A barely audible squeak had her eyes open in a second. To anyone else the noise was nothing but a building settling in the night, temperature changes for oncoming winter triggering the swell and shrink of wood. But to someone trained as she was, as paranoid as she became, and as ready as she was from the moment she touched foot on the island, this was a signal of something more insidious.
That was what had Anna lying still on her bed. Part of her tensed as the prickle of fear raised the hairs on her neck and arms. But another part, the part of her that triggered when she fought Braithwaite at the party. The part of her that kept to the shadows until it soothed her fear and forced her to act.
The glow of the stove behind her, a pulsing red of dying embers begging for her to bring them back to life to send warmth into the cabin, accustomed Anna's eyes to the darkness while any approaching her would have to see around the difference in hues. Hues she used to her advantage when Anna slipped her legs toward her chest and scrunched her pillow into the space remaining. A move that put her in a position to act.
Whatever noises slipped over the floor, soft shuffles of padded feet moving over the old wood, took no notice of what they believed was the reaction of someone growing colder in the night. It made them oblivious to Anna sliding roll that put her pillows and bunched blankets to keep her outline in the indeterminate half-light while she landed on her fingers and toes on the floor. Holding her weight there, Anna smoothed into a crouch and reached for two pieces of wood next to the stove and waited the interminable eternity until the three figures took on definition in the light of the dying fire.
But all three jumped back, covering their eyes, when Anna thrust the pieces of wood into the fire. The sudden spark of yellow-orange caught the others off guard and she slid under the bed to grab her metal rod. Clutching it tightly, Anna emerged from under the bed and whipped the rod out to catch the ankles of her nearest attacker. The cracking noise occurred almost simultaneously with the howl of pain and Anna hauled the rod back to bring her elbow up with the force of her body to catch the distinctly male voiced individual in the throat.
He coughed and choked, his hands going for his throat, and Anna pivoted sideways just enough to bring her other elbow down on the man's kidneys. His knees buckled under the blow and Anna's knee caught his falling face just in time to send him unconscious to the floor as the crack of his jaw and cheekbone rang out in the silence of the cabin.
Silence that had Anna gripping at her metal rod before turning in a circle with the other two potential attackers keeping her in their sights. Only the creak and squeak of the floorboards betrayed their noise as none of them fell to the common enticement of goading their opponent. These were agents robbed of their voice and Anna had nothing to say to them. They were shadows of whatever people they might have been before, mere agents of something better. There was nothing to be said and they had nothing to say.
Just the way Anna wanted it.
Spinning the metal rod back, using a bend in it to hold the length along her arm, Anna eyed her opponents. They made no move to address their companion or his possible injuries, which eliminated distractions by the injury of one or the other. Their synchronous movements and similar heights almost betrayed their training time but Anna focused on their feet. The weight spread on each was different as one led their grapevining motions with the left and the other with the right. Even with empty hands the indicators for which hand took lead and angle of their bodies betrayed their coordination and dominant hand.
Anna arranged her feet and hands to give the impression of left-handed dominance and watched the other two react. The one with left-hand dominance relaxed and the right-hand dominant one took a step back. Exactly the way she needed them to.
Ducking the first swing, Anna brought her right arm around to crack the metal rod into the over-extended leg of the right-hand dominant attacker. The one surprised that Anna avoided the closer of the two. The one who twisted their legs together when Anna brought the same metal rod between their legs. Lack of impact betrayed the girl's sex but a moment later Anna's fist impacted with just enough force at the base of the girl's skull to leave her falling to the floor. Not hard enough to leave her lifeless but enough to leave her as unconscious as her companion.
But the moment of mercy proved enough to have the other attacker feel confident. Confident enough to wrap arms around Anna's chest from the back and squeeze. The squeeze kept Anna close, inhibiting her range of motion, but betrayed this attacker's gender as well. The hard wall of muscle allowed Anna to swing the metal rod out from her body as she jumped into his hold. He reacted, stepping backward to counter her momentum, and Anna threw all of her force toward the floor. Not hard enough to bring him over her back but hard enough to separate his legs and leave him open to the solid whack of the metal bar.
