Raptor
B. A. Bostick
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Enchanted Indie Press
Dedication
Raptor Claw
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Biters
Acknowledgments
About The Author
Back Cover
by
b. a. bostick
Urban Fantasy Noir
Book One of the Raptor Trilogy
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
All rights reserved under International and American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Enchanted Indie Press. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 B. A. Bostick
Claw Image: by permission granted from
The Ohio History Connection
eBook Cover Design: Carol Terry
eBook Conversion, Print Edition
Formatting and Cover Design:
Tosh McIntosh
Digital Edition
ISBN-13: 978-1-938749-35-3
ISBN-10: 1-938749-35-9
Also Available in Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-938749-34-6
ISBN-10: 1-938749-34-0
DEDICATION
I would like to dedicate this novel to Joss Whedon. We have never met but he taught me everything I needed to know about writing a fantasy novel. Thank you Joss.
P.S. If my mother hadn’t thrown out all my hundreds of original Marvel comic books the minute I left home for college I would currently be rich, bored and useless and never have written this book. Thanks, Mom.
IMAGINATION IS THE ONLY WEAPON IN THE WAR AGAINST REALITY
— Lewis Carroll
Demons only tell the truth when it will
cause more trouble than lying.
Part I
- 1 -
Ariel had no fear of heights, but she’d never developed a fondness for crumbling masonry, broken glass and pigeon poop. To top it off, a wicked night wind was trying its best to peel her off the decorative stones ledge of the old building’s top floor and smash her to the pavement nine stories below.
Built over one hundred and forty years ago, the building was designated an historic landmark. That meant the façade could not be altered unless public safety was involved. The brick building’s old fashioned, double hung windows were long and wide with low sills and unreinforced glass. Their size maximized the view of the lake, and at night, the lights of the surrounding buildings were spectacular.
The view wasn’t why she was here.
A row of office windows were only ten feet from where she’d landed, but they seemed miles away. Another gust of wind whipped a tangled mass of dark hair into her face. An impatient toss of her head sent the errant strands back over her shoulder. She thought briefly about the elastic band she kept in her coat pocket for occasions like this but searching for it meant letting go of the wall, and letting go of the wall was not the best choice under the circumstances.
Her target, Nikolai Tesslovich, had been in his office for several hours. Ariel had watched him enter the building at nine o’clock that evening, and three of the attorney’s most infamous clients had come and gone between then and midnight. These were people who preferred to conduct their business late in the evening rather than be seen going into the building in the light of day. Ariel assumed the lawyer was now alone, sitting at his desk, finishing his notes and adding up the enormous fees he would bill for every ten minutes of his valuable time.
A direct assault was not the strategy Ariel wanted to use, but Tesslovich had proved a hard man to get to. He was never alone even in his own house, and she was tired of following him and his bodyguards around waiting for the ideal opportunity to present itself.
What she’d finally decided to do was high risk, savage and messy, and best accomplished without witnesses. She took a deep breath.
Time to suck it up and get it over with.
Ariel looked down at her feet. She’d left them bare for better balance on the shallow ledge and, just as she’d predicted, she was now standing in a mound of fresh pigeon poop. Disgusting.
She began to inch toward the nearest window. Unfortunately, decorative limestone wasn’t meant to survive over a hundred years in the wind and weather of an industrial city. Small cracks were forming and she could feel pieces of it chipping off as her toes gripped and released the front edge of the stone.
At last, her fingers slid around the trim surrounding the first window. She hoped, unlike the ledge, it hadn’t become too fragile with age to support her grip.
A quick peek through the window showed Tesslovich sitting behind a massive, antique, desk making notes on a yellow legal pad. No one else seemed to be in the room.
She knew the lawyer might be alone right now, but his driver and bodyguard were sure to be nearby. There would be no time for a protracted fight, or loud noises that would attra
ct attention.
Speed and surprise were her best options.
Ariel dug her fingernails into soft wood of the old window frame, took a deep breath, pivoted in a tight arc and burst through the glass.
Instantly on her feet, she threw her arms wide letting the gravity knives strapped to her forearms slide beyond the cuffs of her long black coat and click into place.
