Elektra (2 page)

SOMEWHERE SECRET

E
LEKTRA
.

She was floating, no, sleeping in blackness. No… that wasn’t right either. She was… she was…

Nothing.

That was it, just nothing at all. No feeling, no dreaming, no emotion—

Elektra.

Something touched her.

No—that couldn’t be right.

Go away!

She said it, she whispered it, she screamed it, but of course, there was no sound. She couldn’t hear it; certainly whoever or
what
ever was trying to reach her couldn’t. Why? Because she was gone, she wasn’t alive, she wasn’t
anything.
She was
dead,
even she somehow knew that. Nothing could reach her or hurt her, and that was good. No one—

But something definitely
was.

Hands.

They were there, she
felt
them, even as she somehow realized that she had no right to, that her time upon the Earth was over and the material realm should have been forever out of her reach.

You are a warrior.

They touched her hands, her feet, her arms, legs, bringing sensation to the suddenly burning wounds in her stomach, palm and throat. They left trails of volcanic sensation across her forehead and the top of her skull and painted strips of agony around her elbows and knees, all pooling into a torturous, liquid fire spot just beneath her left breast—her heart.

Come back, Elektra.

Where before she’d had blessed nothingness, now she had a universe of torment, a timeless, endless pit of pain in which she was drowning. It soaked into every pore of her suddenly reawakening skin, burned the surface of her eyelids beneath her squeezed-shut lids, crept up her nose and filled her sinuses, mouth, and throat. She gagged and something—

Breathe!

—went down her throat and pushed its way into her windpipe. Maybe it was air, or energy, or a combination of both, but it felt like acid, like bleach, like a thousand different chemicals that were never meant to pass the lips of a human being. The well-toned muscles along her back and abdomen tightened, then twisted into full spasm mode, sending a stream of vicious white heat to radiate from the hole in her stomach along every single nerve ending until the torture found its way to all parts of her body.

Her eyelids squeezed together a final time, then flew open to see the first thing in the second part of her life.

Blue eyes, pale and sightless, gazed through her and into a realm she’d glimpsed but could now no longer see. They belonged to a stranger she had no way of knowing would soon become the focus of her second-chance existence.

Elektra fought to pull herself upright, then gagged as she leaned over the side of the low wooden pallet on which she had been placed. She hauled more air into her bruised lungs, and they hitched in protest, wanting to refuse it but not able to do so on their own. Another inhalation, another wretched, futile attempt at vomiting.

Finally,
finally,
Elektra was pulling in air in a semi-steady motion, although the effort cost her so much that all she could do was sit there with her head hanging so low that her long hair brushed the floor beneath the table on which she lay.

But the man at her side only smiled faintly as he stared into space and spoke to her in a soft, butter-smooth voice. “Only a warrior can come back from death,” he said.

Later she would learn that the blind man’s name was Stick, and he would be one of her teachers.

She would also discover that he’d forgotten to men tion that even for a warrior, the second life is never quite like the first.

HIDDEN TRAINING CAMP

Before she’d died and come back, Elektra Natchios had trained with a number of sensei, and she had learned their crafts well. At the camp where she ended up after her stomach wound had finally closed and healed (mostly) and her body had regained its strength, she learned even more about the art of fighting. Additions to her fighting repertoire included the
bo
—long staff—eskrima sticks and the nunchaku, the whip and the kukri, along with the weapons and skills of dozens of other disciplines. Like the other students, Elektra pulled her hair back in a headband, dressed in white, and trained with others like herself—but not nearly as skilled—daily. She lived with them, ate with them, fought with them.

But she was never quite
one
of them, never a part of the subjective family existence and camaraderie that the others seemed to share simply by virtue of being there with each other. They were brothers and sisters because of proximity, the children of the emotionless sensei who ruled the camp and taught their arts with stern and unyielding methods. In their students the masters accepted no mistakes, no weaknesses, no slackers, and Elektra did not disappoint them. But they also condemned the American woman’s need to shine, her hunger for competition and undying drive to be the best—they wanted her to be a soldier in their army, one small cog in the larger machine of their battle against darkness. But like the television commercials for the military, the ones she vaguely remembered from her previous life as the daughter of Nicholas Natchios, Elektra didn’t want to be one part of an army.

She wanted to
be
the army.

There was so much anger inside her, for so many reasons—her mother, her father, Matt Murdock, the life that had been carved out of her existence and lost forever. She could feel her rage warring with the desire to do good. One second she would be practicing an
arnis
form with another student, each move perfectly in sync, both of them ostensibly learning the timing and the rhythm, the
perfection
of it. But then something inside her would take over and suddenly the student would be on the ground at her feet, or maybe his head would be caught in a figure-four combination made up of her left arm and right Kali stick. It was like someone else hearing her victim’s choking sounds, feeling his heels drum uselessly against her shins as his air disappeared before his mind could formulate a way of escape.

A snap of realization, some small spark in her brain, would save her classmate at the last second. Many refused to pair with her, turning away to control their own fury as they reminded her tersely that they were in this camp to
learn,
not get hurt. Again and again the sensei reminded her that self-control was a part of that learning, a
necessary
part, and that she could never teach if she could not learn. Teach? She didn’t care about teaching, and she was learning just fine. She had remarkable skills, moving with consummate skill and grace, incredible speed and strength. She was learning to be faster than her classmates, more brutal than her enemies, and better than her sensei.

And then her learning abruptly came to an end.

“I’ll partner with you.”

