The girl whirled with the box cutter raised and ready to strike, but again, she never got the chance. Elektra’s other hand was nothing but a blur in front of the teen’s face; there was a deceptively small slap! against the thumb pad of her hand, then her fingers went numb and released the weapon of their own accord. Elektra caught it reflexively and tossed it out of reach. The teenager gaped at her, then swallowed. “Th-the door w-was unlocked,” she stammered. Her eyes were wide. “So I…”
“No, it wasn’t,” Elektra interrupted. Her voice was as frigid as the water dripping out of her hair.
They stared at each other, but Elektra wasn’t giving in. “It was,” the girl insisted. “The beach door.”
Still maintaining a death grip on the slender wrist, Elektra began steering the teen toward the door on the beachfront deck off the master bedroom.
“The people who live here, they let me come all the time,” the girl told her. Her voice was jittering. “Ask anybody.”
Elektra paid no attention—she wasn’t hearing anything useful anyway. The lock on the beach door was broken, but by whom? And when? The answer could easily be standing right in front of her, or it could have been that way all along. The girl chattered nervously on, but Elektra wasn’t listening as her gaze roamed the room. She took in everything, subconsciously counting as she scanned the doors, the windows, the furniture. Something was odd, missing.
“So who are you?” the teenager asked. “My name is—”
Elektra yanked her forward. “What did you steal?”
Her visitor’s face twisted. “Nothing! What do you think I am—ow!”
The hand she had kept rolled into a fist flew open as suddenly Elektra squeezed it hard, digging the tip of her middle finger deep into the groove between the wrist bone and the median nerve. A necklace fell to the floor and bounced against the carpet, a necklace that was very precious to Elektra.
The girl couldn’t meet her gaze. “Don’t call the cops,” she implored. “Please? My Dad’ll kill me.”
Elektra’s scowl softened as she realized this girl had a family somewhere, a father and mother, maybe siblings. She’d probably just wandered in and seized the opportunity to explore a little, then found temptation stronger than common sense. She let go of the girl’s wrist and bent to pick up her necklace. “In some parts of the world,” Elektra told her, “they’d just cut your hands off and—”
The teenager shot for the door.
Foolish girl that she was, she was pretty surprised when Elektra was already waiting for her when she got there.
The quasi-thief’s mouth dropped open. “Whoa! How did you—” She looked at Elektra speculatively. “Work out much?”
“Just get out of here,” Elektra snapped, instantly angry at herself for revealing too much. “Go.”
This time the girl’s common sense did win, and Elektra didn’t have to repeat herself. She watched her go and squeezed the necklace, then thought about something else. Dropping the necklace back on the dresser, she hurried to the master bedroom closet and pulled open the door, but the leather case and box inside were untouched. Relieved, she let the door close once more, then wandered back over and stared at the ankh necklace the girl had tried to steal.
Today, it seemed, was a day for memories.
6
THE NATCHIOS ESTATE, A LONG TIME AGO
SHE’S BEEN IN THE POOL AGAIN, SEVERAL TIMES THAT day. At least this time was better than the last, her attempt at treading water much stronger and more successful, worthy of even her father’s hard-won praise. Elektra is almost prancing, she feels so good, so rather than go through the changing room that connects to the kitchen, she heads for the main entrance. A quick skip across the fancy, complex pattern of tiles around the pool deck, then she crosses the lush, meticulously manicured lawn that separates the pool area from the front of the huge mansion that she and her family call home. She will make a grand, proud entrance, and she can’t wait to tell her mother how well she’s done at her exercises today. She’ll—
The front door to the house is wide open.
Puzzled, Elektra stands in the foyer and looks around, but no one’s there—not her parents, nor any of the servants, or even a visitor. After a few indecisive moments, she climbs the long, curving staircase that leads to the second floor. The polished oak steps are well made and don’t make a sound beneath her slight weight; at the top of the staircase, she turns left and heads for the master bedroom suite. With her eyes focused on the door, Elektra nearly steps in the thick pool of blood that is seeping from beneath.
