Silent Warrior (8 page)

“Out,” came Silence’s terse reply. “Then left.”

She was the first to punch and slice her way free. He could only hope she would reveal her whatever-the-hell plan when he followed suit. He’d rather not watch her retreat into the carnival-colored night, leaving him behind, but that would be her most logical choice.

The debt was his. The fight was his. She had no reason to help him.

When he smashed past the last man standing between him and relative freedom, Hark caught the gleam of green neon shining off her white-blond hair.

“Do you trust me to find one? Another Dragon King?” Her face was splattered with the unpleasant aftermath of swinging a serrated shield at guys’ faces and unsuspecting knees.

“I trust you to run. Tell me pretty stories while we get the fuck out of here.”

He should’ve been more specific, because where Silence ran, he had to force himself to follow—away from the particolored streets and the endless parade of humanity that trounced through all the hours of the night. She ran into the shadows. Dense blotches of darkness began to swallow even the gleam of her beacon-bright hair.

He let his body take over. How often had that been the case? Most of his life. Talking didn’t require real thought. Talking was just his id let off the chain. Maybe that’s why he’d been so quiet in the moments after he and Orla had burst apart. He’d needed to think about how to express his surprising contentment.

So he became lungs and legs and muscle memory. The scant rhythm of his gorgeous guide’s steps and the jangle of her shield became his only guide. The heavier, unrelenting rhythm of their pursuers’ footfalls prodded him forward with another burst of speed. His mind sank into a place where nothing could touch him, and where he wouldn’t feel anything if it did.

Time passed with the sloth of a nightmare on the edge of waking.

Until . . . Hark spotted a hulking high-rise ahead, like a ship emerging from a thick mist. It looked
ill
. A jaundiced eye. A leper’s body. A patient being eaten from the inside by a metastasized tumor.

Hazy edges took on more solidity, as did a dull but gratifying glow. The building contained hundreds of grimy windows that stretched up its thirty stories. Half of them shone with light that couldn’t be described as light, as if every third room shared a single candle.

Comprehension shoved through his decidedly happier place of non-thought.

“A warren? Are you insane?”

Silence grabbed his hand and kept running. They shunted around through a locked gate using an unscripted, synchronous union of their weapons. He hit. She sliced the weakened metal. They raced across a dead courtyard that might have been, two generations ago, grassy and full of children playing. Now it was cluttered with the charred remains of discarded furniture, and even a whiff of smoke. Nearby fires. Squatters, maybe. People so poor that even the shelter of a warren was denied to them.

Glossy tourist brochures and city planning committees probably didn’t like to admit these failed housing experiments still existed.

The once-deluxe high-rise block was one of Kowloon’s dirty little secrets. Apartments bisected. Cut into quarters. Again. Smaller. Tighter. Until families lived in spaces no bigger than coffee tables. No such niceties as privacy, sanitation, or even hallways. Passages crawled through living spaces, where people walked over the heads of sleeping children in order to reach their own micro-rooms. An entire community of people would never leave those disintegrating walls. Police would never step within them.

Hark had never planned to.

They came to an iron door that opened no wider than two feet placed side by side. Silence handed over her shield and slipped in. After a distinctly feminine grunt and a few grating noises, they were able to push from one side and pull from the other. Hark shoved through. Together they reinforced the iron with chunks of busted concrete and cinder blocks that seemed to have held up a wall. The wall was now rotten wood and damp, pulverized Sheetrock.

“In the name of the Dragon and the Chasm, what are we doing here?” Hark asked.

Silence held a finger to her lips.

Great.

Darkness
and
quiet. Thirty minutes earlier, he’d been fucking a woman named Orla in what, by comparison, had been the most opulent hotel in Hong Kong.

“I’ve stashed my prisoner here.”

“Your—? Oh, I get it. Retrieving indigents for the cartels. Nice.”

“Such high morals, Hark.”

“Hey, nice. That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

Her expression hardened, until she was the opponent he’d squared off against in Wu’s bar—something like a lifetime ago. “Those thugs weren’t after me,” she said in a rough whisper. “Who are we running from?”

