by Dakota Banks
Not unless Camila is Ageless—in which case I would already be on my ass with a knife at my neck, or in my neck.
“It’s about the story on Senator Plait.”
“Did Plait send you here? That son-of-a-bitch? You can tell him to go screw himself. Nothing’s gonna stop this story from coming out and it’ll be my byline he can ride to hell.” Her voice was low and even, remarkable given the situation, except that she practically spit out the senator’s name.
This may be a tougher sell than I thought.
“Everything you have on Plait is true?”
“Yeah. It’s one-hundred-percent legit. I busted my butt for a year checking out all the shit.”
“So you feel confident that the public has a need to know this, given that it’s going to derail his career?”
“Don’t kid yourself. He goes to some country-club jail for a while and when he gets out, he squirms his way back into politics like a worm. The public’s got a short attention span. This is just a bump in the road for him.”
“Even if that’s possible, it could take years to get back on track.”
Camila shrugged. “That’s my concern because?”
“Are you doing this to make a name for yourself?”
“I wouldn’t mind the extra money. Get a two-bedroom place, start saving a bit. But that’s not the main reason. He killed my sister four years ago. I thought about hiring somebody to take him out, but it’s too risky. My baby isn’t going to Family Services. I’m getting some justice for Angelita the only way I can.”
Maliha viewed Camila’s aura. She detected some darkness there, which she guessed was due to her childhood experiences. She’d seen it before in the auras of abused children. There was no deception.
“What happened to Angelita?”
“I don’t have to tell you my life story. I’ve told you too much already. Now it’s time for you to answer some questions. Who the hell are you, and what gives you the right to come into my home with a gun? You’re threatening my son and me. I want you out of my apartment.”
“Calm down. I’m here to offer you a different story to investigate, a national scandal. And I can do something about your money anxieties. Give you and your son a secure life.”
“What are you talking about? Haven’t you been listening? I don’t want another story. This is personal, with Carlton Plait. You’re gonna bribe me out of getting justice? No way.” She pulled a string hanging around her neck and brought out an emergency call pendant that was hidden under her pajamas. “I pressed this when you put that gun on the table. How long has that been? Three minutes? The police will be here any second!” Camila stood up. “You are so out of your league, sister. You think I haven’t been expecting something like this?” She upended the table, knocking the gun onto the floor. Grabbing a knife from a wooden block on the counter, she lunged at Maliha.
Maliha blocked the thrust easily and grabbed Camila’s wrist. She twisted Camila’s arm behind her back, hyper-flexing the wrist and plucking the knife from her fingers. She kicked the back of Camila’s knee and brought the woman down hard on both knees.
Maliha felt a rush of air. Viewing auras in the room, she saw the black streak left by an Ageless running at speed. When a person moved, his aura lagged a fraction of a second behind, a kind of inertia of the energy field. For a normal person, that slight delay wasn’t enough to matter—his aura would appear to stay with him as he moved. At Ageless speed, it did matter, and was visible to Maliha as a black blur crossing her field of aura vision.
Puzzled, she said, “Jake?” Then she noticed that the gun on the floor was gone. “No, Jake, don’t!”
She heard gunshots and Camila slumped in her grip. The woman had taken a bullet in the head and another in her chest. Maliha turned to leave and saw that the computer had been pulverized and flames were already leaping from the stacks of research folders to the nearby curtains. In a minute, the apartment would be engulfed.
The front door crashed in and a S.W.A.T. team rushed into the room. They stopped a few feet beyond the threshold. The carpet was on fire.
Maliha was already in motion. With the flames around her, she locked her fear of burning alive away and sped toward the bedroom, drawing on her Ageless speed. She pulled the baby from the crib and ran out the door, knocking into an officer holding a shield, who couldn’t even see what had brushed him aside.
She spotted blood on the baby. Horrified, she checked him over and found no wound.
It’s his mother’s blood from my hands. I’m glad he’ll never know it.
In the hallway she placed the baby on the floor and ran for the stairwell. She delayed long enough to make sure that someone noticed him, and then she bolted down the stairs.
She was running down the street, trying to distance herself physically and mentally from the horror of her plan gone wrong, when Anu’s judgment hit her so sharply she stumbled and rolled. She grimaced in pain as a figure crawled from the lives saved side of her scale and made its way across her stomach in the wrong direction, burning its tiny footprints into her skin. Then the scale swung into motion as the pans readjusted their positions. The pull through time, since she aged every time the scale moved, was not great. The damage was already done to Maliha’s heart.
The boy will die because I didn’t save his mother. What on Earth went wrong in there?
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Jake was here the whole time,” Hound said. “He said he needed a couple of hours’ rest. He was sleeping in your room at the time you were in Camila’s apartment.”
“How can you be so sure?” Amaro asked.
“I don’t have a trusting nature. I pushed a piece of heavy furniture in front of the closed door. If he’d come out, I would have seen the furniture move.”
“He could have jumped over it, genius,” Amaro said.
“Shit.”
“Could he have run to D.C. and back?” Amaro said. They both looked at Maliha.
