The Dragon’s Mark (19 page)

Unfortunately, the blow to the head had slowed her down a bit, and the cuts on her feet dropped her speed even more. When she reached the edge of the roof she planted one foot on the small ledge that ran around the top and launched herself into space, only realizing that she didn’t have enough speed when she was halfway across the gap.

She wasn’t going to make it.

As she watched, the Dragon touched down on the other side and kept going, widening the distance between them without looking back.

The edge of the roof was coming up fast and Annja could tell she was going to be an inch, maybe two, short. She stretched as far as she could, reaching out with her fingers, praying all the while.

One hand caught the edge of the roof, barely grabbing on with just the tips of her fingers.

Her body slammed into the side of the building, the force of the impact almost jarring her loose, but Annja held on with all her strength, crimping her fingers the way she’d once been shown in rock-climbing class. By some miracle she managed to remain hanging on to the edge of the building, though by only the thinnest of margins.

Having originally been worried that the Dragon was going to get away, now all Annja could do was hope that he didn’t come back. If he wanted to kill her, now would be the perfect time. All it would take would be a little tap on the fingers and she’d plunge to the concrete below.

“L
OOK
!” J
ESSI SHOUTED AND
as one the group turned to follow her pointed finger. Above their heads, between the buildings, they could see someone hanging off the edge of the roof.

Marco radioed Dave. “Can you tell who it is?” he asked.

“No. They’re out of my sight now, behind the next building over.”

Terrified that Creed was going to die on his watch and he’d have to explain how it had all gone wrong to Henshaw, Marco rushed for the entrance to the building, praying he’d be in time.

S
LOWLY, EVER SO SLOWLY
, Annja reached up with her other hand, being careful not to twist and pull herself off the roof. Gradually, inch by inch, she managed to get her other hand over the edge of the rooftop.

She rested there a minute, then began to pull herself upward, as if doing a chin-up, intending to get herself high enough to throw an elbow over the edge and secure some leverage to pull the rest of her body back to safety.

Unfortunately, the roof had other ideas.

The low wall that lined the outer edge of the roof had seen more than its share of harsh winters, acid rain and time’s steady but corroding hand. The section Annja was clinging to chose that moment to voice its displeasure at the conditions it was forced to endure by crumbling beneath her weight.

One minute she was pulling herself upward, the next she was twisting in the wind again, barely hanging on with one hand, while chunks of masonry plummeted to shatter on the street far below.

She wanted to kick her legs and flail about with her arms, but she fought the instinctual motion that her body cried out for and willed herself to hold still. Any extraneous motion at this point could pull her right off the roof.

To make matters worse, her left hand was starting to slip, as well. She could feel her fingers slowly sliding backward, one millimeter at a time.

She guessed she had less than a minute before her hand would slide totally free.

After that, it was all over.

M
ARCO DASHED UP THE STAIRS
three at a time, muttering under his breath all the while.

“Hold on,” he was saying. “Hold on, hold on.”

He kept a sharp eye out for whoever it had been that Annja had been chasing, but he didn’t meet anyone on the stairs, and by the time he burst onto the rooftop his attention was solely on rescuing the woman whose life he was supposed to be protecting.

He couldn’t see her from where he stood and he didn’t have time to search every side.

He keyed the radio.

“Which way?” he asked, nearly frantic with worry.

Dave was immediately on the line with an answer. “Left. In the middle.”

Marco rushed over to the edge.

A
NNJA TRIED TO SWING
her right arm up and over the edge, but the motion only served to make her other hand slip faster. She wrapped her thumb over the tops of her fingers, bearing down, but it was too late—she’d slid too far and couldn’t find any traction to keep from slipping farther.

“I am not going to die like this!” she said through gritted teeth, and was about to call her sword, thinking she could jam it into the masonry or something as a last-ditch effort, when she heard footsteps charging in her direction.

The Dragon.

Apparently letting her fall to her death wasn’t good enough; he had to help her along the way.

Well, two could play at the game.

As her fingers began to slip faster, Annja brought forth her sword. If she was going to die, she would do what she could to take the Dragon with her.

M
ARCO RUSHED OVER TO
the edge. As he drew closer he saw her hand, and watched in dismay as her fingers slid backward.

“No!” he shouted, and dove forward, arms outstretched.

The fingers of his left hand touched something soft, something alive, and he seized it with all the desperation he could muster.

He felt her fingers wrap around his wrist in return, locking them into a mountain climber’s grasp.

Then her weight asserted itself and he felt himself being dragged forward.

His head popped over the edge the roof and he found himself staring into those amber eyes he’d first noted in that photograph back in Paris.