His arms immediately loosened and Anna rolled forward to escape his grip and the range of his motion. Motions now inhibited by his wild swings with one hand as the other protected his vulnerable genitalia. Anna slipped easily between the defenses of the reactionary and chopped the blade of her hand against the man's throat. The hand formerly trying to defend himself held at his now swelling throat in the hopes of holding together his broken larynx.
He hit the floor, gasping for air as the only noise compared to the silence of his unconscious companions. A silence Anna reveled in as she moved back toward the stove and pushed two more logs into the fire to stoke the light in the cabin higher. A light that revealed three others waiting for her.
Anna swung out with the metal rod but one of them snatched it while the two others coordinated their attack to grab her. One for her torso and the other for her legs to lift her bodily from the ground and toss her onto the bed. She thrashed and aimed her strikes, attempting to disguise them as uncoordinated motions, but these three bore more training than their greener companions. They held her still as the one who wrestled away her metal rod tampered with something glass.
It caught the light and Anna fought harder at the sight of a glass syringe and a bottle the first one tucked into pocket before coming toward Anna. She relaxed a moment, allowing a second of shock to render her immobile, and waited for the barely perceptible loosening of grips from her two captors. They did exactly as she predicted and Anna attacked.
First her leg flung out and caught the wrist of the oncoming syringe, locking it behind her knee to bring the attacker to their knees next to the bed. Anna's arm punched into the thigh of the attacker at her right and the deep voiced huff of pain signaled another punch slightly higher that landed him on his ass as he gripped for his crotch like his still-choking fellow had.
That only left the last of the original three trying to wrestle Anna on their own. A feat she made more difficult by curling toward them. With a arm still trapped behind one of her legs, Anna forced the syringe-holding man to fumble on the floor as she wrapped her arm behind the neck of the last one standing to trap them in a triangle choke. A choke that left the woman slapping at Anna until her body went limp. Limp enough for Anna to drop before she kicked her leg out to catch the syringe-holding one in the face.
The clink of the syringe hitting the floor had Anna turning herself off the bed in the other direction. She bent to bring her fist hard into the face of the man who reached for her but it cost her a moment. The moment she felt a prick at her neck and rounded a second too slow to land her fist in the man's throat.
Unlike the attacker choking on a bruised trachea and broken larynx, the solid fist Anna landed on this man's throat collapsed his trachea. His eyes widened as she fought for breath and Anna grabbed at his arms, as if only just realizing the strength of her blow, and tried to hold him as he hit the floor. His body shuddered and spasmed as it fought for air in the seconds before his face turned blue.
Anna staggered back, catching herself on the bed, and barely held to it when the weight of her fall knocked it into the stove. She blinked, her vision hazing as she tried to comprehend her motions, and threw herself backward at the sight of her blankets on fire. Fire that licked and spit as it consumed the bed and ran over the metal supports there to drip toward the old boards of the floor.
The two conscious attackers moved as quickly as their injuries would allow. Each reached for the person nearest them, leaving Anna shuffling backward in her night clothes as the fire slithered and lapped toward her. Her movements stopped when she hit a body and it took all of her energy to organize her failing faculties to see the woman she knocked unconscious. With heat rising and the threatening burn nipping at her heels, Anna lifted the woman and shuffled toward the door to follow the others from the building.
As she looked back in, her view marred by the shadows and smoke as well as the tilting fuzziness of whatever ran through her veins to slow her, Anna noted the body of the dead man in the middle of the floor. Flames immediately overtook him and Anna could only collapse backward into whatever waiting arms gathered outside her cabin. A cabin engulfed in flames as blackness engulfed her.
Anna woke in a rush, pulling at whatever kept her wrists and ankles immobile. She arched her back, shoulders pressing into the odd chair that constrained her head and kept her from turning. After a second her body released its tension and she hit the chair, rocking it slightly and alerting whoever else was in the room with her.
"Well, well," She tried to turn her head to see who was speaking but in a moment Green's face appeared in front of her and Anna almost recoiled but the constraints of the chair stopped her. "I guess you're already awake. Here I was, all prepared to have a grand opening, but you ruined it."
