Rogue Angel 53: Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

Radecki was disarmed, but not out of the fight. He reversed Annja’s grip on his wrist and caught hers instead, spinning her around and locking his other arm around her throat, pulling her back against his chest in the process.

  “I’m going to make you pay for that,” he said in her ear as he pulled his arm tighter, choking her.

  Annja’s lungs started to burn seconds after he grabbed hold of her. She was already exhausted from her fight with the guard, and she couldn’t take much more of this abuse. She needed to get out of his grip and she needed to do it quickly, or she’d be unconscious and completely at his mercy.

  She couldn’t pry his arm free, not with the way he had it locked up against his other one, so she didn’t even bother trying. Instead, she reached into the otherwhere, wrapped her hands around the hilt of her sword and dragged it into the real world.

  The blade flashed into existence, the hilt clasped tightly between her two hands, and Annja drove it backward, running the flat of the blade against the edge of her body as a guide, hoping to skewer her assailant where he stood.

  Fortunately for Radecki, Annja’s aim was a little off. The position of her body and the growing dimness in front of her eyes as the air was choked out of her caused the blade to shift to the left. Instead of running through the center of his gut, the blade simply slashed through the fatty tissue on the outside of his torso.

  It hurt—hurt a lot, no doubt—but it wasn’t fatal.

  The strike did accomplish her objective, though. Radecki loosened his chokehold, and that was enough to allow her to break his grip entirely.

  She spun away from him, bringing the sword up and around in a whistling arc, then slashing downward in the kind of blow designed to split a man in two.

  Except the man in question was no longer where he’d been a moment before. Radecki had dived to the right, and instead of cleaving him in half, her sword slashed into the hood of the vehicle with the shriek of tearing steel.

  Radecki turned his dive into a rolling somersault and came up on his feet, facing Annja. He was bleeding from the wound in his side, but it didn’t look bad enough to take him out, an observation he proved when he charged her as soon as he was back on his feet.

  Her sword was embedded in the SUV’s hood, and she tried to tug it free.

  It wouldn’t move.

  It was stuck, good and fast.

  Radecki had already closed half the distance between them. She had only seconds to act.

  Annja was about to order the sword to vanish, thereby freeing it from its metal trap, but decided against it. She had a better idea.

  As Radecki charged toward her, arms ready to grab her again, Annja waited until the very last second and then leaped up into the air, using the sword as a fulcrum to support her weight. At the top of her arc, she kicked outward with one foot.

  The toe of her boot struck Radecki right on the temple.

  He crashed into the front of the vehicle and went down without a sound as Annja landed.

  Radecki lay there on the floor of the garage, unmoving.

  Finish him now before he can do more harm.

  For a moment, Annja considered doing just that. She let go of the sword, and as she did it flashed out of existence and then popped back into her hand, ready to deliver the fatal blow.

  Radecki had helped kidnap and murder dozens of women. He had shown no remorse and would certainly continue doing so if Annja couldn’t stop him.

  In Annja’s view, Radecki certainly deserved to die for his actions.

  But Annja was not judge, jury and especially not executioner.

  As near as she could tell, she’d been called to bear the sword as a representative of justice, truth and righteousness. Killing Radecki—no, murdering him—would be a violation of all the sword and its original bearer stood for and of her own tacit agreement to continue that tradition.

  However much she might want to do so, killing him now while he lay defenseless would be wrong.

  She turned away, and in doing so caught sight of Owens frantically pushing the elevator call button while looking back at her with frightened eyes.

  Annja knew Owens would sound the alarm, but it would take time to coordinate a response. She intended to be long gone by that point.

  It was time to get out of here.

  She ran over to Csilla’s wheelchair, grabbed the handles and began pushing it as fast as it would go as she ran for the gate and the ramp to freedom that lay just beyond.

  Thirty feet...

  Twenty feet...

  Ten feet...

  Almost there.

  Something punched her hard in the leg, knocking her feet out from under her. She fell forward, unbalancing the wheelchair in the process and sending it crashing to the floor. Annja could only watch in dismay as Csilla toppled to the ground.

  After a moment, Annja was finally able to identify the sound echoing in her ears—a gunshot.

  33

  Radecki found his gun, Annja thought absently as she looked down at her leg in a semidaze. The outside of her thigh was bleeding freely, but she didn’t feel much pain.

  Then again, she couldn’t feel most of her leg.

  You’re in shock, a voice said in the back of her head. You’re in shock because you’ve been shot. That’s why you don’t feel anything.

  As fuzzy as her thinking was, she knew that if she’d been shot, someone must have done the shooting.

  Looking back, she saw Radecki leaning against one of the Suburbans, one hand holding the gun pointed in her direction and the other clamped over the bleeding wound in his side. She was wondering why he hadn’t just killed her with the first shot when he fired again.

  The shot went wide, the bullet hitting the concrete more than a yard to her right.

  It took her a moment to put two and two together; Radecki was shooting with his off hand!

