Jubal Van Zandt & the Revenge of the Bloodslinger Read online

  Carina reached for her duffel’s zipper.

  I put my hand on her arm, squeezing so she would focus on that pressure instead of me lifting the fold of cash from her hip pocket. “Let me take care of this. You can shoot up the next place if you want to.”

  “I wasn’t going to—”

  I steered us away from the youngest-looking guard at the nearest door—too likely to want to make a name for herself—and away from a haggard-looking veteran guarding a set of doors at the center—too likely to be the leader of this operation.

  A nice middle ground presented himself at the second to last set of doors.

  I led with the money and my winning smile. “Our taxi’s waiting in the pickup area, my good man. Grab my wife’s bag for her, will you?”

  The guard faltered, then his eyes settled on Carina and went wide with recognition. He opened his mouth.

  With a flick of my opposite hand, I slipped out the pin I keep in my wristpiece band for emergencies. Before the guard finished taking a breath, I stuck the pin in the base of his throat at the vocal nerve bunch.

  His hands flew to his neck. His lips worked, but only a wheezing sound came out.

  I shouldered the guard out of our way and slipped out the door, Carina on my tail. We headed down the line of waiting vehicles.

  Carina threw a look back over her shoulder as if she were trying to get her head around what she’d just seen.

  “I paralyzed his vocal cords open,” I explained. “Pretty cool, right? Makes it impossible to phonate. Take that hoodie off and give it here before he gets somebody’s attention and points at us.”

  Carina handed the hoodie over. I shoved it into my bag, then unbuttoned the tourist shirt I had on and stuck it into the bag, too. I smoothed the black t-shirt I’d worn underneath.

  “This is why I dress in layers,” I said, shooting her with a finger gun. She didn’t seem to notice. “Probably better not take the airport transportation.” Without slowing down, I scanned the directory signs for the shuttle to long-term parking. “Red line. This way.”

  We waited at the shuttle stop for two long minutes. Carina stared at me the whole time. I could feel it.

  “Shouldn’t you be watching for threats?” I asked her.

  A long Carina-pause. An intake of air as if she was about to say something.

  But then nothing. No response at all. She just exhaled.

  I looked Carina’s way. She was looking out at the people coming and going, the guards weaving in and out of the cabs and cars in the pick-ups lane, looking for two fugitives wearing a tourist shirt and a white hoodie.

  The red line shuttle showed up. We got on and took a seat near the middle. Carina stayed silent.

  ***

  I started down the row of vehicles in Long Term Lot C, looking for something suitable. Not much there to choose from that wasn’t a POS. People with money get dropped at the airport by their chauffeurs; they don’t need to park for a month.

  I picked a classic Fedra that looked like its owner had gotten about halfway through the restoration before getting bored and taking a flight to somewhere interesting. I dug around in my bag for my slip bar.

  “Glad I threw this in,” I said when I came up with it. “I didn’t even think I’d need to steal a car on this trip. Life with me is a bundle of surprises, Bloodslinger.”

  “You learned it from him,” she finally said.

  “Learned what from whom?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew.

  “The vocal cord pinning. One of his—and two of her—victims had pinhole punctures at the vocal cord nerve bunch. She said he used it for victims he couldn’t make come willingly.”

  “I didn’t learn it in medical school,” I agreed, slipping the bar between the window’s glass and seal. “Although I was always told it was more of a precaution.” I wiggled the bar over until it hooked the door’s internal locking mechanism. “That if you can’t make someone do something of their own volition, then you don’t deserve to have it done, period. Nice to know the old man wasn’t as slick as he thought.”

  “Have you ever used it on anyone before?” Carina asked.

  “Sure, when I needed to.” I found the lever point, then jerked the slip bar. The mechanism gave and the lock popped up with a chunk! “Of course, I felt like a failure every time I had to. Get in.”