Tesslovich reacted faster than she expected. He was already struggling to his feet and reaching into his coat as she leapt over his desk and hit him square in the chest with both feet. The sharp talons on her toes dug effortlessly through his expensive silk jacket and linen shirt into the soft flesh beneath. Her weight pushed him back into his chair. The momentum tipped it over onto its back with her firmly on top.
Tesslovich’s hand was still pulling at the grip of his gun seconds after she’d slashed a blade backhanded across his throat, neatly separating his head from his body. Gouts of arterial spray began to pulse steaming green liquid onto the walls and floor.
At a sound from behind her Ariel spun around. She raised the blade in her right hand just in time to deflect the flight of a black steel throwing knife, then bat away another with the blood encrusted blade in her left hand. She ducked a third which sailed harmlessly over her head and buried itself in the wall.
The small, muscular attacker, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, paused to give her a stare of venomous hostility, all-the-more incongruous coming from someone barely five feet tall dressed in a garish yellow-and-black, pinstriped suit and purple shirt.
Behind the little man, watching wide-eyed from a corner of the room, was a bruised and bloody man in a rumpled sports coat and jeans, gagged and bound to a chair with duct tape.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ariel asked the pinstriped man. “Get your tiny ass out of my way, or I’ll kick it into next week.”
“You will die in great pain for what you’ve done,” the little man hissed. He had a foreign accent she couldn’t quite place. He smiled showing a mouthful of twisted, brown teeth. A metal wand slid out of one coat sleeve into his hand. He popped a brief crackle of blue light off the end.
Shit!
Going up against a Taser with a steel blade was suicide. Time for Plan B.
Ariel retracted one knife back up her sleeve; scooped up Tesslovich’s half-drawn weapon and shot pin-stripe twice in the chest. The surprising force of the bullets blew the small man out the smashed window.
“Wow.” She hefted the gun. “Demon loads.” She dropped it into the pocket of her coat. A girl in her profession couldn’t have too many weapons.
Outside the office door, a commotion had started; fists pounding, loud voices demanding information. It wouldn’t be long before someone smashed the door in.
Ariel turned toward the duct taped man in the corner. “And what about you, sparky?”
The man had duct tape over his mouth so, duh, his answer was unintelligible.
The blood and bruises on the man’s face were enough to predict what would happen once Tesslovich’s bodyguards got into the office. It was a rule of her profession to never let bystanders see her doing what she’d just done, but in all conscience, she couldn’t leave him behind.
Ariel vaulted the desk and slit the cocoon of tape around the prisoner’s chest with two quick, strokes of her knife. Wrists and ankles were next. A flick of her wrist and the weapon disappeared up her sleeve. She grabbed the man under his arms, dragged him over to the sill of the broken window and heaved them both into the cold night air just as the office door crashed open.
- 2 -
Two hours ago, when Nicolai Tesslovich’s mutant circus freak had duct taped him to a chair, Frank Bishop decided this might be the worst night of his life. As he was falling through the air, toward the street below, he decided it might be the last. His ‘rescuer’ held him from behind, her arms wrapped around his chest, legs locked firmly around his hips. He could feel her strained breathing against his neck, and the muscles of her chest flexing in and out as they plunged toward the ground.
Suddenly, as if some critical point had been reached, they started to rise instead of fall. The rhythm of their ascent became a successful fight against gravity. As the screaming buzz in Bishop’s head started to subside, he thought he could hear the swish of wings.
He opened his eyes which had been screwed tightly shut since he’d exited the window. Big mistake. There was still nothing under them but air and it was a long way down.
“Don’t struggle,” a voice hissed in his ear. “I might drop you – and for God’s sake, shut up!”
Bishop shut his eyes again and tried to bring the volume of his terror down to a whimper. Screaming through duct tape hadn’t been very easy anyway. He concentrated instead on trying to hold onto his rescuer as best he could from his face-forward position. This mostly consisted of hugging her arms more tightly to his chest and willing himself into rigidity.
That proved to be a mistake. Within a few moments, the legs around his hips unlocked and he was dropped feet first onto a hard-uneven surface. He immediately fell over on his face like a ten pin. The surface smelled of dirt and tar and was imbedded with little pieces of stone that were poking sharp points into his already battered cheek and jaw.
