by Matt Wallace
“That son of a bitch,” he says, and he might’ve forgotten Lena is even in the room. “That forked-tongued, snake-in-the-tall-grass, French-fried son of a bitch!”
Bronko bolts from the chair to his feet, and just seeing the silhouette of his former self is enough to spread a measure of relief throughout Lena’s body.
He looks down at her, eyes burning. “Where’s Luciana now?”
Lena meets his gaze, suddenly feeling like a high school kid in the principal’s office. “Um . . . well . . . bear in mind this was part of a plan formulated when we all thought you were being held in the thrall of a sex demon—”
“Tarr!” Bronko warns.
“Jett,” Lena says quickly. “Jett’s . . . handling her.”
FUCK SUN TZU
Luciana strides confidently through the lobby of Sin du Jour, the early afternoon sun pouring through the front windows at her back. She swings her vintage attaché case at her side while wearing the easy, unflappable smile half the staff has come to worship while the other half dreams of stripping it from her face with a fishhook.
That smile has yet to falter once during her tenure with the company, and it doesn’t now even as Luciana finds her way is suddenly barred.
Jett is guarding the entrance to the main corridor like the Black Knight attending his bridge. She’s clad in gym pants that cling to her legs and hips like a second skin, steel-toed Red Wing work boots, and a black athletic top. Her hair is coiled into a tight bun, and fingerless martial arts gloves cover her hands and knuckles.
“Did we join an intramural catering company cage fighting league of which I’m unaware?” Luciana asks her.
Jett grins. “Do you know what the best part of this is?”
Luciana moves her attaché case in front of her body, grasping its handle with both hands. In answer to Jett’s question, she shakes her head pleasantly.
“I don’t have to listen to any more of your bullshit,” Jett says, deftly fitting a plastic mouth guard over her upper teeth.
Luciana actually laughs. “Very well then, Miss Hollinshead. I suppose this was inevitable.”
One of her hands moves to unsnap the left latch on her attaché case. Unfortunately for Luciana her fingers never touch polished brass. She hasn’t finished her last sentence when Jett unleashes a war cry worthy of an ancient Celtic army and leaps at her, driving a flying knee into Luciana’s sternum. She goes down and the attaché case goes flying from her hand, landing near the front doors.
When Luciana stands up to face her again, Jett slams a right cross into her jaw. It finally wipes the smile from Luciana’s face.
“That’s for my staff!”
She follows it with a left to the cheek.
“That’s for coming between me and Byron!”
Jett launches an uppercut that tilts Luciana’s head enough for the hall lights to blind her.
“And that’s for trying to show up my wardrobe, you obvious outlet whore!”
Jett grabs two handfuls of the shoulder pads in Luciana’s suit jacket. The woman-who-isn’t-really-a-woman’s eyes are as glazed over as the men she wraps up in her will-draining web.
“And last but not least, this is for trying to take away my home.”
Jett drives the top of her forehead into Luciana’s mouth and chin with shocking power. The blow knocks her out of her thousand-dollar pumps and flat onto her back. Luciana achingly rolls onto her stomach, spitting blood and teeth at the lobby floor.
Jett pulls out her mouth guard, flicking it at Luciana’s prone back.
“Should have . . . ripped your eyes out . . . on my first day,” Luciana growls through the gaps in her clenched teeth.
“And just how would you have gone about accomplishing that?” Jett asks.
Luciana is already crawling forward, and Jett is more than happy to stand back and let her slink back out through the door and away from Sin du Jour forever.
It’s not the door she’s seeking, however.
Luciana reaches out and grips the edges of her discarded attaché case. In answer to Jett’s question, she flips open both latches simultaneously.
As soon as the lid of the case is cracked, ethereal streamers of pure black begin shooting from every side. Luciana rolls onto her back, grinning up at Jett with her suddenly horrific maw. The black tendrils begin enveloping her, encircling her every limb like kudzu. In the next moment they’re lifting her body off the lobby floor, raising her to an elevated position several feet above Jett’s head.
