The Changeling Game, Chapter 89

89.
The Better Killer

“Check her for me. She always has a blade somewhere.”

Six, to be exact. Not that Kyra was going to help them find any of her shivs.

It wasn’t easy staying still while the greenest member of the guard team walked up behind her. She could anticipate what he was going to do, but only by wading through the other filth in his mind, the things he kept imagining doing to her body.

He was also afraid of her. At least there was that. Too busy holding onto his cudgel to do a real pat-down. He half-assed it with his right hand instead, using the same hand he—

Fuck, his head was full of nasty shit. He completely missed the blade she kept in her sleeve, his hand moving from her right shoulder, down her back, and now his fantasies were getting the better of his caution as he reached her ass.

Not yet. Don’t make your move yet. He’s still a little scared. Wait until he’s only thinking with his dick…

She had her mouth knife ready. She doubted it would come into play, though. Not after what she’d done to the last guy who’d tried to make her go down on him. Usually she just disappeared their junk into Elsewhere, but that time—

His hand moved to her hip. She could feel the jolt of excitement that began overwhelming his caution when one of his fingers touched the bare skin between the hem of her shirt and the waistband of her pants. Revolting as his mind was, she had to stay close to it, warned by it, if she didn’t want her skin to try to crawl right off her body and her defensive reflexes to kick in. She had to stay in control. Anatoliy and the other two—she called them Cueball and Curly in her head, because they always seemed to show up together and she’d never once heard their real names—were watching, growing even more excited. Their guards were beginning to drop, too.

Which was good, because their friend was trying to slide his hand into her waistband and that was more than she felt like tolerating.

She sprung the blades in the back of her right shoe and kicked back, feeling the man’s sudden agony as they slid home.

Your chances of ever being a father were low, thank God, but they just dropped to zero.

She kicked off, arching up and bringing her legs above his shoulders, grabbing his neck with her calves as she began to spin.

Sometime, in the last year, she had begun to get a new sense of the physical, one that baffled her and seemed impossible when she tried to really think about it, but she was pretty sure there was something Tizzy had called “telekinesis” in play. Something she had a vague memory of seeing her mother do when she was little. She could will her momentum and leverage to be stronger than they ought to be, using her grasp of the guard’s neck, as she spun, to flip him and to grab his cudgel. She’d practiced with it, played with it, and knew her limits with it so far. She couldn’t levitate objects, couldn’t even levitate herself—yet, anyway—but she could add in a little something extra to her movements that logic dictated shouldn’t be there.

Hopefully any of the guards who realized she was doing it wouldn’t survive long enough to tell anyone else.

She slammed the cudgel against the side of the man’s head and followed up that blow with one to his gut. Fucker was still standing, looking dazed. She kicked off again, cartwheeling her body with the cudgel as a base for the move, her legs sending him flying into a haphazard flip of his own.

He didn’t break his neck when he landed. Dammit. It had almost worked.

Kyra regained her feet, staring at the other three guards, waiting to see what their plans were.

Their newbie friend might be down, but they were three of Yuri’s veterans, his favorites, and they wouldn’t be nearly as easy, especially now that their guards were back up.

Still, their minds would be less appalling to read if they were thinking about battle tactics instead of their favorite sicko porn acts, much less the specific acts they’d been instructed to make sure they performed on her.

C’mon, you motherfuckers, let’s get this over with.

Anatoliy came at her first. She dodged his swing, spinning and kicking his upper back to send him into the wall. Cueball followed him in, throwing a punch at her with the hand holding his flashlight. She blocked it and the follow-up punch before knocking him face-first into another wall. Behind her, she could feel Anatoliy preparing to move, planning to grab her by her upper arms. She spun and planted the wide part of the cudgel against his throat.

He stared at her, horrified. She got a glimpse, in her mind, of a hand holding up—

—a sardine can key?

He really does see into the future!

It had distracted her at just the wrong moment, and she didn’t hear Curly moving up behind her until he slammed the butt of his cudgel into her upper back. Pain exploded along her spine. He dropped it and grabbed control of the one she was holding, pulling it back against her throat. Cueball turned around and slammed his cudgel into her lower abdomen, far too low to knock the wind out of her, but it still hurt like fuck.

