Rogue Angel 53: Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

  As Annja looked on, the gash in Stone’s face stopped bleeding on its own and began to knit itself back together. Starting from each end and working toward the middle, the cut went from an angry, bloody red to a faded pink to nothing at all in the space of thirty seconds.

  Annja shook her head. That couldn’t be. Nobody healed like that. It must be the drugs making her see things.

  But it wasn’t the drugs, and somewhere, deep down inside, Annja knew it.

  “I know you saw my research,” Stone said. “I know you can understand what I’ve created. The prions are far more powerful than even I anticipated. Now there is almost no injury I can’t recover from!”

  To prove the point, Stone abruptly stepped forward, impaling herself on the blade.

  Annja gasped in horror and instinctively jerked her arm back. There was a wet sucking sound as the blade pulled free of Stone’s flesh, causing the other woman to grunt in pain. Blood flowed freely down her leg.

  Without proper medical treatment, it was a fatal injury.

  Or it would have been, on any other person. Stone just stood there, stoically enduring the pain while the wound healed itself. The first had taken mere seconds; this one took several minutes, but in the end the result was the same—the wound might as well have never existed.

  Stone caught Annja’s gaze. “Now that that’s been settled, we’re going to have a little chat about your bloodline and that sword of yours,” she said, still smiling that crazed smile.

  With the drugs coursing through her system, addling her brain and playing with her senses, Annja knew she would be no match for Stone in a physical confrontation.

  Instead of fighting, she did the one thing her body had been screaming at her to do since Stone had set foot in the room.

  She ran.

  Annja released her sword, letting it vanish into the otherwhere, and then lurched forward, slamming into Stone and knocking her aside as she headed for the exit.

  “Oh, good!” Stone called from behind her. “At least you’re going to make this interesting!”

  Annja didn’t bother to answer or even look back as she slipped out the door and headed down the hallway beyond as fast as she dared. It wasn’t easy; her thigh was throbbing and the ground seemed to keep slipping away, leaving her to stumble about off balance. More than once she careened off a nearby wall, but each time she did what she could to use the collision to her advantage, pushing off the wall and propelling herself down the hall.

  Getting to the ground floor should have been easy; she’d memorized the layout of the ruins prior to filming her episode and had explored the grounds pretty thoroughly while seeking out the best backdrop for each scene. But every corridor looked like the one before it, and Annja soon found herself hopelessly lost.

  Behind her, she could feel the looming specter of Stone’s presence getting closer with every moment.

  The next corridor ended in an aged wooden door, and Annja skidded to a stop in front of it. She could hear footfalls coming toward her at a measured pace. A memory of her dream from the other night flashed through Annja’s mind, and she shuddered at how prophetic it all seemed now.

  She’s gaining on you; stop wasting time and move!

  Pulling open the door, Annja found a set of circular steps rising upward.

  Go! Go! Go!

  She went.

  Annja began climbing them as fast as she could, holding on to the steps in front of her as she forced her feet to keep moving upward. She went up step after step, seemingly forever, and then nearly tumbled backward when she suddenly reached the top. A quick grab for the door kept her from falling head over heels back down the stairs.

  She could hear footsteps behind her, so she hauled the door open and ran through it. She found herself in another corridor with a doorway at the far end.

  That’s got to be the way out, she thought, and headed for it as fast as her drugged body would carry her.

  There was still no sign of Stone when Annja reached the doorway, so she hurried through, crossing half the room before pulling up short. Too late, Annja recognized that she was standing in the ruin of the room where Elizabeth Báthory had spent the last several years of her life. A literal dead end if there ever was one.

  She spun about, intending to retrace her steps, only to see Stone in the doorway, blocking her retreat.

  The other woman smiled. “Looks like the end of the road.”

  Annja backed up, looking for another exit. The room was empty, like all the other rooms inside the castle ruins, but this one had a window.

  Perhaps there was a way to climb down, she thought.

  The fact that she was having difficulty seeing was irrelevant; she had no other options except to surrender, and that wasn’t something she would do. She wouldn’t last a week in Stone’s hands.

  Annja stumbled over to the window—an oversize affair easily three feet wide and at least four feet high—and looked out, frantically searching for some means of escape.

  But there wasn’t one.

  Or, at least, none that she could manage in her current condition.

  The window looked down at least two stories onto the rocky escarpment the castle had been built on, and while there were plenty of handholds in the crumbling rock, there was no way Annja could negotiate the climb. Not with her head spinning and her senses reeling. Trying would be tantamount to suicide.

  She turned away from the window, only to find Stone standing right there in front of her, practically toe-to-toe. Annja jerked back in surprise; she hadn’t heard Stone approach and certainly didn’t expect her to be standing so close.

  The move almost proved to be her undoing.

  Annja’s heels struck the wall, unbalancing her, and she teetered on the edge of the very window she’d just turned away from.

  It was Stone who saved her.

  The other woman reached out with lightning-quick reflexes, grabbing Annja about the throat and pulling her in close, away from the window’s edge and the long drop just beyond. Annja dazedly realized that the prion treatment must be augmenting Stone’s strength as well, for the woman stood there holding her an inch off the ground with just one hand.

