by Andrea Speed
Their sedan had slammed into an armored Hummer, and a neat hole in the windshield suggested the driver had been shot immediately. There were now six bodies scattered within Kaede’s limited field of vision, and a couple of them wore the black hoods that were the calling card of the Black Veil, a quasicult run by Black Hand, a supervillain who was something of a rival of Dr. Terror, a fellow mad scientist who was actually more mad than scientist. Kaede saw the man he had stabbed in the arm bleeding out in the street. He was still alive, but not for long.
Kaede stood up shakily and saw a handful of other bodies spread out on the other side of the car. Ash appeared then, a light smattering of blood once again freckling his face. “Are you all right?” Ash asked.
“Yeah, just got my bell rung,” Kaede said, rubbing his forehead. So how many people had Ash killed in, what, twenty seconds? At least ten, maybe a dozen. He was the human equivalent of a tornado of machetes.
Suddenly there was a heavy metallic thud, followed closely by another, and a man in skeletal iron armor appeared on the far side of the Hummer. It was like he was in a humanoid-shaped skeleton. Kaede could see him through it, the bars surrounding him like a personal crash cage. The bars had just a tiny bit more separation than ribs, which meant Kaede could slip a knife through them. If he could avoid the metal sword that seemed to be growing out of the man’s metal left hand.
“Give yourself up, Hayashi,” the man in the iron suit said. “Then I won’t have to hurt you.”
“What the hell is that?” Ash asked.
“I have no idea,” Kaede admitted. “How do we deal with this thing?”
But Ash was already off, running toward their sedan. He leaped up on top of the hood and then jumped toward the man in the metal suit, twisting in midair so his feet hit the man square in the facemask. The guy in the metal cage swiped at him but wasn’t fast enough and was already falling before he got a chance to connect.
Ash tucked and rolled as he hit the street, and the man in the metal suit hit the asphalt so hard it broke around him, kicking up shards of macadam as he settled like a fallen tree. There were metallic noises as the man in the metal suit attempted to do something—stand, maybe?—but he couldn’t seem to do more than weakly move his arms.
“How did you know to do that?” Kaede asked as Ash stood up and dusted himself off.
“He’s clearly top heavy, and he was taking ages to move. What he made up for in body armor and strength, he sacrificed in mobility and speed. There’s always a weakness—you just have to keep an eye out for it.”
“Good to know.” Kaede tried to ignore the ache in his head as he picked up his kukri and did a quick scan of the fallen to see if they had anything worth taking. He liked to take trophies from all his fallen enemies. He saw the spiked brass knuckles that one of the men had hanging on his belt, and he took them. Crude, but they could surely inflict some pain.
He then walked over to the man in the iron body armor, who was still trying to lever himself up, with no obvious effect. Ash followed, ready to back his play.
Kaede knelt beside the man and saw the kukri could indeed fit between the bars on his headpiece. He pressed the tip of the knife into his forehead, and the man winced. Then he regained his composure and started ranting. “All will fall before Black Hand. The Black Veil will cover the world—”
Kaede put his weight on the kukri, which pierced the man’s skin and caused blood to well up beneath the tip of the knife. Head wounds always bled like a motherfucker, no matter how inconsequential they were, so they were good for making people talk.
“Save the spiel for the rubes, iron moron,” Kaede told him. “You have one minute to tell me why you attacked me, or I’m going to scalp you and make a coin purse out of your skin.”
Although the man paused in his rant and flicked his gray eyes nervously over to Kaede, he quickly looked away and snapped back into his canned rant. “The Black Veil will—”
Still pressing down hard, Kaede began moving the blade slowly across his forehead, carving up skin and sending blood cascading down his face. “You thought I was kidding, huh? What if I spin the string out of your intestines? I’m sure there’s a way. Ash, you want to open up his guts?”
“Sure. Slightly dull knife or very dull?”
“Surprise me.”
“Okay, okay!” the henchman exclaimed, eyes wide beneath the slick coating of blood. “Jesus! Black Hand wants your father to know this is his city. You’re not allowed to come here without an express invitation.”
“Uh-huh. How long has he owned all the property in the city?”
The henchman looked briefly flummoxed. “Well, he doesn’t. But….”