  I climbed into the driver’s seat. One of the few things the owner had taken time to replace before he left Soam was the analog ignition. Instead of restoring it, he had retrofitted the car with an electronic fingerprint system, the equivalent of the first-gen locks in the airport—even manufactured by an offshoot of the Rufus-Ponobo conglomerate. I chuckled as I opened the e-skeleton key app on my wristpiece. We had all the time in the world, and the laptic grid in Soam was as omnipresent as the one in Emden.

  Carina fell into the passenger seat more than sat, winced, and slammed the door behind her. Immediately, she started digging in her bag until she found a beat-up med kit. She unbuttoned her jeans and slipped them down until she could access the bullet hole in the muscle of her thigh.

  She had on soft-looking bright blue underwear. Not exactly crotchless lace, but still nice. Kind of sporty.

  I checked the download on my wristpiece. It edged up and over sixty percent. When I looked back, Carina was dumping a little packet of disinfectant into her wound.

  “It hurts like a catfish spine,” she said.

  “Your leg?”

  She looked up from the bullet hole. “The throat pinning.”

  “I believe that,” I said, not caring why she was still hung up on it. “The needle goes right into a cluster of nerves. Yeeee-ouch.”

  “And you can’t scream.” She tore open a KwikStitch pack. “You can barely force the air in and out enough to hiss.”

  “That’s kind of the point,” I said.

  The override finished downloading, and I stopped watching Carina work on her leg. I stuck my wristpiece’s screen to the fingerprint screen and let them interact. The car roared to life, nearly idled too low, then revved back up and evened out.

  I grinned. “I wish I’d been timing that. Had to have been a new record.”

  But Carina wasn’t paying attention to me, she was wiping the excess KwikStitch from her bullet hole. Her leg didn’t look too bad now that she’d stopped the bleeding. She kicked her shoes off, slipped her jeans the rest of the way down, then pulled a pair of those loose cloth pants monks wear when they do martial meditation out of her duffel bag and put them on.

  “My previous record for a car from bar-out to ignition was sixty-one seconds,” I said. “This one had to have been under a minute.”

  “Congratulations,” she said, clearly not enthused.

  “Just no impressing some people.” I slammed my door and started rifling through the console and pulling down the visor shades. “Hey, battle doc, if you’re done with that boo-boo, help me find the parking stub. This hunk of junk isn’t going to do us much good if we can’t get it out of the lot.”

  Carina found it under her seat. The security booth attendant barely looked up from the operatic he was watching when he took our ticket and scanned my wristpiece—which I had set to the incidentals account—for the amount.

  We pulled out of the lot. Because the long-term parking was so far from the airport, its road was a two-way. I took the way that led away from our pursuers.

  “You can transfer that extra eight thousand now,” I told Carina.

  She didn’t touch her wristpiece. “You don’t feel a little bit bad that that guard back there is going to go home tonight in awful pain and wince every time he raises his voice or turns his head for the next couple days? No remorse at all?”

  I fixed her with a look, wishing I had a pair of sunshades so I could do it over the dark lenses like some kind of holostar cliché. “Sister, I don’t feel remorse. I’m not capable of it.”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “What?” I said. “Would you rather I let him ra
ise the alarm so you could go on a shooting spree in the middle of that airport?”

  “I wasn’t going to—”

  “I would’ve gotten killed. I mean, it was neat when you did it in the hallway, but out in the open like that, with guards surrounding us, we’d have been dead. It’s not like I killed him. You’re the one who was going to shoot him, you fucking hypocrite.”

  “I wasn’t going to shoot him!” She pulled a Guild-grade palm stunner out of her bag and held it up for me to see.

  “Like that would hurt less!”

  “It would hurt for a shorter period of time!”

  Then I got it. I’d been too caught up in what I was doing to realize why Carina was upset. The knot unraveled a little more, and a wide rictus stretched across my face.

  “And here I thought you gave a shit about that guard,” I said. “You only care because the pinning is what my father and Harley used. That’s what brought on this little hissy fit. You’re mad that I used it the same as they did.”

