Chicks Kick Butt - Rachel Caine, Kerrie Hughes (ed) Read online

  “Where?” It came out as a cross between a howl and a whine, which wasn’t very heroic, and I blamed it on the urge to vomit. I swallowed, straightened up, and clawed hair away from my damp face to try again. “Where are we going?”

  “There.” Whitney nodded.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You will.”

  David, who’d been about to say something that I was fairly sure would scorch Whitney’s exposed buttocks good, checked himself and spun around, staring upward. I didn’t know why, but then I heard it.

  The abused whine of jet engines, getting louder.

  David shouted something in a language that I didn’t recognize, but there was no mistaking the command in it, and Whitney lifted her hands to the sky along with him.

  A four-engine jet burst out of the clouds, trailing smoke and fire from one wing. Way too low for where it was, which was miles from any decent airport capable of handling an emergency landing. It was an enormous plane, and as I launched myself up into Oversight I saw the black buzzing cloud surrounding it.

  Impending death. Terror. The fear of more than three hundred souls, all preparing for the end.

  The two Djinn were grabbing hold of the plane, straightening its flight, and I warmed air beneath its swept-back wings, trying to provide lift. It was a huge, ungainly weight without the right balance of physics to support it, and I could sense the terrified but determined pilots trying everything they could to keep it in the air.

  “Clear a landing strip!” I yelled to David. “We can’t keep it up!”

  He and Whitney had already determined that. Whitney kept her arms up, channeling power to the plane, but pieces were breaking off of it now as the structural flaws began to shatter along fault lines. One of the engines imploded, streaming metal and fire that plunged down toward us. Whitney didn’t flinch, so neither did I. I felt the impact of the twisted metal like a physical shock as it slammed into the water not ten feet from us, sending a tsunami of muddy green toward us. I didn’t bother to stop it. We had more important things to do than stay pretty.

  David’s power was breathtaking and precise, and he wielded it quickly—dangerous, for a Djinn, because like Wardens, they had to be concerned with balance. He formed a solid pack of earth, a berm that ran straight through the Everglades, and knocked down enough of the cypress growth to provide a window for the plane’s wings.

  “Coming down!” Whitney yelled, and I felt the hot burn of the exhaust as the jet roared right over our heads, so close that I swear I could count the treads on the landing gear, which was winching its way down. The plane wavered, slipped sideways, and Whitney and I clasped hands instinctively and merged our powers, applying force to the side that needed it, bringing the jet back into a semistable glide.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten.

  Down.

  The tires hit the packed earth with more force than normal, and I saw one of them blow out in a mist of rubber and smoke. David flung out a hand and kept that side of the plane up as the pilots applied brakes.

  Whitney and I changed the thickness of the air flowing along the flaps, adding to the drag, burning off speed at about twice the normal rate, until the plane was coasting, then a smoking, scarred wreck sitting motionless on the makeshift runway.

  Whitney took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and the doors on the plane popped open. Yellow emergency chutes deployed. I could hear screaming from inside, but there was also shouting, people imposing order onto chaos.

  I turned toward Whitney. “How did you know?”

  She opened those eerie purple eyes, and for a second, I saw the woman she’d once been … infinitely tired, frightened, and burdened under all that glitter and gleam. “Once you’ve died that way, you know it’s coming,” she said. “It’s just how it is.”

  I said, “I thought you died alone.”

  Whitney studied me for a few silent seconds, then nodded. “I did,” she said. “I was in a plane that went down in the water. I lived. I lived a long, long time. And nobody found me. Nobody ever will.” I was still holding her hand. She glanced down at our linked fingers. “This don’t make us engaged, you know.”

  I let go, feeling a little off balance after all of this craziness. It wasn’t often that someone threw me, but Whitney had, in every possible sense. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  “Why didn’t you just tell us about this, if you knew it was coming?”

  She shrugged, which set off lots of glittering waves from the diamonds. “What kind of fun is that? I got you here, didn’t I? I just did it my own way.”

