She swept the pan she was holding around in one hard arc and threw it, oil and all, at his head. Lina heaved that whole bucket of liquid nitrogen straight into the man’s chest. Mikhail reversed his knife and threw.
And…oh, shit, there was another man, surging behind this one, and his gun was not jammed, and…
Vi leapt across the counter toward him, grabbing more pans as Lina threw herself on the floor and toward his legs and Adrien grabbed a blow torch, lunging in from the side as he squeezed out flame, and…
The second masked man staggered again, again, again, his machine gun giving a little spurt—her brain managed to process that she was seeing the impact of bullets on his body. And then she heard the bullets, in strange delayed echo in her brain, sounds it was finally identifying. She’d never heard bullets except on film. And at a distance that night…that night in November when…
“Vi, get the hell down!” someone was yelling. “Get down!”
But she’d already slammed the pot she held as hard as she could into the second man’s face.
He went down, and she went down on top of him, her legs going right out from under her as if she’d slipped or something.
She landed in a seated position on his body as it hit the ground, his gun bony and hard under her butt.
“Is he wearing a vest? Vi, get the hell out of the way!” Chase was surging into her view, gun in hand. He grabbed her shoulders and literally threw her over the nearest counter. She bumped and slid and fell hard, and there was a lance of pain up from her side through her whole body.
“Thank Christ.” Chase’s voice. Then: “Two attackers. Everyone needs to go on full alert. This may not be the only location. Let me know when the streets are cleared and get me back-up as soon as you can. You, lock the door. Everyone else, get back.”
Vi dragged herself up—which was ridiculously hard to do, anyone would think she was a wimp or something—and managed to get an elbow onto the counter and pull herself upright enough to look over it.
Adrien was the one who had been sent to lock the door. Oh, God, in case there were more attackers. Chase was speaking into something, some kind of communication device she couldn’t even see but it was obvious he wasn’t talking to them, and he had ripped the second guy’s shirt open. There was blood everywhere.
Human blood. Vi was used to blood. Most of her best dishes held some kind of meat. She sliced up flesh and caught the blood from roasts all the time. And her brother had a farm these days, had escaped Paris suburbs to seek their grandparents’ peasant roots. She’d seen living animals butchered. She knew where her food came from.
But…this was like when a cow was butchered only…human.
“That’s not a vest?” Adrien’s voice sounded strained.
Vi felt strained. First of all, she couldn’t seem to stand upright, and second, that looked exactly like suicide vests in the movies.
“It’s C4.” Chase’s voice was clipped. “And he didn’t detonate it.” He yanked something out as he spoke. “If it had been TATP, we wouldn’t be here. Will you people get the fuck clear?”
He looked up at Lina as if he was about to grab her and throw her after Vi.
Lina reached down suddenly and ripped the mask off the first man.
Vi stiffened. Was that Lina’s weaselly, creepy, rapist cousin Abed?
He’d tried to shoot up her kitchens?
He’d tried to hurt her people?
“Vi, stay the hell down!” Chase yelled, but it didn’t even penetrate as she threw herself back over the counter—everything hurt like hell—and threw herself at Abed.
“You pathetic coward asshole putain de merde de connard de…!” Vi kicked him, the nitrogen-fragilized sweatshirt fragmenting under the toe of her stout kitchen shoes, and Lina was kicking the other side of him, yelling at him, and…
A pounding on the door. Chase spoke, not to her team, and then ordered Adrien to let them in. A surge of male military might into the room, several people grabbing her and Lina, pushing and carrying them to safety.
Clearing and securing the room, clearing and securing the bodies—one body and Lina’s cousin, who was groaning. Vi struggled, feeling unusually helpless, as a man in a black RAID uniform just hauled her all the way to the opposite side of her own kitchens as if he was in charge of them.
“Chase, you’re hit,” said a crisp, calm voice. A man who looked freckled all over but moved like a mountain lion in a killing mood. “We need an ambulance.”
“We’ve got more injuries here,” the man who had hauled Vi to the other side of the room called.
“Triage,” someone ordered, while the freckled man sliced Chase’s shirt off him with a lethal looking knife.
He was bleeding. Shit.
Vi looked at her fingers, wondering how his blood had gotten there. Had she grabbed him when he threw her?
Merde, she’d done something sloppy. Her chef whites were all bloody. She couldn’t go around looking like that. A chef worked clean.
Damn, her hand hurt. Oh, yeah, the oil from the pan she threw, right. Blisters were already rising. Merde, both hands out? She had no luck. Seriously.