“You . . . you are the warrior. Find Beata. Save Beata.”
“Okay. Don’t worry.” Eve glanced at Lopez, who shook his head. He began to murmur in Latin as he crossed himself and made the sign on the woman’s forehead.
“The devil killed my body. I cannot fight, I cannot find. I cannot free her. You must. You are the one. We speak to the dead.”
Eve heard the sirens, knew they would be too late. The pads, her own hands, the street was soaked with blood. “Okay. Don’t worry about her. I’ll find her. Tell me your name.”
“I am Gizi. I am the promise. You must let me in and keep your promise.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” Hurry, her mind shouted at the sirens. For God’s sake, hurry.
“My blood, your blood.” The woman gripped the hand Eve pressed to her chest wound with surprising strength, scoring the flesh with her fingernails. “My heart, your heart. My soul, your soul. Take me in.”
Eve ignored the quick pain from the little cuts in her palm. “Sure. All right. Here they come.” She looked up as the ambulance screamed around the corner, then back into those fierce, depthless black eyes.
Something burned in her hand, up her arm, until the shocking blow to her chest stole her breath. The light flashed, blinding her, then went to utter dark.
In the dark were voices and deeper shadows and the bright form of a young woman—slim in build, a waterfall of black hair and eyes of deep, velvet brown.
She is Beata. I am the promise, and the promise is in you. You are the warrior, and the warrior holds me. We are together until the promise is kept and the fight is done.
“Eve. Eve. Lieutenant Dallas!”
She jerked, sucked in air like a diver surfacing, and found herself staring at Lopez’s face. “What?”
“Thank God. You’re all right?”
“Yeah.” She raked a bloodied hand through her hair. “What the hell happened?”
“I honestly don’t know.” He glanced over to where, a foot away, two MTs worked on the woman. “She’s gone. There was a light—such a light. I’ve never seen . . . Then she was gone, and you were . . . ” He struggled for words. “Not unconscious, but blank. Just not there for a moment. I had to pull you away so they could get to her. You saw the light?”
“I saw something.” Felt something, she thought. Heard something.
Now she saw only an old woman whose blood stained the street. “I have to call this in. I think you’re going to be late for Mass. I need you to give a statement.”
She pushed to her feet as one of the MTs stepped over.
“Nothing we can do for her,” he said. “She’s cold. Must’ve been lying there for a couple hours before you found her. Fucking New York. People had to walk right by her.”
“No.” There were people now, crowding the sidewalk, ranged like a chorus for the dead. But there hadn’t been . . . “No,” Eve repeated. “We saw her fall.”
“Body’s cold,” he repeated. “She’s ninety if she’s a day, and probably more than that. I don’t see how she could’ve walked two feet with all those slices in her.”
“I guess we’d better find out.” She picked up her ’link, called it in.
Three
After cleaning the blood from her hands, she secured the scene, retrieved her field kit from the trunk. She was running the victim’s prints when the first black and white rolled up.
“She’s not in the database.” Frustrated, Eve pushed to her feet, turned to the uniforms. “Keep these people back. Talk to them. Find out if anybody knew her, if anybody saw anything. There’s a blood trail, and I don’t want these people trampling all over it.”
And where the hell were they, she wondered, when the woman was staggering down the street, bleeding to death? The street had been empty as the desert.
“What can I do?” Lopez asked her.
“Peabody’s on her way—small slice of luck having a bunch of murder cops a few minutes away. I want you to give her a statement. Tell her everything you saw, everything you heard.”
“She had an accent. Thick. Polish or Hungarian, maybe Romanian.”