Sharpe stopped and reversed direction, drawing the blade out of Sara’s grip. A synapse-popping shock whip-cracked up Sara’s arm and burrowed down into her center. Her arm was numb to the shoulder, but continued to move, controlled by the Witchblade. The volatile mix of emotions left her shaken. Sharpe looked confused as well. He withdrew, sliding backwards.
The Witchblade pulled her forward. The blade came alive in Sharpe’s hands and appeared to be struggling.
Sharpe gripped the blade in both hands like an aluminum baseball bat and dragged it backwards. It appeared to have great weight. Sara glanced behind her. David was gone, thank God, but Hecht had rallied two NYPD blues from out front and were directing them toward Sara.
Sara turned to consult. The Witchblade yanked her back, drew her after Sharpe, hand clamped in an iron grip. She turned the comer just in time to see the elevator doors shut, in a bank of four leading to the unfinished ballroom on the fifth and top floor. Like the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate, the Witchblade’s index finger beelined to the button. An elevator opened, and the Witchblade dragged Sara inside, just as the two cops skated around the corner, guns drawn, one high, one low.
“Hold your fire!” the high one cried, as the elevator doors slid shut.
Kenny G played softly on the sound system. It was only audible in the elevators. Sara stood with her back against the wall and watched the digital display count up to five. The doors dinged and slid open. Sara crouched, ready for anything. The door had opened on a broad area of indeterminate depth, lit only through reflected light streaming through the immense arched windows that encircled the ballroom like a crown.
The Witchblade was inert, awaiting her command. An instant ago it had been alive, dragging her along. “What do you want?” she snarled. “Help me or get lost.”
Witchblade leading, Sara came out of the elevator fast and low. She was behind a collonade marking the grand ballroom, with its inlaid wood floor, cut into a vast map of the world. America was oak, South America was mahogany, teak from Thailand, cedars from the Middle East. The oceans were alternating strips of ash and maple, cut into a wave pattern.
Sharpie knelt on the Canary Islands, sword thrust before him.
“Help me,” he groaned.
“Derek?" Sara asked, cautiously edging forward. She did not regret the loss of her gun. It wouldn't have done any good. “Derek, can you understand me?”
He looked up with haunted eyes. The mask of death was gone. “Sara, stay back. It’s the sword. It wants me to kill...” The thing twitched, gleaming in the city light. Sharpe looked like he was trying to hold it still. It vibrated, casting off shimmering rays of light.
Sara stopped ten feet away, Witchblade held placat-ingly forward, inert for now. “Who? Who does it want to kill?”
His eyes were pleading. “Everybody,” he said in a hoarse whisper. His face twisted, mouth a grimace, some internal struggle taking place.
“Run!” he screamed, rising, struggling with the blade, gripping the handle like a mountain climber at the end of his rope. It turned toward her, dragging Sharpe like a pull toy. He was trying to hold it upright, but the blade bent in a tight little curve. It yanked Sharpe along like a kid on water skis. It dragged him across the polished hardwood floor, his heels emitting a rodent-like screech.
“Let go!” she barked, backing up, feet describing alternating crescents, never leaving the ground. “Let go of it!” “I can’t!” Sharpe wailed in a voice frayed with pain. Skyroot flicked, a god’s eyelash. The Witchblade rose to meet it. The impact caused a crack to appear in one of the glass arcs overlooking Battery Park. The very air seemed to come alive and punch her, everywhere at once. Sara was deaf. The mask descended on Sharpe’s face, and he and the blade were one, attacking with savage fury, leaving a quicksilver figure eight in the air. Sara was forced backwards by the overwhelming attack. She had no chance to think, to plan strategy. The Witchblade thought for her, parrying, trying to hang on. As Sharpe withdrew his blade, Sara could actually feel the metal splitting. Not deep enough to reach her hand. But it was parting before the samurai sword, acknowledging a superior force.
