Chicks Kick Butt (3 page)

As part of my consciousness handled the necessary mechanics of the road, I split off part of it to do something that sprang from instinct, aptitude, and power—reading the flows of energy that moved through the air, the currents of disturbance and calm. Today was a beautiful day in Florida, which was (now) a little unfortunate; there wasn’t a lot of potential energy to work with. Not impossible, though. Never impossible, in a world where action always brings a reaction, and if you’re clever, you can create a storm out of a breeze without destroying the entire balance of the system.

I didn’t say it was
easy,
okay? Just
possible.

Once you get a certain amount of air disturbed and bouncing off of other, less excited air, you get energy. Every collision of molecules creates energy, and that energy has to go somewhere—in the creation of heat. Heated air pushes on cooled air. Wackiness ensues.

That’s an obvious simplification, but if you’ve ever seen a storm form from the collision of a warm front and a cold front, seen those clouds boil up and turn dark and tower up into the heavens … well. That’s how it works.

And you can start a forest fire by rubbing sticks together, if you’re using the right kind of sticks and the right amount of force. The trick is being able to contain the beast you create, because once you get enough energy together, the dynamite is going to go boom. All you can do is direct the force the way you want it to go.

Needless to say, this is not a job for the timid.

The other complication was that Whitney could have known what I was doing … but then again, if, as David had implied, she was
really
young for a Djinn, she wouldn’t think of everything. She couldn’t. Someone like David on the run … that was something that was a much harder target. Whitney, in her see-me-from-space bikini and one-of-a-kind sports car? Not so much.

But
damn,
I hated the idea of hurting that car. Which was why my first lightning strike came down on the road in front of the Bugatti, as close as I could nail it without actually hitting it, and I watched in the neon energy trails of Oversight as the sports car wavered, skidded sideways, and then started to straighten out again. That was okay. The lightning had been a diversion, anyway.

What I was
really
doing was blowing out her tires with needle-sharp shards of black ice lined up on the road like shredder strips.

Whitney hit them at a reduced speed, thanks to my lightning feint, which saved her from a fiery matinee-worthy crash. I zoomed in on Oversight and saw the wheels explode—both front tires, then both back. And the Bugatti instantly went from a precision racing machine to a hunk of metal clumsily trying to plow the pavement.

Ouch.
That was really going to hurt, but it was better than the alternatives.

My radio spit static, and Whitney said, surprised, “You
bitch
! You are so sneaky!” She laughed, long and loud, and then said, “I think I like you.”

Right about then, David blipped in on the passenger seat of the car.

“The guy on the road?” I asked.

“Safe in the hands of emergency help,” he said. “He’s stable. You blew out her tires?”

“Had to try something. Are you ready to spank this little brat before she gets somebody killed?”

“I’d better let you do it. You’d accuse me of enjoying it too much.”

David knew me all too well, and it made me laugh as I pressed the accelerator and gained ground on our fleeing Djinn.

She was trying all kinds of tricks now, including forming new tires out of random shreds of rubber left on the side of the road by other luckless drivers, but David was focused entirely on undoing whatever she was up to, and I was completely locked into the car, the acceleration, the chase. Overhead, the weather darkened, and clouds formed to block out the hot sun. We were going to get rain, as a consequence of my actions, but it was a good rain. A washing shower, not a flood.

Suddenly, the Bugatti stopped. I could see it now, the silvery gleam of it unreal against the violent greens and dull browns of the swamp, like some crash-landed alien spacecraft. “What’s she doing?” I asked.

“She,” said my radio, “is thanking you very much for completely following the script, sugar. Hang on, now. It’s going to get interesting.”

And then everything changed, completely, because Whitney was not an idiot, a compulsive thief, or a sociopath after all—or if she was those last two things, she certainly wasn’t the first. Because Whitney had been taking us somewhere, and we had just arrived.

I coasted the Viper to a stop behind the tire-less Bugatti—the shreds of rubber had fallen apart again—and David and I jumped out to check inside. No sign of Whitney. David turned in a circle, scanning, and then pointed off into the swamp. “There,” he said. “She’s there.”