Elektra turned and studied the man who had spoken. He was taller than her, fit and muscular. His arms were toned and tight beneath the three-quarter length sleeves of his
gi,
the hair on his head shaven down to almost nothing. If she recalled correctly, his name was Patrick and he was having the same difficulty she was in finding sparring and training partners. He was an ex-Marine; rumor had it that he, too, had been brought back to life and he struggled with the same control issues—or lack of—that Elektra herself was said to have.

She grinned and stepped over to stand beside Patrick in line. Maybe she’d finally found a partner who was actually worthy of her efforts, someone who could take what she had to dish out in the pursuit of her own knowledge. The current lesson was in savate— French kickboxing—and they followed the routine the teacher dictated, weaponless sparring to hone tech niques already learned, then choreographed practice to teach one another proper blocking and parrying. Expect the unexpected, they always said, and Patrick’s hard punches and kicks only made Elektra grin and return them kind for kind. Then, with the toe of her shoe pointed in perfect savate fashion, she got bored with the repetitious
frontal
practice kick and aimed higher than the kicking shield Patrick was holding in front of his body. Her
frontal
kick caught him square in the hollow of his throat and he dropped, clawing at his neck as the useless leather shield dropped away.

The other students crowded around as the teacher ran to the fallen man. Staring down at him, Elektra felt no emotion other than triumph—and certainly no regret. As far as she was concerned, the fault was his. Had they not been told to expect the unexpected? Would a
real
opponent have been nice enough to aim his kick exactly where Patrick wanted it? He’d gotten what he deserved. Beyond that, despite what others had repeatedly said about her, she wasn’t particularly angry…at least not at the moment.

After a long, tense moment, Patrick found his air and managed to stand. He glared at her, then turned his back and stalked away—she’d lost yet another training partner.

The sensei teaching the savate class turned to look at her. She could see the anger in his eyes and in the way the skin around his lips was so tight it had turned nearly white on his olive-colored face. He gestured at her, then dropped into a fighting stance, making the rest of the class members back nervously away from the pair.

Elektra only grinned.

The only protection they had were the padded boxing gloves, but that would have to be enough. She blocked and returned each of his punches, dancing nimbly out of reach as he aimed
fouettés
and
chassés.
This was fun, a game played with a partner who at least had the skill to challenge her, a little innocent recreation—

Then her sensei came in with a split-second
chassé latéral
kick that caught her across the back and knocked her to her knees.

Pain razored through her back and her belly, following the line of the internal scarring left by the
sai
—her own—that Bullseye had pushed all the way through her body. Her head fell forward and she gasped when she saw a spot of stunningly bright blood soak through the previously unmarred white of her
gi
—obviously her flesh still had a bit of healing to do. The pain faded almost instantly but her insides still throbbed, bringing back the horrendous memory of her final moments in that rooftop battle. The sting of the playing card edge that Bullseye had whipped across her throat had shocked her, but that had been nothing,
nothing,
compared to the all-consuming anguish as he’d impaled Elektra using her own steel. Announced with all the enthusiasm of a circus hawker and undercut with Matt’s faint cry of
“Noooooooo!”
Elektra would never forget the last words that Bullseye had said to her—

“And now, for my next trick!”

—right before he’d thrust her
sai
into her stomach, then twisted it so it came out her back. How confident he’d been as he threw her off the edge of the roof level on which they’d fought, then left her to die and gone off in search of other dark pursuits with which to entertain himself. If there was one thing Elektra had to be grateful for, it was that Bullseye’s voice had
not
been the final one she would hear. She’d dragged herself up and forward until she and Matt had found each other, and it was in his loving arms that the light of her life had winked out.

Or so she’d thought.

Before she had been killed that night, Elektra had told Matt she would find him. No doubt he’d thought that promise fulfilled when she’d dragged her dying body over to him, but as far as she was concerned, that was a pledge that had yet to be fully consummated. And Matt Murdock—Daredevil—probably knew it, too—he was a smart man and she had great faith in his ability to read between the lines of Braille punched into the ankh she’d later left for him.

Today, however, Elektra needed to find someone else, someone deep inside her soul with the heart of a lion and who would not tolerate being beaten again, no matter what the lesson to be learned, no matter who was teaching it. She would not be bested again, placed in danger again, humiliated again, even by her own martial arts instructors. She would not die. She would
not.

Besides, this was
fun.

She lifted her head and stared up at the sensei who’d kicked her, and she could feel her own eyes light up with the thrill of the hunt and the rage… and oh, there was so
much
of that. Could he see that in her? A part of her brain knew that the instructor standing in front of her was not the cause of her pain, at least not the mental part, and that in reality he would never intentionally hurt her. He was probably only trying to teach her a lesson, push upon her a bit of wisdom about self-control. But another part of her brain wanted no part of selfcontrol. It desired only to fight, to retaliate and cause more pain than she had received and then to make it last that much
longer.
And that part was the stronger half, the overwhelming majority, and it
always
won.

While she had been on her knees, someone had tossed the sensei a
bo,
one of the master league ones made of hardened bamboo and covered with carvings. He held it at the ready, comfortable with its use and secure in his knowledge of the weapon’s forms, especially when his opponent was down and clearly injured.

Even so, it didn’t help him.

Elektra came up underneath it and when he swung at her and twirled it end over end, she was already inside his circle of defense and spinning outward, seeing everything from his point of view. That made it easy to anticipate his next attack, and she disarmed him in seconds, striking back at him viciously, embarrassing him in front of the other students as they saw him defeated with his own weapon at the same time as he took a vicious double blow to his ribs and one leg. Now it was her instructor gasping on his knees before her, and there was a tickle—just that—at the back of her brain that hinted maybe she shouldn’t have gone this far. But there was nothing to be done for it now, and so she let the bo slip from her fingers, turned her back, and walked away. That would teach him to be more careful about his lessons to her in the future.