Bad Kitty

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  “Okay, so it was kind of sexual,” she trilled as she bypassed the steps to jump to the ground. She landed in a crouch, looking particularly predatory.

  “Kind of? More like definitely.” He was astonished to hear that from Karn…no, Cal. Even when he was being Karn, he’d shown a serious, reserved side, which Rahal figured now was the real Cal showing through Karn’s stylish bravado. “Speed. Heart-stopping descent. A narrow tunnel. How is that not erotic?”

  Cal pulled his dart pistol as he descended, which he did more cautiously than either Xia or Rahal. “Do you have any more firepower stashed somewhere? I’m sorry, Xia, but I’m going to need more than darts.”

  “I understand. People without claws need weapons.”

  “Armory’s down the hall.” Rahal shouted, already running. When he glanced back over his shoulder, the others were following.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They paused long enough for Rahal to open a hidden panel and break out weapons for himself and Cal. Xia, of course, disdained anything but her own claws and, having seen her in action, Cal wasn’t inclined to argue with that decision. Then they were running again.

  They burst into the palace through a door to the central atrium. Cal must have passed it a dozen times without noticing, not that he’d been looking for hidden doors at the time. One guard sprawled at the head of the corridor that led to the guest wing; two had fallen blocking the way to Rahal’s private quarters.

  Rahal swore in his native tongue. It involved a lot of hissing and snarling and a little spitting. Then he sniffed at the air as if trying to track the assassins that way.

  Could a felinoid really do that?

  Xia shook her head, a barely perceptible motion. She, at least, couldn’t. Rahal was grasping at jet trails.

  But he said confidently, “This way,” and headed toward the guest quarters.

  Cal and Xia followed. Cal, at least, figured he had no choice. Among other things, he wasn’t sure he could find his way around the palace without a guide; it was something of a warren.

  “Poor bastards were just doing their job,” Cal said quietly as he passed a corpse.

  No…not a corpse. The fallen guard was breathing, though it was shallow.

  Cal dropped to his knees, checked the man’s vitals. Slow and faint, as far as he could tell. Cal was no medico but he did know first aid for his own species and a few others. “Zap stunned,” he said. “He should be fine.” There wasn’t anything to be done for the guard, not until he started to come around, in which case pain blockers and a chillpill or two would be in order. Cal rose.

  He’d intended to get to the other downed guards, but discovered Xia, quick on her feet as always, had already darted across the enormous atrium to them. “The felinoid’s breathing for sure. Hard to tell with the Durali since they breathe through their skin, but she has no visible injuries so I bet she’s just stunned too.”

  “Thank the stars!” Rahal was still moving forward, but those three words sounded as heartfelt as anything Cal had ever heard. “But why…”

  “Belesku won’t get paid for killing random guards.” Xia said, literally skipping to join the men, as if excitement and/or battle frenzy had taken over.

  “And Karn Anders doesn’t kill people if he doesn’t have to.”

  At that, Rahal, still not stopping, turned to glare at him.

  “I know the man inside out. I worked on the case against him for the Denguay government, who I’m really going to have to talk to, because letting him go so he could come after me is just not helpful.”

  “I’m finding it humorous under the circumstances,” Rahal snarled. “Hurry up, you big… Xia!”

  But Xia was already well ahead of them. Running toward danger without a ranged weapon.

  He wanted to yell at her to stop, but they’d already made enough noise. He could try to relay her, but it wasn’t like she’d listen anyway.

  Why would she? The people in the guest quarters were her family.

  “Sir, sir? Are you there?”

  He jumped then remembered he’d turned the relay back on once they landed. Rahal’s administrator’s voice buzzed low and frantic in his head. He acknowledged it quickly, curtly, while moving toward the guest quarters.

  The suspiciously silent guest quarters.

  Stars, were they too late? If Drax and the others were dead…he didn’t know what he’d do, but it would be the kind of bloodbath people would be talking about in hushed tones for centuries to come. Especially since Xia would join in.

