Behind her, a voice bellowed, “Get that piece of shit! There’s still way more of us!”
The leader. So he had made it out of the textile factory. Kera sighed. She was already getting tired of this, both in the physical sense and in the numbing psychological one. The chase through the streets had taken more out of her than she’d realized.
And she had inflicted enough damage—alone, to boot—to have made her point, but the gang might need to be driven off or thoroughly stomped in order to get rid of them.
She tried a bluff. Stepping back, she waved at the three men still advancing and said, “Take ‘em out,” as though issuing orders to someone who’d been hiding in the shadows the whole time.
The guys stopped but didn’t flee. The leader narrowed his eyes and looked straight at the witch.
“How about you take off your helmet? What are you, some kind of deformed-ass freak of nature under there?”
Kera stood her ground. “How about I’m camera-shy?”
“Yeah, sure.” The man grunted. “Guess I’ll just have to strip you after I finish beating the shit out of you.”
One of his friends looked at the leader, his face slack and aghast. “Dude! That’s gay!”
“No,” the bigger man growled, “that’s a girl. She thought she was fooling us this whole time.”
The one who’d spoken protested, “No way! Sounds like a guy, mostly. No tits. It’s some skinny dude who thinks he’s the baddest-ass on the planet because he was in kung fu classes. Let’s just shoot him and get outta here.”
Kera tensed. They still had at least one gun amongst them, though she hadn’t seen it since they’d come into the warehouse. If the leader heeded his underling’s advice, she might need to leave.
But...
“No way,” said the large bald man. “It’s a chick, and after she goes down, we’re all gonna see exactly what she looks like.”
Good luck, Kera thought with weary humor. I’m skin and bones under here.
Another man jumped in to argue about what that meant and how they’d divide the spoils of victory if it was true.
Kera’s bile rose, all humor disappearing, but rather than think too hard about what they were saying, she seized the opportunity created by their stupid argument.
A brick was lying on the floor nearby. Kera ducked and grabbed it, then, channeling a small speed boost into herself, dashed toward her adversaries.
By the time they realized what was happening, she was on top of them. She swung the brick down onto the top of the leader’s shiny head, and it landed with a deep clonking sound. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, then he dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Kera sprang back as the others turned on her. The guy who’d been asking about “dividing the spoils” gave her a vicious glare.
“You bitch,” he snarled.
They all attacked at once.
The binoculars revealed the scene going on within the warehouse, or, at least as much as could be revealed through the cracked portions of the big windows.
A slender figure in a black leather motorcycle outfit and a glossy black helmet in the middle of an all-out brawl with various members of the local population. The mysterious person, pound for pound, seemed to be a better fighter than anyone in the gang—not necessarily more vicious, but they had good timing and control, not to mention unusual strength for their size. They also retreated to more advantageous ground anytime it looked like their numerically superior antagonists were going to gain the upper hand. Smart.
But it wouldn’t be enough.
Johnny lowered the binoculars and pushed off from the hood of his Mustang. A casual glance at the vehicle from any given passerby would fail to arouse any suspicion that not so long ago, the car’s hood had suffered extensive fire damage. The guys at the repair shop had done a good job.
“Yeah,” he muttered, climbing into the seat behind the wheel, “they’re keeping Motorcycle Bitch busy, so let’s make things more interesting.”
He started the engine and drove a block or so down the street, past shops with bars over the windows and dilapidated houses. When he stopped at the corner, a quartet of glum-faced youths noticed him and sauntered over, their eyes glimmering with menace.
The dark-tinted window rolled down, and Johnny flashed the bangers a wide grin. “You boys want to make some money?” he queried.
They looked suspicious but also curious. “Do we know you?” the one out front asked.
“Not exactly.” The man in the dark suit reached into his jacket and the gangster tensed, but their demeanor changed again when they saw him produce a wad of cash. “You probably noticed that commotion over in the warehouse, am I right? I dunno if you’re with those guys or not, but the assholes they’re fighting are threatening to move in on all your turf. The LA Witches. Heard of them?”
“Yeah.” All four of the young men frowned. “Yeah. We heard of ‘em.”
“So,” Johnny went on, “no new gangs allowed in your neighborhood. Especially not them. Drive the current one causing most of the trouble off, and you guys can divide half this cash between you. For each member of the gang you knock off, another hundred bucks. So if there’s three of them, that’s the other half of this loot. Not bad, right? The catch is, you need to do it now. You’ve got twenty minutes because that’s all my police contact can promise me. They have to intervene past that point.”
The quartet of youths exchanged glances, then briefly huddled and whispered. Seconds later, the leader turned back to the man in the Mustang.
“Deal. Give us the first half now.”
Johnny smiled again. “Sure. But I’ll be watching.” While his left hand gripped the stack of bills, his right hand, out of sight, clutched his loaded Beretta. If they tried to bail on him and take the first half of the money for free or take the other half by force, they would regret it immediately.
The gang leader took his payment and stuffed it into his jacket, then the four turned toward the factory.
“Oh,” Johnny called after them, “and call your friends and tell them to come along if you want.”
