He saw something move outside the window as he passed by it. He looked closer. It was a shadow, like somebody’s head and shoulders. A big somebody.

But this was the fifth floor!

He had to be hallucinating. That stuff in the cup must have been stronger than he thought. He bent closer to the window for a better look. What he saw there held him transfixed for a long, agonal heartbeat. It was a face out of a nightmare, worse than all his nightmares combined. And those glowing yellow eyes…

A scream started in his throat as he reflexively lurched backward. But before it could reach his lips, a taloned, three-fingered hand smashed through the double pane and clamped savagely, unerringly around his throat. Ron felt incredible pressure against his windpipe, crushing it closed against his cervical spine with an explosive crunch. The rough flesh against the skin of his throat was cool and damp, almost slimy, with a rotten stench arising from it. He caught a glimpse of smooth dark skin stretched over a long, lean, muscular arm leading out through the shattered glass to… what? He arched his back and clawed at the imprisoning fingers but they were like a steel collar around his neck. As he struggled vainly for air, his vision blurred. And then, with a smooth, almost casual motion, he felt himself yanked bodily through the window, felt the rest of the glass shatter with his passage, the shards either falling away or raking savagely at his flesh. He had one soul-numbing, moon-limned glimpse of his attacker before his vision was mercifully extinguished by his oxygen-starved brain.

And back in the room, after that final instant of crashing noise, all was quiet again. Two of the remaining patients, deep in Dalmane dreams, stirred in their beds and turned over. Tommy, the closest to the window, shouted “HELP ME!” and then went back to snoring.

Chapter Two

bharangpur, west bengal, india

wednesday, June 24, 1857

1

It’s all gone wrong. Every bleeding thing gone wrong!

Captain Sir Albert Westphalen of the Bengal European Fusiliers stood in the shade of an awning between two market stalls and sipped cool water from a jug freshly drawn from a well. It was a glorious relief to be shielded from direct attack by the Indian sun, but there was no escaping the glare. It bounced off the sand in the street, off the white stucco walls of the buildings, even off the pale hides of those nasty humpbacked bulls roaming freely through the marketplace. The glare drove the heat through his eyes to the very center of his brain. He dearly wished he could pour the contents of the jug over his head and let the water trickle down the length of his body.

But no. He was a gentleman in the uniform of Her Majesty’s army and surrounded by heathens. He couldn’t do anything so undignified. So he stood here in the shade, his high-domed pith helmet square upon his head, his buff uniform smelly and sopping in the armpits and buttoned up tight at the throat, and pretended the heat didn’t bother him. He ignored the sweat soaking the thin hair under his helmet, oozing down over his face, clinging to the dark moustache he had so carefully trimmed and waxed this morning, gathering in drops at his chin to fall off onto his tunic.