Her head was filled with buzzers, fire alarms, tinitis, black noise. Her eyes were filled with tears of rage and frustration. She cursed the Witchblade, and in that instant it sprouted a scythe, index and middle finger blending into one. Sharpe reversed direction and thrust forward like a fencer. The Witchblade rose. It made a faint metallic whisper as it cut through Sharpe’s arm above the wrist. Sword and hand fell heavily to the floor, dappling the finely finished ash with the suggestion of a chrysanthemum.
Sara panted, supporting herself with her hands on her knees. Her blade was gone, faint afterimage of a quicksilver loop. Skyroot lay on the wood floor, still in Sharpe’s grip, blood spreading, tip of the blade thrust skyward. Ever so slowly, it began to descend, a recalcitrant lever, until it touched the ground. One by one, the fingers of Sharpe’s hand let go.
Sharpe had staggered back until he hit one of the iron girders, slid to the floor clutching his pumping stump. The sight of his blood gouting forth snapped Sara out of her trance. She was on him in three steps, had his belt off in three seconds. It was narrow, made of some kind of lizard skin, and had probably cost more than her entire wardrobe. Sharpe was going into shock. She got the belt around his forearm below the elbow and drew it tight.
“You’re going to be all right, Derek. I have to stop the flow of blood. You’re going into shock, okay? That’s normal. Breath deep, from the pit of your stomach. There’s an ambulance on the way.”
Was there? Where the hell was everybody?
Her hand blazed. The Witchblade flowed over her hand again, from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder.
And then the power went out.
Not just in the building. All of lower Manhattan. First the Woolworth Building. Then every light on every wall in the canyons of Lower Manhattan. The elevators wouldn’t be operating. But somebody should have shown up by now. Maybe they were waiting to hear from the SWAT guys. Why weren’t they coming up the stairs? Where were the stairs?
The gout of blood from Sharpe's cleanly amputated arm had stopped. The wound was grotesque. Sharpe sat with his knees up, his head resting against the wall, eyes shut, slowly counting out his breath. It was an impressive display of self-control.
Sara crouched next to him. “Derek, you’re doing great. I have to leave you for a minute to get help.”
“Cell phone,” he rasped. “Jacket pocket.”
Sara felt in his jacket, found the plastic clam, flipped it open. Dead. It wasn’t a natural blackout. Something was sucking the juice out of every battery in Lower Manhattan, not just the grid. She looked at her watch. Not long enough.
“I was...” Sharpe croaked. “Water,” he gasped.
Sara rose. She remembered passing a water fountain by the elevator. She grabbed an Etruscan style vase off a plinth, rinsed it out, filled it with water. Outside, the city breathed in fear, wondering what had happened. Millions would assume it was another terrorist attack. They’d rush to the televisions but receive no solace. The cars were dead. Nothing was moving. For the first time ever, Sara couldn’t hear any sirens.
She heard voices, howls of confusion, anger, paranoia, floating up from below. Cries of fear, questions hurled into the night. She ran back to Sharpe, knelt, helped guide the vase to his mouth. He drank greedily, Adam’s apple bobbing.
“This time,” he said, “I could feel what was happening. Spirit of a dead samurai, fierce. Fierce spirit. Chose me! Because of what happened over there...”
“What happened, Derek? What happened over there?” “Joint exercise... with Japanese Anti-Terrorist Police. Charismatic shintu priest named Osagi, holed up in a mountain retreat in Hokkaido ... He attacked me, I took a cut in the shoulder, was wearing a vest. I shot him, but it was too late. When he cut me, the spirit of the sword transferred from him to me. It was a Muramasa. The spirit belonged to a samurai who was forced to commit sepp
uku...”
“Shigeyoshi?” she asked in surprise.
“How did you know?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Where was the damned ambulance? She forgot. Nothing was running. No help was coming. Sharpe looked pale, and had slumped down. The best she could do for now was to make him comfortable. She looked around for something to cover him, to keep him from getting cold, found an Oriental rug on the wall in a side room, tore it down.
Taking a cushion from a sofa near the elevator, she covered Sharpe and made him as comfortable as possible. There was nothing more she could do. She turned to examine the sword.
Sharpe’s hand lay on the floor, empty.
A scraping sound from the shadows, a gleam of reflective light from the three-quarter moon as the blade emerged, seemingly suspended in midair. Then she saw the man, short blond hair, moon in glasses.
