She tensed for the sound of Calhoun’s screams.

But there were no screams.

There was nothing at all.

30.

Calhoun had seen the light at the end of the hallway just moments after he’d exploded through the stairwell door onto the fourth floor. He thought it could’ve been a hallucination, a mere side effect of his own panic…at least until the moment he’d opened that last door.

The secondary glow wasn’t like that initial flash of light as he’d sprinted out of the stairwell. He hadn’t imagined that—the flash of a camera—and through his dark-adapted eyes he could’ve sworn he’d even glimpsed a figure standing behind it, actually holding a camera. And even in his semihysterical state, that was irrefutably crazy. Who in the unholy name of fuck would be up here in the dark in an abandoned hospital taking pictures?

He’d run toward the light as fast as he could, his chest cramped and burning too badly to give whoever it was fair warning that Snow was behind him with all the hounds of hell on his trail. Given world enough and time, Calhoun would have liked to have shouted some warning, however incoherent, but his foot had tangled on something in his path and he would’ve gone sailing had he not caught his grip on the railing that ran at waist-level along the wall of the corridor.

This is it, he thought grimly. This is where he takes me, if he’s going to. He won’t get a better opportunity than this.

But nothing touched him.

Calhoun exhaled slowly, breath draining from his mouth and nose. The fevered footsteps of a moment earlier had stopped. If Snow was behind him somewhere, he was moving on tiptoe again. Which, when Calhoun thought about it, made about as much sense as the mystery paparazzo somewhere up the hallway snapping photographs.

Suddenly his attention was arrested by something else, something in front of him in the blackness. Significantly in front of him, actually. Calhoun blinked, not trusting his eyes, and looked more closely at it, straining to spot the magician’s trick.

Down at the far end of the hall was a thin line of light escaping from under a distant door. It was plain and perfectly straight, as if some steady hand had taken a scalpel and made an incision into the belly of the darkness itself.

He couldn’t be sure, but he would’ve sworn it hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

How would you know? A moment earlier you were running for your life!

True…but even in a state of extreme sphincter-constriction, wouldn’t he have noticed a light in front of him shining underneath a door in an otherwise pitch-black hallway? Could he have actually missed it?

Maybe, maybe not.

One thing was certain. Snow wasn’t down there. Snow was still somewhere behind him, and Calhoun, who had been scrambling for his life a moment earlier, knew there was no way he could’ve gotten in front of him. And why would he, without attacking Calhoun on the way?