17.
Sienna
“I guess I have fans everywhere, too,” I said as I stared at Prettyboy. His looks were classically good—sharply defined cheekbones; dark, mysterious eyes. He wasn’t holding himself in an offensive stance; in fact, he looked completely relaxed as he stood in front of me, back against the next table while mine was up against Kat’s.
“I am a great admirer of your work,” he said, and now he giggled, his voice hitting a higher pitch.
“And who could blame you,” I said. “What’s your favorite thing I’ve done? Shredded Sovereign with my teeth? Beat a handcuffed Eric Simmons like a red-headed stepchild when he sexually harassed that waitress? Annihilated that insubstantial mass killer with fire in LA? I could go on, but go ahead—tell me your fave.”
“I like it when you kill anyone,” he said, and it was chilling how casual he was about it. Also, how little tension there was in his body as he admitted—with a smile—that he liked to watch me murder fellow human beings. I’d done the freaking deeds, and I wasn’t that cavalier about it.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, pushing my voice toward menace. This dude was giving off a bad, bad vibe, and people were picking up on it. Folks were already starting to head for the exits, which I thought was sensible; I wished I could follow them. But no, I was stuck here engaging with some shitbrick who thought killing people was “cool.” “You want to see me kill someone up close and personal? Is that your angle? You a voyeur?”
“Yes,” he said, and there was waaaaaaay too much unrequited lust in how he said it. “I want to see death. Very close.”
“You’re certainly heading that way, bucko,” I said, trying to buy time for the dining room to clear. Some stubborn holdouts were still watching things unfold, and I cursed both them and the fact that my days as a redhead were now over. I was running out of shades to dye my hair, and at this rate I’d be going fluorescent with my next dye job.
“Good,” he said with unmistakably demented joy. “I want it. I want to see it. Feel it. Show me … death. Give it to me.”
“That sounds a little closer to what I figured you’d asked her,” I chucked a thumb over my shoulder at Kat. “This death thing kind of a fetish for you? Am I going to have to turn you Fifty Shades of Purple?”
He still smiled, and OH MY HEAVENS was there something terribly wrong with it. “Yes. Please.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “To be clear … are you asking me to—”
He stood, smiling, and his breath came out in a way that reminded me of—nothing I terribly wanted to be reminded of. It was way too sensual, way too close to intimate, and in a public place, no less. “Yes. I want you, Sienna Nealon … to kill me.”
I just stared at him. “Huh,” I said.
For the first time, he evinced a flicker of uncertainty. “… What?”
I blinked. “Well … usually that’s the subtext when someone picks a fight with me nowadays, but kudos to you for having the honesty to say out loud that you’ve got a death wish. ‘I’m going to pick a fight with Sienna Nealon because I want her to kill me.’ That’s bold. And it’s also what always seems to happen when someone starts shit with me, but I mean … just, bravo on having that self-awareness. It’s so refreshing.” I cast a look around the dining room. There were still about twenty or so people scattered around the room and a bunch more clogging the exits as they tried to flee. This was as good as it was going to get unless I got a little more active about it. “Well, what the hell are you idiots just staring for?” I asked, raising my voice to a thunderous volume, “Get the hell out of here so I can kill this idiot like Sean Bean in everything he’s ever been in!”
I can’t imagine most of the people there actually understood what I was saying, but my tone was enough to get the stragglers moving, bringing the gawkers back to life and making them head for the exits. Within a few moments, the room was clear except for one table at the back with five other guys dressed exactly like my dance partner here. Black suits, white shirts, black ties …
Oh, and a few of them were missing all or part of fingers on their left hands, starting with their pinkies. When they caught me looking, they rose, unfolding themselves from the booth, and I rolled my eyes and looked back at Prettyboy. “Yakuza? Really?”
He grinned and inclined his head in a subtle of bows. “I am who I am.”
“Explains why you haven’t lost any fingers,” I muttered, figuring it was time to go for the gusto. He wasn’t nearly far enough away, his stance was pathetic for defense, wide open and poorly positioned to defend, so I decided to gauge how much trouble this bastard was about to give me. Surging forward, I hit him with a short punch to the throat that would have crushed a human’s—or even most metahumans—trachea.
Unfortunately … the only thing that got crushed were my hopes for a brief fight. My hand bounced off his neck like I’d punched a wall, and Prettyboy didn’t even look surprised when I struck him.
“Shit!” I said as I pulled my hand back, shaking it in the universal sign of, “Damn, that hurt.” I had a sudden burst of empathy for Harry that I’d maybe been lacking after the hand-breaking thing at Narita. I stared at Prettyboy, he stared at me. “Achilles?”
He just grinned. “We call it …” And he said something unpronounceable in Japanese.