It’s useful to have a Djinn along for a run through the Everglades … there’s no good footing, but plenty of stinging, biting, and eating things to take an interest in your passage. I was an Earth Warden in addition to my Weather and Fire powers, but Earth was definitely my weakest skill set, and I was relieved I didn’t have to manage it on the run. David simply created a firm, dry path out of the swamp, straight as an arrow, and made sure that any creatures with an eye to taking offense at our passage were kept otherwise occupied. I saw a couple of alligators eyeing us coldly from the water, but they stayed as motionless as floating logs. The hot, humid air felt like running a treadmill in a sauna, and I was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath in a humiliatingly short time.

We ran into Whitney about five seconds before I was sure I would drop of heat stroke and exhaustion, and I bent over, bracing myself on my knees, gasping and coughing. Whitney, of course, looked perfect. She was still wearing the diamond bikini, which just could
not
be comfortable on a cross-country trek; I was getting chafed, and nothing I was wearing came in measurements of carats.

Whitney put her hands on her barely clad sparkly hips, and gave me a superior look that made me want to throw up on her high-heeled shoes. “Sweetie, you’re gonna want to pace yourself,” she said. “We ain’t there yet.”

“Where?” It came out as a cross between a howl and a whine, which wasn’t very heroic, and I blamed it on the urge to vomit. I swallowed, straightened up, and clawed hair away from my damp face to try again. “Where are we going?”

“There.” Whitney nodded.

“I don’t see anything.”

“You will.”

David, who’d been about to say something that I was fairly sure would scorch Whitney’s exposed buttocks good, checked himself and spun around, staring upward. I didn’t know why, but then I heard it.

The abused whine of jet engines, getting louder.

David shouted something in a language that I didn’t recognize, but there was no mistaking the command in it, and Whitney lifted her hands to the sky along with him.

A four-engine jet burst out of the clouds, trailing smoke and fire from one wing. Way too low for where it was, which was miles from any decent airport capable of handling an emergency landing. It was an enormous plane, and as I launched myself up into Oversight I saw the black buzzing cloud surrounding it.

Impending death. Terror. The fear of more than three hundred souls, all preparing for the end.

The two Djinn were grabbing hold of the plane, straightening its flight, and I warmed air beneath its swept-back wings, trying to provide lift. It was a huge, ungainly weight without the right balance of physics to support it, and I could sense the terrified but determined pilots trying everything they could to keep it in the air.

“Clear a landing strip!” I yelled to David. “We can’t keep it up!”

He and Whitney had already determined that. Whitney kept her arms up, channeling power to the plane, but pieces were breaking off of it now as the structural flaws began to shatter along fault lines. One of the engines imploded, streaming metal and fire that plunged down toward us. Whitney didn’t flinch, so neither did I. I felt the impact of the twisted metal like a physical shock as it slammed into the water not ten feet from us, sending a tsunami of muddy green toward us. I didn’t bother to stop it. We had more important things to do than stay pretty.

David’s power was breathtaking and precise, and he wielded it quickly—dangerous, for a Djinn, because like Wardens, they had to be concerned with balance. He formed a solid pack of earth, a berm that ran straight through the Everglades, and knocked down enough of the cypress growth to provide a window for the plane’s wings.

“Coming down!” Whitney yelled, and I felt the hot burn of the exhaust as the jet roared right over our heads, so close that I swear I could count the treads on the landing gear, which was winching its way down. The plane wavered, slipped sideways, and Whitney and I clasped hands instinctively and merged our powers, applying force to the side that needed it, bringing the jet back into a semistable glide.

Twenty feet.

Ten.

Down.

The tires hit the packed earth with more force than normal, and I saw one of them blow out in a mist of rubber and smoke. David flung out a hand and kept that side of the plane up as the pilots applied brakes.

Whitney and I changed the thickness of the air flowing along the flaps, adding to the drag, burning off speed at about twice the normal rate, until the plane was coasting, then a smoking, scarred wreck sitting motionless on the makeshift runway.

