Striper Assassin (42 page)

It is Cat-Who-Walks-Alone. She who is solitary and supreme, committed to no one but Herself and Her own Cat-Nature. She is at home with humanity and the streets and alleys of the city, but ultimately She is self-sufficient, self-satisfied, complete. If sometimes She is cruel, it is because someone has offended or betrayed Her in some way. She is anything but arbitrary.

Cat comes near, sniffs at the ground, then sits, washes her forepaw for several moments, then looks at Eliana for a time. When She speaks, it is with a voice as pure as Nature. “You have secrets.”

Faintly, Eliana smiles. Cat is perceptive and wise. “I have learned many things.”

“Tell me.”

“Others will hear.”

“Then follow.”

Cat leads up the alley, then around to the rear of a building, then down a stairway, then through an open door, then down another stairway, then down a narrow hall, then into a furnace room, then around to a hidden nook behind the furnace. The floor is clean. The softly rumbling furnace makes the air warm and cozy. They sit. Eliana leans down on her elbows. Cat sniffs at her face.

“Tell me your secrets.”

Eliana leans closer to whisper certain secrets into Cat’s ear. Just the ones that matter now. She tells of the mage Adam Malik, and the spirit possessing him, and the great prize which the spirit keeps.

“You have learned all this on your own?”

“Yes. Through sorcery, and other ways.”

“What other ways?”

“I’ve used others to learn things, and to prepare. They know nothing of my ultimate aim. Only that there is something I want. I have kept the greater truth hidden.”

Cat hisses softly with pleasure. “What is this truth? Your true secret. Tell me.”

Eliana leans closer and whispers the truth in Cat’s ear. There is something she wants, a thing she must have.

“You will need help,” Cat murmurs.

Eliana says nothing. To ask help of Cat is to invite rejection. Cat is vain, assured of Her power, and scornful of any who rely on others for help. Yet, She is not so foolish as to always believe the urgings of vanity.

“If you are to succeed,” Cat whispers into Eliana’s ear, “there is a secret you must know.”

“Tell me,” Eliana murmurs.

Cat gazes at her a moment, then whispers into her ear. The secret conveyed confirms her suspicions. She knows now how to proceed.

“I will go now.”

“Yes.” Cat’s eyes gleam. She is pleased.

Eliana returns to her lodge.

Osorthonoriks, her ally, joins her.

“Prepare yourself.”

Osorthonoriks replies telepathically.
I am ready, mistress…

The front of the altar wavers like the surface of a pool of water, then clears. An image appears, that of an alleyway. At the end of the alley stand two Weretigers. Eliana knows them by their auras, their astral forms, and their assumed names: Ripsaw and Striper. A small patch of air shimmers in the shadows behind them, but they do not seem to notice. They speak to each other in low tones. They observe the street. Ripsaw then crosses the street and slips under a car, an old limousine. Striper follows. They meet beside the car, then go around it to the sidewalk and in through the front door of a tenement.

Eliana sneers. Her instructions to the pair were to do their work and get away. The magical defenses she prepared for them were very limited. They place everything in jeopardy—fools! Fortunately, they know nothing of Eliana’s ultimate aim.

A short time passes.

Striper emerges, looks around, then walks swiftly away. Her etheric energies appear tumultuous. She deserves what she gets. Eliana wastes no sympathy on those who disobey.

Others approach the tenement, but discreetly, keeping to the alleyways, hiding within other of the abandoned tenements, just as she instructed. Eliana knows them well. They are her followers. They serve her willingly and require very little in the way of reward. They are in awe of her magic and desire to learn her secrets, to be accepted as apprentice or student. Only one or two have any real potential.

Just before the dawn, the tenement door opens again. An ork emerges. He is a servant of the mage Adam Malik. Minutes later, Malik himself steps through the door and onto the street. Within his etheric form drifts a stygian blackness. This, Eliana knows, is the etheric form of a shadow spirit. The spirit has not only possessed the man. It has hidden its life inside him.

