Rapture's Edge

51

Then Chance lobbed them a lovely golden apple: driving from the burial site, the girl ran across their path. Literally, right across it. They were at a stoplight on the outskirts of the city, waiting for the light to change, and she’d sprinted across the street in a blur of raven blue hair and long legs and disappeared over a fence into a quiet neighborhood backyard.

Keshav looked at the other members of The Hunt. They looked back at him. Then, without uttering a word, they abandoned the car right in the middle of the street and took off on foot after her.

Then Chance had found it amusing to equip her with a gun and a human sidekick with a sports car.

As the taillights of the Ferrari faded into the distance down the Rue de l’Arbalete, the five remaining members of The Hunt slowed from a sprint to a trot, and finally to a standstill. In flashes of swirling gray Vapor, they Shifted back to human form and stood naked in the middle of the empty road, watching.

“Couldn’t have been driving a Fiat,” commented Calder beside him. Originally from the Quebec colony, he was lean and rangy, with a thick scar that ran in a wavering line from his jaw all the way up to his hairline, bisecting one eyebrow. He never said how he’d gotten it, and none of the others had asked.

“Zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in three seconds,” answered Ang, a member of the Nepal colony who had a fetish for expensive cars. He collected and restored them in his spare time. When he wasn’t killing things. “Top speed over three hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour…We’re fast, but not even we can beat that.”

“All right,” said Keshav, cool. He knew Chance wasn’t done with them yet. “Let’s clean up and call it in.”

Clean up was assassin parlance for get rid of the bodies. Two of the team were still back at the building, one felled by bullets, the other flattened by over a ton of metal. The bullets he understood; travelling at over a thousand miles per hour, a bullet headed in your direction affords only milliseconds to react before you’re dead. A car, on the other hand—why that i***t hadn’t just Shifted to Vapor was beyond Keshav’s comprehension. He deserved to get run over.

One by one, the five assassins now did exactly that. Five glittering gray plumes of mist gathered sinuous as smoke, surged up into the cool weight of the night sky, and headed back the way they’d come.

Laurent had worked for nineteen years as the head of the emergency medicine department at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals in Paris. He’d seen nearly every trauma and injury in his long career, and it had been many years since he’d been surprised by what occurred in hospitals, by what people did to one another in anger or to themselves in despair.

But tonight had proven he still had the capacity to be shocked.

He heard their approach first. He’d been standing at the nurse’s station near the sliding doors to the entrance of the ER, flicking through the admitting form for a patient with a severe head cold who was convinced she was dying of plague, when from somewhere down the street outside came the distinct sound of a car screeching to a protracted halt, its brakes locked and screaming in protest. Whatever the driver of the car had been trying to avoid, he failed spectacularly because the car in question came flying into the hospital parking lot and collided with half a dozen parked cars as it careened to and fro like a pinball in an arcade game, and then as Laurent and the night nurse at the desk watched in openmouthed horror, it made a beeline for the sliding glass emergency room doors.

At full speed.

He leapt over the desk, grabbed the frozen nurse by her fleshy white bicep, and ran.

At the last second the driver gained a measure of control over the car. And by measure, Laurent would later tell his wife, I mean une petit quantité. A smidge. A squealing sideways slide slowed it down enough so that when the low-slung sports car finally made impact with the building, it only destroyed the row of groomed rosemary bushes along the front walk, the wrought iron railing beside them, and a portion of the low brick wall where he sat contemplating his sins during his smoke breaks. A rather substantial portion, but it could have been much worse.

When the smoke had cleared and the flying bricks and shrubbery had settled and the only noise was the angry hiss of a fractured radiator releasing pressurized steam, Laurent emerged from his hiding place behind the tiled column near the staff elevators just in time to see a woman—young, indigo-haired, half-dressed in men’s underclothing—tear off the driver’s door of a mostly demolished Ferrari, toss it aside like it weighed no more than a feather, and lift an unconscious, bleeding man twice her size in her arms.

His first thought was PCP.

Long out of fashion but still available, the hallucinogenic drug phencyclidine tended to imbue users with superhuman strength. When it wasn’t making them schizophrenic. His second thought as the duo entered through the sliding doors and the woman pierced him with her eyes—silvery-black and glittering, like coins at the bottom of a wishing well—was Dieu aidez-moi!

God help me.

She was supernaturally stunning, with an abstract face and courtesan’s body Picasso would have swooned over. She possessed a weird species of beauty, the type average people have no words or use for, alien and compelling, all lips and eyes and smoldering stare. Seeing her, Laurent thought for a moment he was having a heart attack. She literally took his breath away.