roof getting closer.

Henry twisted his body when he reached the edge, aiming to hit the ground feet first. His legs went over the side first, the roof vanishing out from under them. Gravity immediately took over, tugging him downward, the edge of the roof sliding past his crotch, his stomach, his chest.

He clawed at the shingles, refusing to completely surrender to gravity even as the remainder of his body cleared the roof. Henry’s fingers, now bloody and burned, scraped along their last patch of shingles before bumping against the rainspout.

Then, faster than he wanted to and more terrified than he thought he’d be, Henry Goll slid off the roof.

Kat couldn’t bear to look. Not anymore. Not after Dutch Jansen and his ladder were pushed away by the mounting flames. It was bad enough seeing Henry stumble helplessly across the roof, trapped and terrified. But she couldn’t bring herself to watch him jump from it, or worse, plummet into the flames. So she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head for good measure, waiting for the reaction of the crowd to tell her what had happened.

She heard a collective gasp, followed by a surge of motion. Nick grabbed her arm and shook it until her eyes opened.

“He didn’t fall,” he yelped. “The son of a bitch is still hanging on!”

Kat reluctantly turned her head, seeing that Henry was now dangling from the rain gutter attached to the lip of the roof. His body, suddenly halted, swung forward, bringing him perilously close to the hotel’s fiery exterior wall. He turned his face away from the flames as, above him, the rainspout sank under his weight.

Kat knew he couldn’t stay that way. The walls were unstable. The flames and smoke were everywhere. He needed to let go eventually. And she would be there to help break his fall.

“We can catch him,” she said, now dragging Nick toward the burning hotel. “It’s not too late to help him.”

Others joined her, surging forward. On the edge of her vision, she saw Carl Bauersox step into the fray. Tony Vasquez did the same, running right beside her. Soon there were about a dozen of them scrambling past the fire trucks. Dutch Jansen, back on the ground, tried to get them to stop, shouting that the fire was too strong and the building too unstable. They ignored the order, giving him no choice but to join the circle forming below Henry.

Kat shouted up at him. “Let go! We’ve got you!”

Henry didn’t hesitate. One quick glance at the ground was all he needed to convince him to let go.

He fell faster than Kat thought he would, a straight drop to the group beneath him. There was a flurry of movement—hands reaching upward, kicking legs, bodies tumbling like pins in a bowling alley. Kat felt the heel of a shoe, Henry’s presumably, glance off her shoulder before knocking into Tony’s chest. They fell forward, pulled into the scrum, piled on top of one another.

When it was all over, Henry was on solid ground. A little worse for wear, maybe, but mostly unscathed. When he stood, the crowd watching from the other side of the street let out a cheer. His rescuers patted him on the back before shaking hands and congratulating themselves on their success. They lifted Henry onto their shoulders, not stopping when he began to protest.

Dutch Jansen shooed them away, pushing them out of range of the fire until only Kat, Nick, and Tony remained.

“You’ve got to move, folks,” Dutch told them. “Give us room to put out this goddamn fire.”

Tony helped Kat to her feet. She tried to do the same for Nick, who was flat on the ground, wincing in pain. It was his knee, she knew. He had hurt it during Henry’s rescue.

“You okay?” she asked, offering him a hand.

Nick grunted as he pulled himself into a kneeling position. “I’ve been better.”

Kat slid a shoulder under one of Nick’s arms and lifted him into a standing position. Tony joined in, supporting Nick’s other side. Together, the three of them began to shuffle away from the hotel.

They made it two steps before Dutch Jansen was upon them again, shouting. “Get out of here, Kat! It’s too dangerous!”

Behind them, the fire raged. Kat felt its heat on her back, as intense as it was deadly. Sneaking a glance back at the hotel, she saw that the roof was completely engulfed by flames leaping high into the air. Dutch was right. It
was
too dangerous.

“Nick,” she said, “you need to move faster, okay? Can you do that?”

If he responded, she didn’t hear it. All she heard was the roar of fire and the sound of breaking timber.

The inn’s roof was about to collapse.

It emitted a loud, drawn-out crack—like a tree just before it topples. Then the roof caved in, crashing into what remained of the third floor of the hotel before continuing on to the second. The fall continued as the combined weight of the roof and the third floor smashed through the inn’s second level and then the first.

The whole thing—level after level of burning building—came to a stop in the basement. The impact sent up a wave of flames that burst outward, hurtling toward them. The rush of hot air that followed shoved them forward, almost lifting them off their feet. Kat hit the ground again, no longer able to see, no longer hearing her screams.

She rolled onto her back, squinting against the orange brightness of the blaze, seeing that with the roof and floors gone, there was nothing left to support the exterior walls. The one closest to them leaned forward, set loose from the rest of the hotel. Flames danced along its surface.

