Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  “Hello?” she called again, this time a little louder. Her voice echoed eerily in the confines of the church. Again the only response was a rustle of movement that seemed to originate from behind the door.

  Annja knocked once, then placed a hand on the iron handle. It turned. She pushed the door open. She started to call for Johan again, but the words died on her lips.

  The cameraman was tied in a chair with electrical tape over his mouth and plastic ties that secured his wrists and ankles. The chair had been tipped over. He had a white cloth stuffed inside his mouth that poked out from beneath the electrical tape. That white rag was the source of the strange odor, she realized. Gasoline. She saw the terror in his eyes. Fear, panic, relief, all warring with one another for supremacy.

  Every instinct she’d had was right; Johan had been used to lure her here. Before she could question by who, or why, her head filled with pain and the world went dark.

  27

  It had proved to be disappointingly straightforward in the end.

  Tostig had bound up the cameraman, giving him his most loquacious speech, the one in which he tells the victim he only knows two kinds of people, the ones who scream and the ones who don’t, but in the end they’re all just the same because they give up their secrets eventually, and then they die. The cameraman had whimpered as he stuffed the gasoline-soaked rag into his mouth, understanding what it meant for him in terms of survival. After his performance he’d retreated outside the old church, using the time to move his car to park it outside of one of the empty holiday cottages up the road, and then returned to hide within the huge wooden timbers of the bell tower on the hill where he could watch without fear of being seen.

  There were two points on ingress and egress in the old church—the main door that locked with that single huge iron key and a tiny window at the rear of the building. It was what he liked to call a heartbreaker—it offered hope, promising a way out, but was too small for an adult to crawl through. Just as he liked it. There was nothing more satisfying than snatching every last ounce of hope away before the final blow.

  He heard the car long before he saw it, and watched Annja Creed follow the road, stopping short herself to survey the scene. She was cautious. And with good reason. But no matter how much care she took, Tostig held the upper hand. He’d baited the trap perfectly, knowing her natural curiosity would get the woman out here. He’d seen her in action before. He knew all about her tricks. His first move would be to bind her hands. She’d be unable to pull a sword—even from thin air—if she couldn’t use her hands.

  Now it was about payback.

  He’d settle the Serb’s debt.

  It didn’t matter if she recognized him. He wasn’t vain; there was nothing to be gained in a victim taking your identity to the grave with them. He wasn’t about to give her a monologue explaining why she had to die. It was much more effective to let his actions speak. After all, the old saying was right; they were so much more eloquent than any words he had ever uttered.

  Tostig held his breath as she called out. The birds scattered, returning to the trees.

  He allowed himself a gentle smile as he listened to the crunch of her footsteps on the thin gravel. A few weeds poked through the surface. Around the edge of the path the mud was packed hard from the sun, allowing him to avoid the gravel and move up silently behind her.

  He was a ghost in her shadow, listening to every sound she made as she moved inside the church; timing was crucial. He needed to be past the windows before she was completely inside, eliminating the risk of her catching sight of his shadow through the glass.

  He admired her body as she moved—feline, feminine, graceful, light on her feet, all lithe and sinuous without making a sound. Tostig liked to think of himself as above the lure of the flesh, though there was something compelling about this one.

  It was hard to picture her presenting some dumb television show; she moved with a warrior’s poise.

  That gave him pause.

  It was more than just a few hours in the gym pretending to learn kickboxing when she was working out. She was more deliberate, more aware, than any gym fighter. She’d seen combat. There was a particular manner that veterans had as they moved through the world, eyes moving constantly, attuned to their surroundings. She had that as she approached each pew.

  Perhaps this will be more interesting than I’d expected, Tostig thought.

  What she didn’t have, he was sure, finally, was the sword. That tilted the balance back in his favor. He still had no idea how she’d pulled that stunt on him and the Serb. He remembered the ease with which she had seemingly deflected those bullets.

  Annja Creed was truly a remarkable woman.

