She heard a sound and took a turn around a corner, but there was no one there. Still, she knew she’d heard something. “Elektra?” she asked tentatively. Her voice wasn’t that loud because something wasn’t right—she could feel it. “Is that you?” The leaves rustled again, and she looked up, then was horrified to watch the sides of two hedges go black, the leaves shriveling and falling away as the heavy foliage died right in front of her eyes. A moment later a shadowy figure stepped from between their twig-choked skeletons.
“Guess again.”
And Abby looked into the white face of Typhoid Mary and saw death waiting in the woman’s black, black eyes….
Elektra had almost made it to Abby when Kirigi stepped out of the shadows in front of her.
They stared at each other, and Elektra knew the time to run was over. He had destroyed her weapons back at the mansion and now she was defenseless; finally she and Kirigi would meet their destiny, and finish the ongoing war between them—and a lot sooner than expected.
Or so he thought.
He came toward her, his katanas singing on the night breeze. She arched backward and waited just long enough for him to drive forward, then dove under his outstretched arm and through the now-rickety structure that held up the roof over the well. Her body grazed the decrepit posts and the whole thing shuddered at the impact; half-rotted shingles pattered against her back and dropped into the hole of blackness she had once thought held the secrets to her future. But that secret wasn’t inside the well, it was outside, and Elektra knew just where to aim.
She hit the ground hands first, like a diver splitting the ocean’s water and searching for that all-important underwater treasure. Her fingers went deep into the soft earth, pushing aside the grass and soil and closing firmly around the sais she had buried there so many years before. The metal felt warm and right across her palm, comfortable—she hadn’t touched them since she was a child, yet it seemed as those these weapons were made so well they were already like a part of her. She pulled them out and rolled, then held them up triumphantly and turned to face Kirigi yet again.
He wasn’t there.
“Those old things?” His voice was behind her, but not—overhead, to her left, everywhere.
“They won’t save you.”
This time Elektra saw him as he came toward her, his tar-pit eyes smiling and hungry, like a hyena coming in for the kill. He might have even laughed. A few yards away, Kirigi whirled his katanas, a pair of long, incredible weapons that had probably been lovingly fashioned by a swordsman long before Kirigi’s birth. Their silver blades sparkled in moonlight broken by the intermittent clouds blowing across the sky, making them go from silver to black and back again. She was recovered enough now that Kirigi was being a little more cautious as he approached her, and the two of them extended their blades reflexively, judging their distance—Kirigi’s were longer and she would need to remember her shorter range. When the edges met, the impact sent bright showers of red, yellow, and blue flying about their heads, like children wielding oddly shaped, deadly sparklers.
Elektra and Kirigi circled each other around the stone structure that had been built for her much younger self, swinging and parrying, dancing beneath and between the blades whistling across the air. Kirigi slashed and Elektra slipped beneath the edge, flipping her sais in midair and slamming them backward. But Kirigi was never there, and she pushed harder, growing more and more desperate in spite of her training and her instinct, wanting to stop this man and ensure, once and for all, that he would never get to young Abby.
While she sweated and strained, Kirigi, on the other hand, remained unaffected; the dark-haired man struck and blocked, staying calm and watching her face as they fought, as though he were searching for something.
“You’re slipping, Elektra,” Kirigi said, and his voice had an echoing, hollow quality that made it sound as if it was coming from somewhere else… perhaps from the very dreams he had just asked about. “Come on, now. Push, push. Push!”
Her father’s words!
Panting now, Elektra kept striking at Kirigi, but her moves were slowing and her accuracy was suffering badly. Memories from her childhood flashed through her mind, interrupting her vision and making it impossible for her to properly judge where her enemy was. She tried to make her body flow naturally, but the blows were off—she was missing and Kirigi was playing with her, the way a cruel cat toys with a mouse before the final kill. She saw her father again at the pool, hammering his knowledge into her brain, insisting she train harder, work harder; his expression was hard and determined, she would do it right, or he would not let her rest. Then she saw herself in happier times, running along the estate and working her way through the maze, over and over again until she had conquered it. This was the only thing she’d ever truly had patience for in her youth. She saw—
She saw—
Herself as a child, struggling desperately in the swimming pool, tasting the heavy chlorine in her mouth and sputtering as she nearly drowned when pitted against the unrelenting discipline of her father’s swimming lesson.
