He straightened, turned. The flames were falling now, but he could still see clearly by their low light. He saw Frankenstein’s monster face down on the tunnel floor. Two men were wrestling his great arms behind his back, were locking his thick wrists together with cuffs. Blood was burbling thickly out of a bullet hole in the giant’s thigh.

Storm turned again, turned away. He turned to look down at the dying flames.

He saw at once what it was. He saw how Iago’s candle had fallen, how the paper under the Rhinehart triptych had caught. The old wood of the panels had burned like tinder. It was burning still.

Storm moved heavily to stand over the triptych. He looked down into the face of Christ as the heat of the fire made the flesh of it split and curdle. The edges of the panels—the runes that he had seen there—were all in flames now, and settling into char.

Destiny, thought Richard Storm. Yeah.

The triptych settled with a cracking noise into the last of the blaze.

“Where’s Harper?” Bernard said behind him.

Storm looked around blankly. He wiped the sweat from his face. “What?”

“Which tunnel did they go down?” Bernard had a flashlight now. He shone it quickly down one passage, then another, then another. “God damn it!” he shouted. He turned on the others—on Storm and the two men who were now standing away from the monster. The three of them looked back at Bernard blankly. And he cried out to them again:

“God damn it. Which tunnel did they go down?”

28

Harper hunted him through the blackness. Her stick rapped heavily against the stone in front of her. Her grim old face was set and savage. Her wheezing breath was rapid and harsh. Her footsteps pounded on the stone. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She could make out nothing ahead of her, nothing, and yet, beneath the brim of her Borsalino, behind the narrow lenses of her specs, her eyes were, as ever, quick and alive. She stalked through what she could not see into what she did not know. Which was her nature, after all.

Ahead of her, the tunnel curved gently. She felt the rising arc of the floor in the tip of her stick. She charged along the turning path, her quick steps sure, the steady rhythm of them rising into the rhythm of her pulse, her breath. The dizzying blackness rushed past her as she rushed on.