"I'll find you an apology when I drag you to Hell." Anna fought her wrists against the restraints. "Until then you'll just have to choke on it."
"Or just make it up as I go along." Green pulled back, his fingers catching on something and drag it over the floor. Anna finally caught sight of it as Green entered her field of vision again and she noted the stool he used to sit. "But I didn't expect you to be so quick. With the men I sent to get you and then with the drug in your system…"
Green laughed, wiping at his face. "I mean, who manages to incapacitate five of my best in the new generation and kill one of them? After so much time away you still managed all of that… All on your own?" He laughed, "It's… It's what made you so incredible and one of my father's favorites."
"I'm sure that's what irks you." Anna refused to look at Green. "That he was better at all of this than you are."
"It does, I admit." Green leaned back slightly and Anna finally risked a look at him. His face narrowed and lines took over his forehead before it all smoothed. "But I've decided the best way to make sure his practices live on is through his agents. You, being one of those."
"What about Edna?" Anna tried to even her breathing. "Why haven't you used her? Isn't she good enough for your little project?"
"She's occupied elsewhere." Green shrugged, "Your government friend's making a bit of trouble and it's time to deal with him."
"I've only been here for two weeks." Anna snorted, "How much trouble could he truly cause you?"
"You'd be surprised what dedicated people can do." Green pushed himself to his feet. "But you, you are rather an incredible. I've always said it and as much as you detest me and hate me, I'll always believe it."
"I'm so flattered." Anna adjusted in the chair, "What do you want?"
"What I told you I wanted from the moment I brought you here." Green motioned around him and Anna, with her limited view, noted the cave around them. "You're here so I can finally bring you back into the fold."
Anna struggled harder against the restraints. "I don't want this. Let me go."
"Or what?" Green pointed at the restraints. "This is why I took you in the first place, Anna. This is what you're here for."
"Let me go." Anna fought harder, shaking the chair but providing her no release despite her struggle. "I want nothing to do with any of this. I just wanted to be left alone. Let me go."
"No." Green stood, "I'm going to bring you back into the fold Anna. I'm going to bring back Mrs. Cotton and you're going to be one of us again."
"Please let me go." Anna pulled against the restraints, her wrists straining and pulling at the skin to leave little droplets of blood running over her skin.
"Why?" Green was out of her vision and Anna noted the rise of fear raising the hairs on her arms and neck again, just like in the cabin. He reentered her vision, holding a tray he set on a stand within Anna's vision and she noted the tray littered with syringes like the one used on her earlier. "Because I promised I'd let you go if you promised to never come after me?"
"I kept my word."
"But your little government friend refused to stop and we both know that John'll never stop so..." Green chose one of the syringes and pushed some of the fluid out of the end before approaching Anna. "The only choice I had was to send my second-best agent to stop them and make you my agent again so I'd stop you."
He snorted to himself as he approached, pushing her head to the side to expose her neck. "It's really quite something when we're our own worst enemies, isn't it?"
Anna tried to wrestled her head away from him but the constraints of the headpiece on the chair stopped her. And with her body further immobilized she only had the strength of her neck to stop his hold on her. A hold more effective than her limited thrashing that left her tensing as the metal tip poked her skin and sank deep into her vein.
"You'll remember it all and it'll be painful." Green drew back, the syringe empty. "It's also a course of treatment so you'll be here for the duration."
He walked back to the tray and Anna tried to move but her eyes failed her, turning all images blurry and contorting them like mirrors at a carnival funhouse. She blinked and shook her head, knocking against the sides of the chair, and struggled but her limbs lost their strength and all she could do was breathe. But her breathes went from fast and shallow to labored and slow until Anna swore she would suffocate. Suffocate in the whirl of confused color and mixed vision until it all turned black for her again.
Until it was no longer black.
Anna sat up and held up her wrists, free and no longer bleeding. In the blue-white light of the moon, bleeding through her diaphanous curtains, Anna ran her fingers over opposite wrists. They bore no marks of restraint and no signs of scars. In fact, as she traveled further over her body Anna could find no trace of scars anywhere. Even her back was as smooth as the day she…
Bolting out of bed and into the corner, checking over the simple calendar that hung above her desk. A desk with a diary flipped to the day she was taken. The last night of normalcy in a house invaded by shadows and boogeymen.