She skids to a stop and stares at the crimson puddle creeping into the fabric of the carpet, feeling terror rush into her throat and build a lump that threatens to cut off her breathing. There is so much of it, and it’s so dark—surely it must be paint, some new creative project that her mom was trying and which had gotten the best of her. People didn’t have that much liquid inside them.
Did they?
Her heart is thundering in her chest, the sound of her own blood rushing so loudly through her arteries that she can barely hear her own small voice as she timidly pushes open the bedroom door.
“M-mom?”
Something big and black—a demon!—hisses and shrieks at her. Elektra screams and throws herself backward, instinctively levering herself out of the swipe the thing takes at her face. Before she can react or run, the demon launches itself onto the windowsill where the curtains are billowing in the fresh summertime air. It turns and growls something at her, then jumps, and it isn’t until she puts both hands behind her to push off that Elektra realizes she had ended up kneeling in the blood. She gasps and gets up anyway, wiping her hands automatically on her legs and succeeding only in spreading it farther. She stumbles forward, looking around wildly, until she gets to the edge of the king-size bed—
And sees her mother lying there.
She’s dead, her body the source of the blood that had gathered and crawled across the carpet to the doorway. Her head is thrown back above the wide path of red that leaks from beneath her corpse, and in her beautiful face her eyes—the same color as Elektra’s—are open but she isn’t seeing her daughter, or anything else, anymore.
Elektra’s throat hitches and she feels tears sting behind her eyelids, but she will not allow herself to cry. Quietly, as though her mother were only sleeping, Elektra reaches over and lifts her mother’s necklace from her throat. It’s a small ankh, a symbol that her mother was never without; Elektra will keep it forever and ever….
Amen.
PRESENT DAY, HARBOR ISLAND
At two a.m. Elektra woke up shaking and sweating and remembering, and hating the memories and herself for bringing the badness back to rattle around in her head. Her eyes were wide open and her mind was crawling around old stuff, bad stuff, jobs completed and people left dead for both good and bad reasons. Funny how tired she could be, limbs leaden and slow and blood so thick and sluggish that it felt like her heart couldn’t even pump the stuff, but still she was wide awake, her gaze skimming the darkness like a female mosquito hunting for fresh blood in the middle of the night.
She made herself get up and go in the bathroom, found the new bottle of sleeping pills McCabe had made sure was packed with her move-in items. With only the night-light on, she swallowed two of the tablets without bothering to get a glass of water, staring at her faint reflection in the mirror as her throat worked the pills downward. Finally she went back in the bedroom and climbed into bed.
The pills didn’t help—if anything, they just made her mind more slave than controller of her imagination. By two-thirty she could have sworn she was looking at DeMarco only a few feet away, still sitting on the chair in which he’d died across from his fancy fireplace…except now it was in Elektra’s beach house bedroom. She could see her sai still jammed into his chest, conveniently preventing him from squeezing the trigger of that dangerous little Heckler & Koch with which he’d planned to kill her. She stared at him for a while, knowing that th
e whole thing had to be some sort of sleep-deprivation hallucination, but it didn’t go away. Fine—if DeMarco wouldn’t leave, she would. She rolled out of bed and walked out of the bedroom, purposely staring at the carpet instead of the dead man who couldn’t possibly be there.
By three-fifteen she was pacing the floor again, back and forth, this time in the living room. A sudden shriek made her whirl—it sounded so much like the one in the memories she had of her mother’s bedroom on the day of her death. But no…it was just the teakettle, sounding the alarm that the water was boiling. Nerves jangling, Elektra made herself a steaming cup of vanilla-tinged chamomile—the stuff was supposed to relax you and lull you to sleep—then shed her sleep clothes in favor of comfortable workout garb. It didn’t take long to fire up some music on her portable CD player, good hard stuff with a nonstop, driving beat that kept pace with her as she did a high-speed jump rope routine. If evil was sweat, then the tea and the workout raised her body temperature and helped to drive away the personal demons, at least for a little while. It wasn’t long before her skin was glistening and her clothes were soaked.
