Djinn: Cursed (12 page)

I have to admit, that for just an instant, which felt more like an eternity to me, I contemplated pulling the trigger, I even felt my finger tightening on it.  It wasn't like he didn't deserve it.  The bastard had killed Stacy.  He had tortured me.  I glanced at my damaged and bleeding wings.  I didn't want them, but they were mine and seeing the blood all over the feathers and clotting in the wounds made me so inexplicably angry.

But I couldn't kill anyone in cold blood.  That wasn't who Angelina Drake was.

I glanced between him and the door.  It was a storage room style lock, where the deadbolt was keyed on both sides.  In this case, I ventured that it was more like a cell lock.  In the time it took me to look at him and the door and back, he had moved half the distance toward me.  I shoved the barrel of the gun forward, and he held up his hands and stopped.

I said in a cold voice, virtually devoid of humanity, “Keys.”

He reached to his side where he had a keyring hanging from a clip on his belt and unclipped them and threw them to me.  They landed on the floor beside and slightly behind me.  I sighed, I may have been terrified out of my gourd, and not very knowledgeable about weapons, but I wasn't stupid.  I growled out, “Nice try.  Go to the back corner and look at the wall.  It's time for a time out... Kanton.”  I almost spit his name.

He just stood there so I shot at his feet.  Even though I was braced for it, the barrel still swung up, and I shot his toe with one of the rounds.  I moved the barrel aside when I stopped shooting and covered my mouth with one hand.  “Sorry about that.  How the hell do they run around with two assault rifles in the movies, shooting them with one hand?”

To his credit the man just hissed and hopped slightly, readjusting his weight to his good foot.  I shoved the barrel toward him, and he closed his eyes to center and calm himself.  He raised his hands a little higher and turned and limped over to the corner with his hands clasped behind his head as he snapped, “I'm going, I'm going.  Just... be careful with that thing.”  Then he grumbled under his breath, “Fucking amateurs.”

I said as I backed up a step and crouched to retrieve the keys, the gun pointed at him at all times.  “Oh suck it up, buttercup.”

I reached behind me and found the door lever as I readjusted my grip on the rifle.  The weapon was heavy and awkward, and I knew there was no way in hell I could fire it one handed.  I pushed down and pulled the door open, it was unlocked.  Kanton was looking over his shoulder.

I chanced a quick look into the hall, nobody was there at that moment.  Then I went about one handed trying each key in the lock until one turned it.  I took a deep breath then stepped out quickly.  I could see Baldy already on the move, and I fumbled with the key but got the deadbolt locked just as there was a tremendous thud and the sound of wood splintering.  Followed by another and another.  Shit, the door wasn't going to hold long.

I almost wet my pants and squeaked out in surprise when someone grabbed my hand and said in a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, “Come with me if you want to live.”

The next moment I was engulfing Dorian in my wings and hugging her tight.  She felt good pressing against me, and I may have sobbed a bit, I won't admit to it, and you weren't there so you can't prove a thing.

I looked into her dark eyes, and she was nothing but smiles.  She said cutely, “Hi.”

I laughed through tears. “Hi.”  Then just like that, she tightened her grip on my hand as I dropped my wings from around her, and she was dragging me down the hall.

I could hear the chaos of weapons fire on another level and men yelling and screams of pain.  The corridor was spartan and utilitarian, it reminded me of the morgue in the basement of the medical wing at the school.  Linoleum floor with grey and white walls, illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights that weren't helping my headache.

She said offhandedly, “Nice hardware.”

I blinked and looked down at the assault rifle.  I let go of her and shoved it toward her sideways with both hands as we ran.  “I sort of accidentally shot Baldy.”

She cocked an eyebrow, and I added, “And cut his face.”  Then I looked down in embarrassment. “And injured his neck.”  Then almost whispered, feeling sheepish, “And broke his nose.”

She blinked and said, “Damn, Angel.  That's hardcore.”  She checked the rifle and slid a little hinged switch that was labeled 'safety.'  Oh, there it was.

Then I asked as she slowed us by a door with a stairs sign on it, “You know your way around guns?”

She looked down at it a moment then shook her head and shot me a toothy grin, “No, but I know how to read.”  I almost chuckled, and she wiggled her eyebrows at me.

