“Damn right it won’t take long,” Harry said.
I spun as he charged at me, coming on like a mad bull and lunging through the open apartment doorway. For a big guy he was faster than he looked. No time for the scope, and he’d just be a blur at this range. I hip-fired, the Barrett bucking wildly in my grip. The round went wide and blasted open a chunk of freshly painted wall. His fist buried itself in my gut, doubling me over as the breath burst from my lungs. I staggered back. My shoulders bumped against the glass and I swung the rifle like a bat. The steel cracked against his shoulder but it didn’t slow him down.
He swatted the rifle out of my grip and sent it tumbling across the new shag carpet, then grabbed me by the lapels and swung me around. A second later I was tumbling too, flying free and hitting the floor hard on my back. He flexed his tattooed arm. The ink flared to life, blazing sapphire blue as the Nordic patterns flowed like serpents under his skin. Then his cupped palm erupted with blue fire.
I rolled left as a gout of wildfire splashed across the carpeting. It like a meteor, leaving a charred trail and spreading flames in its wake. I scrambled to my feet, going for my pistol. One beefy hand locked around my wrist and the other, glowing azure and hot as an oven, clamped down on my throat.
Harry swung me around again and slammed me against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, hard enough for the glass to rattle in its frame. Then again. The room crackled as the fires spread, going hazy with swirling smoke.
“What do you think will break first?” he asked me with a brutish smirk. “You or the window? Let’s find out.”
The back of my skull slapped against the glass. I gasped, sucking down smoke, then coughed it up while Harry shook me by the throat like a rag doll. My vision blurred, eyes tearing up. I knew I’d be out like a light in less than twenty seconds. And then I’d be dead, either left for the flames or thrown to the street below.
Not today. I had one free hand and one shot left. I fumbled in my pocket, tugging open Bentley’s velvet pouch, and felt crusty clay under my fingertips. I scooped up two of the alchemist’s clay marbles, curling them against my palm, and used the last of my strength to charge them with a jolt of raw magic.
“C’mon, say something,” Harry demanded. “Say something!”
I’d read him right. He could have finished me by now, but he needed the fear response. He needed the power high. He killed for money, but this was the part he lived for.
I answered with my fist. Not to throw a punch, but to hurl the marbles of clay to the floor at our feet. They exploded, violent and raw, spewing columns of choking green gas with a cobra’s hiss. I knew to hold my breath when they went off. Harry didn’t. As the green mist blotted out the world in a heartbeat, I heard him cough and his grip went slack.
I twisted my other wrist, pulling free, and slipped loose from the clinch. Then I sprinted, blind, heading for what I hoped was the apartment door. I broke from the mist and the spreading fire smoke, green and black weaving together above the flames like a nightmare hellscape, and stood in the doorway just long enough to pull my nine-millimeter.
I spent all seven rounds into the smoke, firing fast and free. I couldn’t see Harry, didn’t know if I’d hit him or anything at all, but I had to try. I holstered the empty gun as I ran for the stairwell door. Then it was one long sprint to the bottom, leaving me breathless and my shirt caked in sweat. My lungs strained for air, throat raw from the smoke and the panic.
A cherry-red Jaguar screeched up to the curb. Justine and Juliette stared at me from the front seats.
“I don’t know if you know this, but you set the building on fire,” Juliette said, pointing upward. Flames roiled behind broken glass, spreading to the neighboring apartments. “Did you mean to do that?”
“Where’s our rifle?” Justine asked.
I jumped in back and slapped the seat. “Go. Drive!”
“Okay,” Juliette said, stepping on the gas. The Jag lurched into the street and picked up speed. “So…I’m guessing you didn’t mean to do that.”
I looked out the back window as we veered away from the burning building, watching the street for any sign of Harry Grimes. I wanted to think I’d hit him from the doorway, but I knew better than to hope; I’d heard breaking glass but not a single grunt of pain. I had to assume he’d gotten away in one piece.
That wasn’t the part that bothered me. Neither did his occult tattoos and burning hand, even as I poked at my raw, aching neck. He was a cambion, after all, and a hit man who worked in the occult underground would have to pick up a magic trick or two along the way. I’d seen weirder forms of attack.
But nothing explained how, with an entire city to battle across, he’d not only picked up on the double cross but found my sniper perch. I could only figure it one way: that he’d told one more lie, back at the party. He wasn’t a one-man army and he sure as hell wasn’t a lone wolf. Someone—if not Naavarasi, whoever was pulling Harry’s strings—was backing him up from the shadows, keeping track of my movements, and pointing him at me like a loaded gun.
36.
Lately, when I needed to think, I went to the American.
It was starting to look like a club. The drywall was up and wooden floors were down, waiting to receive their coats of paint and tile. Areas had been roughed out: the kidney-shaped curve of the stage, big enough for a live band, and the span of the dance floor. Strips of tape marked where the bar would be installed, where shelves would hold top-grade liquor, where plush leather booths would run along a short stretch of wall. We had built the rough outline of a dream.
Usually, a slow walk around the place picked my spirits up. This was going to be my legacy, my piece of Vegas history. Tonight, it was nothing but an empty nightclub. Of course, I’d just gotten my ass kicked, I had first-degree burns on my throat in the rough shape of a hand, and my ribs were aching, but that wasn’t it. I had a head full of questions and I couldn’t navigate my way to any good answers.
“Got your message,” Caitlin said, standing in the doorway. She held a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other. “Thought you might want a pick-me-up.”
She knew me. Better than anyone. We set the bottle—Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label—on a board stretched between a pair of sawhorses, and I popped the cork while she held out the glasses. I poured for us both. A standing work light shed its low, dusky beam across the floorboards and framed us in the gloom.
“Feels sacrilegious, drinking champagne in here before the grand opening,” I said.
“Oh goodness.” She lifted her eyebrows at me. “Not sacrilege. I can’t be a party to that.”
“Cute.”
She took out her phone and eyed the screen. “By the way, the twins are demanding reimbursement for their missing rifle. Also they want a formal apology from my court and one pound of imported Swiss chocolate as well as, and I quote, ‘four hours of violent angry sex followed by six hours of make-up sex.’”
“With you, or with me?”
“They didn’t specify.” She glanced to the phone again. “Should I ask?”
“Nah, don’t encourage them.”
I clinked my glass against hers, and we drank.
“Also,” she said, “word from Jennifer. She has some people—the ones she can trust to be discreet—combing through the rest of Donaghy Waste Management’s paper trail. She’s hoping to find some kind of lead to another Network front. Now that we know there is one nearby, thanks to the late Officer Santiago.”
“I’d help if I could, just…” I waved my free hand, biting down a wave of frustration. “Little distracted right now, you know? I’ve got to take care of Harry Grimes before Elmer realizes I’m not chasing him and doubles back. I don’t need two assholes trying to kill me at the same time.”
“And, we can presume, Naavarasi.”