Authors: Elliott James
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Water to my face woke me up. My head was lying sideways on concrete with poached eggs where my eyes used to be, but I kept them closed. My throat was sore and sticky from swallowing blood, hopefully mine, and my mouth tasted like burnt copper. I could feel every one of my teeth individually. My body was a cramp surrounded by burning skin. I had been electrocuted. It’s possible to amp up a Taser high enough to mess with a werewolf’s brain functions although this is highly illegal. That kind of voltage will kill a human being.
I smelled blood and salt and urine and gun oil and tamarind and sweat and Jamie Belmont’s perfume and rakshasa stink. There were six, no, seven other people in the room.
The urine was mine. As secondary sensations—or at least an awareness of them—gradually returned, I realized that I’d wet myself. Perhaps that’s why they hadn’t stripped me entirely though I could feel cool air on my feet, and I wasn’t wearing a shirt. There was something hard pinching my wrists and ankles, and my arms were pulled tightly behind my back. Cuffs or manacles, then, and heavy ones by the feel of them.
The last thing I remembered was Jamie saying she was sorry.
“Wakey, wakey, no more fakey.” The singsong voice was halfway between a purr and the sound of a chainsaw starting.
I groaned and opened my eyes. The lights were on, which was unfortunate. From where my head was propped on wet concrete I could see the rakshasa holding a black leather briefcase in one hand and a small pail in the other. Jamie Belmont was standing as far behind it as she could.
A man holding something that looked like a shark stick with a cattle prod duct-taped to it was standing in front of the rakshasa, and two men with sawed-off shotguns were standing on either side of me. The idiots were standing in a crossfire. Two more men were behind me. Pardon me if I don’t describe any of the flunkies. They weren’t human beings to me. They were obstacles. Targets. Bowling pins. Red security shirts. I didn’t personalize them then, and I’m not going to do so now. It’s easier that way.
Groaning, I pulled myself up to my butt. It wasn’t easy with my hands chained behind my back. Just to help a little, I pulled my hindquarters through my arms so that my wrists were behind my knees. It was a lot harder than it should have been.
“You weren’t lying about the drains,” I rasped. There was one right next to me, as a matter of fact. The basement was a vast expanse of concrete that went on for hundreds of feet in every direction, though we were relatively close to the stairs. I had scouted the place right after I’d taken out the mansion’s cameras. To my right, a small doorway led to a labyrinth of small claustrophobic rooms with wooden shelves and rusty tools and glass jars. To my left, an access door led to the mansion’s nightmare of a heating and plumbing system, a mismatch of modern additions and redundant boilers, water tanks, furnaces and copper piping. There were washing machines and a series of large concrete sinks lining the west wall, while shower heads with no curtains or cubicles lined the east. Either the latter weren’t used for washing bodies, or they were originally made for migrant workers with no rights to privacy.
The rakshasa made that satisfied grinding rumble again. “I wasn’t lying about the room being soundproof either. You can scream all you want.”
I looked around while I hunched and pulled my knees up to my chin and brought my feet up over the chain so that I could pull my arms in front of me. It hurt. I was in the middle of a pentagram of unbroken salt lines. The rakshasa and its guards were standing in a larger secondary circle, also drawn in salt.
Apparently, the rakshasa hadn’t entirely given up on the idea of me being a loup-garou.
“Flexible,” the rakshasa commented. “Martial arts?”
“Ballet,” I said. “I live for the dance.”
“Me too.” Somehow those words were more ominous for being vague. The rakshasa tossed the black briefcase into the middle of the pentagram. “Let’s take care of business.”
I looked at the briefcase as if it might go off. “What the hell is that?”
The rakshasa growled. “The money you won.”
I actually had known that, had even been counting on it. All supernatural creatures whose cultures revolve around deal making or gambling will honor their debts even if they don’t honor anything else. It was why the rakshasa hadn’t crippled me physically yet, torn out my eyes or cut my Achilles tendons. Holding me prisoner was already pushing the limits.
“You mind if I count it?”
Those murky eyes briefly got hot again. The rakshasa was silent for a beat too long. “Go ahead.”
