Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1) (24 page)

“Just so we’re clear, as much as I want to help you, my main goal is to gut as many draggers as I can and get the hell out,” Tim explains casually. “You get yourself into a situation, I’m not here to bail your ass out.”

“Gee, thanks.” I click off the flashlight and toss it back up to him. He doesn’t need to turn around to reach out and snag it out of midair before slipping it into his vest. “You remember the deal. You don’t get to pop Han until he gives up the person who put the bounty out on me and Thomas.”

“I’m a man of my word, Layla. If you make it out of this alive, maybe you’ll get to see that.”

The van takes a sharp turn before, wheels squealing on the pavement, it comes to a full stop. Tim turns off the engine and hops in the back with me. He uses his flashlight to look me over.

“Well?” I ask, feeling all the teenage insecurity I never had to endure rushing over me.

He shrugs. “Eh. It’s not terrible. You don’t look like you did before. At least not really.” He picks at my inky hair, inspired by Ravyn’s, and tugs at it a bit. “And the outfit definitely doesn’t look much like what he would’ve seen you in, I’m sure.”

I grumble and look down at the menagerie we stole, making me look like a high school dropout. Black miniskirt, black tights with matching boots―housing my knife―and nothing but a bra on top. Tim examines my bullet wound and sighs.

“Well… I suppose it’s okay. You’re supposed to look like you’ve been roughed up. Stolen girl and all. Speaking of which…” He puts the flashlight in his mouth just as I had, before he leans back and sucker punches me to the side of the face.

The stars take over as I spit out blood. “You mother―what the hell was that for?” I scream and jab him in the shoulder hard.

“You have to look the part!” Just as the stars are clearing, he gives me another punch, and my eye explodes with pain. I’m seeing red now, and it takes everything in me to keep from going for my blade to kill him. Or at least attempt to.

“Could’ve warned me,” I mutter, blinking a few times, already feeling my face puffing and swelling in painful throbs of my heartbeat. I spit a wad of coppery-tasting spit on his shoes for appearances, but more for spite.

He either doesn’t care or doesn’t notice. “You would’ve braced yourself. Wouldn’t have looked real.” Even being partially blind on my left side, I can see the bright burn of the flashlight as he looks over my face. “Nice. That’s going to bruise up good.” He takes off his vest and tosses it onto the front seat.

“How exactly do you plan to disarm a room full of potential dragons when you’re completely unarmed yourself?”

“Who says I’m unarmed?” He winks.

A few minutes later, we’re walking out of the back of the van, him in semi-tactical garb hidden beneath a ratty coat. He has me walk in front of him, always looking the part.

He jabs his gun into my lower back. “You could cry a little. Sob. Something.”

I give a sniffle and wipe at my eye.

“Scratch that. No wonder you’re an assassin. You’d be dead broke as an actress. Quiet acceptance.” He jabs the gun again and I stumble. “Get the hell up!” he shouts, grabbing me by the hair and yanking me down an alleyway.

I’ve only glimpsed the East Passage from afar, never been marched through the dark gutters. But the smell of it varies only slightly from that of the rest of Saint Roch. The homes are no differently stacked, matchbox-atop-matchbox. The people no friendlier or less. But eyes fall on us. Even so late at night, the youths of the East are moving up and down the street, along with other characters keeping to the shadows, not much different from us.

“Whatcha got there?” a young man calls out to Tim as he shoves me toward the dumpster behind Han Tzu’s club. The obnoxiously bright neon lights on the street-side of the building only serve to make the crevices behind all the darker. The guy strolling forward looks to have a few years and a few dozen pounds on Tim, and he’s got a girl on each arm. Whether he paid for their company or not I can’t tell. They look a little trashy, skimpy clothes and all. But who am I to talk?

His buzzed hair accents the dark glasses he’s wearing, and I know there are only two possibilities. Either he’s a douche for wearing sunglasses at night, or he’s hiding his eyes.

Dragon… shit… shit…

But Tim keeps his cool far more than I do. He reaches out and grabs me by the hair, my scalp burns as he jerks me to him.

“Found some product for Tzu.” I whimper in his grip, but keep the stoned appearance of desperation. He holds me out for the thug like a caught fish.

The man takes his arms out from under his ladies of the night and steps into the alley. He takes off his glasses, and I catch the faintest hint of red before he puts a hand to my chin and grips me, looking me over from side to side, like he’s examining a dog.

“Han don’t like white garbage,” the man says to Tim dismissively. “Why you beat her?”

Tim stands silent, watching the new arrival, and before I can feel even remotely touched by this stranger’s seeming care of my well-being…

“Bitches not worth it when you knock ‘em about. No one want to pay for broken whore.” He slaps my bruised cheek lightly before shoving me back to Tim.

“Hell if I care what Tzu will use her for. I just need some cash to get by for the night…” Tim grabs me by the arm and shudders a little. He sniffles, too, different from my fear-feigning sniffle. He rubs at his covered arm and sniffs again, pursing his lips.

The man grins, all malevolence. “Oh, we might be able to work somethin’ out. What’s you flavor?”

