The Lost Sisterhood (57 page)

Just as the men began to back up, however, the front door slammed shut behind us, and we found ourselves in total darkness. Too shocked to act on anything other than instinct, I ducked out of Reznik’s grip and moved away from the men. Pressing myself against the wall, barely registering the pain when I hit my head on one of the coat hooks, I could hear the cursing and trampling of heavy combat boots as Reznik’s goons tried to locate the door, and then suddenly …

A blinding burst of light from above and a horrible, frenzied whipping sound engulfed us for several seconds, reminding me of nothing I had ever heard before.

Shielding my eyes from the violent rays of light, it took a moment to make out the bodies lying sprawled on the floor by the door, pinned in place by dozens of arrows. It was a grotesque, sickening sight. Most of the arrows had been aimed at their heads and faces above the armored vests. Already pooling on the floor was the blood streaming from the gruesome wounds.

The only two men who had not been hurt were Reznik and James, who both stood pressed against the wall to the dining room, hidden, as was I, from the eyes of the archers on the gallery right above us.

It took Reznik a moment to fathom that all his men were dead, upstairs as well as downstairs, and that we were the only three left alive. When his eyes met mine, his face became so contorted with fury he no longer resembled a human being. “You tricked me!” he growled, charging toward me along the wall, staying clear of the archers’ target zone.

I didn’t even have time to wonder about his intentions. The gun in his hand and the livid expression on his face were all I needed to reach
out for the umbrella stand. Fortunately, the rusty old rapier was still there.

Unprepared for the sight of me holding a weapon, Reznik kept coming forward without seeming to register the danger. “Come on!” he barked at James, who was still petrified with shock. “We’ll use her as a hostage!” Still pointing the gun at me, Reznik reached out for my arm with his free hand, but I managed to get the rapier between us.

“Don’t you dare!” I said, my voice so calm it surprised even me. Somehow, holding a weapon I knew so well made me able to think straight again. “I’m going back to Nick—”

“The fuck you are!” Reznik forced the blade aside with his arm and aimed the gun at my face. “You’re coming with
me.
”

At that moment, a woman armed with a machete emerged from the door to the dining hall right behind him. Pitana. She did not charge Reznik, but pulled back silently, realizing the danger I was in.

That was all it took. Reznik glanced over his shoulder to see what had caught my eye, and I lunged forward, disarming him with a thrust to the wrist. Crying out with surprise and pain, he clutched the wound with his other hand. The gun fell to the floor with a clatter, right between us.

Roaring with fury, Reznik bent to retrieve it, but I kicked it aside. I was so focused on keeping Reznik away from me that I didn’t grasp what James was up to until he darted forward and picked up the gun.

“What the hell are you doing?” I cried, when he pointed the gun at me and began backing toward the door, striding over the dead bodies.

“Come on!” James motioned frantically for Reznik to follow. “Let’s get out—”

The sentence ended in a cry of pain. For the second time, the gun fell to the floor with a clatter. An arrow from above had struck James right in the hand, penetrating his palm, and he doubled over with groaning agony.

“Gentlemen!” roared a voice of great authority.

Looking up, I saw Otrera—my terrible, beautiful great-aunt Otrera—standing on the gallery with her bow raised, the string still
vibrating from the perfect shot. Around her stood a group of young Amazons, among them Lilli.

Opening her arms, bow and all, Otrera said to Reznik, “You wanted to find us. Here we are.”

I did not wait to see Reznik’s reaction. Without another second’s hesitation, I bolted across the floor past James, picking up the handgun on the way. Barely stopping, I tore open the front door, so eager to get out I stumbled over the threshold and fell down on my hands and knees on the gritty stone steps.

I got up, still clutching the gun, but felt a hand grasping at my ponytail and realized that Reznik was right behind me. Twisting around, I hit him in the face with the gun and managed to pull my hair out of his grip. His eyebrow was spurting blood as I turned and started to run.