  “Now, about that sword...” Stone said.

  The room was starting to spin, and Stone’s face seemed to loom close and then pull back again in time with the motion. Annja’s thoughts were equally jumbled; she knew she should be doing something, reaching for something to get her out of Stone’s clutches, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what.

  At her side, her right hand opened and closed, opened and closed, without her even being aware of it until Stone pointed it out.

  “That’s right,” the woman said with a cold smile. “Find that sword for me.”

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “Let her go!” a man shouted.

  At first Annja thought she’d imagined the voice, that the drugs were starting to make her hear things, but then Stone’s head turned in the direction of the door and Annja felt the first spark of hope. There might be a way out of this after all.

  “I said, let her go!” the voice shouted again, and Annja saw Detective Tamás standing in the doorway, pointing his service weapon at Stone.

  Pointing at her as well, she dimly realized. That wasn’t good.

  “Well, if it isn’t Detective Tamás,” Stone said, amusement in her voice. “Come to save the day at last?”

  Tamás’s voice was steady as he said, “I’m not going to tell you again. Let Ms. Creed go and step away from the window.”

  “My dear detective, I wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of capturing her if I was just going to let her fall out a window. That would be a waste, don’t you think?”

  Stone was still holding Annja upright with her right arm, which meant Annja’s body was blocking Tamás’s view of Stone’s left side. That wouldn’t have mattered much if Annja hadn’t seen Stone slowly moving her left hand toward the small of her back.

&nbs
p; Even with her fuzzy thought processes, Annja recognized that such a move didn’t bode well for Tamás. Or herself, for that matter.

  As things started to gray out around her, Annja summoned the last of her strength and made her move.

  “She’s got a gun!” she shouted, while simultaneously bringing her right hand across her body in a circular motion so that it struck the inside of Stone’s arm, right where the key nerve meridians met in the lower wrist.

  The blow was enough to break Stone’s hold on her neck, and Annja felt herself falling to the floor even as she heard the echo of a gunshot fill the room.

  As she struck the stone floor, Annja looked up to see a red flower blossom on the front of Stone’s lab coat.

  How pretty, she thought dazedly as she watched the force of the shot push Stone backward.

  Stone’s legs hit the lower part of the window just as Annja’s had moments before, except there was no one to save her.

  The last thing Annja saw was darkness finally closing in and Stone’s shocked expression as she flipped over the windowsill and disappeared from view.

  37

  Nové Mesto Hospital

  Annja awoke to find herself lying in a bed surrounded by medical equipment and monitoring devices. The steady hiss of a pump sounded from somewhere nearby and her heart jack-hammered into overtime as Annja’s still-fuzzy brain told her she was back in the medical ward under Stone’s control.

  With her mind screaming at her to get up and get out, Annja tried to do just that, only to discover that her wrists and ankles were secured to the bed with wide leather restraints.

  A high-pitched keening noise filled her ears as she fought against the restraints, pulling and tugging and pushing to no avail. In some distant part of her mind she realized that she was the one making that sound, but she was unable to bring herself back from the brink as her fear began to overwhelm her...

  “Hey, hey! Easy!” The voice cut through her fear like a lighthouse in heavy fog, and she looked up to see Detective Tamás entering the room, his hands up in the universal gesture for her to calm down.

  “You’re in a hospital in Nové Mesto. You’re safe,” he said, coming toward her. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “If I’m safe, why am I strapped down?” she asked, pulling on the restraints that held her wrists in place. Her voice was calm, but she knew she was close to the breaking point. All she had was Tamás’s word that she wasn’t back in that facility under Stone’s control, and she wasn’t sure she could trust him. Not entirely anyway.

  Sensing her distress, Tamás moved immediately to her side and began undoing the strap that held her arm to the bed. “The restraints were for your own safety. The antitoxin they gave you causes significant muscles spasms. They didn’t want you to injure yourself if you started flailing about.”

  Once he’d freed one arm, he moved around to the other side and released the other, then started working on the restraints around her ankles.

  Annja watched him for a moment and then asked, “Do you believe me now?”

  “Yes. And the next time you show up in my office with some fanciful tale for me to consider, I promise I won’t simply dismiss it out of hand. I’m sorry I doubted you and Havel. If I hadn’t, some lives might have been saved.”

  Annja shrugged; frankly, she probably would have doubted her story, too, if she’d been in his position.

  Tamás went on, “Dr. Owens started talking the minute we brought him into the interrogation room and hasn’t shut up since. He gave us directions to the facility, and we sent in a team about six hours ago to round up anyone inside. My men are interrogating them as we speak.”

  Annja didn’t care about the lab workers; she had a far more important issue on her mind. “And the women?” she asked. “Did you get the women out?”

  The detective nodded, but there was no joy in his voice as he said, “Yes, but the prognosis isn’t very good for the majority of them. They’ve had their blood drained so many times it’s a wonder any of them are still alive.”

  “What about Csilla? How is she?”