Whitney took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and the doors on the plane popped open. Yellow emergency chutes deployed. I could hear screaming from inside, but there was also shouting, people imposing order onto chaos.

I turned toward Whitney. “How did you know?”

She opened those eerie purple eyes, and for a second, I saw the woman she’d once been … infinitely tired, frightened, and burdened under all that glitter and gleam. “Once you’ve died that way, you know it’s coming,” she said. “It’s just how it is.”

I said, “I thought you died alone.”

Whitney studied me for a few silent seconds, then nodded. “I did,” she said. “I was in a plane that went down in the water. I lived. I lived a long, long time. And nobody found me. Nobody ever will.” I was still holding her hand. She glanced down at our linked fingers. “This don’t make us engaged, you know.”

I let go, feeling a little off balance after all of this craziness. It wasn’t often that someone threw me, but Whitney had, in every possible sense. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

“Why didn’t you just tell us about this, if you knew it was coming?”

She shrugged, which set off lots of glittering waves from the diamonds. “What kind of fun is that? I got you here, didn’t I? I just did it my own way.”

“Your way is insane. Go do something useful,” David told her. “Send up a flare for the emergency rescue parties. They’ll be on the way by now.”

She gave him a smart little military salute, which was
very
weird considering her outfit, and executed a perfect turn to march away.

“Wait!” I said. “The guy you threw in our way on the road. Who was he? Why did you do that?”

She glanced back at the plane. Smoke blew away from the fuselage, and I saw a long, ragged hole, with the fragile metal skin peeled away. “He’s the man who put the bomb on board,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d care if you didn’t stop in time. I wouldn’t have.”

And then she vanished in a mist of diamonds. Gone. I looked over at David, who was shaking his head.

“What?” I asked.

“She took the bikini,” he pointed out. “And nobody’s going to get it back. That’s her price for altruism.”

I laughed. I could hear emergency sirens back toward the road, and I could just see Whitney standing out there glittering like a diamond convention, pointing the way for all the rescuers.

“I think I like her style,” I said.

David rolled his eyes. “
You
don’t have to be her boss,” he pointed out. “Now. Let’s see to the wounded.”

In the end, there were remarkably few, and most of the injuries were minor. MIRACLE FLIGHT , they called it on the twenty-four-hour news channels, which featured interviews with everybody possible: people who’d been anywhere in the flight path of the plane, the crew, the passengers, and the director of Whitney’s failed commercial shoot, who somehow managed to take high-definition footage of the aircraft on its dramatic flight and landing. He did a documentary. It won an Emmy.

The Case of the Missing Million-Dollar Model occupied headlines for many months, along with positively drooling pictures of Whitney leaning against the Bugatti Veyron with just enough diamonds on her lady parts to make her legal. She was spotted in Rio de Janeiro, and then in Cannes, and then in Argentina and—on the same day—in Shanghai. I think she enjoyed playing Where’s Waldo.

David and I never got our beach picnic, but back home, many hours later, we made do. We moved the furniture out of the way, put down the blanket, and had wine and cheese and bread and each other, and somehow, that was still utterly blissful. As we lay there wrapped in each other’s arms, lit by candlelight, I felt the rumble of suppressed laughter in his chest.

“What?”

“I was just thinking,” David said. “Whitney. She’s just insane enough to make a good second in command for me, don’t you think? If Rahel can’t do it?”

Rahel was a longtime friend and a very formidable Djinn. I couldn’t imagine any set of circumstances under which Rahel wouldn’t be able to step up to the plate, so I shrugged. “I suppose,” I said. “She’s certainly not the obvious choice.”

He kissed me, long and sweetly. “That’s what everyone said about you,” he told me, and traced his thumb across my damp lips. “I think my instincts are pretty good.”

“And I think you have a weakness for girls in bikinis.”

“You’re not wearing one now.”

“I’m not wearing
anything
.”

“Oh yes,” he agreed soberly. “I
do
have a weakness for that.”

And he showed me, all over again.

