Duffy didn’t need to tell him that. But Zeke stood frozen, beset by the sensation of helplessness that had surged through him from that minute upon the stairs when he first realized the desperate peril Rory was in. What the hell could he do? There was no way to wrench Rory out of Mrs. Van Hallsburg’s grasp without Rory being hurt or worse.
All he could do was follow, clinging to the hope that there would be one moment when Mrs. Van H. would be distracted, lose her grasp upon Rory—one split second when he would be able to act.
Yet it was as though Mrs. Van Hallsburg sensed the direction of his thoughts, for she didn’t allow her concentration to waver for an instant, not even as she and Rory clambered into the gondola. Rory’s assistants were too caught up in the launch of the balloon to notice anything amiss.
Rory’s chin was raised in a valiant effort to conceal her fear, but the pleading look in her eyes seared Zeke. Was there a chance that Mrs. Van Hallsburg would let her go once Rory had served her purpose, helped her to escape? As the lines were being cast off, Mrs. Van Hallsburg shifted her gaze to meet Zeke’s, her impassive features flushed with a taunting triumph. Zeke knew that whatever Rory did, she was going to die.
As the balloon lifted off, he charged forward. Shoving past the astonished Angelo, he grabbed onto a dangling rope and tried to hold the balloon earthbound. But he hadn’t counted on the sheer power of the hissing behemoth above him.
The balloon yanked him up as though he weighed no more than a rag doll, his feet kicking nothing but air. He heard the startled shouts from below and made the mistake of looking down at the wooden dock spinning rapidly away from him. For a second, he felt a rush of dizziness, the familiar nausea, but he forced himself to look up. The rope abraded his palms as he strained to climb upward and pull himself into the basket.
Dragged down by Zeke’s added weight, the balloon rose a few feet above the warehouse and no higher. Horrified, Rory peered over the side of the basket. She forgot her own danger in the face of Zeke’s struggle for his life, fearing that any moment she would see his hands slip, his body hurtle back to smash against the docks.
She made a frantic attempt to tug on the rope, help pull Zeke up to safety. A futile gesture. Idiot, she rebuked herself. The valve line, she needed to pull on the valve line, release enough air to lower gently, allow Zeke a chance to drop safely back to the ground.
But as she spun about, she was chilled by a burst of laughter from Mrs. Van Hallsburg. She saw the woman striving to release some of the ballast so the balloon would surge even higher.
Rory leaped to stop her, but Mrs. Van Hallsburg brought her gun back to bear. Rory slapped the weapon aside, deflecting it just as it went off, the shot whizzing harmlessly past, singeing one of the ropes. The gun flew from Mrs. Van Hallsburg’s fingers, vanishing over the side of the gondola. With a shriek of fury, Mrs. Van Hallsburg lunged for Rory’s throat.
Rory fought with all her might to hold her off, but despite her brittle elegance, the woman seemed possessed of a demonic strength. Rory felt herself driven relentlessly backward. The basket pitched and Rory lost her balance. Mrs. Van Hallsburg shoved hard and Rory cried out as she fell, tumbling into nothingness.
She grasped wildly, her fingers managing to close over the side of the basket. For a terrifying moment, she thought she couldn’t hold on. She heard Zeke roar her name, glimpsed him swaying on the rope just beneath her.
But she dared not look down. Mrs. Van Hallsburg’s pale face hovered above her, the woman’s length of white-gold hair blowing free in a witchlike tumble. She grasped Rory’s fingers, her nails biting into Rory’s flesh. Slowly, remorselessly, she began to pry Rory’s hands away.
Rory’s legs flailed against the tangle of her skirts. Her hands throbbed with pain as she felt her sweat-slickened fingers start to slip.
“Zeke!” she cried. Below her, she sensed his struggles to scale the rope and reach her in time. She felt her foot strike against his shoulder just as she lost her grip.
Her cry seemed borne away by the wind as she plummeted, knocking against Zeke. He grabbed for her, his fingers clamping ruthlessly about her wrist, arresting her plunge with a suddenness that nearly wrenched her arm from her socket. His other hand barely clutched the end of the rope, his incredible strength the only thing between them and certain death. His facewas beaded with sweat, the cords of his neck muscles taut with the strain, and Rory knew he couldn’t maintain this for long.
Above them she had a glimpse of Mrs. Van Hallsburg, the woman’s features contorted beyond recognition as she worked frantically to release the ballast, her smile insane.
Zeke gave a roar of rage and despair. He suddenly stared downward as if mesmerized, and to Rory’s horror, he let go the rope.
As Rory fell, she had no time to even cry out. She struck ground much sooner than she anticipated, slamming down, the breath driven from her lungs. She felt Zeke landing hard beside her.
For a moment she was too dazed to comprehend anything more than that by some miracle, they had dropped to the roof of the warehouse.
After gulping in a few painful breaths, she struggled to sit up and reach out to Zeke, see if he was hurt. But he was already drawing himself up to his knees, gazing anxiously at her.
“Rory. Are you all right?”
She nodded and he swooped her into his arms, cradling her against him as though he would never let her go. Every muscle in her body ached, but she reveled in the feel of his strength, the reassuring thud of his heart thundering in rhythm with her own. The danger was past. They were safe, but to her astonishment, she burst into tears.
“Hush, darling. Don’t cry. It’s all over now,” Zeke said, brushing the hair back from her brow in a familiar gesture, the rough texture of his fingers gentle.
“It was like a nightmare. She-she?—”
“She’s gone, Rory. She’ll never have a chance to hurt you again, damn her.” He twisted his head, glancing skyward. Rory followed his gaze toward the vanishing speck that was the balloon. She knew it would have surged upward when she andZeke dropped off, but not at such a rate as that. Mrs. Van Hallsburg had to be releasing the ballast like a madwoman, out of ignorance or design, propelling herself upward to those cold regions of sky where the air was too thin. Suddenly Rory recalled her dream of the night before and she understood its significance.
“I suppose she will manage to escape,” Zeke said bitterly. “Get away with everything she’s done.”
“No,” Rory whispered, a chill working through her. “There’s no escaping the banshee.”
Twenty-Two
Some distance beyond the farthest reaches of Fifth Avenue, pavement and mansions gave way to farmland, rolling green fields that stretched out in rural tranquility, fighting to ignore the encroachments of the ever-advancing city. Late that afternoon, the balloon that touched down seemed just one more of these. Tom Grey, the farmer who owned the land, was less shocked by the strange object entangled in the branches of his apple tree than he was by the fair-haired woman sprawled on her back near the tree’s base, her sightless eyes turned toward the sky from which she had fallen.
