The woman had felt it strongly when she passed, just as she did each time any Orphist died. She couldn’t have known it was her daughter, of course, not for certain, but there was a different pang at the moment of this passing, something she hadn’t felt in almost three hundred years: sadness.
The feeling ebbed a bit, but lingered for over a year before her suspicions were confirmed.
She had been walking to the market, one of her rare monthly outings, when she saw a group of girls chasing each other in the street. One of them, the pursuer, held up her fingers in the shape of claws, screaming at the other two, baring her teeth.
The woman had been compelled to stop, curious at the alacrity of the game at first, but was then struck by something familiar in the hunting girl’s re-enactment. “I’ll put you in my soup!” she screamed, and then laughed at the ensuing shrieks of her friends.
The woman had walked up to the girls, stopping only a few feet away when they finally saw her. They froze on their marks, equal looks of terror on their faces.
The woman had little doubt these lass’ parents had told them to beware the eater of children or some such thing, and to stay away from her at all costs.
“What game are you playing?” she had asked them.
The children had looked at each other, each catching the eyes of the other two, trying to agree silently whether to answer, keep quiet, or run. Finally, one of the girls who had been playing one of the hunted said, “We’re playing ‘Gretel.’”
Something rumbled distantly in the woman’s brain at the sound of the name, lingering for just a moment before evaporating. “Gretel?” she had asked, keeping her distance, trying to remain frail and non-threatening. “What is Gretel?”
The girl again looked at her friends and then back to the woman. She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a story. She killed the Witch of the North.”
The woman raised a hand to her chin, rubbing it in curiosity. “A witch?”
The girl nodded.
“And what was the witch’s name?”
The girl shrugged again and then ran away without answering, her flight triggering the hunter girl to continue the chase, growling like a bear as she came this time.
But the woman didn’t need an answer. She knew her name. Marlene. Daughter of Tanja.
It had taken her another day to confirm the children’s tale with the men at the marketplace, and she continued to go there daily for the next few weeks, attempting to pick up different pieces of the story each time, sometimes offering money to those who had family in the New Country who might be able to provide more details.
But the old fools in the markets knew little, and Tanja couldn’t risk hanging around children for details of some sordid tale from a distant land. But she did learn of the Back Country, and the names of Gretel and Anika and Hansel and Petr. And some authoritarian group known as The System. She had even made an anonymous phone call to The System, hoping to get a bit of first-hand insight into that operation, as well as the case involving her daughter. But the initial questions of the answering female had made Tanja nervous, and she had hung up before speaking with anyone else.
But as the months dragged on, Tanja became obsessed with the story, and had sworn to avenge her daughter, an oath driven as much by her need to leave her wretched city as by vengeance. She would first go back to her home in the Old World, and from there sail out to the New Country. It would be an adventure. A point at which to start again.
Those plans to leave, however, had stalled. It was the addiction, of course, that had kept her here, addiction not only to the potion of life but to the routine she’d so delicately cultivated.
But this moment, as she stood and watched the crowds below, was epiphanous, a sign that the time to leave had finally come. The animals she watched on the street below existed everywhere. It would take work to develop again all she had created here, but it could be done. She had time. She had eternity.
And Gretel had to die. As did Anika and Hansel and Petr. And anyone else who was still alive and had contributed to the death of her daughter.
She would finish this last batch of potion and then leave this soiled heap of disease. Escape in the shroud of night, leaving the building in which she now stood a raging ball of fire.
There were still several days until the bungaru venom would be ready, and she would need a few more after that to finalize the solution. After that, however, when her business was finished, she would be gone from here, ready to commence the hunt for the Morgans.
Chapter 10
ANIKA KEPT TO THE TREE line as she made her way north to the Urbanlands, ducking behind the curtain of leaves and branches as she went, hiding at the sound of any car that approached. Ideally, she would have kept to the cover of the tree branches for the entire trek, but there were road signs to be read that gave her direction and progress status.
The university wasn’t close, but she was on the right path. Now she just had to go.
She thought of her phone call with Petr, and how deranged she must have sounded to him. Of course, she was deranged now, and she had only called the boy out of one last desperate attempt at redemption. He was the only person she trusted, the only person she knew really, outside of her own family and Mrs. Klahr. And if Anika was going to attempt this quest to kill Tanja in the Eastern Lands, she wouldn’t be doing it with the help of any of those three. It was Petr Stenson who was meant to help her. It was he who the voice at the warehouse had been suggesting, he who could help her carry out the mission. As she strode the Interways in his direction, she felt almost positive of that now.
Petr’s name had leapt into her head the moment she got back to Pavel Delov’s home, with the body of the System officer still freshly killed in the woods not a half-mile away. Thoughts of suicide had raged during her walk, and once again she considered her options to take her own life.
But some quality inside the man’s cabin had triggered a peace in Anika, and the death grip that had been squeezing her chest and mind as she left the scene of her crimes, suddenly eased. It was a moment of clarity, she reasoned, and she had seized it, locating a phone book in the drawer beneath the phone, and finding the listing for the University of the Urbanlands, and the sub-listing for the Directory of Student Housing. The automated voice that answered had directed her to type in the first few letters of the last name of the person she was trying to reach. The first few attempts were unsuccessful—the letters associated with the numeric keys proved to be a bit clumsy—but on the fourth attempt, she heard the robot say, Stenson, Petr, followed by the phone number to his home on campus.