  “As soon as I realized the Karn Anders who’d entered the palace wasn’t the one I’d met, I got the children and most of the guests to the panic room, sir. I’m in there with them.”

  Rahal had many questions, and the one he actually asked first was the least important. “Why didn’t I know this place had a panic room?”

  The secretary had been inherited along with the palace; he’d become remarkably loyal as soon as he realized Rahal didn’t expect him to work in a gold-lamé diaper and leg irons, like his unlamented late boss demanded. It wasn’t surprising he knew more about the place than Rahal did, though somewhat surprising he hadn’t shared his knowledge.

  “You never asked. Besides, I can’t imagine you retreating to a panic room.” The damn man actually had the gall to laugh, though Rahal assumed that was half nerves.

  “Well, no… Wait a minute, you said ‘most of the guests’. Let me guess—Drax wouldn’t come with you.”

  “He did, but only because his lady friend insisted. So far, they’ve remained fully clothed, but only because of the children, I suspect. The gentleman with the bad leg, however, claimed he’d be dangerous to us if he felt trapped, and the captain agreed. Only, sir…I’ve seen it on the monitors…the man claiming to be Karn the Viking just shot the poor man in the waiting area by your office.”

  Thank goodness for neurorelays. He was able to reach Xia instantly.

  “Buck’s down?” She shrieked it, both verbally and mentally, making Rahal’s ears hurt. “On my way. Don’t kill the guy until I get there, but feel free to make him bleed.”

  “There’s a shortcut, a secret passage…”

  “Opening it now. Drax showed us the first night. I’ll probably beat you to the office wing.”

  He hadn’t even known Drax knew about the secret passage. But Drax was Drax. He probably routinely checked the places he was staying for secret passages and bugs. (He wouldn’t have found the latter because Rahal swept for them daily.)

  True to prediction, Xia beat them to the office wing, but what he and Cal found when they skidded in wasn’t what he expected.

  No dead or injured Buck. He was on his feet, though he looked shakier than usual.

  No gutted stranger.

  Only a little blood stained the floor. Xia and Buck—Buck with an old-fashioned bolt gun in hand and Xia just being Xia—stood shoulder to shoulder, keeping a tall, white-blond man who must be Karn Anders backed into a corner alcove. The statue that used to stand in the alcove had fallen and shattered on the blue marble, but it was hideous anyway. Expensive, but atrocious. Karn’s right arm and hand were bleeding, and he held the hand cradled against his chest, the blood saturating a smoothstyle jacket that probably cost as much as a month’s groceries for a family of four.

  “You must be the warlord,” Karn said, an incongruous smile on his handsome face. “I’m so sorry about all this fuss. I should have known getting Nitari involved was a bad idea, even if she’s one of the few people I could trust to handle my bail. When she bailed me out, she passed on rumors that I’d been spotted on Cibari. I simply wanted to do was talk to you, let you see me and the imposter side by side so he didn’t steal my business, but once Nitari’s involved, violence is inevitable. Mind you, I expected violence once you found out that handsome faker wasn’t really me, but at least I wouldn’t have to take part in
it. Figured you’d take care of it for me.” Bleeding all over Rahal’s floor, Karn the Viking seemed as calm as he might be having a chat in a private booth in a high-end bar. “Could you call off your rabid cat-girl and this nutter? He shot me.”

  “Shot me first.”

  “It was a zap stunner. I was trying to drop you before Belesku did something lethal, since I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask you any questions. You didn’t even seem to notice the zap anyway.”

  Buck roared with laughter.

  Rahal reflected that when a battle-type laugh sounded insane to him, the laugher would probably be locked up on the kind of planet that worried about crazy instead of working with it.

  “Sure I did, pretty boy. Zap stunners don’t do much if you have as much nerve discombobulation as I do, but it knocked my aim for a loop. Otherwise you’d be dead instead of just hurtin’, and so would that one-eyed assassin I winged.”

  “Speaking of one-eyed assassins…” Xia pointed to a few drops of blood on the polished blue marble floor, “…since you guys are here, I’m off. Things to do. People to kill.”

