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“I’m not going to ask you again,” North said.
“Animal psychic?” Tean asked.
The set to Jem’s shoulders looked slightly embarrassed, but he kept his gaze fixed on the men in front of him. “You’re the one he was talking about,” Jem said. “The one whose noodle is past al dente.”
“Oh, well,” Shaw said, “that was really only a one-time thing, and it was private, you know, animal psychic-client confidentiality—”
“Motherfucking traitorous piece of shit,” North said, directing a furious glance at Shaw. “I was sick! I had a fever!” Then he stopped, and with what looked like an effort of will, drew himself back together. His gaze resettled on Jem. “All right, we’ll do this the hard way.”
Jem didn’t say anything, but Tean recognized the coiled energy of his body, the way his free hand dipped toward his pocket.
“Let’s not do anything hasty,” Tean said. “We can explain—”
“North,” Shaw said.
“I’ll deal with you later,” North said.
But Shaw grabbed his arm, turning North toward the door and, at the same time, moving them further into the room. Tean tugged Jem backward, giving the other men space to maneuver. The muscles in Jem’s back were hot and tight, all that potential violence trembling with a kind of molecular frenzy. But North and Shaw seemed, for the moment, to have forgotten Tean and Jem. Their attention was fixed on the door.
At that moment, the four men from the lobby stepped into the room. Up close, Tean formed a clearer impression of them. They were all white, and their ages ran from late twenties into hard forties or early fifties. One of them might have been pretty five years ago, a kind of white trash Ryan Gosling. The next was older, with a goatee of graying stubble. He wore wireframe glasses, which he removed and folded with one hand. The third looked a little like a tee-ball coach Tean remembered from childhood, with his dad haircut and double chin—but you had to overlook the tattoos scrawled across his knuckles. The fourth was a killer. Tean had seen the look now, knew it—the thousand-yard stare under slicked-back hair.
For a moment, Tean was sure the men’s attention settled on Jem.
“Fucking hell,” North muttered. “This is your fault. I wanted to go to Disney World.”
Then the killer pulled up his shirt. Blued steel showed behind his waistband, and he reached for the gun.
6
Jem moved when he saw the gun. He launched himself forward, paracord in one hand, the other slipping the telescoping antenna—pried from the back of an old RCA television years ago—out of his pocket. At the edge of his vision, he noticed the big blond fucker, North, shoving Shaw toward the balcony, shouting, “Get him out of here.” Then Jem’s focus tunneled to the fight.
He swung with the paracord first. The beauty of paracord was that if you bought the good stuff, it stretched at least thirty percent of its length, and it could hold over a thousand pounds of static weight. If you got a long piece of it and you tied a hex nut to the end and you built up some speed, you could do some nice damage, and you could do it from farther away than people expected.
So, while the one with the slicked-back hair was still pulling his gun from his waistband, Jem whipped the paracord once and let the hex nut fly. It cracked against the man’s hand, and Jem thought he heard something break. The man screamed, and the gun dropped to the floor.
That was when North kicked the one with the dad haircut in the knee. Dad dropped, squealing.
Jem extended the antenna with a snap of his wrist and slashed at the pretty one. The antenna whistled through the air, and the pretty one stumbled back, crashing into Slick-back. Jem turned on the fourth man, the older one with the goatee. If you fought fast and lowdown and dirty, the way Jem liked to fight, a lot of the fight was over if you managed to hit first. Three of the four were already out of the fight.
But he wasn’t fast enough, not quite.
Goatee charged into Jem, a knife coming up. That was a killing move, designed to bring the knife up under the ribcage. Jem whipped the paracord at him, but he hadn’t had time to build up speed or to aim, and it whapped uselessly against the man’s side. With the distance between them closed, the antenna was useless, and Jem dropped it. He twisted, felt something tug at his shirt—the knife, his brain screamed—and threw an elbow. He caught only air. Goatee, on the other hand, got a shoulder into Jem, and the force of the blow threw Jem back. He lost his footing and fell, and he landed between the wall and the bed.
For a moment, Jem couldn’t breathe, and black specks whirled in front of him. The sounds of the fight were distant, buried under his brain’s screams for oxygen. Tean, Jem thought. Tean.
Somehow, he got to his feet. The black spots danced and thickened, and he tried to suck in air. Tean needed him. Tean. The knife. Tean and Shaw, who looked about as substantial as a piece of cottonwood fluff, in his purple tights and his pink Crocs.
Jem glimpsed out of the corner of his eye North fighting with Slick-back—North clearly had the upper hand, and Slick-back was barely able to stay on his feet as North rained down brutal, heavy, clubbing blows with one fist, the other hand holding Slick-back upright by the shirt. The hotel room seemed enormous now, the flood of adrenaline stretching everything out into unreal dimensions, and it took an eternity for Jem to scan the room and find Tean and Shaw.
And then all he could do was stare as Goatee lunged with the knife.
Shaw had put Tean behind him, and it was clear he’d been trying to cover Tean as they made their way to the balcony, where they could escape. But Goatee had caught up to them, and although the physical distance wasn’t much—four or five feet as the scarlet macaw flies, a crazy part of Jem laughed—the bed was in the way, and time was the real bitch. Time, dilating in the chemical rush of adrenaline. Everything taking so much longer than it should have. The knife coming up toward Shaw slowly. It would go through that big baggy t-shirt like it was nothing. It would go up under the ribcage, into the heart and lungs.
And then Shaw reared back, the movement so smooth it looked boneless, and spun something from his hand. The telephone handset, still attached to the coiled cord. The cord stretched and flexed just like the paracord, and the handset whipped in a perfect arc, a real beauty. It cracked Goatee in the face, and his nose broke in a spray of blood. Then Shaw leaned forward, grabbed Goatee by his short scruff of graying hair, and yanked his head down to knee him in the face.
Goatee crumpled like an empty bag.
North’s shout drew Jem’s attention. Pretty Boy had finally worked himself up for the fight—or, more likely, had realized he wasn’t going to be able to lie low and let the others do the fighting for him. He had a gravity knife, an ugly little leaden smear in the lamplight, and he slashed wildly at North as he pressed his attack. North retreated, shielding himself with a pillow from the bed. Feathers spilled out from the gashes the knife had left, filling the air.
