Chapter 34
It all started out perfectly fine…
"Son of a bitch." I spat blood straight into the face of some woman whose arm had been replaced with a gleaming crimson blade, and used the split second her grip loosened around my throat to break free—then unloaded a point-blank torrent of water directly into her chest.
She shrieked as she went through the bar wall, crashing outside and leaving a trail of water and metal debris behind her—the kind of hardware the Red Ring gang had crammed into her body when they recruited her.
I caught myself against the pool table, barely dodging the body of some guy that my better half had just flung across the room, and took another look around, trying to piece together exactly how things had gotten to this point. Because tonight's bar fight was a very different animal from any of the ones before it.
---
A couple of hours earlier.
"So our job is just to rescue this little redheaded tramp?" Prism planted her hands on her hips and squeezed the last word out like it tasted bad. She stood at the corner of the building, eyeing the small hotel across the street with open skepticism. "I wouldn't be surprised if she's already drained every last one of her kidnappers dry."
"She has superpowers?" Victor looked up from his bag of crackers and stared at the mistress of light, drawing a tired sigh out of me. "What? She said—"
"Figuratively, genius. It's called a euphemism. Actually, you know what, never mind." With one sharp motion Prism whipped her phone out of her back pocket and snapped a photo of Sonar, who looked like he'd just been told the Earth was flat.
"What are you doing?"
"This is for Harvard." At my questioning look she rolled her eyes, pushing her hip out further and putting those latex-wrapped thighs on full display. "They should give him his tuition back."
"Ha. Good one." The Golem gave a thumbs-up and plugged his earpiece back in, returning to listening to us at roughly half-capacity—if that term even applied to him.
"Done talking? Then let's get a move on and go rescue Miss Job." Robert was in a surprisingly good mood today, which meant he'd even skipped his signature argument with whoever happened to be nearest.
"I'd call her Sloppy Job, personally." Prism took one last drag of her vape with a snort, then beckoned our brave little band to follow her. "I'll put forty bucks on it that right now this little floozy is riding somebody or getting ready to."
"Do you two have some kind of history I don't know about?"
"Ha!?" She stopped dead in her tracks—I nearly walked my crotch straight into the impressive rear bumper ahead of me—and spun around on her heels, waving her hands in the air and deploying the full spectrum of her facial expressions. Which was extremely full. "I have absolutely no problem with that woman!"
"Then what's the issue?" At this point I was genuinely getting tired of hearing it. The moment our colleague had heard the name of the person we were rescuing and got a physical description, she'd snapped like a rubber band—spending the better part of the last hour calling the kidnapped girl a redheaded floozy, and that was the politest term she'd used.
"There is no issue." She tilted her nose up primly and wrestled with herself for about two seconds. It was a losing battle—she was too expressive, too emotional a creature by nature. Every man in the group was mentally counting down to the eruption in perfect sync. "It's just that this little OnlyFans nobody sang karaoke a couple of times and suddenly decided she's a star!? Excuse me!?"
"OnlyFans?" Sonar tried to look like he wasn't immediately pulling out his phone to search it.
"A star?" The Golem perked up with interest and did the same thing as my former cellmate.
"Yes. And yes." Arms folded across her chest, hips swinging—more from habit than intention—our colleague headed toward the hotel. "Although given the way this ragamuffin looks… her page should be free."
Out of the corner of my eye I was doing my level best to ignore Sonar and the Golem, who were already deep into adult content on Sonar's phone, punctuating it with commentary along the lines of: "Whoa," "You can do that?" and "Red wine with fish?!"
"Fine. Let's go rescue the little hussy."
"Prism." Robert's weary voice—he'd apparently never left the channel and had been listening to this entire circus live, probably watching us through the nearest security camera—cut in. "This is a very high-value client, one of the first people to sign up for SDS coverage in this district. So dial it back. Whatever it is."
"And what exactly are you insinuating, you misogynistic racist!?" She found herself a new target like a heat-seeking missile, grateful for the excuse to redirect, grabbed her earpiece, found the nearest camera with her eyes, and flipped it off. "I'm sure if I were a blonde white girl—"
"Prism, don't say something you'll regret." I caught her by the elbow. She held my gaze for a few seconds with a look that could have peeled paint—clearly that time of the month.
"Ма-boy, I always watch what I say and who I say it to." She reined in a smile, pulled her arm free from my grip, and started walking toward the hotel entrance with a noticeably more deliberate sway to her step. "Let's go already. We'll rescue this… Job. And Ginger—thank you."
She blew me a kiss, caught her vape between her teeth, and threw both doors open in front of us in a grand gesture.
And there was nobody inside.
We looked at each other uncertainly. Honestly, none of us quite knew how to react—according to Robert's intelligence, there should have been close to ten people in the building.
"I told you. Let's just go in—we'll find her by the noise."
"You sound very confident about that."