Despite his wounds Reznik followed me down the steps and staggered after me through the snow. “The gun!” he growled, his voice as forceful as ever. “Give it to me!”

Two furious snorts and the rapid thudding of hooves made us both jump with fear. A horse and rider, blending into a single black magnificent form, came galloping out of the woods and pounding right between us—so close the rider’s long leather coat whipped me across the cheek. I saw her face for only a split second as she rode by, but that was enough to recognize Penthesilea, the Slavic woman who had masterminded the ambush.

Squealing with triumph, Reznik bent down to pick up something she had tossed into the snow right beside him when she rode by. A revolver.

His fingers closed greedily around the weapon, and yet I was not afraid. You moron, I thought as I backed away from him. Don’t you know Amazon rule number four? Never kill an unarmed man unless you have to.

Before Reznik could fire a single shot, Penthesilea turned in the saddle, raised a long gun that had been concealed by her coat … and a deafening blast threw Reznik and the revolver backward, into a snowbank. All I could see of him were his hands and feet, but I knew that neither they, nor the man himself, would ever stir again.

“Morg!” A frenzied call stirred me from shock. James stood on the threshold of the house, waving wildly. “Come back! Please!”

I turned and ran.

Clutching my own pistol with both hands, I raced down the driveway. Expecting Reznik’s brutish drivers to be barricaded in their vehicles, armed and desperate, I was relieved to find that they weren’t. Both the cars and the van were empty, with the front doors left open, and the only signs of Reznik’s three remaining men were the bloody furrows in the snow where they had been dragged away.

Getting into the last car—a brand-new SUV with leather seats—I fumbled around for the key and finally found it on the floor, smeared with blood and melting snow. I was so agitated I could barely control my hands and feet, but managed to get the car started and in reverse before backing up as fast as I could out the winding driveway.

Once back on the main road, I began retracing my route with breathless urgency. The only thing on my mind was Nick, waiting for me minute after agonizing minute.

The image of him crouched in the snow in silent agony was so powerful it had stayed before my eyes all this time. And when I finally approached the spot where we had left him, I fully expected to see him kneeling by the roadside still, huddled against the cold.

But he wasn’t there.

Getting out of the car I turned about myself several times, yelling his name at the top of my lungs while the frosty ball of panic rolling around in my stomach grew bigger and bigger. The snow was no longer falling, and the forest was absolutely quiet—certainly quiet enough to convince me no one was responding to my calls.

Running over to our rental car in the ditch, I pulled open the door to see if Nick had crawled inside for shelter. He wasn’t there, either.

Only then did it occur to me to look for tracks in the fresh snow … tracks of someone walking, or crawling … but the headlights that were my only source of light made everything so bright it took me a while to discern that there was, indeed, a fresh pattern—a single tread mark—going down the road toward Suomussalmi.

I felt a rush of hope. Had a motorcycle picked up Nick?

Getting back in the car, I drove on as fast as I could, following the tread mark. Only when I reached the city limits did other patterns begin to weave in and out of the one I was following, and yet, thanks to the late hour and the scarcity of traffic, I was able to follow it all the way through town to its only logical destination.

And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears,
“There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter
They could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans, long ago when the men fought for Troy.”

—H
OMER,
The Iliad

T
HE HOSPITAL WAS A SLEEPY PLACE, WITH JUST A HANDFUL OF PEO
ple on the night shift. When I stepped through the emergency room door everyone on staff looked up. I guessed from their wide eyes I was no pretty sight.

As soon as I had confirmed that Nick was really there, a sympathetic nurse walked me to a small waiting area with a dozen empty chairs. “There is warm water for tea in the thermos,” she said. “I will tell Dr. Huusko you are here.”

“How is he?” I asked, studying her face to glean whatever knowledge she had. “Is he okay?”

She looked away. “Dr. Huusko will speak to you.”

