The woman pushed herself off the cradle of every bright idea he’d ever had—and it was pretty clear she meant to leap to her feet. That was a no-go. She slumped to the side and grabbed for one of her legs.
“Are you okay?” he said. Or at least, that was what he meant to say. He wasn’t sure what kind of fruit salad’s worth of syllables came out of his mouth.
“It’s not broken.” She hissed as she rubbed her calf. “It’s not broken, dammit.”
Sitting himself up onto his elbows, he thought about pointing out that if a cast was required, that pep talk wasn’t going to do shit for the situation. But really, why waste breath on the obvious—
Boom!
They both jumped at the explosion. Putting his arm out to shield her even though he didn’t know what or where the threat was coming from, he looked down at the far end of the alley. Flames. A bonfire’s worth of them. About six blocks away under one of the city’s twin bridges by the river.
The orange strobe-lighting was impressive, and courtesy of the flickering show, he could see that the black muscle car was at the center of the bomb burst. And as street people ran away, he knew that soon there would be flashing blue and red lights, and all kinds of humans with badges, and spectators with camera phones.
“We gotta get out of here,” he said as he stood up—and put a palm to the small of his back with a curse.
When she just looked at him, he extended the hand that didn’t have a gun in it toward her.
“Do you need a doctor?” he asked.
“No.”
As she left his palm out there in the breeze, he’d really had it with the way things had been going tonight.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he muttered. “I saved your life, twice. And if we keep hanging out in the middle of this fucking street, you and I might have to go for a threesome.”
There was an awkward pause and then Lucan shook his head.
“Wait, that came out wrong.”
Or did it, he wondered to himself.
Vishous re-formed on the roof of a walk-up apartment building that had trap house written all over it. As his full weight of nearly three hundred pounds solidified in his boots—hey, he’d been working out hard, and all that iron humping was paying off—there was a creaking that suggested he needed to step carefully. Easing forward, he checked out the raw tar paper, the pockets of leaf debris that were ossifying into topsoil, and some twists that looked like clothes caught up in a crime scene.
’Cuz human flesh would be unlikely. Not a lot of Buffalo Bills in Caldie at the moment. That anybody knew about, that was.
The rooftop was long and thin because the five stories’ worth of crappy flats was a shotgun, the building sandwiched between two others of equal merit and distinction. On a lowbrow domicile such as this, it went without saying there was no HVAC venting of any size, not that he felt like rolling his mortal dice on a ghosting trip down an unknown system of ductwork. But there also wasn’t a set of stairs or even a hatch, and this left him with having to find a way into the top-floor apartment. Not a big deal, though. Plenty of broken windows he could dematerialize through—
Whoop!
There it is.
Without even a snap, crackle, or pop of warning, V went into a free fall, his shitkickers breaking through the mushy roof, his body sucking through the hole they’d created, the drop so lightning fast that he barely had time to put his hands up so that his arms didn’t snap off at the pits.
The weightlessness lasted one blink and a single inhale of powdered urban rot long—and just as he was wondering if he was going to keep busting through until he hit the basement, his soles hit something solid, his knees went into a bend—
And his butt bounced. Twice.
As a cloud of dust blurred the air, his forearms flopped onto padded rolls.
“Fuck me!” Rhage hollered from the far side of the debris bloom.
V glanced down at himself. Well, what do you know. An armchair.
“You want to give me a heart attack?” Hollywood demanded. “Scaring me like that?”
Across a fetid war field of stained mattresses, empty liquor bottles, and drug paraphernalia, the brother was clutching his chest like a little old lady in church who’d just learned premarital sex was a thing.
V crossed his legs at the knees and moved his gloved palm around as if he was on a throne. “You can act like a man. What’s the matter with you.”
“Don’t you Vito Corleone at me.”
“At least you caught the ref.”
Rhage jabbed a finger forward—and kind of blew the tough-guy confrontation by sneezing. Three times in a row. But big, blond, and always-hungry recovered like the fighter he was.
“I liked you better before you got a sense of humor. And I know The Godfather by heart. Also, before you ask, no, I’m not kissing your ring. You don’t wear them, anyway.”
“Oh, but I do. And wouldn’t you like to know where they are.”
Rhage shook his head. “That’s an anatomy chart I do not need to see.”
“Fair enough.” V stood up. Looked to the hole in the ceiling. Well-fuck’d to himself. “What’re the chances.”
Through the ragged wound in the roof, the rain that had started to fall sprinkled his face as flaps of tar paper caught the storm’s gusts and sounded like bird wings.
Rhage came over. “So you didn’t plan it?”
“How the fuck am I going to plan falling through a—”
The groan brought both their heads around. Slumped in the low corner of an off-kilter sofa, a man who was twenty-five-going-on-early-grave was twitching like he was hooked up to a faulty electrical socket, his hands inching toward the red river running out of his lower abdomen.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Hollywood said in a cheerful way. “Great. I thought you were dead.”
“Who’s your friend,” V asked as they went over and loomed above the guy.