Curse of the Painted Lady (The Anlon Cully Chronicles Book 3)

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “Uh…”

  He pointed the gun toward the tub. “Undress and in you go.”

  Pebbles backed up a step and propped her thigh against the sink. “I’d rather not.”

  “Do it, or I’ll do it for you.”

  She looked past him to the bedroom. She could see the door leading outside, but to reach it she would have to navigate around the beds or climb over them. Even if she managed to push past him, she wouldn’t reach the door before he shot her again.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said, wagging the gun.

  Pebbles tried another tack. She twisted the sink spigot and reached for a folded washcloth on the shelf between the mirror and sink. “I can clean up here.”

  With her head turned, Pebbles didn’t see the snarl on his face, nor his boot-covered foot shoot forward. The blow struck her injured calf and down she went, her head knocking against the sink as she crumpled to the floor. While she writhed on the floor with her hands wrapped around her calf, she felt a hand tug down the waistband of her leggings. Pebbles cried out, “Stop! I’ll do it myself!”

  He let go and stood over her. Pebbles raised herself into a seated position, propping her back against the tub. Raising her knees up, she leaned her elbows against them and crossed her forearms. She bowed her head, took a deep breath and began to disrobe. After guiding her leggings the rest of the way off, she reached for the bottom hem of her blood-covered sweater. She froze for a second. Malinyah’s medallion was gone! Darting a frantic look up at her captor, she said, “Where is it? Where’s my necklace?”

  “Keep going,” he said, nudging her bare thigh with his foot.

  After stepping into the shower, Pebbles kept her back turned to him as she lathered and rinsed her hair and body, but there was no way to prevent providing her smug captor with a peep show when she tended to her legs and feet. She tried to ignore his invading gaze while she appraised her injuries. The sight of the swollen, discolored holes in her calf made her nauseous, but she managed to hold down her fast-food dinner. She couldn’t see the bruises on her back from his kicks, but her soapy fingers could feel the tenderness along her rib cage. The lump on the side of her head was prodigious, as was the cut bisecting it. The hot water stung everywhere Pebbles had an abrasion or cut, and while it also soothed her weary muscles, it did little to calm her mind. What had happened to Malinyah’s necklace? Pebbles tried to recall the last time she was aware of its presence around her neck, but she drew a blank. Had it fallen off at Anlon’s or had her captor taken it?

  Pebbles was so lost in thought, she didn’t notice her captor had turned the shower off until he nudged her arm with a bath towel. Pebbles wrapped it around her body, tucking a corner under her arm, and stepped out of the tub. Holding one hand against the wall for balance, she grabbed another towel from the rack above the toilet and limped out of the bathroom. After returning to the bed, she used the second towel to dry her hair and face, then her legs and feet. As she raised up, the towel around her torso came loose and landed around her waist. She quickly pulled it up, aware that he was standing by her side, peering down at her. Before she could re-anchor the towel, he reached down and snatched it off.

  “What are you doing?” she spat, turning to shield her body from his view. “Give me the towel.”

  “Lie down so I can put a fresh bandage on your leg.”

  “Give me the towel.”

  “Lie down.”

  Pebbles reached for a bed pillow, clamped it between her arms and hunched forward. He grabbed her by the hair and shoved her face against the mattress. She tried to squirm free but he jabbed the muzzle of the gun against her bruised ribs.

  “Be still!” he growled as he jabbed her a second time. She yelped and pulled away. He hopped on the bed and straddled her, pushing her face deeper into the mattress. “Be still, damn it!”

  The command was delivered with a livid tone — the same harsh edge that spewed from him during the attack in Tahoe. Pebbles went limp. As much as she wanted to struggle, she didn’t want to risk another full-scale beating. She held up her hands to signal her surrender. He jabbed her with the gun once more, then pulled her hands behind her back. After ordering her to stay put, he crawled off her and left the bed. Pebbles turned her head from the pillow and panted to regain her breath.

