Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) (29 page)
Read Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) Online
Authors: Jacques Antoine
She ducked behind a fancy hotel complex at the corner of West Washington Street and cut across to Poplar Avenue. It might shave a quarter mile off her route, and since it passed through a residential neighborhood, following her undetected would be next to impossible. Adjusting her route as she ran, instead of cutting back to West Street at the end of Poplar, she angled off on Admiral Drive, which led her around the back of the Anne Arundel County Medical Center. She hopped a fence and skirted along the last trickle of Weems Creek, sticking to the tree cover and ample underbrush.
The End of the Trail
Whatever chance Kano had to catch up, or whoever else may have been trying to follow her, it probably evaporated well before Admiral Drive. But even if they’d managed to keep sight of her as far as that, Emily couldn’t imagine how anyone could track her through the lowlands around Weems Creek, whose bed had almost completely dried up this far upstream, though it may have run as recently as three weeks ago, after a rainy spell.
For speed’s sake, she ran along the south bank, even if it left her exposed, since she was darker than anything around her. Once or twice, she crossed over to the more heavily shaded side for cover, and it made running impossible.
Once she’d rounded the Medical Center, and it’s excessively well-lit parking lot, she crossed its main access road and cut over to a nearby bike path. Now completely exposed, her only interest was in speed, and the regular surface of the path allowed her to take the last few hundred yards at a dead run, sprinting the entire way on her toes.
Peering over a concrete abutment, looking for an easy entrance, it occurred to Emily that the security cameras on the parking structure posed a problem: how to enter without alerting the security guards, who were almost certainly not prepared to face Diao Chan’s people. But if Diao Chan chose this location, then she would already have solved this problem, which probably also meant she would be able to use the cameras to track Emily’s arrival.
Stealth was no longer possible, or even useful, Emily concluded, and walked directly into the structure through an entrance ramp on the north end. Mainly empty, except for a few stray cars that had been left overnight, or perhaps belonged to the janitorial staff, her footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and ceiling.
How odd
, she thought,
that she knew almost nothing about Diao Chan, about the way her mind works or what her heart wished for
. They’d met several times in the course of the school year, spoken on a few occasions, and yet she’d developed no sense of who this girl really was. She’d encountered someone like that once before, someone completely closed off to other people, even to her: Ba We. The clone was impervious, unreadable, until he saw his impending death at Emily’s hands, and then he opened up to her completely, with fateful consequences for the two of them… or the three of them. Emily had no expectation that Diao Chan would, or even could, open up to her.
Faced with a choice—upper parking levels or lower sub-levels—she hesitated. Then muttered to herself, “She’s a burrower,” and descended the next ramp she found. Two levels down, she heard voices in the distance and maybe caught a glimpse of a brighter light than elsewhere in the structure, probably one level below where she now stood.
“Why not kill them now?” a male voice asked, in Mandarin.
“We need the
guizi
alive, and more or less in one piece,” a familiar voice replied.
“We can handle her,” another male voice said. “Kill them now.”
“I think not,” the familiar voice said. “Could you handle me so easily?”
“Surely she is no match for you, Madame Diao.”
“I have come, and I am alone,” Emily called down from the top of the last ramp, in as bold a voice as she could manage, hoping for an effect. “Where are my friends?”
The size of the group was daunting, seven men she could see, all in gray suits, standing in a circle on a much smaller, largely empty level, probably used to store mall vehicles. The tinted windows of a nearby van prevented her from seeing inside, but she feared it might contain even more men. Of the ones she could see, some were as large as Jiang Xi, and off to one side, Diao Chan herself, dressed in black, sneered at her. A large work-light cast a hideous glare over the entire scene, which would otherwise have been lit only quite dimly by a fixture near the top of the ramp.
“You are no coward, Tenno-san. I have to give you that.” Diao Chan nodded and her team moved to surround Emily, escorting her down the ramp. “Bring them,” she said, and two men pulled a pair of hooded and bound figures from the van and pushed them to the floor.
Diao Chan pulled the hood off one, revealing Kathy Gunderson relatively unharmed, but still dazed from her ordeal. “This is the one we wanted,” Diao Chan said with a sneer, and then removed the second hood. “And this one tried to stop us, so we brought her, too.”