She saw—
Her mother’s murder.
This vision, that one of all things, made Elektra lose herself, just for a moment. She swung too wide and Kirigi grinned and easily stepped out of range. Then, before she could recover and bring her sais back into position, he spun in a vicious double circle and came out of it with a side kick that caught her dead center on her sternum. One moment Elektra was ready to cut Kirigi into a thousand pieces; the next moment, Kirigi’s kick had hurled her twenty feet backward down the heavily leafed path.
Elektra slammed viciously against the side of the old wishing well, then slid painfully down to the ground. The impact took the wind out of her, leaving her chest feeling like a balloon with a hole punched in it—small and depleted, void of any capacity to again hold oxygen. The flesh on her back screamed where the leather had ridden up and exposed her skin to the scouring effects of the stonework.
Elektra’s chest hitched uselessly, then she toppled over and lay twitching on the ground. Kirigi’s effortless leap took him directly over her, and there was nothing she could do but lie there and wait, blinking up at him through helpless, hopeless eyes as he raised his katanas and prepared to make the killing blow.
Somewhere on the other side of eternity, her father and mother waited. Elektra used her last bit of strength to spread her arms, then she waited, inviting death and just wanting it to, finally, be over.
Abby backed away from the Japanese death woman, but her lack of knowledge about Elektra’s maze had sabotaged her and she was trapped in a dead end. Behind her back and on both sides were the twisted and dead remains of hedges several feet taller than her head; they were like walls of wooden barbed wires, sharp and deadly, impenetrable without a bladed weapon. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but fight, and Abby knew instinctively that she had to keep Typhoid away from her. With no other way to defend herself, Abby brought up her chains and spun them expertly, cutting across the air with painful speed as she struggled to maintain a safety zone between her and Typhoid Mary.
But Typhoid wasn’t concerned about the chains. With a speed that made Abby gasp, the woman reached forward, directly into the path of both chains, and let them wrap around her slender wrists and fingers. The force of their spinning stopped, and while anyone else would have screamed and gone to their knees, Typhoid only gave the chains a bland smile. Before Abby could yank backward, her weapons began to dissolve—blood-colored rust sped across the links right in front of Abby’s dismayed gaze, freezing her in place. The metal corroded and cracked, the damage climbing up the chains and making them fall away to nothing but old, red powder in mere seconds.
Abby was defenseless.
The raven-haired woman look down at her hands, then lightly slapped them together to rid herself of the reddish dust coating her skin. It drifted to the ground and topped off a tiny pile—the remains of Abby’s kusari-fundos—that was the color
of powdered blood. Typhoid gave Abby a wistful look. “You know,” she said, “I used to be the treasure.” She cocked her head and listened for a moment, and Abby realized with a start that while she had previously been able to hear the sounds of the battle raging between Elektra and Kirigi on the other side of the hedge to Typhoid’s right, the noise was gone. Now there was only a deep, unnerving silence.
Typhoid focused again on Abby and gave her a placid, black-lipped smile. Her voice was silky and slow. “Let’s keep this between you and me.”
Abby crouched, her face grim. She was just as good with her hands as she was with her chains, and she was determined to fight to the ground if she had to. In fact, she still felt confident enough about her skills to motion at the woman, daring her to come close enough to where Abby could land a few blows.
But no, Typhoid Mary had other plans for her, and Abby could only watch helplessly as the evil woman raised one palm and used the night’s breeze to blow her the first of her poison-soaked kisses.