  “Your way is insane. Go do something useful,” David told her. “Send up a flare for the emergency rescue parties. They’ll be on the way by now.”

  She gave him a smart little military salute, which was very weird considering her outfit, and executed a perfect turn to march away.

  “Wait!” I said. “The guy you threw in our way on the road. Who was he? Why did you do that?”

  She glanced back at the plane. Smoke blew away from the fuselage, and I saw a long, ragged hole, with the fragile metal skin peeled away. “He’s the man who put the bomb on board,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d care if you didn’t stop in time. I wouldn’t have.”

  And then she vanished in a mist of diamonds. Gone. I looked over at David, who was shaking his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She took the bikini,” he pointed out. “And nobody’s going to get it back. That’s her price for altruism.”

  I laughed. I could hear emergency sirens back toward the road, and I could just see Whitney standing out there glittering like a diamond convention, pointing the way for all the rescuers.

  “I think I like her style,” I said.

  David rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to be her boss,” he pointed out. “Now. Let’s see to the wounded.”

  In the end, there were remarkably few, and most of the injuries were minor. MIRACLE FLIGHT, they called it on the twenty-four-hour news channels, which featured interviews with everybody possible: people who’d been anywhere in the flight path of the plane, the crew, the passengers, and the director of Whitney’s failed commercial shoot, who somehow managed to take high-definition footage of the aircraft on its dramatic flight and landing. He did a documentary. It won an Emmy.

  The Case of the Missing Million-Dollar Model occupied headlines for many months, along with positively drooling pictures of Whitney leaning against the Bugatti Veyron with just enough diamonds on her lady parts to make her legal. She was spotted in Rio de Janeiro, and then in Cannes, and then in Argentina and—on the same day—in Shanghai. I think she enjoyed playing Where’s Waldo.

  David and I never got our beach picnic, but back home, many hours later, we made do. We moved the furniture out of the way, put down the blanket, and had wine and cheese and bread and each other, and somehow, that was still utterly blissful. As we lay there wrapped in each other’s arms, lit by candlelight, I felt the rumble of suppressed laughter in his chest.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking,” David said. “Whitney. She’s just insane enough to make a good second in command for me, don’t you think? If Rahel can’t do it?”

  Rahel was a longtime friend and a very formidable Djinn. I couldn’t imagine any set of circumstances under which Rahel wouldn’t be able to step up to the plate, so I shrugged. “I suppose,” I said. “She’s certainly not the obvious choice.”

  He kissed me, long and sweetly. “That’s what everyone said about you,” he told me, and traced his thumb across my damp lips. “I think my instincts are pretty good.”

  “And I think you have a weakness for girls in bikinis.”

  “You’re not wearing one now.”

  “I’m not wearing anything.”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed soberly. “I do have a weakness for that.”

  And he showed me, all over again.

  IN VINO VERITAS

  by Karen Chance
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  The bottom half of my longneck shattered, splashing golden liquid all over my jeans and the bar’s floor. The mirror in front of me, already pockmarked with chips, now also had a hole courtesy of the bullet that had drilled through to the wood. The cracks spidering out from the center showed me back my own short brown hair and startled black eyes, and the joker with the gun backlit in the doorway.

  I couldn’t see him very well, just a dark silhouette against the rusty evening light spilling down the stairs of the basement bar. But I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway. Most of my varied acquaintances wouldn’t have taken the shot, and the rest would have made damn sure not to miss.

  “That’s gonna cost you five bucks,” I said, swiveling around. My own gun was out, but I didn’t return fire. The guy hadn’t taken the second shot, which meant he wanted to chat. Since I was still recovering from a near death experience all of two days ago, I was up for it. And if my vampire sense was anything to go by, a handgun wasn’t going to be much use against this joker anyway.

