Into the Fire (The Mieshka Files, Book One) (29 page)

Her turn to mirror his look.

“Kitty.”

His hands stopped wiping.

“No one find her. Why you look?”

“My boss wants me to.”

“Boss?”

Time to go
, she thought. She had no idea what terms Aiden was on with this guy’s boss. Instead of answering, she gave him another winning smile.

“I’ve only got tonight. Thanks, though.”

She gave him a little wave and walked down the street. She could feel his stare on her shoulders and she willed herself to not look back.

Three down and an entire world to go. He’d licked his claws clean, but had found the blood entirely unsatisfactory. Besides, he thought, the image was too cliché. He was above that idea of a monster. He was independent from that thought. He thought she knew this, but still she chased him—hunted him—in true monster fashion. She had a gun and, though it had no silver bullets, she had enough power backing her to make her a serious threat.

“Ah, Mieshka.”

Her first impulse was to run. Roger had that effect on things. Instead, she swallowed her jumping heart and forced herself to turn around.

“Roger.” It was amazing how much narrower the alley seemed with him in it. He stepped forward, and the light from a shop’s window slanted across him. He looked quite at home in the dim back alley.

“Long time no see, Mieshka. How’s Joanne?”

Jo, her coworker, had been injured last week in a brawl. Roger hadn’t been responsible for the injury, but the two had a history of picking fights.

“Out of the hospital. How about Stan?”

“Dead.”

Oops.

“Oh. I’m sorry. Shall I send Jo your regards?”

“It would please me, Mieshka. I also have a missive from my employer to yours, if you’d be so kind.”

She flinched back as he reached for something in his jacket. When he produced a letter, it was with a small smile she didn’t like.

“Not a bomb, is it?” Their bosses had a rocky history.

“Quite the opposite, I think, Mieshka.”

He held the letter out to her and stepped forward, pausing as she moved away. Logically, Mieshka knew Roger had no reason to harm her, but she couldn’t help remembering just how quick he was with a knife. The Mieshka felt solid at her back. It should have made her feel dangerous, but instead she felt like a carrier pigeon being coaxed to having something tied to its leg.

“The Water Mage, Mieshka, is not stupid enough to send a bomb to kill a Fire Mage.”

She swallowed and remembered to breathe. Then he threw her another kind of bomb.

“We lost her in Southside.”

“What?”

“Kitty. You’re looking for her, aren’t you?”

This close, she could see his eyes. They watched her with the same meticulous care they gave everything, though there was a trace of amusement in his smile.

“Oh. Thanks. I’ll, uh, get this to him.”

“I expect you will.

She tried not to relax too much when he turned to leave. He’d probably sense it.

What she didn’t realize was that he knew all her little secrets. He knew her tricks and he knew her trades. He knew her back-up plans and he knew her weaknesses. He knew how to dodge her lightning, and that made him near invincible to her.

He wondered if he could kill a god.

He doubted it. His benefactor wasn’t that stupid.

Mieshka was lost. She probably hadn’t managed to get anywhere near Southside, which was just as well because Kitty probably wouldn’t be there. No one stuck around with Roger on their tail.

She grumbled from one dark alley to another, all with varying heights and all narrow enough for her to touch both walls easily. Her left hand habitually brushed the wall, feeling her way along. A lot of these alleys had little or no lighting, and Mieshka was a member of the clumsy club. It was her legs, she blamed, they were too long and she felt like a giraffe. She stubbed her toe on a box and sent it forward a few inches. She could see its shape by the next alley’s faint glow.

Light
. She picked her way to the corner.

To Mieshka’s joy, someone had strung the rafters with Christmas lights. The colours of the strings changed periodically down the alley, but they made her pay more attention to the beams. Rafters like these were common in the underground city, wedged between outer walls. Supposedly, they prevented the buildings from shifting too much. There was a set of stairs at the end.

“Hey. Hey!”

She looked up.

“Hi.”

A pair of well-worn soles stood on the rafter above her. She could see their red tips poking out over the wood. She moved back from the alley’s entrance and found a pair of legs squatting over them. A face peered down at her.

“It’s dangerous down there,” said the stranger, who balanced on the beam with her wrists resting on her knees. A gleam caught Mieshka’s eye, and she noticed one of the hands held a gun. It was casually pointed at her head.

Mieshka moved back another step, swallowed a jump of adrenaline, and felt the corner of the intersecting alley nudge the back of her arm. She kept her voice steady.