I have no idea how long I sat there, anxiously waiting for news. There was a radiator right behind me, hot to the touch, but I still couldn’t stop shaking. The night’s events had chilled me to the marrow, leaving me almost catatonic with shock and exhaustion. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to get up and wash my hands, even though they were still sticky with Nick’s blood.

When Dr. Huusko appeared at last, he didn’t walk up to me right away but first stopped and peered at me across the waiting area. And
when he spoke, it was in a voice so deep it sounded like a rumble from earth itself. “You better have a good story for me.”

I rose on stiff legs, looking in vain for a soft spot in the doctor’s face. He was the sort of looming, oaklike man who gave the impression of having withstood several ice storms and lightning strikes, and to whom human beings such as I were little more than a passing annoyance. “Please tell me he will be all right,” I said, the words nearly clogging in my throat.

Dr. Huusko pointed at his stethoscope. “This is not a crystal ball. This is science. But science is on our side.” He finally walked up to me. “If I was not a rational man I would say your boyfriend has a guardian angel.” He showed me what he was holding in his hand.

It was Granny’s bracelet. Or rather, I assumed it was, for the head of the jackal was so distorted it didn’t look like an animal anymore.

“This was in his trouser pocket,” Dr. Huusko explained. “It stopped the bullet. I’ve never seen anything like it. It probably saved his life.”

“But he was bleeding,” I whispered, fighting back tears of confusion and relief.

Dr. Huusko looked at me with dismay. “Of course he was bleeding! How do you think it feels to have this punched into your tissue with the power of several hundred pounds?”

I looked into Dr. Huusko’s eyes, anxious for him to confirm that Nick was out of danger. “So, will he be all right?”

But now the doctor’s face hardened again. “He’s in a coma. We shall see. He had severe hypothermia. His heart stopped; I don’t know for how long. There could be cell damage.” Dr. Huusko’s furry eyebrows contracted even further. “With no oxygen flowing to the brain—”

I didn’t faint, but everything went dim for a few seconds. “Can I see him?”

“When he is stable.” Dr. Huusko fished something else out of his lab coat: Nick’s cellphone. “This was in his other pocket. Maybe you would like to call someone. The woman who brought him here said she was
his mother, but she didn’t tell us anything else. We tried to detain her but”—Dr. Huusko grimaced—”she didn’t want to stay.”

I
PACED THE HALLWAYS
, almost too sad and shocked to cry. In the end I sat in the empty cafeteria with Nick’s cellphone and the mangled jackal bracelet on the table in front of me. A lonely neon tube was buzzing over the empty food counter nearby, occasionally blinking as if it was just about to burn out. For some reason it brought me back to my trailer compartment in Algeria, and I was briefly assaulted by pointless thoughts of turning back time to a point when Nick and I were still at odds, and where I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined sitting in a hospital like this, crying over him.

Taking a few sharp breaths of air I eventually managed to push those useless thoughts aside and focus on the phone. Although the last thing I felt like doing was talking to strangers, the situation was serious enough to warrant a phone call.

After scrolling through Nick’s endless contact list without recognizing anyone, it finally occurred to me to check the speed dials and see whom he considered his closest and dearest. Surprisingly, a number he called “Office for an Argument” was at the top of the list. Next came “Boy Wonder” and “Goldfinger.” In the end I gave up speculating and dialed the first number.

The phone rang for a while before someone picked up, and I had already braced myself for a Dubai answering service when a sleepy male voice said, “It’s about time.”

“This is Diana Morgan,” I quickly countered. “Calling on behalf of Kamal al-Aqrab. I assume you know him.”

There was a violent rustle at the other end. Then the man said, in a voice somewhere between worry and anger, “What’s wrong? Where are you calling from?”

I looked around at the abandoned cafeteria. “Finland. The Suomussalmi Hospital.” I paused to steady my voice. “I’m afraid there’s been—”

“Is my son alive?”

The question hit me right in the heart. “Oh! You’re—”

“Answer my question.”

