Chapter 18

Saturday late evening

Sam’s mansion

Medina Washington

Something was wrong. Sam’s demon sense was suddenly on edge. Shit. There it was again. Now he could tell what it was. Someone was using power. Lots of it. This did not bode well for Sam and his enterprise. He should have been aware of this much power long before it could get close. Echoes of his last demise a thousand years ago in far off India began to haunt him. Overconfidence had been his failing back then. He had let someone who had appeared to be the simple son of a farmer shred him into pieces and send him back to the depths of Hell.

He wasn’t going to let it happen this time though. He whirled about in the small monitoring room he was sharing with Dell. They had been taking in the details of the auction and reveling together in the almost million dollars they had already raised.

“Dell, we need to get the fuck out of here now!” barked Sam.

Sam could tell Dell was just about to ask why when all the camera’s and microphone went dead at once.

Dell took a step toward the door and was about to open it.

“No! Not that way follow me,” ordered Sam, as he snatched a small thumb drive from a port in one of the computers controlling the monitoring devices.

Sam strode to the back corner of the room where he pressed the corner of a section of pecan wood paneling. A small door popped out revealing a narrow shaft with a metal ladder bolted to the side. Tiny LED lights lit the interior as Sam started down the ladder.

Truthfully, he didn’t give a shit if Dell followed him or not. Unusual talents and a proclivity for unheard of levels of evil aside, Dell was nothing special to him. Dell’s dad’s influence and position would be a loss, but Sam was patient and would find another situation he could exploit eventually.

No, Sam was just following one of the precepts of survival that was probably familiar to anyone who had spent any time in bear country. You didn’t have to be faster than the bear. You just had to be faster than the slowest member of your party. Sam would throw Dell to whoever was behind this incursion as a distraction to save himself as need be.

Sam needn’t have worried. Once they reached the bottom of the shaft and opened the hidden door that let out from the side of the mansion, Sam could tell that they had escaped immediate attention. He and Dell made their way out the side entrance and through a tiny concealed gate in the iron fence. They then worked their way sideways through the trees bordering the neighboring residence and out onto a back alley.

His escape assured, Sam now just had to figure out what had happened and who he had to punish.

The first bodyguard nearly ended her.

In fact if it hadn’t been for the absolute shock of a dark figure appearing out of nowhere directly in front of him, he probably would have. Mei had carefully planned her stalk to approach the bodyguard from behind and not reveal herself until absolutely necessary but she had gotten in too much of a hurry. A rookie mistake that nearly cost her her life.

She was still a little unsure of the second gift her foster mother Nyx had bestowed on her so she wanted to be as close as possible before she used it. She had been maybe a bit too close. As she turned off her invisibility there must have been air movement or a slight sound that gave her away. This guy was good, really good. He had the kind of talent that only multi-billionaires can buy.

The guard spun around quickly and reached for the pistol in his shoulder holster. As his hand dove for the Sig, Mei had a couple of milliseconds to decide whether to stick with her original plan or to improvise.

Improvise it is, she thought and took a step forward delivering a perfect elbow strike onto the point of the bodyguard’s jaw just as his weapon came inline for the shot.

Mei had always done subtle before. Although thoroughly trained she’d never been a brawler or a door kicker in her operative days. She could feel the appeal though when she heard the satisfying ‘pop’ as the bodyguard’s head flew back and his eyes rolled up in his head. This must be what Sarah likes so much she thought as she quickly and efficiently cleared his weapon and zip-tied his hands and feet. Thank gods for the “Ben effect” she thought as she easily drug the 200 pound plus man into a hall closet.

Mei paused and took a deep shuddering breath. That was too close she thought as her hands and body began to shake. A second later Mei realized that she didn’t have time for a break down. Her man and her sisters were counting on her. So she took another deep breath to steady herself.

“Bingo Golf down in North East hallway. Moving to next target,” whispered Mei into her throat mic.

She wanted to investigate the room the guard had been watching but that wasn’t her mission. Ben’s team was coming up from the back in just a couple of minutes. They would round up the non-combatants. The team had thought about trying to just badge the bodyguards with their fake credentials but they had no way of guaranteeing that the armed guards wouldn’t shoot first, or even worse, insist on calling to verify who they were before giving up their weapons.