Jett raises her fists reflexively, but she’s already backpedaling, at a loss as to what’s happening in front of her. The tendrils become rolling curtains of pitch darkness that shimmer about Luciana before enveloping her utterly. That darkness becomes a tornado, churning and twisting until it has stripped away Luciana’s human form. In its place, rising above the mouth of the funnel, is the emaciated face and hairless skull of an albino demon with eyes made of black flame.
A tendril shoots out from the body of the darkness, slamming Jett in the chest and pushing her back to the lobby floor. The living shadow hovers menacingly above her, Luciana’s eyes burning within its depths like the hearts of twin suns.
“The old woman was just a nuisance that required a minor adjustment,” an inhumanly deep voice speaks to her from the heart of the void. “But you . . . I’m going to lick the flesh from your bones with a thousand tongues made of dark fire.”
“Yes, well, I still knocked your fucking veneers out,” Jett spits back at her, although her voice is shaking fiercely.
Jett tells herself she’s ready, and that she won’t give the hellion bitch the satisfaction of hearing her scream.
She almost believes it, too.
The tip of a blade pierces through the center of the black maelstrom above Jett. Luciana’s demon visage screams horribly. Around the protruding end of the double-sided blade, the rippling darkness suddenly recedes, streaming back across the lobby and into the recesses of the attaché case from which it emerged.
What’s left in the wake of that darkness is Luciana’s human form, with her battered and bloody face and rumpled suit, the blade sticking out of her left shoulder. A towering, bearded man in a dark suit stands behind her, holding the unseen haft of the dagger. When he pulls the blade from her body cavity, Luciana collapses onto her hands and knees in front of Jett. She begins frantically and agonizingly crawling away from her attacker, ignoring Jett’s prone form entirely as she skitters past.
The knife-wielding man advances on them both, his face a mask of indifference, save for eyes that contain all the dark determination of an assassin.
Jett begins shaking her head as he points those eyes, and the tip of his blade, at her.
“Wait,” she begins to say, but stops as he raises the dagger above his head.
Jett shuts her eyes tight and buries her chin against her chest, waiting for whatever comes next.
As it turns out, what comes next is the cavalry.
When the strike she’s bracing against fails to descend, Jett opens her eyes and sees Hara restraining the man in his massive arms, hugging him into utter submission. The towering assassin looks like nothing more than a fussy baby refusing to suckle at the giant’s breast.
The rest of the staff is pouring into the lobby. The next thing Jett knows, Bronko is leaning over her, reaching out to gently take her wrists and pull her up to her feet. He embraces Jett warmly with both arms.
“I’m so sorry, girl,” he whispers into her hair.
Jett buries her face gratefully into his chest and focuses on holding back her tears.
“It’s not your fault, Byron,” she assures him.
“Hey, I recognize this guy,” Lena says, examining the face of the man Hara is restraining. “He’s Consoné’s bodyguard.”
“He tried to kill Luciana!” Jett informs them all. “He kinda-sorta saved my life, but I think that was accidental.”
Cindy and Ritter are detaining a wounded Luciana several yards inside th
e main corridor. She begins shrieking, enraged, not at any of them, but at the man who ran her through with the dagger.
His voice, a deep baritone, booms back at her in the same language, one that none of them have ever heard before, not even Hara, who has mastered more dialects than a symposium of linguistic professors combined.
“Both of you shut the hell up!” Bronko thunders over the two. “Now!”
The mystery language shouting match ceases.
“Take Mongo there to Stocking & Receiving and hog-tie him with some heavy-ass chains,” Bronko orders. “Then take our former executive liaison to my office and someone get a first aid kit and see to her wounds. We’ll figure this thing out from there.”
Ritter, Cindy, and Hara haul their new captives away to their separate makeshift cells.
“Tag!” Bronko calls out, searching the lobby for him.
Dorsky pushes his way through the rest of the line, straightening his chef’s smock and clearing his throat.
“Yeah, Chef.”
Bronko pauses. Something about his sous-chef’s manner raises an alarm in his head, but he shakes the thought away.