A quiet clinking sound came from the window and Anna huddled down in the corner, slotted carefully into the space between the desk and the wall, as a thin blade slipped between the panes of her window to knock up the latch. It caught and fought but eventually the blade slipped it free and the window pushed open from the outside to allow a small boy in. He landed smoothly on the floor and picked his way to the side as a larger man followed after him.
"Good work Thomas."
The man ruffled the boy's hair before scanning the room. The empty bed only gave him a moment of pause before his head turned in Anna's direction. The light worked against her, illuminating her while leaving all but the tiniest of flecks in his eyes dark as the night. All she had was his laugh and the looming figure of him as a shadow above her as he stalked the distance between them.
Stopping over her, the deep laugh mixed oddly with the quiet whisper to his voice. "Seems young Edna was right. You'll be quite the prize."
Anna froze. Froze as she did when she was fifteen and a man she never met before, with features she could not see, loomed above her like a terrifying beast. But Anna could fight now. She knew how. She already had.
Lunging for the letter opener on her desk, Anna wrapped her fist around it and charged the man. But now he moved more like a wraith. Any possible strike turned him to smoke and the room fought her as it pitched and rolled. One moment she fought an uphill incline to reach for him and the next she tried not to slide down the slanting surface of her floor as he waited with open arms below her.
Everything was wrong but she fought all the harder. Fought against shadow and smoke until she impacted something. Anna almost crowed with delight at landing the hit until she realized what she hit. Then her excitement turned to horror as she watched the boy the man called Thomas, the boy who now stood before her as the man, held up his handless arm and turned to her with dead eyes.
"This was your fault." His arm formed into a hook that caught the light, blinding her so Anna dropped the letter opener. "This is what you did."
She tried to argue but a bag went over her head and thick arms held her fast. Held her as she kicked and screamed to deafen herself but only emitted muffled sounds from the bag. Sounds that lost all their meaning when the bag finally came off and she sat on a boat seat with the freezing sea washing over she and what appeared to be a hundred other children.
The boat was no more than a simple rowboat but it expanded in her mind. In the illusion her memories meshed with her nightmares to create until Anna could only watch in horror at the sight of so many children cramped together to sail toward their doom. When she tried to stand, to shout a warning to them, to do anything at all, small hands yanked her to her seat.
Edna's face loomed there, tears streaking it. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."
"I know." Anna tried to soothe her. Tried to hold her close. But the moment she did a sharp pain pierced her belly. Anna glanced down and noticed a knife pulling from her abdomen.
When she looked up, Edna was crying all the harder as she pulled the knife away. "It was what you deserved. You did this to us."
Anna struggled to hold herself upright on the seat but the pitching and rolling of the boat knocked her down. Down farther than she should have fallen given the dimensions of a rowboat. Down past the bottom and into the water.
Freezing water brought her head up as her lungs seized. Her teeth chattered and her limbs tensed as her muscles responded to the cold. The cold that Anna tried to force from her mind so she could think. So she could escape.
But arms wrapped around her. Arms she fought against and tried to push off. Arms she finally had to twist and sink beneath her. Arms that, to Anna's horror, led to the body and face of Jane. Jane Moorsum who drown below her.
Anna struggled to pull her from the water. Fought to save her. Fought to reverse her actions and drag Jane from the crushing depths. But she was already gone. All the pulling did was send Anna toward the surface and Jane farther below. Forced Anna to watch as the other girl's lifeless eyes sank into the depths while she gasped and choked for breath on the shore.
A shore with hard wooden floors. A shore where she stood instead of knelt and coughed for breath. A shore where Senior sat before her, shaking his head.
"I brought you into my home, Mrs. Cotton. I saved you from a life of meaningless parties and repetitious childrearing and this is how you thank me?"
"I don't-" Anna looked around the room, noticed the absence of anyone she recognized. But then, all the others in the room had no faces. They stood as a solid mass of spectators who bore no expression and emitted no reaction. "I don't know what's going on."