  It was a shame she had to die.

  Though for all her awareness, she had no idea he was there, watching her.

  She moved toward the vestry door, drawn to it. No doubt the photographer was still whimpering through the gasoline-soaked gag. Tostig didn’t begrudge him a few tears; after all, once he lit the fire and turned Saint Peter’s on the Lake into a blazing pyre, that rag would burn inside him long before he died. He could beg and plead and cry as much as he liked, soon enough the only thing his throat would be good for was roasting.

  Creed quickened her pace as she crossed from the pews to the door.

  She hesitated, hand on the iron handle.

  It was his signal. The moment she pushed that door open everything had to happen, fast. No time for hesitation. No time for subtlety. Everything changed when she saw the cameraman bound to the chair and knew she’d fallen into a trap. He moved inside, the soft leather soles of his shoes not making so much as a scuff on the cold stone floor. He kept to the shadows, moving down the sides of the pews instead of the aisle.

  She didn’t looked around.

  She stepped through the door.

  Tostig moved quickly and silently, skirting the last few pews to stand in the doorway as she knelt to rescue her cameraman, who was desperately trying to warn her that the assassin stood behind her shoulder.

  Before she could heed the warning he was trying to communicate with his eyes alone, Tostig hit her. Hard. Too hard.

  Creed sprawled out unconscious on top of the terrified cameraman.

  “She’s not going to save you. I told you not to build your hopes up. Still, you’ll find your heaven with a beautiful woman at your side. There are worse ways to go,” the assassin mused. “Believe me, I should know.”

  He wanted her awake before he set to work proper—he wanted to exact some pleasure at least from the murders.

  Tostig checked her pulse. It was strong. She was out cold, though. The cameraman struggled manfully beneath her. Perhaps he misguidedly thought he could save the pair of them even though he was trussed up like a hog.

  “You might as well accept it. It’ll be easier for you,” Tostig assured him, not that there was anything reassuring about being told your best bet was to give in and die quietly.

  The next minute would be fundamental to how the killings would play out. He needed to take control.

  He slipped the plastic case from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  As much as he disliked the use of drugs, they were a vital tool of the trade, and in this case would give him long enough to do what needed to be done.

  Tostig was sweating by the time he’d manhandled Creed and the cameraman out of the vestry and carried her back into the main body of the church.

  He was getting too old for this, he thought grimly, sweat streaming down his face. Without the Serb things just weren’t the same. For the first time in a long while the assassin wondered if this was it, the beginning of the end for him.

  The cameraman began to cough and choke around the gag.

  He could have let the man die, but that would spoil the fun, so he pulled the gag from the man’s mouth and allowed him to suck in huge shuddering gasps of air.

  “You’re not going to get away with this!” Johan Cheander gasped.

  “O
h, please,” the assassin said, shaking his head. “Of course I am. I already have. Growing a spine is all well and good, but it won’t help you. Now shut up and save your breath.”

  He regretted engaging the cameraman. It went against everything he held sacred. It opened a dialogue. He didn’t want a dialogue. It was a sign that he was letting things slip. It wasn’t about the risk of someone hearing; even God wouldn’t hear them if they screamed the place down. “Do you want me to stuff the gag back down your throat? One word, that’s all it will take.”

  He looked at the man, then checked Creed again to see if there was any change in her breathing. Ideally he would have moved her car, but there wasn’t time. It would just have to remain where it was.

  “People know where we are. Our producer for a start.”

  “Really? That would be the producer in New York? A pity Concord is no longer in service, then. No one is coming to rescue you. You can have that engraved on your headstone if you like. No One Came. You won’t be leaving this church until the coroner is struggling to identify your charcoaled remains.”

  That was too much for the cameraman. He cried out uselessly for help.

  Tostig felt the heat of anger begin to rise.

  He hit the man hard with the back of his hand. There was no warning. He didn’t hold back. The blow snapped the cameraman’s head back and to one side. The chair rocked, threatening to tip over again.

