Thrill-Kinky (12 page)

Chapter Twelve

She wasn’t too late. Thank all the gods and goddesses she’d ever heard of and any she might have missed, she wasn’t too late.

Rita’s high perch wasn’t lit, but the room below was. Drax was on his feet, uninjured, or at least no more so than when she’d last seen him, but his weapons lay on the floor near his feet. Xia was concealed near the door, so deep in shadow that Rita wouldn’t have spotted her if she hadn’t had a pretty good idea where Xia would hide. A stocky, strong-looking woman who had to be Nitari Belesku stared at Drax with an intensity that, if eyes were lasers, would have drilled right through him. She’d just said something, but from four stories up, Rita could neither make out the words nor read her lips. The beautiful malachite floor was splattered with blood. Three species in the fight, and they all bled the same shade of red. Some of it was obviously Belesku’s, judging from the mess that used to be the left side of her face, but not all of it or she wouldn’t be so steady on her feet, not even with genetic enhancements. Guess the red blood proved she wasn’t Blemondian, even if she looked the part.

She had a knife. She raised it, threatening Drax, Rita supposed. As she did, blood dripped from the blade.

Xia’s blood.

And now she was going for Drax.

Normally, Rita would descend from a height like this slowly and cautiously. Stars, normally she’d descend from a height like this along a cliff face, almost walking or maybe bouncing from point to point, but not just dropping like a flyer that lost its grav-control.

No time for such niceties. Rita opened up the clips that controlled her descent and plummeted.

It was dizzying. It was disorienting. It took the local gravity and turned it up. If Rita were the kind of person who was inclined to get queasy, she’d have started barfing halfway down.

Rita being Rita, she experienced flutterings in her belly, but they were more excitement than nausea. They were accompanied by suspicious tingling between her legs and an urge to yell “Whoo-hoo!” which she repressed.

This was no time for excitement, no time for arousal. But her body didn’t get that.

Belesku was moving closer to Drax, almost leisurely, as if she expected him to stand there and wait for her.

Which he did.

If anything, he moved closer. Not too close, though, and that was when she knew Drax had spotted her.

If Belesku would take two more steps…

Rita swayed in her harness. Normally you’d want to keep it steady when you were descending, especially going as fast as she was, but the only thing she was likely to hit now was something—or more precisely someone—she wanted to hit.

Drax was talking to Belesku in a low, steady voice, almost dancing in place just out of reach. Talking to hide the whooshing sound of Rita’s descent, she guessed, and the almost imperceptible noises of a cat-girl sneaking from patch of cover to patch of cover. Xia didn’t look steady on her feet, and she was clutching her belly, but still managed to move silently and gracefully.

The assassin looked up at the last second. Just in time for Rita’s climbing boots to hit her in the face.

On the side that hadn’t been injured before, so now she had blood dripping into both eyes. Rita hadn’t been aiming that precisely, but she thought it was a useful outcome. Belesku bellowed in pain and rage and staggered back. She was trying to swing at Rita with the knife, but with the blood in her eyes, she must have been having trouble seeing. Rita pumped like a kid on a swing, using the momentum the impact gave her, and swung back into Belesku before she could get steady on her feet again.

This time, Drax finished the job, tackling the assassin. She managed one good blow that caught him between the wings, but the angle was wrong, which made it right from Rita’s point of view, causing a long, shallow, uneven cut that must have stung like a bastard, but no worse than that.

Rita landed hard, but she ignored the painful impact jarring her body. Only a few steps…she didn’t even bother taking the harness off. She knelt down so hard she’d have bruises on her knees for a week. But at least she’d be alive to complain about them, and Xia and Drax would be alive to laugh at her for whining. When they’d all recovered, maybe Drax would help her get new bruises in more fun ways.

Act fast. Belesku was raising the knife again.

The assassin’s hesitation, trying to decide whether to focus on Drax or Rita, was almost imperceptible, or should have been. But time was oddly distorted, so Rita had plenty of time to look into the other woman’s flat, pale, slit-pupiled eyes and see herself dismissed as a non-issue compared to a trained operative, even an unarmed one. Belesku’s focus shifted to Drax, sharp as a Rodrantian honor-dagger.