Stacie’s face was bruised and bloodied, her jaw and cheek swollen on one side, and one eye partially closed.
“Stace, it’s me,” Emily said to rouse her from the stupor of someone who’s been beaten. She blinked her good eye once or twice, and then a dim recognition shone there.
“Em, it’s you,” she croaked out. “You came for us.”
“Enough chit-chat,” Diao Chan snarled. “We have more friends of yours, too.” She beckoned, and two more people emerged from the van: Ruochen Ma and Tim Caspar. “You have been very helpful, Mr. Caspar. We couldn’t have gotten her here without you.”
Gunderson shook off whatever cobwebs remained in her head and looked at Caspar. “Tim, what did you do?”
“I did what it took to settle the score with this DUB, which Casey didn’t have the guts to do.”
“DUB?” Diao Chan asked.
“Dumb Ugly Bitch,” Emily said.
“That’s hardly polite, Mr. Caspar. Still, in view of your services, I think we can overlook it.”
“Tim, no,” Gunderson wailed. “Don’t you know who these people are?”
“Don’t you remember what she did to us in that alley?” he asked. “There was no other way to get back at her, not with her friends protecting her all the time. When she killed Casey, I knew what I had to do. We can’t have her kind in the Navy. What if she ended up commanding
us
?”
“So you slipped those messages into Trowbridge’s bag?” Emily asked. “I knew there had to be an inside man. Were you hoping to incriminate him, too?”
“Why not? The way he fawned over you, he deserves whatever happens to him.”
“All true,” Diao Chan said, now beginning to gloat. “Except for the part about killing Mr. Bauer. I did that, with Mr. Caspar’s help.”
Gunderson stared at her, mouth agape, and Caspar cried out, “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Oh, yes, you were a veritable fountain of information, about who hates Tenno-san, here, who her friends are, and even when Mr. Bauer usually went out each morning to exercise. But that was trivial. The important thing is we could not have isolated her so effectively without your information. And you,” she said, turning to taunt Emily, “now can you see what sort of people you’ve connected yourself to?”
“Tim, you fool,” Gunderson cried out. Meanwhile, Ruochen inched her way back to the van, no doubt hoping not to draw any attention to herself.
“Not so fast, little one,” Diao Chan said, and motioned to one of her men to pull her back. “We haven’t forgotten this little friend of yours,” she said to Emily.
“She’s nothing to me. I thought she was your friend.”
“Don’t lie to me. We know you contacted the traitor, Jiang Xi. Perhaps you thought to protect her family. But all things will be revealed soon enough, Tenno-san, and all our enemies will be destroyed.” She held out her hand, and one of her men handed her a semi-automatic pistol, then seized Ruochen and forced her to her knees.
“If she is not your friend, you won’t care if I blow her brains out,” she said, placing the barrel against the back of Ruochen’s head. Emily shrugged.
“This isn’t what I signed on for,” Caspar cried out, and in that instant Diao Chan swung the gun around and shot him in the chest. The impact drove him back into a concrete pillar, and the terrific noise of the blast seemed still to echo in everyone’s ears as Caspar slid down to the floor.
Once the noise had settled, she nudged Ruochen’s neck with the gun, and the girl shrieked, feeling the barrel a second time, and whimpered quietly. “Shall we reconsider this little one’s fate, Tenno-san?”
“Fine,” Emily said. “Let them go, all of them, and I won’t resist.”
“Bind her,” Diao Chan shrieked, practically delirious with pleasure at her triumph. One of her men, the largest, pulled cuffs from a jacket pocket and let them swing lazily from his fingers. She placed her hands behind her back.
“No, Tenno,” Gunderson cried out unexpectedly. “Can’t you see, she’ll kill us no matter what you do?”
Diao Chan grinned and made a flippant gesture with the gun: “I still can, you know. Remember our deal.”
Emily lowered her head and allowed the large man to step behind her.
