Painkiller (12 page)

“I’m pretty sure the law isn’t settled on taking someone’s memories, since the framers probably didn’t have that in mind when they were drafting—”

“You deprived that guy of his rights,” Reed said, folding his arms, looking more disappointed than anything. “No trial, no—”

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “But I caught him operating an illegal gambling establishment, so—”

“That’s not an excuse for what you did to the guy,” Reed said, looking at the mess I’d made of Thuggy. He had a point.

“What the hell?” Four guys came sweeping in through the exit doors on the side of the building. None of them were as big as Thuggy, but they weren’t small, either. They looked like the casino’s security detail, and they filed in with angry looks on their faces as they took the sight of the two of us and their co-workers on the craps table next to me.

“He did it,” I said, pointing at Reed as someone else came in the main door. I turned my head to look and it was a woman in a grey pantsuit with a pink halter-top looking shirt underneath it. She had long reddish-brown hair and wasn’t carrying a purse or anything. The look on her face said she was not someone’s girlfriend, or the concierge, or a bartender.

Her face said she meant business, a tight smile and dark eyes that were focused on me and me alone.

“You might want to save the lecture on violence for later,” I said to Reed. “You take the guys and I’ll dance with the lady?” I caught his nod of agreement out of the corner of my eye.

“Hi, Sienna,” the woman said, easing toward me, arms awkwardly straight at her side.

“Howdy, stranger,” I said, watching her, “I love your look. It’s says, ‘I’m here for serious business, but I’m ready to party, too.’”

“I like your look, too,” she said, nodding at the bloody mess just beneath my jacket on my side where I’d been shot. “It says I’m not too late … to kill you myself.”

There she stood, Sienna Nealon, plain as day, looking righteous and defiant all at once. It was a pretty common look on her, at least judging by the press photos. Veronika hadn’t paid her that much more attention than she paid to any other celebrity, just enough to know that everyone thought of the girl as some kind of cross between a superhero and a supervillain, depending on who you were asking and when you asked.

Veronika didn’t feel a need to ask. She didn’t care. Hero, villain, it was all the same to her. She needed to reduce the girl to a corpse to collect on the contract, and anything beyond that was just noise.

Still, caution was warranted.

“You know who ruined my shirt?” Nealon asked, pointing at the bloody stain and rip at her side, hidden beneath the dark fabric of her coat. Pristine, pale skin showed from the hole in the cloth.

“It was probably Phinneus Chalke,” Veronika said, stepping a little closer as she peered at the sight of the former injury. “He uses this Old West rifle, one of the ones with a lever on it.” She made the motion like she was holding up a gun and racking it the way she’d seen Phinneus do it when they’d been in competition for another job once. “He’s an Artemis. Good shooter.” She looked back to Nealon’s blue eyes, glowing like ice under a winter sky. “I honestly didn’t think he ever missed.”

“He couldn’t put me down,” Nealon said, sounding a little too pleased with herself.

“Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” Veronika said, a smile twisting her rose-red lips. Nealon’s brother was off to deal with the thugs who had come in through the other door. From the way the voices were rising, it sounded like the tense standoff might be about to break out into violence.

“You said it, sister.” Nealon smirked at her. “I can’t say I’ve ever met a woman who could go toe to toe with me, though. Most don’t even try. The last couple that did? One was a Russian lady that just got out of prison—she begged me to kill her mercifully. The one before that …” She put a finger to the side of her lip as she thought it over. “I think she was Czech? Russian trained, though. Stabbed me a bunch of times. Regretted it, probably, before the end.”

“I didn’t realize we were going to summarize all of our battles in an epic recitation before we fought or I would have brought a list, maybe taken some time to compose it into a poem,” Veronika said, still smirking.

“I kinda like you,” Nealon said, smiling. “What’s your name?”

“Veronika.”

“It’s going to be a real shame when I have to kill you, Veronika.”

“I was just thinking the same thing, Nealon,” Veronika said, leaning forward slightly. “Shall we?” She spread her arms wide.

“This is the way things should always be settled,” Nealon said, matching her motion. “Let’s.”

