“Clever girl,” Kirigi said.
And with that, he turned and stepped into the darker shadow thrown by one of the massive trees that dotted the overgrown front lawn.
And literally disappeared.
19
SOMEONE WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM WITH HER.
The air was tinged with smoke from the kitchen fire, but so far the flames had kept to the kitchen and the more readily consumed mahogany cabinets. Now the fine hairs on the back of Elektra’s neck rose for a second time, and her watering eyes narrowed to slits as she tried to focus in the smoky darkness. Here and there the covered furniture appeared as lighter clumps, but beyond the lazily floating smoke haze, Elektra could see nothing, no movement, nothing amiss. Finally she stopped, then started to lower herself into a crouch and—
A wind came out of nowhere, cold and hard enough to rip the dusty sheets free of the furniture and chase away the layers of smoke. The sheets whirled around her, flapping and shifting, surrounding her like wild, white ghosts and creating more shadows with their movement, exposing the darker furniture beneath them and making more places that she had to try and keep track of.
“Your skills are impressive.”
She spun at the sound of Kirigi’s voice, trying to locate him. There—standing behind the second floor bannister midway between the curving stairs and where the hallway disappeared into the bedrooms beyond. His slender figure disappeared and reappeared as those damnable sheets swung and spun over her head. Suddenly he jumped nimbly over the bannister and dropped toward her.
Elektra had her sais out instantly to slash at the air and the sheets, but Kirigi landed a good twelve feet away. He turned to face her as she started toward him, but he only sneered at her derisively. “But incomplete,” he whispered in an echoing tone, and then she lost sight of him completely.
She went back toward the floor, lowered her body until it she was nearly crawling across the musty carpeting, seeing Kirigi’s face shift in and out of the sheets still rippling in the air, driven by a wind that would not stop. Her intermittent strikes were useless—he was always somewhere else by the time her blade parted the white fabric.
“Your powers are useless against me,” she heard him say, but his voice sounded like it was coming from anywhere and everywhere at once and damn it, she just couldn’t get him.
There was only one way to deal with this.
Knowing it was a dangerous, desperate move, Elektra shut her eyes.
The living room is a fractured and incomprehensible box in her vision, obscured and blurry with moving white shapes. Kirigi swings his katanas through the fluttering sheets—
She opened her eyes, but everything around her still looked like the same thing, a sea of drifting wings, the flapping of a hundred huge birds. Uncertain, Elektra lunged toward the closest one, slicing at the fabric with her sais. It looked as though it had a human form concealed within it, but her blade found nothing hidden in its folds but air.
Her kimagure was useless here—the sheets made everything in the room look the same, and while Kirigi was in here somewhere, it was impossible for her mind’s vision to successfully show her where.
“A student strikes a blow,” Kirigi said. Once more he sounded like he was everywhere, but common sense and methodology dictated that he would be moving ever closer, inching toward her and looking for that killing stroke. Wouldn’t it come from behind her, where his position would be the safest and have the most stealth? Elektra spun and arced her weapons in a double line through the sheet behind her; they fluttered to the floor in evenly spaced ribbons, but again— nothing.
“A teacher anticipates the strike,” Kirigi said softly, “and blocks it.”
Another one of the sheets slithered in front of her, this time wrapping around one arm and her neck, sliding across her face. Elektra had to force herself not to flail at them, to maintain her control and discipline.
Kirigi’s voice came again. “A master anticipates the block… and does the unexpected.”
The sheets fluttered faster around her, suspended in the air as they twisted and turned as though they were living creatures. The faster they spun, the more shadows they created, the more tension they built, the more Elektra’s nerves screamed.
“A master’s attack cannot be foreseen.”
Elektra gasped as one of the sheets whipped around her head without warning. A flick of her wrist sliced through it, but the ends of still more of them snapped at her like wet towels, leaving little red welts across her skin and forcing her to fight the sheets as though they were the opponent rather than the living, breathing man who was controlling them.
Kirigi’s taunting laughter echoed around the room and Elektra ground her teeth, reminding herself not to let him get to her, commanding her mind to stay focused. He was toying with her now, mocking her by slapping the sheets against her face, then using his katanas to slice them away. The pieces of fabric writhed and jumping in humanlike forms, tricking her eyes and sabotaging her judgment.
Enough—she was through playing little man-ego games. She let herself shift into instinct, then whirled sharply in a different direction, letting her body find its own way when her mind might have told her something else. In a split second she came up and sliced viciously at a sheet directly in front of her.
Finally, she faced Kirigi.
He was standing at the foot of the stairs, calm and relaxed. Elektra slashed at him quickly with her sais, but he was too fast—he met her strokes with his katanas and, to her dismay, literally sliced off the tips of both of her weapons.
When he spoke, at least now Elektra knew where he was. “Your blades are not strong enough,” he said scornfully, “because you are not strong enough.” Before she could retort, her sais were gone entirely, knocked out of her hands and spinning away across the dark floor as she blinked. Kirigi grinned at her evilly.
“Thanks for the lesson.”
