Lethal Engagement (An Unbounded Novella) (13 page)

“Keene, I found him,” I said.

The man squeezed his trigger.

BURNING PAIN SLICED INTO MY
upper arm as I reappeared behind the big man. Fortunately, he was a lousy shot. Unfortunately, I hadn’t shifted fast enough to avoid the bullet. Deep red poured down the powder blue of my right sleeve. My fingers lost their grip on my gun, and it clunked to the ground. Unlike with my knives, I wasn’t nearly as good shooting with my left, so I didn’t bother to pick it up. The big man started to turn.

“What’s happening?” Keene shouted in my ear.

Ignoring him, I kicked hard, whipping around to jab my foot into the side of the Hunter’s knee. He went down with a satisfying crunch, his weight working in my favor. But there was still his gun. I shifted to his other side as he tried to aim at me.

My arm felt numb now, as though my body was so overloaded on pain that it couldn’t feel at all.

Good.

Lashing out with another right kick, I sent his gun clattering over the rooftop. He roared and lunged to his feet, his good knee holding his weight. I punched him hard in the stomach, but my blow bounced off without seeming to hurt him in the least.

Remind me not to pick a fight with Santa Claus,
I thought.

Keene shouted in my ear, “Jace is almost there!”

“Shut up! I’m trying to concentrate.” I was so going to thump him hard the next time I saw him.

The big Hunter kept coming, arms wide as if to crush me to death. I threw my larger knife from the sheath on my leg. The metal sang as it embedded into the softness of his belly. He howled and clutched at it. I had another knife ready, but he backed away, nearly collapsing when he stepped down on his bad knee.

“Run and I’ll put this in the back of your neck,” I threatened. The numbness in my arm was fading now. Lurking somewhere was an agony I knew I’d have to embrace sooner or later.

A noise made me shift instinctively. I appeared once more behind the big man, expecting to see the first sniper with a gun in his hand. Instead, it was Jace, a grin on his face that was almost happy. He stood over the first sniper, one gun pointed down at him and another at Santa Claus.

My shoulders sagged and the pain finally came—blinding, white hot. I bit my lip to keep from crying out.

“Sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” Jace said.

I reached for numbers, focusing on them to push back the pain. “I managed.”

“Yeah. You barely saved any for me.” He sounded disappointed.

I stepped closer to Santa Claus, who was trembling, his breath coming in gasps. He’d balled up his plaid shirt and was holding it against his wound, my knife still inside him. “They’ve seen me shift, and we have enough problems.” Without mortals having proof of our abilities, I meant.

“We’ll get them to Ava and Erin after we question them. They’ll never remember meeting us.” Jace’s grin became sinister.

The big man didn’t resist as I guided him to his knees and pushed my knife against the front of his neck. The sun glinted off the blade, turning it bright with promise. Ever beckoning. “Are there any more snipers?” I asked the Hunter.

“Oh, just kill him,” Jace said. “I know how you love to play with your knives. I’ll get the information from this one.” He waved a gun over the sprawled man’s heart.

Jace was bluffing, of course. We would kill them if we had to, but only in self-defense, not for information. Lucky for them, we weren’t Emporium.

“One more!” huffed the big man. “Over . . . in that building. Third . . . window . . . on right.” He flung out an arm before bringing his hand back to his stomach wound.

Jace scowled. “Great.”

“You hear that?” I said to Keene. “Don’t let Patrick leave.” To Jace, I added, “I’ll go.”

“You have enough of a view to shift?” Jace looked doubtfully across the space that separated us from the apartment building.

I nodded. It’d be better if I knew the layout, but if I started to shift into a wall, I could change the number during the shift.

“What about your arm?” Jace asked.

I looked down. The bright red flow might have reduced somewhat as my increased metabolism rushed to repair the wound, but it’d be a few hours until I was really okay. A shot of curequick would help matters greatly. “I’ll be fine. I won’t stop to chit chat with him. But maybe you should keep questioning these guys. Just in case.”

Again the evil grin. “My pleasure.”

“I swear that’s all,” said the sprawled man next to Jace. “Please, my arm’s bleeding an awful lot. Can I wrap my shirt around it?”

“Fine.” Jace stepped back, still keeping guns on both men. Guns that he really didn’t need. He could end both men with a few choice punches. But he wouldn’t. I’d seen him lose the contents of his stomach after a fight, and while he hadn’t done that in a while, death still affected him deeply. He enjoyed practicing his ability in a fair fight, and winning battles against Emporium agents, but he didn’t enjoy hurting mortals, even Hunters.

“Mari, what does he mean about your arm?” Keene said as I reached for the numbers that would put me inside the apartment with the sniper.

“Maybe next time you’ll come along and find out.” The reference to using our abilities together was kind of mean, but I kept my voice light because I wasn’t angry at him. Just in a lot of pain. It would be better to let Jace go for the third guy, but it’d take him too long to get out of this building and inside that one, and now that the pain from my wound had hit, I doubted I could take care of these two alone unless he secured them first, and that would also take time. Every second that passed meant a greater chance of the last sniper getting trigger happy and someone outside that school dying.

Keene was silent for several heartbeats and then, “We’ll talk about it later.”

I shifted, appearing inside a small apartment.

I’d calculated ten feet from the window where I hoped the man would be. I had more numbers prepared that would take me five feet to the left and other coordinates that would take me even further away. There was no need.