  When he returned, he roughly retied her wrists. Afterward, he patted her calf and applied a fresh bandage. A moment later, he slid the blindfold into place and retied her legs at the ankles. There was a pause and then Pebbles felt his hand stroking her body. A flash of anger welled inside her. “Get your hands off me!”

  She heard the arrogant bastard snort, seemingly amused by her outburst. His hand slid toward her pelvis. Pebbles rolled away to prevent his hand traveling further south. He grabbed her by the jaw and pried her mouth open. After stuffing the rag back in her mouth, he resumed exploring her curves, this time with both hands. Pebbles protested and squirmed, but restrained as she was, there was little she could do to prevent his invasive probing. His touches grew progressively intimate, despite Pebbles’ angry grunts.

  Chapter 9 – Narrow Escapes

  Lake George, New York

  September 27

  By the time the new helicopters arrived on scene, Aja was already halfway across the thin sliver of the lake between Coates Point and Black Point. She quietly surfaced from beneath the water and turned to look back at the roaring blaze she left behind. As she treaded in place, she scanned the lake in every direction. No searchlights were trained on the water, and she heard no motorboats in the area. Confident her underwater escape had gone undetected, Aja turned her gaze to the eastern shore. There were lights on in several of the houses dotting the Black Point peninsula, and she could see a gaggle of onlookers huddled in one yard, peering across the water at the bonfire. As far as she could tell, however, there were no police among them.

  She took a deep breath and disappeared beneath the icy water. Turning her back to Black Point once again, she raised the bowl-shaped Breylofte to her lips and hummed against its underside. The sound waves emanating from the bowl pushed against the water and propelled her closer to Black Point. On the lake’s surface, a barely perceptible wake marked her progress.

  When she neared the rocky shore, Aja surfaced again and looked for a dark place to come on land. Numb from the frigid lake temperature, she nearly dropped the Breylofte as she tried to slide it into her backpack. With shaking hands, she held the backpack above the water and kicked her legs to swim the last stretch of open water.

  An hour and two more dead bodies later, Aja motored down Route 22 in the stolen vehicle belonging to the murdered couple whose home Aja invaded after coming ashore. Her soaked backpack sat on the floor of the passenger seat. On the seat itself was a Tuliskaera and Naetir, ready to be engaged at a moment’s notice.

  Aja shivered from head to toe. Despite a quick change into dry clothes she had purloined from the dead couple’s home, her body temperature was still well below normal — a circumstance made worse by the night air pouring through the car’s open windows. She briefly considered closing the windows but decided it was more immediately important to detect approaching helicopters or sirens than it was to be warm. She turned the car’s heat up to its highest setting and activated the heated driver’s seat. If that didn’t help, she could use the two flannel blankets she had snatched from the home as well.

  The farther she drove without signs of police pursuit, the more Aja relaxed. In so doing, her thoughts began to shift from escape and survival to planning her next steps. The first order of business was to find another car before she traveled much farther. She had to count on the discovery of the dead couple by sunrise, and that meant more police would be on her tail. Aja was still mystified how the Ticonderoga police found her at the Lake George rental home, but she guessed it had to do with the car she’d nicked from the ferry. There must have been a surveillance camera I didn’t notice, Aja thought.

  It was another sobering reminder
of how fast the pace of technology continued to change in the modern world, a pace that Aja still struggled to cope with. For thousands of years, she had dominated her surroundings and the people within them. Armed with the Munuorian Tyls and her ability to take over new bodies, she had always been able to stay one step ahead of rivals and enemies. Although her name had changed many times over the millennia, the result had always been the same — she conquered and ruled.

  But since reawakening after a thousand-year exile in stone, Aja discovered her ability to control people and her environment had diminished. Gensae was now rare among Terra’s population — too rare. And the mindset of humans had drastically changed after the passing asteroid, Munirvo. This, Aja had seen even before her exile…

  Before the asteroid reset the development of mankind, people had relied on the natural world around them. Pre-Munirvo, the planet had spun around on a balanced axis. This had produced milder seasonal changes and more arable land. As a result, plant-based food was more abundant, and animal and sea life thrived to an extent unimaginable today. This had meant less conflict among peoples. With bountiful resources, wars over territory or natural resources were virtually nonexistent. It was a tranquil world, one in which human senses were more in tune with the planet’s rhythms, an age of harmony between nature and mankind that was then ravaged by a cyclical extraterrestrial flyby.