Been hurt worse, she told herself as Curly spun her around and she hit the floor. Let ’em think they’re winning… Got a few tricks they don’t know are possible…

He slammed the cudgel into her back again as she tried to begin a rise-and-roll. She collapsed, feeling Cueball’s rage beat at her as he stalked forward and used the handle of his cudgel to begin choking her. Curly had his hands on her hips, pressing her down.

She needed to stay still for a moment. Let them calm down. Let them think they’d subdued her and that she wasn’t sneaking air from Elsewhere into her lungs. Let them start thinking about fucking her again. Then she’d take the next one out—

“I don’t think she likes being touched,” a voice from her dreams said, and for a moment she thought she’d passed out in the guards’ grasp.

Riddick was watching from a nearby doorway, a metal cup in his left hand.

“I’d take my wounded and go,” he suggested to the guards, “while you still can.”

Riddick to the rescue…

Like the time he’d saved Tizzy from the creature trying to plow through a huge bone to get to her—

—Wait, wasn’t that me?—

Didn’t matter. Riddick always showed up just in time.

Except…

Don’t think about that, not now. He’s here…

Cueball released his hold on her neck. She gasped in a deep breath, still playing the role of the dazed, vulnerable girl who couldn’t possibly be about to isomorph choice body parts off of anyone. Even Riddick, she suspected, was seeing her that way at the moment. Curly let go of her, too. They and Anatoliy had all risen, preparing to face what they considered the real threat in the room.

Fuck you, assholes, when I’m his age, my kill count is gonna be five times what his is. But do go on…

“Is there a name for this private little world of yours?” Cueball asked. “Huh? What happens there when we don’t just… run away?”

None of them seemed to notice or care that she was getting up. She used the bars to stabilize herself as she climbed to her feet—she was woozier than she liked, but she’d be okay in a few minutes—and turned to watch the unfolding tableau.

She didn’t want to miss a minute of a genuine artist at work.

Tizzy had told her that Chillingsworth had called Riddick that. On their very last night together on Tangiers Prime, as they’d struggled to fall asleep without Sebby cuddling up to them, she’d finally told Kyra a little bit about the Kublai Khan and the terrible menagerie in it, but she’d been unwilling to share any images or feelings. Kyra’d had the sense that somehow it was more traumatic than anything that had happened to her—

…us…

—on the crash planet itself. But Tizzy had described being made to stand on a huge ball, only able to balance by staying perfectly still, a metal noose-collar around her throat, and listening as a woman told Riddick, somewhere behind her, that he was an artist and that she wanted to watch the “moment of creation.”

Gonna get to watch one now…

Cueball was still talking. “You’ll kill us… with a soup cup?”

Curly laughed like a cartoon character, in Kyra’s opinion. Cueball wasn’t that funny.

Riddick lifted the cup in question. “Tea, actually.” He smirked and took a sip.

“What’s that?” Cueball asked.

Apparently, Riddick wanted a moment to savor the last of his drink. He smiled as he lowered the cup from his lips and transferred it into his right hand, holding it between his fingers as delicately as if it was a piece of fragile porcelain. “I’ll kill you with my teacup.”

This, Kyra thought, is gonna be amazing.

Riddick set the cup down, upside-down and clearly empty, on a rocky shelf just beside him. Empty handed, he smiled at the guards.

Obviously Anatoliy wasn’t at all psychic, or he’d be warning his friends to run like hell.

Cueball turned away from him, leaning toward Curly.

“You know the rule,” Curly whispered. “They aren’t dead if they’re still on the books.”

Oh, like any of us didn’t just hear you…

But it explained, she realized, why Yuri was still trying to engineer her death instead of just telling the Planetary Governor that she’d died; he didn’t want to have to take her off the books until she really was dead.

Plus, she sighed to herself, he’s supposed to send the man some choice pieces of me as proof, and he can’t just send some random woman’s bits because they’ll probably be DNA tested… The guards near her had been thinking about which ones they were each going to personally collect from her.

Most men, she thought for the millionth time, were slime. For every Riddick, every Guv, every Ewan or Cedric or Izil or Tomlin… there were countless piles of slime walking around.

Maybe she and Riddick could clear the field of more of them now. The way we did on Canaan Mountain…

Had that really happened?

Cueball was drawing his knife. Somebody was about to die. He was in for a surprise about who.

Still, she had a hard time restraining herself from leaping into the fray.

She caught a glimpse of Riddick slamming his hand down on the teacup, splintering the metal at its rim. A fraction of a second later, she heard a horrific squelching noise and Cueball grunted in pain, freezing in place with his knife raised.

