She checked in, took a shower and then, using the supplies in the medical kit, tended to her torn and bloody feet.

Remind me never to do that again, she told herself, wincing as she applied hydrogen peroxide to the cuts and then wrapped them in soft gauze to help them heal.

When she was finished, she collapsed onto the bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.

She awoke later that morning to the insistent buzzing of her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Annja! Thank God I found you. You’ve got to come down to the studio and fix this!”

She sighed; Doug in a frenzy was really not what she needed right now. “Fix what, Doug?”

“The episode! We’ve got to trim another six minutes and thirty seconds from the footage. Maybe we could…”

Annja let him drone on for a moment, then cut in when she could. “I’ll be down within the hour, Doug. Don’t do anything until I get there.” She hung up before he could protest further.

Spending a few hours in the editing room with Doug wasn’t her idea of a fun time, but she needed to take her mind off the Dragon and her close call from earlier that morning.

Fighting with her producer might be just the thing.

23

Most of Annja’s day was taken up with correcting the issues that had come up after Doug had begun to do the final edits on the episode. She spent the afternoon working with him and by the time she was done night had fallen and the streets were full of commuters trying to get home from work. People pushed past on both sides, but she barely noticed, her focus completely inward.

The past few days had been a blur of action and reaction. She was being stalked by an international assassin for reasons unknown, though she was pretty sure it had to do with the sword she carried. She’d been attacked twice in the past forty-eight hours, more than likely by men in the assassin’s employ. The assassin himself had broken into her hotel room, sent someone to interrupt her lunch and was, more likely than not, out there, somewhere, right now, watching.

She’d seen a hypnotist, allowed herself to be put in a trance and been able to draw a perfect replication of the emblem on the assassin’s own sword, a sword that was most likely cursed and just as mystical as her own. She’d even watched a man die only inches away from her, and she couldn’t imagine that death by subway was an easy way to go. Last but not least, the assassin himself broke into her loft and tried to kill her while she slept.

Frankly it was a lot to take in.

Annja walked down the street, lost in thought. She had lots of questions but few answers. What did the Dragon want? How had he found out about her? What did he know about the sword she carried? How did her sword compare to his?

What made it all the more frustrating was that she felt as though the answers were all right there in front of her and she just wasn’t seeing them clearly enough to put everything together into a coherent whole. Like having all the pieces of a puzzle but, without a picture to work from, she didn’t know if the blue pieces represented the ocean, the sky or some other colored object.

As a scientist, she was used to looking at things through a logical progression that more often than not was based on a cause-and-effect relationship between two items. In order to sort through the mess she found herself in, she decided to apply the same elemental logic and see where that got her.

So what did she know?

She knew there had once been an international hit man known as the Dragon, who apparently had survived the explosion everyone else thought had killed him, and he was following her around New York City.

Garin had claimed that the Dragon carried a sword that was the mystical opposite of her own, the dark to her light. The information she’d managed to haul out of her subconscious while under hypnosis had provided her with the image she’d seen etched onto the Dragon’s sword, and her visit to Dr. Yee had revealed that the sword itself might be the fabled Juuchi Yosamu, Ten Thousand Cold Nights, the final katanaproduced by the master swordsmith, Sengo Muramasa. The sword was said to have been instilled with all the bloodthirsty madness that had characterized Muramasa’s final days. All of which confirmed what Garin had been suggesting.

The Dragon had passed up the opportunity to kill her on two different occasions; first, during the assault at Roux’s estate, and later while she lay sleeping in her hotel room in Paris. Since then his agents had not only followed her about New York, but had tried to kidnap her, as well.

Clearly he wanted something from her.

And there was only one thing, she knew, that was possibly valuable enough for him to go through all the trouble. One thing that he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on simply by killing her outright.

Her sword.

It came when she called. It existed to do her bidding and her bidding alone. While she wasn’t positive, she suspected that killing her would leave the sword lost in the otherwhere until it chose another bearer, and who knew when that might be?

It was the only thing that made sense.

The Dragon wanted Joan’s sword.

With that realization the Dragon’s demands from the night before finally made sense. “Give it to me!” he’d said. At the time she’d had no idea what he was referring to. She had, in fact, assumed that he’d been mistaken in thinking that she had some rare or unusual artifact in her possession.

You were right, in a way, she told herself. Except the artifact in question was none other than her sword.

Annja had no intention of giving it to him.

She found herself at the Eighty-first Street entrance to Central Park and decided that a walk through the park would be a nice way to end the evening. The thought of going back to her apartment, the one the Dragon himself had been in on more than one occasion, just wasn’t all that appealing at the moment. If she had to, she could always catch a cab back to Brooklyn when she got to the other side, on Fifth Avenue.

There were quite a few people still in the park, despite the fact that evening had come and the sun had already set, and Annja enjoyed the sensation of getting lost among them, anonymous even if only for a few stolen minutes.

She had been wandering the grounds for about fifteen minutes when she saw him.

He was hanging back, not making it too obvious, but there was no doubt that he was keeping her in sight, lingering in her wake.

He was wearing a dark windbreaker and slacks, with a hat pulled low over his face so that she wasn’t able, especially from this distance, to get a good look at his features.

It was at least the second time in as many days that she had been followed and she was starting to resent the attention. They hadn’t been shy about chasing her through the subway system and she had the same feeling now; the tourists around her would not be a deterrent to her capture, if that was indeed what he wanted.

For a moment she was tempted to confront him directly, to shout, “Hey, you!” and start striding determinedly toward him, just to see what he would do. Only the idea that he might just pull a gun and simply shoot her, prevented her from such a brash course of action.

Instead of a direct confrontation, she opted for a more covert approach.

ROUX WAS BORED.

He’d only been in the hotel for a little over twenty-four hours, but laying low and staying out of sight was not something he was interested in doing. For a man who had lived as long as he had, he had surprisingly little patience.