23.
Harry didn’t wake up, and there wasn’t much we could do to make him. “I think we need to move him,” I muttered.
“Yep,” Kat said. We were both leaning over him, me trying to avoid even brushing against his skin anywhere he didn’t have clothing to protect him. “Especially without anyone to act as lookout, a cop could come wandering into the alley any minute now, and we’d have to explain half-dead Harry, assuming the guy even understood English.”
“You speak Japanese, Kat,” I said, a brief flash of annoyance welling back up. It brought up the very shallowly buried memory of our recent flashback in time to her and Harry having a baby together. Talk about excavating some confusing-ass feelings in me, especially given that it looked like that had happened decades before I was born.
Strangely … this did not spur my jealousy any less. Who ever said emotions had to be logical? Because that person was a liar.
“Oh, that’s right,” Kat said. “I keep forgetting. It’s not like I even knew that until today!”
“Feels like you should have realized that before now,” I said, grabbing Harry by an arm as she did the same. Thank goodness he was still wearing the same long-sleeved shirt he’d started with in Oregon. It was a little less necessary here in Nagasaki, but not much. More probably, though, he had kept it on because his current girlfriend was a succubus. “Like … you never heard people speaking Japanese and realized, ‘Hey, I know what they’re saying’?”
“Maybe I did,” she said, taking up position under his other arm as we lifted Harry up, shoulder bag still on his back. He was an easy lift between the two of us and our meta strength, but a little awkward if it was just one of us trying to drag him along. Kat was taller than me, but she wasn’t exactly WNBA huge. Her main advantage in the body department over me was those willowy limbs and her very natural curves. Albeit lacking much of an ass, she still seemed to have that hourglass shape most men desired. “Maybe I heard them speaking Japanese and automatically translated it without realizing it.”
I tried to shake this bit of nonsense out of my head. “This sucks without Harry to help tell us what to do next.”
Kat snickered. “Oh, now you need a man to tell you what to do? What the hell happened to Sienna Nealon?”
“She got her ass kicked by a bunch of prisoners, framed for a crime she committed that was actually self-defense, chased by—”
“Yeah, I know literally what happened to you,” Kat said, “because I’ve been there for most of it and watched the rest from a distance. I was just making a joke.”
“Sorry,” I said after a moment, as we dragged Harry around a bend in the alley. I could see another road ahead, but this one was less trafficked than the one the cabbie had taken us on before turning down this way. There was another of those alcoves ahead, too, a little carve-out for the back door of a shop or something that’d shelter us from view of the main road while I changed and Kat—I dunno, stood around and looked useful.
“I’m not stepping on your Kool-Aid, by the way,” Kat said, and it took a second to realize what she meant by that. “Harry, I mean. I have no interest, okay? If something happened between Klementina,” and she said her old name with a little distaste, “and him, it is totally of the past. Harry is not my type.”
“I know,” I said, a little stiffly. “And I was mostly fine with everything until—” And here she stiffened. “Whatever. This last thing.”
“Yeah,” Kat said at a near-whisper, and I wondered if she’d still be looking pale even without her most recent draining. She certainly didn’t want to look at me just now.
We managed to muscle Harry into the alcove and sat him down. His breathing was still steady, though I wished I could test his pulse myself without touching him bare-skinned. Through the cloth of my sleeve didn’t exactly give me a strong reading, though I could tell his heart was obviously beating.
“Here,” Kat said, taking up my shoulder bag as I shed it. She unzipped it and pulled it wide open so I could see inside. “I’ll hand you what you need so you don’t get blood on everything.”
“Thanks,” I said tightly, “but unless I can clean this off,” and I held up my crimson-slicked arms and shoulders, “I dunno that you handing me clean clothes is going to do the trick. It’s kinda like throwing good clothes after bad, actually.” Which was true; I was coated in blood and unless I washed off, anything I put on was going to be just as soiled and gross as what I was currently wearing, and just as bled through in moments.
“Go … inside,” Harry mumbled under his breath. He let out a little moan and brushed his head with his hand.
I looked at him, then at the door just down the little hallway in our alcove. It was solid but not ridiculously so. I could kick it in pretty easily, or maybe even just break the handle and walk in. Kat looked at me and shrugged, so I strode over and tried the knob. It clicked as I broke the guts of the lock, and I opened the door.
Freezing in the frame, I listened, but didn’t hear anything inside. Creeping in, I found myself in a shop that had yet to open for the day. Rugs and such were draped everywhere, and I decided we could take a moment here as I passed a bathroom.