“Go get a torch,” he instructs Dorsky. “Turn that goddamn hipster briefcase of Monrovio’s into bacon.”
Dorsky nods. “Will do, Chef.”
He turns too quickly and collides with Nikki, who stiffens like she’s been hit with a cattle prod. Dorsky’s reaction is a mirror image. They both make awkward, inaudible sounds of contrition as Dorsky quickly moves past her.
“Are you blushing?” Lena asks her a moment later.
Nikki suddenly can’t stop blinking. “What? No. Shut up. No.”
PAN-FRIED
In the industrial hole Stocking & Receiving once again calls home, Cindy and Moon are unpacking boxes while Ritter places a chair in front of the one to which they’ve bound Enzo Consoné’s bodyguard. Hara is looming close to the stoic assassin, watching him intently.
Ritter straddles his chair backward. He’s holding the dagger used to maim Luciana and threaten Jett. Its handle is carved shale the color of sun-baked mud. The tip of the blade is pronged like a fishing spear. Ritter turns it over and over in his hands, examining it.
“This is a Venus dagger, isn’t it? I’ve never seen one up close before.”
The dagger’s owner remains silent.
Lena and Nikki follow Bronko into Stocking & Receiving.
“He talkin’?” Bronko asks Ritter, who shakes his head.
Bronko addresses their prisoner directly: “How about it, son? Even a good soldier gives up their name, rank, and serial number. I’ll settle for just a name. It ain’t like we don’t know who you work for.”
The man looks up at Bronko, his expression unchanging. He does, however, maintain eye contact for a good ten seconds.
“Claudius,” he finally says, his voice deep and surprisingly quiet.
Bronko nods. “Claudius. Good. Well, I’ll go ahead and assume you know me. You came here with a succubus-killin’ knife to kill a succubus. That succubus was plottin’ to murder damn near everybody at your boss’s next fireside chat. That seems clear enough. What’s confusin’ me is what the beef is between y’all. I was hoping you could enlighten me on that score.”
Claudius returns to staring at the wall.
Bronko sighs. “Listen, son, I don’t feel the need to convey to you how serious this business here is. You know that. What you need to know is I don’t give a tinker’s damn about politics, what I care about is my people and us being caught in the middle—”
Bronko stops talking. He’s watching Hara, quite out of character in Bronko’s admittedly limited experience of the man, lean down and whisper something inaudibly to Ritter.
“No shit,” Ritter says out loud, though there’s little to no inflection on the words.
“What’s up?” Bronko asks him.
Ritter stands, sweeping the chair out of his way. He flips the dagger in his hand, thoughtfully.
“My big man here,” he says, pointing the blade at Hara, “noticed something . . . let’s say enlightening, while he was hugging on our guest back in the lobby.”
Lena and Nikki trade questioning glances while Bronko tilts his head, grinning.
“And what might that be, Mr. Thane?”
Ritter takes two steps toward Claudius, who doesn’t even acknowledge Ritter’s presence. Ritter holds up the dagger’s blade in front of the man’s face, then deftly reverses his grip on the knife, slashing the blade down through the left leg of Claudius’s suit pants. He repeats the slice on the right leg, reaching out with his free hand and gripping the material, tearing the man’s pants away entirely and flinging them across the room.
“What the fuck is that?” Lena blurts out, immediately covering her mouth with her hand.
“Is that real?” Nikki asks.
Claudius doesn’t have human legs; he has the shaggy hind legs of a goat. His dress shoes are affixed to two giant cloven hooves by a series of straps.
“He’s a Satyr,” Ritter explains.
Claudius’ expression hasn’t changed, but he does swallow hard under the scrutiny.
Bronko watches him, frowning. “Well, now I feel like an ass. Throw a blanket over him, will ya? Give the boy his dignity.”
Hara retrieves a reflective emergency blanket from one of their open boxes and covers Claudius’s lap with it.
“So, what does this mean?” Lena asks.
“Satyrs are the only race one hundred percent immune to the influence of a succubus,” Bronko explains.