  Yet, by the time Aja had been forced to store her mind on her Sinethal, the human race had regained much of its footing, even though they lived in a harsher world. The asteroid close encounter that flipped the planet upside down had left Earth with a wobbling tilt, and that tilt had produced more pronounced swings in climate. This had made it harder for survivors to find shelter, plant crops and hunt animals, leading to a world where competition for land and resources dominated the thoughts and actions of humans. War became common, and the concept of survival of the fittest rose to supremacy.

  Humans learned one other important lesson from Munirvo, Aja had observed. They no longer believed in harmony with nature. Instead, they embraced conquer over nature. And, honestly, Aja couldn’t blame them. Munirvo and its aftereffects had been so horrendous, no survivor could look upon Terra as the stable, nurturing environment it had once been. Instead, human existence for thousands of years after the asteroid’s passing had morphed into a constant struggle to overcome the unforgiving world Terra had become. And humans had carried those memories with them from generation to generation, each new generation building upon the progress of those before them, with one goal in mind — to conquer the untamable planet.

  By the time Aja had fled the invading Tikal army in an ill-fated attempt to escape across the Atlantic, war had become so endemic that nearly all societies had become warrior cultures. None more so than the fractious Mayans she had once ruled from her seat in Naranjo. In that age, brute force had been the primary method of acquiring resources and territory. Hence the reason, Aja, with the aid of her technologically advanced Tyls, had risen to power after taking the body of the young bride pledged to the prince of Naranjo. In that body, she had unleashed her weapons and ruthless temperament on the surrounding Mayan cities and became the mighty warrior princess, Wak Chanil Ajaw.

  But during her long sleep, technology had leapt to the forefront as the dominant way to acquire resources and control populations. And since reawakening, Aja had seen her fellow humans make technological advancements with dizzying speed, a speed that had seemed to accelerate over the past one hundred years. In this new world, she had struggled to regain her former glory. Aja, in the early days of her rebirth, had quickly discovered that when she wielded her Tyls, people did not revere her as a goddess to be feared and worshiped. Instead, she had been treated as a pariah. A witch. A criminal. A freak. So, Aja had been forced to adapt, to use the Tyls more selectively and bide her time as she searched for a relic that would help her revolutionize the technology forged into a new generation of Tyls. It was a task that had twice been sabotaged by the treacherous Evelyn Warwick, and once before her by the naïve Malinyah.

  As Aja drove onward, she glanced at the car’s digital clock and smiled. Midnight had come, and that meant she was one step closer to her long-awaited dream. She had reacquired one of the three Sinethals taken by Evelyn, and by the end of the new day she might be reunited with the remaining two, plus the relic that had eluded her for more than ten thousand years. Then, she would reawake Omereau, and the world would never be the same.

  Ticonderoga, New York

  September 28

  Jennifer stood at the bathroom sink and stared at her reflection in the mirror. The person looking back was unrecognizable. The right side of the reflection’s face was bruised and puffy, the eye swollen shut. Across her forehead, adhesive tape held a bandage atop a stitched gash. Wrapped around her neck was a padded brace. Another bandage covered abrasions on her chin.

  She was afraid to lift the hospital gown to see the bruises underneath, and even if she wanted to, it would have been a painful exercise. Though her ribs were not broken, her chest felt as if it had been pounded mercilessly by a baseball bat. And, at the moment, she could not move her neck from side to side.

  When the doctors authorized the move from ICU to the general hospital ward, they had told her she had avoided damage to her vertebrae, but her neck muscles were inflamed enough that they advocated restricting the mobility of her head. She also had a honking headache, a lingering effect of the concussion that had landed her in the ICU in the first place.