The sword that was suddenly thrust upward at his face was a shock.

He closed his eyes and instinctively jerked his head back, while simultaneously trying to brace himself against the pressure that was pulling him forward.

“Hold on, lady!” he shouted, trying to preserve his cover without even thinking about it, so ingrained was the instinct to keep from revealing who he was or what he was truly doing there.

He got his knees braced against the wall and planted his feet, stopping their forward slide. Now all he had to do was pull her up.

A
NNJA HAD NO IDEA WHO
the guy was or where he had come from, but she was suddenly glad she hadn’t skewered him when he’d poked his head over the edge. Jabbing her sword into his chest might have ended his rescue attempt a bit prematurely.

As it was she was starting to doubt that he had the strength to pull her up, but she’d let him worry about that because she could barely feel her arm.

The minute she’d realized he wasn’t the Dragon she’d released her sword back into the otherwhere, and now she used her right hand to reach up and grab on to his wrist from the opposite side, trapping his arm between both of her hands.

Well, if you’re going to fall, at least you won’t be going alone, she thought grimly.

Her Good Samaritan was stronger than he looked and with a few heaves backward he managed to pull her up and over the ledge and back onto the rooftop.

Then he collapsed onto the ground and tried to catch his breath.

Annja didn’t blame him; her heart was racing a bit wildly at that moment, as well.

“Are you all right?” he gasped out eventually.

“Yeah. Thanks to you,” she said.

He shrugged it off, apparently not the prideful type.

But something wasn’t feeling quite right to Annja and she wanted to know more. “How did you know I was in trouble?” she asked, and despite nearly falling off the roof she watched him closely.

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the stairwell. “I was on the stairs, headed for my apartment, when I saw you through the window. I knew there was no way you were going to make that jump,” he sucked in another lungful of air. “So I ran up the stairs.”

“And here you are.”

He nodded, and then turned to look at her for the first time since he’d pulled her to safety. “Yep. Here I am.”

Good enough, she thought. So far he hadn’t said anything about the sword, so maybe she should get out of there while the going was still good.

She climbed shakily to her feet, thanked him again for saving her life and quickly left the roof, and his protests, behind.

It was only when she was halfway down the stairs that it occurred to her to wonder what he was doing up and about at that hour of the day.

Just be thankful he was, she thought, and left it at that.

M
ARCO MADE SEVERAL HALFHEARTED
protests to keep Annja from leaving, but he was relieved when she did. If she had started asking any more questions he would have been hard-pressed to answer them. This way, he at least had a shot at keeping the surveillance team from being compromised.

He waited a good half hour before making his own way back down to street level. Annja Creed was nowhere in sight, so he kept his head down and headed for the preplanned rendezvous point.

Marco wanted to have a long talk with Dave. If he found out he’d been sleeping on watch again…

E
XHAUSTED FROM THE FIGHT
and from the release of all that adrenaline, Annja returned to her loft just long enough to pack a change of clothes, grab a first-aid kit and throw on a pair of shoes. The Dragon had been in her apartment once, possibly more than that, so it wasn’t safe for her to stay there anymore. She knew a decent hotel a few blocks away and she decided to hole up there for the time being until she could figure out just what to do.

She checked in, took a shower and then, using the supplies in the medical kit, tended to her torn and bloody feet.

Remind me never to do that again, she told herself, wincing as she applied hydrogen peroxide to the cuts and then wrapped them in soft gauze to help them heal.

When she was finished, she collapsed onto the bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.

She awoke later that morning to the insistent buzzing of her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Annja! Thank God I found you. You’ve got to come down to the studio and fix this!”

She sighed; Doug in a frenzy was really not what she needed right now. “Fix what, Doug?”

“The episode! We’ve got to trim another six minutes and thirty seconds from the footage. Maybe we could…”

Annja let him drone on for a moment, then cut in when she could. “I’ll be down within the hour, Doug. Don’t do anything until I get there.” She hung up before he could protest further.

Spending a few hours in the editing room with Doug wasn’t her idea of a fun time, but she needed to take her mind off the Dragon and her close call from earlier that morning.

Fighting with her producer might be just the thing.

Most of Annja’s day was taken up with correcting the issues that had come up after Doug had begun to do the final edits on the episode. She spent the afternoon working with him and by the time she was done night had fallen and the streets were full of commuters trying to get home from work. People pushed past on both sides, but she barely noticed, her focus completely inward.