Then the bastard hit me.
Unfortunately, I did not share his invincible skin. Mine was as pliable as a normal human’s, and so I took it pretty hard. I managed to mitigate the blow somewhat by twisting away at the last second, but still, there’s only so much you can do when a human wrecking ball winds up and tries to level you when you’re inches away from them. It was my own fault, getting caught up in the pain in my hand instead of moving to the next attack in my tactical toolbox—which would probably involve trying to rip this asshole’s soul right out of his body like I was a crazed, red-headed Scot and he was some sort of sexy, brilliant American succubus who was clearly the most misunderstood person on the planet.
Except I wouldn’t have played around; I would have finished the job on his sorry ass.
I flew through the air but only a couple feet, smashing into the wall above Kat as she let out a shriek beneath me. She caught me as I fell, praise be to Little Miss Persephone’s meta-reflexes, and I felt her bare hands on my wrists. There had been a curious shattering sound in my skull as I’d hit the wall and failed to crash through, a sound that told me that a) it was concrete and b) my skull was softer than concrete and my momentum not great enough to overcome the challenges of smashing through.
“Hold still a sec,” Kat muttered, still gripping me skin to skin. I could barely understand her because I’d just experienced skull trauma of the sort usually reserved for people who have just been hit with a falling piano. From the top of the Empire State Building. Or something of the sort.
The black blurring around the edges of my vision faded, and I broke contact with Kat with a subtle, “Thanks,” as I sprang back up five seconds after landing, shaking off the feeling of getting battered and nearly one-shotted by this douchecanoe.
“Don’t mention it,” Kat said, sounding woozy herself, “and don’t expect a second round anytime soon unless you want a new passenger.”
“I like you as a close friend, but not that close, if you know what I mean,” I said. “Also, if you think Harry is creepy now, it would be so much worse if you were in my head when we—”
“Okay, thank you, go fight now,” Kat said, sounding caught between exhausted and repulsed.
Speaking of Harry, I caught a glimpse of him lingering in the doorway, eyes on the five yakuza standing across the room. They were leering at me, but they weren’t moving yet. And Prettyboy was just standing there, doing a little leering of his own as I came up off the mat from my near-first-round knockout.
“I thought you wanted me to kill you,” I said, putting my dukes up and watching my foot work. I was going to need to get in close with this guy, and frankly—and this bothered me at least a little because of the consequences—absorb his soul, since otherwise beating an Achilles with their impenetrable skin and near invulnerability required weapons and powers I no longer had.
“I do,” he said, still smiling. “But do not think I will simply surrender, lie down, and die. You must defeat me.”
“Oh, I’ma defeat you, all right,” I muttered, keeping both eyes on him. “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t asked for that by the time this is done. I’ve killed harder Achilles types than you in my sleep.” Technically true, though Reed had been heavily involved in that, beating the living tar out of Anselmo Serafini and tossing him onto my insensate body, which had been wreathed in superhot flames at the time.
“Tell me more,” he said, just standing there, waiting for me to come at him. “Or better still—show me .”
It was pretty obvious to me he wasn’t just going to stand still and let me absorb him. And he was bound to know about that, because everyone on the freaking planet who had even a nodding acquaintance with the name “Sienna Nealon”—and this guy was way past nodding and into Annie Wilkes territory—knew I absorbed souls through skin-to-skin contact. Whatever his death wish was, it didn’t look like he was down to just be drained, or at least he wasn’t going to simply surrender to it.
Which only left me a few options, none of them great.
I came at him in an obvious jab, something straight out of a boxing match, and he slapped my hand aside. None of my punches were going to do squat to him. If I landed a true, brutal, grand slam haymaker, it might annoy him slightly, and come at the cost of my knuckles getting broken. Achilles were truly, nearly invulnerable, possessing a bone structure that was hard as diamonds and skin that was resistant to blunt force trauma like it had been hardened into steel. Fire worked on it, but unfortunately I didn’t have a blow torch secreted away in my bag. Guns did nothing against these guys. Eyeballs were kind of a weakness, but not much of one; they were slightly more susceptible to a good strike, but I couldn’t really pop them like with any other, normal(ish) meta.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t vulnerable in other ways.
Glancing at the nearest table out of the corner of my eye, I took a mental inventory of the discarded dishes that the patrons had left behind. Rice, ramen, rice, tempura, rice—yakisoba—
Yakisoba noodles in thick brown sauce. Perfect.
I made a feint at Prettyboy and then swept my hand around, grabbing the plate of yakisoba off the table and hurling it into his face from less than two feet away. He must have been expecting to intercept my hand midair, because he slapped at me and knocked it aside—
But not until after I’d loosed the yakisoba right in his face.