“They work for a loan shark named Jing. I owe him maybe . . . seven thousand Hong Kong dollars. It’s, what, a week’s work in an American office—you know, one of those nine-to-five jobs that sound like torture. But really? Jing is about third from the bottom when it comes to dickweeds who want a piece of me.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t kill you.”

“Some people have an overly eager hard-on for vengeance.” Hark stifled a laugh. “Forget cartels and big, grand schemes. This is a minute bird shit by comparison.”

Only then did he realize that they weren’t in the dark anymore. Some grotesque yellow glow allowed him to see her ridiculous excuse for a smile. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. He actually liked her smile, because he’d started to think of it as his. He especially liked it compared to the hellhole she’d led him to.

“Yeah. Okay. So what sort of friendly beast do you have chained down here? Gimme another Pendray. Say it’s a Pendray.”

“A Southern Indranan.”

“C’mon. Telepathy? They’re almost as lame as us.”

She surprised him by grabbing the back of his neck and kissing him. Hard. Fast. Demanding. “They have guns. They have a target. We’ll change that target.”

“Have them shoot each other?” At Silence’s nod, he grinned. He brushed his knuckles across her cheek. Her midnight black eyes should’ve been unnerving in that graveyard gloom, but he was beginning to read her. Know her. “You are a maniacal woman.”

“You like that.”

“I do.”

But he absolutely hated it when the lights went out.

8

“T
here’s something I haven’t told you,” Hark said, trying to keep the edge of panic out of his voice. “And don’t go all secret squirrel on me now. Whisper or whatever, but stay close.”

“I assume there’s quite a bit you’ve never told me.”

“I . . . I have issues with complete darkness.”

“Issues.”

The delivery of that single word was devoid of emotion.

He’d expected
something
. A snappy retort. Because why wouldn’t she? When she bothered to speak, Silence was as snarky as the next chick with a brain. But at that moment, he’d rather have complete stoicism than some witty mockery.

“Yes, issues.”

“Fine. Then we’ll always fuck with the lights on.” She groped for his hand until their fingers intertwined. “We still need that telepath.”

No judgment?

Wait,
always
fuck?

That implied enough of a good time following this debacle to get his wits together.

She wound through the passageways. The tunnels were as tight as the tension in Hark’s chest. Only that tension wasn’t his hatred of the dark. He was oddly eager. Anticipation spiked, made him light-headed, as if he’d spun in circles too many times. He’d never had a partner before. He worked alone, procuring items, risking his ass. Aside from an occasional hookup—as he’d assumed Silence would be—he bedded down by himself each night, always expecting to wake up facing the barrel of a napalm pistol.

The deeper they ventured into the dark, the more potent the human stench. On occasion Silence would stumble over something that grunted. A person. Hark imagined them spread across the floor like puppies laid out before their mother, hunting for a ripe teat. He and Silence were navigating a minefield labyrinth in black so thick that the old bastard Set, Egyptian god of darkness and chaos, would’ve lit a candle.

“You
do
know where we’re going?”

“When you run all your life, you remember ways to circle back. Stairs.”

They climbed. Wove. Dodged. And yes, it seemed as if they’d circled around. The warren was a maze. Wherever she was taking them, they would not be pursued easily. Too many nooks and cubbies and wrong turns.

The lights flickered back to life. A small part of Hark regretted being so eager to see. The filth was overwhelming. She still clutched his hand, and they picked up speed.

He identified the source of the blackout. Water streamed down the shoddy, makeshift walls. Leaking sinks? Toilets? The water dribbled dangerously close to wires strung along across every surface and in mazes of crisscrossed clotheslines at head height. The wrong drip on the wrong live wire . . .

Momentary blackouts seemed the least dangerous outcome.

They arrived at what appeared to be a basement interspersed with heavy I beams. Like the rest of the building, even those support structures seemed tired.

A moan echoed from across the wide space—wide by comparison. The moan was not of human origin, but came instead from a Dragon King. Hark knew the difference; it radiated across different nerve endings.

Silence strode forward. “Jawahar, time for your feeding.”

“Bitch,” the Indranan spat.