"You were going to betray me, Anna." He stood, stalking toward her like the dark nightmare from so long ago. "You were ready to run. To take my investment of time and money and toss it to what? The life of a socialite? The life of a fisherman's wife with that scud?"
"John's not…" Anna stopped herself, pressing her palms to her temples. "No, that's not how this goes."
"Why not?" Senior's face was in hers, so close their noses almost touched. "Why does it not go this way?"
"Because…" Anna scrunched her eyes closed, pushing past the pain just behind her eyes. "Because he was going to offer me the chance to take my revenge. To lead it all here instead of…"
Her eyes opened and she saw Green, standing just off his father's shoulder. "He wanted me to lead and not you. He didn't trust you. He didn't want you to make this your legacy. He knew you'd ruin it."
"Too true." Green's arm swung out and Anna caught the flash of a blade before it sank into Senior's chest.
She rushed forward, pulling at the knife and trying to staunch the flow of blood with her nightgown. But it only soaked up the traces of it as the light faded from Senior's eyes. She could only watch in horror as Green took the knife back and went to put it to his tongue.
John was there in the next instant, tugging on her wrist. A wrist that, for a second, bore the metal restraints. Anna blinked and she was in the cave at Mermaid Lagoon, Green standing over her. Blinking again had her by the boats. By the boat John prepared for his escape but pushed her toward.
She pulled on his arm, begged him to come, begged him to help her save the others, but something hit John in the side. He fell to the ground with the weight of Green on top of him and they rolled, both trying to gain control of the knife between them. Anna ducked and dived to retrieve it as something struck the side of her head. The hilt of the knife pulled away and John knocked it clear.
Anna stumbled back, watching in a daze as John gained the upper hand over Green and freed himself before leaving Green unconscious on the ground. His fingers closed over her wrist and Anna, still in a haze of confused thoughts, tumbled onto the boat. She reached for John, called out to him, cried for him to join her as he pushed the boat away from the dock and fought back those who tried to follow her themselves. Those who might try to stop her.
She steered the boat as best she could but the cold of the sea and the rising storm blew at her. Tripping and slipping on the deck, Anna lost her balance. The boat steered itself, pitching and yawing through the waves as she vainly fought for better control. Control she gave up entirely when the boat crashed into the rocks of whatever shore the winds deigned lead her to find.
Escaping the wreck, drenched in seawater and blood, Anna crawled from the beach and onto dry land. Land and nipped at her toes and fingers with the chill. Land that threatened to suck her too deep when she wandered into the moors. Her mind still fogged and her pace halted with bumbling steps.
Steps that had her tripping into a large boulder where she barely caught herself. Her fingers slipped and her head hit the side of it, leaving Anna victim to the blackness that swirled around her again. Swirled with interspersed images of those calling out her name. Those asking what happened to her. Those curious where she hid for so long on the desolate moors.
Anna could not answer. She could not open her mouth to speak. She could not even move as she thrashed desperately to find control over her muscles. But they refused to respond and instead the blackness sucked her deeper like a mudhole on the moors.
A darkness from which she would never return. A darkness that yawned like a void before her, bidding her enter with soothing sounds and enticing entreaties. A place that offered her safety and peace and eternal rest if she only just succumbed to it. If she only just-
"Are you really going to listen to that?"
Anna stopped but could find no source for the voice calling to her. "What?"
"I said, are you really going to listen to that and give up?"
"I…" Anna coughed, her own voice surprising her. "I don't know."
"Then you'd better figure it out fast, before you've no choice at all."
Anna took only a second before she pulled toward the voice. The void sucked at her in a final attempt to entomb her for all time before it relinquished its hold. Instead she was left afloat on… Something and somewhere. A thought that frightened her more than the void and led her to call out.
"Who's there?"
"You know who."
"No, I don't." She struggled. "Who are you?"
"Oh Anna…" The voice struck her as more familiar now. Like a dream half remembered. Or an old friend from an age ago whose name she forgot. "It has been such a long time for us, hasn't it?"
"Who are-"
"Hello Anna, I'm Mrs. Cotton."