The past few days had been a blur of action and reaction. She was being stalked by an international assassin for reasons unknown, though she was pretty sure it had to do with the sword she carried. She’d been attacked twice in the past forty-eight hours, more than likely by men in the assassin’s employ. The assassin himself had broken into her hotel room, sent someone to interrupt her lunch and was, more likely than not, out there, somewhere, right now, watching.

She’d seen a hypnotist, allowed herself to be put in a trance and been able to draw a perfect replication of the emblem on the assassin’s own sword, a sword that was most likely cursed and just as mystical as her own. She’d even watched a man die only inches away from her, and she couldn’t imagine that death by subway was an easy way to go. Last but not least, the assassin himself broke into her loft and tried to kill her while she slept.

Frankly it was a lot to take in.

Annja walked down the street, lost in thought. She had lots of questions but few answers. What did the Dragon want? How had he found out about her? What did he know about the sword she carried? How did her sword compare to his?

What made it all the more frustrating was that she felt as though the answers were all right there in front of her and she just wasn’t seeing them clearly enough to put everything together into a coherent whole. Like having all the pieces of a puzzle but, without a picture to work from, she didn’t know if the blue pieces represented the ocean, the sky or some other colored object.

As a scientist, she was used to looking at things through a logical progression that more often than not was based on a cause-and-effect relationship between two items. In order to sort through the mess she found herself in, she decided to apply the same elemental logic and see where that got her.

So what did she know?

She knew there had once been an international hit man known as the Dragon, who apparently had survived the explosion everyone else thought had killed him, and he was following her around New York City.

Garin had claimed that the Dragon carried a sword that was the mystical opposite of her own, the dark to her light. The information she’d managed to haul out of her subconscious while under hypnosis had provided her with the image she’d seen etched onto the Dragon’s sword, and her visit to Dr. Yee had revealed that the sword itself might be the fabled Juuchi Yosamu, Ten Thousand Cold Nights, the final
katana
produced by the master swordsmith, Sengo Muramasa. The sword was said to have been instilled with all the bloodthirsty madness that had characterized Muramasa’s final days. All of which confirmed what Garin had been suggesting.

The Dragon had passed up the opportunity to kill her on two different occasions; first, during the assault at Roux’s estate, and later while she lay sleeping in her hotel room in Paris. Since then his agents had not only followed her about New York, but had tried to kidnap her, as well.

Clearly he wanted something from her.

And there was only one thing, she knew, that was possibly valuable enough for him to go through all the trouble. One thing that he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on simply by killing her outright.

Her sword.

It came when she called. It existed to do her bidding and her bidding alone. While she wasn’t positive, she suspected that killing her would leave the sword lost in the otherwhere until it chose another bearer, and who knew when that might be?

It was the only thing that made sense.

The Dragon wanted Joan’s sword.

With that realization the Dragon’s demands from the night before finally made sense. “Give it to me!” he’d said. At the time she’d had no idea what he was referring to. She had, in fact, assumed that he’d been mistaken in thinking that she had some rare or unusual artifact in her possession.

You were right, in a way, she told herself. Except the artifact in question was none other than her sword.

Annja had no intention of giving it to him.

She found herself at the Eighty-first Street entrance to Central Park and decided that a walk through the park would be a nice way to end the evening. The thought of going back to her apartment, the one the Dragon himself had been in on more than one occasion, just wasn’t all that appealing at the moment. If she had to, she could always catch a cab back to Brooklyn when she got to the other side, on Fifth Avenue.

There were quite a few people still in the park, despite the fact that evening had come and the sun had already set, and Annja enjoyed the sensation of getting lost among them, anonymous even if only for a few stolen minutes.

She had been wandering the grounds for about fifteen minutes when she saw him.

He was hanging back, not making it too obvious, but there was no doubt that he was keeping her in sight, lingering in her wake.

He was wearing a dark windbreaker and slacks, with a hat pulled low over his face so that she wasn’t able, especially from this distance, to get a good look at his features.

It was at least the second time in as many days that she had been followed and she was starting to resent the attention. They hadn’t been shy about chasing her through the subway system and she had the same feeling now; the tourists around her would not be a deterrent to her capture, if that was indeed what he wanted.

For a moment she was tempted to confront him directly, to shout, “Hey, you!” and start striding determinedly toward him, just to see what he would do. Only the idea that he might just pull a gun and simply shoot her, prevented her from such a brash course of action.

Instead of a direct confrontation, she opted for a more covert approach.

R
OUX WAS BORED
.

He’d only been in the hotel for a little over twenty-four hours, but laying low and staying out of sight was not something he was interested in doing. For a man who had lived as long as he had, he had surprisingly little patience.

