Elektra (18 page)

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.

T
ATTOO LAY DEAD AT HER FEET, BUT
E
LEKTRA
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.

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!
—