by Alex Archer
Releasing the sword back to the otherwhere, she could still feel the lingering warmth of the hilt.
Santos was quickly growing weaker. If the man lived, he could talk to the police.
She raced to the Jeep where Doug, still in the backseat and strangely shirtless, leaned over the front seat tending Luke. Frantic, he looked to her, then to Luke, and shook his head.
“What is it? Is he hurt?” she asked as she arrived at the driver’s side. Blood covered Doug’s hands, and he fumbled with the T-shirt he’d removed to press against the side of Luke’s neck.
“He took a bullet to the neck right before we swerved to a stop. He’s bleeding a lot. I don’t think he’s dead. Hell, Annja, this is not happening!”
“He’s not going to die.”
She didn’t know that. She had no idea how bad the wound was. If it had skimmed the carotid, or merely opened flesh and abraded the skin like Doug’s wolf bite.
“Help me get him onto the passenger seat. I remember seeing a hospital in Liberec not far from the train station. I’m going to get Luke some medical care, then see you off to the States.”
“Is that guy back on the road dead?”
Annja climbed behind the wheel and shifted into gear. “Not yet.”
* * *
THE HOT AFTERNOON sun boiled in the bubbling wound on Santos’s leg. He was growing dizzy and his mouth was dry, yet sticky. He knew he had to get to a hospital, and fast. The sword cut was deep and the blood flow had slowed. Or maybe it hadn’t.
He blinked. The bright sun flashed in his eyes and made it difficult to see anything.
The driver, a friend for over a decade, must be dead. He hadn’t moved or come to help Santos.
Annja Creed was some kind of crazy. The operation should have gone smoothly, the Gypsies in his encampment seeing the American woman had lifted a horrible curse from the ground, and causing them to believe it had come to fruition when their children started to disappear.
They did believe that.
Mamma didn’t, though. She’d spoken to Annja Creed and it was as though the two had known, had seen beyond the lies to the truth. Mamma had cursed at him for whatever he was involved in and told him he had to make amends to the families for their missing children. She hadn’t known he was behind Tomas’s disappearance, but she felt he’d been a part of it somehow.
But shame no longer affected Santos. The only emotion he still felt was anger. After losing Mica two years ago, he had nothing left to care about. His child hadn’t been stolen by a fictional creature or an evil man. Mica had died two days after Santos’s wife had given birth to him. Laura had died the moment Mica had taken his first breath.
Santos had lost so much. There was nothing left to give.
Somewhere close a tinny buzz vibrated against his hip. Santos spat blood and moaned. He had his phone! He could call for help. And luck upon luck, someone was making it easier by calling him.
He flipped open the phone and, gasping for breath, muttered, “Help me.”
“Santos? What is your status?”
“Dying,” he said, realizing the voice on the other end belonged to his boss. And that meant he’d get no mercy and no help from him.
“Hell,” Bracks said. “What went wrong?”
“The woman...she is smart.”
“Annja Creed? The same woman who challenged me in the hotel room, and who then followed my men to the cottage out of Liberec? You said she was an archaeologist.”
“She fights like a man and carries a big sword.”
“Is that so? Interesting.”
“And she knows things. Has it figured out...”
Though Santos himself wasn’t clear on the real reasons behind Bracks wanting the children. That Tomas had returned home with stitches had shocked him. He’d thought the kid would never be seen again.
He gasped and choked on the blood that fountained up his throat. If his driver were only still alive, he could get to a hospital.
“I’m ten miles out of...Chrastava...south...”
The phone clicked off, and Santos tasted metal on his tongue. The wicked sun blurred bright orange spots in his vision. Sweat dripped into his ears and down his neck.
He laid his head on the rough gravel and reached for the sword his father had given him. His father had stolen it from a man who had once threatened to kill him with it. One should never threaten a Gypsy without following through because that threat will come back to haunt you. They protected their own.
Santos had not protected his own. Didn’t matter. Mica was all that had mattered to him.
Whether or not death took him today, he would return to haunt the American woman.
Dragging himself across the gravel, he cried out at the pain in his leg. In the distance, he heard a man’s shout.
* * *
“CLOSE UP THE operation in the Czech Republic. Damn it!” Bracks stubbed out his cigar and waited for his assistant to leave the room. Wayne Pearce was on the phone, currently driving through France. The man was sightseeing when he should be back in London. “And send someone out to clean up the debris. What a wasted effort that was.”
He settled into the easy chair behind a massive mahogany desk and put up his feet on the open drawer. He’d jumped at the opportunity to use the discovery of the skull as cover for his operations.
In Egypt he’d used a mummy’s curse to obtain gold relics and scarab jewelry from a relatively insignificant tomb. He still carried one of the gold beetles with him because the weight of it in his pocket reminded him of his clever foray.
In Italy he’d manipulated the rumor of a serial killer, and had gotten out with half a dozen children without raising suspicion.
Only three children from Chrastava.
Yet the demand didn’t cease. It was a profitable venture but the supply could never meet the demand, and coming up with covers was making it not worth the effort. Almost. He wasn’t one to abandon business ventures until they’d been proven profitless. Up to fifty thousand per child, sometimes more, was nothing to sneeze at.