“Not wise to insult one’s captor.” She squatted beside him, but not near enough to risk his touch. He was chained to the wall by manacles around his ankles and wrists. “I might return you to the Kawashimas rather than take you to the Asters. At least with the Asters you’ll have a fighting chance in the Cage matches. Old Man Aster has no grudge. He just wants a proven warrior. What will happen when the Kawashimas reclaim you?”

“Beheading.”

“So shut up.”

She retrieved a packet of what looked like jerky and dried fruit and flung it between his restrained legs.

Hark met her where she stood. “What did he do?”

“Got the jump on Shiro Kawashima.”

“The big guy’s youngest son? That’s ballsy.”

“Then literally tried to take him up the ass.”

“Man, who’d have thought you’d actually be lucky to be chained to the basement wall of a warren?”

“We’re going to borrow your powers,” Silence said, no nonsense.

Jawahar snarled. “Like fuck you will.”

Hark pulled the
nighnor
out of his satchel. “I have a perverse fondness for killing would-be rapists and guys with really foul mouths. It’s a weakness of mine. Wonder if you’d have time to scream.”

Silence nodded. “What he said.”

The captive Indranan sneered. “And if you bring me to the Old Man with my head smashed in? What then?”

“You’d be dead. Won’t be your concern.”

While Hark hefted his weapon, Silence edged forward with her shield at the ready. She tapped what looked to be a pattern against the back of Jawahar’s collar.

“Temporary collar,” she said without prompting. “A permanent one will be affixed when the Asters’ jet arrives day after tomorrow.”

And then she’d just . . . go back with them?

Of course she would. This was a jaunt compared to the rest of her life. He felt his respect for her dimming like the light in the basement. Elsewhere, huddled humans created a cacophony of ordinary noises. Life encapsulated. Were they any freer than Silence in her collar?

Was he, hounded by debts?

Those debts had taken human form, and they hadn’t given up on finding him. Rather than navigate the warren, they began blasting through it. The ordinary sounds of people living stacked on top of one another gave way to gunfire and collapsing walls.

“Time to make with the magic, blondie.”

“Have you ever used telepathy in tandem?”

Hark frowned and drew his chin back. “Oh, hell no. I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“Too busy talking.”

They’d shared a Pendray’s rage.
No problemo
. Sharing a Tigony’s ability to amplify any source of electricity would’ve been damn tricky in that claptrap electric chair waiting to happen. And of course the long-lost Garnis—speed and senses that bordered on mind-boggling.

But an Indranan’s telepathy? Sharing it with Silence? All well and good for turning those napalm pistols against each of his debtors’ goons. If Jawahar had killed his birth twin, he’d have become even more powerful by uniting two halved gifts into one. They also took their siblings’ minds into their own. Twice-blessed or twice-cursed—the value of the nasty deed depended on who you talked to.

Hark only knew they were more likely mad than not. They weren’t called the Heartless for nothing.

He had no idea how to prepare, let alone with a partner. He liked his brain intact—not the consistency of snot—and he liked his secrets to remain secret.

Another crackle of gunfire. Some sort of explosion. The lights gave up trying.

“Fine,” he said, his opinion quickly changed. “Stay out of my head and I’ll stay out of yours.”

But that wasn’t how it worked.

Their minds touched instantly.

He saw a girl of maybe twelve, restrained by anonymous guards. Her face was wrenched forward to watch as a fellow Sath was burned to cinders before what was left of his skull was chopped clean off. Then a woman, killed by equally gruesome spears and the cutting blow of a Dragon-forged sword.

Hark didn’t just see the image; he smelled the wood and burning flesh, heard the cheers, felt the guards’ remorseless hands. And he felt what Silence had felt—no, what the girl named Orla had felt.

Satisfaction.

An idol. The shape of the Dragon. He caught the glimmer of black rock as it reflected the desert sun. Obsidian? He’d seen it before. That same glimmer. But he was pulled back to the story Silence told without words.

I would’ve suffered as a Sath virgin.

Hark resisted a shudder. He couldn’t think of anything worse.

No wonder she’d run—Silence, the woman who seemed impervious to everything. She hated running so much that she’d made the Asters’ compound her home for five years. She hated it as much as he hated the dark and the quiet.

