There are better times to start wondering what I’ve gotten myself into, and I’ve got enough sense to know now isn’t one of those times. I take Judy’s advice and duck. The bullet whistles past, splitting my hair and punching a hole into the elevator’s metal wall. I swear, use my momentum from ducking to carry me forward, and barrel into the guy wearing a colorful suit still holding a pistol. When my shoulder rams into his gut, I squeeze the AngelWeight’s trigger and put a round through his kneecap, buckling him and making him scream. Forearm around his throat, back to my chest, gun to his head, facing the six guys standing in the room. I pant, sweat and lick my teeth before I shout: “I don’t wanna put a body on my books but I will if you force me, so relax, and everyone gets to go home!”

  The others blink, almost coming out of whatever haze that’s still hanging over everyone’s heads. Must be something to do with vanishing and coming back, or whatever. Don’t really know and don’t really care right now.

  Victoria heads out first, gun raised and firing three shots, all of the bullets going in three heads. Bodies thud on the floor, spraying their brains on the book cases and large, cigarette smoke-stained windows behind them. Morgan shoves past me and swings her bat, cracking a guy’s shoulder so badly you can hear the crunch from both times she smashes the bat into his body and then against his head, turning his skull into meat. Smaller runes on her neck glow a deep blue, and that’s when I figure out she’s some kind of Berserker Pledge. Normal people don’t just bust someone’s head open with one swing of a metal baseball bat. Two left, but they’re making a human wall now.

  Because our target is sitting there in his comfy leather couch, shaking himself with anger as he tries to wipe the blood off his face with a napkin. His skin is pale, pretty and porcelain, with a mane of slick-back black hair and pointy ears. Ears too pointy for just a normal Elf. Nokarian. You can always tell, because some kind of genetic mutation makes the tips of their ears a deep scarlet. Expensive suit, no tie, chest out and a bottle of blood-covered booze on the table in front of him, but here’s the catch: there’s two of ‘em sitting at the table, which isn’t the plan.

  There was meant to be one person in tonight, maybe a few girls, sure, but just the Elf.

  It’s a standoff the second the thugs’ brains catch up to the surprise. Nobody moves, nobody breathes. Vicky is standing partially in front of me, not blocking my moaning, groaning meat shield, but keeping her pistol ready.

  In my frantic mess of a mind, trying to ignore the droplets of sweat stinging my eyes, I look at the other person at the table sitting opposite Mr. Hark, because they’re staring at me, too, and I’ve got to repay them the favor. But I don’t even know what I’m looking at right now. Our animal masks hide our identities, our gritted teeth and the sweat sitting on our brows, but this other person is wearing a mask. Bandages, I guess, is a better word. Head-to-toe, wrapped in a slew of them, and they still chose to put themselves in a comfy purple baggy silk shirt and black pants. They’ve got holes for a mouth and a strip along their eyes, which are gray, dead, almost distant and chilling. Their mouth, though, is a wide, toothy smile, parted by the cigarette they’re smoking and the alcohol they drink.

  Casually, too, like all of this is some circus they came into town expecting to watch.

  “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE?” Hark shouts, standing up, but not getting any further than the three guys standing in front of him. He makes sure not to step in the bloody puddle of one of his other thugs when he does. “Have you got any clue who you’re fuckin’ wit? I will put you in a grave so deep I’ll dig a damn Rift!”

  “Sid,” Vicky says, jerking her head. “Drop ‘em.”

  Astrid waves her hand, then clenches her fist. A pulse of white magic flares around her, and the next thing we know, those two guys with guns collapse onto the floor, knocking over the bottle of liquor and the full ashtrays on their way to the shag carpet. She can do that? I thought she was a Knight Pledge at first. Girl knows spells, too. That means she’s got two Pledges down, at least somewhat. I glance at her, not turning my head but eyeing her. She doesn’t look at me, only stares at the bodies on the floor, her fist still clenched as her threads of white magic slowly suffocate them until they’re either dead or completely comatose. My stomach feels weird standing here next to her, almost like I’m jealous, maybe envious, because Alexandria has all five Pledges down, the only person in the modern day to even come close to mastering them, and here comes our bitch of a First Sword with two of them.

  She could have done that to me if she really wanted to, but she didn’t, which only bitters my saliva.

  I take my anger out on the dude I’m holding, whacking the butt of my gun into the back of his head hard enough to put him on his one good knee, and then face-first onto the floor, out cold. I stand over him and ignore Astrid as she stands beside me, placid, cold, with her freakishly poignant and icy magic rubbing against my skin.

  “Hey,” I whisper to her. She turns her head a little. “What do we do with the other guy?”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “What other guy?” Astrid asks dryly. “Hark is the only one here.”

  I glance at Morgan. She shrugs, not knowing what I’m saying. The man in bandages hasn’t stopped staring right at me, blood slowly spreading through the white cloth wrapped around his chest, not caring one little bit.

  “Mr. Hark,” Vicky says, stepping over the body and onto the carpet. The person covered in bandages sits there drinking their whiskey, watching this all play out. “I’ve got a proposal you’re probably not gonna like.”