There was nothing chemically bad about the dish as far as I knew. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him, it didn’t possess peppers that would irritate his tear ducts. It was just noodles in a nice, thick sauce that’d make him blink for a second and maybe obscure his vision.
That was all I needed, really.
Another flaw of the Achilles was that they were just as susceptible to laws of physics as anyone else. Once Prettyboy had his hands on his face, trying to clear the yakisoba, he was blind as an old beggar, and nicely distracted. I slipped a couple feet to my left, circling around him and avoiding the chairs in my path with a quick jump that placed me just over his right shoulder. He was grasping at his eyes, trying to restore his sight, even though he probably could have just opened his eyes at any time and stared through the blur of sauce without having any problems at all.
The human instinct to protect the eyes is a powerful thing. Even in a being whose eyes couldn’t actually take damage from getting something like yakisoba in them.
I jacked Prettyboy in the back of the head with a haymaker, slamming my fist into the soft-ish tissue at the base of his spine. I got a little hit on the bone, too, which stung me, but also caused him to lurch forward from the force of my donkey punch, and—I suspected, at least—sent his brain hard against his invulnerable skull.
I’d recently proven that an Achilles’s brain was not invulnerable, mostly by turning Rose’s into pudding with a bullet trapped inside her own invincible skull. That gave me a tactical direction to move in, which was to say that my current plan B (since plan A, drain his soul, was being blocked at present) was to use his own invulnerability of skin and bone to turn his head into a makeshift brain blender. I also had a few suspicions that his spinal cord, while more durable than most, was probably not as invincible as the bones protecting it. That was Plan C, though, because I didn’t know if striking him hard in the vertebrae was going to be something I’d get enough time to test, at least not right now. I’d just done it, after all, as hard as I could, and since he wasn’t dead or paralyzed, it suggested I’d need to bring a lot more force to bear on his spine in order to dislodge a vertebra and break the cord.
Right now, though, I was focused on Plan B, turning his brain to slurry. Next: take his legs from underneath him. I couldn’t just bust out his knee joints, either, which was always the quickest way to take a person to the ground, because his knee joints weren’t exactly breakable.
I came around him, circling to behind his left shoulder as he lashed out blindly toward where I’d thrown the punch only a second before. I didn’t bother trying to do what I normally would have, peppering his kidneys with painful blows, because he wouldn’t have felt the pain anyway. Instead, I kept circling and shot my right hand out over his shoulder like I was going to tap him, but kept going until it hovered over his left collarbone. Then I swept my right foot forward at the back of his knees until I just barely touched them. It wasn’t a kick, and it wasn’t a traditional sweep, the kind where you try and deprive your opponent of footing and do them a little damage at the same time. Doing damage to him with a kick was the kind of fruitless stupidity I tried to avoid in my life.
Instead, I just placed my leg there as a brace, and then brought my hand down—relatively gently on his chest, palm flat against his collarbone. I was still wearing my gloves, which was a tactical error, but alas, not one I could remedy right this second. Once my hand was placed, I yanked on Prettyboy, jerking him backward with all the force I could bring to bear. I’d manhandled him once, after all, and it wasn’t like his strength was ridiculously greater than mine.
He staggered backward against my sudden forceful yank, and the back of his knees stumbled over my right leg, which acted as a perfect tripwire. He grabbed futilely—at the air, at me, at anything he could see through his partially noodle-blinded eyes—
Then I sped him up with a little more force applied to his collarbone. He smashed into a table and bounced (!), his invulnerable skin stopping it from doing harm to him. I took advantage of this sudden change of his momentum and spun him, midair, his feet off the ground, his body free of anything to grab hold of or hang on to—
And I hurled him, face first, into the floor and jumped on his back.
“Yee haw!” I announced as his chin thundered into the tile, shattering it. The table he’d just hit skidded and crashed into the next one. “Ride ‘em, cowgirl!” And then I thunderpunched him in the back of the head again.
“Sienna!” Harry shouted, and I realized he was in the middle of a hard squabble with the five yakuza. Two of them were already down, but the other three looked like they were giving him a heckuva a fight. Or at least trying.
I didn’t have much time to process Harry’s warning before I was lurched skyward, thrown off Prettyboy’s back like he was a bucking bronco. I fell way, way short of eight seconds, I reflected as I smashed into the ceiling, which was—thankfully—not concrete and yielded to my skull’s impact.
As I crashed back to the ground, landing on my knees (yes, it hurt as much as you’d expect), I saw Prettyboy roll sideways and out of my crash zone. It stung, not gonna lie, but it could have been a lot worse if I hadn’t caught myself before my face smashed into the ground like a meteor.
