The doctor’s house was a farmhouse a few miles outside Bern, set back from the road behind a screen of bare winter trees. I couldn’t see any lights in the windows. In fact, I couldn’t find a sign anyone was home. It looked abandoned and forgotten.
Bisch pulled into the drive and killed the engine.
“Wait here.”
He climbed out of the car and limped to the door. His leg was worse than he’d let on, I realized.
Once at the door, he knocked in a clear pattern: three short, two long, three short.
Nothing happened.
I watched Bisch standing in the snow, his breath fogging in the cold air, his shoulders rigid with tension. Behind me, the Baroness was stirring, making small sounds of pain. In the seat beside her, Otto hadn’t moved since we’d loaded him in.
And Thomas—
I checked his pulse again. It was still there, but weaker than before.
“Come on,” I muttered. “Come on, come on, come on—”
The door finally opened.
Yellow light spilled across the snow, warm and sudden. I saw a figure silhouetted in the doorway. It was small, stooped, and wrapped in a heavy robe. Words were exchanged, too quiet to hear. Bisch gestured toward the car, urgent, insistent.
Then he waved us forward.
I opened the door and lifted Thomas as gently as I could, cradling him against my chest the way I had carried the Baroness through the drainage channel. He was much heavier than her—solid and muscular, the body I knew as well as my own—but I barely felt the weight. Adrenaline, fear, and love were more powerful than any weight.
Bisch was already at the back of the car, pulling Otto’s broken body from the seat. The old man’smustache was matted with blood and stuck against his face. His eyes and cheeks were a landscape of bruises and swelling. He made no sound as Bisch lifted him. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
“The Baroness,” Bisch said, nodding toward the back seat. “Can she walk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Leave her for now. These two first.”
We carried them inside.
The doctor’s name was Rainer Müller, and he looked like he had been practicing medicine since before the fourteenth century. His hands were spotted with age and his back curved with decades of bending over patients, but his eyes were sharp and clear. He took one look at Thomas, at the blood-soaked coat pressed against his shoulder and his pale face and shallow breathing, and pointed to a table in the next room.
“Gunshot. When?”
“Maybe forty minutes ago,” I replied.
“Blood loss?”
“Significant. He lost consciousness in the car.”
Müller nodded once and moved with a speed that belied his age. Within seconds, he had cut away Thomas’s shirt, exposing the wound. It was an ugly thing, ragged and raw, still seeping blood despite the pressure I’d kept on it.
“Through and through,” he muttered. “Good. There will be no fragments to extract.” He glanced at me. “You. Wash your hands. You’re going to help.”
For the next hour, I held retractors while the doctor cleaned the wound, passed instruments I didn’t know the names of, and kept pressure here and released it there. I watched the doctor’s aged hands move with a precision that seemed almost mechanical.
Thomas lay motionless throughout, his face slack, his breathing supported by a mask Müller had fitted over his nose and mouth. An IV line ran into his arm, feeding him fluids to replace what he’d lost. A second line delivered blood. How the old man maintained a ready supply was a wonder I would have to learn about later.
“He will need more blood,” Müller said without looking up. “I have enough for tonight. Tomorrow, we may need a donor.”
“I’m O positive.”
