by Alex Archer
“At the Tumble Bug, get an ambulance. Now!” His face was sweaty from the heat the ride generated, but his skin felt clammy. “The girl—” Annja said.
He swayed and she helped him set back, with her free hand motioning the crowd to give him space.
“She had a knife. She was running. I was worried about the kids. I tried to trip her was all, just wanted to get the knife away.”
“Where did she go?” The crowd was parting and two paramedics were pressing through. They must have been close.
“Dragon Wagon,” he said.
The paramedics pushed Annja away, the tall one thanking her. She melted into the crowd, wiping the blood on her hips. “Dragon Wagon. Dragon Wagon.”
“It’s over there.” A young man nodded toward a fresh burst of sounds and lights. “Just past the Freak-Out.”
The Dragon Wagon was easy to spot, and it was filled with children. It was a roller coaster that sat on the flatbed of a semi, a vinyl red-and-white-striped skirt hiding eighteen wheels. Arcing above it was the top of a castle, jester heads stretched across the top—one missing an eye, another missing its entire face. Flags flapped from the two plastic turrets, and the coaster rumbled along, making an annoying clacking sound that competed with the attraction’s music. The coaster was an eight-segmented dragon, and the toddler sitting in the last car was red-faced. There was no sign of the girl, and this was the last ride in the lot.
“Papa!”
Annja whipped her head around. Papa was dead, Edgar, too, and...
“Papa, look at meeeee!” It was a boy, in the lead car of Dragon Wagon, hands flailing in the air and trying to get his father’s attention.
Perhaps the girl had fled the carnival entirely. Annja felt anger and disappointment well up. Maybe if Annja went back to the lake, the girl would show up again...just to keep her away from the pyramid.
“She went under there.” It was the young man from a second ago. Annja recognized him this time. He’d been with Keesha Marie, the girl who’d made such a fuss over Annja outside Sully’s What-Nots yesterday.
“The girl with the knife, that’s who you’re looking for, right?”
“Yes.” Annja followed where his finger pointed. Under the ride. “Great.” Common sense told her to stay out, but common sense and Annja had never gotten along well.
“Do you have a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you call the police for me?”
She saw him take her picture with it as she ran to the back of the ride. He pressed his ear to the phone as she picked up the skirt, crawled underneath and called for her sword.
Chapter 34
Annja’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness, and in that moment, she was undone. The girl must have heard her coming and been waiting.
The jade knife sliced into Annja’s sword arm above the elbow, cutting all the way to the bone. In reflex she screamed and opened her hand, thereby losing contact with the sword. It vanished into its otherworldly space, and Annja rolled to avoid a second blow. She knew she shouldn’t have rushed in; she should have waited for help.
But too little sleep, a long, deep dive and then a race from the shore to the carnival had made any rationality disappear. Still, she shouldn’t have second-guessed her instincts.
The pain in her arm was excruciating, fire chasing through her entire body. She felt the blood running from the wound, down her arm and over her hand, turning the asphalt beneath the ride slick.
The girl was smaller and more agile, skittering like a spider under the bed and between the wheels. She darted out and slashed Annja again. At the same time, Annja called for the blade and she swept it forward, knocking the girl’s knife nearly out of her hand. The girl regained her grip and rocked back on her haunches, snarling.
If the second cut hurt Annja, she couldn’t feel it. Her arm continued to burn, and she could barely move it. Annja guessed the girl must have severed a tendon.
But the pain now seemed to help her focus. She used it. Annja hunched forward, sweeping the sword, her second circle.
If the girl had been winded from the run, she didn’t show it. She did look wild, hair tangled and sticking out from the sides of her head; the light that came through the vinyl skirting outlined her as a shadow dancing madly in front of a backlit curtain. She jabbered, and Annja tried to make it out, but there was too much other noise—including, finally, a siren. One word Annja could make out from the girl’s ranting was Anamaqkiu.