“Okay, let’s get off the street,” I said to Kat, beckoning her in from the alley. She grabbed Harry under the arms and dragged him in, dumping him unceremoniously in the dark, rear hall where we entered.
“Let’s hurry,” Kat whispered as she closed the door to the alley. “I don’t want to B and E here any longer than we have to.”
“Heh,” I said, stepping into the bathroom and clicking on the light. It cast a soft glow, and I looked at myself in the mirror. “‘B and E’ spells ‘be’, but also stands for breaking and entering. You are occasionally quite clever, Kat.”
“Huh, what?” Kat asked. “Oh. I didn’t even get that second meaning.”
I worked the sink, cleaning myself off as quickly and carefully as I could. Fully aware that this was going to be a crime scene at some point in the near future, I didn’t concern myself with anything but getting done as quickly as possible. I used paper towels to sponge the blood off myself as Kat stood out in the hall, watching me with barely veiled nervousness. “Here,” she said after a couple minutes, “let me help,” and she started tugging my shirt off.
“I can dress myself, you know!”
“You’ve got blood all over your back,” she said, winning the tug of war and shredding my shirt in the process. Just as well, when was I going to wear it again, given its current state? She took a step back, surveying me. “You’re going to have to lose that bra, too. How is it that you look like you’re lactating blood?”
I looked down at myself. She wasn’t wrong, but it still annoyed me enough to slash back. “I don’t know. How is it that you eat like a wolverine and I can still see your ribs with your shirt off?”
“I could totally eat like a wolverine right now,” she said, grabbing a paper towel and starting on my shoulders, dabbing and rubbing.
She hit a rough patch of tender flesh. “Ow. Owww. OW! OWWWW!” I said, retreating from her.
“And how is it that you can get almost thrown through a wall and not whine, but here I am trying to clean you off and you get all whingey,” she said, not letting up.
“Dude,” I said, imitating her, “when I get thrown through a wall, it happens fast, like ‘blink and you miss it.’ This is happening the opposite of fast. This is happening like Akiyama has stopped time in a moment of high pain for me.” I cringed. “Geez.”
Kat got a little quiet. “So this is the guy from back in the war? The one you went to meet in St. Paul the night …” Her voice trailed off.
“Yeah,” I said, finishing it for her. “The night my mom died.” The night I figured out how to unleash my succubus powers and survive a fall from a plane. The night I killed the Wolfe brothers, Grihm and Frederick.
The night I figured out how to win the war.
But mostly … the night my mom died.
“Does it feel like it’s been a million years since then?” Kat asked, being a little more gentle and a little less steel-wool with her scrubbing. “I mean … that Weissman guy that was hounding us back then. I feel like I haven’t seen his dirty, leering face for lifetimes. That I remember things from … back when Omega first scooped me up in the fifties better than I remember those days.”
“Well, I imagine your ascent to blinding fame has caused a dilation effect in time,” I said dryly. “And thus, everything before you became a superstar seems long ago and painful, like a distant nightmare after you’ve woken up.”
“You such a heinous bitch sometimes,” Kat said, smiling at me in the mirror. She was clearly taking my ribbing in the spirit it was (mostly) intended. “I’m glad I never had to actually fight you.”
“There was that time I punched you in the face in front of Bastet.”
“That was not a fight. One-punching me does not count as a fight.”
“You did fold pretty quick on that one.”
I could see the trace of a smile on her in the mirror. “Janus told me to take it easy on you.”
I felt a little scandalized, holding a bloodied paper towel against what was now a mere angry welt on my abdomen, but which had probably held a sliver of glass a few minutes ago. “You sandbagged me?”
Her smile twisted her lips, like it was trying to escape. “I mean … you hit hard , but you didn’t exactly throw out your A game at me that time.”
“Ohhhh!” I paused in my cleaning. “You are so lucky I like you now or I would show you my A game up close in the face, right now.” I let slip a smile of my own. Why hadn’t it always been this easy with Kat?
Oh, right. Because I was short, dark-haired, pale, socially awkward, and my touch killed people, while she was tall, blonde, tanned, beloved by all, and her touch healed people and made men shudder with joy and not agony. Why, it was practically written in the stars that we had to be rivals back in our high-school-ish years.
“You know,” I said, soberly, working on another bloody patch on my stomach, “you probably shouldn’t have helped me back there.”