The quartet muttered something about not wanting to divide the money among any more people, though the leader argued that they could just lie about the initial payment and only tell their buddies about the “bounty per LA Witch part.” Then they advanced on their new target.
Once he was satisfied that the dupes would do the job they’d been contracted for—and hopefully get out before any police showed up—Johnny nodded and drove back to his vantage point. He had no desire to be there in person, but he wanted to see how this shook out.
And, as he climbed back out of the car with his binoculars, his gaze fell on a sniper rifle in the back seat.
If this bitch somehow got away from her opponents again, he’d be sure to finish her off.
Kera stood over two more fallen bodies, lungs heaving, sweat running down her brow. In the three or four seconds she had before the next wave of pricks engulfed her, she cast a lower-middle-level healing spell on herself. She’d have preferred something more powerful, but healing magic was among the most draining of all types, and exhausting herself would defeat the purpose.
Because the fight wasn’t over yet. She savored the moment of pain relief and gentle warmth and invigoration, then her mind turned to steel again.
“You assholes picked a fight with the wrong law-abiding motorcycle enthusiast,” she told them with a grin. They’d chased her up to the second floor, which made her feel as though she’d been fleeing. “Don’t make me give our kind a bad name.”
Someone from the advancing crowd, possibly another female, screamed, “Shut up, you dumb ho!”
Kera ignored the crude insult. She’d taken out the two guys who’d been arguing with the bald-headed leader, but there were still at least half a dozen more gangsters who were out for her blood. And now, behind them, another car and a handful of other people on foot were approaching the building.
“Shit!” S
he grunted and met the charge of the wild-haired girl out in front of the gang.
Kera cast a shower of blinding colored lights that took the young woman full in the face, and some of the spell affected the two dudes behind and to the sides of her. The girl screamed, clutching at her eyes. She wasn’t hurt but was probably consumed with terror that Kera had shot her with a flare gun or something.
The witch ran, jumped, and kicked the girl in the chest, knocking her back a good ten feet to crash into a unit of shelving that fell atop her, pinning her to the ground.
Then the two men at her flanks came up. One had a knife, the other a big-ass wrench.
She had an idea. She hit the wrench-wielder with a light confusion spell, then ducked behind his blade-wielding partner, yelling, “Over here! Get him!”
As the knife guy tried to stab her, she ducked away from his charge, and the wrench-wielder, shaking his head as though drunk and dazed, swung his makeshift bludgeon in a slow, clumsy arc. His partner, not expecting to be attacked from behind, took the heavy metal head of the tool on the back of his skull.
“Urgh!” he cried and sprawled forward, unconscious and bleeding.
The wrench guy blinked as he tried to grasp what had happened. By the time he saw Kera again and figured it out, her foot was connecting with his jaw, cracking it, rattling his brain, and knocking him out.
The rest of the gang were on top of her more quickly than she would have liked.
Someone thick and heavy bowled into her, growling, “We’re gonna break every goddamned bone in your body!”
Kera fell backward, slipping from his grasp but crashing into one of the counters still mounted along a side wall. The counter cracked and gave way and Kera sprawled, then rolled and grabbed another counter to pull herself back to her feet.
The guy who’d tackled her was moving in for another bull rush.
“How original,” she remarked, and drawing upon her thaumaturgically enhanced strength, kicked the fallen piece of the counter.
It rose a few feet in the air and slammed into the man’s face and arms. He fell back, spitting blood and curses, as his remaining buddies tried to work around him to the sides.
Kera saw two men flanking her at once, but the one on the left caught her attention more fully than the other. Her blood nearly froze.
The man there, sinewy and with a tattoo running up his neck, was holding a Glock 19, probably the same one that had fired on her from the car—and he was about to fire again.
“Goodnight, motherfucker,” he rasped.
There was no time to think. Kera threw a Firefly spell at the gun. The man’s sleeve burst into flames, and the gun, glowing reddish, swung up and aside from the impact of the air moved by the rush of heat. As its wielder shrieked in alarm, the gun went off twice, its report painfully loud in the enclosed space.
Kera winced and shrank back. “Fuck!” She reflexively raised her hands to her ringing ears.
Meanwhile, the guy she’d blasted had dropped the gun and fallen to the ground, rolling around in a desperate effort to put out the blaze. Kera tossed an inverted version of the same spell toward him, coating his arm in frost as the fire winked out.
Then the other guy, who’d been advancing from the right, struck her in the helmet with a chunk of concrete.
Kera toppled but managed to turn it into a roll and got clear of them.
The guy guffawed.
As the witch sprang back to her feet, she wobbled and nearly fell again; her helmet had protected her from the worst of the blow, but it had been enough to rattle her skull and briefly discombobulate her.
Now she was pissed. There were still a good seven or eight people left since a carload and a half of others had joined the fray. She supposed she’d brought it on herself, but why couldn’t they admit defeat?
Because you lured them here, genius. But there were more than there should be.
It was difficult not to be salty about that. “Where the hell are you getting all these guys?” she wondered out loud. “Is there an Etsy shop that sells douchebag gangsters? I might have to get a few myself and sic them on your unsatisfied girlfriends.”