  From outside the bathroom, Jennifer heard Nurse LeShana call to her. “Are you all right, sugar? Do you need any help?”

  “I’m fine,” mumbled Jennifer, her speech impaired by the painkiller dripping through the IV inserted in her hand and the muscle relaxant she had somehow managed to swallow. She slowly shuffled her feet to turn away from the sink. With one hand, she guided the wheeled rack holding the intravenous solutions toward the bathroom door, while she used the other hand to help balance her stilted steps. “Coming out now.”

  Nurse LeShana opened the door for Jennifer and helped her back into the hospital bed. She adjusted the incline of the bed so Jennifer was half sitting, half lying. The nurse propped pillows behind her back and neck and layered the bed’s sheet and blanket over her legs. When all was set, she offered Jennifer water. While Jennifer sipped through a straw, LeShana asked, “Are you sure you’re up for this? I can have the doctor tell them to come back later.”

  “No, I’m fine. Let them in,” she said.

  “Okay, sugar,” LeShana said. “If you need me, just press the red button.”

  Jennifer thanked her and waited for LeShana to escort the police entourage into the room. As much as she rued the coming interrogation, she was desperate to know what had happened after crashing the BearCat. From the insistent police requests to “interview” Jennifer as soon as possible, she assumed Muran had escaped.

  The door opened and LeShana ushered in Dan Nickerson, Captain Bennett and Detective Hall from the Vermont State Police, as well as New York troopers Jack Sterns and Superintendent Dunsmore. An Asian woman who was with them tersely introduced herself as FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Li.

  Before LeShana left the room, she told the officers that Jennifer couldn’t move her head much, so it was best if they stood at the foot of the bed instead of spreading out around the room. On her way out, she turned one last time to remind Jennifer to press the button if she needed anything.

  When the door closed, Nickerson was the first to speak. “Hey, Jen. How are you feeling?”

  Jennifer raised a hand and waggled it. “I feel like I look.”

  “Yeah, I imagine so,” he said with a soft smile.

  “Good to see you. Thanks for coming,” she said.

  “No problem. Wanted to make sure you were okay,” Nickerson said.

  Jennifer smiled at him and then turned to Jack and said, “Sorry about the truck.”

  “Nah, truck’s okay. It’d take a lot more than a tree to knock it ou
t of service. I’m just glad you made it out when you did.”

  “Please tell me Team Delta made it out, too,” Jennifer said.

  Jack lowered his head and sighed. “Unfortunately, Muran got them. She must have doubled back between our lines.”

  Agent Li interrupted the conversation. “I’m sorry. We don’t have a lot of time to chitchat. We need some answers from you, and we need them fast. We have a dangerous fugitive on our hands.”

  “Understood,” Jennifer said.

  Agent Li forged ahead. “Major Sterns and Captain Bennett say you know the woman who robbed the bank by the name Muran, but they say you were evasive when they asked for details about her. We need you to be totally candid about everything you know about her. Right now.”

  Captain Bennett, adopting a less antagonistic approach, said, “Jennifer, she killed twelve officers and two civilians last night. Not to mention torching an entire neighborhood. That’s on top of Carla Bailey’s murder, the officers she killed during the fiasco in Middlebury and possibly Anabel Simpson. We need full disclosure from you.”

  “I understand, Captain. I want her caught, too,” Jennifer said.

  “How well did you know her?” Agent Li asked.

  “I don’t know her. Never met her, never seen her until the video yesterday.”

  “Then how did you know the person on the video was Muran?” Li asked.

  “The weapon she used, the Dreylaeks.”

  “Ah, yes. The little cookie stones,” Li said, with a mocking tone. She held up an evidence bag with the Stones taken from Jennifer’s jeans pockets. “I saw your demonstration in Ticonderoga. Impressive little weapon. Compact, portable, lethal. Did you get them from her? From Muran?”

  Jennifer frowned. “No.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. Where did you get your ‘dray-locks’?”

  “Um, Nicaragua. At an archaeological dig site.”