  Thankfully he wasn’t that good with his left.

  Frustrated he tried again, but when that bullet, too, missed, he threw the gun away in disgust. Pulling something out of the inside pocket of his coat, he began walking purposefully in Annja’s direction, calling over his shoulder to Owens as he went.

  Annja clamped a hand over her own wound and tried to stand, only to collapse back on the floor, her leg too numb to support her weight.

  As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, a sudden rattling sound from close by caught her attention, and when she looked up in the direction of the ramp she discovered the source.

  The gate over the exit ramp was slowly descending!

  Another glance behind her showed Radecki walking inexorably closer and, over his shoulder, the figure of Owens standing near the gate controls, a triumphant smile on his face.

  It was the smile that did it.

  There was no way she was letting these two beat her. Not today, not ever.

  She could feel the blood trickling out between her fingers. It was going to get worse if she exerted herself, but staying here was not an option. She’d bleed to death if they didn’t kill her first. She had to get on the other side of that gate.

  Pushing herself up onto her hands and knees and letting her injured leg drag behind her, Annja began crawling forward.

  “She’s getting away!” Owens shrieked.

  Thank you, Captain Obvious, Annja thought. And damn right I am!

  Behind her, Radecki started a kind of limping run in an effort to catch her.

  Annja crawled past Csilla’s wheelchair, and the sight of it caused an ache to well up from her heart. She’d tried to help, and in the process she’d dragged the woman into even greater danger. Now she was abandoning Csilla where she lay. The fact that she had no choice, that if she didn’t get away she couldn’t help Csilla or any of the women back in that medical ward, didn’t help remove the sting and shame leaving her behind.

  She kept going anyway.

  The gate was less than a foot above the ground by the time she reached it.

  She knew if she hesitated, all would be lost, so she
went for it.

  Annja dropped to her stomach and crawled forward as fast as she could, doing her best not to think about either the homicidal maniac running up behind her or the steel gate lowering itself toward her unprotected body.

  Radecki was shouting at her, but Annja couldn’t understand what he was saying over the clank and clatter of the gate. Nor did she care. All of her attention was focused on getting clear of the several hundred pounds of steel descending toward her. She’d worry about Radecki later.

  She reached out with her arms, braced them against the floor and dragged herself forward until her head and shoulders cleared the gate.

  Clank.

  The gate dropped an inch.

  She did it again—reach, grab, drag—pulling her torso through.

  Clank.

  Another inch.

  The steel edge was less than four inches off the ground at this point. Annja’s heart was beating wildly, the pounding rhythm filling her ears.

  Hurry up!

  Clank.

  A mere three inches or so left.

  She bent her left leg, pulling it clear, but couldn’t do the same to her right thanks to the bullet wound in her thigh.

  Come on! One more time! she screamed at herself.

  Annja pulled and her leg slid forward beneath the gate’s edge just as it dropped the rest of the way to the floor...

  ...and caught the sole of her boot beneath it.

  Sensors built into the bottom of the gate kept her foot from being crushed as the machinery controlling it shut down the moment the gate encountered an obstruction.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that she was stuck.

  Annja reached back, grabbed her lower leg and, ignoring the pain, tried to tug her leg free.

  Nothing.

  Come on, you can do this.

  She braced her good leg against the gate, gritted her teeth and pulled on her other leg a second time.

  Still nothing.

  She was stuck hard and fast.

  Annja looked up and found Radecki standing on the other side of the gate. As she looked on he raised his hands and slowly, mockingly, began to clap.

  “A marvelous attempt,” he said with a grin. “Really top-notch.”

  Her reply was less than politic.

  Radecki grinned. “You had a good run. For a while there I thought you were even going to make it. But now it’s time to bring this little charade to an end.”

  He squatted down, reached under the edge of the gate with his hand and pressed the stun gun he was holding against the back of her trapped leg.

  Five hundred thousand volts of electricity surged through her body, making it shiver and shake against the floor of the garage. The last thing Annja saw before she descended into unconsciousness was Radecki’s face, grinning at her.

  34

  Annja regained consciousness slowly, as if drifting up from the depths of a deep sleep. Her thoughts were fuzzy, incomplete, and more than once the waves washed over her and dragged her down again for a time. In her more coherent moments she had the sensation of movement and would occasionally hear people talking over or around her, but she couldn’t make out what was being said. Each time, she was washed back beneath the tide and lost track of her surroundings again. Gradually the real world intruded, and at last she found herself back where she belonged.

  Back in the real world.

  She was unsurprised to find herself being carried along between two men, their hands gripping her under the arms and lifting her partially off the ground while her legs dragged along behind her.

  What was surprising, on the other hand, was her discovery that she couldn’t move her head.

  It was like having a disconnect somewhere between her brain and her muscles; the latter were being told what to do but they weren’t listening to the commands her brain was giving or they were unable to carry out the task.

  And it wasn’t just her head.

  The same held true for her arms.

  And her legs.

  And her hands and feet.