  “You want to stay out of our business,” I was told, as everyone else scattered to the four winds. The large shape moved into the bar and resolved into a good-looking Asian guy in khakis and a brown leather jacket. The ensemble looked more weekend-in-the-Hamptons than biker chic and clashed badly with the orange and black tiger tat prowling around the right side of his face.

  The tat told me a lot, none of it good. The Chinese don’t like tattoos. In ancient China, they were used as punishment, branded on criminals before exile to ensure their easy identification should they ever return. They are still seen by many as a defilement of the body and a sign of generally poor taste. That attitude is changing among the young, but despite the glossy black hair and unlined face, this guy hadn’t been young in centuries.

  Of course, there was one group in China who had always liked tats.

  “I don’t have any business with the Chinese mafia,” I told him, walking behind the bar to get myself a new drink. “Particularly not the vampire kind.”

  “Then how did you know what I am?” he demanded, coming closer.

  The light inside the bar mostly came from the small TV flickering overhead, but it was enough to show me that I’d been right. The facial design was new, but it hid an old secret. I could still see the lines of the original tat, infused with magic so as to be irremovable, flowing under the newer, brighter colors.

  “The artist was good, but magical tattoos are a bitch to hide, aren’t they?” I asked with a smile.

  The man’s right hand twitched, like it wanted to cover his face. Or maybe rip off mine. “Like my teeth marks in your throat!”

  “Not on the first date,” I said, baring my own small fangs. “And I know who you are because I recently met your boss.” As I recalled, Lord Cheung and I had parted as … well, not friends exactly, but I hadn’t expected him to send an assassin after me.

  Even one as inept as this.

  “You’re dhampir.”

  It didn’t appear to startle him. And it should have. The children who result from a coupling between a vampire and a human vary widely in appearance and abilities, with some looking scarier than the creatures who sired them. But not in my case. Except for the vestigial fangs, which aren’t noticeable unless I’m pissed off, I’m pretty much human standard. On first sight, most people think I’m sweet and innocent.

  Most people are wrong.

  But it looked like Tiger boy had known who he was shooting at after all. And then he confirmed it. “They say you’re almost five hundred.”

  “A lady never tells her age.”

  He leaned on the bar, like we were having a nice, normal chat instead of planning to kill each other. “If you’re that old, you should know how to avoid trouble.”

  “Guess I haven’t been paying attention.” I glanced over his shoulder. Was I being set up somehow? Because he just couldn’t be this stupid. But there was no one there.

  I glanced back to find him looking annoyed, like I wasn’t keeping to whatever script he’d worked out in his head. Annoyed, but not afraid, despite the fact that I had one hand below the countertop. That told me he wasn’t that bright. Well, that and the fact that he’d deliberately sought out one of the few things on earth capable of killing him.

  “You aren’t clinically depressed, are you?” I asked. “This will be no fun if it’s some sort of suicide-by-dhampir.”

  He looked confused for a moment; then his face rearranged itself into a sneer. “I saw one of your kind once. A master I know keeps him on a leash. Like a dog.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He didn’t look like much.” He took in my less-than-impressive height, my slender build, and my dimples. His lip curled. “Neither do you.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “So can little girls who have been surviving on their reputations for too long!”

  Okay, maybe he could be that stupid. “I deserve my reputation,” I said mildly.

  “Sure you do.” His eyes went roaming again, sliding over the black leather of my jacket until they fixed on the vee of my red T-shirt. “Prove it.”

  So I did.

  “Damn it, Dory.” Fin scurried up as I walked around the bar and knelt by the still smoking corpse. The owner was a Skogstroll, a kind of Norwegian forest troll, although to my knowledge the closest he’d ever gotten to the land of his ancestors was a PBS documentary. But it meant he didn’t have to bend down to examine the damage the shotgun he kept behind the counter had done to the bar. “That’s going on your tab!”

  “No problem,” I said, showing him the contents of the guy’s wallet.

  “No way.” He started backing up, but tripped on his beard. “I’m not touching Tiger money! Not if the whole place burned down!”