“It’s dangerous up there. I could fall.”

“I suppose,” said the woman, and Mieshka’s eyes followed the gun’s barrel as the woman lifted it and aimed it farther down the alley.

“But down there, he could get you.”

Fear tightened her stomach, and she felt it turn in her gut. Despite herself, Mieshka turned and followed the gun’s aim. The alley behind her wasn’t nearly so festive, and the rafters lifted to give the woman an open range in the narrow maze. There didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about the empty alley. Just the usual darkness they came with, the same as what she’d just been stumbling around in.

But something moved in the dark. It was subtle and quick. She could have imagined it, except it happened again with the same velvet smoothness. The dark of the alley seemed much more alive for it.

Bang!

Mieshka jumped, and the shadow did too. She was deaf for a few seconds after, and when her hearing returned, it came with a ringing. It wasn’t just the bullet the woman had fired. Mieshka had seen a form jump away from a blinding, dancing arc of electricity. The Christmas lights flickered.

“There’s a chain ladder on the wall a little way back.” said the stranger over the ringing in her ears, and Mieshka didn’t need telling a second time. She turned and ran, which is what a Mieshka does best.

Bang!

This time she heard it: a loud thunderclap with the gun’s retort. She didn’t look back a second time. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know who ‘he’ was until she could look down on him. She almost missed the chain, but luckily some lights were wrapped around the top rung. She scrambled up it.

“You bitch, can’t you leave me in peace?”

It wasn’t the woman talking. This voice was male and odd in a way that made Mieshka scramble harder. It spoke slowly, and its pitch wavered a tiny bit through the sentence. The ladder jangled and swung stubbornly.

Bang!

Another thunderclap boomed through the scene, and the flash left little dots in Mieshka’s vision. There was a shriek, and something scraped the wall. Mieshka jumped, grabbed the highest chain she could, and pulled her legs up to push against the wall. She ran out of ladder as she reached the rafter. Something scraped on the ground below her as she jumped for the beam. Then the woman was there and pulling her up. A few seconds later, Mieshka was straddling over the support with her legs curled up and out of reach of whatever was below.

She looked down and saw a cat.

A kitten.

“Quick, get the ladder up,” said the woman, aiming the gun at the kitten. The kitten looked up at Mieshka with piercing blue eyes. Even in the alley’s gloom, she could see those eyes. It had a blotched grey coat.

“What the f—” said Mieshka, but stopped when the kitten moved.

She wasn’t sure why the movement drew her attention, when she really should have been focused on the gun, but she looked down.

The kitten was reaching for the ladder. Her breath caught when she realized what she was seeing. It shouldn’t have been able to reach the ladder, but its foreleg had grown grotesquely long for the act. It caught her stare and pulled its lips into a sneer.

“What’s wrong? thought I was a cute little kitty?” It snarled over the last word, and those teeth came much closer than she was comfortable with.

But not high enough to reach the beams. Mieshka hooked the ladder with a foot, and pulled it out of its reach. The woman grabbed the rest of it and draped it over the wood. The kitten-thing edged along Mieshka’s gaze, and slid back into a smaller form as it paced. it was a grownup version of the kitten she’d first seen, with long, skinny limbs, and a longer face. It had very prominent canine teeth, and his eyes, which she now saw were sunken into his face, never wavered from her. Its long tail moved madly, and a shadow snake writhed on the floor to its beat.

“What the hell?”

“It’s complicated,” said the woman. She was several skin tones darker than Mieshka. Her hair was black, and pulled into a rough ponytail. There were lines of fatigue under her eyes. The hand that held the gun shook. A number of hairs strayed from the ponytail, completing the image of someone wanting for coffee.

“You’re Kitty, right?”

“Yeah,” said the woman who watched the cat.

“Is he—”

“No, he’s not the reason I’m called Kitty.”

“Ah.”

“He used to live in my head. No one knew about him till a week ago.”

Maybe that explained the ‘mental condition.’ Mieshka decided to digest that later.

“When you killed that guy?” she said.

Kitty looked up, and Mieshka could see the gleam of light in her eyes.

“That wasn’t me.”

Mieshka raised an eyebrow.

“That was him.”

Mieshka looked down for a long moment. The shadows had grown around the cat, and they seemed to swim to his call. The black blotches of his coat bled like an ink-wash painting, and lingered in the air where he’d been. His face twisted in her gaze, and fury bristled his back. She could feel their gaze, like a poison in her mind. She believed Kitty.