Striper Assassin (35 page)

Eliana turns her head slightly, looks at him from the corners of her eyes, but says nothing.

It is typical.

40

Tikki turns in off the street, goes through the door of the row house in northeast Philly, and briefly pauses in the foyer. On the stairs the slag with bright orange hair and teeth filed to points looks at her a moment, then lowers the muzzle of his shotgun toward the floor. Tikki stares at him an instant longer, then heads up the stairs. She doesn’t like people pointing guns at her, even if it is their job.

Otherwise, the evening has gone well. Adama laid out his plan for her upcoming assassination of Bennari Ohashi, yakuza executive. It’s a good plan. Tikki doubts she’ll have any problems. Whatever doubts she may have entertained about Adama must have been the product of her own paranoia. The man is too much a predator to betray her. He takes too great a pleasure in the kill to ever turn against her. What could possibly have been wrong with her head that she might have suspected him of treachery? She ponders that at some length, but comes up with nothing. She must have been crazy.

Out of her head.

She reaches the top of the stairs, tugs the door open and steps into the fifth floor hallway. A strange smell stops her cold. Before she can identify it, something hits her hard from above and behind, driving her flat to the floor.

What’s going on?
She’s being attacked, ambushed. Tikki realizes that even as she feels the impact against the back of her head and shoulders as some incredible weight thrusts her down onto her belly, banging the breath from her lungs.

Before she can even start to fight, she feels a cold hard pain starting somewhere around her right kidney, then rising, tearing up through her back, and then it’s too much. Over before it began. Weakness assails her. The pain smothers her mind.

She hears her heart pounding. Fading into silence…

* * *

Raman retracts the claws of his snapblades into his forearm mount and gets up onto his feet. There can be little doubt that the blood-drenched form on the floor is Striper. She wears her signature red and black paint and synthleather clothing. The gory wound stretching from near-hip to shoulder makes her condition clear. Raman has seen many such wounds. A DocWagon emergency response team would not be able to revive Striper now. The damage his claws have inflicted is too extensive, too vicious. Striper is dead. His work is complete.

The fact only confirms his own beliefs. No one is invincible. No one is forever so cautious or clever or quick as to be immune to death. For every being that kills there is another capable of killing it. Somewhere in the world there is one who is fully capable of killing even him. Perhaps Striper herself might have killed him, had she known the way, had she been sent to kill him before he had been sent to do her.

Raman turns toward the stairs, but then stops, hearing something. A rasping breath, a rustling of synthleather. A glance back over his shoulder gives him a brief view of the impossible. Striper is up on one knee. Her hand is lifting a heavy automatic. Even as Raman tugs the throwing knife from beneath his left jacket sleeve, the gun roars, and the first slugs pound into his ribs.

He staggers back, incredulous.

The roaring of the gun rises like thunder.

* * *

Her back feels like shredded rubber, the pain is intense, but she’s handled worse. She’s healing rapidly. Her strength is returning. The water filling her eyes is a distraction, but she can handle that too.

The Kang clicks empty.

Staggering to her feet, Tikki puts one shoulder to the corridor wall and thumbs the Kang’s magazine release. Her free hand is ramming a fresh magazine home even as the empty one drops to the floor. The fire burning in her back is an imperious command—her hands know how to respond. She snaps the slide, points and opens fire. The deafening reports slam against the walls of the corridor and reverberate. The rising calamity of noise becomes an apocalyptic storm of thunder, a storm to end all storms. Her big, synthleather-clad attacker staggers back against the wall at the end of the corridor. She keeps right on shooting. Blood splashes the wall. The killer falls to one knee. She keeps right on shooting. A knife or something falls from the killer’s hand to skitter along the floor. The Kang clicks empty. Tikki rams a fresh clip home, snaps the slide, lifts the gun and again opens fire. She’s got at least two more full clips in her pockets and she’s going to make damn certain that anything, anyone or anybody who tries to skrag her winds up dead dead dead dead dead.