It wanted me to formally acknowledge that the debt had been paid.
Whoever had dragged me down there hadn’t found the pick I’d inserted beneath my hair. It was stuck through two nerveless points in my scalp like an acupuncture needle. I removed it casually, then began to openly pick the lock off my leg manacles. It was an easy lock, ripe for the picking. “Give me a second.”
“Taser it,” the rakshasa said.
I leaned to the side and the dart went past my shoulder. Unfortunately, it hit the puddle of water I was sitting in.
My whole body was an exposed nerve. I howled and reached my fingers down and yanked the small metal grate next to me out of the floor, standing up and screaming at the ceiling.
The rakshasa was not impressed. “If I wanted those leg manacles removed I’d cut your feet off. Count the money.”
Hurling a heavy circular drain cover like a throwing star when your hands are manacled is no easy thing. You have to move your entire body sideways and shadow the movement of one hand with the other, as if you were flowing water in a tai chi or qigong exercise. I meant to embed the drain between Mr. Taser’s eyes, but a muscle in my left shoulder spasmed or pulled, and I wound up just bouncing it off his forehead. It still knocked him out, though.
“Fine,” I said while three men with shotguns almost blew my head off and the rakshasa barked at them to stop. I bent down and pretended to fumble with the briefcase latches. I didn’t have to fake much. My hands were tingling.
“Get on with it,” the rakshasa said flatly.
I stretched and opened and closed my fists. “Just give me a second to get my hands back online. Or feel free to step in here and open this briefcase for me.”
“Why don’t you just blow on the salt?” Jamie asked curiously from where she was standing. “Or throw that briefcase over it?”
I looked at the line of salt and lied. “I can’t.”
The rakshasa nodded, satisfied. “What did you say to Russell Sidney anyhow? That fool committed suicide while you were down here pissing yourself.”
I fumbled open the briefcase and began to count the money. “Good for him.”
“You’ve won all the small battles,” the rakshasa acknowledged. “But you lost the war. Blind luck won’t save you in the long game. You’ve been outplayed.”
Then the rakshasa stalked over to the stairway, bent behind it, and removed a four-foot section of copper pipe from where I had hidden it. I had crushed one open end into a crude wedge. “Or did you think I wouldn’t smell this?”
I stared at the pipe. There are very few things that will kill rakshasas. One of them is brass that has been cleaned with ash from a holy fire, but I didn’t have any Hindu or Buddhist priests around to make one of those. Another is copper that has been cleaned and polished with tamarind. Tamarind trees grow in southern India outside holy temples to a Mother Goddess who battles evil spirits.
The copper pipe was there because I had known that I was going to wind up in the basement one way or the other. I had been hoping for the other.
“What I don’t understand is why a loup-garou would study up on Indian traditions,” the rakshasa went on. “Unless you really came here to kill me.”
I addressed the room in general while I continued counting the money. “You people realize that you’re working for a monster called a rakshasa, right? Your stories aren’t going to end well.”
The rakshasa chuckled. “You might as well give it up. My people are all junkies, perverts, and gamblers. They’ve seen too much and done too much to ever go back to the other side. You’re not talking to decent people.”
No one denied it. I stopped counting money long enough to look up at Jamie. “Is that right?”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look away either.
“Do they know what’s in the baida rolls?” I asked it.
“Keep counting,” the rakshasa growled. “Or I’ll take it as a sign that you have refused payment.”
“This thing has been feeding you human flesh,” I told them. “They particularly like children.”
“Blow his head off,” the rakshasa ordered.
I had actually managed to unlock my leg manacle, I just hadn’t pushed it open. When I lunged forward, my left foot came free. And no matter what they told themselves, everyone in that room had come to unconsciously accept that the salt lines were a barrier I couldn’t break; I blew past the pentagram with inhuman speed.
The two men with shotguns on my right and left were so startled that they yanked the triggers in a panic and discharged both barrels without thinking. They blew each other away. A stray pellet that never would have hit me if I hadn’t been so stiff caught the back of my right calf and another took off a tiny piece of my right heel, but I was already past their firing zone.