But he had a problem. Annja Creed.
Who the hell was she? That he had connected her to Garin Braden added a new and interesting twist to the game. He did love to toy with Braden. The diamond caper a few years ago in Abu Dhabi had been a marvelous snatch. And Braden had followed up with an elegant yet subtle twist of the blade into Bracks’s Japanese uranium securities.
Garin Braden was a fine opponent, a match to Bracks’s ingenuity and criminal daring. And the man was strong, another thing Bracks appreciated. He kept fit by boxing and practicing mixed martial arts every other day. Proper nutrition and meditation kept his mind and body at peak performance. The only one he’d found with the mettle to stand against him was Garin Braden.
Was the female archaeologist involved with Braden? He’d already stolen a girl from Garin once.
Annja Creed was a looker. And if she had taken out Santos, then he wanted to meet her, alone, and get to know what made her tick. Garin wouldn’t appreciate it if Bracks tortured that knowledge out of her.
He smirked.
He did admire bruises on female flesh.
Chapter 16
The small clinic in Liberec was open when Annja drove up. Together, she and Doug helped Luke inside. He drowsily muttered, “You’re so beautiful,” as she helped him from the car and had given her a smile.
Leaving him in the exam room with a nervous nurse and an elderly doctor who yawned after every sentence, Annja paced in the waiting room painted a sterile 1970s shade of lime green while Doug ransacked a vending machine across the street in front of a combination pool hall/Laundromat/massage parlor.
She checked with the receptionist. “Do you have the number for the police?” she asked, and when given it, she punched it into her cell phone. “Thanks.”
Stepping outside the front doors of the hospital, she dialed the Chrastava police and left an anonymous tip that two children had gone missing from the Roma camp outside t
he city and that an adult male was bleeding out from a gunshot wound on the other side of the forest from the camp.
She could hear the dispatcher placing a call for an ambulance and a police escort for the wounded, then asked her name, which Annja skirted by going into a description of the man.
“The Romani are frightened,” she said. “They need help.”
“Our officers will speak with them, Miss...?”
Annja hung up. She’d have to get rid of this mobile phone. But first...
Garin Braden answered after five rings. “What do you want, Annja?”
“Now you’re answering my calls?”
“I’m in no mood.”
“Again with the mood. Fine. There’s only one thing that could possibly give me reason to call you. What did you learn tracking the cooler? Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Is that an ‘I’m still tracking Bracks and haven’t been able to get close to him’ nothing, or a ‘she doesn’t need to know all of my business’ nothing?”
“Figure it out for yourself.”
She stared at the cell phone for a moment. He was particularly abrasive and she suspected the man had done a one-eighty regarding helping her. On the other hand, she didn’t recall him ever agreeing to help her.
Garin Braden never did stand on the side of anyone but himself. She knew that, and expected as much. But the few times they had worked together he had genuinely helped her and she had accidentally expected as much this time.
“What was in the cooler?” she asked.
“What makes you think I looked?”
“Was it blood or a body part?”
“Annja.”
“You’re involved in this,” she stated, angry that he was keeping a tight lid on this when anything they learned could help innocent children. “That’s why you don’t want me breathing over your shoulder. And when I learn the connection between you and Bracks, I’m bringing you down, too.”
“When making a threat, Annja, I suggest you’ve the moxie to back it up.”
“You know I do.”
“Not today you don’t.” The phone clicked off.
With a curse, Annja shoved the phone in a pocket on the thigh of her cargo pants. Garin and Bracks? She didn’t even want to start doing that math.
She stormed back inside the hospital to continue pacing.
As soon as Luke was finished here, she should head back to the States and leave whatever it was going on with the Romani children to the police. She would put Doug on a train. Luke could finish up at the dig site. And the Roma could handle their own troubles, superstitions be damned.
Only, it didn’t work that way in Annja Creed’s world. She’d been embroiled in this situation for a reason. The sword always led her to trouble, and she always followed it.
Children had gone missing. No one was protecting them. And her heart squeezed inside her chest for what they were going through. She knew she could make it all stop if she found Garin Braden. Because wherever he was, she felt sure Bracks would be close.
Doug entered the waiting room with a handful of potato chip bags and chocolate bars. He tossed her a protein bar.
“Figured you’d like that one.”
“Thanks, Doug.” She dropped onto the hard plastic waiting room chair that wobbled thanks to two missing rubber pads that should have tipped the steel legs. “You get a train out?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, crunching loudly on the chips. “You sure you’re going to be safe here? Alone?”
“I’ve got Luke.”
“Dude’s getting a bullet wound patched up, Annja.”
“And still standing, so that puts him in the capable category. Don’t worry, Doug. I never unnecessarily put myself in harm’s way.”
Her producer paused midbite, eyebrows lifted.
“I can handle it,” she insisted. “But what I’m about to handle isn’t fodder for the television show.”
