"Right. Outside. Where you can kill me and leave my body in a gutter. Does anyone actually leave bodies in gutters anymore? Even alleys are hard to find."
"Outside."
She started heading toward a parking garage door, but people were coming through into the lobby. She prodded me up a flight of stairs to the meeting room level, then out an exit there to the parking garage.
"Can we discuss this?" I said as she steered me toward the stairwell. "I got the impression from your sister that you wouldn't be unhappy to see Veronica dead. I could do that for you. One free assassin, at your service."
"We can handle her without your magic, witch."
"Okay, I won't use magic. I'll be discreet. Speaking of which, you've gone a little off the playbook here, haven't you? A young woman gutted in a stairwell is hardly going to be mistaken for a natural death."
"That's why you're going up the stairs. To the top floor. Where you will leap to your death."
"Are you sure? Because this building doesn't look that tall. I'd hate--"
I wheeled and chopped down on her knife-hand. She slashed and the blade cut my palm. Blood sprayed. I kicked. She went down, knife still gripped tight. I kicked again, this time at her arm. She rolled and the blade sliced the back of my jeans. I stumbled.
She leapt to her feet and ran at me. I landed another kick, this one to her stomach. She fell, and I tried kicking the knife out of her hand, but the tip caught in my pant-leg, and I lost my balance. I went down, face-first, palms slamming into the pavement, my back exposed, brain screaming that I'd made a fatal mistake.
But she didn't leap on me. Didn't stab me in the back. I twisted. Adam stood between us. The woman rushed him. His fist hit her jaw. She stumbled. A fast jab to the stomach, then another to the jaw finished her. After she landed, he grabbed her by the hair, lifted her head, and smacked it down on the pavement. She collapsed, unconscious. He plucked the knife from her hand and waved it at me.
"Ignore the knife," he said. "If you're fighting back, it'll take a miracle for her to manage a fatal stab. Get her down, then take the weapon. You're lucky the GPS on your phone works. It's your fighting skills you need to work on. Notice I didn't use my powers against her?"
"You're a guy. You have the natural advantage of upper-body strength. And she's tougher than she looks." I glanced down at the woman. Twice my age. Six inches shorter. Thirty pounds heavier--none of it muscle. I looked back at Adam. "She's a trained assassin. It's all about the reflexes."
"Uh-huh. Well, wake up the trained assassin so I can practice my trained interrogation--Shit!" He dropped beside her. Bloody foam trickled out of the side of her mouth. "I didn't hit her that hard."
As his fingers went to the side of her neck, she started convulsing. Adam wrenched her mouth open to hold her tongue down. She began to gag, spewing more bloody foam. As it spattered my shoes, I backed up, then noticed a piece of plastic on my sneaker. I bent. It was part of a capsule, some powder still caked inside.
"It won't help." I showed Adam the capsule.
The woman continued to convulse, eyes rolling, limbs flailing. Adam hovered there, as if he wanted to do something, at least ease her suffering. Then she collapsed again, this time for good.
We checked her pockets for ID. There was none, just a key card for a room in the hotel. It was still in the folder with the room number on it.
"We'll leave her here," I said. "We can't risk moving--"
Adam pointed to the blood on the pavement.
"Right," I said. "That's why we can't risk moving her. They'll find the blood--" I stopped as I realized it was my blood.
"Stand guard," Adam said. "I've got to get her gone before someone drives up here."
Adam found an old sedan that looked like it'd been there a while. He picked the trunk lock and we put her inside. I had to take her clothing, too; I'd bled on it during our fight.
Then I took cover between two cars while he went to get supplies--water to wash away the blood on the asphalt, and clean clothes so I could cover my injuries. The slash on my leg was barely a scratch--my jeans had borne the brunt of that--but my hand was bleeding. He bound it.
We searched the woman's hotel room next. We found a vial of poison capsules and a bill made out to Amanda Tucker--an alias or a relative, maybe. Other than that, the room was clean.
"How the hell did she find me?" I said as we returned to our room to pack. "I can see them tracking me around Columbus, even to Seattle. Picking up my trail again after I visited Roni's aunt makes sense. But how did they track me here?"
"You do have the blocker on your cell, right?" He meant the one Paige created to block our locations from any GPS trackers other than our own.
"Of course I do."
"And you don't turn it off?"
"Yes, I turn it off. Paige said we could, whenever it interferes with an app we need--"