Free Paradox by Alex Archer Page A

with blood.

As he slumped into a bubbling mass of torn cloth and violated flesh his
compatriot recovered from his facial battering enough to grab Annja's arm
again. He was still strong; she couldn't break free, especially with too little
room to really get her hips into it.

She opened her hand. The sword vanished. The astonishing sight made the
assailant relax his grip slightly. Then she turned and jabbed him in the eye.
He squealed.

His shades were broken and askew on his face. Half-blind he tried to grab her
again. He still hadn't given up the notion that he was big strong man and she was mere weak woman; he was relying on muscles and now
adrenaline rather than going for the gun whose butt she could see tucked
beneath his left armpit.

As she fended off his blows Annja flicked a glance at the driver. He looked
smaller than the two bruisers who'd picked her up—literally—but that was a
relative thing. He was veering around some narrow street, dividing his
attention between steering the big black SUV, looking in the rearview mirror to
try to see what was going on in the backseat and bellowing what she thought
were alternate curses and advice at the top of his voice.

The guy on her right cocked a fist to smash her in the side of her head. She
couldn't afford to lose consciousness now or even focus.

Her problem was the car wasn't quite six feet side to side, internally. The
sword was four feet long and there was no room to maneuver. She leaned way over
the now quiescent, sodden body of her other assailant, held her right hand up
and back at a wonky angle and formed it into a half fist again.

Again the sword came to her call. The way her wrist was bent her grip was very
weak. She wrapped her left hand over the pommel again and, turning hard, drove
the sword with all her strength into her enemy's thick throat.

She overdid it. She barely felt the blade's passage through the cartilage
muscle and sinews of his neck, nor the seat padding. Only when the sword began
to bite deeply into the metal of the car's body itself did she feel a shock of
resistance.

And then the blade was well and truly stuck. The driver had finally turned his
head to see firsthand what was happening behind him.

His eyes were wide with shock. The olive facial skin around his dark eyebrows
and moustache was suffused with a dark hue that she figured was red; his blood
pressure was headed toward detonation. Spittle flew from his mouth along with
sounds Annja suspected weren't intelligible in Turkish or any other known human
language. It was the primal speech of rage and terror.

But he hadn't lost enough touch to forget his own handgun. He was obviously
grabbing for it, while trying to bring the car to a stop.

Annja released the sword. It vanished instantly back to the otherwhere. In the
milliseconds she had to estimate, she didn't see any way to wield it
effectively against the driver. Not before he got his own piece and started
blasting her.

But she wasn't tied to the Renaissance and its tools. The butt of the handgun
belonging to the man she'd just killed was prodding her in the right bicep. She
needed no more hint than that.

Her left hand snaked over and dived inside his jacket. It was a wet mess, damp
with a wider variety of fluids than she wanted to think about. Fortunately he
didn't have one of those trick holsters that only work for a certain angle, or
that you have to perform some kind of complicated ritual to get to disgorge its
contents. For a while those had been all the vogue in law enforcement, to keep
cops from having their guns taken away from them by suspects. Annja wasn't sure
how that worked out; she personally thought that the point to carrying a
firearm, which was at best heavy and inconvenient, was to have it instantly
available at need.

The dead man's piece was a Glock. It was boxy, reassuring and reliable and best
of all had no external safety to try to fumble to flick off. Annja was ready in
an instant.

The driver came out