Mr. al-Aqrab’s hostile tone jolted some of the courage out of me. “Yes, but we don’t know—” Again, my voice faltered. “He had severe hypothermia—”

“Stay where you are. I’ll be right up.” Mr. al-Aqrab ended the call.

And that was where Dr. Huusko eventually found me—lying over Nick’s phone in the empty cafeteria, too heavyhearted to move. “Here.” He held a gray photo printout in front of me. It showed a woman in full stride, pulling off a motorcycle helmet as she came through the glass doors of the hospital. “This is the person who brought your boyfriend here. Do you know her?”

I leaned forward to scrutinize the photo. It was taken from above, but I recognized the silver pixie crop right away. Nick’s guardian angel was the angry cat woman from Istanbul. She had tried to avoid us by staying upstairs all evening, but Fate had found her nonetheless, to put her to the test. Had she passed with distinction this time? It was a matter of perspective. Breaking the rule of being first in battle, the queen of the Baltic Amazons had left her sisters alone with Reznik’s goons in order to save her son.

“Well?” said Dr. Huusko.

I shook my head, avoiding his eyes. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Come.” The doctor motioned for me to get up. “I’m going to let you be with him. He’s still in a coma, but the brain is a strange thing.”

Lying in a hospital bed in a room by himself, Nick appeared to be connected to every piece of medical equipment in the building. And he was so deathly pale I should never have recognized him if I hadn’t known it was him.

Walking to his bedside, I placed my hand gently upon his, carefully avoiding the intravenous line. There was no reaction. Nor did he make any discernible movement when I bent over and kissed him on the cheek.

Dr. Huusko took Nick’s pulse the old-fashioned way, ignoring all the expensive machines. “He’s a strong man with a strong heart,” he
said, making a note on a chart. Then he turned to face me, the look in his eyes a little less severe. “I don’t know what happened to you two. I’m not sure I want to know. But the police will have questions. You better start thinking of answers.”

Alone with Nick at last, I lay down next to him on the narrow bed, inching as close as I could. Despite everything, he still smelled like him. I tried to cast my mind back to that morning, when I had woken up next to him in our warm cocoon of hotel comforters. I’d had a strong feeling then that nothing outside our little nest really mattered too much anymore; I had finally found the center of my universe.

“I love you so much,” I whispered into his ear, hoping the words would reach him, wherever he was. “Please come back. I’m so sorry.”

It was I who had wanted to go to Finland, who had been hell-bent on following Granny’s trail to the end. And when things went wrong, I had hesitated and fumbled while Nick took on Reznik’s men.

“How can you not want to learn how to defend the people you love?” He had asked me in the ruins of Mycenae. “I can show you some easy tricks.”

I had been too angry to listen. And now the grand machinery of heaven had taken my arrogance and slammed it right back in my face with blinding accuracy.

M
R. AL-
A
QRAB ARRIVED AT
daybreak. When I heard the gruff demands and indignant outcries in the hallway outside, I assumed it was the police coming to interrogate me. But then the door to the room was pushed open and four men came in, with Dr. Huusko and two agitated nurses trailing closely behind.

With his stern, all-business manner Mr. al-Aqrab looked so unlike the man I had seen the week before, walking through the Çira?an Palace reception in a baseball cap, I had to reach all the way back to the intense face in Mr. Telemakhos’s scrapbook to be convinced it was really him. Dressed in a suit and tie almost identical to those worn by his three associates, he paused in the middle of the floor without even
acknowledging my presence, then walked up to Nick’s bed with a grimace of helpless fury.

“Who did this?” was his first question, addressed to no one in particular.

“Reznik and James Moselane,” I replied, glancing at Dr. Huusko. “They followed us here.”

Mr. al-Aqrab muttered a curse.

I waited for a moment, expecting him to try to talk to Nick, or at least touch him. When he didn’t, I said, “It shouldn’t really surprise us, though, should it? Wasn’t that the plan all along—to use us as bait?”