A tall young man wearing an oversized jacket sprang toward her, snarling, “Shut the fuck up!” He lashed at her with a medium-length serrated kitchen knife.
Kera knew she had to end the fight as quickly as she could. There was no point in conserving her strength by holding back on the magic when her body couldn’t take much more physical fighting. Abruptly she channeled twice the speed and strength into herself that she’d been using so far.
Before Kitchen Knife Guy knew what had happened, Kera had ducked inside his swing and hit him square in the chest with enough force to send a bowling ball through the pins, the machine, and the back of the bowling alley.
The dude flew through the air, struck a thin section of wall between two windows, and smashed them outward before vanishing into the night air beyond.
One of the other bangers sputtered, “Holy shit! Who is this guy? Chick. Whatever.”
“You should really know the answer to that question by now,” Kera told him. “Didn’t your mama teach you not to fight people without figuring out who they are first? Back to the drawing board.” She blasted him with a moderately-strong memory wipe spell, enough that he’d have trouble recalling much of the last week. He raised hands to his temples, dropped to his knees, and drooled on the floor.
The last few looked hesitant; the tide had turned. Kera plunged into them, roaring at the top of her lungs, then everything became a whirlwind of savage destruction. She killed no one, but blood flowed and bones broke and heads were knocked about. Most of the second floor of the textile place became a wreck as the witch carved a swathe through her enemies.
When the last of them dropped, she barely realized that she’d won. It took another second or two of staring dumbly at the wreckage with blood pounding in her head before she heard the blare of sirens and saw the flashing lights of an ambulance and at least two cop cars.
“Oh, heck. Whoops.” Kera spun on her heel and ran toward the back fire escape, hoping the police hadn’t gotten there yet.
When she pushed through the door, there were no cops, but the staircase was blocked off by a bunch of debris—fallen wall chunks and machinery—that had been tossed or dislodged during the battle.
She was still running when the report of a gun caught her attention and blasted through one of the windows nearby.
Kera threw herself flat and stared open-mouthed at where the bullet had taken a chunk out of the wall.
There was someone else, and she couldn’t afford someone else. She turned, took all of the strength she had, and threw a confusion spell in the direction the bullet had come from. Then, staggering with tiredness, she wheeled Zee to a side door and zoomed away before the police could arrive.
She didn’t see Johnny across the street, staring down at the sniper rifle at his feet as he wondered vaguely why he had one and how he’d gotten to this neighborhood.
Chapter Thirty-One
Christian had heard the sirens and the gunshots. He paced, wanting to get into his car and drive to find Kera but knowing he would be worse than useless. He would slow her down and give them another target. She had told him to wait here, and if he didn’t, he would make things worse for her.
He didn’t think he’d ever felt like more of a failure as a person, especially a male person.
She was Motorcycle Man. She had to be. That meant Motorcycle Man was a woman, though that wasn’t the part that was getting Christian’s attention. It was Kera. She was some sort of crime-fighting superhero, lifting cars and fighting off whole mobs of people.
She’d defused a hostage situation, for God’s sake.
Although, it probably didn’t count as “defusing” when the guy had fallen out a third-floor window and died.
He was still pacing when he heard a motorcycle nearby. His head whipped around, and all of his breath left his chest when he saw the famil
iar figure pull into the cul-de-sac.
She was here, and she was…
Covered in blood.
Kera parked the bike, swung off of it, and pulled her helmet off.
“Hi.” She was trembling with tiredness now. “I…the blood isn’t all mine.”
Christian shook his head wordlessly. She could tell he wanted to come over to her, though he held himself back for now.
“That looks bad,” she guessed. “It’s a long story. I didn’t, uh, kill anyone, but yeah, I’ve been through some shit. Listen, I don’t know if anyone else was watching or if they’re going to find us again in a couple more minutes. I’m going to hide my bike. Could you…can you, y’know, give me a ride?”
He nodded, seeming relieved to have a question he could answer. “Of course. Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“No.” She wheeled Zee toward the shadowed space behind a nearby public dumpster, reassuring herself that the cloaking spell was still in effect since the bike looked oddly hazy even to her. “But holy hell, do I ever need some food.”
They climbed into the Jeep, and Kera kept her head below the windows as Chris looked nervously around, then pulled onto a side street that would shortly take them back onto LA’s network of major roads.
“Drive around randomly for a little while,” Kera told him. “Until you’re sure those assholes aren’t following us. If you do see them, don’t panic. Just act like nothing is up while I keep my head down until they leave.”
“Okay,” he agreed, speeding up. The car’s gears made a horrible grinding sound, and he winced. “Ugh, sorry.” He shifted into the appropriate gear. “It’s, uh…this is my first manual.”
Kera chuckled. “And I made you take it up a flight of stairs.” Her lip trembled. She was so tired.
“Yeah, I probably won’t be able to exchange it.” He pulled onto a main street. “But you know what they say: if your Jeep is clean, you probably don’t really need a Jeep.”
How To Be A Badass Witch: Book Two Page 23