And had he been home when she called, things likely would have gone much more smoothly.
She knew she could have just confirmed he was a student and then headed towards the campus, but she needed to hear his voice, needed to hear the sound of allegiance.
The roommate had not provided that, and as the day wore on, Anika had become increasingly unstable, her moment of peace and clarity gradually slipping. By the time of her last call—which could have been her fiftieth, if she included all of the times no one answered—she felt the anger and desperation that had brought her to that place to begin with, and Pavel Delov had become the unfortunate subject of her aim.
Anika had hoped the seafood man would stay away for the night—perhaps on some overnight delivery—but, as Anika was sure he had done virtually every night of his working life, he came home right around dinnertime.
She had cut off his air for a time to render him unconscious, but there was no lust in her for his killing. The young female officer had sated her desire to feed, so killing Pavel Delov would have been unnecessary. It would have turned Anika from an instinct killer to a cold-blooded one, which, to her, would have placed her at a much higher section of the evil echelon. The man had seen her, that was true, but what matter was that really? She would be leaving for the Eastern Lands soon, in a day or two if she could arrange it, and she had no real intentions of ever coming h
ome. Even if she wanted to she couldn’t. She had murdered three people now and was believed to be dead herself. There was nothing left for her in the New Country.
And if her irresistible drive for human organs didn’t wane soon, there would be nothing left for her anywhere.
Anika could see the top of a sign rising on the side of the road in the distance. She looked back to the road and then, seeing nothing, jogged in the direction of the sign until she was close enough to read the words Univ. of Urban—110. A hundred and ten miles. That was three days at least. Probably longer since she would have to take shelter far more frequently during the day.
But it wasn’t really the walking that was the issue. Police from everywhere—not just The System, but local and regional police as well—would have flooded the area the second the body was found, which had certainly happened by now. And once they were set free, they wouldn’t stop looking until they found the killer. There was a System officer dead, a police murderer on the loose, and despite their sordid reputation of late, this type of incident would not be taken lightly by New Country law enforcement.
Anika had created some distance over the last few hours since she left Pavel Delov’s cabin, but not as much as she would have liked, and the dragnet would reach her soon. She had wanted to leave earlier, but she reasoned that if she was to take to the road, she would need to clean herself up. So that was what she did, and based on the reflection she saw in the mirror, she had done a fairly decent job. Her eye was freshly patched, and the rest of her wounds were now cleaned and explainable, not that they would be anyone’s business.
But regardless of her appearance, no amount of foliage was going to keep her safe. The dogs would be set loose, and with the smell of the officer all over her body, she would be caught easily.
No, walking was impossible. If she ever hoped to make it to Petr, if she ever hoped to make it to the Eastern Lands to fulfill her destiny, Anika would have to flag down a car.
And she would have to do it soon.
Once the report of the murder reached the public, there wouldn’t be many motorists willing to stop for a hitchhiker. The fact that she was a woman would make little difference; after all, women were the source of most of the damage done in the Southlands over the past couple of years.
Anika quickly devised a rudimentary plan in her head, and then retreated to the tree line where she waited for the sounds of an approaching engine.
Chapter 11
PETR TRIED TO STAY focused on his project, which was due in a couple days, but the memory of the woman’s phone call from two nights earlier kept invading his mind. There was a recognizable crackle and pitch in her voice, a tone that Petr was now intimately familiar with and one he had come to believe was a characteristic unique to beleaguered and abused women. Mrs. Klahr had that pitch now.
And Anika had developed it as well.
Her voice had deteriorated to that of someone twice her age, a combination of her traumatic imprisonment, the poisonous potion, and the addiction that followed.
Marlene, of course, had the same qualities as well, but Petr imagined her warped voice had been formed since before the discovery of the New Country.
But that voice on the phone, could it have been Anika’s? Was that possible? Was it she who Petr saw on the porch from the bank of the Klahr orchard?
It wasn’t Mrs. Klahr who had called him, he was sure about that. Petr had spoken with her yesterday, ostensibly to inquire about Gretel and Hansel and the progress of their mourning. He was sincerely concerned about them, of course, but the real thrust of his call was to make sure Mrs. Klahr was home and safe. He hadn’t truly been worried about her—if she had been the caller, phoning from some strange phone number where a crime had been committed, he would have heard about it from Hansel or Gretel. But still, he had to be sure. He’d seen too much over the past couple of years not to cover all of the bases. Besides, it was no guarantee that Hansel and Gretel weren’t also victims.
But Mrs. Klahr was safe, and this fact kept leading Petr’s thoughts back to Anika. Nobody had called The System to retrieve her body from the lake, a decision Petr thought to be a mistake at the time and now believed even more so. He understood the reasoning behind it, but there was so much that felt wrong in it.