Mr. al-Aqrab turned toward me slowly, as if he could barely believe my nerve. “And you are?”

“Diana Morgan.” I held out my hand. When he did not take it, a bubble of helpless fury burst in my head. “Surely, you remember me from the detective report. I imagine you and your”—I nodded at the other men, who all stood around with frowns of latent aggression—”intelligence department know more about me than my own parents do.”

“Right.” Mr. al-Aqrab reached into his jacket. “How much do I owe you?”

I stepped away from him. “For what exactly?”

He pulled out his checkbook. “For walking out that door right now”—he pointed over his shoulder with a gold fountain pen—”and erasing it all from your mind.”

Although the tone of our exchange had hardly been civil, I was so baffled by his rudeness the room became a blur around me. “I wouldn’t take a penny from you,” I said, forcing out the words, “if I were a beggar in the street. You were the one who did this to Nick. And had it not been for his mother, pulling him out of a snowbank and bringing him here, he would be dead now.”

I spoke with furious passion, and Mr. al-Aqrab swayed briefly before squaring his shoulders and tightening his tie. “This is neither the time nor the place—” He gestured at someone else, and only then did I see the medical team coming into the room behind Dr. Huusko.

“What are you doing?” I asked, stepping a little closer to Nick.

But it was only too clear what they were doing.

I tried to block their access. “Don’t take him away! Please! Dr. Huusko has everything—” Seeing that no one was taking any notice of me, I turned to Mr. al-Aqrab and exclaimed, “Haven’t you done enough to him? It’s freezing cold out there.” When he continued to ignore me, I blocked his way, forcing him to pay attention. “All right. You’re taking him back to Dubai.” I was so upset I couldn’t even soften my voice. “I’m coming, too.”

Mr. al-Aqrab could not have looked more appalled. “You? Why?”

I glanced at Nick, struggling to hold back my tears. “Because he’ll ask for me when he wakes up.”

Another contemptuous once-over put me in my place. “I doubt it. Now, excuse us—”

Working without hesitation, the medical team unhooked Nick from all of the equipment in the room and efficiently rehooked every line to their own portable devices. When they wheeled the bed out of the room, I ran after them down the corridor. “I’m serious,” I said to Mr. al-Aqrab. “Don’t you dare—” I reached out and tried to grab the bed rail. “Stop! You don’t understand!”

In a smooth, effortless maneuver, Mr. al-Aqrab managed to cut me off right there, while the medical team continued down the corridor and disappeared around a corner. “Oh, but I understand completely,” he said, putting a patronizing hand on my shoulder. “Nick is my son. He has that effect on women. Here.” Reaching into his jacket, he took out a wad of money and pressed it into my hand. “Buy yourself a little something from him. He would like that.”

I
DROVE
R
EZNIK’S
SUV
back out the Raate Road in the morning sunshine, only to find that the rental car was no longer stuck in the ditch and that all traces of violence had been erased by new snow. Gone was our luggage, my coat, the
Historia Amazonum,
Granny’s letter … not even a footprint was left.

Driving on, I managed to doggedly retrace my steps to the Amazon safe house despite the fact that everything looked different in the daylight and the makeshift street signs had disappeared.

As I rolled down the winding driveway I saw right away my trip had been in vain. Not only were there no vehicles left in the driveway, just a jumble of half-erased tread marks, but the house itself was gone. Where the sad old mansion had stood there was now a pile of charred rubble.

Getting out of the car, I walked around a bit in the knee-deep snow, looking for signs of life. There were still thin columns of smoke coming from the burned remains of the building, but no identifiable objects stood out among the slag.

Standing there, staring at the ruin, I felt oddly numb. What had I expected? That the Amazons would still be here, busily scrubbing bloodstains off the floor?

Making my way around the foundation of the house I noticed an old gray barn tucked away in the woods. It was a long, tall building—perhaps even bigger than the house itself had been. Approaching through the snow, I opened the barn doors with cautious curiosity.