they won't know exactly where. You know what that means?"
"No," she said uncomprehendingly, and she sat heavily on the sofa. She put a hand to her forehead. "No," she repeated; but Pete was already on the move, grabbing her few possessions together.
"We're still one ahead," he said. "They're watching the wrong window on the wrong side of the building. We can sneak out and be away before they know it.
"Away to where?"
He stopped by the window, and checked on the view.
Nothing moved.
He said, "I'm taking you home with me."
He looked at her then, and found that her gaze was already on him; but what he saw in it was nothing like what he might have expected. It wasn't relief, it wasn't even apprehension; it was something cool and remote and yet strangely compelling, as if there could only ever have been one outcome to the night and both of them had somehow known it all along.
Rusalka.
Heartbreaker.
Wasn't that how they said it?
PART THREE
Out of Darkness
SIX
Daybreak tended to steal up gently on the valley, re-inventing a fresh landscape out of the leftover mists of the night; lake breezes would then strip away the shrouds one by one to uncover the forests and the shores and the mountains behind. Three Oaks Bay was a small resort town on the lake's eastern side, busy in the season and almost dead outside of it. The Bay had a square, two pubs, a promenade walk overlooked by three medium sized Victorian hotels, and a restaurant with a terrace that stood out over the water. It rated one resident policeman and a mention in the Shell Guide. People came in the summer to walk and to sail and, if development plans succeeded and the roads could be kept clear, they'd soon be coming in the winter to ski.
Pete had seen a fair number of valley mornings, although not so many had been as early as this. He shivered a little, and turned up the collar of his suit jacket.
It didn't make much of a difference. He was standing on the exposed rocks at the highest point of the headland; the ground fell away steeply from here, mostly bare rock and scrub, with just a narrow shelf of land that was almost a beach down at the water's edge. He could see the upturned hulls of a few boats drawn up onto the shore, mostly of fibreglass but some of varnished timber, all of them de-rigged and tied down against the weather. Out across the water, the end of the lake had not yet emerged from the mist, and the mountains above it were no more than a delicate shadow of grey against a deep grey sky.
Alina was still in the car. Still, as far as Pete could tell, asleep. He'd covered her over with a coat and taken her few possessions inside, and she'd slept on; she'd been the same way for the last couple of hours of the journey, ever since they'd made their final stop at a twenty-four hour garage so that he could fill the Zodiac's tank and buy some tape for a running repair to the headlamp that he'd broken when, lights doused to escape notice, he'd clipped the corner of the garage block on their way out of the parking area. The repair didn't look much, but it would keep the rain out.
A sound came from behind him. He didn't turn.
Alina scrambled up alongside, and found herself a rock just a couple of feet lower than his own. She'd brought his coat from the car, and she wore it around her shoulders against the cold.
They stood in silence for a minute or more.
And then she said, "This is where you live?"
He looked at her then. "You like it?"
"It's…" She searched for the words. "I do like it. I like it a lot."
"Actually, the house is a dump, but the boss lets me have it cheap. It belongs to his sister's family."
"I think it's fine," Alina said, and Pete watched her for a moment longer, almost as if he was checking her score on a test.
"Yes," he said finally. "It's fine." And he turned again to the view. The mist over the northern end of the lake had now begun to clear, uncovering a part of the Liston Estate. A piece of land that had held no particular
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