Fade to Black (11 page)

She hesitated a split second too long as his sword swept round at waist height. Pasha let out a panicked “Shit!” and dropped his glass. But she bent backwards at the waist, like
a reed in water, just enough so the sword passed her. The Storad, sure he had her at last, was left off balance and she wasted no time now. She seemed to run up his body; a foot blasted into his groin followed by a straight-legged kick to his nose that spread it over his face before she flipped herself over and landed lightly, crouched on the sand.

He let out a bellow of rage, lost among the roar of the crowd, as he flew backwards, blood spraying, to land on his back, hand loose on his sword. A foot landed on his right arm with the slap of stiff leather on skin. Her other foot landed no more than half an inch from his head in a puff of sand. When he looked up through pain-filled eyes there were two sword-tips touching his cheeks. Jake’s mouth was hooked up in a grin, her face alight with some emotion, pride maybe, or just the sheer rush of not being sliced to ribbons.

The Storad glared upwards and the muscles in his arms moved as though he would try to raise his weapon, but the tips of Jake’s swords moved almost imperceptibly forwards, the points pricking his skin. Then she leapt up and brought both feet down on his right arm. Bone broke with a sick, wet crack and he lost his grip on his sword altogether. An instant later the blades rested on his skin again. One of them trailed its way down his cheek towards his unprotected throat, a silent, potent threat.

With a look of intense hatred and humiliation, and with what I could only assume was some curse in his native tongue, he held his good hand away from its sword. She looked down
at him and from this close I could see a blank calculation, backlit with a little flame of that pride.

She spun away from him and the noise from the crowd rammed into my ears, vibrated in my bones until being shouted to death became a distinct possibility. Jake didn’t parade in victory like Blondie had, just raised one arm briefly and held her bloodied sword aloft. It was only then that I saw what I’d missed in the rush of the fight. Blood trickled slowly down across her forehead from a gash among her hair. She held the arm by her side stiffly and there was a bloody rent in her armour. With a quick, blank glance at the box where Pasha and I sat and watched, she turned on her heel and stalked up the ramp, past a band that was setting up on the stage, and out of the arena.

Pasha sat back in his chair, shaking and sweaty, and murmured a few relieved swearwords. He got up and made his way to the drinks, poured himself a stiff shot and drank it down. The band started up a raucous tune that had the crowd stamping their feet in time and singing along.

“Must be tough,” I said. “Watching your girlfriend do that.”

Pasha shot me an alarmed look but another voice answered before he could say anything. A curious tone to it, half amused warmth, half deadly warning. “I don’t do relationships. I don’t do boyfriends. I don’t do flings, or one-night stands. I don’t do friends. I barely even manage acquaintances. Pasha is my employee, that’s all. And if he doesn’t stop snorting my booze
we’re going to have words.” Pasha laughed and brought out another glass.

The singer in the arena wailed that he was suffer, he was smite, he was hope. I turned my head, very slowly. I didn’t know about the singer, but the woman sliding a swordpoint towards my eye – well, she was at least two of those things. I couldn’t be sure about the hope.

The sword stopped a scant half-inch from my eyelid and I kept very still. She looked me up and down without a flicker of interest and I regarded her carefully in return. Normally I’d have liked what I saw. Just slim enough while still going in and out in all the best places. In and outs all snugly cased in leather. Soft, slippery leather that made naughty thoughts appear like a rash in my imagination. A smooth face that might be pretty behind the blood.

I don’t go for looks as a rule. Don’t get me wrong, I like a pretty face as much as anyone. But it’s the way they walk that always gets to me, the way they carry themselves. Jake walked as though she owned the place, with an unconscious grace that made me tingle. An ice queen, untouchable, just how I like them. A challenge, and there’s normally such a volcano underneath. The only difference here was she looked like she meant it; the ice went all the way through.

So, she ticked all my boxes. Over eighteen, female, still breathing, a challenge. Unfortunately she ticked the “not on your fucking life” box too. Maybe it was the swords, or maybe it was her eyes. Those calm, dead eyes talked to me, told me
she could slice me limb from limb and not worry about it, but there was something else, deeper, darker, and even now I couldn’t tell you what it was. What I
can
tell you is that she scared the crap out of me. That I liked it and wasn’t about to let that stop me. I was just going to have to be a bit more careful than usual.

