Game of Cages

light.

“It touched me!” Gregor screamed, his voice stripped of all courage and dignity. “It touched my soul! Don’t let it happen again! Please, God, don’t let it happen again.”

I felt a tremendous relief. My ghost knife still worked. I wondered if Ursula had some sort of special protection against it.

“What happened?” the new voice said. He sounded spooked. The Russian-speaker answered him in the same confused, frightened tone.

I called the ghost knife to me. One of the men screamed, “Look out!” then the spell returned to my hand.

“It came from over there!” Fat Guy said, and then a volley of gunshots rang out, all facing away from me. I dropped low anyway. The floor was concrete and the walls were cinder block; I didn’t want to be killed by a ricochet.

The shooting stopped after a couple of seconds. One of them let out a high, quavering whine, like a fan belt about to give. “Dammit,” Fat Guy said. “Gimme a clip. Somebody gimme a clip.”

But it was too late for that. Their morale had been broken. There was a cascade of stomping footsteps as they fought one another up the stairs. No one wanted to be the last to get out of the darkness.

I crouched in the dark, listening. The basement was quiet, but I could hear footsteps above me, shuffling around. I felt a little smug. Those guys had been afraid of me—well, they’d been afraid of what they’d imagined was in the darkness.

There was probably a lesson in that, but whatever. Someone was moving toward the front of the house, so I headed toward the garage. I still needed to find Catherine. I held my hands in front of me as I went. Although I had to backtrack out of a couple of dead ends, I didn’t run into anything dangerous.

The windows on the garage side of the house were about fifteen feet away when a metal shelving unit toppled onto me.

I raised my arm to shield my face, feeling for a moment that the whole building was falling onto me. Something slid off the shelf, bounced off my forehead, and shattered at my feet. I fell back against a second metal shelf, and the two frames closed on my head. I cried out as I scraped myself free.

“Got you!” someone said. It was Fat Guy again.

The shelves struck something and stopped falling. I slid close to the floor where the gap between them was widest.

A sharp pain in my knee froze me in place as a huge shadow moved toward me, black against not-quite-as- black. I’d knelt on something, but I’d worry about that later.

I could hear him breathing through his mouth. He had emptied his gun and asked for a clip. Had he gotten one before his buddies ran upstairs? I lunged for him, hoping to end this quickly. Trickery wasn’t going to help me now.

I threw a punch at the general area where his head should have been, holding back a bit in case I missed and struck a piece of furniture. I connected. Lucky.

He took the blow in stride and grabbed my collar. Like a lot of big, slow, tough guys, he wanted to grapple. My shirt rippled. He’d hit me on the protective tattoos on my chest where I couldn’t feel it.

Now I knew exactly where he was. I hit him with a right to the side of his jaw and, when he staggered, a left to his temple.

My left hand—which had never fully recovered from an old gunshot injury—throbbed, but the strength went out of Fat Guy. He rolled and fell flat on his back. I heard flimsy metal clatter around him in the dark.

I knelt and patted him down. He carried his wallet in his breast pocket. I took it. I also took his handgun from his shoulder holster and, after checking that the slide was back, pitched it into the darkness.

It only took another minute or so to reach the windows on the garage side of the building. I peeked outside. No one in sight.

By the light of the window, I searched Fat Guy’s wallet. He was from Chicago and had two hundred dollars in twenties. How considerate of him. I took the cash and tossed his wallet into the clutter.

I cut a window out of the frame and pulled it free as quietly as I could. Cold, clean air rushed in. I boosted myself up and squeezed my shoulders through the gap.

A familiar voice said something in German. Tattoo was standing by the corner where he could watch this side of the house and the front. He began to stroll casually toward me.

I squirmed through the window and scrambled to my feet. He was smiling and his limbs swung loose. He said something else, sounding almost friendly, and gave a pointed glance at my stomach.

I absentmindedly wiped my hand down the front of my shirt. There was a long slash in the cloth, starting beside my solar plexus and going down and to the left.

Damn. Fat Guy hadn’t punched me in the gut. He’d had a knife and I never knew it. The Fellows had been frightened of what they couldn’t see, but I’d nearly been killed by the same thing.

Tattoo was just a few paces away from me now. He was smiling like a guy who was going to walk all over me and enjoy the hell out of it.

CHAPTER FIVE

The ghost knife was still in my pocket. I left it there. Tattoo made me nervous and I needed to keep something in reserve. The marks on his body could mean all sorts of things. Maybe he could breathe fire. Maybe he could shoot tear gas out of his armpits. I wanted him to play his hand before I played mine.

Also, I didn’t want to go for my weapon right away. I hate to show my fear.

I started toward the garage, but he stepped lightly into my way. His smile grew wide and he clucked his tongue. That wasn’t allowed. Hell, if he was going to tsk tsk me, he was going to get the fight he wanted. We moved toward each other.