“Then you tell Black Hand that I’m going anywhere I want, and he has twelve hours to get out of the city. Otherwise, I’m going to scoop his brain out of his head and use his skull as a candy dish. And that’s only if he’s caught by me. If my father gets him first, he’ll be lucky if there’s enough of him left to hold a Chiclet. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the henchman said, trying to nod before remembering he still had a knife on his face. “I got it.”
“Good. You might want to run too. If I ever see you again, it’ll be way too soon.” Kaede got to his feet, and saw Ash standing there, holding a knife he must have taken from a fallen member of the Black Veil. Was he actually waiting for the word to start gutting him? Ash was the best bodyguard ever.
There was no point in going back to their car, as it was effectively totaled and the driver dead, so Kaede climbed up the Hummer and looked in the driver’s side window. Yep, the keys were still in the ignition, like he figured. When you had to jump into action, you didn’t have time to grab your keys, and it was also possible you didn’t have the pockets. (Did their uniforms have pockets? He couldn’t tell.) It was surprising what supervillains and superheroes alike overlooked when costume designing.
“Know the way to the safe house?” Kaede asked.
Ash shrugged. “I think so.”
“Great. You can drive if you want.” Kaede went and retrieved his bag from the trunk of the sedan, and they left it, the dead driver, and the dead henchmen at the scene. As they drove away, it appeared the guy in the iron suit was still struggling to get up. Kaede wondered how he’d ever managed to get the thing to move in the first place. They let the wrong guy pilot the suit, and maybe they should have worked a bit longer on the suit too. It was reasonably impressive looking, but that was all it had going for it.
They decided to park a couple blocks away from the safe house and walk in since the Black Veil might have a way to trace the Hummer. Kaede had done a cursory scan for a tracker, but if they were pros at all, it’d be buried in the engine or underneath the car, somewhere where getting rid of it would not be easy. Ash suggested that maybe he was giving them too much credit for competency, which was a fair point.
They ended up abandoning the Hummer in a parking garage, illegally parking it so it would soon be towed, most likely before the Black Veil bothered to recover it. They then walked out, and Kaede threw a backhanded finger at one of the security cameras, just a little message to the Black Veil that they might never get. These guys had to know his father was not just insane but ruthlessly insane, and yet they still persisted in coming after him. Superheroes too. How many dead would it take for them to realize the fucker was more dangerous than a plague-racked rabid dog and best left alone? It was also just a little bit offensive that they thought him such an easy target. Oh sure, he wasn’t the walking horror show his father was, but you didn’t get to be Kaede Hayashi without picking up a ton of baggage, mostly full of nasty tricks.
Corwyn, from the sidewalk, was just another city, another concrete and steel canyon of similar skyscrapers lining anonymous roads, and could have honestly been anywhere in America, or in certain parts of Toronto. Something about cities blending toward homogeny offended him. The identity of a place shouldn’t be so interchangeable. Sometimes it seemed like the world was threatening to tur
n into one big fast-food restaurant, and he hated it.
They were in sight of the massive building where Kamani’s penthouse suite overlooked this generic city when Ash made a negative noise and paused on the sidewalk, a hand pressed to his side. Kaede stopped, turned, and was about to tease him for being a shitty supersoldier when he saw blood leaking between Ash’s fingers.
“Holy shit!” Kaede gasped, returning to him and hoping to block the view of bystanders with his body. “Were you shot?”
“Yes, but it passed through. It’s just a flesh wound,” Ash said, his lips looking a little paler than usual.
“A flesh wound that hurts?” Kaede asked dubiously.
“Any shot that hits you hurts,” Ash responded, and Kaede had no counter to that.
The building, Kamani Tower, was a luxury condo and had a suited doorman among its security precautions, but Kaede flashed his genuine ID, the one with his real name on it, and the doorman asked no questions. He simply held the door for him, tipped his cap, and welcomed him to the tower. It was mostly bad to be a Hayashi, but sometimes it was very good indeed.
Ash insisted he didn’t need a doctor, and it was in his best interests to never see one since a doctor might notice he wasn’t exactly your average human. Kamani had some in-house doctors, ones who knew they didn’t report shit to anyone unless they wanted to wake up in a body bag, but Ash didn’t want that either. So Kaede told him to take off his shirt, grabbed a bottle of vodka and a clean rag from the fully stocked bar, and found an emergency sewing kit and some Super Glue.
