There was a single dim light burning in the far corner of the living room. Aside from that, the apartment seemed to be completely dark.

And completely deserted.

He went through the place room by room, his heart beating faster with each empty space that confronted him. It had been hours since he'd spoken to Caroline—she and Melantha should have been here long ago.

And indeed they had, he discovered as he reached the last of the three bedrooms. One of his suitcases was sitting against the far wall, with a couple of Caroline's shirts and slacks stacked neatly on one of the two twin beds.

So where had they gone?

He went back down the hallway and pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. A bag's worth of groceries was there, stacked neatly on one of the sideboards beneath a row of shiny copper pans.

He stepped over for a closer look, the acid taste of fear seeping into his mouth. So they weren't out shopping, at least not for food. Shopping for clothing for Melantha? But it seemed unlikely that Caroline would take such a chance, especially with evening upon them. They hadn't gone to a restaurant, either, not with everything they needed for a simple dinner right here.

Had they been abducted? But there weren't any signs of a struggle, and he couldn't imagine Caroline letting anyone take Melantha away without one.

Unless it had happened under the soothing aura of official authority. Roger had already gotten a call from someone purporting to be a cop trying to lure him back to his neighborhood. If that same someone had traced Caroline here, he might have tried the same trick on her.

Would Caroline have given Melantha up to a stranger with a uniform and the right credentials?

Probably.

But if all they wanted was Melantha, why was Caroline gone, too?

He glared at the pile of groceries. Where was there for two footloose women to wander off to after dark? A movie? A doctor? The park?

The park.

He frowned, a stray bit of conversation suddenly popping back into his mind. The mysterious mugger with the mysterious gun, asking what kind of trees they had on their balcony.

The balcony Melantha had disappeared from when the cops arrived. The balcony she'd been standing on when she'd reappeared nineteen hours later.

And then, suddenly, a current of cool air flowed across his feet. Had someone just opened the door?

But the air in the hallway hadn't been nearly this cool.

Someone had opened a window.

In the center of the counter, nestled between the cutting board and the bread box, was a wooden block holding an assortment of knives. Silently, his heart pounding, Roger crossed to it and pulled out the biggest one he could find. He returned to the kitchen door and gently pushed it open.

There were two of them: youngish middle-aged men, squat and wide. The first, his massive shoulders straining against a blue pea coat, was already inside, standing at the far end of the living room. His only slightly smaller companion, wearing gray slacks and a gray jacket with fleece collar, was just finishing the task of pulling himself in through the open window.

The first man spotted Roger at the same time he spotted them. "Where is she?" he demanded in a gravelly voice, stretching his right hand toward Roger as if offering to shake hands.

"Get out," Roger ordered, his voice shaking. "You hear me?"

He stepped forward, lifting his knife in what he hoped was a threatening manner. The men didn't move, but the second now lifted his hand toward Roger in the same handshaking gesture as the first.

As he did so, his sleeve fell back a little, and Roger saw that he was wearing the same style of wide metal wristband that he'd seen earlier on Torvald and his friends.

That clinched it. "I said get out," he repeated. "Tell Torvald he can't have her." He took another step forward, hoping desperately that they wouldn't call his bluff, and wondering what he would do if they did.

"You're right, he can't," the blue-coated man agreed. He twitched his hand—

Roger stopped short as something silvery flashed into view across the man's right palm, thin metalliclooking tendrils that flowed up along his fingers like the burst from a tiny fireworks explosion. Even as he caught his breath, the filaments twisted back again, wrapping against and around each other in a pattern too fast and complex for him to follow. The wrapped tendrils settled into place against the man's palm, flattening and darkening and reforming themselves into a boxy sort of T-shape—

And a second later Roger found himself looking down the barrel of a small gray handgun.

He felt his mouth drop open, staring at the weapon in disbelief. The man's hand had been empty, his sleeve open, no sign of a holster or any other place the gun could have come from. Another flicker of silver caught his eye, and he looked at the second man to see another set of metallic tendrils twist in his hand and settle themselves into a second gun.

And impossible or not, there were now two guns pointed straight at his chest.

"Now, then," the second man said, his voice tinged with scorn. "You want to do this the easy way, or the hard way?"

Roger took a deep breath. It was, by his count, the third time in as many days that someone had pointed a gun his direction.

And deep inside him, something snapped.

"Figure it out," he snarled, lifting his knife and starting forward again. So they were calling his bluff, were they? Fine. It was time to see how far they were willing to go to get to Melantha.

The first man's face settled into hard lines as Roger started toward him. The expression didn't even twitch as he squeezed the trigger.

There was no thunderclap of a bullet going off, or even the softer snap the movies always used when the gun was equipped with a silencer. This weapon merely gave a quiet but sharp rising-pitch tzing, like a tight electric guitar string being plucked while the guitarist slid his finger down the fingerboard. A thin line of white shot out from the muzzle toward him—

And he was rocked backward on his heels as something slammed hard against his chest.

He gasped, staggering back as he grabbed for his breastbone. The impact had felt like someone had lobbed a bowling ball at him. He looked down, cringing at the thought of the blood that he knew must be streaming out of the gaping hole that had surely been blown in his chest.

There wasn't any blood. There wasn't any hole, gaping or otherwise. The brand-new jacket was completely unmarked.

Were they shooting blanks?

He looked back up, frowning. The men were gazing steadily back at him, as if waiting to see what he would do next.

Under the circumstances, Roger decided, there wasn't much he could do. Taking a deep breath against the throbbing ache in his chest, he lifted his knife and again started forward.

Both men fired this time, a matched set of guitar twangs and arrow-straight white lines. This time it was a pair of bowling balls that hammered into his torso, shoving him even more solidly backward.

Before he could even catch his balance they fired again, and this time the twin impacts threw him flat onto his back.

He shook his head to clear it, his entire torso now a throbbing mass of pain. At some point along the way he'd dropped the knife, and he rolled half over on his side to try to snag it. There was another tzing, and the knife skipped up off the floor and bounced away into the corner. Roger turned back to the two men, still gazing unemotionally at him, and started to get to his feet.

And then, through the open window, he heard a scream.

Not an ordinary scream, though. This was something thin and wailing, yet somehow with a weight and strength behind it that rattled his legs straight out from under him and sent him sprawling again onto the carpet.