The Mortality Principle (11 page)

Unless, of course, Garin held an ace up his sleeve. He wouldn't put anything past the man.

Morning was already fast approaching as he saw the runway lights of the Prague airport inviting the plane to touch down.

By the time the aircraft had landed and Roux had dealt with the officious representatives of customs and border control and picked up a rental car, the sun would be rising. Once that happened he'd be helpless for twelve hours or so, the killer holed up in his den, safe from his vengeance.

Roux knew he was going to need to get his hands on every last shred of evidence the cops had gathered, assuming they'd gathered anything. Given the nature of the victims, he didn't harbor high hopes. He had tricked his way into more than one police station before, and the various degrees of disinterest to ineptitude never ceased to amaze him when it came to tracking down what seemed bizarre or unusual.

Why should this time be any different?

Who out there was remotely prepared for the possibility of someone like Roux himself even existing? Let alone anything beyond that? The real monsters of the world? Not a prayer.

“Well, good morning, beautiful,” a voice said through the fog of her mind.

The light hurt as Annja opened her eyes.

She was lost.

This wasn't the alleyway.

And she hurt. Everywhere. She had aches in places she didn't know existed. She tried to move, but couldn't. Not at first. A searing stab of pain lanced up under her shoulder blade, causing her face to twist in agony. It took a second or two for the pain to subside. When it finally did, she asked, “Where am I?”

“Hospital,” the voice said. “You're not dead, if that's what you're wondering. I'm not Saint Peter come to check you off my list, to see if you've been naughty or nice.”

Garin.

He sat in the chair beside her with a brown paper bag resting in his lap. The brown skeletal stems were all that remained of the grapes as he popped the last one into his mouth.

“How…?” she started to ask, but then remembered the stars as she fell to the ground.

“To be honest, everyone here is hoping that you'll be
able to tell them. It seems that you were found sprawled on a pile of boxes in someone's backyard. I assume you haven't taken to sleeping on the street, but I will admit, I have absolutely no idea how you managed to get there, or how you managed to sustain your injuries. Looking at the state you're in—there are some really tasty bruises on your back for a start—I'd say you had a lucky escape.”

She couldn't argue with that.

“So, I'm thinking you fell from the roof, and yet managed miraculously to not break a single bone. The docs seem to think that it's some kind of miracle. I just figure its par for the course with you.” He offered a wry smile.

“How did you know I was here?” Annja asked. She knew better than to try to ease herself up in the bed.

“Do you really need to ask?” Garin made a telephone out of his thumb and little finger and held it up to his ear. “I'd like to pretend I tracked you down through cunning and brainpower, triangulating the signal, pinpointing it off various cell towers, then calling in a favor with the local law enforcement, but when you didn't come down for breakfast I tried your cell phone. The nurses did the rest. It's almost as if fate's playing a hand, isn't it? I arrive, you suddenly need me.”

“I'm not sure I'd go so far as to blame fate. Stupidity, maybe, Czech plumbers, more like,” she said, but the pain in her head left her feeling pitiful. She'd screwed up big-time, but she was still in one piece, and to be honest she was glad he was there.

“So, are you going to tell me what you were doing up on that roof?” Garin asked, looking disappointedly down at the empty bag of grapes. He shrugged, crushed
the bag and tossed it into the trash can beside the bed. “I take it you haven't taken up parkour?”

Annja shook her head and regretted it an instant later.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to isolate the pain and push it away into some convenient nerveless quadrant of her body where she couldn't feel it. It didn't help in the slightest.

Her eyes were still closed when she sensed the presence of someone else standing at her bedside.

“Can you tell me where it hurts?” the voice asked. It was a woman's voice, soft and tender and speaking in English.

“Everywhere,” Annja answered, not joking. She opened her eyes, needing one hand to shield them from the light.

“With good reason,” the nurse said. “The human body isn't designed to bounce. It's a fundamental flaw in the design process, if you ask me.”

“You speak English,” Annja said.

“Nope, you're just suffering a really bad case of concussion,” Garin said.

The woman laughed.

“Don't flirt with my doctor,” Annja grumbled, earning another laugh from the woman.

“They called me off another ward when they realized you were a tourist. Then your rather charming friend appeared.”

“He's not charming. He's a very bad man. You really don't want to fall for it, believe me,” she replied, and that was the biggest understatement she could have offered.

“The handsome ones always are,” the doctor said.

“Hey, I am here, you know, and contrary to popular opinion, I do have feelings.”

The doctor offered Garin a lopsided grin, before she leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “So, he's single?”

That earned a laugh from Annja.

“I'm serious. In this place, I don't get to meet too many complications that look like he does.”

“Maybe I should leave?” Garin offered. “I'm beginning to feel like a side of beef in a butcher's window.”

“That might be a good idea,” the doctor said.

“I'll go and grab a coffee. I'll just be down the corridor if you need me.”

“And if we don't, you'll still be just down the corridor, right?”

“Right,” Garin said. “I'll be back later. Don't go anywhere without me.”

The doctor waited until Garin was out of earshot before saying anything else.

“You've got yourself a looker there.”

“Oh, I haven't got him at all, and I'm not sure I'd want him.” Annja chuckled, correcting the doctor's assumption. “You don't want him, either, trust me. He's much more trouble than he's worth.”

“Ah, but he's so pretty.” The doctor grinned. “I could make an exception for that pretty face.”

Annja laughed and wished that she hadn't. The doctor offered her a small plastic cup with a couple of painkillers inside, and then handed her a glass of water. “They should help. I don't want to give you anything stronger if we can avoid it.”

“Thanks,” Annja said as she threw the first of the pills back. The water on the back of her throat made her feel a little more alive. She offered the glass for a refill when she had drained it.