“Good choice for an assassin, then,” Nikki says.
“But what does this mean?” Lena asks again.
Bronko looks at Ritter, who turns to address Lena and Nikki.
“In these modern times of ours,” he says, “Satyrs are often gainfully employed by one race with a very specific interest in protecting themselves against the influence of succubae.”
Lena waits, becoming annoyed with the fact that she’s waiting pretty damn quick.
“Will you spit it out and knock off the murder-mystery weekend crap already—oh wait, you’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you? This is revenge?”
Ritter doesn’t quite grin, but he does shrug.
“Revenge for what?” he asks.
Lena just narrows her eyes at him.
“Ritt,” Bronko half-chastises him. “Just tell ’em.”
Lena’s groan is almost a growl.
“Jesus! Tell us what?”
THE CANDIDATE
“You’re not human,” Lena tells Enzo Consoné.
His suite at the Four Seasons Hotel is larger than any home in which Lena has ever lived, with a view of Central Park (and pretty much the entire city surrounding it) that must cost upwards of thirty thousand dollars a night. He’s received them in a quaint sitting area with plush sofas and a glass coffee table between them.
“I was gonna open with something akin to, ‘Thanks for seeing us,’” Bronko says to him, “but Chef Tarr here is more direct.”
“That’s quite all right,” Consoné says with a winning smile.
Unlike Luciana, he manages it without seeming patronizing or artificial.
Consoné leans forward and pours the three of them a half-flute of champagne. He tops them off with a splash of fresh orange juice from a carafe next to the ice bucket.
“I appreciate directness. I try to cut through the bullshit myself. Not easy when you’re running for public office, particularly a public that’s more private than any private society on the planet.”
“You’re an incubus,” Lena says, ignoring his palaver, as charming as she might find it. “You’re the male version of a succubus.”
“I am, yes,” Consoné confirms without hesitation. “Please, enjoy a mimosa with me.”
“Don’t hafta ask me twice,” Bronko says, picking up one of the flutes and tapping it against Consoné’s as he does the same.
Bronko has drained his mimosa before Lena has time to s
eriously contemplate hers. She watches him do it with a gaping expression on her face, wanting to tell him he’s totally undercutting her thunder here.
“Anyway,” Lena says. “We do have a situation to discuss here, Chef.”
“Right. So, y’all are both ’buses with a passion for Italian skins,” Bronko observes. “You and Luciana Monrovio, that is. And I’d ask you if you know her, but since you tried to have her killed it’s a safe bet you do. That all seems one helluva coincidence to me, Mr. Consoné.”
“Luciana is my sister,” he says. “I’m afraid we don’t get along. We had a parting of the ways some time ago. Or rather, the man you know as Allensworth and I had a parting of the ways some time ago. Luciana, unfortunately, chose to side with him and his . . . organization.”
Bronko frowns deeply. “Well then . . . that’s pretty much exactly what I did not want to hear.”
“I’m very sorry,” Consoné says, and he actually sounds sincere. “I’m sorry you were caught up in this. You seemed a convenient weapon to them, and so you were.”
“What were they trying to do?” Lena asks. “Kill you?”
“No. From what you’ve said, they wanted my speech to the goblin hierarchy and the human contingent to go disastrously awry. If everyone but me were killed at such an event, the suspicion it would cast on me would be insurmountable for my campaign, possibly even my freedom, or life.”
“You knew they were going to try something,” Lena says, and it’s not a question.
Consoné nods. “Though I couldn’t predict precisely what.”
“When I watched your speech, my friends were ready to throw their underwear at your head. You didn’t have any effect on me. Am I special, or did you do that?”
“Can’t both be true?” Consoné asks with a wicked grin.
Lena glowers at him.
Consoné laughs. “I’m sorry. Bad habit. I’m good at reading people, Chef Tarr. I read you as a fighter, a leader, someone fiercely protective of her comrades and compatriots who would root and cast out an influence like Luciana threatening them. So I . . . nudged you.”