Riddick made a move like he was twisting something. A violent shudder ran through Cueball’s back.

And then, as Kyra watched, the guard tilted backward and crashed to the floor, his eyes already empty, all sense of life and mind abandoning the space where his body lay.

The metal teacup protruded from his chest, partly buried in him. His knife fell from his nerveless fingers.

She could feel Curly and Anatoliy’s sudden terror. Both of them had considered Cueball the best hand-to-hand combat fighter they had.

You really should’ve read Riddick’s file, boys…

She had. The Merc Network account that Tizzy had created for her, so she could keep tabs on where hunters were looking for her, had given her access to all of Riddick’s kill data. She’d read through the entirety of his file more than once, coming to understand, in the process, why Stacey had liked looking at his picture while she got herself off. The only weird thing had been his first cluster of kills on Helion Prime, which seemed to have an entirely different M.O. than the rest. Maybe he’d just changed things up when he hit adulthood, though.

The idiots weren’t backing down. Curly moved into combat position, brandishing his cudgel and forcing Anatoliy to do the same. “Come on!” he hissed at Riddick.

As if Riddick was gonna play by his rules.

Casual as could be, as if nobody was on the verge of snapping near him, Riddick knelt down and picked something up off of the floor.

A key from a sardine can.

Okay, maybe Anatoliy’s a little psychic…

Riddick held it up, showing it to both men, and then set it on the same rocky ledge where he’d rested the teacup.

Anatoliy and Curly stared at Riddick for a moment. Kyra could hear them imagining just how he might use that key to kill them. It was tinier than most of her blades but loomed larger in their heads than a sword.

Curly’s nerve broke first.

Both men hurriedly gathered up the newbie guard, still uncon­scious—

—And hopefully permanently im­paired!—

—and carried him past Kyra and down a corridor. Their eyes never moved to her; Riddick filled their vision. Their mission to take her apart for Yuri was forgotten.

It was almost a shame. She’d been planning on feeding their dicks to the “hellhounds” tonight.

Probably won’t be my last chance to do that…

She knelt down beside Cueball, studying Riddick’s handiwork. “Death by teacup.”

It took some effort to pull the cup free. Riddick had buried nearly two inches of it in the guard’s chest and then had turned it at least ninety degrees, mangling the man’s heart.

“Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” She’d come up with some ingenious ways of killing, and could probably have produced the same effect by isomorphing to make up for the sheer muscle power of Riddick’s move. The man can turn anything into a weapon…

She grinned up at Riddick, waiting for him to ask her about her kills. There’d been a movie she’d seen back in Aceso, which was a favorite among the other Killer’s Club girls, where two men kept one-upping each other with the most improbable methods of killing the enemies surrounding them. A few tactics, she’d known even then, would never work in real life, but it had still been hilari­ous—

“I didn’t come here to play ‘Who’s the Better Killer,’” Riddick growled, turning away.

Had he been in her head?

She stood up behind him. “But it’s my favorite game. Haven’t you heard?”

They’d started playing it on Canaan Mountain.

He was there. He should know that—

He had been there, hadn’t he? They’d hunted Red Roger together…

But somehow she had other memories, more detailed ones, of being alone on the mountain, painstakingly laying traps and shivering in treetops as she kept watch and lured her prey to her…

…using herself as bait to get Roger himself to walk into her snare because he was too focused on the seemingly oblivious naked girl bathing in a creek to realize it was a trap…

That had been her trap, though, not Riddick’s. Where had Riddick gone?

Had he ever been there? He had a weight and presence in this moment that was completely absent from all her memories of him on Canaan Mountain.

Was her banter falling flat because the shared moments she was trying to evoke had never happened? How were they gonna get to the kissing part without the banter?

She could see it so clearly in her head: Ewan calling Tizzy a cheater, a huge smile on his face, her sister walking closer and closer to him as she teasingly refuted his joking accusations and playfully challenged him to do something about them, the intense chemistry igniting between them that she wanted to feel between Riddick and herself now—

“I heard you came looking for me,” Riddick said, not turning around to face her. She had the weird sense that he was testing her, trying to trip her up in some way. But about what? It didn’t feel at all playful.

“Is that all?” It was, pretty much, all she’d told Imam when she’d called him. Two fucking years ago… “Then you missed the good part.”