  Tamás didn’t say anything, just shook his head. She clenched her jaw against the rising tide of emotion. She’d tried so hard to save that woman, and now she didn’t know whether to hit something or cry.

  The detective didn’t miss her reaction to the news. “If it makes you feel any better, we’ve recovered enough evidence to damn Officer Radecki twenty times over. Had he lived, he never would have seen the outside of a jail cell again.”

  Annja already knew that. After what he’d done, she would have made sure of it.

  A sudden thought occurred to her.

  “What happened to Stone?

  Tamás glanced away. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I hit her with at least one, maybe two shots and then watched as she went out that window. No one should have been able to survive a fall like that. And yet, by the time I finished getting you the medical attention you needed and made my way around the tower to where she’d fallen, there was no sign of her.”

  Tamás turned to look at her, and Annja could see the confusion on his face, plain as day.

  “How does a woman who’s injured like that just get up and walk away?”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Annja said. “Maybe someone else spirited away her body.” She didn’t believe that was what happened, not by a long shot, but Tamás might. It was, after all, the most logical explanation.

  But Tamás was already shaking his head. “I had the place cordoned off completely. No one but law enforcement personnel were allowed on-site and then only with my say-so. No one could have gotten her body out of there without being seen.”

  Annja saw the hole in his argument and used it to her advantage.

  “But we already know Radecki was dirty. Is it such a stretch to think that he had help? That someone else on the force was working with him?”

  It wasn’t, not really, and it didn’t take long for Tamás to acknowledge that. The idea actually seemed to energize him, and it wasn’t long before he took his leave so he could get back to the investigation, saying he would check in with her later.

  Annja didn’t blame him; for someone with a policeman’s mind, the intricacies involved in this case would be practically irresistible.

  After Tamás left, Annja sat looking out the window, watching the sun sink behind the hills west of the city, and thought about the fact that she’d lied to the detective.

  She did know what had happened to Stone.

  Stone’s body hadn’t been spirited away by another person. In fact, Annja would bet that Stone hadn’t died of her injuries at all. Stone had impaled herself on Annja’s blade, and Annja had watched the resulting gash heal right before her eyes in a matter of seconds.

  So was it such a stretch to think that Stone had used that same ability to heal whatever injuries she’d sustained in the fall and had simply gotten up and walked away on her own?

  Annja didn’t think it was.

  Which meant Stone was still out there.

  Somewhere.

  Annja didn’t doubt that she’d see Stone again. The woman didn’t seem to be the type to leave loose ends lying around.

  She’d lay low for a while, waiting for things to cool down as the authorities were distracted by other, more recent incidents, and then she would make her move.

  Except this time, Annja would be there to stop her.

  The broadsword once carried by Joan of Arc flashed briefly into existence and then disappeared again.

  Puncture wounds were one thing, Annja thought. But Stone might not find it so easy to heal if her head were separated from her body.

  The next time Stone showed up, Annja would be ready.

  38

  Three weeks later...

  “If you would follow me, please.”

  The hard-looking man who’d been waiting for her at the Prague train station didn’t say anything
more as he turned and made his way down the hall. Stone didn’t mind; she wasn’t much in the mood for conversation anyway, at least not with the likes of him. She rose from her chair and followed, her thoughts on the conversation to come.

  She’d never met her mysterious benefactor, and she could feel her heart unexpectedly racing as the moment of doing so drew closer with every step she took. She’d originally been approached through a mutual third party, Simon Kovács, and it had been hard to argue with both the freedom and the money she’d been offered. The project had been directly in line with what she’d already been working on, and she recognized the brilliance of the suggested line of inquiry almost immediately. She might not have been privy to her employer’s identity, but that was a small price to pay to be afforded veritable free rein to pursue her research the way it needed to be pursued.

  She’d sent the weekly video reports to Kovács and occasionally received an email in reply suggesting certain courses of action or methods of approach. She’d taken those in stride, understanding that operating in such a fashion was a requirement of the work they were doing. They were on the cutting edge of science, and sometimes that meant pushing past the ethical boundaries society had erected around such endeavors. Stone had expected some success, yes, but she never would have imagined things would turn out the way they had. She supposed all of the scientific greats—from Copernicus to Watson and Frick—must have felt the way she did now at some point or another, that giddy sensation that went along with victory when it was finally pulled from the towering piles of previous defeats.

  Granted, the past three weeks had been difficult. Those first few hours spent crawling through the underbrush, dragging her broken legs behind her while trying to stop the flow of blood from the bullet wound in her chest, had nearly proved to be too much for her. She’d found a cavity in the rocks large enough to fit her body inside and had lain there in the dirt for the hour it took the prions to knit her tissue and bones back together again.

  Escaping under the cover of darkness, Stone had made her way to Budapest, where she’d called the emergency number she’d been told to memorize at the start of her employment. Two hours later she’d boarded a black helicopter with a dragon logo on the nose and was flown to a remote estate outside of Vienna, with instructions to stay there until called for. The estate had been fully stocked with food and liquor, and she’d enjoyed her time there, hidden away from the world and the events unfolding in Nové Mesto.