The Mortality Principle (16 page)

The killer could not be that far ahead of them if he was heading for the border, she reasoned, so deciding to take the brief detour she saw no reason to delay Turek.

She made the call.

“I'll meet you there,” she promised.

“Got a better offer?” Turek asked.

They had decided to take both cars, but he was only a matter of twenty yards ahead of her.

“Something I need to take care of,” she said. She didn't elaborate because she didn't really know what she could say to explain the hunch.

“And it's something that can't wait?” the journalist asked, sounding slightly exasperated. It wasn't that she
was bailing on him that annoyed him; he was only after the story, not the killer, so it didn't matter if he was an hour behind the monster or a day, as long as he got to the truth before any other reporter. The gold was always in being the first. That was what got the book deals.

“Not sure,” she said. “I'll see you at the border. Let me know if there's anything strange going on while you're waiting.”

“Will do, but be honest with me, you're not cutting me out, are you? You're not off chasing a lead that will take you to the killer and leave me with nothing?”

“I promise,” Annja said.

“I'm serious. I need to be the one who breaks the story. I've done all the groundwork. No one else was interested in what the people on the street were saying. This is my story, Annja. It could change my life, see me on the staff of one the nationals.”

“If I turn anything up I'll let you know, but I promise you, I'm not trying to screw you. I don't even know what it is about this place. It just rings a bell so I need to check it out. I won't be more than an hour. Cover the border, and don't let the killer escape, Jan. This is bigger than just the story. Lives are at stake.”

“I know that, Annja. I'm counting on you,” the reporter said as he hung up.
Counting on her.
He wasn't the only one who was counting on her, was he? Every vagrant between here and the border was counting on her to stop the killer even if they didn't know it. Everyone sleeping on the street that night and every coming night was counting on her even if they never met Annja Creed. That was the burden of who and what she was, and only she could carry it.

She tripped the blinker and took the turn toward Benátky, hoping that the hunch would pay out.

As she drove, Annja half expected to see something to suggest she was on the right track, an omen, a portent, something, even if it was just a murder of crows lining the trees at the roadside. But there were no more blue flashing lights up ahead to indicate anything out of the ordinary. And that was what she was looking for, wasn't it? Something out of the ordinary.

She scanned the silhouettes of the buildings as she approached the town. The sky was full of stars, a reminder of just how far outside the city she'd traveled. A few of the houses still had lights on in their windows, but the streets were deserted.

She drove slowly through the streets, looking, but not sure what it was she was looking for.

This would be the perfect hunting ground for the killer if its prey could be found on these streets, she realized.

The needle on the speedometer barely touched fifteen kilometers an hour. No matter how much she looked, she couldn't see anything to suggest she was on anything but a wild-goose chase.

Annja pulled the car over to the side of the road, ignoring the parking restrictions painted on the asphalt. There wasn't anyone around to enforce them.

She needed to think.

She wanted to know where Roux was. More importantly, she wanted to know why he had left her in the hotel room.

He knew more than he was telling her, that much was painfully obvious. He felt some sort of personal guilt, too. So somewhere in between his secrets and his guilt
was the difference between success and failure, whatever that might be. His tight lips frustrated her. They always did. So many times he had known things that he had chosen not to share until it put her at risk or dragged her deeper into trouble. He'd always protested it was for her own good, to keep her safe, but that was nonsense. It was to keep Roux in control. He was a control freak.

She killed the headlights, turned off the engine and listened to the silence of the street.

There was nothing.

The silence was absolute.

There were no background sounds of the city life Prague offered.

She settled back into her seat and waited.

So much for instincts. What was she supposed to do now that she was here? There was no point in sitting and waiting for something to happen. She had to be out there looking for the killer, who could be anywhere in the world—or if not the world, in the miles of countryside surrounding Prague—and almost certainly not here in this silent township in the middle of nowhere.

She looked down at her hands, wondering if she'd just made the mistake that would let the killer slip through her fingers again.

Garin slipped out of sight for a moment when he entered the town.

There was no other traffic around and following Garin too closely would only serve to arouse suspicion. There was nothing to be gained by giving the game away now, so close to the finish line. So much of the place remained recognizable despite the passage of time. There were changes, of course, subtle ones, little things like the overhead wires of the telephone network that would no doubt disappear again in a few years as 4G took hold and wiped out the need for landlines. But none of those subtle changes were enough to turn the town into an unfamiliar place.

Roux waited when Garin's sports car—as out of place as that fine craftsmanship could ever be—took a turn and disappeared out of sight.

He rolled down his window so he could listen for its engine as it negotiated the narrow streets.

He heard the sound of the engine change, grumbling throatily one last time before being silenced.

Garin had stopped not far around the corner, close enough for Roux to hear the echoing slam of the door as he closed it.

Roux left his own car where it was and climbed out, but unlike Garin, he closed the door as quietly as he could so as not to betray his presence. He hugged the wall as he made his way to the corner.

Hearing the sound of footsteps moving away from him, he chanced a look around the building's edge to see Garin disappear into an alleyway.

He knew that the winding passage would lead the way to the castle.

This was the place where it had all started.

It was also the place where he had thought it had all ended.

Roux had been wrong. He knew that now. Their presence here was all he needed to know just how wrong he had been.

But would the killer really return to this place?

