The assembly was close enough to the giant spool of det cord to propogate into a bigger boom.

He didn’t have to look up to know when it happened. The air told him. The molecules seemed to still as if drawing their breath, the stunned nanosecond of calm before the hurricane.

And then everything let go.

The blast hammered the vault door the remaining inches into the frame with enough force to knock Evan across the inside of the vault. He bowling-balled through the folding chair and racked up against the rear wall.

Bright orange flame lit the world around him—it was as though he’d flown into the sun. Heat pulsed through the Lexan walls, the ceiling, even the floor. He couldn’t see anything, and for a moment he worried that he’d underestimated the charge, that he was going to bring the whole goddamned chalet down on top of him.

But a fresh wind suctioned off the flames and black smoke from all around him, the vault emerging from its sheath of fire. As the air started to clear, he looked up to see the massive chandelier plummeting down at him. By instinct he covered his head. The chandelier shattered across the transparent roof into a million brilliant pieces, each facet lit with a yellow lick of flame.

Bits of crystal tinkled across the hardwood. Bodies twitched. The entire rear wall of the chalet had blown out. Snow drifted in, swirling among the ash, settling across the piano and the corpses—a wartime tableau.

His ears didn’t ring so much as scream. His head hummed.

The vault door had wobbled open again. Sprawled on his ass inside the Lexan box, Evan blinked, trying to draw the ballroom into full focus. The scene was biblical.

They lay dead. All of them. The chairs had slid to the walls, many of them still upright. Through the gaping hole where the wall had been, Evan heard the Dobermans somewhere outside, barking and barking, notes of terror mingled with their snarls.

With a groan he found his feet and lumbered out of the Lexan vault.

The air carried the scent of sap and snow and burned flesh. Across the ballroom Sark’s charred body lay sprawled in a heap of others against the wall, his face and chest missing as if scooped out. He’d almost made it to the kitchen.

Impossibly, he wiggled.

Evan stared with incredulity. Sark heaved upward, and for a moment Evan thought he was going to sit up stiffly, a B-movie vampire rising from his coffin. But then René squirmed out from beneath the wrecked corpse. He staggered a few steps and leaned heavily against the wall.

Ash painted his forehead, and his cheeks looked raw. Evan stepped forward and raised the .45, and René swung his head heavily to face him.

The two men stared at each other across the churning air of the ballroom.

René lifted a hand, fingers splayed. “Let’s—”