  Tostig picked up the white gasoline-soaked cloth and stuffed it into Johan’s mouth. The cloth quickly stained red from the cut on his lip.

  A little blood was the least of his worries.

  Thorssen wouldn’t be pleased that he was transforming their deaths into a piece of theater, but not everything in life was about pleasing Karl Thorssen. Sometimes it was about pleasing himself. Any satisfaction Thorssen drew from these latest deaths would just be a happy byproduct, not the motive for the killing.

  Annja Creed showed no sign of coming around.

  Good. That gave him time.

  He’d chosen Saint Peter’s on the Lake for reasons beyond its location.

  Even if this place had been right in the heart of the city it would have been perfect with its great wooden crucifix on the wall behind the pulpit and its ancient seasoned timbers. Even the walls themselves weren’t stone, but a mix of natural materials that had calcified over time.

  They would burn.

  As a boy he’d stared at these walls during the services he’d been forced to attend, imagining what it might be like to nail the people who teased and otherwise tormented him to that giant cross.

  There had been times when he’d considered coming back to do that very thing, but had always decided against it. He felt it made things too personal, and therefore, too risky. But this was different. This was personal. It was her fault he was alone. The Serb’s death lay squarely at her feet.

  It was fitting that Johan Cheander was an observer. A watcher. Now he could watch her die without the distance of his lens between them.

  Tostig wanted to make it last as long as he could.

  He wanted the pair of them to endure long beyond the threshold of pain, and exist in that place where there was nothing—no pain, no relief, no escape. He wanted them to know there was no salvation, and then he wanted them to see his face as he struck the match that would transform the church into hell on earth.

  28

  In her dream she reached for her sword—Joan’s sword, the sword that inextricably joined them across the centuries, Annja and the Martyr—but it was always just beyond her grasp. Tantalizingly close, and yet so desperately far away. She couldn’t move her hands. She couldn’t will its familiar hilt into her hand.

  Annja felt the flames of the fire, heard the crackle and snap of the moisture in the wood, the cross at her back digging into her spine. No salvation, no reprieve, this was it, her wrists and ankles bound to the stake. The air so thick with smoke it seemed impossible to breathe.

  Through the confusion she could hear someone calling to her.

  She knew the voice.

  She recognized the name it spoke over and over.

  “Annja! Annja! I’m begging you, Annja! Wake up! Please! Just wake up!”

  But it felt so much less real than the dream.

  So much farther away.

  She struggled against her bonds, trying to pull away from the stake.

  She could feel their eyes on her, watching to see her burn out of their lives.

  Then she heard a scream.

  It wasn’t the voice that had called to her. It was another voice. She knew it now, of course. Roux. The old man had lost her once.

  Where are you?

  Annja fought to open her eyes, willing herself to wake up.

  Another scream. Not the old man this time, but she knew the voice every bit as well as his. The scream was her own.

  She blinked, trying to grasp what was happening around her and remember where she was. The last thing she had seen was Johan lying on the ground, tied to a chair and unable to free himself. He was still in the chair, still tied to it and unable to free himself, but now he was sitting only a matter of feet from her, with a barrier of smoke forming between them.

  “Annja!”

  She coughed, trying to speak, and regretted it instantly as pain exploded through her head again.

  She managed to crane her neck forward, lifting her chin from her breastbone to see the pews that had been broken and stacked at her feet before being doused in gasoline and set alight. Her arms were pinned to her sides, bound to the crucifix at the front of the church, just as Joan had been bound.

  Flames from the pyre stacked around her licked the soles of her feet.

  She was suspended well above the fire, but that didn’t matter. The wood would burn, the interior of the church itself would burn, the crossbeams that supported the vaulted roof, the broken pews, and eventually her body would all be engulfed in flames.

  She hated fire.

  She really hated fire.