A woman, not a man, knelt by the open window. She peered into the scope of her rifle. The lines of her body were rigid, determined. The apartment looked like a home. Maybe hers. She must have come and gone a million times to this place, and if that was the case, not even Stella could have pegged her as someone unusual. She wore headband earmuffs over her long brown hair so she didn’t hear me shift in.

Replacing my knife in my arm sheath, I picked up the lamp from a table and shifted closer to the woman, slamming it down against her temple. It wasn’t elegant or pretty and there might be lasting damage, but it was efficient and I was feeling weak enough that it was all I could do. My left hand did have limits, and this was safer for the woman than my knives. I caught her as she fell, protecting her head from the wood floor. As I laid her down, I recognized her as the woman who fled after the bombing this morning at Patrick’s house.

A wave of hot pain flooded my arm and blackness nibbled at the periphery of my vision. “Keene,” I said. “We’re clear, but I’m not sure I can make it back there now. I need time.” I was a mess anyway. How could I step out of the bathroom at the school covered in blood and with my skirt ripped halfway up the side? And tomorrow I’d never be able to explain to the world how I, supposedly a mortal, healed from a gunshot wound overnight.

“You can’t stay there.”

“I may not have a choice.” I slid to the floor. I’d been in several serious conflicts, but so far I’d been lucky not to get shot. I never dreamed there could be so much pain concentrated in a single spot. I didn’t know how Ritter could continue to fight with multiple bullet wounds.

“Mari,” Keene’s voice was hard. “You need to get out of there now. Shift to the car. I’ll figure out an excuse for the Secret Service. When Patrick leaves the school and no shots come, their friends waiting for the diversion are going to know something’s up and will go searching for their people. Jace has his hands full. Cort’s on his way, but he won’t make it in time, and I have to stay with Patrick.”

“I’ll come in a bit. Give me a minute.” The pain made my thoughts hazy. I just wanted to lie on the ground next to the unconscious woman and sleep for a week or two.

“Shift to the limo now! You remember the location, right?”

That made me find enough strength for a snort. “Of course.”

“Do it now, or I
will
come and get you. Patrick be damned.”

That got my attention. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

“I have your location on my GPS. If that doesn’t change in five seconds, I’m coming for you.”

“Okay!” I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d traced me. We all had tracking chips inside us, which in our line of work came in handy more often than not. Usually, I liked knowing my new “family” could always find me.

“Well?” Keene asked.

Numbers flickered inside my head. I could see Keene’s dark green, and I wanted more than anything to shift to him and let him take it from there, but that would compromise Patrick. My fingers tightened around the woman’s rifle, just in case her friends made it here before Cort did. “I’m shift—”

“—ing.” I finished the word in my new location. But instead of the limo appearing around me, I found myself on the floor in another bathroom. A plush throw rug in front of the sink pillowed my head. It was huge as far as bathrooms were concerned, but I was sick to death of them.

“Mari, what are you doing?” Keene sounded angry now, his voice almost obscured by static.

“I don’t know.” I gave myself up to the darkness.

THE SHARP JAB OF A
needle awoke me. Pain followed, just as stabbing and bright as the overhead lights. Keene knelt beside me, his lean face set. He pulled out the needle and inserted it again in another place and then another until all the liquid in the syringe was gone.

“That better be some kind of painkiller,” I muttered.

“Mixed with curequick.”

He put the needle aside and began cleaning my wound. Pain again rippled through me, but less now than before. I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped my lips.

Keene chuckled. “Well, at least you came back to the house. I wasn’t sure there for a minute until my GPS finally pinpointed your signal.”

I was still lying on the bathroom floor, but there was a real pillow under my head now. A puffy white quilt I recognized as having been on my bed covered all of me but the arm, which lay on several equally white towels. The sleeve of my suit was gone, and the jagged edges told me Keene had cut it with a knife. He finished cleaning, and somehow the thread for stitches was already in his hands. I was happy he’d shot me with painkiller, but my body would get rid of it fast, so I hoped he hurried. I’d heal without the stitches, of course, but they would help the process. The curequick would also increase my already rapid ability to heal by up to five times.

Keene’s hands were gentle, and for no reason at all I thought of how his hands had felt touching other places on my body earlier in his room. The door opened, scattering the thoughts, and Patrick slid inside, shutting the door behind him.

“Okay, I think we’re good,” Patrick said. “The Secret Service doesn’t really believe your story about Mari leaving the bathroom without being seen, but since she’s here and they believe nothing weird happened at the school, they’re letting it go. They did post a couple extra agents here in case there’s any more bombs.” He knelt down next to me, smoothing my hair from my face where it blocked my vision. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too. But really, there wasn’t much danger. I just moved a little too slow. Didn’t know getting shot was this bad.”

Patrick grimaced. “You never get used to it. When the Emporium had me, they used to shoot me just for fun. Then they’d fill me with their version of curequick so I’d recover faster and then do it all again.” He shuddered. “That experience is what made me volunteer to be the face of the Unbounded. We can’t let the Emporium win.”

“Too bad Hunters don’t realize we’re on their side,” I said. “What about Lucinda? She okay?”

“She came back a while ago. She’s downstairs in the kitchen now. The Secret Service agent who works with my cook is apparently out sick today, so Luce volunteered to help with what’s going to be our very late lunch.”