Somehow, though, she didn’t want to tell him about losing Tizzy. Her sister had trusted a military general and was probably dead, or worse, because of that mistake. She didn’t really want to tell him about Oliver, either. Her biggest regret there was that she hadn’t ghosted him on the spot, buried him out in the hills, and then claimed ignorance when asked where her boss had gone, instead of just threatening to cut off his hands if he ever tried to grope her again. Maybe she’d even have ended up in charge of his paddocks instead of—

“Hooked up with some mercs out of Lupus Five,” she told Riddick, picking up her story there. “Said they’d take me on, teach me the trade, give me a good cut…”

Riddick’s whole body had gone rigid. Tension was suddenly thrumming through him. Maybe he already knew what had happened to her? She set the teacup back down on the ledge.

“They slaved me out, Riddick!” Why did she suddenly feel like it was his fault that had happened to her? Any feelings of playfulness were suddenly gone. “Do you know what that could do to you when you’re that age?”

She’d turned seventeen on New Queensland, but that suddenly wasn’t the age she was thinking of. Somehow her mind shuddered away from the insides of the settler ship, and instead she saw the mercs handing her over to Red Roger and his men. Those men forcing her mother to watch while Roger—

Fuck. No. All that shit had happened to Jack. Not her. Jack was dead. Not her.

“When you’re twelve years old—”

“I told you to stay in New Mecca,” Riddick hissed, swinging around to come face to face with her.

When had he said that? Had he said it to Tizzy and not her?

Riddick suddenly grabbed the light in the low ceiling, just beside them, and pulled it out with a single, powerful yank. It exploded in his hands as he roared at her and she couldn’t stop herself from recoiling. “Did you not listen?”

When she turned back to look at him, he’d pulled his goggles off and was glaring at her.

“I had mercs on my neck. I’ll always have mercs on my neck. I spent five years on a frozen heap just to keep them away from you.”

And Tizzy and I were hunted the whole time you were in fucking hiding! she wanted to shout at him. She managed to stand her ground and keep quiet without saying it. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to talk about Tizzy with him. Everybody always cared more about Tizzy than her…

Riddick’s expression became accusing, even disgusted. “And you go and sign up with the same fake badges—”

She had an image in her head, suddenly, of Tizzy kneeling over Duke Pritchard, the same sneer on her face as she examined the badge she’d taken from the paralyzed merc’s pocket.

“—that wanted to cut you up and use you for bait.”

I told you not to do it, she thought she heard Tizzy whisper, somewhere deep inside her. And something about a motherfucking son of a side of bacon…

“What are you pitching, Riddick?” she demanded, trying not to feel the twist of guilt and shame that her little sister had just provoked. Riddick turned away from her. “That you cuttin’ out was a good thing? That you had my ass covered from halfway across the universe?”

More guilt tore through her. That was what she had done to Tizzy, too. She’d abandoned her little sister after Riddick had abandoned both of them, and had lost her forever. Maybe everything that had happened after that was what she deserved for making that choice, she thought, feeling ill.

So what does Riddick deserve for abandoning both of us?

It was his fault Jack was dead. His fault she’d lost everything. Nothing had worked right once he’d left them.

She felt Riddick’s own sense of guilt swelling, and then felt him push it aside and go blank and unreadable again. “You signed with mercs,” he murmured, walking way.

It was the only choice I had left, damn it… Every other door had closed to her. Every other friend had left or been taken from her. “There was nobody else around.”

Because she’d let General Toal separate her from Tizzy…

Because I told Tizzy we couldn’t stay together anymore…

Fuck.

She had to get out of there before she lost it in front of Riddick.

Keeping her spine straight, she turned and walked out of the room before he could, slamming one of the barred “cell doors” shut behind her. The moment she’d hoped to have with him had unraveled, again, into a godawful mess.

She needed a kill. A good, righteous kill. More than one. Once she was sure she was alone, she isomorphed into Elsewhere and followed a tunnel that led to the warren of the Moles. Three were dead. She’d finish off the rest.

Fuck you, Riddick. I’m the better killer.

Now if she could just stop crying…

You’d never have talked shit like that to Tizzy, damn you, she thought as she crept up on the first of the Moles and pulled his beating heart into Elsewhere. She hoped the “hellhounds” would like human hearts for a midnight snack. How come you can’t care that much about me?

She had the sudden, horrible feeling that Riddick had come to Crematoria for Tizzy, not her. It left her chest feeling even hollower than the Moles were when she was done with them.