By four a.m. she was working on her arms and upper body, counting out her numbers with excruciating slowness, gasping and trembling with the effort of hauling her body weight upward using only one arm—
“Forty-eight… forty-nine… fifty.”
Elektra let go of the overhead bar and allowed herself to drop to the carpet. For a long while she simply stood there, waiting for the burn in her muscles to subside and for her heart rate to come down a bit, stop its jackhammering inside her chest so she could get on with the next part.
Finally she felt strong enough again.
She looked up at the bar, then leaped and gripped it with the other hand.
“One…two…three…”
Still in her workout clothes, Elektra was lying diagonally across the bed when the sun crested the horizon and the first of its rays bounced off the water. Despite the sleeping pills, the tiredness, the brutally difficult workout, there had been no sleep for her last night, just as happened more often than not. Once again, rest had eluded her, and she certainly wouldn’t find it with the sunshine burning its way through her windows and her eyelids. Exhausted and sore, she dragged herself up and off the bed; as she pushed through the beach door and into the moisture-laden morning air outside, she felt like some strange cross between Sisyphus and a zombie.
She wasn’t sure how long it took her to get there, but eventually Elektra found herself walking along a section of the beach that was awash in driftwood. It must have been something about the current and the tide that did it, but twisted pieces of the stuff lay everywhere, like the inexplicable skeletons of alien creatures for which humans had no name. She lost herself for a while as she walked among the wood carcasses, examining the ruins and quietly searching. Finally she found it—a nice, wide tree stump, one large enough for her to settle comfortably on in a cross-legged position. A moment later Elektra closed her eyes, and relaxed for the first time since she stepped off the ferry onto Harbor Island.
Her breathing slowed, and her muscles, so twisted inside that they might have been unintentional mockups of the knurled wood around her, finally untensed. Her spine was straight, her shoulders were pulled back, and her face was up to catch the air, pull it in and in and into her lungs, cleansing and cold. With each passing moment her inhalations were fewer, her heart rate slowed a little more, until finally everything met and meshed, becoming one as the sun warmed her shoulders and the breeze lifted her long hair.
Finally, she had it—kimagure. A sixth sense accessible only with the deepest of concentration, it enabled her to accurately perceive the world around her without even opening her eyes. She could feel the breeze, smell the salt water, hear the birds… and see well beyond the small stump on which she sat even though her eyelids were completely closed. Everything around her was moving, alive, even though to the untrained human eye it was nothing but a simple beach landscape dotted with dried-up tree limbs. She could sense the clouds in the sky, darkening as they approached and the weather changed. In her thoughts, the rain began to fall but her skin remained dry—what she was seeing was the rain that hadn’t yet arrived.
Once, standing on a rooftop and facing Matt Murdock—Daredevil—he had told her the same thing: The rain was coming. She hadn’t believed him, but his senses, attuned to the world differently than hers because of his blindness, had been completely correct. She learned later that he had used that sense to “see” her in his own way, forming images based on the echoing of the raindrops like a bat’s sonar.
Like Matt, Elektra could see it all now, the totality of everything around her, even the future.
Which showed a man walking down the beach toward her.
She knew that he had seen her already, sitting on the stump like some kind of cold sun goddess, or maybe a female incarnation of Buddha. Even so, the instant he turned his head to glance at the waterfront, she was up and off the stump, and by the time he reached where she’d been sitting, he had no idea where she’d gone. She let him stand there and look puzzled for an amusing ten seconds, then stepped up behind him.
“Looking for me?”