  Cal opened his mouth to protest, but Rahal relayed. “Let her go; this is personal.” Not like they could have stopped her anyway, short of using the zap stunner Karn had dropped.

  “Good hunting, Xia,” Buck said as she darted off, far more cheerfully than Rahal could have managed. “What the heck is going on here anyway? At first glance I thought you were Xia’s friend there, so I didn’t shoot you again when my nerves reset. Figured there was a story everyone needed to learn.”

  “There certainly is,” Karn and Cal said simultaneously.

  “You even sound like me,” Karn added, shaking his head. “Not to mention looking enough like me to be my brother, if not my clone. Who the hell are you anyway?”

  To Rahal’s amusement, Cal bowed mockingly, the way he would have playing Karn. “Cal Janssen, PL.”

  Rahal froze, anticipating an explosion, but the real Karn just shook his head and grinned wryly. “You’re one of the bastards who helped Denguay put me away, and you had the cheek to impersonate me with one of my clients. I think I like you, Cal Janssen. Though I imagine the warlord doesn’t, which might be a career-ending problem.”

  “I’m irked,” Rahal said, flashing his broadest toothy grin. “But, come on, he’s shown real style and flash, not to mention he’s even prettier than you are. Broader shoulders. Bluer eyes. Though you may have better cheekbones.”

  Cal bowed again, to Rahal, and then toward the direction Xia had run, and finally to the real Karn. So the stylish cheekiness was part of him, not just something he put on to play at being a playboy arms dealer.

  Karn smiled at the bow. Then, with his voice more subdued than it had been, he said, “What the marling stars is going on here? It sounds like you’re all friends.” Then he blinked. “On second thought, explain later. After I’ve stopped bleeding.” He started to sink toward the floor.

  Rahal dove for the zap stunner, which might be in reach once the wounded man touched the floor.

  And Cal, Cal whom he’d never understand, skidded to Karn, eased him into a more comfortable position and started applying pressure to his wound. “The bail-jumping bounty’s less if he bleeds out,” Cal said nonchalantly.

  But Rahal didn’t believe for a second it was that simple or mercenary. Cal was, at heart, a decent person.

  And so, in his way, was the real Karn Anders. Didn’t mean Rahal wouldn’t do something career ending to him as payback for the home invasion.

  Not life ending. Career ending. That would hurt longer and would be way less messy.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Before she’d gone more than a few steps down the hallway out of the atrium, Xia turned her neurorelay off to concentrate better. Okay, more so she wouldn’t have to listen to the guys scolding her for running off on her own. She didn’t need to concentrate much. Tracking a blood trail indoors was easy.

  Nitari Belesku was here. Nitari Belesku had been stopped from killing Buck only because the real Karn Anders was, like Cal’s portrayal of him, both swashbuckling and responsible, trying to minimize carnage.

  Nitari Belesku was already bleeding.

  Xia paused long enough to crouch down, dip her index finger into a droplet of blood and then taste it. Yeah, that was the flavor she remembered. Belesku’s blood was red; the genetic manipulations hadn’t been enough to change that. But its slight piquancy was more Blemondian.

  She hadn’t tasted Blemondian blood since childhood, but some things you didn’t forget, even if you tried.

  She jumped to her feet, went back to following the blood trail.

  The palace seemed dark and cold, although all the lights were on and she knew the climate control in the palace was good.

  Let the dark and cold envelop her. She was this close to Nitari Belesku. This close to ending her and maybe freeing herself from the darkness. Once her parents were avenged, once she got some of her own back for having been dumped on Lysander and almost killed on San’bal, she’d be okay. Right?

  The flavor of Belesku’s blood swirled in her mouth.

  She found Belesku crouched behind a well-stocked bar in a disturbing purple- and green-striped room with gilded barstools. Great. She’d be able to have a drink when she was done.

  She made a mental note to bring something snooty in the whiskey line back to Buck. Rahal wouldn’t begrudge it, under the circumstances. If Buck hadn’t wounded her, Xia figured Belesku would have been more alert and stealthy, if not necessarily faster. (That was the downside of Blemondian genes. They made her sturdier, with stronger bones, but also slowed her down.)