“That’s not your name after all, is it?” Annja tried to draw the girl into conversation. She still held the sword in front of her, sweeping it slowly to keep the girl away. Though it was hard to maneuver under the bed, it was even more difficult now for the girl to find an opening, and so the confined space was working in Annja’s favor. The girl could not physically get below Annja’s swing. “What is your name?”
Annja couldn’t catch the word the young girl hissed out at her. “But I am Anamaqkiu!”
“And what is that? A title? A queen?”
The girl laughed. She was so very young, really a child. It was a child’s laugh that belonged in a schoolyard or on a merry-go-round. Annja wouldn’t kill her, would do everything she could to avoid hurting her...provided she could get out of this alive. The blood continued to gush from her arm.
“We have to finish this,” Annja said as much to herself as the girl. It was an effort to stay crouched as she was, and her breath was becoming ragged. Did the girl know how badly she was hurt? “We can’t fight under here. We shouldn’t fight at all.” That knife of hers shouldn’t have been so sharp, Annja thought...it hadn’t looked so sharp. And yet it cut through her flesh as if she were tissue paper. And the heat. The heat that it had somehow generated was still powerful.
“I will kill you,” the girl stated, in that instant sounding very grown-up.
She knocked Annja’s sword aside with her jade knife, blade to blade. The girl didn’t know the basics of fighting, that edge to edge was the worst hit, that it could break the weapons involved. Annja pulled the sword forward again, holding it like a spear.
“Why do you have to kill me?” Annja asked.
“You know.”
“To protect the pyramid?”
“Because I am Anamaqkiu.”
“A god?” Was that word Mayan? Did it represent one of the figurines carved on the temple?
“A dark spirit. Anamaqkiu.”
“And you protect the pyramid?”
The girl came at Annja again, rolling fast and kicking out, landing a solid blow against the sword and knocking the point against the undercarriage. A second kick caught Annja in the jaw. The girl stabbed with the knife, but Annja moved, slamming against a wheel and adding to the pain in her arm. Miraculously, the blade only severed a hank of hair.
She felt a rush of dizziness and recognized it: blood loss. Annja had been here before. She’d lost count of how many times she’d been wounded in fights, on more than one occasion wounded just as seriously as this. But in those cases her opponent had been an adult and she’d not been so hesitant to fight back. This was a mere girl, mad perhaps, misguided certainly...and a killer. But a child.
The clattering above them stopped and feet tromped across the metal planks of the semi, the sound booming underneath like elephants charging. There were more screams, none filled with pleasure, shouts. “Police! Clear the area!”
The blaring music kept going, threatening to drown Annja as surely as if she’d drowned in Rock Lake.
“The police are out there. You can’t get away.”
The girl looked one way then the next, scampering backward between the flatbed’s landing gear, which was down to stabilize the ride above. “I always get away.”
“How many people have you killed?” Annja wanted to keep her talking. She inched toward the girl, sword out like a lance. She was also concentrating on staying conscious. If she went down, the girl would finish her. “How many people have threatened your pyramid?”
She was possessed, Annja was certain. Still, the girl was not old enough to be responsible for the deaths dating back to WWII. Someone else had done that. “Who gave you the knife?”
“Mother to daughter to daughter to daughter,” she answered. “Anamaqkiu to Anamaqkiu.”
“What a lovely family tradition.” And one Annja meant to put an end to.
Give me strength, she prayed just as she launched herself forward, her head and back scraping hard against the undercarriage. The vinyl flap was raised up, revealing flashlight beams. The girl was caught in the glare of the light and Annja swung, not caring if the police saw her sword, caring only if she got rid of the threat.
Despite her training and the warning sounding in her head, Annja aimed the edge of her sword for the edge of the knife.
Edge to edge, where weapons should not meet.
The girl tried to escape, skittering farther back, but she was stopped by the wheel coupling.
The blades connected.