Then she looked beside me and said, “Make yourself useful blondie?”  And she nudged her head toward the door.

I looked around. “Stace?”

Dori paused a second and narrowed her eyes at the door.  “I'm not saying that... what?  Fine.”  She looked at me, and said in a prissy manner, “The one and only.”  Ok, now I did chuckle.  We were in a life or death situation and were joking around... with a ghost.  I guess it was either that or let the weight of the situation crush us I guess.

Then her smile disappeared, and she nodded. “She says it's clear to the next level.”

I asked as she held the door for me, staring at my injured and bloody wings, her grip on the weapon tightening, “Where's Hailey?”

There was a short burst of gunfire two levels up and the sound of a man yelling in pain, then silence.  She pointed up and cocked an eyebrow.  “I'd say right about there.”

I chuckled as I passed into the stairwell.  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

She ran by my side up the stairs and prompted, “Then why did you ask?”

I sighed, and she grinned smugly.  Then she looked up the stairwell and admitted like the words tasted bad on her tongue, “She is pretty damn kickass, what mercenaries-r-us catalog did you dig her up from?”

I looked at her and couldn't help smiling, the girl was jealous, and I sort of liked it, it meant she liked me.  I blushed and repeated my earlier words, “She's my bartender.”

She nodded like that explained everything.

We had Randy check out the first floor before we exited the stairwell.  I have to say, it is pretty sweet having people who could just walk through walls to look around in your odd group.

Then Robin and Stacy led us out the back way.  I could see the city lights in the distance, from the alley between two warehouses.

We were in some secluded flats to the east of the city, no wonder the police weren't coming to investigate the gunshots.  The group of ten or twenty warehouses were in a huge empty field with no other buildings for around a quarter mile or so.

And it looked to be almost morning if the orange tint on the horizon was any indicator.

I saw Hailey's bike parked by a curb near some low windows.  I swallowed, that would be my impromptu holding cell I knew.  I lowered my head a bit to see the bloody message on the wall and a splintered doorframe, Kanton was out.

I asked, “Is Hailey meeting us here?”

She nodded and said, “I'm supposed to signal her.”  She looked embarrassed.

I squinted one eye and asked carefully, “How?”

She shrugged and said, “I was supposed to whistle.  I can't whistle.”  Then she blushed and held a hand up to her mouth to amplify her voice and cut loose with a passable warbling Xena war cry.

Again, I know, life or death, yadda yadda... but I burst out laughing and covered my mouth.  Then we ducked when we heard an explosion on the second floor. Then some sporadic gunfire.  A moment later there was a crashing sound as something shattered the glass above us, and a dark shape flew out the opening with the shards of glass.

It impacted the wall of the building behind us and then slammed down onto the heavy plastic lid of the dumpster behind us, denting it in.

Hailey rolled off of it, dressed all in black leathers and body armor and she fired off a couple shots up at the opening she had just crashed out of.  I saw two men dive aside for cover.  I gaped at her.  I mean, dayum that was hot.  She gave me a cocky smirk as she stepped past me, her rifle still trained on the opening above as she raised a hand to my chin to shut my mouth.

She still had that cocky smirk on her face as she mounted the bike, saying, “Hi, gorgeous.”  Hailey kick-started her beast while not lowering her weapon.  She fired off a round and glanced at us, “Saddle up ladies.  Time to go.”

We jumped on, and I wrapped my arms around her waist, and we were screaming down the space between the buildings, gunfire just missing us as we went.  It felt like a pressure left us when we emerged out from between the buildings and were shooting across a weed-infested parking lot.  It was more open, and the acoustics weren't bouncing the sound all around us.

I almost sighed in relief as we approached a set of open gates with barbed wire on top of them.  But Hailey swerved sharply, bringing us to a screeching and skidding stop, causing Dorian to be thrown roughly to the side and she almost tumbled out of the sidecar.

We sat there, Hai revving the motor as two figures stepped into the open, guns belching fire at us faster than the reports reached us.  Xerxes and Kanton!  Xerxes had a snarl on his face, and Baldy looked stoic and oddly detached as they fired.

Then with the squealing of tires and throwing a rooster tail of loose asphalt from the crumbling lot behind us, we were off in the other direction, swerving wildly as Dori was grabbing at the sides of the sidecar as she was thrown around in it.

