“No,” I said, and stuck the cable to her chest.
Okay, that worked better than expected, I thought, watching her slam back into the void, like she’d been hit by a giant fist.
And then get smashed between two of them, when she sailed straight into the middle of a troll fight.
I winced.
That had to hurt.
And then the cable suddenly coiled around and hissed at me, like some huge black snake. An image that was only reinforced when it started striking down, sparking off brick and plaster and part of a twisted girder, as I ducked and dodged and cursed vampire master powers, the fun stuff they get with advanced age but which I’d managed to miss out on.
At least I know how she managed that throw, I thought, wrestling with the damned thing. And finally managing to loop it around a girder. And tie it off in half a dozen knots until it just stayed there, flailing helplessly.
Like me, when a roundhouse kick came out of nowhere and sent me sailing.
Son of a bitch!
I landed in a rug-burn-inducing slide in a soot-covered apartment somewhere below. One stuffed to the gills with ogres who didn’t appreciate the intrusion. Between the pots and pans and somebody’s floor lamp they started pelting me with, it took me a second to notice that my assailant’s hair was now blond and short, and that she seemed to have changed sexes.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, staring up at the new guy.
“A dead man,” he told me, which was accurate considering the fangs, but weird.
Or maybe not, I thought, as he suddenly staggered backward into the abyss, and I realized that he hadn’t been the one speaking.
“Competition?” I guessed, as Purple Hair grinned at me some more.
“Competition,” she agreed.
And then she lunged.
But I’d expected it, and got a frying pan up in time, slamming it into her pretty face. It didn’t cave it in, exactly, but I had the impression that her features might be a lot flatter once it came off. I decided not to find out and kicked her over the edge.
For anyone else, that would have been it, but anyone else would have already been dead from electrocution. So it wasn’t entirely a surprise to see some purple-tipped talons grasp the edge of the floor a couple seconds later, although how their owner managed that I didn’t know unless she jackknifed in space. But at least she was looking a little worse for the wear, with her hair a crackling nimbus around her perfectly made-up and now-blood-smeared face.
Not that it seemed to be slowing her down.
I’d gotten back to my feet, but before I could blink, my ankle was caught, my butt hit the floor, and the only reason I didn’t go over the edge was the couple of large ogres I’d managed to grab on the way down.
And the fact that I was slamming my boot into her head as hard as I could.
“Out of curiosity,” I panted, while one of the ogres’ friends started wailing on me with a toaster, “is there a reason you and Blondie both showed up tonight?”
She spat blood. “You’re a hard person to find. You get appointed to the Senate, then immediately get sent out of the country.”
And, yeah, the Senate had had a couple errands for me, one of which had resulted in my current, less-than-optimal state. But I didn’t see what that had to do with her. “So?”
“So we didn’t know where you went, and had to wait for you to get back, and now there’s only a week left.”
“Until what?”
“Until the swearing in,” she said, getting smacked by a determined little guy with a broom handle. “Once you’re confirmed . . . no one can touch you . . . until after the war. And by then . . . you’ll have made alliances.”
I vaguely remembered somebody telling me that duels between sen
ators had been outlawed until after the war, to cut down on the chaos. And because I guess the consul felt like she’d lost enough Senate members already. But we newbies weren’t technically senators yet, were we?
“So this is gonna be an all-week thing?” I guessed.