  “I know you,” Hark snarls, stepping backward, stumbling over bodies. “You’re that thing. You should've been decommissioned years ago! Oh, we paid top dollar for you, bitch. You should be thankful, not some ailing Guild’s attack dog. Went around talking all big, sayin’ how you’re more than a weapon, and now look at you!”

  Victoria says, “Sit and be a good boy, so we can call your daddy to come save you.”

  His face gets even paler the moment his back presses against the window and Victoria is towering over him. “Platinum? You want him? Are you out of your damn minds?! He’ll kill me if I get in the way of his wo—”

  She puts the gun to his jaw, which, from experience, shuts people up very quickly. “Sit. Down.”

  For a moment, it almost looks as if he’s going to maybe reach for the gun, but his jaw is clenched and his eyes are wide. Sweat glistens on his brow, and the thing about Nokarian’s is that they’re some of the rarest Elves you can ever come across. Apparently, way back when Rifts were tearing the world open and Dread Titans were gouging out Earth’s guts, these guys were hunted down for their blood, their skin, their bones and every fibre of hair on their bodies. They’re the kind of things we like to call Milkers in the bounty hunting scene, because you put ‘em in a cage and feed them what they want, and you can keep taking bits out of them each day, enough to have your family set for generations, simply ‘cause of the amount of raw magic that lives within them. I’m talking pure, unadulterated magic that can heal anyone, energize anything, and turn your empty pockets into bulging sacks of golden dough. I’ve got to stop myself from carressing the trigger, because there’s instinct in my veins, screaming at me to do what I so badly want to do right now and put a bullet between those slit eyes of his. But I don’t shoot him. I swallow and white-knuckle the pistol, keeping it beside me. They said spoils are for the taking? Cool, yeah, I can deal with that.

  When we eventually dump him, a stray bullet might find his body on the curb, just sayin’.

  I’ll be out of here soon, anyway. All’s fair in love and war.

  And when all you’re trying to do is make cash, you’ve just gotta understand.

  Mr. Hark tries something stupid and grabs Vicky’s arm. She grabs his wrist, spins him around, and pins him to the wall with just one hand. He struggles and roars in pain, but her gun is still hot, which she makes sure he knows when he presses it to the base of his skull. The stink of singed skin makes my nose wrinkle the next second.

  “Listen here, you Elven fuck,” she snarls. “I thought about being nice for a moment, about not having to tie you up and drag your body out into the streets like some dead little dog, but I’m gonna do you one better and tell you what’s going to happen next: I’m going to put you in the back of a van, and then we’re going on a field trip. If you want to come back from our vacay, you’re gonna do what I say, when I say it, and exactly how I say it.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” he says, struggling to breathe with his chest pressing against the window. “Platinum’s gonna have your head on a platter, I swear! Get your godsdamned, grubby monkey paws—”

  She does what she promised him and smashes his head through the window. His body stays there limp, half of it hanging outside the building like he’s just seen something really interesting on the pavement below. The breeze wafts in, muggy and hot, but the distant shriek of police sirens tells us everything we need to know about what’s coming next. As planned, Morgan’s got a body bag with her, which she and Astrid make sure that Hark fits inside of, then zip it up and give it all to Victoria to carry on her shoulder. I’m first into the elevator, punch the button and hold the doors, waiting for Morgan to grab anything shiny that can fit in her pockets before Vicky loses her cool and shouts at her to hurry up. She finishes stripping a dead guy of his golden bracelet and another of his diamond watch, and for extra measure, when she bundles into the elevator next to me, I raise my AngelWeight.

  Then put one through the bandaged guy’s skull. His head snaps backward, the bullet jerking his neck into an awkward angle. He slumps onto the couch and drops the cigarette and the alcohol onto the floor. The others spin around at the sound of the gunshot, stopping their fussing over Hark’s limp body. I slowly walk to his body, still feeling that odd, skin-crawling feeling I’d gotten on the way over here. I press the gun to his jaw, turning his head from side to side, making sure he’s dead. I swallow, then check his trousers, taking the golden zippo lighter in his pocket. With a piece of cloth torn off a dead body forced into the open end of a bottle, I light the end and smash the bottle against the bookcase. In case you’re wondering, no, they don’t explode in an instant, but they burn and they burn quickly, and you don’t get to buy me like I’m some object and keep making money in the same breath. Tough.

  I’d like to call it retribution, but I kinda just like torching someone’s hard-earned property. You don’t get to have an office two times bigger than my whole apartment off the backs of buying people, that’s just not what I like to hear. When I finally get into the elevator, I don’t look at the others. Astrid’s eyes tell me she’s got something she badly wants to tell me, especially when the fire begins to catch and burn and chew and crackle, but the doors are shut by then, and the stink of smoke is trapped upstairs, at least for a few minutes, before everything burns.

  Vicky says nothing. Morgan grunts quietly, resting her bloody bat on her shoulder.

  And revenge isn’t best served cold, by the way. The hotter the better.

  Preferably hot enough to take down an entire building.