LITMIR.BIZ

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      This was a mob hit, Jessie thought. She had been right about Brandt being mixed up with gangsters. The two men who had grabbed her and Ted had come to the Chateaux to kill Brandt. For some reason they were trying to lure him out of the lodge before they got rid of him. But Brandt wasn’t biting on the bait.

      “I’m not the coward,” he said. “That would be you and your kind.”

      “All right.” A ghastly chuckle came from Jessie’s captor. “Have it your way.”

      Some sort of signal must have passed between the two killers. The one holding Ted suddenly flung him through the air with no more effort than if he had been tossing away a rag doll. Ted cried out in terror, a cry that was cut short when he crashed into the thick trunk of one of the trees that dotted the grounds. Jessie thought she heard bones snap. Ted bounced off the tree and landed in a limp sprawl. A tendril of blood leaked from his mouth. He was either unconscious…or dead.

      The scream Jessie felt welling up inside her was still trapped, unable to get past the iron-muscled barrier across her throat. The man holding her said, “How about it, Brandt? Are you coming out, or do I kill the woman?”

      In a rough growl that sounded as dangerous as the threats issuing from Jessie’s captor, Brandt said, “Don’t kill her.”

      “I thought that would do it. Well, come on. Step out here.”

      Brandt took a step forward, moving over the threshold. One of his companions suddenly grasped his arm. “Michael, wait.” Now he and the other man were the ones urging caution, where they had been ready to charge into battle before.

      “I don’t have any choice,” Brandt said. “You know he’ll do what he says. I won’t allow them to hurt anybody else.”

      The one who had slammed Ted against the tree laughed. “Oh, we’ll kill her, too,” he said, “once we’re through with you and your lapdogs.”

      He moved forward as Brandt took another step out of the lodge. Even to Jessie’s terror-fevered brain, it was obvious that this man intended to fight Brandt.

      “Max, Clifford, stay inside,” Brandt said to his friends. “I’ll take care of this.”

      “All you’ll take care of is dying.”

      And with that the black-garbed man lunged at Brandt, moving faster than it seemed possible for a human being to move. His arms shot out. His fingers were hooked like the talons on a bird of prey.

      But Michael Brandt was no ordinary prey. He whirled aside with blinding speed. The reflexes that enabled him to pilot a car around a racetrack at two hundred miles per hour pulled him out of the way of his attacker and sent him leaping into a spinning kick that struck the man on the side of the head. Big and strong though the man might be, that blow was too powerful to be shrugged off. He stumbled to the side and fell to one knee.

      Still moving almost too fast for Jessie’s eyes to follow, Brandt hit the man with a right and a left, rocking his head back and forth, and then kicked him in the chest. The man went over backward, but he rolled and flipped and came back up on his feet. He rolled his shoulders and moved his head from side to side, shaking off the effects of the battering Brandt had given him.

      “Not bad,” he said, “but nowhere near good enough.”

      He charged Brandt again.

      As if the man holding Jessie had just realized what Brandt planned to do, he called, “Wait!” but it was too late. Brandt had already shifted smoothly to one side, grabbed the black shirt that his attacker wore and used the man’s own weight and momentum against him by twisting and heaving him along the path toward the door of the lodge. The guy yelled in panic, unable to stop his out-of-control plunge. That yell became a scream of agony as he stumbled through the doorway and burst into flame.

      Jessie hadn’t been expecting that.

      Brandt’s two friends—Max and Clifford, he had called them—were waiting for the man who was now on fire for some reason. They pulled weapons of some sort from under their coats. Knives? Jessie couldn’t tell. But they used the weapons like knives, stabbing them into the man and driving him to the floor of the foyer inside the door.

      Funny thing, though. Nothing actually hit the floor except the now-empty black shirt and trousers the man had been wearing.

      Where had he gone?

      Jessie didn’t have the time or inclination to worry about that, even though the tiny part of her brain that wasn’t gibbering in mindless terror made a mental note of the oddity. Stars began to explode behind her eyes as the lack of oxygen finally got to her. A red mist seemed to drift in front of her, cloaking her vision as Brandt faced her and the man holding her.

      “Damn you!” the man said. “You killed him!”

      “That’s what he…intended to do to me.” Brandt was a little breathless, despite being in superb physical shape. His voice grew stronger and steadier as he went on, “Now let her go.”

      “I’ll let her go, all right,” the bastard growled, and his grip tightened even more.

      This was it, Jessie knew. She was about to die. He was going to snap her neck like a twig. Maybe even twist her head right off her shoulders.

      But before the man could do that, Brandt’s arm drew back and then flashed forward. Something whipped past Jessie’s face, brushing her cheek so closely it felt like a kiss. A rough kiss, because it also stung as if something had scraped her skin.

      The man holding her stiffened and staggered and suddenly the crushing force on her throat went away and air, precious, life-giving air, flowed back into her lungs. She gasped and gulped as she fell to her knees. Although it hurt her neck to twist it, she half turned and looked back over her shoulder at the man who had been her captor until a couple of heartbeats ago.

      He stood there with his face twisted in a rictus of agony as he pawed at a six-inch-long wooden shaft maybe an inch in diameter sticking out of his right eye.

      “Get down!” Brandt shouted to her.

      Jessie obeyed the order without thinking, pitching forward so that she lay flat on the flagstone walk. Brandt sailed over her in a flying kick. Both his feet crashed into the man’s chest and knocked him backward. Brandt landed with an agile grace, leaned over and ripped the shaft out of the man’s eye socket. It had been sharpened to a wicked point on the end.

      A wooden stake?

      An instant later, Brandt drove the stake into the man’s chest. Jessie heard a sound like bacon frying, and then the guy was gone, just like the other one.

      “Stay down, Michael!” one of the men from the lodge yelled as he and his companion burst out of the place carrying crossbows loaded with similar wooden stakes. “There might be more of them!”

      “No,” Brandt said with a shake of his head as he straightened from his crouch over the remains of the man he had just…killed? Destroyed? Jessie wasn’t sure what the right word would be. “There was another one, but he ran off into the night. I don’t sense any others.” She couldn’t think straight as he moved to her side, grasped her arm and effortlessly lifted her to her feet. “Are you all right, Miss Morgan?”

      “You…you remember me,” she said. The words sounded stupid to her.

      “Of course I remember you. And I’m not surprised you tried a ruse like this.” His voice hardened. “Too bad it got your friend hurt.”

      Ted! Oh, God, he was right. Ted was injured—or worse—and it was all her fault.

      Despite that, his callous comment made her so furious she wanted to slap him or curse him or both. But she couldn’t do either because her head was spinning so badly and as she staggered to her feet she was so sick to her stomach all she really wanted to do was puke or pass out.

      Instead she did both of those, first one and then the other.

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