[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]that separates the pool area from the front of the huge mansion that she and her family call home.
She will make a grand, proud entrance, and she can t wait to tell her mother how well she s done at her
exercises today. She ll
The front door to the house is wide open.
Puzzled, Elektra stands in the foyer and looks around, but no one s there not her parents, nor any of
the servants, or even a visitor. After a few indecisive moments, she climbs the long, curving staircase
that leads to the second floor. The polished oak steps are well made and don t makea sound beneath her
slight weight; at the top of the staircase, she turns left and heads for the master bedroom suite. With her
eyes focused on the door, Elektra nearly steps in the thick pool of blood that is seeping from beneath.
She skids to a stop and stares at the crimson puddle creeping into the fabric of the carpet, feeling terror
rush into her throat and build a lump that threatens to cut off her breathing. There is somuchof it, and
it s so dark surely it must be paint, some new creative project that her mom was trying and which had
gotten the best of her. People didn t have that much liquid inside them.
Did they?
Her heart is thundering in her chest, the sound of her own blood rushing so loudly through her arteries
that she can barely hear her own small voice as she timidly pushes open the bedroom door.
M-mom?
Something big and black a demon! hisses and shrieks at her. Elektra screams and throws herself
backward, instinctively levering herself out of the swipe the thing takes at her face. Before she can react
or run, the demon launches itself onto the windowsill where the curtains are billowing in the fresh
summertime air. It turns and growls something at her, then jumps, and it isn t until she puts both hands
behind her to push off that Elektra realizes she had ended up kneeling in the blood. She gasps and gets
up anyway, wiping her hands automatically on her legs and succeeding only inspreading it farther. She
stumbles forward, looking around wildly, until she gets to the edge of the king-size bed
And sees her mother lying there.
She s dead, her body the source of the blood that had gathered and crawled across the carpet to the
doorway. Her head is thrown back above the wide path of red that leaks from beneath her corpse, and in
her beautiful face her eyes the same color as Elektra s are open but she isn t seeing her daughter, or
anything else, anymore.
Elektra s throat hitches and she feels tears sting behind her eyelids, but she will not allow herself to cry.
Quietly, as though her mother were only sleeping, Elektra reaches over and lifts her mother s necklace
from her throat. It s a small ankh, a symbol that her mother was never without; Elektra will keep it
forever and ever& .
Amen.
PRESENT DAY, HARBOR ISLAND
At two a.m. Elektra woke up shaking and sweating and remembering, and hating the memories and
herself for bringing the badness back to rattle around in her head. Her eyes were wide open and her
mind was crawling around old stuff, bad stuff, jobs completed and people left dead for both good and
bad reasons. Funny how tired she could be, limbs leaden and slow and blood so thick and sluggish that
it felt like her heart couldn t even pump the stuff, but still she was wide awake, her gaze skimming the
darkness like a female mosquito hunting for fresh blood in the middle of the night.
She made herself get up and go in the bathroom, found the new bottle of sleeping pills McCabe had
made sure was packed with her move-in items. With only the night-light on, she swallowed two of the
tablets without bothering to get a glass of water, staring at her faint reflection in the mirror as her throat
worked the pills downward. Finally she went back in the bedroom and climbed into bed.
The pills didn t help if anything, they just made her mind more slave than controller of her
imagination.
By two-thirty she could have sworn she was looking at DeMarco only a few feet away, still sitting on
the chair in which he d died across from his fancy fireplace& except now it was in Elektra s beach
house bedroom. She could see hersai still jammed into his chest, conveniently preventing him from
squeezing the trigger of that dangerous little Heckler & Koch with which he d planned to kill her. She
stared at him for a while, knowing that the whole thing had to be some sort of sleep-deprivation
hallucination, but it didn t go away. Fine if DeMarco wouldn t leave, she would. She rolled out of bed
and walked out of the bedroom, purposely staring at the carpet instead of the dead man who couldn t
possibly be there.
By three-fifteen she was pacing the floor again, back and forth, this time in the living room. A sudden
shriek made her whirl it sounded so much like the one in the memories she had of her mother s
bedroom on the day of her death. But no& it was just the teakettle, sounding the alarm that the water
was boiling. Nerves jangling, Elektra made herself a steaming cup of vanilla-tinged chamomile the
stuff was supposed to relax you and lull you to sleep then shed her sleep clothes in favor of
comfortable workout garb. It didn t take long to fire up some music on her portable CD player, good
hard stuff with a nonstop, driving beat that kept pace with her as she did a high-speed jump rope
routine. If evil was sweat, then the tea and the workout raised her body temperature and helped to drive
away the personal demons, at least for a little while. It wasn t long before her skin was glistening and
her clothes were soaked.
By four a.m. she was working on her arms and upper body, counting out her numbers with excruciating
slowness, gasping and trembling with the effort of hauling her body weight upward using only one arm
Forty-eight& forty-nine& fifty.
Elektra let go of the overhead bar and allowed herself to drop to the carpet. For a long while she simply
stood there, waiting for the burn in her muscles to subside and for her heart rate to come down a bit,
stop its jackhammering inside her chest so she could get on with the next part.
Finally she felt strong enough again.
She looked up at the bar, then leaped and gripped it with the other hand.
One& two& three&
Still in her workout clothes, Elektra was lying diagonally across the bed when the sun crested the
horizon and the first of its rays bounced off the water. Despite the sleeping pills, the tiredness, the
brutally difficult workout, there had been no sleep for her last night, just as happened more often than
not. Once again, rest had eluded her, and she certainly wouldn t find it with the sunshine burning its
way through her windows and her eyelids. Exhausted and sore, she dragged herself up and off the bed;
as she pushed through the beach door and into the moisture-laden morning air outside, she felt like
some strange cross between Sisyphus and a zombie.
She wasn t sure how long it took her to get there, but eventually Elektra found herself walking along a
section of the beach that was awash in driftwood. It must have been something about the current and the
tide that did it, but twisted pieces of the stuff lay everywhere, like the inexplicable skeletons of alien
creatures for which humans had no name. She lost herself for a while as she walked among the wood
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