"Please." Another snort. She pushed open the door to the first-floor corridor, and we immediately caught the sound of muffled voices—but Prism just waved them off and kept walking. "I've known this woman since school. She's always been like this. Called herself Madame Vandersex, the idiot. Say what you will, the girl's got stamina."
"Wow. Seriously."
"Mm-hmm." The guys were trailing behind us, so neither the girl nor I worried about being overheard—especially since their admiration for the kidnapped woman's personal page showed absolutely no signs of subsiding. "Always drove me crazy. Redheaded little floozy. Oh, and ма-boy—stay well back and don't get too close, or you'll catch something, understood?"
She delivered this with such a completely straight face that I had no choice but to nod along in agreement, if only to avoid igniting another argument—even though somewhere deep down I still wasn't fully convinced that the kidnapped girl would actually try to sleep with an entire crowd of men.
How wrong I was. The first hint that Prism was onto something was the fact that we made it all the way to the last door without running into a single guard. From behind it came two voices. The first was rough and male—full of frustration and something that might have been fear. The second was female—sultry in an exaggerated, theatrical way, thick with saccharine notes that turned the stomach a little. Mine, at least.
Sonar, on the other hand, practically lunged toward the door to go rescue the damsel in distress. Fortunately, Prism had his enthusiasm extinguished in short order with a small flash of light directly in his face—leaving our overeager bat temporarily blind for the next few minutes.
"What the hell? How—what—" Through the barely cracked-open door, we became witnesses to a fairly explicit and rather unsettling scene. At the head of an enormous bed—a proper medieval-hentai production piece—lay a redheaded girl in nothing but underwear, with a figure that was certainly hard to ignore.
Around her, sprawled in various positions, were six or seven men. An eighth stood at the foot of the bed, pointing a very large knife at the girl—who was smiling at him with a wide, carnivorous grin.
The redhead showed not even a flicker of fear. If anything, the entire situation seemed to have the opposite effect on her entirely, and she looked like she was coiling up for a pounce. The man with the knife, though…
"I swear to God, I'm going to rearrange your insides…"
"Oh, you fool," Prism breathed softly in my ear, pressing her chest against my back to peek through the same crack.
I didn't even need to ask why.
Ignoring the knife entirely, the redhead heard the magic words—in her own interpretation of what they meant—and started moving directly toward her would-be captor, stripping off the last scraps of fabric as she went and dropping them onto the barely-conscious bodies scattered across the bed.
"Hey, wait—what are you doing? Stop it! I'm not flirting with you! Put that back on!" The poor man's voice cracked into something hysterical, and he retreated backward, waving the knife from side to side, as the redhead advanced on him without the slightest hesitation. "Oh God… No, I don't want—"
He dropped the knife. His hands started shaking. He curled into a corner, trying to put up a wall of trembling palms between himself and the nymphomaniac approaching him.
"Well. I told you. Still feel like getting involved with…? Actually, who am I even asking?"
Prism threw up her hands and stepped aside to let the rest of the team through. The moment Sonar and the Golem disappeared through the door, she slammed it shut right in my face—but I could have sworn I heard a gleeful female cry of "Jackpot!" from the other side just before it closed.
"Let's go, ма-boy. Let the boys have their fun, if they're so keen on spending the next six months injecting antibiotics into themselves." She filed her report to Robert without pause and ignored his sputtering objections before cutting the call—but then noticed me glancing back over my shoulder at the door, from behind which some very eldritch screaming and pleading for mercy could now be heard. "Hey, Waterbane. Relax. Nothing's going to happen to them. Unless you want to go in too?"
I'd barely started shaking my head when Sonar let out a pained shriek in his bat form somewhere behind the door. So Prism drew her own conclusions.
"Honestly. You men are all the same." She popped her bubble gum with a snap, caught the shreds with her tongue in a fairly indecent manner. "Come on, we'll wait in the bar. And if it's that urgent, I'll take care of you myself before I let that woman get her hands on something as nice as you. Trust me—you would not be the same afterward."
"…Thanks?" Not entirely sure how to respond to that, I just gave an awkward shrug. Prism laughed—a real, unguarded, genuinely warm laugh, the kind you almost never heard from her.
"Anytime."
---
"We're at the bar already…"
Team Z was slowly reassembling at one of our regular haunts. The Sardine—a bar for former, current, and nominally future villains. A miserable dump, dirty and aggressively aromatic, soaked through with blood, sweat, cigarettes, and cheap liquor, and not just anyone was allowed to order the last of those.
Sitting at one of the few large tables our crew had long since claimed as its own, I was gradually inching away from Prism, who was clearly in the grip of some kind of acute episode—not to mention the mood swings that were, to put it gently, unnerving.
If Colm and Kupé hadn't shown up when they did, I'd have been out the door at a dead sprint, because the hints had graduated into something far beyond hints. Direct invitations. Becoming simply… too much.
But disaster was averted, and now, under the amused smirk of a mustachioed leprechaun, I was doing everything in my power to put furniture between myself and the situation—quietly hoping my big, strong, red woman would show up soon and protect me from the advances of an equally strong, if differently pigmented, woman.