Gretel had relayed to him the whole story of the death: Hansel’s strike to Anika’s temple with the oar, and the blood and glaze in her eyes as she finally collapsed over the side of the canoe into the water. And perhaps the most important detail: how Petr and Mrs. Klahr had seen Anika sink beneath the surface and never come up again.
But Gretel’s was a second-hand account of what had happened. She hadn’t actually seen any of it. And though Petr believed she had told the story as she knew it to be, maybe it was wrong. Maybe Hansel and Mrs. Klahr hadn’t waited long enough. Watched long enough.
Petr had read stories of people surviving after prolonged underwater stints in freezing temperatures, and though temperature couldn’t have been a factor in this instance, perhaps something else had preserved her. It seemed possible. Ever since Gretel and Marlene and the potion had come into his life, everything now seemed possible.
But if it was Anika, why had she not simply told him so on the phone. Even if she were in the grips of addiction, why couldn’t she just tell him it was she who was calling? Tell him that she was alive and, in fact, had not died at the bottom of the lake? Maybe Petr wouldn’t have believed her at first, that was likely, but it wouldn’t have taken long for her to prove the story. There were so many details that only she and a handful of people knew; it would have been easy to convince him of her identity.
Instead, she’d screamed his name like a wild woman, the desperation in her voice absolute and chilling. Whoever it was on the other end of the line, Petr knew she was in real trouble.
Petr scribbled another note for his project and then closed his biology book. He walked to the kitchen, staring at the phone as he passed, and then stopped and turned back to it, picking up the receiver.
His thoughts turned to Gretel. Was she gone yet? She had still been there yesterday when he called to check on Mrs. Klahr, but what about today? She had told him she would try to wait, but Petr had his doubts about her commitment to that statement. He could see something in her eyes when she made the promise—shame perhaps—which suggested her plans had already been made.
Well, there was no harm on checking in on them again. He had called yesterday, that was true, but every day was different in the mourning process. And he wanted to reiterate to Mrs. Klahr that he would be back again this weekend, as soon as his presentation was finished, and would stay as long as they needed him.
Hopefully she would remind Gretel of that too.
He dialed the number to his Back Country home and listened to the phone ring four times. Five times. Petr brought the phone back down toward the receiver when he heard the faintest “Hello,” come from the earpiece.
“Hello? Mrs. Klahr?”
“It’s Hansel.”
“Oh, hi Hansel.”
Petr had never learned how to talk to Hansel, a truth that was due mostly to the fact that he’d never really gotten to know him. When he’d first met him, he was just the little brother of the girl Petr liked—and later loved—but in less than three years, Hansel had been thrust into manhood, a cynical orphan who was now burdened with defending what remained of his family.
And now he was the killer of his own mother, a mother he had lost and found once as a little boy, only to lose her again a few years later to the poison of a monster.
“It’s Petr, Hansel. How...how are you doing?”
There was a pause. “If you want to talk to Gretel—”
“I want to know how you’re doing, Hansel.”
“Why?”
Petr considered letting himself out of this awkward conversation, giving an exasperated huff and moving on to Mrs. Klahr. But something compelled him to stay on.
“Is there anything you need? There at home, I
mean. For the orchard maybe. I’ll be coming home this weekend, so I can go into the city to pick up some supplies. Maybe even a couple of luxury items? Something you can’t get back home?”
“Sure Petr. That’d be great. I had no idea you were so well-off these days. Maybe you can pick us up a couple of diamond-handled fruit pickers to go along with some golden baskets. Oh, and I heard Mrs. Klahr swooning over a new ball gown that she saw in a Blanton’s catalogue.”
“Hansel, come on. I just meant—”
“I don’t care, Petr. We don’t need anything. I’m glad you’re coming home because Mrs. Klahr will want to see you, but we’re fine. You’re not my big brother or father or uncle. You don’t need to take care of us.”
Hansel’s words stung more than Petr would have imagined, but he kept them in perspective. The boy was devastated, obviously, and now that Petr thought about it, his own words may have come across as a bit condescending. “Okay Hansel. Can I speak with Mrs. Klahr?”
Petr heard the phone being set down, and then the soft, weary voice of his adoptive grandmother. “Hello, Petr.”
“Mrs. Klahr, are you okay?”
There was silence on the other line, and for a moment Petr thought she hadn’t heard him. But then Petr heard her swallow. “She’s leaving, Petr.”
Gretel had finally told Mrs. Klahr of her plans. “I know, Mrs. Klahr, she told me.”
“I’m so frightened for her. Alone in the Old World. It pains me to think about it.”
Petr felt his chest tighten and a lump developed in his throat. He hated to hear Mrs. Klahr so distraught, particularly when Gretel was the source of the pain. “She’ll be okay. You know her, Mrs. Klahr. You’ve seen how much she’s...grown.”
Mrs. Klahr was still uncomfortable with the whole notion of Orphism, and, in particular, any of the strange powers it spawned. It was black magic to her, heresy, and though she’d seen too much at this point to ignore it or dismiss it as myth, she avoided the conversation whenever possible.
Anika Rising (Gretel Book 4) Page 11