I noted that all the shots missed, and they had in the alley as well.  Then I realized that the girls were safe as long as I was on the bike.  Xerxes didn't want me dead, he wanted me to make a wish.  I patted Hailey's shoulder and yelled over the motor and the wind rushing past, “Go toward them.”

She looked at me like I was insane and I shrugged and said, “Trust me.”

She shook her head and exhaled, then put us in a sliding turn, kicking up more loose asphalt and debris and gunned the motor.  It roared like some sort of prehistoric beast, drowning out the sound of my heart beating, trying to break its way free of my chest.

She started screaming with a challenge as bullets struck the ground around us as she put us on a direct collision course with the two madmen.

She raised the assault weapon, which a detached portion of my mind realized it was the same as the one Dorian was holding.  She must have liberated it from one of her unfortunate victims while busting me out.  She fired one shot at a time, and I absently wondered how she was doing that.  Every time I squeezed the trigger, a bajillion shots went out.

The men weren't moving.  Her shots were going wild, it must not be like the movies where every shot the hero takes, hits its mark.  And I would assume just getting close like she was while driving a motorcycle and shooting one handed was a miracle in itself.  This was a deadly game of chicken.

A moment before we would have slammed into the men, they both dove out of the way, and Hailey whooped in elation as we rocketed out the gates and toward San Francisco.

She smiled back at me, her pupils wide from the excitement and the adrenaline she must have been mainlining in her system.  Then I said, “I have to pee.”

Which got her tilting her head back to laugh long and hard, her purple hair flowing back in the wind, into my face.  I looked aside and saw Dorian still gripping the sides of the sidecar with white knuckles.

She finally smiled thinly, reached a shaking hand to her feet and pulled out the ridiculous smiley face helmet and snapped it on.  It was my turn to laugh out loud when she turned a toothy grin toward me.

She handed me a helmet as Hailey started pouring on the speed.  I looked back and knew why. There was a caravan of headlights pouring out of the compound behind us.  Just how many men did Xerxes have and how many were his kin?

She was pulling farther and farther away, and our speed was making me nervous as hell as I lashed on my helmet.  As soon as we hit the outskirts of the city, then our leather clad protector started weaving through the streets in a random pattern, losing us in the maze of streets.  I was hoping that there was no way they would catch us now.

But they kept plaguing us.  I found myself silently hoping that our high speeds would attract the attention of the police, so that Hailey and Dorian would be safe, while still hoping it did not.  I've already learned that I didn't want to be pinned up and dissected like some science experiment.  It was an experience I didn't ever want to revisit.

After out third brush with SUVs cutting us off.  Hailey pulled us into an alley and jumped off the bike.  She started running her hands over my clothes.  Dorian looked ready to protest as I asked, “What's going on Hai?”

She hissed out, “They're tracking us somehow.”  Shit, not again.  Kanton and his damn trackers. She paused at my collar and pulled a little device no bigger than a postage stamp from under it.  She tossed it away and said, “Bastards planted a tracker.”

I felt oddly violated once again, more over that than about the torture Xerxes had inflicted on me, how messed up were my priorities?

I glared at the little device as she got back on the bike and said, “Hang on.”  I wrapped my arms around her waist again, and we were roaring down the alley and turning north.  We took a random route for some time before the club owner seemed satisfied and started toward the city center on the side roads.

I felt the urge to spread my wings as the wind whipped past us.  I let them flutter a bit, trailing behind me.  I realized I wanted to fly.  Being on the back of the bike reminded me of the freedom I had felt when I was flying for my life from the tower.

I turned to grin at Dori, who had reached out to brush her fingers along my wings as I let them flow back in the artificial breeze of our retreat.  The look of awe and amazement and... hunger?  On her face was surprising to me and had me blushing for some reason.  She didn't seem to see me as the winged freak I felt like.

She caught me looking, and we shared a smile.  I reached over and took her hand for a moment, letting my fingers curl around hers, feeling her warmth.  Then I let my fingers drift away and then turned back to the road, just to have some purple hair get in my mouth as it streamed back into the wind.

I swear Dori chuckled as I pulled back and pushed the locks out of my mouth.