Annja had all her strength and determination behind the one blow. Left-handed, wounded, on the verge of collapse, she called for her last ounce of measure and severed the Mayan dagger.
“No!” the girl howled. Her scream reverberated under the truck bed and crescendoed to a piercing wail.
Annja shielded an ear with her good hand, letting go of the sword. In the wail she heard voices, all high-pitched. Mother to daughter to daughter to daughter.
“No!” the scream continued, joined by panicked calls from the carnival-goers. “No!”
It was a painful and brittle sound, one Annja would never forget, the chorus of names swelling up, whispers folding into it: “Anamaqkiu. Anamaqkiu. Anamaqkiu. Vucub-Caquix. Cabracan. Zipacna. Anamaqkiu.”
On and on the mantra went, until the silly carnival music swept in and carried her away.
Chapter 35
Monday
The man was easily in his seventies, white hair falling to just above his shoulders and a neatly trimmed beard that extended a few inches below his Adam’s apple. Usually he wore the beard and hair longer; he’d had them trimmed recently. Under the hospital room’s fluorescent light, his skin looked like worn leather, though she didn’t notice a single extra wrinkle from the day she’d first met him. Despite his appearance, she knew him to be well more than five hundred years old.
“Roux.” Her voice cracked at the word, and he handed her a cup with a straw in it. She drank the liquid, stopping herself from asking where she was. A hospital, obviously; she’d been in so very many hospitals since inheriting Joan’s sword...either as a patient being treated for this or that wound or to visit someone who had been injured for being in her presence. She knew the smell of them...the antiseptic scent. She also usually smelled flowers in her room, but not on this occasion.
She pictured the sword in her mind. It was whole, hanging there in its otherspace and waiting for her. She’d worried that she’d broken it, as hard as she’d brought it down on that damnable green knife, purposely hitting it edge to edge. Her precious sword was all right, not a knick on its blade that she could sense.
Roux had seen Joan’s sword before it came to Annja. He’d been one of Joan’s knights, like Garin. “In case you are curious, Annja, you are in the regional medical center, a private room.”
Where Sully had been taken, fifteen miles from Lakeside. She waited; he’d tell her more if she just waited for it. The mattress crinkled as she made herself more comfortable. It had plastic on it beneath the sheet and was not soft enough to suit her. The pillow was good, though.
“I was told they brought you in after midnight, almost had you airlifted to Milwaukee. You’d lost a great deal of blood, apparently. You’ve had transfusions.”
Wow. Transfusions. She looked at her right arm. It was wrapped in so much gauze it looked twice its normal size.
He continued, “Humerus broken. Severed tendon, severed artery. You could have bled to death.”
The knife had been incredibly sharp.
“They stitched up your stomach. I got a look at your medical chart, and—”
Either because he charmed a nurse or looked like a doctor, Annja thought.
“—I could have sworn you’d been in a sword fight with a master.”
“She was a kid,” Annja stated. “A teenager and—”
“She wasn’t.”
Annja raised an eyebrow.
“According to the police report, she was twelve.”
A kid. A murderer. Mad or possessed or... “How did you see a police report?”
“I didn’t see a report, but I talked to one of the policemen at the carnival. He’s in the lounge, waiting for me to leave so he can come in. They’re allowing you only one visitor at a time. The doctors don’t know you heal so rapidly. They think you’re going to be here for several days.”
“I’ll leave tonight.” She moved again and revised that. “Or tomorrow morning.”
“A carnival, Annja, what were you doing fighting a twelve-year-old girl at a carnival? Under a truck in a small town at midnight?” He made a huffing noise and ran his fingers through his hair, messing it slightly. “Instead, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I want to know why you’re here.” Annja took another sip of water. She wished it was colder. “What brings you to the medical center? You couldn’t possibly have known I was here. There is no way that you—”
“I flew into Madison last night. From London to New York to Chicago to Madison, rental car here—and not the kind I’d arranged for—all of it taking me sixteen hours because I had to wait for two connections.”