  As it was, Xia was able to vault over the bar and more or less land on the woman. She looked up, showing a face ravaged by Xia’s claws, and that looking up offered Xia the chance to close her claws around Belesku’s throat.

  “You again? The stray kitten from San’bal?” For a woman who was already dripping blood from her side and whose jugular vein was in imminent danger of being severed, Nitari Belesku sounded downright blasé. “I’d hoped you’d learn to keep better company.”

  Hate the woman or not, Xia had to give credit where credit was due—Nitari Belesku could keep her cool under pressure.

  Xia knew what to do about that. She applied more force to the fragile skin of the human’s throat. “I’ve learned a few things. Who I am. Who my parents are. Who killed them.” Which wasn’t completely accurate—she’d never had time for the full story of who her parents were, but Cal seemed to know, so she’d learn soon enough.

  Belesku blanched and twitched in a way that brought her the critical millimeter closer to Xia’s claws. Blood spotted Belesku’s skin. Pretty soon she’d be dead and the awful pounding in Xia’s brain would ease up.

  “Marling stars, you’re the girl in the fountain!”

  Xia was seeing through a haze of red, but it looked like Belesku was smiling.

  “I should have recognized you on San’bal, by Olo’s training, if not by that white ear, but it’s been so long, and you were just a kitten the last time I saw you. My old mentors on Lysander took good care of you.”

  “If good care includes abuse and molestation, sure.” She tried to sound as nonchalant as Belesku, but the pounding in her head, the haze of blood obscuring her vision, the damp chill deep in her bones, all made it hard. “I learned to fight, though. Learned not to be afraid.”

  To her astonishment, Belesku laughed. “Bullshit. You’re always afraid, same as me, same as anyone trained by Olo. And it’s all right. The pain and fear drive us. It’s made me the best in the business, and made you good enough I’m trying to talk my way out of dying because I’m not sure I can win this time, at least not while hurt. You feel that dark punishment cell on Lysander all the time, don’t you? It’s in your bones, just like it’s in mine. Keeps you moving. Keeps you alone.”


  Always afraid. Alone. Too damn true, though she’d never admit it. Maybe to Rahal and Cal, assuming they didn’t end up killing each other, but not to this bitch. “I thought it was the fountain.”

  Why was she still talking? Why didn’t she just end this now? But she couldn’t. Not until she knew why, nearly two decades ago, her parents had had to die and she’d been left alive.

  “There was a leaky pipe in the punishment cell in my day. A plumbing problem back then, probably a feature by the time you were there. I regret the fountain. I regret that whole job. Didn’t come close to paying enough for the mess it turned into.” Belesku sounded surprisingly sincere. “I thought it was about politics. I mean, I was hired to kill the prime minister’s family; you’d figure that would be about politics. I didn’t know the client was a regular zelacxi who thought the way to a woman’s heart was to kill her family and then be there to comfort her in her grief. I didn’t know there was a child involved.”

  Belesku took a deep enough breath that Xia’s claws pressed deeper into her skin. “The whole job was a clusterfuck. But I did save your life, even if I had to drug you with a memory scrambler and dump you with Olo to make sure no one could track you down.”

  “I suppose I should thank you for that. But you slaughtered my parents.” The smell of blood wasn’t inclining Xia to mercy, and the cold darkness was screaming to be fed, screaming that it was Nitari Belesku’s fault she had to fight the darkness every day.

  Xia’s grip tightened instinctively, drawing more blood. It would be so easy to slash the woman’s throat. She ought to. It would be doing the galaxy a favor. The darkness roared for blood, and the red haze thickened so it almost completely obscured Xia’s vision.

  She raised her other hand, claws fully extended.

  “Seriously, it was just a job,” Belesku babbled. “Nothing personal, except for those few minutes when the darkness has been fed enough it’ll lose its grip. You know how that is. We’re alike, you and I.”