When the lights went out, the sudden darkness caught everyone by surprise, and it took a few seconds for eyes to adjust. Until they did, a figure lunging at them from the shadows caused considerable mayhem. The familiar sound of blade on flesh, Emily couldn’t help recognizing it: Kano had arrived. She saw his outline on the right, and one man fell with a groan, another gurgled out his last breath from the floor, and she could see just well enough to follow the glinting blade slice through the back of another’s neck—
maybe not dead yet, but he’ll walk no more
.
The gun roared three times, and in the muzzle flash Emily saw Kano struck at least twice, and once in the chest. He staggered backwards, stunned, and dropped the
wakizashi
he’d used to such deadly effect, and finally collapsed against the van, dead.
Once the light was restored and the carnage fully visible—three men dead, one more, the largest man, bleeding profusely from wounds somewhere on his chest and left leg—Diao Chan bent over to examine Kano.
“One of yours, I think, Tenno-san. He’s still breathing, faintly… probably not for much longer. Shall I finish him?”
“It looks to me like the arithmetic of our situation has changed,” Emily said. “Three dead, another wounded, only three left to help you, and tending to the big guy will slow you down. Let my friends go now… cut them loose and let them walk up the ramp, and I won’t cause any trouble.”
Diao Chan picked up the
wakizashi
, hefted it in one hand, as if she might actually accept Emily’s offer. Standing over Stacie, she sneered, raised the gun and fired twice into the wounded man’s chest, then watched as his respiration ceased. The three remaining men stepped back, stunned, until she barked out an order Emily didn’t understand, and they straightened up—probably more frightened of Diao Chan than anything else.
“I think I’ve solved your arithmetic problem, and what makes you think I need your cooperation, when I can just beat it out of you?”
“Because you need me alive.”
“You think you’re strong enough to face me? How do the tough guys in the movies say it... ‘you want a shot at the title?’ Fine.”
She handed the gun and short sword to one of her men, who began to protest to “Madame.” She waved him off and made a slang remark Emily couldn’t quite follow which seemed to reassure all three men. It must have been a joke, perhaps in Cantonese, about how she would easily defeat the
riben guizi
, the Japanese devil.
Emily took a deep breath and faced her enemy. “People have mistaken me for a demon before.”
I am Death
Events and images swirled through Kathy Gunderson’s mind so rapidly—could she ever have dreamt of what she saw unfolding in front of her at this moment? Her enemy, and her enemy’s friends risked everything to protect her, had probably been doing it all year, though she hardly wished to face such a harrowing thought.
She remembered arguing with Carnot the other night and running afoul of men in an alley, then waking up in that van and seeing how they’d beaten Stacie. She must have followed and tried to save her in that alley… but why would she do that for her? How long had she been under that hood, hours… days? Then this foul, evil woman, beautiful in a way that made her even more terrifying, who would kill without hesitation, she brought them to this concrete hole in the ground, and Kathy knew it might as well be her grave.
She watched as the two of them stood quietly, facing each other, the one seething with focused, malevolent energy, the other calm, seemingly unaware of the peril surrounding her, merely breathing. One in a fighting stance, the other holding herself somehow differently, a hand extended as if in greeting, the other ready to receive a gift.
When the violence began, Kathy’s eyes could barely follow Diao Chan’s hands, they moved so quickly. At first, Tenno seemed able to keep up, to block and counter. Kathy was no judge of these things, but as invincible as Tenno had seemed that night in Cumberland Court, when she handled Casey, Caspar and Martens effortlessly, she seemed vulnerable now, even overmatched. Kathy knew all their lives now depended on her.
The blow, when it came, fist striking face, was not nearly as loud as Kathy thought it would be. Tenno spun away from Diao Chan, lost her footing and fell to the floor. Diao Chan’s men cackled their approval.
“Tenno-san, do you still think you can resist?” Diao Chan said.
Kathy cringed as Tenno picked herself up, and stood opposite. Another sequence of strikes and blocks, kicks and grabs, Tenno managed to gain what looked like the upper hand until Diao Chan turned the tables in a sudden pivot and kick to Tenno’s chest, which sent her tumbling backwards. The expression on her face no longer seemed impervious in the way that had so infuriated Kathy and her friends. Now shaken, her eyes radiated doubt instead of that dark fire. Kathy gasped to see it.