Kaede knew he shouldn’t have been surprised by the sight of shirtless Ash, but he was. If you could ignore the blood and the small hole in his torso on the left side of his body, he had a flat stomach and a solidly muscled abdomen, along with nicely shaped pecs. Kaede thought his chest might have been shaved, which was kind of icky, but up close he could see Ash did have chest hair. It was very fine and not so much pale as nearly translucent. Also, he had a large red, blue, and green tattoo of a Chinese-style dragon, its sinuous, snakelike body curving around his side and up his chest, the head perched over his left pec, showing a mouth full of needlelike fangs, its eye glowing red. The scaling on the body was intricate and must have taken ages.
“Goddamn,” he said, hoping Ash thought he was staring at the tattoo alone. “When did you have that done?”
Ash glanced down as if he’d forgotten his own massive tattoo. “Back in Laos.”
Kaede flashed back on what Ash had told him. “Holy shit, when you were fifteen?”
Ash nodded. He was perched—somewhat uncomfortably to all appearances—on the huge blue leather sofa in the middle of the minimalist living room. An entire wall of windows overlooked the city, one that could be turned opaque with a single voice command, and what design scheme there was focused on chrome and Lucite, white and ice blues. He would never understand his father’s love of sterile and cold as a theme, except it did fit his personality.
“I thought you had to be a certain age to get a tattoo,” Kaede remarked. “Especially one that large.”
Ash shrugged. “I don’t know. The law and I have only ever had a passing acquaintance.”
Kaede thought that was probably a great understatement, and he smiled as he sat down beside him. “Okay, so, I’m going to disinfect the area with booze, and it’s gonna sting like fuck. You wanna take a slug off the bottle first?”
Ash considered that a moment before nodding and taking the bottle from him with a blood-slicked hand. He guzzled quite a bit of it, gulping the high-proof vodka like it was water. But then again, gengineered humans would have a different tolerance to foreign substances.
Finally, Ash stopped to take a breath and handed him back the half-full bottle. “That’s enough to do the job, right?”
“Oh yeah. As it is, that bar has, like, a billion bottles of booze. So I can always just get another one.”
Kaede covered the bottle’s open mouth with the rag, then quickly tipped it and straightened it in one move, getting the rag damp but not soaking. He then gently dabbed the neat hole the bullet had ripped through Ash, taking the opportunity for a slightly closer look at the wound.
Not that he had seen a lot of bullet wounds, but this one did look fairly neat. Ash was right; it appeared to be a clean in and out, with a small exit wound almost directly opposite the entrance wound. A sharp intake of breath was the extent of Ash’s reaction to his ministrations. Kaede tried to be gentle as he cleaned off some of the blood and used the alcohol to sterilize the wound. He did notice that Ash had taut, smooth skin Kaede wanted to keep touching, but maybe not when Ash was bleeding.
Kaede explained how he was going to use the Super Glue to close the wound on both sides, and that it would also sting like fuck, but it was more painless and in general better than if he’d tried to sew it shut with regular thread. He gave Ash the option, but he seemed fine with the glue. While Kaede got to work, Ash said, “You seem to have medical training.”
“I have triage training,” Kaede admitted. “My father thought it might be useful, and also I have a feeling he wants me to follow in his footsteps.”
“But you don’t?”
“No. I’d like to be myself, if at all possible.” Carefully he daubed the glue on the entry wound and closed the skin over it. Ash hissed from the burn, but that was it.
“So what would you like to do?”
Kaede glued up the exit wound before telling him, “Honestly, I have no idea. I want to be myself, but I have no idea who that is.”
“You’re pretty good with this triage stuff,” Ash said.
Kaede shrugged. He didn’t think he was, but it was nice of Ash to say. “If you think I’m letting you get away without telling me about your tattoo, you’re crazy.” Now that he could see Ash’s back, he saw the dragon continued there, its long, almost leonine, tail ending right between Ash’s shoulder blades, just beneath the nape of his neck.
