Tear Of The Gods

Visions of being sucked down beneath the surface swam in her mind and caused her to try pulling her feet free with brute force, yanking upward first on one and then the other. Rather than loosening the bog’s hold, however, all her actions managed to do was to get her feet to sink deeper.

She was stuck.

Annja opened her mouth, intending to call out, to see if there was anyone close enough to help. Surely someone else had survived the brutal attack. But then she thought better of it. While other survivors might be within earshot, so, too, might the very men who had slaughtered her friends. Calling attention to herself while she was trapped would just make her a target.

One that would be almost impossible to miss.

She was going to have to get out of this on her own.

Taking a deep breath to calm her already frayed nerves, Annja considered the situation. She knew she had to work with the bog’s natural qualities rather than against them, if she hoped to get out of this alive.

She slowly began to wiggle her left foot, gently rocking it back and forth. Each time she did so it let a little more of the water within the bog slide between her foot and the thicker particles of peat that kept it trapped. Gradually she was able to loosen the bog’s hold on her foot.

With one foot floating free she reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest corpse, using it to maintain her balance while she began to work on the other leg. The body was that of a blonde woman dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, though Annja made a point of avoiding looking at her face, afraid of seeing the face of another friend. Her efforts pushed the corpse a little deeper into the bog, but it maintained enough natural buoyancy that she could still use it to support herself despite that fact that it was now mostly underwater.

After several minutes she was able to work her other foot loose enough that she could lift it when the time came.

With her feet free, she had to fight the urge to lean forward, to power through the muck with big strokes of her strong arms, for she knew that doing so was exactly the wrong thing to do and would only leave her trapped again, perhaps in an even more precarious position. She knew the surface of the bog would support her if she let it; the corpses floating around her were proof of that. With that in mind she leaned backward instead of forward, letting her head and upper back come in contact with the surface of the bog. When she felt its chill wetness lapping at her skin, she lifted her legs and spread her arms wide, allowing the bog to bear her weight.

It worked!

She floated on the surface and if she’d held still an observer wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her and any of the other dozen corpses surrounding her.

So far, so good. Now comes the hard part, she thought.

Solid ground was only fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, but if she moved too quickly she’d sink and wind up trapped all over again.

Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself.

Using the nearest corpse as a lever, she pushed it firmly toward her feet. The act sent her own body gliding across the surface of the water, taking her a foot or two closer to the bank and what she hoped was solid ground.

Little by little, she made her way to safety.

When the water beneath her grew so shallow that she was having a hard time keeping her feet up, she rolled over and discovered that the bank was less than an arm’s length away. Letting her feet down beneath her, she stood cautiously.

The bog immediately tried to tighten its grip.

This time she was ready for it. Rather than fight it, she simply let herself topple forward like a downed tree. Her upper body easily reached the bank. Sinking her fingers into the thick grass she found there, she pulled herself up onto firm ground and crawled away from the bog’s edge on hands and knees.

Once she had her heart rate under control, she sat back on her haunches and thought about her next move. The sun was up now, its thin light breaking through the trees around her, and by its height she estimated that it was somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., which meant that it had been at least that many hours since the attack had occurred. She had no idea if the killers remained at the camp or if they had fled once their job here was done, but it didn’t matter either way. There were things she wanted at the camp and that was where she needed to go.

She stood and did what she could to wipe off the worst of the muck from the bog, which wasn’t much. She purposely left the wound on her head alone; no sense messing with it until she had some way of cleaning it properly.

When she finished, she reached inside her sports bra and retrieved the torc from where she’d stashed it the night before. She had a bit of a bruise from where it had pressed against her tender flesh, but the torc itself was no worse for the wear. Not that she’d expected it to be; it had already survived a couple of thousand years in the bog.

Still, she was relieved that the killers hadn’t found it. With it in hand, her chances of discovering what this was all about, as well as who was behind it all, went up considerably.

It also told her that the killers, whoever they’d been, made mistakes. The bodies should have been searched before being dumped into the bog. If they had been, those doing the searching hadn’t been very thorough at all.

Not that she was complaining. A proper search would have shown them that she was still alive, so their poor effort had actually saved her life.

She stuffed the torc back into its hiding place and spent a few minutes searching through the tall grass at the edge of the bog until she found the trail the killers had used to get there. The added weight of the bodies they’d carried had pushed their footsteps deep into the soil and it was an easy matter to follow them back through the woods in the direction of camp.

It was cold and she was wet—not a good combination. Her first order of business was going to be dry clothes. After that she would figure out a more solid game plan. The authorities had to be notified, the bodies recovered from the bog, but before any of that happened she wanted a few minutes alone with whatever evidence the killers had left behind at the scene. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the police to do their job; she did. This one just happened to be a bit more personal for her and she wasn’t going to leave justice in the hands of someone who might not care as strongly as she did about seeing it served up properly.

Craig’s smiling face flashed in her mind and she swore that she’d make those responsible pay for what they had done.

As the telltale flashes of color that marked the camp’s tents became visible through the trees, Annja slowed down. It wouldn’t do to just blunder into the middle of camp, particularly if the killers were still hanging about, so she stopped and listened instead.

Aside from the calls of a few morning birds, no other sound reached her ears. While that didn’t mean the perpetrators were gone, it was certainly a good sign.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be armed.

She reached out with her right hand and plucked her sword from the otherwhere. It flashed into existence in a heartbeat as it always did and just having it in hand was reassuring.

Cautiously she continued forward.

11

The camp had been ransacked. Several of the tents had been torn down entirely, while the contents of the others were strewn about, left to lie where they had fallen during what Annja assumed was the search for the torc.

She slipped from one piece of cover to another for the first several minutes, leery of suddenly running into any of the men she’d encountered the night before, but eventually she realized that the camp was deserted and that let her move about more freely in the open.

The killers, whoever they had been, had fled.

Her free hand touched the torc through her shirt. What was so important about it that someone would kill to possess it? she wondered.

The entire attack just didn’t make sense. While she knew there was a burgeoning trade in black-market artifacts, she wouldn’t expect a piece like the one she currently carried to be of particular interest. They’d only dug it up yesterday, for heaven’s sake!