“David,” she said in an eerily calm voice. “Put it down.”
But he was not David. The creature that shuffled into the moonlight wore David’s clothes, his body, but it belonged to another era. Death lurked in its eyes, no longer hidden. The thing that was David spat guttural Japanese and attacked. He did not seem to lift his legs. He skated forward, seemingly exempt from the laws of physics, the glittering blade held overhead like an ax. Sara had always been quick, but were it not for the Witchblade, her reflexes would have failed.
Her arm didn’t raise the Witchblade. The Witchblade raised the arm, meeting Skyroot’s downward stroke six inches above Sara’s head. The shock compressed her nearly to the floor as the Witchblade instinctively closed on Skyroot. It was like catching a Lincoln Blackwood with a razor attached. For an instant they remained frozen, the un-David bringing all his weight to bear on the blade, Sara struggling, free hand bracing the Witchblade inches from her face, as Sharpe struggled feebly to distance himself.
“Who are you?” Sara demanded.
With both hands, the creature withdrew the blade. There was a sound like exposed nerves, fingernails on chalkboard, yowling cats, screaming children. Skyroot sliced through the unknown metal of the Witchblade, scoring Sara’s palm. She could feel the blood flowing down her wrist.
Skyroot cut Witchblade.
The creature backed off, an unknown expression subtly rearranging David’s features so that he resembled a bad wax image of himself, or the way he might look after an undertaker had done his work.
Slitted eyes beamed hate. Clenched jaw spat forth a stream of jagged-edged consonants like tobacco juice. One word was recognizable.
“Udo,” she hissed.
The creature smiled grimly, a smile of death. She recalled the stoiy—how once he had slain his rival and his lady love, Udo had gone on to kill hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. His malignant soul had come to roost in sweet, innocent David. How could that happen? How could she fight him?
Crunching sounds from below, as someone tried to batter their way through a locked steel door. Hecht was concerned about security, all right. He’d made his performing arts center a fort, an elegant pillbox with a wig and makeup. The glass was three inches thick, optically perfect, impervious to armor-piercing rockets.
Hand burning fiercely from the blade, Sara leaped to her feet, hunkered into a combat stance, most of her weight on her left leg, the right ready to kick. She couldn’t compete with the heavy sluggers. She had to rely on her speed, agility, and the Witchblade.
“I know you can understand me,” she hissed, speaking not to the young man she’d come to love, but to the warrior spirit lurking like cancer behind him. “What do you want?”
“Blood." Voice like buckling metal, like white noise, like screams in the night.
“Why? You’re not human. You came from up there.” She nodded toward the ceiling. “You fell from the sky, a lump of metal. Where do you come from?”
The thing that used to be David grinned, glanced briefly upward. “Up there."
It attacked, fusing supernatural strength with skill and cunning, a dragon’s tongue, leaving a gleaming retinal silver trail. Sara had no time to anticipate. The Witchblade was in constant motion, intercepting each blow, describing a series of arabesques. The stone glowed like a red dwarf with each contact. If Udo killed her, nothing would stop him. Skyroot had proved a match for the Witchblade. Would the police be able to gun him down in a fusillade of lead? Would he spin the sword like a pro-pellor, repelling each shot?
A bolt of white-hot fury ignited in her gut and flushed through her system, indistinguishable from the Witchblade. Her fingers fused into a twenty-six inch blade of a delicate curving nature. The metal itself was not smooth, like the katana. It was a crazy quilt of textures that never settled. Only in motion could Sara get a sense of shifting patterns, rune-like, a ghost finger writing on the wall of some long-forgotten tomb.
The non-David grinned and pressed his attack. Sara gave herself to the Witchblade, moving through a series of complex steps designed to provide maximum mobility, thrust, and defense. The non-David relentlessly circled, slashing, stabbing, seeking an opening with terminal fury. It drove her across the inlaid ballroom floor, across the North Atlantic, East to West, almost faster than she could shuffle on the balls of her feet. She stumbled at Hudson Bay. The thing coiled like a serpent. She saw death in its obsidian eyes. She remembered that David’s eyes were hazel.