The bottom half of my longneck shattered, splashing golden liquid all over my jeans and the bar’s floor. The mirror in front of me, already pockmarked with chips, now also had a hole courtesy of the bullet that had drilled through to the wood. The cracks spidering out from the center showed me back my own short brown hair and startled black eyes, and the joker with the gun backlit in the doorway.

I couldn’t see him very well, just a dark silhouette against the rusty evening light spilling down the stairs of the basement bar. But I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway. Most of my varied acquaintances wouldn’t have taken the shot, and the rest would have made damn sure not to miss.

“That’s gonna cost you five bucks,” I said, swiveling around. My own gun was out, but I didn’t return fire. The guy hadn’t taken the second shot, which meant he wanted to chat. Since I was still recovering from a near death experience all of two days ago, I was up for it. And if my vampire sense was anything to go by, a handgun wasn’t going to be much use against this joker anyway.

“You want to stay out of our business,” I was told, as everyone else scattered to the four winds. The large shape moved into the bar and resolved into a good-looking Asian guy in khakis and a brown leather jacket. The ensemble looked more weekend-in-the-Hamptons than biker chic and clashed badly with the orange and black tiger tat prowling around the right side of his face.

The tat told me a lot, none of it good. The Chinese don’t like tattoos. In ancient China, they were used as punishment, branded on criminals before exile to ensure their easy identification should they ever return. They are still seen by many as a defilement of the body and a sign of generally poor taste. That attitude is changing among the young, but despite the glossy black hair and unlined face, this guy hadn’t been young in centuries.

Of course, there was one group in China who had always liked tats.

“I don’t have any business with the Chinese mafia,” I told him, walking behind the bar to get myself a new drink. “Particularly not the vampire kind.”

“Then how did you know what I am?” he demanded, coming closer.

The light inside the bar mostly came from the small TV flickering overhead, but it was enough to show me that I’d been right. The facial design was new, but it hid an old secret. I could still see the lines of the original tat, infused with magic so as to be irremovable, flowing under the newer, brighter colors.

“The artist was good, but magical tattoos are a bitch to hide, aren’t they?” I asked with a smile.

The man’s right hand twitched, like it wanted to cover his face. Or maybe rip off mine. “Like my teeth marks in your throat!”

“Not on the first date,” I said, baring my own small fangs. “And I know who you are because I recently met your boss.” As I recalled, Lord Cheung and I had parted as … well, not friends exactly, but I hadn’t expected him to send an assassin after me.

Even one as inept as this.

“You’re dhampir.”

It didn’t appear to startle him. And it should have. The children who result from a coupling between a vampire and a human vary widely in appearance and abilities, with some looking scarier than the creatures who sired them. But not in my case. Except for the vestigial fangs, which aren’t noticeable unless I’m pissed off, I’m pretty much human standard. On first sight, most people think I’m sweet and innocent.

Most people are wrong.

But it looked like Tiger boy had known who he was shooting at after all. And then he confirmed it. “They say you’re almost five hundred.”

“A lady never tells her age.”

He leaned on the bar, like we were having a nice, normal chat instead of planning to kill each other. “If you’re that old, you should know how to avoid trouble.”

“Guess I haven’t been paying attention.” I glanced over his shoulder. Was I being set up somehow? Because he just couldn’t be this stupid. But there was no one there.

I glanced back to find him looking annoyed, like I wasn’t keeping to whatever script he’d worked out in his head. Annoyed, but not afraid, despite the fact that I had one hand below the countertop. That told me he wasn’t that bright. Well, that and the fact that he’d deliberately sought out one of the few things on earth capable of killing him.

“You aren’t clinically depressed, are you?” I asked. “This will be no fun if it’s some sort of suicide-by-dhampir.”

He looked confused for a moment; then his face rearranged itself into a sneer. “I saw one of your kind once. A master I know keeps him on a leash. Like a
dog
.”

“I doubt that.”

“He didn’t look like much.” He took in my less-than-impressive height, my slender build, and my dimples. His lip curled. “Neither do you.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“So can little girls who have been surviving on their reputations for too long!”

Okay, maybe he could be that stupid. “I deserve my reputation,” I said mildly.

