“No, that’s not what I—”
Ray gave a sudden twist, and the phone went sliding across the floor. And I went sliding after it, because it was that or risk an Interspecies Incident. But I didn’t pick it up. Because my hand landed on it about the same time that a foot did—a foot in a size sixteen boot belonging to a guy big enough to need it.
No, not a guy, I thought, looking up when the phone didn’t budge. A vampire. And not one of the nicer ones.
Chapter Twelve
“Mm-hmm. Now that’s a Magnum,” the clerk said behind me. She sounded impressed.
I was, too, but for a different reason. “I didn’t hear you come in,” I accused, standing up. And then getting a few feet between us.
The vamp grinned, all big white teeth in a handsome Asian face, which upset the tiger tat sleeping on his left cheek. It uncurled, stretched, and muscled down to the open neck of his black polo, watching me the whole time through narrowed emerald eyes. It looked like it was thinking about going for my jugular. Unlike its owner, who was in a worryingly good mood.
He switched the toothpick he’d been chewing to the other side of his mouth. “Takes talent,” he said mildly. And then he lunged.
A fist with enough force behind it to punch through a wall went whistling toward my face. But it didn’t punch a wall—or anything else—because I did a limbo-like maneuver that had me bent almost double in the wrong direction. And that much momentum doesn’t stop on a dime. It took him a half second to recover, and that was a half second too long.
I whirled, got my boot in his ass and pushed. He went barreling straight into the cash register, causing the clerk to jump back, the machine to hit the ground and the drawer to pop open. Change scattered, bills fluttered and he turned, grinning, because he was nuts and always had been.
I tried to remember his name, since it helps if you’re trying to talk somebody down. But “Scarface” was the only thing coming to mind. It was the nickname I’d given him the first time we met—you know, a couple of minutes after I tried to blow him up.
In fairness to me, he’d been trying to kill me at the time. In fairness to him, I’d been trying to steal something that belonged to his master, namely Ray, who the Senate had wanted to squeal on
his boss’s White Tiger triad and its network of illegal portals. So you could say we had been about even on the fault scale when the bomb decided matters—temporarily, because the guy was a first-level master.
A little thing like a bomb going off practically on top of him hadn’t slowed him down for long. It had left him with a face full of scars, however, and an attitude. The scars had faded, and I thought the attitude had, too, when we ended up on the same side—sort of—a little later. So I wasn’t exactly facing an enemy.
Of course, he wasn’t a friend, either. At least, not in the conventional sense. Like in the not ripping the ICEE machine off the wall and chucking it at my head sense.
I ducked, which avoided decapitation but did nothing to prevent cold neon blue sludge from drenching me when the tank burst against the wall. He grinned. “Not your color.”
“What is your problem?” I asked, scooping the freezing mess out of my cleavage.
“We got unfinished business,” he reminded me.
“My name’s not Bill.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I loved that movie. Shoulda brought a katana, but it seemed like an unfair advantage.”
And then he pulled out a shotgun and blew the shit out of the fixture behind me.
It would have blown a hole through me, too, but I’d already been on my way to the ground. I rolled, slipped in the guts of a shampoo bottle, got to my feet and slid behind a row of fixtures. Which went up in a line of explosions right on my heels, because vampire reflexes on reload made almost any gun an automatic.
Until the crazy bastard firing it runs out of shells, anyway.
I crouched behind a bunch of mirrors on a pegboard, which were making a lot of oh, shit faces at me. I debated shooting back, but it wouldn’t have done any good. I had an M1911 .45 under my arm and a 9mm Glock 17 in a concealed holster at my waist, plus a cute little .22 I kept as a backup in my boot. None of which would do more to this joker than piss him off.
But it looked like I’d better come up with something, judging by the gun butt that obliterated the mirrors a second later.
I launched myself backward, flipped and sent three knives into his heart, one right after the other. Which didn’t buy me any time, unless you count the second he took to do an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression and flex a pec at me. And pop the damned things out.
“Don’t you hate it when they do that?” he asked sympathetically.
“They…don’t usually do that,” I admitted.
“Yeah.” He looked smug. “But I been getting a lot of practice lately. You know the games are on.”
“So I heard.”