“Good.” I rolled off of him. I’d have only a second to do this, and I had to do it precisely.
Saiman got up to his knees. As he rose, I threw a fast right hook. He never saw it coming and didn’t brace himself. My fist landed on his jaw. His head snapped back. His eyes rolled over and he sagged down.
Lucky. I ran to the lab.
It took a hell of a lot of practice to knock someone out. You needed both speed and power to jolt the head enough to rattle the brain inside the skull but not cause permanent damage. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even try it, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Walls were curving in to eat me.
If I did cause too much damage, he would fix it. Considering what he had done to his body so far, his regeneration would make normal shapeshifters jealous.
Third cabinet. I threw it open and scanned the glass jars. Dread mugged me like a sodden blanket. Ligularia dentata, Ligularia przewalski . . . Latin names, why me? Lilium pardalinum, Lobelia siphilitica. Come on, come on . . . Nymphaea odorata, pond lily. Also known to Russians as odolen-trava, the mermaid flower, an all-purpose pesticide against all things unclean. That would do.
I dashed to the door, twisting the lid off the jar. A gray powder filled it—ground lily petals, the most potent part of the flower. I slid open the lock. The ward drained down, and I jerked the door ajar.
Empty hallway greeted me. I hurled the jar and the powder into the hall. A woman wailed, smoke rose from thin air, and Badzula materialized in the middle of the carpet. Skinny, flabby, filthy, with breasts dangling to her waist like two empty bags, she tossed back grimy, tangled hair and hissed at me, baring stumps of rotten teeth.
“That’s nice. Fuck you, too.”
I swung. It was textbook saber slash, diagonal, from left to right. I drew the entirety of the blade through the wound. Badzula’s body toppled one way, her head rolled the other.
The weight dropped off my shoulders. Suddenly I could breathe, and the building no longer seemed in imminent danger of collapsing and burying me alive.
I grabbed the head, tossed it into the elevator, dragged the body in there, sent the whole thing to the ground floor, sprinted back inside, and locked the door, reactivating the ward. The whole thing took five seconds.
On the floor, Saiman lay unmoving. I checked his pulse. Breathing. Good. I went back to the island. I deserved some coffee after this, and I bet Saiman stocked the good stuff.
I was sitting by the counter, sipping the best coffee I’d ever tasted, when the big-screen TV on the wall lit up with fuzzy glow. Which was more than a smidgeon odd, considering that the magic was still up and the TV shouldn’t have worked.
I took my coffee and my saber and went to sit on the couch, facing the TV. Saiman still sprawled unconscious on the floor.
The glow flared brighter, faded, flared brighter . . . In ancient times people used mirrors, but really any somewhat reflective surface would do. The dark TV screen was glossy enough.
The glow blazed and materialized into a blurry male. In his early twenties, dark hair, dark eyes.
The man looked at me. “You’re the bodyguard.” His voice carried a trace of Russian accent.
I nodded and slipped into Russian. “Yes.”
“I don’t know you. What you do makes no difference to me. We have this place surrounded. We go in in an hour.” He made a short chopping motion with his hand. “You’re done.”
“I’m shaking with fear. In fact, I may have to take a minute to get my shivers under control.” I drank my coffee.
The man shook his head. “You tell that paskuda, if he let Yulya go, I’ll make sure you both walk out alive. You hear that? I don’t know what he’s got over my wife, but you tell him that. If he wants to live, he has to let her go. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. You tell him.”
The screen faded.
And the plot thickens. I sighed and nudged Saiman with my boot. It took a couple of nudges, but finally he groaned and sat up.
“What happened?”
“You fell.”
“Really? What did I fall into?”
“My fist.”
“That explains the headache.” Saiman looked at me. “This will never happen again. I want to be absolutely clear. Attempt this again and you’re fired.”
I wondered what would happen if I knocked him out again right there, just for kicks.