The next bodyguard should be close. From the bugs and small cameras that Mei had planted earlier, Lizzy had been able to identify a total of 4 bodyguards guarding 4 principals. From what Maria had passed to them it seemed that some of the auction winners would be taking their purchases to special rooms to ‘try them out’.

Mei rubbed the sun side of her ring to turn her invisibility on again and crept around the corner.

Yes! There were two bodyguards standing watch in the adjacent hallway, each in front of a bedroom.

Shit! Now what, she thought. She had discovered that she could only use one of her gifts at a time. But if she turned off her invisibility to take out one guard the other would see her. If these guards were anything like the first one they would react like a ferret on meth.

Well, she hadn’t tried this on two people at once, and never from so far away, but she didn’t have much choice. Mei pulled herself back around the corner and shut her invisibility off. She focused her intent on a mental image of the hallway around the corner and began rubbing the moon face side of her ring.

Mei could feel a tension in the air that suddenly relented just as she heard near simultaneous thumps around the corner. Risking a darting glance she gave a sigh of relief as she saw both guards down and unconscious. Rushing forward she quickly confiscated their weapons and zip tied them. She could feel Ben and Sarah nearby and knew she was nearly out of time.

“Bingo Golf two and three down. Moving to Bingo Golf four now.” Mei sent.

Now, where the hell was that last bodyguard?

Sarah thought that the two kidnappers were likely hanging around the back service entrance. Lizzy had postulated that the organizers wouldn’t want the goons too near the fancy pants party, but would want them on hand for any dirty work that might arise.

For an instant she flashed back to her dream experience as a captive and she clenched her hands until her knuckles were white on her ASP baton. Sarah forced herself to relax. She wasn’t afraid, she was just stressed because she couldn’t just kill these assholes outright. She had promised to not to flip the switch on them unless she had to, and she always kept her promises.

There! She caught the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke near the landing at the back of the stairwell. She motioned behind her for the team to freeze as she continued up the stairs. Sarah instinctively knew that these goombahs would never take a lone girl seriously and she could get close enough to take them both out without any danger to the others in the team.

She spotted her targets just as she cleared the last step. They were leaning up against opposite walls just past the landing in front of double doors enveloped in a foul smelling bluish cloud of cheap cigarette smoke...

The target on the right was a short fat fuck with a sparse, slicked back combover and a 3 day growth of stubble. Sarah was doubly glad of her gloves since it looked like his idea of hygiene was to dip himself in bacon grease instead of showering. Sarah named him Goombah One

The target on the left was taller, almost gaunt, with pale hair and narrowed weasel eyes. Sarah named him Goombah Two.

They were both wearing cheap shiny polyester suits that looked like they had been issued right from Central Casting for villain roles. The pistols stuck in the front of their pants were quite real though.

“Hey how the hell did you get out...” was the last thing Goombah One was going to be able to say for a very long time as Sarah strode across the tiled landing in a deceptively fast, sinuous glide and punched him straight in the throat. Goombah One never even thought of reaching for his gun as the cigarette shot out of his mouth and both of his hands flew to his throat. Without pause Sarah snatched the cigarette out of the air, reversed it and drove the lit end deep into Goombah One’s left nostril. At the same time she yanked the 9mm Beretta out of his pants, tempted to pull the trigger and play ‘did he remember to put the safety on’ roulette with the Goombah One’s junk. But she refrained.

As Goombah One started trying to scream through his destroyed throat, Sarah took a smooth stutter step to her left around him, shot out her collapsible ASP baton and whipped it into the back of his right knee, destroying it completely.

By this time Goombah Two had managed to overcome his shock at being attacked by a pony-tailed blond demon and was reaching for his pistol. In her hyperaware state Sarah calculated distances and speed and came to the conclusion that she could cross the 6 feet between them before he could get off a shot. But ‘what the hey’. She’d never tried throwing a pistol like a knife before.

Sarah pivoted faster than the human eye could track and nimbly whipped Goombah One’s pistol at Goombah Two’s head.

There was a loud thump as the butt of the pistol impacted squarely between Goombah Two’s eyes. This was followed by the shushing sound of cheap polyester sliding down expensive plaster work as Goombah Two’s semi-conscious body slid down the wall into a heap.

Sarah quickly cleared the bodies of weapons and zip tied the two goombahs together.

“Clear,” she whispered into her throat mic.