“You didn’t come here for me, did you?” He would have arrived before the fight at the carnival.
He pulled up a chair next to the bed and refilled her water glass. “I heard you were in Madison. Then from chatter on the internet, I heard you were in a place called Lakeside. Some girl posted your picture outside an antiques shop.”
That would be her fan Keesha Marie.
He leaned back in his chair. It was vinyl-coated wood, easy to clean and old. It creaked under his weight.
“I was looking for Garin,” he admitted finally.
She tried to sit up in bed, but a jolt of pain shot through her bandaged arm.
“Be careful,” he cautioned. “They’re going to put that in a cast this afternoon. Had to get the bleeding under control first.”
“Garin.” She’d almost forgotten he’d been at the conference. With the pyramid and the girl and the dagger and everything else, he’d been the least of her worries.
“But he was gone.”
“I see. And you wanted Garin because...” She knew their history, or rather some of it. As much as both men had been willing to confide in her on separate occasions.
“He has something that belongs to me, and I’ll leave it at that. So I take it you haven’t seen him.”
“Once. Briefly. Outside a lecture hall.” Garin obviously hadn’t been at the conference to see Annja, and yet he’d let her know he was there. It was something else for her to puzzle over...or something for her to forget about. Roux and Garin had their lives and dealings and she was better off staying out of them.
“And you haven’t read your email?”
She laughed, discovering that her ribs ached. “I don’t have a laptop anymore. Less to pack for my trip back to New York.”
Roux rested his hands on his knees and dropped his gaze to the floor. “Be well, Annja. Take good care of yourself.” He stood and gave her a small smile, the wrinkles deepening at the corners of his eyes. “Please take good care.”
Manny came in after Roux left, setting a bouquet on the stand next to her bed. It was beautiful, and she knew he’d spent a good bit on it—a dozen orange gerbera daisies, a dozen yellow poms, hot-pink carnations and bright green button poms. Certainly cheery,
it brought a smile to her face.
“I arrested a woman this morning at the hotel, Stephanie Granger.”
“Stevie.”
A nod. “I figure she was the Stevie you mentioned, the woman in the van from that alley. Got her and some hulk of a guy. They’d been seen with that Aeschelman character.”
“Mr. A.”
“Him, we couldn’t find him. Not Sunday, not today. Gone before the sun came up Sunday morning, and couldn’t find an airline anywhere with an Aeschelman on the passenger list. But Stephanie and her buddy had stuck around, waiting for the bank to open this morning. It was your photographer’s description of the guy that helped us find them.” Manny took a breath and rubbed at his eyes before continuing. Annja could tell he hadn’t gotten much sleep in a while. “Played Stephanie and her buddy against each other. She was a toughie. In the end it was him who confessed everything. Admitted Aeschelman was involved in an artifact-smuggling operation and had killed the people at the hotel...or had them killed. Stevie and her buddy will be in Wisconsin for more than a few years cooling their heels. We got Stevie for killing the thug in the alley.”
“So you’ve wrapped it up.”
A shrug. “Not all the way. There’s still Aeschelman. Arnie’ll be looking for him. The Feds, too. Me? I’ll be looking out my back door at my swimming pool in Brownsville.” He got suddenly very serious. “Thought we were going to lose you. The paramedics at the carnival—”
“You were there at the carnival?”
“Yeah, just as all the screaming started. Followed the racket ’cause I guessed I’d find you at the heart of it.” He gave her the lopsided grin. “Paramedics there...they were good. Your heart stopped twice on them. Blood...lots of blood, Annja.”
“I heal quickly,” she told him.
“Good thing.” He fiddled with the vase, turning it so the front of the arrangement was facing her. Then he moved the chair farther back from the bed to accommodate his long legs and eased himself into it. “Local guys got the kid out—the one with the knife. Your friend with the camera—”