And Rita struck.

Belesku convulsed, dropped the knife, and convulsed again, making a pathetic keening noise.

“What the…” Xia said from behind her shoulder. Xia’s voice was weak, but her curiosity remained undimmed.

“How did you do that?” Drax echoed the question.

Rita brandished the Arinath grid disrupter.

“Arinath disrupters aren’t supposed to do that.” Drax sounded remarkably calm.

“I recalibrated it to emulate a police stunner.” Belesku’s gyrations were slowing down, so Rita hit her again. It seemed to hurt a lot, but Rita wasn’t inclined to care, especially since she could now see the extent of Xia’s injuries. “Mik and I figured it would come in handy someday to have a weapon that didn’t look like one. Mik thought tonight there might be a reward for someone this infamous so it would be better if she were alive, and since I already knew the settings, it didn’t take more than thirty seconds to recalibrate it this time.”

“Just as well,” Drax said. “If you’d had a gun, she’d have known you were a threat. But who ever heard of attacking with a grid disrupter? Rita, you’re amazing.”

“You want to know who’s amazing?” Xia whispered. “This man. He played for time and piled lie on top of lie so I almost believed him even when I knew the truth and…he offered himself to talk her out of killing me.” With the amount of blood seeping from her wounds, Xia
had
to be in shock, but apparently that wasn’t enough to keep a felinoid quiet.

“Because I thought you were nothing to him, an innocent who got in the way.” The assassin’s voice was harsh with pain, but steady. And furious. “Now I know better.”

“I
am
nothing to him. He’s just not a piece of violent driftdwell like you and me. Thing is, though, I’m a predator. What’s your marling excuse?” When Belesku opened her mouth to speak, Xia shoved what was left of her tattered shirt into it, hard. “No answer for me? Cat got your tongue?” The assassin was making noises behind the improvised gag. From the cadence, Rita was betting on some creative swearing in a variety of languages.

The felinoid’s ears swiveled toward a sound no one else could hear. “Sounds like police flyers,” she said. “You should hear them soon.” Then her legs buckled and she collapsed onto the floor abruptly. “Rita, sweetie, I don’t feel so good. Think I want…a nap now.” Her eyes flickered shut.

Rita caught her as she slumped over. She was still breathing, but her skin was too cool, her face sweaty, her skin caked with blood. Rita pressed her hands over the wound in her friend’s belly, wishing she had more hands.

As she did, she realized she hadn’t bothered to put her gloves back on after recalibrating the disrupter. Her hands were torn and bleeding from her rapid descent, and her blood mingled with Xia’s.

After he finished tying up an incoherently furious Belesku, Drax joined them, putting his wings around them both, his big hands on the wound in Xia’s stomach so Rita could get to work on her thighs. He was bleeding too, and dripping sweat, but the shelter of his wings felt so sweet, she was surprised Xia didn’t wake up purring.

That she didn’t underlined how seriously injured she was.

Where were the damn police?

And would they help Xia when they arrived or regard her, and everyone else, as criminals too? They’d broken into the museum, just like the real thieves, and the real thieves had respectable covers, where they were just space trash to most dirtbound types.

But the first person through the museum door wasn’t a San’balese police officer. It was a well-dressed, older Banjali man, weapon drawn, flanked by a San’balese woman, also armed, in a simple black outfit that just screamed
government agent.
“Planetary agents!” she barked. “Hands in the air.”

Rita looked desperately at the armed agents and the police officers who poured in the door behind them, wanting to comply for fear of being shot, but afraid to let up the pressure on Xia’s wounds.

“Get her belly, Rita. It’s the more dangerous injury.” Drax rose slowly, hands in the air, wings spread, letting them see the scene. “At last. It is so good to see you, Ms. Gentria. I was afraid my message never reached you. Please tell your local people that my associates can’t put their hands in the air, since one is unconscious and the other is making sure she doesn’t bleed to death. We need a medico team immediately.”

Both agents nodded. The San’balese woman lowered her weapon, shouted something in her own language to the gathering cops, looked at poor Xia, then barked out, “Medicos, in here now! Area secured, civilians down!” in that weirdly random way people did when they were going back and forth between using a neurorelay and talking to people who were actually present.

