I’d prepared for Daishin to attack me in the midst of two of his warriors’ untimely ends, but he’d surprised me by falling back with his remaining men, leaving the bodies of his fallen to become gruesome garden ornaments, spreading out like cockroaches too fast to be plucked off with bullets.
It fucked me off, but I couldn’t blame them. They were men, after all. They could equip themselves with every skill imaginable. They could become the best in the world and kill with their bare hands, but unless they could turn their flesh into Kevlar they were still vermin who bled.
As they’d melted into the night, Mercer yelled, “Shoot on sight.”
I’d leapt off the stoop, buckling under the avalanche of agony in my ankle, tearing/hopping in pursuit of the bastards who’d run. I expected us to separate, but Mercer stayed beside me, sprinting with agility and hardly out of breath as we rounded the first corner of his home and slammed into a Chinmoku.
I delivered an uppercut on instinct, whipping the man’s head up and cracking his teeth together. I waited for him to plummet to his knees, ready to chop the nerve in his neck and suffocate him.
But Mercer had other ideas.
The moment I incapacitated the fighter, he yanked out his pistol and shot him point blank in the face.
For the longest second, we stared at each other, the scent of sulphur still strong in the air. I hated him for taking my first kill but was grateful, because the world swam with sickness and pain, and I needed to conserve every ounce of strength I had left to survive the night.
The strangest thing wasn’t the fact we’d worked as a team or the fact that we’d fought side by side when only hours ago we’d fought tooth for tooth—the strangest thing was how fucking easy it had been.
How smooth.
How rehearsed.
How right.
We grinned in the dark, shedding our human skin and letting pain and lust for death drive us. Not my ankle, shoulder, elbow, nor any malady could stop me as we jogged through his gardens, peering into shadows, steadily listening to the popping of guns from his security team as they found their own Chinmoku to eliminate.
Racing into a large conservatory with palm trees as high as the Phantom and the coos and trills of exotic birds, we ducked as a Chinmoku launched from behind an aviary, going for my jugular in an artery pinch I knew well.
One touch and my nervous system would stop talking to my brain and boom, unconscious and easy prey. Instead, I whirled and performed the same trick on him.
He collapsed into a bag of bones, and Mercer finished him off with a single trigger squeeze. The crack of his gun ricocheted around the glass conservatory, startling roosting birds and making them soar around their gilded cage.
He murmured something in French, linking his fingers through the wire as his gaze darted between the feathered bodies of different jewelled colours.
Outside, more shots fired.
I counted.
One, two, three, four.
I didn’t like that it wasn’t a perfect trio but I loved the noise and visualised my enemies falling.
So far, I estimated eleven Chinmoku had been dealt with. Unfortunately, that probably meant at least one from our side would’ve been killed in retribution for not shooting fast enough or believing he could take on an expert fighter barehanded.
In this fight, we were nothing more than cardboard cut-outs of villains and heroes. I didn’t care about the Chinmoku’s motive to kill me. I didn’t care what it would mean if I lost or won.
All we focused on was that elusive finish line.
Bang.
Bang.
Two more down.
Did that make thirteen Chinmoku in an untimely grave or more of ours as worm food?
Mercer gave me a pointed look, standing over the fresh corpse. There was no time to wait and no safe places to dawdle.
Thirteen down did not make this war won. If Daishin had brought twenty of his men—despite his attempt at throwing me off age-old tradition—then we were closer to winning than we’d been at the start.
Keep going.
Keep living.
We faded into the foliage, letting shadows do our camouflaging for us.
I couldn’t allow thoughts of Pim to consume me. I couldn’t permit worries over Selix to distract me.
I had enough distractions with my injuries.
As we crawled through the night, my ankle turned weak, burning with agony, forcing me to hop more than run. My elbow screamed at being used as a balancing rod while my shoulder singed hot around the pinpoint of stitches.
I’d probably have to spend another week in bed after this—if I survive—but I refused to think about that now. The only thing that mattered was extermination.
Mercer guided me through the aviary and down a long corridor with black and white images of real estate and high rises. We bypassed a pool and found another Chinmoku slinking up a back staircase.