Veronika raised a fist at the same time Nealon did, just behind her ear. “You know, that guy over there just tried this,” Nealon jerked her neck slightly to indicate one of the toughs that was bloody and insensate on a nearby table, “and it didn’t work out very favorably for him. You sure you want to go bareknuckle with me?”

Veronika smiled and struck, and Nealon came right back at her. They clashed, fist to fist, and the force of the impact threw them both back. Bottles shattered behind the bar, and the glass in the slot machines ringing the room burst from the shockwave of their collision.

Veronika slid back ten feet, skidding to a stop on carpet that ripped under the soles of her shoes, and she looked up to see Nealon staring back at her in a similar posture, surprise obvious in the girl’s eyes. “Yeah,” Veronika said with amusement, “I do.”

“Well, okay, then,” Nealon said, looking a little disoriented, shaking her hand. Hints of blood welled from her knuckles. Veronika didn’t bother to check her own, she just charged forward again.

Veronika came at her straight on, and Nealon dodged right. The girl was fast, Veronika would give her that, faster than anyone else Veronika could recall fighting recently—

Veronika traded punches with her; Nealon landed one to her side, causing Veronika to gasp, Veronika planted one solidly on her jaw and felt bone buckle from the impact. They both flew off to the side, Nealon rolling over a roulette table and sending it skidding ten feet, Veronika slamming into the bodies of the two suited thugs draped across the craps table.

Veronika shook off her landing in a hot second, springing back to her feet as Nealon sat up, Frankenstein-like on top of the roulette table. Her eyes looked faintly dazed, and she muttered, “Wolfe,” so low it was barely audible. Her jaw pulled back into line and her eyes cleared in a second. “Gavrikov,” she said, “let’s end this.”

Veronika watched Nealon stick out a hand. The girl smiled as it sprang into flames. She hurled a burst of blazing orange fire right at Veronika—

And Veronika stuck out her own hand to intercept it, springing to life with cold, blue fire. The orange burst curved right into her hand and disappeared, absorbed right into her palm like it had never even existed.

Nealon stared at her, her jaw slack even though she’d just fixed it. “Uh. Okay.”

Veronika just smiled and faced her down. This was the most fun she’d had on a job in decades. “What else you got?”

Uh oh.

My mom was always fond of saying that there’s always someone badder than you out there. It was her all-purpose reason to keep training constantly, like a motto designed to blow away all my excuses about why sleep or television were more important than going down to our basement dojo and getting slapped around by her meta-powered ass for a couple hours per day.

The truth was, since I’d learned what an unleashed succubus could do and really gotten a grasp on how to fully use my powers, I’d been in peril a lot of times, but I hadn’t met very many people that I would have considered even remotely as badass as I was. Oh, sure, they had powers, but most of them were soft or attacked me when I was down or used some unfair advantage to sucker punch me because they couldn’t stand up to me in a head-on fight.

This bitch … if she wasn’t badder than me, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

There was none of the flinch in her that I’d seen in other metas I’d fought. She knew how to fight, she’d clearly done quite a bit of it, and she had gone knuckle-to-knuckle with me and caused a shockwave in the process. She’d yet to try and run, even though her nose was bleeding just slightly, probably from said shockwave.

She just looked like she was having a ball.

Like me.

As I said before … uh oh.

I wasn’t exactly ready to throw in the towel and call it quits, you understand. But it did give me a moment’s pause, realizing I was up against someone like myself, someone who enjoyed the fight, someone who prided herself on being a badass.

Eve
, I said silently and sprayed a net of light right at this Veronika’s face.

It hit her around the eyes and dissolved a second later as part of her face and hair sprang into a cold, glowing blue before dissipating back to reveal her features. It looked a little like fire, but with more substance. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d seen this power before, but I was at a loss to recall exactly when. I’d fought so many metas by this point that I couldn’t even remember all of them. I just knew I didn’t have anyone with these powers currently stuck in my prison.

Not that that narrowed anything down. I’d killed way more metas than I’d imprisoned at this point.

I racked my brain, throwing a quick look at Reed, who was fending off the four toughs that had come in through the side door. He should have been having an easy time of it, but two of them had guns and he was blasting them around, trying to dislodge the weapons from their hands.

