Chapter 164 - The Fracture of Mirror Lake
The ice sheet groaned beneath them like a dying beast. The explosion had severed the structural integrity of the lake's western basin, and the weight of the water surging through the fracture lines was forcing large plates to tilt, creating jagged ridges that rose four feet above the waterline.
Emma didn't run away from the danger; she ran toward the darkness of the shoreline cliffs where the shadows hung thickest. Carrying Maya on her hip, her skates skimming over the scarred ice, she moved with the instinct of a woman hunted across two countries. Every muscle in her thighs screamed from the strain of balancing on the thin blades while dodging jagged shards of ice thrown up by the blast.
Behind them, the baying of the hounds grew sharp and rabid. The dogs were trained ice-runners, their paws fitted with spiked neoprene boots that allowed them to corner at full speed without losing traction.
"Mommy, they're coming!" Maya cried out, her small fingers digging through Emma’s coat down to the flesh of her collarbone.
"Don't look back, Maya! Keep your eyes on the black stone ahead of us! Count for me!"
"Twelve... eleven... ten..."
A double-tap cracked behind them. *Crack. Crack.*
One of the hounds let out a sharp yelp that was abruptly cut short as a heavy body skidded twenty yards across the ice on its flank. But the second dog didn't pause. It leaped over a tilted ice shelf, its dark silhouette silhouetted against the blinding beam of a newly activated spotlight from the boathouse tower.
Emma saw the animal mid-flight—an eighty-pound shadow with bared fangs descending directly toward her right shoulder.
She had no weapon in her hand. Her hands were keeping Maya alive. With a frantic pivot, Emma swung her body around, planting her left skate and swinging her right leg upward in a wide, sweeping kick. The sharp, hardened steel pick of the figure skate caught the dog beneath the jaw with a sickening crunch. The force of the blow deflected the hound’s trajectory, sending it crashing into the jagged edge of an upturned ice slab. The animal scrambled to its feet, dazed and whining, its snout bleeding into the snow.
Before it could recover, another shot rang out from Julian’s position fifty yards back. The second hound collapsed into the slush and lay still.
"The gate!" Julian’s shout was ragged, carried away by the stiffening northerly wind. "Emma, the grate on the culvert!"
Emma reached the stone embankment where the granite foundations of Vance Manor plunged directly into the lake. Here, beneath the massive overhanging timber porch of the main house, the lake was sheltered from the snow, but the cold was even more suffocating. A heavy iron grate, rusted red and choked with dead leaves and frozen mud, barred the entrance to an arched stone tunnel.
Emma set Maya down on a dry shelf of rock. "Hold onto my coat, baby."
Emma grabbed the iron bars of the grate. They were thick, forged iron, frozen solid into the masonry. She pulled with all her strength, but the metal didn't yield a fraction of an inch.
From the top of the stone stairs fifty feet above them, a flashlight beam suddenly pierced the shadows, catching Emma’s frantic movements in its glare.
"Give it up, Emma," a voice called down from the landing. It wasn't Eleanor. It was Arthur. His tone was weary, bureaucratic, completely devoid of the warmth he had displayed when driving her through the Adirondacks three days ago. "Eleanor has the state police holding perimeter at the highway. Even if you get into the cellar, there’s no exit. The whole house is surrounded."
Emma stepped in front of Maya, shielding her daughter with her own body. She looked up through the iron railings of the staircase into the pale, emotionless face of her father’s former personal attorney.
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"You sat at our table, Arthur," Emma said, her voice shaking with a rage that burned hotter than the cold wind. "You watched my mother tell my daughter that she was an unwanted burden on Christmas Eve. You watched Maya cry until she threw up in the car, and you said nothing."
Arthur looked down at her, his finger resting casually alongside the trigger guard of a suppressed automatic pistol. "Your mother pays twelve thousand dollars a month on retainer, Emma. Your daughter doesn't pay anything at all."
