W
hen Maliha had ordered Hound to stay behind, he’d chafed at it. She was paying a good price for his service and he didn’t like going against a client’s order. He could get a bad reputation that way.Still, this wasn’t just any client. He wasn’t in the habit of sleeping with many of his clients. None of them, in fact, except Maliha.
Without thinking a whole lot about it, he found himself in the helicopter with Glass waiting for the pickup summons. The copter was in the air just close enough to keep the building in sight through binoculars, and he saw the flare of orange leaking from windows on ShaleTech’s third floor.
“Blast on level seven. I think that’s our pickup call.”
Glass nodded. She took them back to the barn and hovered the copter while Hound rappelled down.
He was at the door of the barn when he heard a voice that wasn’t Maliha’s. He dropped down and crawled in silently, taking up a post inside the door. He could see Maliha in the man’s flashlight, and she looked bad. Really bad.
“The boss is dead and that fucking bodyguard is in a million pieces,” the man holding a gun on her said. He was waving a radio, and was in touch with someone inside the ShaleTech building. “You did a first-rate job. Ordinarily, I’d try to hire you, but as much as I hate to admit it, you’re a step or two above my ability, and I never hire anyone better than me.”
His voice chilled Hound. It was the voice of someone who liked to see people suffer.
“That means I have to kill you. If I let you get away with this, I’d never get another top security job. Gonna be hard enough after that piece of work you did in there. ’Course you look three fourths dead on your own, so this is kind of a mercy killing.”
Enough of this shit.
Hound pulled a gun and plugged the guy in the back three times. Then he walked up and put a couple more in his head, just to be sure.
He picked up the flashlight.
“It’s me, Hound. I’m going to get you out of here. You owe me extra for that kill.”
When the light hit her, he could see relief in her eyes. Then, from one breath to the next, she was writhing on the floor, her face contorted in a mask of terrible pain, clutching her belly. He’d seen it before, in the fields of Vietnam.
Dying!
He ran forward and knelt at her side, looking for whatever wound was sending her into death throes.
To be at her side when she died.
What he saw shocked him almost as much as her death would have. She’d ripped open the front of her outfit. In the flashlight’s beam, a parade of small figures was moving across her belly, leaving a raw trough of burned flesh in their wake as their tiny feet moved. There was an animated scale on her body and it was tipping as he watched the figures climbing up into the taller of the two pans.
Maliha screamed as the last one dragged itself into the pan. He reached out to grab her shoulders, but she shimmered in front of his eyes as if something was pulling her away. His eyes couldn’t quite focus on her, and his hands went right through her like she wasn’t in the barn with him. He wanted to pull her up into a fierce hug, to keep her there with him, to make whatever was happening stop, with the force of his will if nothing else.
When the shimmering passed, he sat back on his heels, keeping a hand on her to make sure she was there with him.
Damn. This woman’s stranger than I thought.