The Key to Midnight

snow, but he was still able to follow Hunter and Carrera.

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    74
        
        Shouting and a series of muffled noises arose in a distant part of the house. At first, Joanna hoped it was Alex coming for her - or someone from outside coming for both of them. But Rotenhausen ignored the uproar, either because he was so focused on her that he didn't hear it or because there were other people to deal with whatever was happening; and when quiet quickly returned, she knew that she was finished.
        He backed her into a corner, pinned her there with his body, spread his steel fingers, and gripped her throat. He placed his real hand over the battery back to prevent her from pulling out the jacks.
        She couldn't look away from his extraordinary eyes: They now seemed as yellow as those of a cat.
        He cocked his head and watched her quizzically while he squeezed her throat, as though he were observing a laboratory animal through the walls of its cage. His expression was not bland; on the contrary, in his face was a cold passion that defied description and, most likely, understanding.
        When she began to choke, and when she saw that her choking only elicited a smile from him, she struggled fiercely to break free - twisted, thrashed, kicked ineffectually with her bare feet. She was too tightly pinned to be able to go for his eyes, but she clawed at his arms and flanks, drawing blood.
        Until now, she'd held fast to the hope of being saved from both Rotenhausen and his treatments, but his unexpected reaction to her counterattack stole all hope from her. He flinched and hissed each time that she drew his blood - but each pain that she inflicted seemed only to arouse him further. Crushing her against the wall, he said excitedly, 'That's it, yes, fight for your life, girl, fight me, yes, fight me with everything you've got,' and she knew then that each wound she inflicted would have no effect other than to give him even greater pleasure later, when he subjected her to various tortures on the bed.
        The steel hand tightened inexorably around her throat, and black spots glided like dozens of ink-dark moths across her vision.

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    75
        
        Great surging rivers of snow poured out of the Swiss mountains, and Alex seemed to be carried through the deep night by the powerful currents of the storm almost as he would have been swept away by a real river. With the buoying wind at his back, he crossed a hundred yards of open land before he reached the shelter of the forest. The mammoth pines grew close together, providing relief from the wind, but a considerable amount of snow still found its way through the evergreen canopy.
        He was on a narrow but well-established trail that might have been made by deer. The heavy white crusts that bent the pine boughs and the white winter mantle on the forest floor provided what meager light there was: He navigated the woods by the eerie phosphorescence of the snow, able to distinguish shapes but no details, afraid of catching a tree branch in the face and blinding himself.
        He stumbled over rocks hidden by the snow, hit the ground hard, but scrambled up at once. He was certain that Carrera was close behind.
        As he came to his feet, he realized that he had one of the loose rocks in his hand. A weapon. It was the size of an orange, not as good as a gun but better than nothing. It felt like a ball of ice, and he was concerned that he wouldn't be able to keep a grip on it as his fingers rapidly continued to stiffen.
        He hurried deeper into the woods, and thirty feet from the spot where he had fallen, the trail bent sharply to the right and curved around an especially dense stand of shoulder-high brush. He skidded to a halt and quickly considered the potential for an ambush.
        Squinting at the trail, he could barely discern the disturbance that his own feet had made in the smooth skin of softly radiant white powder. He weighed the rock in his hand, backed against the wall of brush until it poked him painfully, and hunched down, becoming a shadow among shadows.
        Overhead, wind raged through the pine and fir boughs, howling as incessantly as the devil's own pack of hell hounds, but even above that shrieking, Alex immediately heard Carrera approaching. Fearless of his quarry, the bodybuilder made no effort to be quiet, crashing along the trail as though he were a drunk in transit between two