Then she gave an easy grin that didn’t quite warm up the deadness behind her eyes, flicked the sword away and dropped it and its twin on a table. Pasha handed her a shot of the liquor and she drained it. “What’s the Upsider doing here?”

“Looking for someone, a girl gone missing,” Pasha said, and gave me a look that meant “Let me do the talking”. I was happy to leave him to it, because a stammer rarely comes across as professional.

Jake pulled off her gauntlets and peeled back the armour-clad allover down to her waist, revealing a sweat-soaked undershirt that clung to her and almost ensured I didn’t see anything else for a while. I dragged my eyes away, to soft leather strips that wound around her hands and arms to her elbows. Her upper arms and shoulders, what I could see, were covered in a tracery of old scars, and a gash split the skin on her left arm near the shoulder.

She sank into a chair and grinned up at Pasha as he hurried over with a small medic kit.

“Any poison, do you think?” Pasha asked, his face scrunched and monkey-like again.

Jake looked my way and shrugged. “Who can tell? We’ll
find out when I keel over, eh? So, Upsider, who are you looking for and how’d you get down here?”

I stared in horrified fascination as Pasha got out a needle, thread and tweezers. Without pausing for anything other than sterilising the needle in the flame of an oil lamp, he began stitching the wound in Jake’s head. He seemed very careful not to touch her with anything other than the needle or tweezers. Jake barely flinched. By the looks of the scars, she’d been through this a fair few times before. Pasha opened his mouth to answer her question for me, but she waved his words away and asked me again.

“Tam sent me,” I managed after a moment. “He said Pasha could help.”

“And? There’s thousands of girls missing down here. Why should we worry about finding one when we could be finding dozens?”

“She’s my niece.”

Her eyes stayed steady on mine and there was a hint of something there, deep down, too deep to know if it was really there or only my imagination, but her lips smiled sadly and I think she actually meant her words. “Sorry to hear that. Any proof you aren’t Ministry?”

Pasha stopped his stitching a moment and fished out the picture that Tam had given me. Jake looked at it with a frown. “You checked this out, Pasha?”

“Of course. Right message. And an extra.” Pasha finished with the gash on her head and moved down to her arm.

“An extra?” She hissed quietly as the needle dug in, but there was no doubt about the warmth in her voice. When she spoke to Pasha, anyway. “Careful, you great lug.”

“Sorry. A possible name.” Pasha’s voice tightened and Jake gave him a wary look. Pasha kept his eyes on his stitching. “Azama. Tam’s sure he’s back.”

Jake’s arm jerked and pulled the stitches tight in her skin. She didn’t seem to notice. Some meaningful look passed between them but it was difficult to say why, or even what sort of look. Weighing up whether to help me tackle someone they clearly knew something about, perhaps.

“You think you’re the first person the Ministry’s sent down here to try to find us, find out who it is keeps taking those girls back? Eh? Not the first, and probably not the last. The others didn’t make it back.” Her eyes and mouth were set hard now, and the way she glared at me almost robbed me of words.

“The Ministry didn’t—”

Pasha interrupted me before I could go further, his voice low so I had to strain to catch the words. “If he is Ministry, he doesn’t know it.”

Jake flicked him a quick, surprised glance before she returned to looking at me, with a hard, thoughtful stare that made me quiver.

If I couldn’t get her to help, her and Pasha, I had no hope, not down here where everything was arse about face. I knew nothing and nobody. I said the first thing that came into my head. “I can pay you.”

Jake shot out of the chair, wrenching the thread from Pasha’s hand. “You think all these girls going missing from down here don’t have family too? People who love them? Parents, sisters, uncles? Do you think your niece is worth more than they are because you can
pay
to try and get her back?”

I flinched back in the chair, grateful that the swords were out of reach at least, although I doubted that would help much if she decided to go for me. I gripped the butt of the pulse pistol in my pocket. It didn’t seem very reassuring. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. I’m a bounty hunter, that’s how it works Upside. Money is the grease on the squeaky wheel of life.”

She slid back into the chair and looked at me levelly. “You aren’t Upside any more.”

I relaxed my grip on the pistol, gladder than I could ever remember that I didn’t have to use it. I had my doubts it would work on her. “And don’t I know it. Look, I need your help. I’ll gladly help you in return, any way I can, pay you that way. But I have to find my niece. I can’t go back to my brother and tell him I saw where she is, but couldn’t rescue her. I need to get her out.”

