by Alex Archer
Moonlight illuminated the rooftops. Annja scanned the horizon, looking for the killer. Her hotel was the only taller building in the vicinity. Silver light shimmered on the ridged tiles. Too late. She’d wasted too much time getting up there. The killer was gone. She turned in a full circle, desperately trying to make out any sign of movement, any uneven shape along the line of rooftops, but there was nothing.
She’d misjudged the killer again.
He was long gone.
She’d had him in her reach only for him to slip through her fingers.
She crouched low, frustration threatening to bubble over inside her. He couldn’t have gone far. It was impossible. The night was even quieter up there. She could barely hear the strains of music from the bars and clubs, no more than a distant susurrus like the wind. She was listening for a very particular sound: footsteps, or more accurately, the grating of clay with weight being put on the tiles, then removed as the killer fled.
Nothing.
It was pointless to blindly walk over rooftops without some sort of clue as to which direction the killer had taken.
He could, she realized sickly, have escaped a few moments after climbing, disappearing through a fire door, or down the side of another building. There was absolutely nothing to say he’d run across the rooftops, and the longer she stood there scanning the rooftops, the surer she became that he hadn’t.
She was about to give up and make her way back down when the scrape of a tile sliding from a roof and falling, followed by the almost delicate smash on the ground below, had her moving again quickly, as sure-footed as a cat across the cold tiled roof toward the source of the sound.
A shape rose from the skyline and started moving.
The killer was more than two hundred yards away. He’d managed to get much farther away than she’d expected. She had no idea how many buildings were between them or how many streets she’d have to traverse, but at least she knew which direction she needed to go.
Another tile crashed.
He was moving quickly, without any kind of care for his safety, or for stealth.
Annja started the chase.
She moved faster than the lumbering shadow, light on her feet, barely seeming to rest on top of the centuries-old tiles as she moved quickly across the rooftop.
The gap between them closed quickly.
Annja ghosted across the rooftop, but as her foot came down, inches from the edge an instant before she jumped, the tile slipped. The clay tile grated across the surface of the final tile, then spun away into darkness. Then she was in the air and it was shattering below her. She came down on the other side hard, falling forward. Her fingertips dragged across the tiles as she stumbled away from the edge.
A light came on in one of the windows. A second later the window was thrown open and a shout filled the air. The anger in it was universal, even if the words weren’t. She could only assume the speaker was demanding to know what was going on.
The killer was still several rooftops away, moving with an almost-simian gait, knuckles seeming to drag across the tiles. He didn’t slow for so much as a heartbeat, launching himself from one roof to another, and charging off again across the flat surface, putting more distance between them.
Watching him go, Annja realized that his bulk should have inflicted far more damage on the roof than it appeared to be doing. There was nothing graceful about his movement, but he kept on moving, not once looking back.
Annja launched herself in pursuit of the lumbering figure again, but the tiles offered little purchase and she felt herself slipping and sliding as she advanced. She crossed the middle of the roof, looking up to see the killer outlined by the moon. Her breath caught in her throat. He was huge. She recalled the illusion that Jan Turek’s coats wove around him, but this was different. The killer wasn’t padded with a dozen coats for warmth.
She misjudged the next leap, too focused on the man in front of her, putting her foot down awkwardly as she pushed off.
She felt herself falling, knowing she didn’t have the height or momentum to stick the landing on the other side, having horribly misjudged the width of the alleyway beneath her. It was a long way down. Too long. She arced her back, arms and legs pinwheeling to try to stretch a few more precious inches out of the leap.
It was all about nerve now.
Annja reached out for the rain gutter as she fell, knowing it was her only hope.
Rough metal dug into the palm of her hand as she tried to support her weight and reach up with her other hand. She kicked out with her feet, scrabbling desperately for purchase on the smooth wall as the rain gutter failed. The brackets groaned, the iron itself buckling slowly as the entire thing pulled away from the brickwork. The old mortar couldn’t hold her weight.
There was a moment, the long, lonely silence between heartbeats, when it held and then the whole assembly began to fall away in slow motion.
Annja glanced around frantically, desperately hoping to find something she could use to slow her fall. Her gaze raced over the iron braces running through the center of the building to prevent the ancient walls from pulling themselves apart. No good. She looked across the line of the roof to other anchor points that were out of reach. No good. Then she glanced at the French balcony ten feet below her feet, desperately trying to work out any possible combination of gymnastics and contortions that might offer up a chance of grabbing hold of one of the elaborately filigreed bars before the ground came rushing up to meet her. She looked all the way down to the ground, where a pile of cardboard boxes lay invitingly, promising a soft landing that would be anything but. The image of her broken body lying amid the crumpled cardboard flashed across her mind. No good.
The metal pipe continued its relentless collapse, peeling farther and farther away from the safety of the wall.