“Sure you do.” His eyes went roaming again, sliding over the black leather of my jacket until they fixed on the vee of my red T-shirt. “Prove it.”

So I did.

“Damn it, Dory.” Fin scurried up as I walked around the bar and knelt by the still smoking corpse. The owner was a Skogstroll, a kind of Norwegian forest troll, although to my knowledge the closest he’d ever gotten to the land of his ancestors was a PBS documentary. But it meant he didn’t have to bend down to examine the damage the shotgun he kept behind the counter had done to the bar. “That’s going on your tab!”

“No problem,” I said, showing him the contents of the guy’s wallet.

“No way.” He started backing up, but tripped on his beard. “I’m not touching Tiger money! Not if the whole place burned down!”

I frisked the guy, but of course, there was no ID. Assassins didn’t carry it, as a rule. I did find one thing of interest, though.

“Raymond,” I said, with feeling.

“Is that his name?” Fin asked, staring at the book of matches I’d found in the not-so-recently deceased’s coat pocket.

“No. Tell me about—,” I began, when the body started twitching. So he wasn’t just a regular old vamp, who would have been killed by that shot as sure as a human. Dumb as a rock or not, he was a master. Cheung really wanted me to get the message.

Whatever the hell it was.

“Don’t do it, Dory,” Fin warned, his tiny blue eyes worried. “You kill one, and they’ll all be hunting you. That’s how these guys operate.”

“I’m not planning to kill anyone,” I squawked, because the vamp had grabbed me around the throat. So I stuck a knife through his, pinning him securely to the wood.

Fin’s glare intensified. “Dory!”

“Relax, it won’t kill him. I’d have to take the whole head for that.” I sat back on my heels. “And when did you become so squeamish?”

“I’m not! But you don’t want to mess with these guys.”

“I haven’t been,” I said, exasperated. “I had a run-in with his boss recently, but we cleared that up.” Or so I’d thought.

Fin didn’t look convinced. “He sent a master to screw with you for no reason?”

“Let’s find out,” I said, wrenching the knife out.

But even though I’d taken care to miss the vocal cords, it looked like the vamp had lost interest in conversation. An arm sent me skidding on my back into the forest of tables, reducing a few of the battered old pieces to kindling. I leapt back to my feet, but the vamp didn’t press his advantage. He was gone between one blink and the next, out the door and up the stairs, despite the fact that, in vamp terms, sunlight + major blood loss = bar-be-cue.

If I was lucky, anyway.

Fin hopped about, contorting his body to avoid the shaft of light spilling over the old boards. Older trolls could withstand direct sun, and even those Fin’s age didn’t actually turn to stone. But he said it gave him hives.

“And stay out!” he shouted, flipping the door shut with his toe.

I picked myself up and assessed the damage. Other than for some bruised ribs and a jacket full of splinters, I was unharmed. The same couldn’t be said for my cell phone, which had been in my back pocket. I fished out a few pieces of plastic and some metal innards, extracted the memory chip, and threw the rest in the trash.

It could have been worse; it could have been my head. And maybe next time it would be. Because it was a little hard to stop doing whatever was pissing Cheung off when I didn’t even know what it was.

I walked back over and retrieved the guy’s wallet. “You going to tell me what you know?” I asked Fin.

“It isn’t much,” he said, eyeing the fat sheaf of banknotes peeking out of the natty eel-skin cover. “They call themselves Leaping Tigers, and they’re new. The first of them showed up about a month ago, but they operate out of Chinatown, not here. I heard they pretty much destroyed a couple gangs over there, setting up house. They’re bad news.”

Tell me something I don’t know, I thought cynically. “And this house would be where?”

He licked his lips. “You, uh, you gonna need all that?”

I fanned myself with the fat stack of bills. “I thought you wouldn’t touch Tiger money.” He gave me a limpid look and I sighed. “You’re planning to tell everyone I took it, aren’t you?”

He looked pained. “You can take care of yourself better than me. And you
did
shoot him.”

“So give.”

