Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

  Annja stood up and moved away from Radecki’s unconscious form, not wanting to be too close to the man. She stared at the phone’s lit screen for a moment, debating, and then tried to dial a number from memory. The keypad seemed to shimmer and dance as the drug continued to make its way through her system, and it took her three tries to get it right.

  There was a moment of silence after the call was answered.

  “Nové Mesto policajné oddelenie,” a bored male voice finally said.

  “Detective Tamás, please.”

  “Just a moment,” the duty sergeant replied, then put her on hold. Calling Tamás was a calculated risk. Until recently, she’d thought he was directly responsible for the deaths of Havel Novack and Marta Vass, never mind being a willing participant in the cover-up of nearly two dozen additional murders. But after overhearing the discussion between Radecki and Stone, Novack’s true killers, she’d come to believe that she’d misjudged the police detective. Tamás likely still wanted to speak to her regarding the Novack house fire, so Annja was confident she could get him to make the trip out here.

  At least now she had proof those women hadn’t just disappeared. They’d been kidnapped. Annja reached into her pocket for the hard drive, only to find that the device was gone. Radecki had probably searched her for weapons after he’d knocked her out.

  The detective’s voice startled Annja out of her ruminations.

  “This is Tamás.”

  “Do you know who this is?” Annja asked, not wanting to give her name over the open line.

  Tamás was silent for a moment, and then said, “Yes.”

  A wave of dizziness washed over her, forcing Annja to wait until it passed. It was getting harder for her to pull her thoughts together, and she could feel her sense of the here and now slipping away. Her dizzy spell must have been stronger than she thought, for when she came back to herself she could hear Tamás speaking into her ear with concern.

  “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” she said as the room ballooned in front of her and then settled down again.

  She must have been hit with some kind of psychotropic.

  “Are you all right?” the detective asked.

  Annja quelled the urge to shake her head, and settled for pacing to keep herself focused, despite the pain in her leg. The last thing she wanted to do was collapse unconscious.

  “No, I’m not,” she told him. “In fact, I need your help, as do the several other injured women I just left behind. I found them, Tamás. Novack’s missing women. I found them and they need your help.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Annja turned, intending to retrace her steps, and nearly screamed in surprise when she found a bloodied Radecki standing directly behind her.

  He lashed out with his left hand, knocking the cell phone from her grip, and then followed it up with a snap punch to her face.

  Normally Annja was quick enough to slip a punch like that, but whatever Radecki had jabbed her with was wreaking havoc with her reaction time as well as her senses. She tried to jerk her head to one side, a move that had helped her evade many a punch in the past, but this time she was too slow, and instead of sailing harmlessly past her face, Radecki’s fist slammed into her cheekbone.

  The pain was so overwhelming she saw stars, and in that moment she was helpless.

  Her heart was beating madly, no doubt sending whatever he’d injected her with pumping wildly around her circulatory system. Soon Radecki could stand back and watch her fall.

  If she was going to survive this, she needed to do something before she lost all her strength.

  Radecki picked up a piece of rope and advanced toward Annja. She covered her head with her arms and hunched over, hoping Radecki would think she’d given up. Annja couldn’t see much of anything in that position, but she could see his feet, which meant she knew where he was.

  When he got close, Annja shot her foot out without warning, delivering a near-textbook front snap kick to the man’s groin. Radecki doubled over, his hands cupping his groin. He was staring at her with hatred, his face red with pain.

  Radecki let out a bellow and charged toward her.

  Annja watched him come.

  She didn’t have the strength for another prolonged fight; the last one had left her battered, bruised and exhausted. She needed to end this decisively, here and now. If she didn’t stop him, she likely wouldn’t survive this next confrontation.

  She was only going to get one shot at this.

  She waited for Radecki to close the distance between them, waited for him to build up so much momentum there would be no chance of turning aside or stopping short, waited until he was almost atop her...

  Then she reached into the otherwhere, wrapped her hand around the hilt of her sword and pulled it forth into this side of reality with a wordless shout of defiance as she thrust it forward.

  The blade entered his stomach just to the left of his navel and, cutting through everything in its way, came thrusting out his back as his own momentum carried him forward until the hilt of the weapon was pinched up against the front of his gut.

  For a moment, he hung there, impaled on her sword, staring at her. His eyes were filled with hatred and disbelief, then Radecki gurgled once and died, a thin stream of blood running out the side of his mouth.

  Annja released her sword back into the otherwhere and let his corpse drop to the floor at her feet.

  36

  It was all Annja could do to stand there a moment and catch her breath. Her head was pounding and her heart was beating wildly. One eye was so swollen she could barely see out of it, and she was pretty sure her cheekbone was fractured, if not broken outright. The difficulty she was having taking a deep breath told her Radecki had probably cracked a few of her ribs, as well.

  But at least she was alive.

  If only Tamás would get here quickly...

  Tamás!

  She spotted the cell phone fetched up against the far wall and stumbled over to it. Picking it up, she put it to her ear.

  “Detective?”

  Nothing.

  A glance told her why; both the case and the screen were cracked. The phone must have been damaged when Radecki swiped it out of her hand.

  Now what?

  She had two options, she supposed. Try to find help on her own, or wait, hoping that Tamás had taken her call seriously and was on his way right now.

  She slumped against the nearest wall, trying to make up her mind, when the sensation of being watched alerted her to someone else’s presence.

  Annja glanced up, startled, and found Diane Stone standing in the doorway. Stone was dressed semicasually, wearing a white lab coat over jeans and a T-shirt.

  “A rather impressive display,” Stone said. “From conjuring the sword out of thin air right down to slaughtering Radecki with it. I must say I’m surprised.”

  The drug coursing through Annja’s system bent and distorted the words slightly, so it took her a moment to understand what Stone was saying. The predatory look in the woman’s eyes was clear.

  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  Having already been seen once, Annja didn’t hesitate. She slipped her hand into the otherwhere and drew her sword.

  “Stay back,” she said, brandishing the weapon before her. “I’m warning you.”

  Stone laughed. “Or what? You’ll cut me with that thing?” She marched forward until she stood about two feet in front of Annja. “Go ahead,” she said.

  Annja’s flesh crawled at Stone’s nearness, as if her body instinctively knew that the woman standing before her was, in part, unnatural. Annja felt the almost overwhelming urge to run, to get as far away from the woman in front of her as possible.

  Sensing her distress
, Stone smiled a shark’s smile, full of hunger and teeth. “Cut me or I’ll take that blade from you and use it to cut your hand off.”

  Annja’s survival instinct flared. Before she knew it she’d flicked her wrist, slashing the very tip of the sword across Stone’s cheek. The near razor-sharp weapon opened a long gash in the woman’s smooth skin.

  That was going to leave a nasty scar, Annja thought with a sense of drugged detachment.

  Stone, on the other hand, didn’t even flinch. She wiped at the blood with the back of one hand and said, “Is that all you’ve got?”

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.

  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