  Carina raised her eyebrows like Duh.

  The pretending to be friends, the almost-flirting, the whole job—hell, she’d probably chosen me out of the Guild files because I was Lorne Van Zandt’s son, not because I was the best damn thief in the history of the Revived Earth.

  I cackled. “Your dad literally murdered children in the Soam Massacres and you’re mad at my dad? That is too fucking beautiful.”

  “My dad defended himself,” Carina snarled, her voice low and cold. “Soam used child soldiers so full of drenum that they couldn’t feel—”

  “Oh, sure, hide behind that war-is-hell fishshit. Whatever helps you sleep at night, Bloodslinger.” My foot laid down the accelerator. “Say, I bet that’s an interesting story, how you got your name. Let’s hear that sometime.”

  “Lorne Van Zandt was a recreational murderer. He—”

  “But you just do it for the Guild,” I said. “And oh, yeah, also whenever you feel like taking revenge and somebody gets in your way. I mean, shit, sister, there’s so damned much blood on your hands that Xek’s could subsist on your business alone!”

  Carina raised her voice, trying to yell over me. “He tortured women to death for his enjoyment!”

  “And because of one instance of throat pinning, you think I get off the same way?”

  “Do you?”

  “I thought we were tighter than that, Carina.” Another high-pitched giggle slipped out. “I really did.”

  Maybe she didn’t even care about getting revenge on those brujahs who did in her dad. Maybe there were no brujahs! Maybe this whole thing was an elaborate sting operation to see if 1) I was following in my old man’s bloody footsteps and 2) the Guild could bring me down. I’d been so excited about the difficulty level of this job that when the possibility of a trap popped into my head, I’d just written it off. Jubal fucking Van Zandt can walk out of any trap. And I could. But I didn’t like thinking that I’d walked into one without even seeing it. Worse yet, that a Guild knight—a fucking Jesusfreak—had played me. Me!

  I laughed again, another strained cackle, and tore ass down the highway in our stolen vehicle.

  “Hang on,” I told Carina. “We’re still eight hours from Courten!”

  EIGHT

  I’ve mentioned before that I don’t know whether I believe in dreams and nightmares or not. If they do exist, then they’re rare enough that I’ve never had one, nor have I ever talked to anybody who could prove that they’d had one.

  But as the afternoon closed in on sunset, Carina finally dozed off in the passenger seat, and she did not sleep easily. The expression on her face was either extreme concentration or extreme disgust. At one point, she inhaled as if she were about to say something. I looked over, expecting her to be awake, but her eyes were closed.

  It was possible that she was having a dream. It was also possible that she was pretending to be asleep and pretending to dream. She didn’t touch herself in any naughty places or let out any pent-up farts like someone who was really asleep might, but she also didn’t react when I let one rip, so the truth of the matter was up in the air.

  When she finally woke up—or decided to stop pretending to be asleep—I didn’t notice. She didn’t make a big show of stretching or yawning. One minute I looked over and she was just awake, staring out at the road in the greenish-peach light of the Soam sunset.

  “How long to Courten?” she asked.

  I did the math based on the last sign we’d passed. “Three hours. Give or take.”

  “Need me to drive for a while?”

  My eyes had dried out, so I agreed. We pulled over and switched places.

  Back on the road, Carina said, “If you need to sleep, you can put the seat back.”

  “Maybe after a while.” But I would die before I slept while she was awake and in control of our transportation.

  The sun disappeared behind the horizon, and we disappeared into the Soam rainforest. The car’s headlights fought back the dark the best they could, but the road wound around blind corners and took ridiculous jags and switchbacks without warning. I was about to suggest some cautious driving, but Carina finally slowed down to a reasonable pace.

  Not an adrenaddict. So that was one point in her favor.

