A polite tap at the door interrupted. "Mr. Catlin?" a man's voice inquired.

"Yes, come in, it isn't locked." Yet... The moment the driver was gone, Jenna intended locking the door and putting a small army of little up-time burglar alarms she'd brought with her on every windowsill and even under the doorknob. The door swung open and Jenna caught one glimpse of the two men in the hallway. Jenna registered the guns they held faster than with the driver. Jenna dove sideways with a startled scream as the pop and clack of modern, silenced semi-autos brought the driver down with a terrible, choked sound. Jenna sprawled to the floor behind the bed, dragging frantically at the Remington Beale's revolver concealed in her coat pocket. The driver was screaming in pain on the far side of the bed. Then Jenna was firing back, bracing her wrists on the feather-ticking of the mattress to steady her hands. Recoil kicked her palms, jarred the bones of her wrists. The shattering noise of the report left Jenna's ears ringing. But one of the bastards went down with a surprised grunt and cry of pain.

Jenna kept shooting, trying to hit the other one. The second shooter had danced into the corridor again, cursing hideously. Smoke from her pistol hung like fog, obscuring her view of the doorway. The wounded driver, gasping with the effort, managed to grab the leg of a nearby washstand. He brought the whole thing crashing down across the wounded gunman's head. The crockery basin shattered, leaving a spreading pool of blood in its wake. Then bullets slammed into the wallpaper beside Jenna's head. She ducked, doing some swearing of her own, wet and shaky with raw terror. Jenna fired and the pistol merely clicked. Hands trembling, she fumbled for her other pre-loaded revolver.

The driver, grey-faced and grunting with the effort, was dragging himself across the floor. He left a sickening trail of blood, as though a mortally wounded garden snail had crawled across the carpets. Jenna fired above the man's head, driving the gunman in the doorway back into the corridor again, away from the open door. Then the driver was close enough. He kicked the door shut with his feet, hooked an ankle around a chair and gave a grunting heave, dragged it in front of the door. Then collapsed with a desperate groan.

Jenna lunged over the top of the bed, scrambled across the floor on hands and knees to avoid the bullets punching through the wooden door at head height, and managed to snap shut the lock. Then she grunted and heaved and shoved an entire bureau across the door, toppling it to form a makeshift barricade. The door secured, Jenna dragged the driver's coat aside. What she found left her shaking and swearing under her breath. She didn't have time, dammit... but she couldn't just let the man lie there and bleed to death, could she? It was all Jenna's fault the man had been shot at all. She stripped a coverlet off the bed, managed to tear it into enough strips and pieces to form a tight compress. She had to yank off her gentleman's gloves to tie knots in the makeshift bandages.

"What in hell's going on, Catlin?" the driver gasped out, breathing shallowly against the pain.

"Long story," Jenna gasped. "And I'm really sorry you got dragged into it." She ran a distracted hand through her cropped and Macassar-oiled hair, felt the blood on her hands, wiped them on the remnants of the coverlet. A pause in the shooting outside indicated the gunman's need to change magazines or maybe even guns, temporarily stopping him from turning the solid wooden door into a block of swiss cheese. Jenna bit one lip, then scrambled across the floor on hands and knees. "Look, I can't do much for you. I've got to get the hell out of here. I'm really sorry." She handed the driver a pistol scavenged from the dead gunman. Then Jenna retrieved the Remington she'd emptied at their attackers and wished there was time to reload it, but the gun was so slow and difficult to load, she just shoved it into the waistband of her trousers beside the partially loaded one.

Then she wrenched up the nearest window sash and let in a flood of relatively fresh, wet air. It stank, but coal smoke smelled better than the coppery stench of blood and burnt gunpowder in the room's close confines. Jenna glanced down, judged the drop. Even with Ianira, she ought to be able to manage it without injury. Maybe ten feet. She opened the trunk, barely able to control her fingers. Holding the trunk lid open with one hand, she dragged Ianira up out of the protected cocoon in which she'd traveled. The Prophetess was fumbling with the oxygen mask and bottle, clumsy and slow from the cramped confines of the trunk. Jenna tore them loose and dropped them back in. "Trouble," she said tersely. "They hit us faster than I expected."

Ianira was taking in the blood, the corpse on the carpet, the wounded driver. Her eyes had gone wide, dark and terrified. She had to lean against Jenna just to remain on her feet, which terrified Jenna.

"What the hell—?" The driver was staring. "Who's that?"

Jenna gave him a sharp stare. "You don't know?"

"Should I? Been living in London for the past eight years. Haven't been back on the station in at least seven..."

If this guy didn't know who Ianira Cassondra was, Jenna wasn't about to tell him.

"I'm going to lower you out the window," Jenna whispered tersely, so her voice wouldn't carry beyond the door. "Hold onto my wrists tight." Ianira climbed over the sill and held onto Jenna's wrists with enough force to leave bruises. Jenna grunted and shifted her weight, swinging Ianira out, lowering her as far down along the wall as she could reach. "Now! Jump!"

Ianira plunged downward, staggered, landed. "Hurry!" the prophetess called up.

Jenna climbed cautiously across the windowsill, carefully balancing herself, and inched around until she was facing the hotel room. Bullets had started punching through the stout wooden door again. The gunman was shoving at it, too, trying to break it down or splinter the lock out of the doorframe. Thank God for solid Victorian construction, plaster and lathe walls and genuine wooden doors, not that hollow-core modern crap.

"Sorry, really," Jenna gasped, meeting the driver's bewildered, grey-faced gaze. "If he gets through that door, shoot him, will you? If you don't, he'll kill you." Then she scraped her way down until she was just hanging by her fingertips and let go her hold on the window. Jenna shoved outward slightly to keep her face from bashing against the wall on the way down. The drop was longer than she expected, but she landed well. Only went to one knee, jarring the soles of her feet up through her ankles. When she straightened with a pained gasp, her legs even condescended to work. Ianira grabbed her hand and they stumbled toward the carriage.

And the gunman charged out of the hotel's entryway. Gun in hand, he was heading for the window they'd just jumped from. But he hadn't seen them yet... Jenna dragged her loaded gun out of her waistband again, cursing herself for not holding onto it, and shoved Ianira behind her. The gunman saw them just as Jenna fired. She managed to loose off a couple of shots that drove their pursuer back into the hotel while smoke bellied up from her pistol and hung in the air like wet fog.

Jenna didn't wait for a second opportunity. She turned and ran, dragging Ianira with her, unable to reach the carriage without exposing them both to fatal fire. Ianira couldn't run very fast at first, but found her stride as they whipped through an alleyway, dodged into the street beyond, and gained speed. "Is he still back there?" Jenna gasped, not wanting to risk a wrenched ankle despite a driving terror that she would feel a bullet through her back at any second.

"Yes... I cannot see him... but he still comes, not far behind..."

Jenna decided she didn't want to know how Ianira knew that. She cut down side streets, running flat out, then heard a bullet ricochet off the wall beside her. Jenna shoved Ianira ahead, whirled and snapped off a couple of wild shots, then ducked down another street with one hand around Ianira's wrist. They wove in and out between horse-drawn phaetons and heavier carriages, running flat out. Drivers and passengers shouted after them, stared open-mouthed and hurled curses as horses reared in surprised protest. Then they were running down yet another street, dodging past the biggest greenhouse Jenna had ever seen.