“The owner of a soup shop was being bothered by mobsters. I offered to take care of the problem in exchange for the room over the shop and soup. I think he thought I was crazy since I was a—” Ash used a word Kaede didn’t recognize. It sounded Thai, though. “—and a teenage one at that, but he was desperate enough to agree. So I took care of their Triad problem, and I got the room. Then word got around, and I was hired by both a tattooist and a shop owner to take care of their Triad problem. The tattoo was my payment for my services. I left it up to the tattooist. He said I was a dragon, and I should be marked as such.”
“He was right. Umm… when you say ‘take care,’ do I assume kill?”
“Mostly. The Triad are not big on negotiating.”
“I guess not,” Kaede said. He cleaned off the blood still on Ash’s torso. The tattoo was even more extraordinary close up. The colors were shockingly vibrant, and the layering of the scales, the texture of the claws, marked this as work of a rare quality. No strip-mall tattoo store would ever do this. “How long did it take?”
“Clearing out the gang or the tattoo?”
“Both.”
“The gang was gone in a month and a half. The tattoo was a bit over two months of work.”
Yes, that made sense. It wouldn’t take long for Ash to wipe out a bunch of heavily armed humans who thought they were badasses, even if he was doing them one at a time. “At fifteen, huh? Sweet. Sounds like you were living the dream… albeit with a bit more killing.”
“It really wasn’t a bad life at all,” Ash agreed. “I was… well, not happy. I’m not sure I’ve ever been happy. But content, I suppose. Apparently that’s how your father’s investigator found me, though. The remains of the gang were talking to their Triad masters in China, and apparently they were thinking of trying to recruit me rather than attempt another futile round of trying to kill me. The investigator picked up the chatter and found me first. A good thing, as I’d have killed any Triad that tried to recruit me. I don’t like gangsters. They think they’re better than everyone else, even though
they’re only big with numbers and guns.”
“Man’s gotta have a code,” Kaede agreed, even though he knew, coming from Dr. Terror’s son, that was some incredibly rich irony. But he did have a code. Kind of. He was also saner than his dad, so he had that going for him.
Ash nodded. “I know Karna preached nihilism and anarchy, but that only gets you so far. You have to have some personal rules to live with yourself. Fuck society, fuck everyone. You just need to be centered in your own head. The rest of ’em can hang.”
Hearing that made Kaede smile, and he leaned over and impulsively kissed Ash on the corner of his mouth. Ash sat back and gave him a curious look, raising one pale eyebrow. “Why did you do that?”
“You were just so cute, I had to.”
“Cute?”
Kaede couldn’t believe his confused reaction to it. “Oh come on, you’re not telling me you’ve never been called cute before.”
“Yes. People ignore me, or they’re afraid of me. There’s little in between.”
“Then they’re blind or nuts.” The bleeding had stopped, most of the blood had been wiped away, and Kaede no longer had any excuse to touch him. It was a shame, because he really wanted to keep touching him. He caught his honeyed eyes and realized that maybe Ash was starting to grasp that. But he gave no sign of how that affected him—was he curious about it? Scared? Repulsed? Thrilled? No clue. His poker face was back in full effect. As Kaede collected the bar rag, now soaked with blood, and the Super Glue, he said, “Hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable.”
“No, you didn’t. Now I’m wondering if I was ever sent signals and just never noticed them. Hmm.” Ash grabbed the bottle of vodka and finished off the rest of it.
Kaede really hoped he hadn’t made him uncomfortable. He liked him. Ash was fucking amazing. Who could dislike him? Well, okay, gangsters—and guys he killed or beat the shit out of. Which, in retrospect, must have been a rather long list. Man, maybe he should be Ash’s bodyguard, and not vice versa.
He recommended Ash go take a shower to clean up the last of the blood, then head off to bed, rest up. It would accelerate the healing and all that—yada, yada—and while Ash was compliant, Kaede found himself watching him leave the room with something like longing. He really wanted to join him in hitting the shower and going to bed. He couldn’t, especially not now, not while Ash was still recovering from a bullet wound, but goddamn. He knew he probably shouldn’t have those thoughts about him, especially since Ash had no idea about sex or anything, but he couldn’t help it. That intricate dragon tattoo just made him sexier.