  Annja fought against her bonds, trying to wriggle free of them, but they drew tighter, biting into her skin. She gritted her teeth and pulled and twisted at the plastic ties, but that only served to tear the skin around them, leaving it slick with blood.

  She didn’t need to see the man’s face to know what had occurred. Even muggy headed from a concussion, it didn’t take a genius to work out she’d been tricked by the man who’d broken into her hotel room—Thorssen’s man, the paramedic who had dragged him out of the theater after the rally. Thorssen had signed her death warrant.

  Annja willed the blade into her hand, but hands bound tight to her sides, she couldn’t summon it from the otherwhere even though it was clear in her mind, there, waiting for her to reach out and take it from the nothingness.

  Johan was choking badly. Annja saw he was tied to the chair and, bar dragging it a few inches across the stone floor, hadn’t managed to gain any kind of freedom. He rocked the chair a little, the movement threatening to tip over again.

  As he did, a burst of air stole into the nave, fanning the flames.

  “Is he still here?” Annja shouted over the roar of the fire.

  The heat was intense. Sweat stung her eyes. She twisted, trying to get her hair out of her face, only to have her vision swim as she threatened to black out. A wave of nausea struck. Annja swallowed the rising bile.

  “No. He’s gone.”

  “Good.”

  “Are we going to die here?”

  It was a question she had no intention of answering honestly.

  “Not if I can help it.” She could smell the pervasive reek of gasoline everywhere.

  The big man had soaked the interior of Saint Peter’s on the Lake in the stuff. Once the fire spread there would be no stopping it. The whole place would go up. Tendrils of flame snaked out toward the walls, reaching up for the timbers bracing the ceiling. She could smell the stuff on her clothes, too. Thorssen’s assassin wasn’t taking any chances.

  A s
park leaped from the bonfire and landed on the strip of carpet that ran between the remaining pews. Fire danced along the fabric like a demon, igniting the fibers and lighting up the tiny church toward the door as if in wild celebration.

  Annja struggled with renewed energy.

  Glass cracked, detonating like a gunshot in the confines of the church as the windows shattered. Fresh oxygen surged into the room, sucked through the window by the hungry flames that roared in delight. Supporting beams creaked and groaned desperately. A shower of dust fell from the rafters.

  They were lost and Annja knew it. The fire fanned out to isolate them from the only exit. It wasn’t death that concerned her; it wasn’t even the fire. It was dying without answers. She’d pinned her hopes on the laptop, which was back at the hotel. It might as well have been a million miles away. Whatever secrets it held, she’d never know them. She could only hope Garin would figure them out and use them to take down Thorssen and avenge her.

  Not exactly going to your happy place, Annja, she admonished. But it was true. She should have taken more precautions before coming out here. And as angry as she was with herself, she was angrier with Roux for not answering his stupid phone. She’d told him she wanted him down here, but he was obviously preoccupied with his latest flush or straight or dead man’s hand or whatever they called it.

  She pulled at the ties binding her, the plastic slicing even deeper into her wrists.

  Will the plastic melt before I burn to death or will it just fuse with my skin?

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Beneath her, Johan continued to struggle, more desperately now that his path to the door was cut off. The desperation in his face was heartbreaking. She’d gotten him into this, but she was powerless to get him out of it. Somehow he was fighting back the panic as he struggled with his restraints, though no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t wrench his hands free. The fire catching him seemed inevitable now.

  The pillar of the crucifix strained as Annja continued to fight against her bonds. Its base began to weaken as the fire gained strength and ferocity. It groaned as she rocked against it, using all of her weight to try and pull it from the anchor points securing it to the wall. If she could just unbalance it enough that she could fall forward, maybe she could carry herself beyond the reach of the bonfire beneath her—not that that would buy her more than a few seconds from the flames that covered the walls and ceiling now. But it was something. And she had to do something. She felt the smoke in her lungs. She felt her head swim alarmingly, but refused to lose focus. If she was going to die here, like this, she was going to die trying to help herself, digging deep, not caving in.