Tim shrugs and twitches, his junkie impression much too accurate for my comfort. “Whatever you got. I just need a fix. If it means I get to lose the bitch, too, then all the better.”

The man turns and snaps at the two girls standing on the curb, likely freezing more than I am, which is saying a lot. He shouts out something in what I assume is Chinese. For all the training in my youth, Mom never thought language was worthwhile. When he’s done with his companions, he turns back to us and points down the alley.

Tim hauls me by my arm, damn near dragging me through frigid puddles, the only warmth I’m getting now from the sputtering exhaust vents of the kitchens of the club.

“Keep on your toes,” Tim mutters. “He’s planning to kill me.”

His training apparently included Chinese.

Tim keeps hauling me along until the man behind us calls, “Here. Han want to see merchandise personally. You wait here.”

Tim shakes his head. “Nah, man. If you want the slut, you gotta get me my fix.”

The man considers, looking Tim over. Tim’s ratty coat does the work for him. The dragon decides he could take him.

“Okay. You funeral.” He gives us both a toothy grin as he opens a door and waves us in. Tim shoves me through, and I stumble on a set of cement stairs. My foot falls out into nothingness before Tim slings out a hand. I’ve done the same, praying for a railing in the darkness. Tim’s got his hand wrapped around my lace bra. I say a silent thanks for the quality of the store we stole from as it holds my weight, but it’s the heat of indoors that I’m more grateful for. I’ve been thrown around a lot lately, but I’ve never felt quite so cold. I finally steady myself and find a metal bar leading down. I grip it for dear life as my captors follow me in, the sunglass-wearing guy taking the lead.

He waves us into an area lit only by the glowing red lights peeking out from beneath closed and slightly ajar doors. From inside some emanate grunts, moans, and others just quiet weeping.

Damnit. Feelings. Focus Layla. You can’t help anyone if you get yourself killed.

The music from the nightclub, still alive in the earlier hours of the morning, is nothing but dull thuds between the many floors separating us from the kids home on winter break and the normal city patrons. For a brief moment, as Tim grips my arm in both acting and general concern, I have to wonder how many of the people out on the dance floor have no idea what’s going on below. Though it disturbs me more to think of all who do, sipping on their cocktails and crappy beers, knowing full well the horrors that are going on just beneath their feet.

We pass by locked doors, and I only get to wonder about the freak show of suffering Han Tzu’s running out of his daddy’s club. The doors where I hear people making noise are unsettling, but it’s the rooms that are completely quiet that freak me out. And we haven’t heard a noisy room for about a minute as we take another set of stairs down.

The red lights of the hallway above are all that light our way now as the stairway grows dark, ending in a single doorway ahead. Our guide, likely planning how he’ll put a bullet in Tim’s head and take me up to one of the less crowded rooms upstairs for a test drive, grabs the handle, and electronic beeps echo in the gray of the basement. The door opens with a metallic clang, and he steps forward, waving us in sharply.

Tim hauls and pushes me into the room as I slide onto the concrete floor like a runner sliding into home. My chest and shoulder scream at me, scraping against the floor and opening up new and old wounds.

The room is silent, much too silent for what I had been hoping for: Han Tzu and maybe one or two other people. It was a best-case scenario, and I was expecting a dozen people.

In truth, I was expecting to die in a blaze of glory. I’m nothing if not practical.

Tim steps over the threshold behind me, and I lift my face off the floor, my hair a knot of tangled strands blocking half my view of the room.

But that’s just fine. Half a view is more than enough to see how righteously fucked we are.

y plan was not overly elaborate. I needed a skilled partner to accompany me into Han Tzu’s club and get me in the same room with him. Between myself and the partner, we would disable―whatever that would entail―all other occupants of the room and render Han himself incapable of shifting. Shifting to a form I had only ever heard stories of but had never witnessed. I wouldn’t say I was unfriendly with the Westies, but I was never invited into their homes. I was certainly not on good terms with those in the East Passage, but few are.

The problem with this plan, that neither Tim nor I had thought of, was a rather glaring issue at the moment. In hindsight, it’s more likely that neither of us wanted to consider the possibility, because it entailed definitive failure.

And as I pick my head up, my eyes shaded by the black hair draped over my bruised and bloodied face, I’m staring at definitive failure stretched across the enormous room we’ve walked into. Mottled red scales trace up and down the snakelike body, shifting to golden at the stomach and the enormous and razor-sharp scales lining his back. I say his because, as I quickly sum up my life, I come to the conclusion that the fifty-foot-long dragon sprawled at the end of the luxurious palace-like room is Han Tzu himself. Already shifted into his dragon form. Even at a distance, I start to sweat at the heat radiating off the beast as he moves.

If not for the movement, I’d assume him a statue. Or pray that he were. But he does move, eyes flicking back and forth, tail wavering about, armed with scales far larger than the ones adorning his back. From the deep gouges in the stone wall and floor where he’s moving, I can tell that tail is more than decoration. As he exhales deeply, the room vibrates and the temperature spikes. Seeing a dragon like Han is amusing when it’s on a menu at the local Chinese joint that serves suspiciously American food. In person, it’s significantly less so.