Both Elektra and Kirigi started and turned at the sound of Abby’s voice. The girl stood, smiling congenially not three feet away, and Elektra had just enough time to be alarmed before Abby charged Kirigi. The necklace and bracelet were gone, traded in for a genuine and quite deadly pair of kusari-fundos that spiraled through the air with dazzling speed.
Even so, Kirigi sidestepped Abby’s attack with a speed of his own that was nothing less than incredible, and while Elektra was still shocked to see Abby, Kirigi was clearly delighted. “Brave girl,” he practically purred. He smile was absolutely hellish. “You taught her well.”
Oh no—Elektra had not come out here to battle Kirigi just so he could murder Abby. She leapt toward him, but he ducked and countered with a graceful but powerful uppercut that sent her sprawling. The sheets still streaming around the room suddenly exploded with movement, whipping into a frenzy and knocking Abby flat. Down on her knees, the girl tried to crawl away from them, but they buried her and Elektra.
And finally, all was quiet.
Kirigi stood in the center of the room, surrounded by white debris and shredded pieces of fabric. Elektra lay somewhere beneath the jumbled piles of white, unmoving and silent, but Abby threw off the material covering her and rose.
“But now,” Kirigi told her, “it’s time for a new master.”
Looking more serene than she felt—she was terrified—Abby brought up her chains and spun them, but every time she struck at Kirigi he easily deflected her blows, retaliating with strikes of his own that forced her to slowly go on the defensive. She backed away, unwillingly allowing him to guide her across the room, remembering only too well Elektra’s previous lesson against allowing herself to become trapped but helpless to stop it from happening again.
Kirigi advanced again, but this time Abby saw something move within the sheets on the floor behind him. She kept blocking his strikes and inching backward, still searching for that elusive opportunity to sidestep on her own and wrap a chain—or both—around his hands so she could relieve him of those katanas. In another two seconds, Elektra so
undlessly eased aside the last sheet covering her, then sprinted for the staircase. She and Abby locked gazes, and before Kirigi realized what was going to happen, Abby went on the offensive one last time. The attack took Kirigi by surprise—he didn’t give up his ground, but for once he wasn’t forcing Abby backward, either. At the highest arc of her strike, Abby twisted her wrist and whipped out with her arm—
—and let go of one end of the chain in her hand.
It soared up and over Kirigi’s head and he automatically followed the movement, then scowled when he saw Elektra leaning over the bannister. The second he took his gaze off Abby, she sprang; Elektra caught the weighted end of the chain, wrapped it around her wrist, and pulled, jerking Abby up and swinging her out of Kirigi’s range. Still hanging on to her end of the chain, Abby landed almost halfway up the staircase, and then Elektra had her safely—at least until Kirigi got his bearings again—on the second floor landing with her.
Elektra let go of the kusari-fundo, and Abby expertly reeled it back in. Then Elektra grabbed Abby by the arm and hauled her down the hallway, trying to put as much distance between them and Kirigi as she could. “Abby,” she told her as she steered the girl through the doorway into the master suite. “You need to go—”
“I’m not leaving you!”
Before Elektra could retort, she saw Kirigi appear in the doorway to the room. There was no way to go but out, so Elektra lashed out at the window, smashing it with a vicious sidekick. “You’re just like me,” she complained. “A real pain in the ass!” Before Kirigi could get closer, both of them sprang out the window.
They landed easily on the soft grass and weeds below, both rolling back into a standing position and dashing away. As they fled, Elektra glanced back and saw Kirigi watching, unperturbed, from the window. Something passed overhead and Elektra’s gaze snapped upward—it was that elusive hawk again, its shadow bisecting the light of the moon as it glided past.
A final glance over her shoulder at Kirigi’s figure in the window, and it didn’t make Elektra feel any better to see that he was smiling.
“They’re coming.”
Tattoo heard Master Kirigi’s voice in his head as clearly as if the man had been standing next to him. He nodded and slipped off his robe, folding it quickly but still with ceremonial precision. His skin glistened with perspiration and movement, the slender, knotted muscles making the color-soaked tattoos pulsate across his flesh. Inked around his arms and across his back was one of the more complex pieces of his body art, an intricate meshing of arabesques and hieroglyphics that the casual eye might mistake for nothing more than a pretty design, but when someone looked closer…Tattoo closed his eyes and concentrated, and after a moment the pattern began to shiver, then twist. The twisting increased, then his back bulged as the first of hundreds of venomous snakes pulled free. Just as suddenly they transformed again, this time into thousands of tiny, winking lights. They burst off his back like a fireworks display and fell to the ground. A moment later they streamed across the ground and toward the bridge leading into the maze.
Abby and Elektra clambered over the bridge, no longer trying to be stealthy. Up ahead, way too close for comfort, they could see countless spots of light flooding toward them like an eerily silent display of sparks. Elektra didn’t know what they were, but she was sure of one thing—she and Abby needed to avoid them. Getting into the maze, deep into it, was their only hope to get away from Kirigi—Tattoo was nearby and his master would use him to find them and attack. Elektra had seen Tattoo’s weapons, but she also knew she probably hadn’t seen them all. The wise warrior would always save the best and most deadly for the final kill. If nothing else, the trees planted precisely at each corner within the once-living puzzle would shield them from the prying eyes of anything the tattooed man could send overhead.