“I agree. Whatever is going on out at that dig site and in the Gypsy encampment has gone beyond mythical monsters.” He crunched a few more chips, then fell silent and became very still. “Do you think the monsters are human, Annja?”
“I do think that. And I’ve called the police about Santos. Hopefully they’ll get out there and pick him up before he bleeds out. I want to make sure the plight of the Roma children gets some attention.”
“If Santos was behind it,” Doug spoke slowly, working things out as he went, “that means he betrayed his own people.”
“He didn’t seem like a very upstanding man to begin with.”
“No, but his mother was nice. In an eerie, Gypsy, read-your-mind kind of way.”
“I think she knew her son was up to no good, but didn’t have a clue how horrible it could be. I still don’t know the facts.”
At that moment Luke wandered into the waiting room. His eyelids were drooping heavily and his smile wavered. “Painkillers,” he mumbled. “They’ve signed me out—payment’s all taken care of. And you are still one gorgeous woman.”
“Let’s get you back to the hotel,” Doug said, catching the man’s arm over his shoulder and leading him outside to the rental. “Unless you want the gorgeous woman to help you?”
“Just get him in the car,” Annja said.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING Luke took a phone call from a colleague in England while Annja excused herself to have a shower. She and Doug had slept on the floor last night after Luke had literally sprawled across the entire bed.
Doug had left for the train station an hour ago. He’d emailed himself the footage he’d filmed on Luke’s iPad, but didn’t erase it, so Annja intended to scan it as soon as she dried off. Shrugging the towel over her body, she rubbed her hair, then combed it out, tugged on her underclothes and a T-shirt, then wrapped the towel around her waist and returned to the main room.
“The university upset about the fire at the site?” she asked while shuffling through her backpack.
A reasonably clean pair of black cargos were made less dusty with a smart snap. She pulled them up under the towel while Luke watched from his position as he leaned over the table. The Welshman didn’t take his eyes from her.
Sliding onto the bed and leaning on one elbow she gestured to Luke’s work on the table in front of him. The skull was still wrapped in the plastic beside the microscope.
“Luke?”
“Uh, sorry.” He exhaled and riffled a hand through his hair. “Really sorry.”
He exhaled again, and this time made a show of sorting the few items on the table before him: iPad, tweezers, lab slides. But before launching into what she hoped was an answer to her question about the fire, the man tilted his head and winced. “They weren’t pleased, but also understand that these sort of things are hazards of the profession. I’m to report back to work next Monday.”
That cut their time much shorter than she’d thought. “You mentioned the blessing in the car. What was that about?”
“Yes, the, uh, scribblings on the paper are actually Romani. Chester Rumshaven, a colleague of mine, interpreted it as ‘may the sun always shine.’ A blessing, he believes.”
“Appropriate for one who would fear a vampire coming after them. But the vampire legend hasn’t always embraced the not being able to walk in daylight trope, has it?”
“Exactly, so it’s baffling. Makes it difficult to date the skull preceding the twentieth century, that’s for sure. This adds fuel to the idea that it’s rather new.” He tapped the paper with the tip of a fine set of tweezers. “Perhaps five or six decades? Or who knows? It could have been planted a year ago before the floods. I’ve no means to test the paper for aging methods, and we have no proof the brick was originally placed in the skull’s mouth. The flooding moved the soil around the bones and completely destroyed the original placement.”
“A plant? Someone might have engineered the whole thing? What better way to deflect suspicion from the real monsters than by tossing some false monsters int
o the mix,” she decided. “The Roma’s beliefs are so strong they would first believe in the mullo, especially if encouraged by someone they trust, like Santos. But we dug that out of the dirt. It was embedded. I’ve dug up pots that have been put in the ground to look like artifacts. A person can usually determine a plant from the real thing.”
“I agree. Though with the flooding and all the movement in the earth, well—”
“Santos knows. He has to. I shouldn’t have left him out there on the road. I need to question him further. I wonder if the police reached him in time to save his life. If Garin would have only been more forthcoming...”
Luke turned on the chair and propped an elbow on the back of it, leaning toward her.
“What’s our next move?”
“I’m going to find Garin. I think he’ll lead me to the man behind the kidnappings. The skull was a diversion. The real danger is in Bracks.”
“So...this is where my job ends,” Luke said, then hesitated. “I’m not sure how I can help you with your friend Garin. I’m an archaeologist. You, on the other hand, are something I’m not sure how to define.”
“I’m an archaeologist who occasionally hosts a TV show about monsters.”
“Yes, but you’re so much more, Annja. So much more.”
She shrugged, not so much uncomfortable with his admiration as unsure. “The trail’s growing cold.”
“Then you should get to it.” Luke reluctantly turned back to his work. “Or―” he looked over his shoulder at her “―I could call the university and get a reprieve. Come with you...?”
Annja slid off the bed and walked over to Luke.
After all, the morning was still young.
Chapter 17
“In the 1950s the government forced sterilization on the Romani camps. It was a horrible thing. Women would go to their local clinics for a free checkup and come home unable to conceive. Very sad,” Luke said as they traveled west in Annja’s rental car toward Liberec.