  As far as I could see them, the facts were these: Carina had hired me to get her into a village full of aguas brujahs. I had found a contact who knew of a fix-it witch in Courten. The Courten witch could confirm that these brujahs existed and that they were well known for having killed a Guild knight. Whether that Guild knight had been Carina’s father couldn’t be ascertained yet. I hadn’t even done the research to make sure Carina’s father was dead. Maybe it had all been an elaborate setup and I’d swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

  No one can catch you but you, my father used to say. Lorne Van Zandt had gotten sloppy and caught himself for the Guild. Now his son needed to get his act together before he did the same thing.

  I glanced over at Carina to find her staring out into the night like she had road hypnosis, then I checked my wristpiece.

  “Perfect reception in the middle of the jungle,” I said. “That floater, Nytundi, should take a lesson.”

  The good side of Carina’s mouth smiled. It didn’t look forced. It was the smile of someone who hadn’t woken up all that long ago and either hadn’t yet put up her defenses or could easily pretend that she didn’t have any defenses.

  “You can finally listen to your messages,” I said. “Find out if Nickie-boy’s pissed at you.”

  “I checked them at the airport,” she said.

  “What? When?”

  “Either your fourth or fifth bathroom break.”

  “You did not, you big fat liar!” Then I sat up and leaned across the armrest. “Was he mad? What’d he say? What was the subtext?”

  She paused, a Carina-pause, thinking, then she sighed. “He sounded mad, but he’s not really. He gets hurt when I shut him out. We’re supposed to be a team.”

  “The Bloodslinger, shut somebody out? Surely not.”

  That wrung a half-smile out of her.

  “He said ‘I thought we were past this,’” she said. “And we were. I was doing good. We were partners. But then with Dad… I forgot that the street went both ways, I guess.”

  “Think he’ll break off the engagement?” I asked.

  “No.” She said it like she knew without a doubt that this Nick guy would forgive her and they would live happily ever after, pausing every now and then to pop out a kid here and fight a holy war there.

  I rolled my eyes. “Jeesh, get a room.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Why are you so interested in me and Nick?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Because I want to know exactly what kind of person I’m dealing with here and because I think that we need to be straight with each other from here on out.”

  In the light from the dashboard, her drawn brows shaded her eyes. “You think I’ve been lying to you about something?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know. That’s why I want to call a truce and pull all of the trotlines out of the water.”

  “Truce?”

  “Don’t try to manipulate a manipulator, Carina. I see everything that you do. Just because I don’t call you out on something doesn’t mean that I’m not filing it away and watching for it next time.”

  She whipped out another Carina-pause. This one was the granddaddy of all the pauses I’d sat through in her presence, pregnant as a waterpossum, but it was a thinking pause, so I waited.

  “What you’re talking about, it’s just something I do sometimes,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. “It’s easy for me to see how people want to be treated and treat them in accordance with that in order to further a case or help them achieve their goals or anticipate their next moves or whatever. But I’ve never used it to manipulate you. I haven’t acted like anything but myself around you, Van Zandt. But I didn’t tell you everything when I hired you. I didn’t tell you about my father’s part in the Soam Massacres because I didn’t think you would be interested—”

  “Mostly correct.”

  “—and I didn’t tell you about my internship tracking down your father’s copycat killer or that I’ve been keeping an eye on your file for the last…almost twelve years now.”

  My balls sucked up close as if her foot had just narrowly missed them. The breath stuck in my chest.

  I grinned. “You were watching to see if I was a serial killer like my old man.”

  “Yes.”

  “You hired me hoping to catch me in the act.”

  “Nope, I hired you because you were the best thief in Emden and I needed to get into a place that only you were good enough to get into.” She slowed the car as we cut around a particularly sharp switchback, then returned to a mostly-safe speed. “And also because I don’t think you’ve ever killed anyone, Van Zandt. The only time I ever doubted that was tonight when you pinned that SecOps guard’s throat. You were fast and efficient at it, practiced, but the assumption I made based on those observations was faulty.”