One red eyebrow raised and her look sharpened. “You saw her? How? Where she is now?”

“I, er—” Damn Namrat’s fucking bollocks. I didn’t usually have a problem talking to women. To anyone. But my magic, I don’t like to talk about that. Not just because it could get me arrested and dead faster than you can say mage. It didn’t seem I had much choice, though. “It’s how I make my living,
how I find people. I can see where they are. If I – er, if I use my magic.”

Pasha dropped something which bounced across the floor with a tinkle. Jake sat up straighter. She looked very interested all of a sudden. “What sort of magic?”

Normally I’d have lied. A lot. Somehow, with that disturbing gimlet gaze on me, with that soft growling marauding around my head and Amarie’s sobs a counterpoint, I couldn’t. I wanted my life back, to be back where my worst worry was what mushy crap to have for dinner or which girlfriend to see tonight. I wanted to not give a shit again. Right at that moment, I would have given my left bollock to be an only child. I hated myself for that thought.

I gave myself a mental kick and looked her in the eye when I said it. “Pain magic.”

That was the first real sign of disturbance in her – one hand flew to the other wrist and fluttered there, a strange gesture for a woman like her. She got herself under control quickly enough. More than I could say for Pasha. He looked younger than ever, his eyes wide and his mouth working as though he was trying not to – what? Cry? Shout? I was oddly disappointed in them, as though I’d hoped they’d understand. I hadn’t consciously thought that, but maybe – yeah, maybe I’d hoped. A guy can dream, right?

“You – you don’t…” Her brow creased as she trailed off from voicing the thought. Pasha put a gentle hand on the chair, a hair’s breadth from her shoulder.

“Only on myself. I swear, I keep to that code. I swear, just help me find her. Please.” I left the rest unsaid. Please, because I couldn’t bear to watch the pain on Perak’s face otherwise. Couldn’t live with myself if I fucked this up. Which might make more sense to my brain if I knew
why
. The emotional part of me said,
Because it’s your brother and you promised Ma
, and the other part, the one I’d let fester and take hold and was now a part of me, said,
So what? You haven’t given a fuck about anyone in years, and you did OK. Better than OK really. Why stop now? What’s in it for you?

When I looked up from the shoes I’d contemplated while I thought this, Jake was staring at me. I couldn’t tell you what was behind that gaze. I never have been able to, not with Jake.

I expected… well, something angry, or disparaging. What I got was “Has today left you wanting a stiff drink?”

Normally I’m not one for serious drinking, but Namrat’s balls, I needed one right then. Anything to rid my mind of the growl and the sudden resurgence of a conscience. “A whole bottle. Screw it, maybe two.”

Jake stood up with a smile and shrugged her leather allover into place over the arm that was still bleeding. “I know just the place.”

The bar was seedy, with a floor sticky enough to lose you a boot, and some very suspicious stains on the walls. On the tables too. It was also more upmarket than anything in Boundary. The clientele drank out of glasses rather than jugs or straight from the bottle, the doorman didn’t look like an ape in a suit, none of the windows had any cracks and there weren’t any working girls touting for business, or if there were, they were being discreet about it. However, the thing that struck me most was the smell.

By the time we’d walked through the door I was salivating. Unless you counted a few vegetable leftovers at the hotel, I hadn’t eaten since – hey, since lunchtime the day before? Time was difficult to tell down here. But I didn’t care about time, I cared about the smell of cooking beef.

This, Pasha said, was where the matchers hung out after a hard day slicing each other to ribbons, and it appeared
matchers had the money. I tried to ignore the fact that I was in a room full of men with swords and the scars to match, where one wrong word could see my guts on the floor, and followed Pasha to a table. Padded benches all but surrounded it, making it a quiet haven from the more raucous of the drinkers in the bar. Jake slid in next to Pasha opposite me. He was more relaxed when she was around, I noticed, less jittery. They might not be lovers but there was something there, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Some shared history, perhaps. I probed a little – it’s always good to know as much as you can about the people you work with. Saves nasty surprises. Besides, I’m a nosy bastard and questions were my only defence, from long habit. Shame they didn’t seem to go down so well. “So how long have you been doing these matches? It’s not a normal kind of job. Why do you do it?”