  She couldn’t move at all—not even a twitch of a finger!

  Annja would have groaned aloud at the discovery, except she couldn’t move her mouth.

  Thoughts of all the terrible things they might have done to her to cause this condition ran unbidden through her head, and she could feel panic starting to well up from somewhere deep inside her. She knew that if she let it out she might not be able to get it under control.

  Calm down, she told herself, calm down. Temporary paralysis was one of the side effects of sustaining a heavy electrical shock. Your control will come back; you just have to wait it out.

  In the meantime, she could gather information about where she was and figure a way out of this mess.

  Her paralysis wasn’t the only difficulty she was experiencing. Her head was pounding and she was having trouble organizing her thoughts. Her mouth was full of the taste of burned metal and she felt as though she’d been drugged, but these were all symptoms of electrical shock, as well. Like the paralysis, they would disappear with time.

  Look on the bright side, she told herself. At least she could still see and hear.

  It might have been a more rewarding observation if she could see something beyond the floor beneath their feet.

  And yet, on second thought, that might be helpful after all, she realized. Gone was the institutional tiled floor that she’d seen after escaping her cell. In its place were flagstones held together by some kind of mortar, and the crumbling nature of both made it clear that wherever they were, the place had to be at least several hundred years old.

  She’d been moved. That was clear.

  But to where?

  They could be anywhere, but something told Annja they hadn’t gone far. The women’s disappearances had all happened in one general area, in and around Nové Mesto, which suggested that Stone had wanted to be near the source of her prion supply. And while there were literally dozens of medieval ruins in that area, only one had any real relevance to the situation.

  Only one that Annja had spent hours wandering around, so that the look and feel of the place had settled into her bones.

  She recognized it now.

  Csejte Castle.

  With her head hanging down and her hair falling over her face, her captors probably didn’t know she was conscious, a fact that was borne out just moments later when her two captors started talking.

  “What are we doing here?”

  The voice came from the man on her left. It took her a few seconds, but she recognized it as belonging to Owens.

  “We’re taking care of a problem. Something that should have been done the minute she stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.”

  There was no mistaking the voice of the man on her right.

  Radecki.

  Owens apparently didn’t like the sound of that. “You brought me in to supervise the lab. I’m not some hired killer.”

  Radecki laughed. “No? Then you’re an even bigger fool than I thought. A hired killer is exactly what you are. Or did you think all those women survived the things you’ve been doing to them?”

  “That’s different!” Owens answered hotly. “What I’ve done has been in the name of science! This is...cold-blooded murder!”

  Radecki came to a sudden halt, causing Annja’s head to jerk about as Owens took another step. She instinctively tightened her neck muscles to avoid injury and was stunned when she felt them respond.

  “I don’t care what you call it,” Radecki said in a deceptively calm voice. “You will do as you’re told or I’ll hook you up to one of your own machines and let it suck you drier than the Gobi Desert. Understood?”

  Owens was smart enough to realize he’d gone too far. “Understood,” he said, without complaint this time.

  They started walking again, dragging Annja along, and she used the cover of the movement to test her body’s responses. It seemed the numbness was slowly going away. She
could move her mouth and facial muscles now, as well as her neck.

  It must have been the stun gun, she thought. Now the effects were wearing off and she was starting to regain some control.

  The question was whether she’d get back enough control in time to get her out of this mess.

  As they dragged her along the passageway, Annja focused all her attention on the fingers of her left hand.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, turning her head slightly so she could see her fingers as she directed her thoughts at them, willing them to bend, just a little bit.

  They didn’t respond.

  Her hands were still as good as dead.

  It’s okay. You’ll get there. Just gonna take some time.

  But she didn’t have time to spare.

  Owens and Radecki dragged her around corners, along several passageways and down a flight of stairs. They had to stop several times along the way to give Radecki a chance to rest; the wound in his abdomen was obviously making it difficult. They continued down another hallway until they reached the end, at which point they entered a room.

  Annja recognized it right away, and she felt her heart rate accelerate as she considered what Radecki intended for her. Based on where they were standing, she knew it wasn’t going to be good.

  A large sunken tub sat in the center of the room and took up most of the space, leaving a two-foot walkway surrounding it on all sides. At the far end of the tub, a metal support structure shaped like an inverted Y rose from the edge, standing stark and alone in the beam of their flashlights.

  “What is that?” Owens asked.

  Annja didn’t need to wait for Radecki’s answer to know she was looking at the iron framework from which Elizabeth Báthory had allegedly hung her victims while their blood drained out of them into the bath below.

  Seeing it confirmed Annja’s suspicions that they were at Csejte Castle.

  It also told her in no uncertain terms that she was in serious trouble.

  “Over here,” Radecki said, and led the way around the side of the tub to the base of the Y. When they reached it, he said, “Put her down and help me with this.”

  Annja was left lying on her back. Her head lolled to one side, pointed away from where the two men were working. She was literally in the dark, as they took their flashlights with them.