He knew Henshaw had things under control with regard to the Dragon’s sudden interest in Annja. That wasn’t the problem. The problem lay in the fact that if he had to sit there and stare at those same four walls for another minute he was going to go nuts. Why did Henshaw have him hiding out anyway? Annja was the one in danger, not him!

“Enough of this!” he said to himself, and got up to dress for dinner. Roux had old-fashioned tastes and one of the things that he appreciated about the Waldorf was that you were expected to be properly dressed for dinner. None of this casual-dress nonsense that seemed to have become the norm, and thank the heavens for that, he thought.

Attired in a crisp blue suit and matching tie, Roux headed for the main dining room.

Two hours later he was relaxing after his meal over a glass of brandy when he spotted the most exquisite young woman sitting alone several tables away. She was Asian, looked to be in her twenties, and was dressed in a figure-hugging black dress that highlighted her every curve. She had that classic porcelain-doll look—pale skin, full red lips, her long hair as dark as oil at midnight.

Her beauty wasn’t what had attracted his attention, however, but rather the fact that she had been casting surreptitious glances in his direction throughout his meal.

It appeared he’d found something that would make a worthwhile diversion for the evening.

Roux’s success with young women was matched only by his skill at the poker table. The trick, he knew, was to make them think it was all their idea.

He caught and held her glance for a long moment, then signaled for his bill. When the waiter brought it, he signed it to his room and, taking his drink with him, he moved across the restaurant to the bar on the other side of the room.

He intentionally chose a seat several chairs away from anyone else and waited, knowing the conclusion was already a foregone one.

“Is anyone sitting here?” a feminine voice asked.

Roux turned to find the young beauty from the restaurant indicating the chair beside him, a smile on her face and a spark in her eyes.

“Please,” he replied, smiling back. “Be my guest.”

She slid deftly onto the seat, managing to look extraordinarily graceful and at the same time giving him a flash of tanned and supple thigh through the slit in the side of her dress as she did so.

Roux couldn’t help but smile.

It was going to be an interesting evening, after all.

The bartender wandered over. Roux’s new companion glanced at his glass and said, “I’ll have one of what he’s having.”

Roux raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

She turned to face him. “Aren’t you even going to ask me my name?” she asked with a smile.

“No. If you want me to know it I’m sure that you’ll tell me eventually.”

“And if I don’t?” There was amusement in her voice.

“Then our lovemaking will be all the more passionate for the mystery.”

She laughed aloud at that one. “That’s rather forward of you. What gives you the idea that I intend to sleep with you?”

“Because a woman like you can’t resist a challenge.” Roux grinned and extended his hand. “But if it will set you at ease, my name is Roux.”

Her grip was strong. “Hello, Roux.”

Now it was Roux’s turn to laugh when she didn’t give her name in return. “I take it that puts the ball firmly in my court?”

The bartender returned with her drink and she took a healthy swallow of the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old brandy as if she had it every day.

“Do you think you are up to it?” she asked.

“We’ll never know unless we give it a try, now, will we?”

Her eyes smoldered. “What did you have in mind?”

Roux shrugged. “How about we retire to my suite and see what we can do with a full bottle of this fine brandy?”

“An excellent suggestion.” Her smile turned mischievous. “Maybe, if you’re good, I’ll tell you my name when we’re finished.”

“Whatever the lady desires,” Roux replied.

He signed the check, asked for a bottle to be delivered to his suite and then extended an arm to the gorgeous young creature by his side.

They didn’t say much in the elevator, though more than a few sidelong glances passed between them. They made some small talk about nothing of consequence on the way to his suite and arrived to find room service already waiting outside with their order.

Roux opened the door, let his guest inside and then dealt with the room-service waiter. He left the cart in the entrance hallway where it wouldn’t be in their way and, drinks in hand, Roux returned to living room, only to find it empty. The bedroom door was open and a pair of high heels lay discarded in the entrance. Just beyond, her cast-off dress lay in a pool of silk.

Her voice floated out of the darkened bedroom. “Bring me that drink, Roux. I’m thirsty.”

Never one to deny a beautiful woman, he did as he was told, an I-told-you-so grin on his face.

The lights were off in the bedroom, but there was enough illumination coming through the thin curtains covering the windows to reveal his guest, now naked, languishing across his sheets. The light cast dappled shadows across her sensuous form and as she rolled to face him the tattoo of the dragon that covered much of her taut young flesh seemed to ripple and writhe, as if the creature was rising to life from the surface of her skin.

“Come to bed, Roux.”

As uncharacteristic as it was of him, Roux again did as he was told.