For a nanosecond, she saw the way things might have been: the split-level in Westchester, the two moppets-one boy, one girl, some kind of pound puppy, spreading waistlines and happiness. All futile. Not for her. Never for her. Not for Vince’s little girl. She had her own curse to bear.
The malevolence shrieked with all the bloodlust in the jungle and slashed downward in a killing stroke. Sara skittered forward, ducking inside the slash and inserting her knife arm at the hip, drawing across his body toward the opposite shoulder, feeling the meat part, the scrape of the bone, the tensile snapping of connective tissue. The Witchblade was out the other side, flicking blood as far as Rio de Janeiro. David looked down in astonishment.
“What—?” he said, before slipping in two. He was dead before his torso hit the floor. His guts splashed in righteous display. A man of honor forced to commit seppuku would welcome such incontinence. Sara remained in a combat crouch, but the Witchblade had withdrawn into itself, leaving only the bracelet. A massive scraping sound issued from somewhere close, followed by matter-of-fact murmuring. Hecht must have rallied his troops and broken through. Or maybe the police department.
Trembling, she sank to her knees and crawled forward, cradling David’s lifeless head and torso in her arms, soaking herself in gore. Skyroot lay inert, temporarily sated. Her tears dripped onto his lifeless eyes.
“Oh, David,” she moaned softly. “I’m so sorry...”
The black bone snouts of assault rifles poked around the corner, followed by Kevlar-clad SWAT guys in fiberglass helmets.
“It’s okay,” she tried to say. It came out a croak. She waved her hand. She remembered the shield around her neck and held it up, dripping blood.
“I’m a cop,” she gasped.
EPILOGUE
She wouldn’t let go of David. Siry had to pry her loose, finger by finger, while talking to her in a low voice. He rode with her to the Emergency Room at Cedars/Mt. Sinai, where a woman doctor examined her for damage. Only shock, the doctor declared, and gave her a sedative.
Siry drove her home and tucked her in. “I’m putting a guard out here, just in case.”
Sara rallied. “You don’t have to do that, Joe. I’ve got Los Romeros.”
He wondered what she meant, did it anyway. She hated the fact they’d put her under, hated that she wouldn’t be in on the cleanup. She fell through warm gauze toward a feather bed.
When she woke, Raj was seated in a kitchen chair he’d brought into the bedroom, and was sipping tea from a cup, Schmendrick perched contentedly on his lap. “Greetings. It is I, Raj.”
“I see that. What are you doing here?”
“I am protec
ting you from the press and seeing you do not choke on your own vomit.”
Sara sat up, feeling woozy. “What time is it?”
Raj set his teacup down in its saucer on a tray on a TV table, and carefully lifted the cat to the floor. “It is just past noon on Tuesday, and even as we speak, the Mayor, the Commissioner, and the Chief are proudly declaring that the case of the samurai killer has been solved.” Memory caught up with Sara in a great, walloping smash and took her breath away. A sob clawed its way unbidden from her lips.
Raj rose. “I shall get you some tea.”
Sara fumbled for the remote and keyed on the little Sony that perched on her dresser. There was Joe, reading from a teleprompter in a monotone. “... responsible for these murders. He had all the missing blades, hanging on the wall of his studio.”
Coiffed heads bobbed for attention. An especially shrill reporter drowned out all others. “Chief, Mr. Commissioner, wasn’t Detective Sara Pezzini involved in this case? Didn’t she, in fact, shoot the alleged perpetrator?”
“I have no comment.”
Sara switched it off.
Oh, David. First decent guy she’d dated in years, and he turns out to be the samurai killer. A case could be made that David was innocent, being possessed by a thirteenth century samurai at the time of the murders, but this was small comfort to the victims’ families.
Sara held her right hand up and stared at the swirl of silver orbiting her wrist.
Raj returned to the room with an old tray he’d dug out of her cupboard, a silver pot of tea, and a plate of Pep-peridge Farm Bordeaux cookies. “Feeling better?”
“A little,” she lied. “Thanks for baby-sitting, but I’m all right now.”
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