Roof, he thought numbly, feeling around with his hands before opening his eyes. He rolled over, not sure what to expect. A young woman sat on her haunches next to him, arms balanced on her thighs, a black coat pooling around her bare feet. Her dark hair had fallen forward obscuring much of her face, but her eyes weren’t exactly friendly. She reached out one sharply pointed finger nail and ripped the tape away from Bishop’s lips. The cuts, caused by a few well-placed punches to the mouth in Tesslovich’s office, opened up and began to bleed.
As the words blurted out of his mouth, Bishop knew that he was asking the three dumbest questions in the English language. He just couldn’t stop himself.
“What?” He babbled. “Who? How?”
“Just what I was going to ask you,” the woman said.
“We were flying!”
“I was flying,” she corrected. “You were screaming.”
Bishop sat up, still slightly dizzy. “I hate flying.” He started pulling left over strips of sticky duct tape off his coat and pant legs, throwing them onto the roof. “The last time someone made me fly I ended up in Iraq.”
“What were you were doing taped to a chair in Nicolai Tesslovich’s office in the middle of the night?” Ariel asked. “Did you forget to pay your bill?”
“I’m a PI,” Bishop fumbled in his jacket for his ID. He held it out.
“See? Frank Bishop. Licensed Private Detective. I have a client whose six-year-old daughter was abducted from a park three days ago. No ransom demand. The police haven’t been much help. I said I’d look into it.”
“At Tesslovich’s office?”
“Rumor has it he’s been involved in supplying kids from unknown sources for illegal adoptions. I thought I’d push him a bit. When he got out of his limo in the parking garage I asked if I could speak to him about my client. The mutant hit me with a Taser and they dragged me upstairs in the freight elevator. I think you saw where that got me.”
Bishop held up a hand. “Not that I’m not grateful for the rescue,” he said, “but now that Tesslovich is dead, I’ve lost my only lead. Plus, I seem to be stuck on a roof with a homicidal super-pigeon. What the hell are you, lady?”
Ariel got to her feet. “I’m a Raptor.”
“A what?”
“A Raptor,” Mr. Detective. “It’s a bird of prey.”
“So, you mean you’re some kind of superhero?”
“No,” she lied. “I’m special ops. If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you. Etcetera, etcetera.” She flexed a hand, extending wicked looking talons from the ends of her fingers, then she folded them back in. “I took a really big chance saving your life Mr. Bishop and I’d hate to see that come back on you.”
“Yeah, right.” Bishop wa
sn’t totally unfamiliar with federal spooks and their threats. “I still don’t understand why you killed Tesslovich.”
“Orders.”
“Seriously?”
Ariel sighed. “Maybe you noticed he wasn’t exactly human?”
“I noticed he was a total asshole, but I guess that would explain the green blood.”
“Demons don’t bleed red,” Ariel explained. “Cut them it’s all green, blue or yellow -- sometimes black, but never red.”
“Well, my blood’s red,” Bishop wiped his bleeding lip with the back of his hand. “What color’s yours?”
Ariel drew a talon across the palm of one hand and held it up for Bishop’s inspection. A thin line of red welled up. She wiped it off on her jeans.
“Strangely,” Bishop said. “That doesn’t make me feel the least bit better.”
- 3 -
Ariel paced while Bishop pulled himself together. Now that her adrenaline had dropped to near normal, she needed to take a serious look at her situation. She’d impulsively saved a quasi-innocent bystander from being tortured and killed by a demon. She’d lied about the whole special ops/technology thing, but the guy still knew a whole lot more about her business than he should. Although really, who would believe him? It was a long fall from the roof. Neat, clean, problem solved. Except the detective wasn’t a demon, he was human and she had issues with killing people just because they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
This will definitely come back to bite me in the ass.
“I think I know somebody who might be able to help you get information on missing kids.” Ariel said.
“Are they in Special Ops?”
“In a way,” Ariel said. “Hungry?”
Bishop looked at her like she was crazy --- well, more crazy.
“A good kill always gives me a craving for pizza,” she said. “With anchovies. I know an all-night place, not too far from here. The ambience sucks and the food is terrible but there’s someone there I’d like you to meet.”
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 1