I went under the cattle prod that the foremost thug was thrusting forward, twisted into the slide and pulled his wrists in the direction that they were already going, taking one knee and guiding him over my shoulder in a full flip. He was a big man, and he was completely covering my body when the third guy with a shotgun fired from the other side of the pentagram. I felt the impact behind my shield’s torso and got stung by a few loads that penetrated his back. They burned, but they didn’t retain enough momentum to go through the top of my skull or the bone of my shoulders. A stray pellet sliced through my right forearm where it was sticking out a little bit, but it was no big deal.
The rakshasa charged forward with a roar, but I plucked the cattle prod off the ground and swung the tip into the rakshasa’s upper thigh. The rakshasa screamed and dropped the copper pipe.
Maybe I should have moved to finish it there, but the rakshasa was convulsing and the guy across the room had the breech of his sawed-off shotgun open. The corpse at my feet had a sidearm holstered at its side, and I bent down and removed the gun—a Beretta—and hands still manacled, arms shaking, fired several shots into the last thug’s center mass.
He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest.
Unfortunately, the rakshasa had been faking the extent of its convulsions. From where it was lying on the floor, the rakshasa’s meaty fist closed around the open manacle still trailing from my left ankle and pulled. Pulled hard. My upper body went down and the back of my skull slammed against the concrete. I like to think it was the residual numbness in my hands that made me lose the gun, but either way the rakshasa pulled its heavier, stronger body over my legs. I tried to bring a knee up, but its weight was on the manacle connected to that foot. I brought my hands up, but one of its fists grabbed the chain still linking them.
The rakshasa was bigger than me, stronger than me, had all the leverage, and literally had my limbs tied up. It was roaring in triumph when the copper pipe rammed between the V formed by tendons in its back neck and stabbed upward into its brain.
There was a reason Jamie Belmont had won the poker tournament. The rakshasa stiffened, its torso arced, and black blood began to spill out of its nose. I shoved it off of me.
Jamie seemed frozen, blood drained from her face. She looked like she would have thrown up if she was the sort of person to do such a thing.
“Are you all right?” I asked as I pulled myself across the floor, towards the man I had only knocked out with a drain cover. She didn’t want to answer that question and just watched as I pulled the man’s head off the ground and broke his neck with a sharp twist.
“I can’t believe how close you called that,” Jamie said. Her face and voice were both tight, so tight that it seemed like something was threatening to break inside her. “It worked out almost exactly the way you predicted it.”
Outplayed my ass.
“It even got out the copper pipe like you said it would,” Jamie continued shakily. I kind of had the feeling she was talking so that she wouldn’t have to stop and think about what had just happened: the feel of the vibrations in her hands that had travelled up the pipe, the sight of the unnaturally dark blood that had welled slower than blood should, the sound made by the neck I had just broken, the smells all around us.
“Ego,” I commented. If Jamie felt like babbling, I was having the opposite reaction.
“I still can’t believe you let me take you prisoner,” Jamie said. She dropped the pipe and seemed embarrassed by it. Her hands were trembling.
“You had to prove your loyalty.” I hauled myself up to my feet and felt a thousand pricks and stabs tear through my body. “And it had to feel like it was in complete control. That’s the only reason this happened the way it did after all the guests were gone.”
Jamie clasped her shaking hands and stared at them. She was used to controlling any sign of anxiety, and a part of her was wondering if her nerves were shot, if her poker playing was screwed up for good. The game was into her that deep. If it hadn’t been, the rakshasa never would have gotten a hold on her in the first place.
Maybe her thoughts were following the same trail mine were. In any case, she whispered: “I knew it was a demon. I thought I had sold my soul to it.”
Crouching, I located the pick. “If you did, I’d say you just got a piece of it back.”
“You’re not a demon are you?” She was making a statement with a question mark on it, not really asking me. “You never would have taken a chance on me if you were evil. You’re not really some loup whatever.”
I went back to work on my wrist manacles. “No.”
“What are you then?” Had it just been last night that we’d slept together? When she had confessed what she had been doing for the rakshasa — manipulating games, feeding people little pieces of false luck, getting them good and hooked. We seemed to be staring at each other from different worlds across a span of centuries.