When Tenno picked herself up once more, Diao Chan attacked again, this time before she could set herself, a spinning kick that caught Tenno on the side of the face, another quiet contact that drove her to the floor again near one of the men. His foot dangled over her head, ready to come crashing down, and Kathy thought this was the end. Even when Tenno swept his other foot, upending him as she spun away and sprang up again, Kathy thought she could feel the desperation in Tenno’s heart.
Stacie must feel it, too, she thought, glancing over to see her struggling to free her hands, newly revived from her stupor. If only she could be of some help, strong and tough as she’d always seemed in the past. But if Tenno couldn’t stand up to Diao Chan, what could Stacie hope to accomplish? Kathy shifted her position to conceal her efforts.
Speaking to her men, Diao Chan said something in what Kathy assumed was Chinese, an order perhaps, or a joke at her victim’s expense. Then she turned to Tenno and laughed.
“Now you see how much better my father’s experiment is than your grandfather’s could ever be.”
“I am no genetic experiment,” Emily muttered. “Haven’t you learned yet… there is only training.”
“Pathetic,” Diao Chan said. “Tang Tian used to say the same thing. But your Japanese mysticism will not save you, or them, just as it could not save him. We know all about the Crown Princess’s little schemes, and the fable she uses to seduce her agents, the
samurai
who believe you are a
Genji
, or that it could make any difference even if you were.” She turned to sneer at the body of the man lying by the van. “I imagine he’s just another one of those fools, and you see what became of him.”
Bizarre as that exchange seemed to Kathy, she was at least heartened to see a spark of defiance in Tenno’s eyes. If only she could rally.
Diao Chan’s next onslaught seemed even fiercer than before, as if now she meant to kill and not merely subdue. But Tenno’s response was different this time. Instead of blocking and striking, dueling her opponent, she merely leaned away from the attack, elusive as water or air. Then in a sudden return, just when Diao Chan’s frustration peeked out from her otherwise stony mien, Tenno slapped an errant punch away, tying her opponent’s arms up in the inertia of the miss, and leaned her full weight forward into a short, low punch to Diao Chan’s ribs, followed by a quick, loud slap to her face.
As Diao Chan staggered back, stunned by the sudden reversal, Tenno smiled at her and tilted her head, almost like some sort of feral animal contemplating its prey. Enraged, Diao Chan roared something incoherent, and charged ahead, looking to strike at her enemy with hands or feet, even claws if she’d had any. But Tenno side-stepped the onslaught, pivoting as Diao Chan went by, and brought a high kick around to the back of her head, sending her face first into the concrete floor.
“Being able to take a punch is as important as being able to deliver one,” Tenno said. “Perhaps your father never taught you that lesson.”
With a broad scrape across her cheek and forehead, Diao Chan picked herself up and faced Tenno once again, taking a breath and spreading her arms horizontally to settle herself, then drawing them back together into a fighting stance. Tenno tilted her head once again as she eyed her opponent darkly, then shifted her weight onto her back foot and rotated her arms in widely overlapping circles. Kathy found the movement of her hands mesmerizing, as if the curves they traced prevented her from focusing.
The movement of Diao Chan’s feet was so quick, Kathy couldn’t understand how she hadn’t managed to strike Tenno’s face. But once again, elusive as the air, Tenno evaded each strike without blocking. Fierce combinations, kicks and hand-strikes all somehow went awry, though Kathy could hardly see how. But she could sense Diao Chan’s frustration growing, as well as the deteriorating mood of her men as they watched from the side. Would they dare intervene?
In what seemed a desperate effort, Diao Chan swung wildly for the face, and this time Tenno blocked, or at least swatted the fist aside, then stepped forward to deliver a series of strikes to Diao Chan’s chest and head. None of them were overpowering, all were controlled, balanced by the movement of Tenno’s hips and shoulders. Kathy couldn’t see all the blows, but she could see the toll they took on Diao Chan, who’d been hit so many times she began to seem intoxicated. When she stumbled back to get out of range, Tenno crossed one foot behind the other and kicked her hard in the center of her chest, sending Diao Chan crashing into the concrete wall.
