Page 56 of Ghost’s Awakening

The Muay Thai guy was out cold. Flat on his back, arms wide, blood already running from his nose down both sides of his face.

Valkyrie didn't stop to look at him. She was up and moving before I'd finished turning, straight across the concrete toward Vega, who needed her most. Past her, Blade had his man going backward, slipping a kick and answering it in the same half second, a hook to the body and a cross behind it that put the man's back into the side of the van hard enough to rock it on its springs.

Then Valkyrie screamed.

I'd never heard a human being make a sound like it. It tore up out of her from somewhere below her stomach, hit the concrete and the beams, and came back doubled. A war cry under a concrete ceiling. Every head on that level turned toward it, including the head of the man in front of Vega.

He turned right into her, but she'd already left the floor. Both legs up, both boots out, all that height and weight coming at him through the air, and both feet took him dead in the chest. She dropped out of the kick and hit the concrete on her shoulder, smooth, rolling the fall out of it, and the man flew back off his feet.

Vega was behind him and ducked. The man's momentum carried him straight over Vega's bent back, and Vega drove up out of the crouch with everything his legs had left in them, and the man went up and over, spinning, arms flailing at nothing, and crashed flat on his back on the concrete with a thud that emptied him. His hands moved once, both of them, and then they fell loose onto the floor.

Three left. The boxer, holding his jaw with one hand. Santos's man. Blade's man against the van with his eyebrow pouring.

They looked at the two on the floor. I watched it land on them, the way their eyes went from their friends to each other to us, and the thing in those eyes was fear. The numbers were not even anymore.

They went for the guns.

All three at once, and late, like they were reaching for a thing they'd forgotten they had. The boxer got his out from under his shirt clean and then fumbled the slide, because there was nothing in the chamber. Santos's man had his half out of his coat and snagged on the cloth. Blade's man clawed at the small of his back and came up with the pistol turned the wrong way in his fist.

The sight of that first pistol put ice straight down my back. A hospital parking structure at two in the morning. One shot, and every cop in the city would be on the ramps, and Liam would be upstairs with nobody on his door.

Blade and I drew at the same instant. My Glock came out of my jacket pointing at the boxer's chest before he'd found the safety. The Desert Eagle came out of the small of Blade's back and sat on his man's face. Fast. Faster than anything those three had ever seen, and I watched all three of them see it.

Santos's gun came up on his man. Valkyrie, up off the concrete, had hers out in one motion.

The three of them went still with their guns half out and ours all the way.

Five men who'd come here carrying and fought us with their fists. They'd only reached for the steel when they saw it going wrong, and then they'd reached for it like it was the first time. Maybe it was.

"It's over." My voice came out at a speed I didn't use. Flat. Cold. The one I'd found in a kitchen, days ago, with my hand on Caleb's shoulder when he got that payment notification, and it scared me a little, how easy it came. "You're beaten. We don't want to kill anybody tonight." I let the Glock hold the boxer's eyes. "But reach for a gun again, and I will."

Nobody reached.

"Drop them." Blade. Two words that ended the situation.

Three pistols hit the concrete.

"Santos." I didn't look away from the boxer. "Collect them."

He went down the line, searching the two unconscious ones on the floor too, and every pistol that came off went into his pockets, and when he straightened he had a look on his face I'd seen on Tank when a client told him how to tune an engine.

"Five." He turned the last one over in his hand. "And every safety is still on. Pathetic."

"Van." Blade tipped his head at it without taking the Desert Eagle off his man.

Valkyrie went. Ten seconds, and she came back out with a plastic bag in one hand and held it up under the light so we could see it.

"Zip ties." Her voice had gone rough. "A whole bag. In the door pocket. Next to the straps. No other weapons in there. Just what they had on them."

A gurney with straps and a bag of ties. A blind spot picked out on purpose. They'd come for a sleeping man with a tube in his throat and they'd packed for a fight. For a just in case.

"Use them," I told her, and I heard my own voice and didn't recognize it.

Somewhere quiet. I'd said it days ago in a kitchen with my hand on his shoulder. We take him somewhere quiet and he tells us everything he knows.

Somewhere quiet was a dead strip-mall lot a mile off Charleston, the van backed into the corner farthest from the road with its lights off and its engine ticking as it cooled. Blade's bike was already in the back of it, run up the ramp and set on its stand between the legs of four zip-tied men. Santos and Valkyrie stood at the open doors with their pistols out, and Vega leaned on the panel beside them with one eye swelling shut, holding his own weight up.

Blade and I took the fifth one. The youngest, the one Santos had been fighting, a kid with a burst lip who couldn't have been more than twenty, whose eyes had gone wide when the Desert Eagle came out. We walked him thirty feet across the lot with his hands tied behind him, to where the light from the road didn't reach. Blade turned him around and put him against the wall of a shuttered nail salon, and the knife came out.