Something incredible happens then. She begins to hallucinate. Nothing like this has ever happened before and it’s such a convincing lie that she feels a sudden sharp pang of fear.

The killer is changing. Flesh and clothing ripple and twitch. The killer’s face becomes a furry, blood-splashed mask. His eyes swell into huge orbs that glint red with the light. His nose and jaw thrust forward. Bared teeth become fangs. Between one deafening blast from the Kang and the next, the killer’s whole body grows and stretches. Torn and tattered clothing falls to the floor. Arms form into massive forelegs. A long, sinuous tail rises into view. Tikki whips her free hand across her eyes, but the lie remains. She’s looking at herself in a mirror, shooting at something that looks just like she does when in her natural form.

It’s impossible.

The creature is roaring and lunging forward, bounding up as if to bowl her over, and she can’t smell anything but her own sweat and blood and the exhaust of the gun. The roaring weapon suddenly seems so utterly impotent it’s a joke.

The Kang falls from her hand as she staggers back. Then the creature hits, driving her right off her feet.

* * *

The pain is a madness driving him to greater madness, compelling him to assume his other form, his animal form, propelling him down the corridor toward the very source of his pain.

All thoughts of biz are chased away by the pain. Primal truths rule him now. To stop the pain, he must either run away or put an end to the source of his pain, and he cannot run away. To run away is to surrender, to admit defeat. Better he should die here and now than give in to another’s power.

As he charges, the female drops her gun and staggers back, but that is irrelevant. The she’s attack must be answered. The pain must be satisfied. He bounds onto his hind legs and drives his forepaws into her chest and slams her down, flat to the floor. Momentum carries him right over her and past. He tears at the floor, turning, reversing direction. Bounding back, he drops his head to seize the she’s neck in his jaws, but what he sees then stops him short.

Her jaws thrust forward. Red and black-striped fur rushes over her face. Her body swells to almost twice its original size. A single swipe of onyx claws as swift and sharp as his own proves beyond any question the reality of what he is seeing.

Raman bounds up and back, back toward the door to the stairs, leaping away from this creature that suddenly seems at least as big as him, if not bigger, and just as deadly.

The she rolls onto her belly, then rises onto four powerfully muscled legs and turns to face him, roaring, roaring even louder than he, filling the air with fury, her ears laid back, fangs bared and gleaming. Raman begins to roar in answer, but then falls silent, astonished.
The she is shaped just like him!
Their fur is colored differently, but otherwise they might have been cast from a single mold. Confusing thoughts, some only half-formed, rush helter-skelter through his mind. He has been across half the world and never encountered another creature like himself. Where did this
she
come from?

Could they be brother and sister?

Abruptly, the she is right in his face, roaring, pounding at him, slashing with her claws. It’s a brief but frenetic exchange of blow and counterblow, more challenging than any Raman can recall. He bounds back and away with surprise, barely aware of the new blood streaming down from around his face, down his shoulders and forelegs. He immediately bounds up onto his hind legs, roaring, and drops to all fours and charges. The female meets him head-on, roaring and slashing, but this time she is the one to withdraw, bounding up, leaping away.

Then they’re facing one another from barely two meters distant, panting huskily, fangs bared, ears laid flat. Growling, snarling. Old pains replaced by new. Blood smearing their fur.

Abruptly, the she’s ears straighten up. Raman hesitates, uncertain about this new sign. Everything is happening so fast. Barely an instant seems to have elapsed since the she began shooting at him. Everything before that now seems irrelevant. Everything that happened before the she changed shape suddenly seems completely irrelevant.

Abruptly, without warning, the she bolts right past his shoulder.

Running away…?

No—Raman turns and sees a man standing in the doorway to the stairs. The man holds a gun, a shotgun. The she bounds up in front of the man, launching herself at him. The gun roars and the she roars—roars louder than ever before—and both she and man fall out of sight, disappearing down the stairs.