Kathy could hardly take her eyes off their enemy, leaning against the wall, searching her face to see if any fight remained in her, and it took a moment for those dark, hateful eyes to find a focus again. When they did, she shrieked something in Chinese, and Kathy turned to see one of the men pointing the gun at Tenno, his other hand still holding the sword Tenno’s friend had dropped.
With the sound of the blast, magnified by the echo chamber of the parking garage, Kathy hardly noticed Stacie fling herself in front of Tenno, letting the bullet hit her square in the chest, then slump to the floor, inert as a sack of potatoes. She’d managed to free herself, thank goodness... but at what cost? The magnitude of her sacrifice would probably hit home later. For now, through the swirl of emotions, Kathy felt something like relief—her protector still lived.
In the confusion of smoke and noise, her eyes dazzled by the muzzle flash, she could barely follow what happened next. Somehow, Tenno had pivoted around Stacie’s body before the man could fire again, and in the spin, she seized his wrist and smashed through the back of his elbow with her free hand. The gun clattered on the floor as he howled in agony, and before she knew it, Tenno had wrenched the sword away, gripping it now like a dagger with the tip pointing at the floor. She swung it up along his thigh, slicing through his belt and tearing a huge gash in his belly and chest. The same motion seemed to carry her around, hacking through the side of a second man’s neck, a spray of blood blossoming behind her as she let the movement carry her past him, to slash across the throat of the last man, who’d been as transfixed as Kathy by the sudden burst of violence Tenno had just unleashed.
Did she conceal that spirit inside herself all the time? It wasn’t difficult to see why someone capable of such things might go to great lengths, even adopt an attitude of extreme reserve, to keep it in check. Kathy’s reassessment of her entire relationship with Tenno, of the meaning of her own behavior, percolated behind her eyes as she watched her fighting for their lives.
But in the meantime, Diao Chan had managed to get hold of the gun and raised her arm toward Kathy. She tried to yell some defiant threat—“Stop or I’ll shoot her!”—but Tenno leapt at her anyway, and when she panicked and tried to bring the gun around to shoot Tenno herself, she was too slow. The blade sliced down through Diao Chan’s forearm with the slick sound of wind whistling through a bamboo grove.
What did it take to slice through bone?
Kathy hardly knew. The gun, still in the grip of the hand, came to rest on the floor, the fingers flexing in one last spasm that no longer responded to the rest of the arm.
They stared at each other for what seemed like forever to Kathy, though it probably lasted less than a second, the one girl’s eyes finally tamed by the loss of a limb, strangely not registering the pain it must entail, her face bruised and bloody, the other’s eyes almost too severe to behold.
“Who
are
you?” Diao Chan hissed at her now triumphant enemy.
Tenno replied in a tone so dark as practically not to come from her body: “I am death.”
In a stroke as fast as thought, she pivoted away from Diao Chan and then back around towards her, letting the blade pass through her neck as if it were slicing water. Perhaps Diao Chan didn’t quite know what had happened, her expression showing only perplexity… until her head tipped slightly to one side, and then slid off her shoulder, making a dull thump as it hit the concrete floor and rolled away.
The next moment, as she cut Kathy loose, her eyes softened with sympathy and she turned to cradle Stacie’s head in her arms, her shoulders shaking.
Could this angel of death be weeping?
Kathy tried to stand—her legs feeble from bondage—and put her hand on the back of Tenno’s neck.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Stacie was so brave. I feel like it’s my fault. She wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me.”
Tenno turned to look at her, and in her eyes Kathy saw something she could hardly have expected, a serenity in the depths of those black eyes, as if she’d resigned herself to all the suffering the world had to offer, absorbed it and was ready to pass over to another one. The imperviousness that had so irritated her these past few years—Kathy now saw its true meaning.
“It’s not your fault,” Tenno said. “You didn’t kill anyone.”
Kathy was grateful for the acknowledgment, even if the tone of voice it came in seemed harder than steel. But what else could she hope for, given the circumstances, and the weight of her own conscience? The moment called for mourning more than reassurance.