Malik gets into the rear of the limousine, the ork enters through the driver’s door. An instant later, the limo explodes.

The street outside the tenement is engulfed in fire.

From out of the boiling flames comes the form of Adam Malik, now a human torch. The power of the shadow spirit has saved him from the force of the explosion and now protects him from the flames enveloping him.

Eliana sings a soft song of command.

The shimmering patch in the alleyway coalesces into a form like that of a man, but a man of great splendor and beauty. He is neither man nor god, but rather an animus spirit, previously bound. He steps onto the sidewalk and lifts his hands toward the street. As he tosses back his head, a devastating barrage of lightning strikes down out of the night. Within seconds, half a hundred dazzling bolts blast at the staggering, fire-blackened form of Adam Malik. As the lightning strikes, Malik falls. An instant later, a new fire erupts, a massive pillar of boiling fire, roaring toward the dark heavens, completely enveloping Malik’s body.

When the flames subside, only dust remains.

With the death of Adam Malik comes the destruction of the shadow spirit that had hidden its life inside him. The spirit called itself Abbirleth, but its true name, Eliana knows, was Soul-Catcher.

Eliana retires to bathe.

Some hours later, one of her followers enters the small room at the back of her talismonger shop and offers her a metal briefcase. Eliana gestures for the boy to leave the case on a stool, and dismisses him at once. The dirty and disgusting condition of the briefcase brings a sneer of distaste to her lips, but she kneels before it anyway. The case has been twisted and seared by fire, all but melted. She whispers words of power. The briefcase squeals and swells, then snaps open. In a velvet-lined recess lies an enormous white crystal. Eliana takes it carefully into her hands.

Even from a distance, the power of the gem was obvious to her. Now, held in her hands, it is almost overwhelming. She sways with dizziness and immediately cuts out her astral perceptions. Moving with utmost care, she carries the gem downstairs to her lodge, to her velvet-draped ritual altar. There, she examines the gem once more with her astral senses. She apprehends a tenuous connection with one of the greater metaplanes of astral space, a faint, fading link with the native plane of the Soul-Catcher.

Abruptly, she assenses the gems true power. Hidden at its core, an orb of orange-gold orichalcum, infused with the essence of uncounted beings… all victims of violent death.

The gem’s power is dark, but it will earn her many secrets.

A smile slowly forms on her lips.

Cat will be pleased.

Epilogue

“Hands on heads!”

Tikki lifts her hands to the top of her head, and, peripherally, sees Raman do the same. They are standing on either side of Raman’s chopper along the shoulder of a local two-lane highway flanked by heavy woods. The gruff male voice giving the orders comes from somewhere beyond the glaring colored strobes and dazzling, flashing headlights of a car stopped on the shoulder about five meters behind them.

It’s a bronze and his cop car.

So much for taking so-called back roads out of Philly. Tikki didn’t like the idea to begin with. Back roads lead through lightly populated regions where the police have nothing to do but drink soykaf and harass those they deem to be undesirables. She and Raman should have used the major routes of the northeast corridor. The police regulating those routes are so busy they’re happy if people stop killing each other for five minutes at a time.

Tikki glances at Raman. If he feels any chagrin at having gotten them into this, he’s hiding it well. She has a few choice things to tell him once they get clear.

If they get clear.

“Female passenger, advance!” booms the voice from beyond the lights. “Keep your hands on your head!”

Wonderful.

She steps forward, toward the driver’s side of the cop car, from where the voice seems to be coming. Two steps closer to the flaring lights and she has to turn her head aside. Two steps more and she swings her elbows in front of her face. The pain in her eyes has them full of water. She trips and almost falls. The instant she’s beyond the front of the car, the pain is gone. But it’s like stepping from the surface of the sun straight into the bottom of a mine shaft. For an instant, she’s almost blind. Red and blue orbs dash through a world of inky shadows. A large hand catches her right shoulder and thrusts her against the fender of the car.