The Banjali man didn’t stand down.

“Jalricki, what in the marling stars have you done now? Dragging alien civilians into a classified mission. Having a shoot-out, or whatever happened here, when this was supposed to be a simple snatch-and-switch with no violence.”

Rita was ready to crawl into the marble floor and drag Drax with her, but Drax seemed unperturbed. “Toor Ashbahal. Good to see you again too, you burrow-dwelling nashbet. Didn’t know you were on this case, or on this planet, for that matter. I guess no one told you I was almost killed last night by Blemondian operatives.”

“I’d have told him,” said the San’balese woman Drax had addressed as Ms. Gentria. “Except I didn’t know he was involved. He just showed up at the last minute.” She hesitated, then added, “All his paperwork checks out.”

“Headquarters heard a rumor Belesku might be involved in this and called me in to back you up, given the history between the two of you. But you’re still alive, so I guess the rumor was wrong.” Rita had a feeling Toor Ashbahal’s disappointed tone had more to with the former than the latter. But the older Banjali finally lowered the gun.

“For once, a rumor about her was correct.” Drax folded his wings close to his body, revealing the bound, bleeding assassin. “She won’t be raising her hands either.”

Cops surged forward.

A medico team pushed their way in through a sea of police and set to work on Xia, using a lot of equipment Rita didn’t recognize except for the Universal Transfusion Fluid rig. She lost track of whatever else was going on around her as she tried to keep as close as possible to her friend while not getting in the way of medicos. At another time, she thought grimly, she would have been fascinated to watch the speed and precision involved in doing emergency medicine with four hands per medico. But she didn’t have the heart now. She’d seen Xia injured before, but never this badly. Never wounds that a few stitches and a drink to dull the pain wouldn’t set right. Only when one of the medicos had a minute to clean and bandage Rita’s torn hands did she dare to ask, “Will my friend be all right?”

The medico, a young man with liquid brown eyes and tan stripes on his creamy complexion, patted her shoulder with one of his hands as he finished bandaging her right hand with the others. “We’ve got her stabilized. She’s one lucky cat-girl, though. She’s lost a lot of blood, but her major arteries weren’t nicked, and there’s minimal organ damage. She’s young, felinoids are tough, and she’s responding well to the UTF. Once we get her to the hospital and get some appropriate synth-blood into her, she’ll be on the road to recovery.” He smiled reassuringly. “Worst thing will be keeping her still long enough for the abdominal wound to heal. We don’t have regen tech for her species here.”

“Thank the stars universal healing accelerator works really well on felinoids. Don’t ask me how I know.” They couldn’t afford regen anyway, not for an injury that would heal on its own. But Mik had gotten his hands on a case of off-label accelerator—for clinical use only most places, but
not
, as it turned out, on Xylac—and they’d been shepherding it ever since, knowing it would come in handy someday.

Just then Xia opened her eyes, stuck out her tongue at the nearest medico, and said groggily, “Hey, nice stripes, mister. What you are doing later tonight? I bet those four hands would feel niiiice in my fur.” She was slurring like she was still in shock, but the fact she was even trying to flirt was a good sign.

For the first time in what seemed like years instead of hours, Rita laughed. “Yeah, she’ll be fine. You hear that, babe? You’re going to be fine.”

She turned to Drax, wanting to hug him, wanting to feel him warm and solid against her after all the danger and emotional upheaval.

But he was gone, along with the two agents, Nitari Belesku, and about half the police and medicos.

Two police officers approached her. “Miss,” the female said, “we need you to come with us.”

Buck was right, Rita reflected as they handcuffed her: the San’balese were eerily polite. She’d been arrested a couple of times in the past, though never booked, but never in a way that made her feel like the cops were inviting her to a swank party that just happened to involve a little bondage gear.

With Drax gone without saying goodbye, a kinky party at the cop shop might be the closest thing she’d get to action for a while.

That was the least of her worries, she knew. But it was easier to be annoyed with the exotic, sexy spy ditching her and leaving her to be arrested for a situation he got her into than to contemplate the fact she and the others were under arrest.

Or that Xia was on her way to the hospital.