Her forehead creased so hard that dermatologists all over the world would have salivated at the mere sight of it. Relax, boys, in a minute it’ll go back to flawless, put the Botox down. “Are you out of your mind? You needed help. You could have died back there.”
“Yeah, but,” I said, voice a little tight, “you got seen on camera, Kat. It’s possible that right now they’re building a case against you for aiding and abetting—”
“Pfffft,” she said, dismissive. “Who cares? I’ve got lawyers to deal with that.”
I stopped her, turning around to look at her in the tiny bathroom in a shop in Nagasaki that we’d broken into. How many crimes had we committed today? Enough that even super-celeb Kat could be in real trouble if she got caught. “I’m serious, Kat. Just look at us—”
She stared at me, taking me in with one look, and her lip quirked in amusement. “You, half-naked in a Japanese bathroom, and me, washing you off like an actual cat? Yeah, I’m pretty sure meta fanboy loins would be combusting like sticks rubbed together at meta-speed if there was footage of this.”
“Not what I meant,” I said, “and also—awkward. There are meta fanboys?”
“Totally,” she said with a hard nod. “There’s slash fic of us out there on the net. My agent told me about it.”
“Slash … what?”
“I think I see what you’re getting at,” Kat said, and she resumed her cleaning of a blood-gash-turned-red-welt on my shoulder. “But you don’t have to worry.”
“I think I worry more because you’re not worrying at all,” I said. “There could be real consequences for you here, Kat. I’ve dragged you into something serious and dangerous and—”
“Worse than that time I helped you fight the hundred strongest metas in the world, who wanted to kill us all?” A flash of amusement lit her pretty features, but she didn’t stop rubbing a crust of blood off my shoulder. “Or more dangerous than the time the president was trying to mind-control the entire planet, and I had to help spearhead the rebellion against him because all our other friends had already gone full Stepford?”
“More personally perilous to you, maybe,” I said, wishing she wouldn’t just brush this off. “Kat … you could go to prison for this. Any of this.”
“If I do,” Kat said, “I’m going to end up queen of that place. I will have so many bitches,” she was smirking, “you have no idea. They will not see me coming. Because I totally do know how to throw a punch, an epic one. Not quite Sienna-level devastation, but it will knock those chicas over.”
I found myself laughing, the bathroom ringing with it, echoing in the confined space. And it hurt a little, because my ribs weren’t entirely mended. “Ohhh,” I said once I’d mostly gotten it out, “why can’t you take this seriously?”
“For the same reason you keep fighting,” Kat said, and she was serious now, save for that trace of a smile. She looked up at me with those bright green eyes, and I could see the soul-deep conviction. “You save the world, Sienna. And you save people. Jail? Pffft. Small price to pay for doing the right thing on the scale you do. I’d take a few years of prison if that’s what it means to do the right thing.” She put her head down again as she looked at my chest. “Seriously, lactating blood. Did you lose an entire nipple under there? What the hell happened under these straps and—also, we need to introduce you to some actual lingerie type stuff, because this ‘softer side of Sears’ crap might as well be manufactured by Craftsman. I know that you have no need of any man, ever, but—come on. You have a boyfriend now, you could be thinking about dressing for him at least a little.”
What the hell do you even say to that? “Hey, it hasn’t exactly put a damper on my sex life, okay?”
Kat rolled her eyes and tossed a bloody paper towel. “That’s because you’re in the honeymoon phase. And if you’re wearing this during the honeymoon phase, I shudder to think what you’ll be wearing if you make it a couple more months. We’re talking full-on green goo face mask at night, curlers in the hair—”
“My hair is naturally curly. I use a straightener.”
“My point,” she said, “is you need to go all Justin Timberlake and ‘Bring Sexy Back,’ girl. Immediately. We’ll find a Victoria’s Secret after this is over and get this,” she snapped my shoulder strap, causing me to get a very offended look on my face, because it stung, “taken care of.” Then she hunched over and started to work on a spot on my side that was coated in red.
“Fanboy pants, exploding all over,” I muttered, turning back to the mirror. There really was a lot of blood here, and eventually I was going to have to wash my hair, because I could see the crust all in it. Which would, in turn, require me to spend at least a few minutes putting it up. “And Kat …”
She did not look up from where she was scrubbing just above my left kidney. “Yeah?”
I paused, feeling a swelling sense of gratitude. “Thank you.”
I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “You’re welcome.”