“Better?” the doctor asked when she'd taken the second pill. Annja put the empty glass on the nightstand.

“How long before I'm up and moving again?”

“You took quite a battering.”

“But nothing broken? No internal injuries?”

“You're an incredibly lucky woman. You're going to feel pretty sore for a few days, but apart from a few cuts and some pretty impressive bruises, you don't appear to have done any lasting damage.”

“So I can leave?”

“I'd rather you didn't, to be honest. But I've got to do my rounds. I'll be back in an hour or so. If you can get yourself out of bed and make it to the bathroom and back before I do, we can talk about it. No guarantees, though.”

The doctor left her on her own, with Annja thinking that there were no guarantees in life, anyway. She was already starting to feel better, most likely because of the heightened metabolic rate and increased healing properties of her own flesh and blood ever since she'd bonded with Saint Joan's sword. She wasn't like other women. What would break them barely served to bend her, and where her spine should have been shattered, all she had to show for it was a blue-black stain at the base of her back. Gritting her teeth, Annja pushed against the blankets, and swung her legs around, knowing that if she couldn't get out of bed she wasn't getting out of this place.

There was no way she was staying in here a minute longer than she needed to.

Annja called to Garin, pitching her voice just loud enough for it to bring him back to the door. He poked
his head inside. “You up for busting me out of here, big guy?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” he said. “And you realize by doing so I'm blowing any chance of getting together with the lovely Sam.”

“Sam?”

“Dr. Sammica.” He nodded down the corridor.

“I guess it's not love, then.”

“It very rarely is, Annja. It very rarely is.”

She planted both feet on the floor and tried to stand.

It didn't go well.

Garin caught her, and eased her back down onto the mattress. “Maybe we'll try the great escape in a few minutes, eh?”

“Maybe five,” she agreed.

But five turned into ten, then turned into twenty.

By the time she finally made it out of the bed and onto two very unsteady feet, her cell phone was ringing. The noise earned her a withering look of disapproval from one of the nurses who happened to be passing her door, followed by a muttered instruction she could not understand.

Sometimes there were advantages in being a stranger in a strange land.

It was Roux.

“Where are you?” he asked without preamble.

“The hospital,” she said.

That didn't faze him. He didn't ask what was wrong or what had happened. He simply asked, “Which one?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Never mind. I'll find it,” he said. “Don't go anywhere until I get there. This time I'm serious. Wait there.”

She was about to reassure him that she wouldn't leave when the doctor returned trailing a gaggle of students like a line of ducklings. She read the notes that hung from the metal frame at the bottom of Annja's bed.

“Got to go,” she said before she realized that Roux had already hung up.

She waited while the doctor talked rapidly, not in English this time, offering her students the opportunity to take a look at the notes. Annja saw the look of surprise cross a couple of faces as they discovered the cause of her injuries—or lack of injuries—and the double take as they checked her notes again trying to understand how it could possibly be the case.

The doctor smiled her way. “So, how you are feeling now?”

“Stiff and sore, and a headache that feels like a hangover without all the fun of the night before, but other than that, still in one piece,” Annja said, earning another of those lopsided smiles from the doctor. Her examination was cursory at best. Annja was banking on the fact they'd want to discharge her to free up the bed for someone else.

“I'd really like to run another scan to make sure there's no internal bleeding, but if that's clear I can't see any reason to keep you in here any longer than necessary.”

“Wind me up and point me in the right direction,” Annja said.

“Don't worry, we'll have a nurse come by to bring you down to radiology in an hour, then if it looks fine, you're good to go.”

* * *

A
NNJA WAS ALREADY
dressed and waiting for her prescription painkillers by the time Roux arrived. He looked harried.

She didn't expect to need the pills once she wrapped her hand around the sword's hilt again and got the blood flowing through her muscles.

“I thought I told you to stay in your hotel,” he said.

“And you knew I wouldn't,” she replied, not moving from the chair.

“Touché.” The old man shook his head. “Hoisted on my own petard.”

“Which sounds incredibly painful,” Garin said from the doorway.

Roux looked Annja up and down, taking in the bruising. “But, like it or not, if you had done what I said, you wouldn't be in here now, would you?”

“You're not my father,” she said.

“Or even her grandfather,” Garin offered helpfully.

Yes, he had been her teacher, her trainer, her mentor, even her friend, who she could turn to when she was in trouble, as if they were family.

That ended the objections. The hurt in his eyes was plain to see. Annja regretted the biting comment, but she didn't apologize.

“So what happened?”

Annja filled them in on everything that had happened to her the night before, including Turek's assertions about the first body she'd found being a witness to a previous murder, and how she'd stumbled across another body in the same alleyway. She described the witness reports kept out of the papers, and why Turek believed the golem was hunting. Finally she explained how she'd gone in pursuit of the killer across the rooftops, matching some if not all of the eyewitness reports with her own eyes, but how at last the roof had betrayed her and she'd lost her footing.

“Thirty feet is a long way down,” Roux observed.

“Hey, at least she found something nice and soft to break her fall,” Garin said.

“If I'd have had a choice, I wouldn't have fallen at
all,” Annja said. She spotted the doctor coming up behind Garin. She had a clear plastic bag in her hand. “Your meds,” the doctor said as Garin moved aside. And to Garin, “My number.” She handed him her card. Garin pocketed it with a grin.

“I'll make sure I give you a call.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Roux asked.

“She's free to go.”

“Excellent. Up you get, then.”

Roux turned to Garin. “Any chance you could make yourself scarce? I was hoping to have a little time with Annja alone.”

“I can take a hint,” Garin said, showing no sign of taking offence at the old man's directness. He turned to the doctor. “So, what time are you due to take a break? A girl's gotta eat, after all.”