I snapped my attention back to Veronika, who was advancing on me as I flipped back off the roulette table, buying myself a second or two. I yanked my jacket along for the ride, ripping it from where I’d left it at the point of the wheel when I’d taken it off earlier and flung it right at Veronika as a distraction.
Bjorn
, I said as she disappeared behind the leather.

On it
, Bjorn said, blasting the warmind at her.

“Ooh,” Veronika said, swiping aside the coat and blinking at me, a smile perched on her perfectly red lips. Had she applied lipstick before our fight? It hadn’t smeared at all since we started to rumble. “Warmind. I’d forgotten how that felt.”

“You seem strangely unmoved by it,” I said, kinda glad the roulette table was still between us.

“I learned mental defenses from a telepath I slept with on and off for a century,” she said, dabbing at the little drip of blood on her upper lip. She looked down at her knuckle, tipped with red, and smiled. “The warmind is like a gentle kiss compared to what a real telepath can do.”

LIES!
Bjorn said, but somehow I doubted he was right based on both her reaction and his.

I’d run through almost my entire gallery of powers and was left with only a few options, none of them awesome.

Please don’t turn into a dragon in the middle of the room here
, Bastian said.

I’m not going to
, I said,
it’s downtown Chicago and there are other things in this building besides an illicit gaming house
. If Maclean disliked me now, imagine how he’d feel if I dropped a five-story building off State Street while turning into a dragon. That’s not the sort of thing that brings in the tourists.

I’d run through Gavrikov’s, Eve’s and Bjorn’s powers, though, which left me with only Wolfe’s, Bastian’s and my own to fall back on. Bastian’s, for the reasons above, was right out. Wolfe’s I had been drawing on from the first punch of this fight, and Veronika’s strength clearly matched his pretty well. All that remained was his healing ability, which I would probably need to make copious use of if we kept brawling. It wasn’t exactly a game-winner, though.

And neither were my own powers. Assuming I could lay a hand on Veronika, I kinda doubted she was just going to stand there and take it while I absorbed her soul. Most people didn’t, and she was much more of a fighter than your average meta.

“Why are you here to kill me, Veronika?” I asked, hoping it would give me a moment’s respite.

“Because I’m being well-paid for it,” she said with a smile.

“I kinda figured that you were an assassin,” I said as we faced off over the roulette table. “I just thought maybe you’d accord me the respect of telling me who wants me dead bad enough to engage the services of a preeminent badass like yourself to get the job done.”

“I didn’t ask the why,” she said, still smiling, “because I don’t care. And you should know I’m a professional, so telling you would be … well, gauche.”

“Right,” I said, and the
DUH!
idea clicked in my head. “Well, I’m a professional, too, and it strikes me that in all this hustle and bustle, what with being sniped and having you get all up in my area, I haven’t even had a chance to show you or your buddy Phinneus the tools of my trade.”

Her eyes widened and she kicked the roulette table as I drew my CZ-75 Shadow, which I had conveniently nicknamed “Shadow” (because I’m super original). The table hit me in the upper thighs but I snapped a shot off as I dragged Gavrikov into the front of my mind to lift me into the air. Veronika was already moving, using the kick against the table to try and shove herself backward and down. She hit the floor and rolled as my first shots echoed in the gaming hall.

I fired fast; she moved fast. It wasn’t exactly a draw, but my visual acuity rated her as a fricking blur as she rolled under the craps table, and I held my fire so as not to hit the dumb lumps of goon that were unconscious upon it. I came back down to steady my aim, holding my pistol in front of me, focused on the table.

Veronika’s eye popped up from behind the craps table. She was clearly holding her head sideways, awkwardly so as to spoil my shot. I considered trying to shoot her through the edge of the table, but I was using hollow-points designed to expand when they hit, low velocity rounds that were meant to disperse their force upon impact with targets like walls. It was a hedge, an acknowledgment that while I might be a pretty good shot, sometimes I missed. Using a higher-powered bullet with a full metal jacket round meant those bullets might keep going, killing some poor bastard in the next room. So shooting through the craps table was not a great option.