Annja scrambled her feet against the concrete, desperately trying to change the angle of descent, when the pipe lurched beneath her, two anchor points pulling away at once. She had no choice but to go with it, pushing herself back toward the building she had launched herself from.
The change of angles brought new pressure points to bear on the iron. It couldn’t hold, shearing away into dozens of fractured pieces.
Annja held her nerve, waiting for the last possible second to reach for the French balcony.
Her fingertips snagged the metal bar for a second, but as she tried to close her fist around it, an iron leaf stabbed deeply into her palm and pain exploded in her hand. She recoiled, and by then it was too late.
The world above her was filled with stars.
And then it wasn’t.
10
Roux had been on edge as soon as he’d hung up on Annja.
The old man knew her too well. He knew that by saying don’t go out she was going to go out. Annja wasn’t the kind of woman you could tell what to do. He’d known she was going to dive head-on into the investigation the moment she’d called simply because there was something strange going on. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what it was. That only ensured she’d chase down every possibility until she did know.
He wasn’t worried about her well-being; she was more than capable of dealing with the threat gripping the city of Prague.
That was not the issue.
The issue was that he knew who the killer was.
Or rather, what.
And it was his job to take care of it, not hers.
Maybe once upon a time, like in the fairy tales, he could and should have taken care of it, but he’d screwed up and the opportunity passed. How many people had died because of his mistake? More than the handful of most recent victims, that was for sure. That wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. This time he was going to have to take care of it, no matter the cost to him, even if that cost was his life, which he suspected it would be. He’d always known there would come a time he’d have to face the reality.
Even the great Roux couldn’t expect to live forever.
But maybe there was a
nother explanation?
Just because he saw patterns within the killings and could connect dots no one else seemed to see didn’t have to mean he was right. Garin being there, for instance. Was he involved? It was inconceivable that his appearance in Prague was a coincidence. The universe and Garin Braden didn’t function that way. Garin had chosen this time to track Annja down for a reason. But what might that reason be?
The flight seemed to take forever despite being a short-haul trip, and it wasn’t helped by the fact it had taken hours to tie up the few loose ends he thought would take minutes. In the air he’d put out a couple of calls of his own to people to see if they could shed any extra light on what was happening in Prague. There was nothing in those conversations to make him doubt his gut instinct. He looked down at the world through the window, the lights of the city looking like ley lines directing power all across the surface of the Earth. It was quite beautiful, but he didn’t have the time for beauty. The miles weren’t passing fast enough.
There would be another death tonight. He knew that. It was part of a pattern that went back centuries now. In daylight it would be impossible to track the killer. It moved only at night, using daylight hours to recuperate, falling into an almost-hibernation state. It was how the monster had always worked. And yes, that was the word he chose to use, not killer, not beast, not man. Monster.
The time passed agonizingly slowly.
There was nothing he could do but think as the plane made its way toward its destination, beginning its descent. He needed to devise a suitable plan, something that would deal with the problem once and for all. The problem was, the only thing he could think of that stood a chance of working was no more sophisticated than scouring the streets. London would have been better, some kind of city with the level of surveillance cameras that covered every rooftop and every angle, not Prague, which was almost backward when it came to that kind of security. He was going to have to rely on luck, and he hated relying on luck.
Unless, of course, Garin held an ace up his sleeve. He wouldn’t put anything past the man.
Morning was already fast approaching as he saw the runway lights of the Prague airport inviting the plane to touch down.
By the time the aircraft had landed and Roux had dealt with the officious representatives of customs and border control and picked up a rental car, the sun would be rising. Once that happened he’d be helpless for twelve hours or so, the killer holed up in his den, safe from his vengeance.
Roux knew he was going to need to get his hands on every last shred of evidence the cops had gathered, assuming they’d gathered anything. Given the nature of the victims, he didn’t harbor high hopes. He had tricked his way into more than one police station before, and the various degrees of disinterest to ineptitude never ceased to amaze him when it came to tracking down what seemed bizarre or unusual.
Why should this time be any different?
Who out there was remotely prepared for the possibility of someone like Roux himself even existing? Let alone anything beyond that? The real monsters of the world? Not a prayer.
11
“Well, good morning, beautiful,” a voice said through the fog of her mind.
The light hurt as Annja opened her eyes.
She was lost.
This wasn’t the alleyway.
And she hurt. Everywhere. She had aches in places she didn’t know existed. She tried to move, but couldn’t. Not at first. A searing stab of pain lanced up under her shoulder blade, causing her face to twist in agony. It took a second or two for the pain to subside. When it finally did, she asked, “Where am I?”
“Hospital,” the voice said. “You’re not dead, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’m not Saint Peter come to check you off my list, to see if you’ve been naughty or nice.”
Garin.
He sat in the chair beside her with a brown paper bag resting in his lap. The brown skeletal stems were all that remained of the grapes as he popped the last one into his mouth.