Hands run quickly over her flanks and belly, down both her legs, then over her back. The MK-7 gas dispenser disappears from her left jacket pocket. The Zimmer narcoject hold-out pistol leaves her right jacket pocket. The Civilian RX-10000 electro-stunner slips out from under the front waistband of her trousers. The Kang slides out of the holster at the small of her back. Various other implements leave the sheaths inside her boot-tops. She blinks the last of the water out of her eyes as her hands are tugged down behind her back. The fingerless gloves on her hands are veiled in a spiderwebbing of feminine black lace, but that doesn’t inhibit their effect. They’re called shock gloves, straight out of the Ares Winter Catalog. Someone pulls them off her hands, then traps her wrists in prisoner-restraint cuffs.

Abruptly, she realizes that there’s only one bronze, one cop. She figures that if he’s going to all the trouble of putting her in cuffs, he isn’t planning to cite anyone for traffic violations. She also supposes that if he’s using both hands to search and cuff her, then his weapon must be in its holster.

He turns her around to face him, then presses against her right shoulder as though he wants her to move toward the rear of the car. She stands facing him.

“Move it!” he growls.

Tikki sneers, and strains. Something hard like metal snaps. Something clinks sharply against the car. Tikki swings her hands out from behind her back. The cop looks down, then an expression of astonishment bursts across his face.

Tikki butts her head against his face, hard.

“Ra!” she shouts.

The cop staggers back, seeming stunned, bleeding from the nose, fumbling with his sidearm. Tikki snatches her electro-stunner from under his belt, puts it to his gut and fires. A brief discharge of eighty thousand volts turns the cop’s legs to water. He slumps to one knee as Raman comes running up. She grabs the cop’s arms and starts dragging him toward the woods. Raman helps, taking the man’s legs.

“We should scrag him,” Raman says.

“No.” Tikki shakes her head. They put the cop down just inside the treeline, where Tikki reclaims her weapons. She’s got the Kang if she needs it, but doesn’t plan to use it unless her back’s to the wall. The only things she intends to kill in the foreseeable future are deer and other four-legs. She’s had enough of killing two-legs, humans. Maybe too much.

Out on the road, a car goes by, slowing, then abruptly speeding up. Did the driver see what happened?

A thought comes to mind.

“Get our gear.”

Raman looks at her for a moment, then hustles off. Tikki gives the cop another jolt. He jerks with the shock, then grunts, acting drunk, like he can’t even sit up. Tikki unloads his sidearm and tosses it deeper into the woods.

The road is empty again as she slides in behind the wheel of the officer’s Nissan Police Interceptor. Raman tosses their gear into the rear seat, then slides in on the passenger side.

“What are we doing?” he says.

“Watch.”

She keys the shifter, presses down hard on the accelerator. The Interceptor moves out, roaring, engine rising to a whine between gears. Another kilometer up the road and Tikki steers the car onto the entrance ramp for the interstate.

“The chopper would have been faster,” Raman remarks. “And less noticeable.”

“You had your turn.”

Now Tikki leads.

There’s a tollbooth up ahead, a few cars sitting in line. Only two of three lanes are open. Tikki steers for the empty lane with the red light over it and finds the console key for the siren, which immediately brawls out, whooping and wailing.

“Hide.”

Raman bends down low.

Tikki puts the cop’s hat on, just to make her silhouette more cop-like. The hat doesn’t fit too well, but then she doesn’t keep it on very long and no one outside the car is going to catch more than a quick glimpse of her. She steers the Interceptor through the tollbooth at something like ninety kilometers per hour, then slaps down even harder on the accelerator. There’s a brief clanging of alarm bells from outside, then the tollbooth is falling rapidly behind.

Tikki keeps her foot hard to the floor. No pursuit immediately comes into view. The lanes ahead merge with the interstate. She cuts the siren, steers over to the far left lane, then cuts the emergency strobes as well. At close to two hundred kilometers per hour, they eat up pavement fast, streaking past other traffic. Tikki veers into the breakdown lane when cars ahead fail to get out of her way.