“I already did. Nobody knows where they hole up during the day. It’s like they just vanish.”

“You mean nobody wants to know.”

“That, too. Anyway, they’ve made a big impression pretty damn fast. You’re better off staying away from them.”

“Yeah. But will they stay away from me?”

“Just take care, Dory.”

“I always do.” I fished out a five and tossed the rest on the bar. “Drinks are on him.”

* * *

Raymond Lu was a disreputable nightclub owner who had recently become a disreputable snitch. He didn’t have a tiger tat, probably because he wasn’t important enough to deserve one, but his boss just happened to be Lord Cheung. And the last time one of Cheung’s guys had taken a shot at my head, it had been due to my association with Ray.

His club’s logo had been emblazoned on the matches I’d found in the hit man’s coat, so I decided to see if anything interesting was happening. It wasn’t. Of course, that in itself was interesting.

The club usually did a pretty good business, despite being wedged between an acupuncturist and a cut-rate electronics store on a backstreet of Chinatown. Not tonight, though. The jazzy neon sign was dark and the usual bouncer-and-rope combo was missing from the front door.

Instead, a large guy leaned against the dirty bricks, in the process of lighting a cigarette. The glow of the flame into his cupped palm highlighted a familiar craggy face. Zheng-ze, aka Scarface, Cheung’s right-hand vamp and a first-level master with power to burn.

He and his boss were in the process of challenging for seats on the senate, the ruling body for vamps in North America. From what I’d heard, they’d been doing pretty good. I silently cursed and shifted a little closer to the Dumpster that was providing my cover. The fact that Scarface was standing guard duty cut down my chances of getting in by at least half.

A moment later, he finished lighting up and relaxed against the wall. And grinned at me. I gave it up and crossed the road.

“Haven’t you heard that stuff’ll kill you?” I asked as he took a long drag.

He laughed it back out. “You look like shit,” he told me cheerfully, his eyes on the not-yet-faded bruises under the pancake I’d slathered on before leaving the house. “I heard you got yourself blown up.”

“You heard wrong.” Although it had been pretty damn close.

“Good. Once I get the Challenges outta the way, you and I gotta square off.” He showed me some big white teeth. “See who’s best.”

“I know who’s best.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said approvingly. “There’s no sport in it when they just give up and die.”

I ignored that in favor of nodding at the building behind him. “So what’s going on?”

I hadn’t really expected an answer, although I got one—sort of. “Lord Cheung’s trying to clean up his image. He’s jonesing for a senate seat bad and thinks some of his activities might not look too good if they’re brought up in the voting process.”

“I thought combat decided the new senators.”

“Combat narrows the field,” he corrected. “But once we’re through, we got to be confirmed. And your senators are going to be looking for any possible reason to turn us down.”

“They’re not my senators,” I said flatly.

The senate employed me to clean up its messes from time to time, but the fact that I occasionally proved useful hadn’t made me any more popular. The only one who might not hate me was Mircea, second in command to the consul, the senate’s leader. Most vamps treated him like he was scary with a little scary on top, which I’d always found puzzling. He sparked a confusing tangle of emotions in me, but fear had never been one of them.

Of course, that might be because he was also my father.

“Look, I don’t care who does or does not get on the senate,” I told Scarface. “I just want to know why your master sent a hit man after me.”

“You’d have to ask him about that.”

“Is he in there?” A brief nod. “Then get out of the way and I will.”

He blew smoke at me.

“I’m going in there,” I informed him.

He dropped his cigarette to the stained concrete and ground it in with his toe. “I was hoping to wait until you recovered to beat you up,” he said regretfully. “It won’t be nearly as much fun this—” He broke off as I turned on my heel and headed down the sidewalk. “Hey! Where you going?”

“The side exit.”

His booming laughter followed me around the building.

The short alleyway stopped after half a dozen yards, ending at another brick wall. Three steps went up to a door, steps that were occupied by another bored-looking vamp. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, having heard my conversation with his buddy out front, and he didn’t even stand up. I decided that was rude and started rooting around in my big black duffel bag.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, amused. “Mace me?”