“Owww,” I muttered, on all fours. I threw a kick blindly with my right leg and struck Prettyboy. He let out a mild grunt at the impact, and an even milder one as I shoved him, hard, away from me so I could have another second or two of recovery, then snaked my leg back before he could get his hand on it and do more damage to me.
“You …” Prettyboy mumbled, looking a little hazy. Maybe I’d rung his bell a little. I could hope, anyway. He was a few feet away, and on all fours himself. My shove had moved him far enough out that he’d have had to come at me pretty awkwardly in order to get hold of me, but I wasn’t discounting the idea that he might.
“Yeah, me,” I muttered, and grabbed a nearby chair and threw it at his face. You couldn’t exactly block that sort of thing, and he didn’t, though he did throw up a hand and catch it across the back of his wrist without so much as a grimace. Instinct, again; he had nothing to fear from a chair right across the bridge of his nose, yet he took pains to avoid it. “Your fondest dream. I’m not done with you yet, spanky.” I paused. “Also, I’m not usually in the business of fulfilling fantasies for strange men who accost me, but yours—I’m seriously going to fulfill. This kink of yours is right up my alley, pal, but I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it nearly as much as you seem to think you will.”
He shook his head, like he was trying to shrug off what I’d done to him, and for the first time, a look of fury cracked his smiling visage. “You …”
I threw another chair at him, and he tried to block it but the leg cracked him just above the eye, doing exactly nothing. “Stop saying ‘You ’ all dramatically. Your dumb ass already has my full attention. Compose yourself and start speaking like a proper villain, not a drooling moron.” I threw another chair at him and this one got him right in the middle of the forehead because he didn’t bother to block. Now he was learning. “I expect a certain level of banter with my prey, and you are failing on all fronts. What’s the matter? Did all your wit points go into buying you that invulnerability?” I chucked another chair, but to my rising alarm, he shrugged it off, getting madder and madder as he started to rise to his feet. I matched him, not wanting to be left on the ground.
“Uh, Sienna?” Harry asked, standing amid a field of five downed yakuza thugs, like he was just another American tourist here to deliver ass-kickings and rudeness. “We gotta skedaddle.” He raised a finger and pointed to the ceiling, and it took me a second to realize what he was getting at.
Sirens. Distant sirens.
“Shit,” I said, and thrust a finger at my opponent. “Look, I only have a limited time here—”
He lurched at me, fury cracking his face into a terrible grimace. He came at me full bore, and the only thing that stopped him from jumping all over me and going right through my (ineffectual against invincible people) defenses was a sudden table that hit him from the side, altering his course and flinging him across the restaurant.
At that, I made another mental note: Achilles types were extremely weak when separated from the ground and susceptible to all sorts of mayhem that probably wouldn’t kill them but could at least get them off my back for a little bit.
Prettyboy went smashing through a plate glass window that separated the dining room from the room where the ordering line had snaked. He disappeared behind a waist-height wall while the table stopped, unable to pass through the window. It came crashing down on top of another table, destroying the dishes left behind by fleeing patrons mid-meal.
“Thanks,” I said to Kat as she joined me in staring across the restaurant at the place where Prettyboy had just vanished. “Nice toss. A-plus Frisbee form.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help out sooner,” Kat said. She was looking a little pale. “Your succubus powers leave me twice as drained as a normal heal.”
“Sorry you needed to use them,” I said. “Bastard caught me flatfooted. Won’t happen again.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Kat said, a little lethargically, as she started toward the door.
“We gotta hurry,” Harry said, suddenly right there and ushering us toward the door. “This place is going to be swarming with cops in minutes, and also? Our train’s leaving in like ten.”
“Okie dokie,” I said, grabbing my bag and Kat’s and boogieing for the exit a few steps behind Harry and my blond-haired savior. “Let’s vamoose.”
“Ugh, ‘vamoose’? I’m partying with old people,” Kat said under her breath, still white as a sheet as we stepped out into the Tokyo twilight. Neon lights were beginning to spring to life on the buildings around us, and she let Harry lead as we hustled her toward the train station. “Next, you’ll be wanting to eat at four for the early bird discount, and crash at seven p.m.”
“Whatever, man, I’m younger than you,” I said, trying not to communicate too much umbrage, since Kat had been pretty clinch in not letting me get my ass handed to me back there.
“Yeah, but you’re like … an old soul or something,” Kat said, throwing a look behind her as we tried to disappear into the crowd flowing along the sidewalk. The train station was just ahead, and the sirens were growing louder and louder. People were clearing out of the way for us, leaping aside with surprising alacrity at the sight of three tall westerners pushing through. We must have looked like hell.
“Thanks … I think,” I said as we entered the train station and the cry of the sirens seemed to fade behind us. I let Harry lead us on, but I didn’t take a breath until we were safely in our seats and the train was pulling out of the station.