Abby glanced behind them, then gasped and clutched at Elektra’s elbow. The assassin followed Abby’s pointing finger, then grimaced as she saw movement on the surface of the bridge—the lights, bursting through the slats and cascading over the old wooden railings. Elektra urged the girl to move faster, pulling at her, but now the lights seemed to be everywhere, exploding from the hedges like crazily waving sparklers. They swirled around and between Elektra and Abby, trying to force them apart, but Elektra wasn’t going to let that happen. She sprinted toward the center of the maze, using her childhood knowledge of the structure, knowing where each corridor, turn, and dead end was from the countless weeks and months she’d spent playing in it as a child. For a precious few seconds she thought they had the upper hand, then she glanced back—
—and realized Abby was gone.
Abby ran as fast as she could, but when she glanced over her shoulder, all she could see was a sheet of lights—it looked like thousands of them—coming right for her. She gasped and surged forward, saw a break in the hedge and turned right, then turned again. Another turn and she made herself pause as it hit her that she was not only running blindly, but she’d gotten separated from Elektra. She wanted to go back the way she’d come but she couldn’t—there were the lights again, hurtling in her direction and—
No!
They weren’t lights at all, but pinpoints of… what? Eyes? Maybe, but that didn’t matter, because the lights were suddenly gone and in their place were snakes, hundreds of them, rushing at her down the pathway, churning out of the hedges surrounding her. She whirled and started to flee, but all she got for her effort was a face-full of hedge—she’d turned into a dead end! She was trapped, and with no way to escape, all Abby could do was flail wildly as the glittering scales of countless reptiles twined about her body and ultimately held her prisoner.
Elektra dashed back the way they’d come, hoping Abby had turned instinctively toward the house. As she made her way back through the maze, expertly negotiating the turns and twists into the shortest path possible, her heart hammered with fear for the teenager. Then she skidded around the last turn and jerked herself up short as her face twisted in rage.
There, only a few feet away, was Tattoo, the cause of a good chunk of her and Abby’s misery. His skin was coated in a glowing, iridescent blue, and he was rising from a lotus position, holding his arms out in front of him like he was urging a herd of invisible beasts forward. He probably was, and no doubt they were descending upon Abby even as Elektra bared her teeth and stepped directly into his path.
The ink-covered killer was concentrating so deeply that he didn’t even realize she’d stepped in front of him, and it could be only a bad thing that he was shaking and smiling despite his deep mind sink.
“Nice trick,” Elektra said with all the sweetness she could manage. Tattoo’s trembling stopped abruptly, and he opened one eye. The pupil rolled slightly as he tried to bring back only what he needed of his thoughts. Unlike his previous decisions, this would turn out to be a bad one, indeed. “But I’ve seen it before,” Elektra added.
Before he could focus enough to move out of her range, Elektra stepped quickly into his opened arms and slid her right arm around his neck until her hand was flat against his cheekbone. Bracing herself against him, rib cage to rib cage, she snapped her left arm forward as hard as she could—
Crack!
Abby thrashed within the grip of the snakes, fighting desperately for freedom. She twisted, then turned in the other direction—
—and nearly fell flat on her face. Without warning, the reptiles holding her exploded outward, spewing nasty black fluid toward the maze as they released their hold. In a matter of seconds Abby was surrounded by small, dark puddles instead of the pulsing, twisting snakes. Finally, finally, she could breathe. Finally she could run.
Time to find Elektra.
Elektra stepped back as Tattoo slumped to the ground with a broken neck. An instant later, the ink patterns across his arms and chest bled messily out of his skin, sliding down his body like tears of oil.
Elektra gave a tight, grim smile. Abby should be safe…
At least for now.
20
TATTOO LAY DEAD AT HER FEET, BUT ELEKTRA knew there was no time to celebrate. She headed back into the maze toward Abby, but this time her steps were a little more hesitant—she thought she knew which way to go, but it wasn’t a matter of just finding her way through it—every decision had the potential to be devastating. The wind picked up and brought with it the unpleasant recollection of Kirigi’s windstorm back at the house, and then something happened that took her anxiety level to a whole new height.
A single leaf blew in front of her.
It fluttered on the cool breeze, turning and twisting like a perfect example of nature suspended for her viewing. The only problem was that it was dead, unnaturally so, black and withered with the ends twisted in a way that could only mean one thing:
Typhoid Mary.
“She’s here,” Elektra breathed, and then more leaves suddenly blew into her path, dark evidence of the diseased woman’s presence. She had to find Abby before it was too late.
She charged into the maze, taking turns and twists and letting her unconscious memory keep her from getting lost. That instinctive memory wouldn’t help her locate Abby, though—the girl could be anywhere, although the dying sounds from Tattoo’s herd just a few moments ago made Elektra believe the teenager had to be close. It was just a matter of finding the right pathway.
Abby heard Elektra’s voice calling out, but the high, thick hedges surrounding her made it impossible to tell where it was coming from. One minute she’d spin expectantly, because she could swear the assassin had to be right behind her; the next brought her nothing but deep, dark silence.
Elektra Page 18