“Oh!” He spun, surprise flashing across his features. Elektra recognized him instantly—the fisherman she’d seen smiling up at her from the smaller lobster boat. “Hi,” he managed, then added, “Are you, uh, the new tenant?” When she frowned, he said, “Eddie Ferris— he’s the Realtor—he said a young woman had taken the house, the one you’re in, for a month.”
Elektra didn’t return his smile. “What do you want?”
She was being rude, but that was intentional. She watched as he tried a smile, but it wavered a little when her expression still didn’t change. He glanced around, his eyes searching the beach. “Sorry,” he said. He hesitated, then looked toward the beach again. “This is kind of awkward, but… have you seen a girl? She’s thirteen, blondish-brownish hair down to about here?” He gestured at his shoulders self-consciously. At Elektra’s curious expression, he explained, “My daughter, Abby. We had a fight yesterday morning. She took off, and I—”
“I saw her late in the afternoon,” Elektra said.
The fisherman’s eyes brightened. “You did? Thank God—”
Elektra decided to be blunt. “Yes. She broke into my house.”
“Shit,” he said crudely, then blushed a little. “Really? She knows the Wheelwrights, who own—say, she didn’t take anything, did she?”
Elektra hesitated, then said “No.” This one time, and only this one time, she decided, she would give the girl a break. If she did it again, though, Elektra would hang her out to dry.
He looked relieved. “Oh, good.” He stared at the ground uncomfortably. “Look, if she broke anything, I’m happy to pay for it, of course. I’m Mark Miller. We’re in the little cabin two properties down.”
Elektra only folded her arms, not bothering to introduce herself. Mark smiled tightly and began to back away—obviously he wasn’t an idiot and he was getting her hint. “Okay, well, thanks again. If you see Abby, could you ask her to at least call? I mean, she’s probably around here and just avoiding me. She’s good at that sometimes. I just need to hear from her.”
Elektra barely nodded. His face grim, Mark turned and headed back the way he’d come, and she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
7
ELEKTRA MADE HERSELF RELAX WHEN SHE REALIZED she was gripping her cell phone so tightly that her fingers were actually hurting. “Come on,” she muttered. “Come on, come on, come on.” Finally there was a click as the phone was picked up. She opened her mouth, then a slightly tinny version of McCabe’s voice cut her off. “I’m out. Leave a message.”
She didn’t leave messages, so she snapped her phone closed and looked around for something else to do. She hoped to God she got the name of her target pretty soon, or she was going to go out of her mind with boredom.
She killed a couple of hours wit
h some magazines that McCabe had thoughtfully packed into her new belongings, but they were more annoying than entertaining, filled with inanely material things that she would never possess. It wasn’t the physical stuff, like furniture, clothes, or even a house with a stupid white picket fence—she had enough money socked away in foreign accounts to practically start her own town. It was the intangible things, like love, the joy of another’s company, and the supposedly emotional peace it provided…which, of course, led to marriage, children, happily ever after, golden anniversaries, and yadda yadda yadda. Had there ever been a time when such things had been her goal, or any kind of a priority at all in her life? She’d known love with Matt, but that had been too brief and had ended in false betrayal, mistaken accusations, and her nearly killing him… right before her own death. She couldn’t imagine going through something like that again, and she certainly wasn’t the kind of woman who could slide into an everyday suburban life.
At dusk, Elektra tossed the magazines aside and headed outside to the deck, the part that overlooked the big boulders just beyond the house where the sun would set. Facing west, she stood and enjoyed the wind and the way it carried the salt spray from the waves over her face. It was cold enough to be biting but she didn’t care; the froth of the breaking waves was stark white against the dark water, and the clumps of clouds were painted brilliant pink and red by the sun’s final rays. You didn’t get spectacular sunsets like this in New York, where—
“Hey.”
Elektra spun in surprise, then saw Abby standing over by the door. Chagrined, she scuffed her way across the deck toward the girl. “How long have you been standing there?”
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