“I couldn’t have done that when I was Ageless. Not in two hours. It has to be some other Ageless who has taken an interest, protecting Mr. X. Or Mr. X is Ageless, and that was him in the room with me.”
“Then why did you say that the first thought that entered your mind was Jake?” Hound said.
Maliha started to get irritated. “I was surprised. Can we move on?”
She didn’t want to explain that she thought first of Jake because he’d offered to take over the assignment for her and in that instant, she’d thought that somehow he was doing just that.
“Looking at the practical side, that clone of Camila’s disc came in handy. I found that she had an account for backing up her files on a cloud service. I wiped them out. We’re sitting on that information about the good senator if we care to use it.”
“If it’s true, we’ll use it, but not until we have Yanmeng back.”
Maliha sat at a small table in Kelly’s Pub later that night. She was on her second glass of orange juice. Hound was late. He’d wanted to talk with her in a private situation.
She was positioned so that she could see the front door and spot Hound when he came in. Ten minutes later, he entered, a fresh dusting of snow on his broad, uneven shoulders and his Indiana-Jones-style hat pulled down low over his face. The bar was full of students celebrating the end of the semester, but Hound stood head and shoulders above most of them. He acknowledged her with a quick upward nod of his head, and then went to the bar for a beer.
He sat down across from her and took a long swallow of beer. “Any booze in that O.J.?”
“No,” Maliha said. “One of us has to stay sober, and it looks like I’m it.”
“Hell, I’ve only had one, maybe two beers. Just to warm up. It’s cold outside.”
I’d say it was more to build up your courage.
“What did you want to tell me?”
“I’ve been thinking that when this is over, it’s time to go our separate ways,” Hound said.
“What? You argued agai
nst that when I suggested it. You said you’d spend the rest of your life looking for me if I disappeared.”
“Things have changed. First, you’re not the only one who has any say about it. The new democracy, remember?”
“Bullshit. This sounds more like a mutiny than a democracy.”
“Hear me out.” He took another swallow of beer. “Maliha, you’ve gone to pieces on this Yanmeng thing.” He grimaced. “Poor choice of words.”
“I have not—”
“Ah!” He held up one finger to stop her denial. His breath wafted across the table to her, and she was sure he’d had more than a couple of beers.
“My turn to talk,” he said. “You said you were thinking of splitting the team because we were in danger due to our association with you. We”—he gestured as though Amaro were with them at the table—“think we’re endangering you.”
She frowned at him. “I can take care of myself. I’ve managed to survive a few tough spots. Explain.”
“You’re usually aggressive and confident of success. Now your confidence is eroded, which I think has been the point all along—breaking you down until you mindlessly follow directions like a good little assassin. When you take action, something goes wrong. Yanmeng is involved and your judgment has gone to hell.”
“I swore to get him back and I will. If I don’t, that means I’m dead.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about. Not everything is going to turn out your way because you said so. We come up against impossible circumstances sometimes and we lose our loved ones. You can’t accept that. All that conflict going on in you is spilling out into just about everything you do. It’s as clear to us as a mountain stream. You can’t work rationally when one of us is in danger.”
It was hard to hear, but Maliha knew he was striking close to the truth. She was treading on moral territory she’d rather not walk on, and she was forced to do it with the clock ticking on Yanmeng’s life. The result had been mistakes and missed opportunities, which compounded and made her feel even worse. The frustration over not being able to find Yanmeng and put an end to the nightmare was turning her into a blindfolded woman with a loaded gun.
I’m playing right into Mr. X’s hands.
A drunken man stumbled into their table. Hound rose from his seat. “Fuck off, jerk.”
He was a happy drunk and didn’t react to Hound’s imposing presence. “Need to take a leak,” he said, and smiled.
Hound gave him a shove toward the men’s room. “The door with the stick figure of a man on it.”
“Thanks.” He moved off in that direction and Hound sat down.
“There’s another thing. There’s a worrisome pattern going here,” Hound said. “The first target was a bad guy. The second target was gray, where it was hard to tell whose life or goals took priority, the journalist’s or the senator’s. Not the kind of decision I’d like to make without a big spotlight to point the way.”
“Camila said the senator killed her sister. That’s a sizeable spotlight.”
“If it’s true. Her sister Angelita died in a car accident. So far I haven’t turned up anything suspicious about it. The whole thing might have been Camila’s imagination. The next target might be a good guy. What then?”
“I don’t know. You want me to let Yanmeng die? I don’t want to do it, but I might take Jake up on his offer to kill the target.”
“I didn’t know he’d offered. Ain’t love grand? What would you do if the kidnapped person wasn’t Yanmeng?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“Shit, Maliha, we’re talking honestly here. If you’re not going to start telling the truth, then you already have broken up this team.”
“I’d refuse to do the killing. I’d try a bluff. Take a risk, something.”
“There it is. You’d risk a kidnapped stranger’s life so your moral compass doesn’t go haywire. In this case, you don’t feel you have freedom to act because one of us is involved. I rest my case.”