Oh no—Abby blinked hard and tried to hold her breath, but it was already too late. By the time Typhoid wandered over to gather Abby into her arms, Abby was sagging, already filled with fever and losing her fight for life.
Elektra let her head loll to the side, welcoming the feel of the rotting leaves against her cheek, the moistness of the soil. Soon she would be one with Mother Earth, her body reintegrated into the circle of life and eternity. As for the here and now… she didn’t want to see Kirigi kill her—just let it be over with, let the blades do their work. She already knew how it would be—had she not already experienced exactly this at the hands of Bullseye? A magnificent flash of pain, a minute that would seem to last forever, then… blackness.
Yes, she could do that.
But through the decades, the lack of attention had taken its toll on the maze in more areas than those apparent at first glance. Now there were gaps beneath the hedges where the mounds of rotting leaves had eaten away chunks of the hedge structure with them, where the heavy spring and fall storm winds had blown aside the dry and more fragile piles of leaf debris. Typhoid Mary’s touch had finished off the one directly in her line of sight, reducing most of its bottom to little more than dried and blackened twigs and leaving skull-sized gaps between it and the ground.
“Elektra…”
It was Abby’s whispering voice, but… not. Elektra’s blurring vision tried to focus almost against her own will, and—there.
Was she really seeing this, or was it kimagure? She couldn’t be sure—she was unfocused, weak, at the worst she had ever been in a battle. Even so, she could not ignore what was playing out in front of her eyes, whether it was reality or what might be in only a few very short minutes.
Held tightly in Typhoid’s embrace, the girl had sagged to the ground just on the other side of the hedge. Her head was thrown back but her eyes were open and staring right at Elektra. Typhoid Mary was rocking her like a dying infant; with her black lips nearly touching the side of Abby’s head, she was crooning some misbegotten death song into the teenager’s ear. Abby’s hands were lying palm-up on the ground, the fingers twitching feebly.
NO!
There had been little in Elektra’s life that had touched her heart since the double strike of losing her father and enduring a death that had parted her from Matt Murdock. This girl, and to a lesser degree her father, had done just that—reawakened something blocked away and forced to stay dormant for too long. That segregation had served Elektra well, given her time to heal and a solid measure of self-protection, but the time for such things was over now.
She would not let Abby Miller die because of the Hand.
Above her, Kirigi’s smile had stretched to a self-satisfied rictus. “Here ends the lesson!” he said triumphantly. He raised his katanas as high as he could, gripping their handles tightly. Elektra inhaled deeply and stretched her arms over her head as if she were preparing for death, even welcoming it. But the second before Kirigi brought down his blades, Elektra’s fingers closed around the hilt of the sais she had dropped when she’d hit the side of the well. She swung up at the same time Kirigi swung down. Their weapons met with a head-ringing CLANG!—
—and Kirigi’s katanas shattered.
He had a millisecond to look stupidly at the remains of his broken swords, then Elektra’s right sai pierced the center of his chest.
He tripped backward as Elektra’s momentum pulled her up and propelled her toward him, his wide, black gaze going from Elektra to the blade buried in his heart as if he couldn’t believe such a thing could actually happen, not to him, not to Kirigi.
But Elektra only stared at him grimly as she pulled from deep inside herself, gathering every bit of strength she had and lifting the killer overhead using her two deadly blades. “The lesson is over,” she said coldly, “when the student becomes the master.”
Kirigi’s body wobbled over her head, then she flung him as hard as she could, right into the wishing well. For a second, there was nothing, then suddenly the familiar noxious smoke spewed from the well’s shadowed opening like a shower of toxic fireworks. Elektra yanked her face away and threw up one arm to protective her eyes as a swirl of nearly blinding green fire exploded from the well.