Or was it worse than he had first suspected and it had never left? He couldn't bring himself to believe that, because that would mean someone else was mimicking its actions, and the only person capable of something like that—of having the knowledge, the skill and the sheer bloody ruthlessness—was Garin. And that was his deepest, darkest fear. Garin
was
capable of everything that killer had done. Had fighting monsters for so long, finally turned him into one? They had spent six centuries and more waging battles of one kind or another.

What had that cost them in terms of their souls and selves?

Prague. They had pursued the killer across Europe, through every valley and ridge, to finally find themselves in Prague, and yet they were still a decent morning's ride away from the site of the most recent death. They were always traveling in the killer's footsteps, gaining a little but never enough, and no matter how hard they'd ridden their horses, how many times they had changed their carriages and how little they had slept, the murderer was always ahead of them.

They had done everything humanly possible to keep up the punishing pace, taking it in turns to drive the coach they had bought, switching out the horses for fresh ones at inns along the way, but nothing helped. They still had to eat. They still grew tired. They still had to rest, pausing inevitably for longer than they needed to.

But always they gave chase again, dogging the killer's trail.

There had been stories of murders here—one of them recent, the other many years ago, but somehow a connection had been drawn between the two. In drinking houses in the back alleys of the town it was the only topic of conversation. The legend endured. “This has
to be the end of it, surely?” Garin said. “We can't keep chasing this shadow forever. There has to be a place along the road where we say enough is enough.”

“Admit defeat?” Roux asked, shielding his eyes from the early-morning sun. “Why would we want to give up? The killer
can't
keep going forever. It is impossible. We are closer today than we were yesterday. We have to catch up with him eventually.”

“Can't it? How do you know that? Apart from optimism? Who says he can't keep going? I don't like the word
can't
, old man. After all, we seem to defy that word quite a lot ourselves, don't we?”

Roux fell silent.

There were things that he had no intention of sharing with his protégé, things that he would rather take to the grave. The idea of giving up, though, stuck in his craw.

Until that moment, until Garin voiced the possibility, it hadn't even crossed his mind.

“If you have all the time in the world, why would you give up on anything?” he asked. It was a philosophical question, but there was an element of truth to it. There was no finite “end” that said they had to give up the chase. There was no clock inside their bodies counting down to oblivion.

“There will always be another tomorrow,” Roux continued, “and beyond that there will always be another day when we can think about doing something else. Today we catch a killer. It doesn't matter how many todays that takes, does it? When you have all the time in the world, why would you worry about wasting any of it?”

Garin only shrugged, but despite his grand words Roux knew exactly what he meant; he was growing
bored of the chase. This had nothing to do with being concerned about wasting time or watching life pass him by. Garin knew that Roux was interested in finding the shards of Saint Joan's sword—he cried out in his sleep often enough, his guilt at the memory of watching her burn all but overpowering even after all this time. He even knew why he was so driven to find it: the belief that it might offer an end to their seeming endless time in this mortal coil. But unlike the old man, his apprentice had no hankering for death. He would quite happily live gloriously and eternally, sucking the marrow out of the bones of the world and all of the people he encountered along the way.

“So,” Garin asked, letting that one word linger as he did his best to shift the conversation in a less contentious direction. “What do you think of all this gossip? Could we have been chasing a golem all this time? A man-made man?”

“Nonsense,” Roux said. “There's no such thing. It's a fairy tale.”

“How can you say that after everything we've seen?”

“Because it's all nonsense. No matter what else, we both know that it's impossible to make something out of nothing. You can't take a handful of dust and clay and turn it into a living thing. It cannot be done. It's wishful thinking. It's not magic or alchemy or any form of science. It is pure fairy tale.”

“Or is it? Just because we haven't come across it on our wandering doesn't mean it's not possible, that there's not some underlying universal law beyond our understanding.” Roux understood the point well enough.

“Yes, of course there is an element of truth to that,” Roux agreed. “There is more to the world than any
one of us knows. But do you really think there could ever be a science so powerful that it could fashion life not from the living?” The thing was, Garin was right; there was no way that he could be absolutely sure it wasn't possible. Living almost four centuries wasn't possible, and yet they had done it, hadn't they? And in those four hundred years Roux had seen a great many things that should not have been possible and yet they had happened.

But could that mean the killer they sought had emerged from myth? Surely not. It made no sense, no sense at all.

“It's the last great miracle, isn't it? Over the past century man has taken every power believed to be supernatural and found a way to harness it. All save the creation of life. So surely, that's the next step? That's the next great scientific leap? The mortality principle?”

Roux really didn't have the words to argue with the younger man. The world was changing. Fast. So many of those changes were happening faster than he could comfortably adapt to. This wasn't the world he had been born into. There would come a time when it had all advanced beyond him, he knew, and he did not look forward to that day.

“If you truly believe we are nearing the end of this journey, we need to find him before he moves on,” Roux said. “End it here.”

“You think the killer is still here? Surely he has already moved on. Kill and move. Kill and move. How else could he stay ahead of us?”

“I don't think he's left yet,” Roux said. It had taken a while for a simple idea to percolate in his brain, becoming an itch that he couldn't quite scratch. It had nagged
away at him for so long that there had been nights when he had lain awake trying to unravel a jumble of thoughts to find the irritant. But it was always there, and it always came back to the same question:
Why had no one seen a stranger traveling alone despite the distance that the killer had covered?

It didn't make sense.

How could the brute make his way from town to town without ever being seen? Surely his simple presence on the road would raise suspicion. A lonely traveler leaving death in his wake? People should see him. People should be talking about him, fearful, suspicious…