"Come join us…"
"All the best, see everyone Monday." Robert's rather clumsy attempt to vanish was met with a chorus of commentary spanning a wide range of creative insults.
"Don't be like that."
"Come on, Robert, get over here."
"Too good to drink with us?"
"Stop making excuses, man." Colm was apparently tired of my weak deflections too and decided to go hunting for new entertainment. "We know you've got nothing going on tomorrow."
"And Miss Blazer already let you off the leash." Mel's voice came first through the earpiece, cheerful and teasing—and then, half a second later, in person, as she stepped out of a portal right beside me. "So you're out of excuses."
Even sitting down she had a slight height advantage on me, though we were close in the shoulders. She draped one arm over the back of the sofa and pulled me in toward her—but the initial possessiveness softened quickly into something warmer.
"Hey there, sweetheart." I rolled my eyes. The demoness answered with a quiet, low laugh, and while above the table we kept up the appearance of casual conversation, below it her shoes had already come off, her legs were draped across my lap, and her nimble tail was making its way up my pant leg. "It's been so long…"
"Ahem." Colm cleared his throat politely into his fist and gave the red-skinned girl a little wave. "Good to see you too. Maybe save the roleplay for after we've all had enough to drink, so things are at least a little less awkward afterward?"
"Agreed. Tonight we drink. We're not doing that." The former assassin delivered her verdict crisply, flicked a dagger into the space between me and Mel, and forced us both apart to the sound of the team's laughter—though I caught myself smiling all the same.
"Tch." Prism clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction and drifted toward the karaoke setup, where the usual queue hadn't formed yet. On a proper evening she'd have to physically wrestle other drunk vocalists for two minutes of glory.
"Yo." Diva materialized out of thin air beside us, immediately grabbed an unopened bottle of beer from the table, and proceeded to pound it. Then she hit an inhaler. Then she lit a cigarette. She was a genuinely interesting individual. "What's up? I zoned out. Is Robert actually coming?"
"He's coming, he's coming." I waved a hand at Flambe, who'd just sailed through the door with his most imperious expression firmly in place—which exactly nobody on Team Z had paid any attention to in a very long time. "He even said something about buying a round."
"Oh-ho-ho." Diva began rubbing her palms together with exaggerated villainy as the rest of the table exchanged knowing looks. "Something tells me Mister Collar's going to be eating instant noodles for the rest of the month."
"What do you think he normally eats? You've seen the man without his shirt on. All skin and bones." Flambe settled nearby, grabbed a handful of nuts, and toasted them with his own power. "Honestly amazed he can walk under his own steam. Poor Robert, heh."
"Speaking of which, where are Sonar and the Golem?" I started casting around for a version of events plausible enough to get a laugh without revealing the genuinely horrifying truth that Prism had filled me in on during the walk over. But I didn't get the chance.
As if they'd been waiting for exactly that moment, the two in question pushed through the bar entrance. The Golem, who certain bouncers occasionally refused entry to, simply showed the guy at the door his middle finger and walked in without breaking stride.
The clay bulk was barely dragging his feet, one hand steadying our resident bat by the shoulder. Both of them looked terrible—like they'd spent a full week in this grimy bar already. Sonar was clutching himself between the legs as though afraid someone might steal it at any moment.
They collapsed into the seats at our table. Silently, under the bewildered stares of everyone present, they demanded drinks. Strong ones.
"Hey, man, how are you—"
"Don't ask." Sonar turned his head toward me with the mechanical precision of a man running on fumes. What I saw in his eyes was something awful—something I was very glad I had no direct knowledge of. "What happened in that hotel goes with me to the grave."
He shifted in his seat several times, wincing painfully with each movement. Then, without a single word, he drained whatever glass happened to be closest. And then—under everyone's stunned gaze—he reached into the glass, fished out all the ice, and dumped it into his underwear. Both sides.
The Golem, meanwhile, was simply sitting on the floor. Arms wrapped around his knees. Staring at the wall. A perfect statue.
"This reminds me of that evening in Amsterdam." Kupé offered this observation sweetly, with an oddly bashful glance at her compact companion. "Wonderful holiday."
"Ja-ja." At Eggbreaker's light-hearted response, the two shattered survivors looked over at Colm with the eyes of hunted animals. I was almost certain I saw them both flinch. "Uh… you alright?"
In wordless unison, they shook their heads. The interrogation might have gone on, but at that moment the bar doors swung open and an extremely out-of-place figure walked in.
Our very own dispatcher.
Clean blue shirt. Light stubble. An expression of profound bewilderment, the look of a man who had absolutely no idea why he'd agreed to come. Against the backdrop of every other specimen in the Sardine, Robert was an immediate focal point.
"Oh, I've got a feeling tonight's going to be fun." Diva said it with a laugh, and the rest of the table seconded it—enough to even pull our traumatized duo halfway out of their stupor.
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