Matthew couldn’t see where she cut him, but he howled and suddenly Matthew was gasping on the floor. Krakowski stumbled over Matthew and fell, and then Matthew saw that RakeHell Lizzie had slashed him across the right side of his face and turned that eye into a white, oozing ruin. Krakowski made an animalish noise that was a combination of fear and rage and then he came up off the floor with nearly superhuman strength. As he did, Matthew saw he had scrabbled into his coat and upon his right hand was the ugly nail-studded knuckle-duster Matthew had seen in the weapons basket at Lash’s mansion.

If RakeHell Lizzie saw it, it made no difference to her. Or perhaps it made all the difference, and that was why she flung herself at Krakowski with a warped sense of joyful abandon and Albion’s blade went up and down like a piston in the meat of his face, neck and chest.

Matthew grabbed hold of Krakowski’s legs. The man staggered but stayed upright, dragging Matthew with him. Matthew could feel him swinging back and forth with the deadly duster. RakeHell Lizzie clung to him like a deadly vine, and Krakowski was bellowing like a dumb injured brute who was staying on his feet by sheer willpower, and there was nothing Matthew could do to bring the man down.

Then suddenly Krakowski fell like a huge thick tree that had at last received its final axeblow. His body lay quivering as Matthew sat up and saw that Elizabeth too had slid down against the wall, and she was staring blankly at the dagger in her hand as the life streamed from the wounds that had torn her throat open.

Someone else was in the hallway. Greta Autrey, holding the musket. Matthew got up as if in a slow-motion dream, and he saw through his own haze of pain Greta’s eyes tick toward the back door and her face tighten, and when he turned from her he saw Lioness Sauvage in her lion-skin coat coming through the open door with a pistol in each hand.

At that instant he gave himself up to Fate.

With death and blood all around him, with his ears half-deafened by the pistol blasts and the red haze pulsing in his eyes, everything seemed to him to have become eerily calm, even his own breathing and the labor of his heart … calm, as if chaos itself had reached its limit and collapsed, and what was behind that tattered veil was the glimpse of another world where life and death had become a strange and stately dance.

Matthew took the musket from Greta.

He walked—or rather, drifted in his dream—toward Lioness Sauvage, who also in slow-motion lifted one of the pistols into his face and pulled the trigger.

Fizzzzzzz … The snow-damp gun shot out from its flint three sparks and a ghost of smoke, but no bullet.