“How…?” she started to ask, but then remembered the stars as she fell to the ground.
“To be honest, everyone here is hoping that you’ll be able to tell them. It seems that you were found sprawled on a pile of boxes in someone’s backyard. I assume you haven’t taken to sleeping on the street, but I will admit, I have absolutely no idea how you managed to get there, or how you managed to sustain your injuries. Looking at the state you’re in—there are some really tasty bruises on your back for a start—I’d say you had a lucky escape.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
“So, I’m thinking you fell from the roof, and yet managed miraculously to not break a single bone. The docs seem to think that it’s some kind of miracle. I just figure its par for the course with you.” He offered a wry smile.
“How did you know I was here?” Annja asked. She knew better than to try to ease herself up in the bed.
“Do you really need to ask?” Garin made a telephone out of his thumb and little finger and held it up to his ear. “I’d like to pretend I tracked you down through cunning and brainpower, triangulating the signal, pinpointing it off various cell towers, then calling in a favor with the local law enforcement, but when you didn’t come down for breakfast I tried your cell phone. The nurses did the rest. It’s almost as if fate’s playing a hand, isn’t it? I arrive, you suddenly need me.”
“I’m not sure I’d go so far as to blame fate. Stupidity, maybe, Czech plumbers, more like,” she said, but the pain in her head left her feeling pitiful. She’d screwed up big-time, but she was still in one piece, and to be honest she was glad he was there.
“So, are you going to tell me what you were doing up on that roof?” Garin asked, looking disappointedly down at the empty bag of grapes. He shrugged, crushed the bag and tossed it into the trash can beside the bed. “I take it you haven’t taken up parkour?”
Annja shook her head and regretted it an instant later.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to isolate the pain and push it away into some convenient nerveless quadrant of her body where she couldn’t feel it. It didn’t help in the slightest.
Her eyes were still closed when she sensed the presence of someone else standing at her bedside.
“Can you tell me where it hurts?” the voice asked. It was a woman’s voice, soft and tender and speaking in English.
“Everywhere,” Annja answered, not joking. She opened her eyes, needing one hand to shield them from the light.
“With good reason,” the nurse said. “The human body isn’t designed to bounce. It’s a fundamental flaw in the design process, if you ask me.”
“You speak English,” Annja said.
“Nope, you’re just suffering a really bad case of concussion,” Garin said.
The woman laughed.
“Don’t flirt with my doctor,” Annja grumbled, earning another laugh from the woman.
“They called me off another ward when they realized you were a tourist. Then your rather charming friend appeared.”
“He’s not charming. He’s a very bad man. You really don’t want to fall for it, believe me,” she replied, and that was the biggest understatement she could have offered.
“The handsome ones always are,” the doctor said.
“Hey, I am here, you know, and contrary to popular opinion, I do have feelings.”
The doctor offered Garin a lopsided grin, before she leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “So, he’s single?”
That earned a laugh from Annja.
“I’m serious. In this place, I don’t get to meet too many complications that look like he does.”
“Maybe I should leave?” Garin offered. “I’m beginning to feel like a side of beef in a butcher’s window.”
“That might be a good idea,” the doctor said.
“I’ll go and grab a coffee. I’ll just be down the corridor if you need me.”
“And if we don’t, you’ll still be just down the corridor, right?”
/>
“Right,” Garin said. “I’ll be back later. Don’t go anywhere without me.”
The doctor waited until Garin was out of earshot before saying anything else.
“You’ve got yourself a looker there.”
“Oh, I haven’t got him at all, and I’m not sure I’d want him.” Annja chuckled, correcting the doctor’s assumption. “You don’t want him, either, trust me. He’s much more trouble than he’s worth.”
“Ah, but he’s so pretty.” The doctor grinned. “I could make an exception for that pretty face.”
Annja laughed and wished that she hadn’t. The doctor offered her a small plastic cup with a couple of painkillers inside, and then handed her a glass of water. “They should help. I don’t want to give you anything stronger if we can avoid it.”
“Thanks,” Annja said as she threw the first of the pills back. The water on the back of her throat made her feel a little more alive. She offered the glass for a refill when she had drained it.
“Better?” the doctor asked when she’d taken the second pill. Annja put the empty glass on the nightstand.
“How long before I’m up and moving again?”
“You took quite a battering.”
“But nothing broken? No internal injuries?”
“You’re an incredibly lucky woman. You’re going to feel pretty sore for a few days, but apart from a few cuts and some pretty impressive bruises, you don’t appear to have done any lasting damage.”
“So I can leave?”
“I’d rather you didn’t, to be honest. But I’ve got to do my rounds. I’ll be back in an hour or so. If you can get yourself out of bed and make it to the bathroom and back before I do, we can talk about it. No guarantees, though.”