The wall tilted even more, creaking and crackling. Then it fell forward.

“Kat! Look out!”

It was Nick. Just behind her. Shoving her forward. Kat rolled along the ground, feeling the sidewalk beneath her. Then she hit the curb, bouncing into the gravel-dusted street.

She came to a stop facing the fire at a sideways view. The ground was now vertical. The falling wall horizontal. Disoriented and confused, she saw that Nick had also pushed Tony, who was rolling the same way she had.

Now it was only him, caught in the shadow of the fiery wall. He looked her way, wide-eyed and frightened. His expression changed, just for a second, when he saw that she was out of harm’s way. It was, Kat realized, a look of relief passing across Nick Donnelly’s face.

Then the wall crashed down on top of him and Kat could no longer see him at all.

1
P
.
M
.

Kat forced herself to stop crying long enough to make a phone call, although there were plenty of tears left to be shed. She felt them pressing at the corners of her eyes, waiting to be released. But she had to be composed. Just for a few minutes. Sitting on a bench outside the hospital, she sniffed once and wiped her cheeks. Then she dialed her phone.

Lucy Meade answered a few rings later, her voice friendly and unsuspecting.

“Hey, Kat,” she said. “I was just about to call you. I’ve got big news. My friend took a look at the femur. He agrees it had been in a fire. Even more, he got an age. According to him, the owner of those bones died more than three hundred years ago.”

Kat stayed silent, not quite sure what she should say and how she should sound. Lucy noticed the lack of response and said, “Kat? You still there?”

“Lucy.” Her voice was a tremulous croak. “I’m calling about Nick. Something terrible has happened.”

“What do you mean?”

She tried to explain everything as best she could. Nick’s surprise arrival in Perry Hollow. Him helping with the case. The fire at the bed-and-breakfast. But when it came time to break the really bad news, she found she couldn’t. The words just wouldn’t come.

“Kat,” Lucy said, “what happened to Nick?”

“The wall—” Kat tried and failed to choke back a sob. “It collapsed on top of him.”

Lucy’s shock was palpable, even over the phone. Kat heard a sharp intake of air, followed by a worried “Is he okay? Tell me he’ll be okay.”

He’ll be okay.
Those were the words Kat so desperately wanted to say. But it would have been a lie. She had no idea if Nick would be okay. That could only be answered by the doctors currently trying to save his life.

“He’s in surgery now,” she said. “He’s hurt really bad.”

Kat didn’t know with certainty all the things that were wrong. She was only aware of what the paramedics had uttered on the way to the hospital. Broken bones. Trauma to the head. Second-degree burns. Internal bleeding. Sitting numb and motionless in the back of the ambulance, she realized that the paramedics were surprised Nick was still alive.

“Is he going to survive?” Lucy asked. “Be straight with me, Kat.”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

Lucy said she’d be there as fast as she could. Kat told her she’d call immediately if anything changed. Then the call was over, and not a moment too soon. Just as Kat was saying good-bye, the tears started to flow again.

This time, she knew, there would be no stopping them.

Weeping openly, she returned to the hospital’s emergency room and took a seat next to Henry Goll. There were bandages on his fingers—the gutter he hung from had cut them badly—and a mean-looking scrape on his chin. Kat could only imagine what they looked like to the others in the waiting room. Probably like a pair of chimney sweeps—faces blackened with ash, holes the size of dimes burned into their clothes. The stench of smoke rising off them was so strong that no one even tried to sit near them. They had a whole corner to themselves. Perfect, Kat thought, for inconsolable crying.

“Sorry for being such a wreck,” she told Henry. “In the past year, Nick and I have grown very close.”

Henry gave her a surprised glance. “You two aren’t—”

Kat stopped him before he could go any further. “God, no. That would be like sleeping with my brother. If I had a brother.”

Sitting in the sterile waiting room, tears forming clean streaks down her soot-smeared cheeks, Kat realized that Nick was the closest she’d get to having a sibling. That made the thought of losing him all the more terrifying.

“I just don’t know what I’ll do without him.”

Henry put an arm over her shoulder, a gesture Kat found as surprising as she did comforting.

“Nick will be okay,” he said. “If I remember correctly, he’s as stubborn as they come.”

He was right about that. Kat had never known the true meaning of the word
determination
until she met Nick Donnelly. He was fueled by an inner fire most people didn’t possess. It’s what had driven him to become a cop and, when that abruptly ended, a private detective. It’s why he had come to Perry Hollow, even though the death of Constance Bishop had nothing to do with him. And it’s what had allowed him to save Kat’s life, not once but twice.

“Yes,” she said, trying to sound convinced. “He’s definitely going to pull through.”