Maliha shifted her feet and noticed something new: a box on the floor, right next to her ankles.
“Hound, the drunk—he left a box.”
“Stay here!” Hound was up and running toward the men’s room, plowing a path through the crowd.
Stay here? Why should I? I’ll check the front.
Maliha started to rise and felt an insistent hand on her shoulder. Blood red fingernails walked down her arm and tapped the table.
“Sit down. Let your manservant do his job.”
A woman slipped into the seat Hound had just vacated. She was tall, blonde, young, with skin as pale as if she lived underground and had lost all of her coloring. Her lips matched the color of her fingernails, and Maliha noticed that those nails were filed to a point. Her coat was drawn tightly around her body, but Maliha could tell that body was both fit and curvaceous.
Viewing the woman’s aura, Maliha was shocked at its black intensity. She knew she had to be looking at one of the Ageless, a woman with more death and blood on her hands than Maliha could measure on her scale.
This woman had a good start on killing before she became a demon’s slave and hasn’t slacked off since. She is Mr. X or she is guarding Mr. X at her demon’s command.
The woman tossed her hair. “Did you get a good look?”
She can tell when her aura’s viewed! Never met anyone else sensitive to that except Yanmeng.
“Yes,” Maliha said.
“I thought it was about time we met face-to-face. Speaking of faces, you really should do something about that skin of yours.” She ran her fingers down her own perfect alabaster cheek. “I could give you some ideas on that.”
“I’m not here for a beauty consultation. Let Yanmeng go.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Do you remember Xietai?”
Maliha couldn’t figure out where the conversation was going. “Yes. He was a depraved snake.”
“That may be, but he was my depraved snake. I reward depravity with advanced training. That training is now wasted.”
That’s why Xietai put up such a strong fight. He was trained by one of the Ageless. A nasty one.
“I have one of his knives. I’d be happy to return it to you, right between your eyes.”
“I’ve heard so much about you, rogue, but up close you seem a bit unimpressive. I’ll take you on though, and make the best of it.”
Maliha blinked. “What?”
“You killed my top warrior. I expect you to take his place when Yanmeng’s dead. Ooh, did I say that last part aloud?”
Fear and rage fought inside Maliha. She kept her voice as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “Who are you?”
“Countess Elizabeth. ‘My Lady’ will do.” She stood and turned to leave.
Go!
Maliha rose from her seat, tugging on the grip of the whip sword wrapped around her waist as she did so. By the time she was standing, the two flexible blades were separated and whirling toward Elizabeth. They struck low, severing her legs below the knees. Blood spurted wildly. The crowd scrambled for the exits and the staff disappeared into a back room, heading for the loading door.
Maliha crouched over the figure on the floor. Elizabeth was losing a lot of blood. If she didn’t act soon, she might become unconscious before she could put her lower legs back in place and let them reattach.
I could kill her now. But would I ever find Yanmeng?
She put a knife to Elizabeth’s throat.
“Return Yanmeng or next time those blades will cut off your head, not your legs. You can forget about me becoming your warrior.” She heard a siren approaching in the distance. “Better hurry up and put your legs back on or you’ll have a lot of explaining to do to the paramedics.”
Maliha picked up the box on the floor at her feet and walked out of the now-empty pub.
Hound came jogging down the block. He was breathing hard—he didn’t have a lot of stamina due to the old injuries to his chest.
“The jerk who left the box
is dead,” he said between breaths. “Somebody killed him a few blocks away before I got there.”
He glanced through the window of the pub and noticed that the celebrating crowds were missing. “Where’d everybody go? What’d I miss?”
Then he noticed that Maliha was coiling the whip sword back into its sheath around her waist.
“Let’s split up,” she said.
He nodded and took off into the night.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Maliha took home the box from the pub. It contained Yanmeng’s hand, the one that was already missing fingers. Eliu identified a small deformity of his little finger that Yanmeng acquired in prison during the Chinese Revolution.
Eliu had made one attempt to convince the team to go to the police, something Yanmeng would never have wanted. When that didn’t work, she became withdrawn. She spent most of her time in a bedroom with the door closed, barely coming out to eat. No more treating them to fresh, hot meals as though they were her children.
She’s already suffered the loss of her only son. If Yanmeng doesn’t come back, she’ll be alone in the world. She has us, but doesn’t seem too keen on that idea right now.
Maliha was worried Eliu would give up and leave the condo, making her an easy kidnapping target if she went out on her own.
She thinks he’s going to die. I can see it in her face.
“It’s a very clean cut,” Jake said. “Surgical.”
Or a swing from Elizabeth’s sword.
“We should confirm the identity with a DNA test, even though Eliu seems sure. I can take care of that,” Jake said.
“A little late in the game for that,” Amaro said.
“Excuse me, I got in the game late,” Jake said, annoyed.
“Behave, children,” Hound said.
The note containing Maliha’s instructions for the next meeting was nothing but GPS coordinates and a time, 9 A.M. It was signed with Elizabeth’s initial in a flowing script.