  I frisked the guy, but of course, there was no ID. Assassins didn’t carry it, as a rule. I did find one thing of interest, though.

  “Raymond,” I said, with feeling.

  “Is that his name?” Fin asked, staring at the book of matches I’d found in the not-so-recently deceased’s coat pocket.

  “No. Tell me about—,” I began, when the body started twitching. So he wasn’t just a regular old vamp, who would have been killed by that shot as sure as a human. Dumb as a rock or not, he was a master. Cheung really wanted me to get the message.

  Whatever the hell it was.

  “Don’t do it, Dory,” Fin warned, his tiny blue eyes worried. “You kill one, and they’ll all be hunting you. That’s how these guys operate.”

  “I’m not planning to kill anyone,” I squawked, because the vamp had grabbed me around the throat. So I stuck a knife through his, pinning him securely to the wood.

  Fin’s glare intensified. “Dory!”

  “Relax, it won’t kill him. I’d have to take the whole head for that.” I sat back on my heels. “And when did you become so squeamish?”

  “I’m not! But you don’t want to mess with these guys.”

  “I haven’t been,” I said, exasperated. “I had a run-in with his boss recently, but we cleared that up.” Or so I’d thought.

  Fin didn’t look convinced. “He sent a master to screw with you for no reason?”

  “Let’s find out,” I said, wrenching the knife out.

  But even though I’d taken care to miss the vocal cords, it looked like the vamp had lost interest in conversation. An arm sent me skidding on my back into the forest of tables, reducing a few of the battered old pieces to kindling. I leapt back to my feet, but the vamp didn’t press his advantage. He was gone between one blink and the next, out the door and up the stairs, despite the fact that, in vamp terms, sunlight + major blood loss = bar-be-cue.

  If I was lucky, anyway.

  Fin hopped about, contorting his body to avoid the shaft of light spilling over the old boards. Older trolls could withstand direct sun, and even those Fin’s age didn’t actually turn to stone. But he said it gave him hives.

  “And stay out!” he shouted, flipping the
door shut with his toe.

  I picked myself up and assessed the damage. Other than for some bruised ribs and a jacket full of splinters, I was unharmed. The same couldn’t be said for my cell phone, which had been in my back pocket. I fished out a few pieces of plastic and some metal innards, extracted the memory chip, and threw the rest in the trash.

  It could have been worse; it could have been my head. And maybe next time it would be. Because it was a little hard to stop doing whatever was pissing Cheung off when I didn’t even know what it was.

  I walked back over and retrieved the guy’s wallet. “You going to tell me what you know?” I asked Fin.

  “It isn’t much,” he said, eyeing the fat sheaf of banknotes peeking out of the natty eel-skin cover. “They call themselves Leaping Tigers, and they’re new. The first of them showed up about a month ago, but they operate out of Chinatown, not here. I heard they pretty much destroyed a couple gangs over there, setting up house. They’re bad news.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, I thought cynically. “And this house would be where?”

  He licked his lips. “You, uh, you gonna need all that?”

  I fanned myself with the fat stack of bills. “I thought you wouldn’t touch Tiger money.” He gave me a limpid look and I sighed. “You’re planning to tell everyone I took it, aren’t you?”

  He looked pained. “You can take care of yourself better than me. And you did shoot him.”

  “So give.”

  “I already did. Nobody knows where they hole up during the day. It’s like they just vanish.”

  “You mean nobody wants to know.”

  “That, too. Anyway, they’ve made a big impression pretty damn fast. You’re better off staying away from them.”

  “Yeah. But will they stay away from me?”

  “Just take care, Dory.”

  “I always do.” I fished out a five and tossed the rest on the bar. “Drinks are on him.”

  * * *

  Raymond Lu was a disreputable nightclub owner who had recently become a disreputable snitch. He didn’t have a tiger tat, probably because he wasn’t important enough to deserve one, but his boss just happened to be Lord Cheung. And the last time one of Cheung’s guys had taken a shot at my head, it had been due to my association with Ray.