The sais that had killed Kirigi lay on the ground at Elektra’s feet. What she had seen had been reality, not kimagure, and now Elektra saw that Typhoid Mary had gone; satisfied that her evil work was done, the woman had left Abby lying motionless on the other side of the desiccated hedge. Waving away the last of the smelly smoke, Elektra bent and picked up her weapons, sensing the air and everything around her with a flow of inner peace that was steadier than anything she’d experienced in years. She brought up one sai on her palm and closed her eyes, then twirled it twice and threw it as hard as she could. When she opened her eyes, Elektra saw the sai whirling away end over end, burning its way through the dead hedges as it went in the opposite direction from Abby. Elektra smiled darkly just as she saw Typhoid Mary turn the corner ahead.
The sai slid neatly into the small space between the poisonous woman’s eyebrows.
Other than that it rivaled Kirigi’s spectacular end, Elektra barely remembered the explosion and the burning that followed the death of Typhoid Mary. Abby was the only thing in the world now that was important, and she was at the teenager’s side in seconds after slicing through the dead brush that stood between them. But Abby was almost gone, her breathing so shallow Elektra could barely feel it against her cheek when she bent close to the girl’s face. The teenager’s skin was china-white, a bizarre mirror image of Typhoid’s own Noh mask.
“Abby,” Elektra said urgently, “concentrate. Focus on your breathing.” Sweat and steam poured off the prone body, but there was no sign that she could hear Elektra’s instructions. Elektra’s hands gripped Abby’s wrists. “Listen to me!” Elektra’s voice rose as she fought to control her own panic. “Use my voice as a guide—” Before she could continue, Abby jerked, then convulsed in Elektra’s arms. Her cheeks, so pale just a moment ago, flushed bright red as the fever climbed to its highest point yet, then her eyes, still slightly open, rolled back in her head until only the whites showed—
—and her breathing stopped entirely.
Elektra clutched at Abby’s shoulders, then shook her. “Don’t die!” she cried. “Abby, please don’t—slow your heart! Slow the poison!”
But Abby only lay there, still and silent. Elektra searched for a pulse, but there was nothing. She searched again, refusing to give up. “No! No! Abby— come back. Abby, come back!”
For the first time since she had mistakenly plunged her sai into Daredevil’s shoulder and nearly killed him, Elektra cried. And as the tears ran down her face, she gathered Abby in her arms and sprinted for the house.
Elektra remembered.
She remembered being a young girl and coming down the upstairs hallway, how her footsteps had made muffled thumping noises along the long, expensive Persian carpet runner. She remembered standin
g before the closed bedroom door and how tall it seemed, how she had to crane her neck to see above it where the wall and the sixteen-foot ceiling met. Worse than that, she remembered opening the door itself and seeing her mother’s body lying on the bed. In this memory, the real one, her mother was still dead, but the blood from the nearly hidden wound was minimal and there was no demon shrieking at her as it escaped out the window. There was only her mother’s corpse and the blackclad ninja, a figure with which she would become intimately familiar over the course of her life. Yes, her mother had died in this bedroom—
The same room, and the same bed, in which Abby now lay.
As she had done over her mother so many years ago, Elektra hovered over Abby tonight. Elektra could only guess, of course, but even though the tools were different, perhaps this was the same way the two ambulance attendants, those luckless, surprised New York City employees, had watched over her as she’d died under their care.
As she was doing to Abby, Stick had done to her.
It was the way of the warrior.
Doing this for Abby now, Elektra realized she had missed something all these years, and she had started by missing it all the way back when she had trained under Stick in the hidden compound. There was no doubt in her mind that the love, knowledge, and energy flowing from her into this child had come to her in the same way from her mentor, Stick. Had she not been so self-centered and blind to the world around her, so full of rage over the hand that destiny had dealt her, she might have seen that—she might have seen a lot of things. Her fingertips touched Abby’s head, arms, legs, and all the while she whispered in the teenager’s ear, putting herself into the healing, inserting her undeniable will into Abby’s already strong spirit. Her voice was soft and songlike, crooning, and she would not stop, not now, not ever, until she had found her way right down into Abby’s soul.
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