Before long we were pulling into the alley of the old Regency building.  It seemed that since the night of Stacy's death, my life has been a series of alleys.  I glanced at my wings as we dismounted, knowing that would be true until I got my feathered afflictions bound and hidden away again.

Hailey scanned the alley and the rooftops above before she started piling cardboard boxes on her bike while Dorian stowed our helmets and pulled out the assault rifle from the floor of the sidecar.

Hailey stopped and held her hand out.  “Give.  I have to get rid of these.”  She placed her other hand on the one slung over her shoulder.

Dorian narrowed her eyes and pulled back, giving our resident badass a wary look, cradling the weapon like a baby.  “No, it's mine.  I found it so I'm keeping it.”  She had some sort of disconnect about things she found, and I wondered if it was a mindset she got from living on the streets.

I shook my head and said with a lopsided smirk on my face, “You didn't find it.  I gave it to you back at the warehouse.”

She shrugged and gave me a toothy grin.  “Semantics.”

Hailey huffed out a breath in exasperation, and her hand shot out lightning fast, like a snake striking, and she snatched the gun out of a startled Dorian's hands.  “Give me that.  You're going to hurt yourself.”

The two stared each other down for a few long seconds.  Then Dori conceded, “Fine Debby Downer.”

Then she went silent as we both just stared slack-jawed at Hai as she deftly ejected the magazine and cleared the weapon, slinging it over her shoulder with the other one.  We blinked as she said, “Stay here.”

She stalked down the alley looking at the ground for something.  Then Dori stepped to my side as we watched her go, I absently wrapped a wing around her, and she grasped it and held it close to her as she asked in a whisper, “Ok... is it wrong that that sort of aroused me?”

I swallowed and blushed and shook my head, “No.  No... not at all.”  I bit my lower lip.  Then I shook myself out of my admiration for the woman I had always believed only to be a smart business woman and bartender.

I snorted and bit back a laugh when the dark-eyed woman under my wing changed the subject.  “Now you owe me a jacket and a kickass gun.”

I turned toward her, shaking my head as I playfully wrapped my other wing around her, trapping her in a cage of feathers.  “You've got some pretty messed up priorities, Dor.”

She was quick to retort, “Says you.”

I nodded and teased, “I think we just established that.”

Her returning grin made my knees go a little weak.  Then she sighed loudly and just sort of laid against me.  I basked in her closeness and tightened my wings.  That solidified it, I was smitten with the little smartass.

We watched Hailey crouch and swing a rifle around to use the barrel to pry something up.  She grunted and moved a manhole cover to the side.  Then she disassembled the weapons like she had done it a million times, dropping the pieces into the manhole before grunting as she slid the cover back in place.

She joined us, and I asked, “What if the wrong kind of person finds those?  Someone could get hurt or worse.”

She shook her head and opened a fist to show me two pieces of metal.  “Not without the firing pins.”  Then she looked back at the manhole and said, “Once we get through this, I'll come back and dispose of them properly.”

Once we get through this?  I unwrapped my wings from Dori and just looked at them.  Would I ever get through this?  I contemplated using a wish to just make them go away.  But that just seemed wrong on so many levels to me now.

Not just the fact that it would bring me one step closer to enslavement and death, but because...  I understood Dorian a little better in that moment.  Because they were mine.  It would be too much like losing an arm or leg.

Hailey said, “Ok street rat, where is this safehouse of yours?”

I was getting amused at how much the two grated on each other when I saw a grudging respect for each other.

I shook my head. “No, the first thing is that you two need to do is to turn around.  If I don't pee now, I'll wind up embarrassing myself even more in a few seconds.”

They complied with my wishes and turned around as I moved behind a garbage can.  This may or may not have been the first time I had to relieve myself in an alley.  Shut up, we all do stupid things when we drink.  I just barely made it in time.

I swear I heard chuckling when it seemed like I wasn't going to stop.  I felt much better as I stepped back out, zipping up.  They turned to me with innocent smiles on their faces.  I growled, “I hate you both.”

I got toothy grins in response, and I tried not to smile, so I turned away and said, “Follow me.”

I spread my wings wide, it felt good to stretch them, at the same time it hurt like hell.  I could feel the damage to my wingtip, my original bruises, and the bloodied holes I tore into my own flesh to free myself.  The pain was worth the elated sense of freedom I felt as I took two running steps as I flapped my wings.