Raman claws at the floor, abruptly tearing after them.

He finds them on the landing one flight down.

The man is sprawled, a gore-drenched corpse. The she stands waiting, facing him, facing the stairs. She opens her mouth a bit, but makes no show of baring her teeth as Raman descends the stairs, stopping just short of the landing. The she advances, meets him nose-to-nose, sniffing, sniffing him all over, all over his face. Raman sniffs at her too. Her scent is unlike anything he’s smelled before, musky and powerful, and… Different. Strange, exotic, incredibly and overpoweringly female. It reaches right into his groin, clenching, squeezing, gripping him with excitement. Only as several more moments pass does he notice the new blood matting the fur on the she’s right shoulder and foreleg. This is evidence of the wound she took charging the man with the shotgun. Why did she do that? Raman wonders about it, in addition to everything else afflicting his brain.

Could it be that she had meant to protect him?

No one has ever done that before.

* * *

If she’s dreaming, she’s having the dream of a lifetime, because there’s no telling truth from fantasy. She pauses at the edge of the landing, looking up, stretching her neck to meet the illusion eye-to-eye and nose-to-nose, as if she might uncover the truth, discover the flaw in the disguise, sniff him out. The male… what? Tiger…?
Weretiger!
He seems to have healed most of his wounds, just like her, faster than any human. She sniffs at his face, not quite incredulous, but seeking some clue, some scent, that will make rational sense of all this.

He even
smells
real, as real as she.

She can hardly believe it.

The only other male of her kind she’s ever known is her brother, Gnao. A
male Weretiger…
The idea alone fills her with a strange excitement she can’t control, much less comprehend. She just stands there breathing his scent till other realities intrude, creeping into her awareness, shouts from downstairs, the far-off peal of a siren. The other Weretiger, the
male Weretiger,
looks at her and grumbles deep and low, far back in his throat. The sound and the smells that come with it speak of danger, alarm. Absolutely nothing about him now speaks of aggression. That makes up her mind.

She brushes past him, heading up. At the top of the flight, she stops and looks back. The male returns her gaze, otherwise unmoving. How to tell him what she wants? She imagines something like a wave of the hand, but her forelegs won’t move like that. She shakes her head, trying to motion for him to follow, then realizes she’s only wasting time. Already, somebody several floors below is pounding up the stairs. She changes, changes back into her human guise, and stands up buck naked.

“Slot and run.”

Something totally inscrutable rumbles in the male’s throat, then he changes, too. In human form, he seems only about as tall as Tikki, but much broader, far more heavily built. Husky even for a male, with lots of kinky black hair. He looks like a cross between some dark brand of Amerind and a native of Delhi, India. At a glance, he seems to have all the standard male equipment and in proportions she considers pleasing.

Tikki hustles up the hall, kicking torn and split-open clothes out of her way, once slipping on a smear of blood. She retrieves the Kang, the male collects his knives. She keys the locks to her apartment on the left and motions the male inside.

The moment the door is shut, he says something in a voice low and deep and intensely masculine, and in a language Tikki doesn’t know. She lifts her hands, shakes her head, and turns and walks straight to the closet. The only clothes she’s got that might fit the male come in the form of an oversized black duster. She throws it at him, then hurriedly pulls on a blouse, slacks, boots, and a jacket, then gets spare ammo for the Kang. The male speaks again, another bad choice of tongues. Whatever it is, she doesn’t know it, doesn’t even recognize it.

As she turns back to the male, he looks at her and says, in thickly accented English. “What… are you?”

For about one second, she wonders what that means; then she’s out of time. Voices are carrying into the hallway. She can hear them clearly through the wall. She smells cop, scents that go with cops. That makes it past time to flee. She shoves open one of the windows and leads the male onto the roof of the building near door. From there, it’s an easy run to the fire escape three rooftops over. The male follows her like a shadow.