Why, Hark? Tell me.

They had no time.

“Concentrate,” he said aloud, although his words were as far removed as the sun.

Rather than probe, they united. They were Sath. Thieves. They used Jawahar’s gift to search the rabbit warren to find Hark’s hunters. Nine. Three were easily overpowered. They had weak minds and itchy trigger fingers. Hark could practically taste the copper on their tongues as they awaited their first kills. He’d never thought of enforcers as being novices, but they had to start somewhere. Likely they hadn’t thought to start by turning their weapons against one another. The hot electric petroleum scent of napalm bullets filled Hark’s nostrils, followed by the tang of blood and a trio of screams.

Silence took out a pair of men by forcing their unwilling legs to charge out a window. Hark gripped her hand and mentally tugged her free of their consciousnesses as they smacked the inky pavement six stories down.

Don’t be in their heads when they die. I’m not Indranan, but I sure as fuck know that much.

Her mind glowed with thanks.

Four men left. Their feet banged heavy boots on the floor, which happened to be the basement ceiling. Hark had a sense of déjà vu as he heard it with his own senses and saw the action through the Indranan’s telepathy. He’d throw up before all this was over.

Don’t be a pussy
, came Silence’s reproach.

You’re cranky.

They grounded one another in the only thing they could still feel—
really
feel. The grip of their two hands.

That certainty was ripped away. Hark’s head was still a tangle of too many synapses, but he knew when he’d lost Silence. He whirled to find that Jawahar had used a loosened chain to snake Silence’s feet out from under her. She collapsed to all fours. Her forehead hit the grimy floor. Pain shot through Hark’s mind like the crack of a hammer between his eyes.

Jawahar wrapped the chain around her thigh, just where the joint fit with her pelvis. He tightened it with enough force to cripple her. Silence screamed. Another wrenching tug. Hark, still pushing through and past and around the minds of at least a half-dozen people, noticed where Jawahar had crumbled the pitted concrete that secured his chains to the wall. He’d been as patient as a Sath. Waiting. Now he had Silence in a grip that could rip her leg clean off.

She screamed again. Hark was nearly blinded by her pain, but it must’ve been a shadow of her agony. He leaped forward, seeing that her shield was their nearest weapon. He shoved his arm into the leather loop and swirled against her attacker. Chunks of the man’s forearm flayed away. It was his turn to scream.

Jawahar’s grip on the chain loosened enough for Silence to scramble away. She was still on hands and knees, gasping, swallowing sobs Hark could feel in his mind.

He wanted to go to her, but Jawahar came first. Hark cut the loose chain with the serrated shield. A manacle still dangled from the Indranan’s wrist. Three other chains remained in place—left hand and both ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere.

We have unfinished business, dead man.

A mental snarl was all Hark heard in reply as he raced to Silence’s collapsed body. The chain had pinched inward, cutting the skin of her upper thigh. Near her carotid artery? He couldn’t remember what happened to Dragon Kings who bled to death, but he wasn’t about to play science experiment. He peeled back her thick leather trousers. She helped him, although her strength was failing. He could feel her mind slipping into a haze where thoughts winked out, overcome by pain and panic.

He ripped off the layers that protected his chest until he found cloth. A quick tourniquet. Just get the bleeding to stop. Then he took her face between his hands. No telepathy now.

“You move a Dragon-damned muscle and I’ll use the
nighnor
on your stubborn head. I happen to like your head, so don’t piss me off.”

“Where?”

“Four more goon guys, blondie.”

“It’s dark. You hate it.”

“We’re not dying down here. Not by some second-rate Indranan asshole, and not by third-rate killers.” He dredged up a grin. It felt like smiling past a mouth full of glass shards. “Besides, we’re way too cool for this place. Next time we’re naked together, it’ll be on satin sheets.”

“I’ll keep Jawahar and my pain away from you.”

“See? Too cool.”

He kissed her forehead. Nothing could be done about the smudges of blood he left on her cheeks. Their kiss would have to do as he retrieved his weapons and charged into the darkness.