Wrath of the Demon Girl Page 11

  “Well, beggars can’t be choosers,” Charles said. “I just want a little TLC, and maybe some company to watch anime with.”

  “Let me know when you’ll be done here, I’m gonna hook you up.”

  “Whoa, wait. Really?” Charles’ face lit up, and his hands got all twitchy.

  “Yep,” I flicked the business card back at him. “Pick a girl, any girl.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Charles remained silent on our drive back down to the Brighton Beach area. I parked my car next to a decent-looking apartment, the location where the handler for Russian Dolls sent us via text. The apartment wasn’t far from the beach, and the location of Sokolov’s end, in fact it was only a block or two away.

  From what we gathered, once you book a girl, you had the option to meet them at this apartment, or have them visit you at your home, or a hotel. We chose to meet them here as it was the option Sokolov was going for. I escorted Charles into the lobby, brushing off lint that fell on top of his nice shirt, while he posed as a regular John looking for a good time.

  Visually he was nervous as fuck. I couldn’t blame him, considering I didn’t explain the game plan in detail to him, and for good reason. I couldn’t afford to have him get too nervous about the situation and make the lady of the night become wary of him. Charles was by no means prime undercover material. What he had was a dick, a clean record, and the fact I already dragged him down this pit. What he needed in return was the promise to get laid so he could keep his mouth shut about my work behind Gabe’s back.

  We stepped into the elevator, the doors sliding closed signaled our brief chance to talk without anyone in the lobby hearing.

  “So why are you following me up?” Charles asked.

  “I’m just backup.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case you’re premature and she gets pissed.” I gave him two firm pats on his shoulder, handing off my backpack to him. The weight of it threw him off, forcing him to apply more strength than he thought he needed to hold it. “Keep that with you.”

  “For what?”

  “Just do it, and whatever you do . . . don’t drop it, or throw it.”

  The elevators arrived at the designated floor. Charles let out a massive exhale and psyched himself up for the encounter that was minutes away from going down as we walked into the halls. “Hey, I wanna thank you in advance for this,” he said.

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “I’m a virgin you know. Been too busy to meet a girl, and too broke to afford one. Man, I hope this is the right call.”

  “Lots of guys pay to get their noodle wet for the first time.”

  My face twisted into a nice little devious glare when Charles knocked on the door. I made sure I was a good two feet away from the door, so the girl inside couldn’t see me. The door unlocked and opened, Charles had to do a double take as he stepped in.

  “Oh wait—”

  The door closed. His reaction when he entered was expected. I might have given him the option to pick any girl from that site, but in the end, he was way too shy to send the message. I did it on his behalf using his phone, and then secretly made the appointment for Anastasia AKA Belyana. She was the one that greeted him at the door, not the girl he wanted to see.

  I took advantage of the downtime to double-check my gear. Hidden wrist blades, check, shurikens inside my jacket, check, katana hidden within a black art storage tube, check, Umbral energy inside my body to conjure demonic magical talents . . . check. I was ready for anything, and if the woman inside was truly a dangerous demon, then it was going to be up to me to charge in before Charles ended up like the rest.

  I flattened my ear against the hard surface of the door to the suite Charles was led into. I didn’t hear much. No fake orgasms, no romping and thumping, nothing except for some rustling sounds close to the door, which was most likely where my bag had been placed—

  The sound of the elevator doors opening caused my head to jerk away from the door, facing the halls. I moved away from the door quickly, didn’t need any of the residents exiting the elevator knowing I was up to something. Game plan was to let the folks pass by and enter their rooms, and then get back to my snooping. Lucky for me, the elevator doors were around the corner, I couldn’t see them right away, and they couldn’t see me.

  That’s when I heard one of the people that left the elevator speak Russian, and he didn’t sound very happy. I briefly harnessed the element of spirit and left my mark within the shuriken I held in my hand and tossed it. The shuriken sank right into the wall close to the corner, my body blinked over to it instantly.

  With my back to the wall, I peered around the corner, looking down into the connecting hallway where the elevator doors were. There was one good thing about paranoia, it always kept you on your toes, giving you the heads-up that shit was about to go down. In this case, my paranoia directed me to the discovery of none other than Vladimir and members of his goon squad. They were all packing heat, dressed in black, with dark beanies over top their heads, and black gloves. Something told me they weren’t here to visit a friend and watch a sports game.

  They were here to start some shit. The question was, what kind of shit? Did they know I was here? Or was it something else? Regardless of what it was, me standing there watching them approach was going to shorten my life expectancy by a huge margin. I retrieved my shuriken still in the wall, and tossed it back to the door of the suite Charles and Belyana were in. It hit the floor silently, as did my feet when I blinked over to it.

  I banged my fists upon the door, looking back periodically down the L-shaped hallways. Vladimir and his thugs would be turning the corner soon, if their voices and footsteps were any indication.

  My knocks on the door were met with silence. Fuck me. I needed in, if a fight was going down, so be it. But a fight in a narrow hallway? Yeah, that didn’t offer much in terms of cover, escape, or help me stay mobile while multiple guns did their thing. I needed this fight to be on my terms, and we were far from that.

  I knocked on the door again, firmly.

  Nothing.

  I did it once more as apprehension started to take hold of me.

  The door opened. Emily stood before it in her birthday suit, my bag was below her feet. I bolted into the suite, shutting the door quickly. I didn’t hear any raging Russian voices, Vladimir and his thugs didn’t see me, I hope.

  “How do you like the bag?” I asked Emily while peering through the peephole of the door.

  Emily winced, while grabbing her clothes from my bag. “You’re lucky I don’t have claustrophobia.”

  Unknown to Charles and Belyana, Emily was stuffed inside my bag in her cat form. Admit it, that was a slick-as-fuck move, one that prevented a gunfight outside evidently. I moved away from the door, scoping out the one-bedroom apartment suite I found myself in. There was plenty of space for a full-on fight, and a fire escape outside one of the windows for a slick getaway if needed.

  “Get your clothes on.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Emily asked, slipping into her panties.

  “We need to hurry this up; Vladimir and his goons are coming.”

  “Did you book an orgy or something?”

  That’s when I took advantage of my brain’s ability to think clearer now I was inside. Vladimir wasn’t here because of me. “This isn’t just any call-girl service,” I muttered, putting the facts together. “It must be owned and operated by the Russian mob. And Vladimir is the pimp coming to make a surprise visit.” I faced the door leading to the bedroom, slightly ajar. “Did they?”

  “No,” Emily said, shaking her head, having finished getting dressed.

  I crept closer to the door to eavesdrop. Charles was inside, Belyana stood next to him wearing nothing but a sexy lace nightgown. She repeatedly tugged on his anxious arms, trying to lure him into the bathroom with her, insisting that the two showered together before they got to the fun and sexy times. Charles was hesitant and became even mo
re so when Belyana’s playful vixen personality took a dramatic change. She seemed distraught, worried like she was about to fall ill, as her gaze continuously shifted to the clock on the wall. It only made Charles distance himself from her as she disrobed and stormed off into the bathroom. The sound of the shower water roaring came next, that’s when Emily and I made our surprise entrance.

  Charles was choked to say the least. “What are you guys doing here?” Charles asked us.

  “I should be asking you that,” I said drily. “You gotta shower before you get dirty.”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . it’s just . . . with her?” Charles rubbed the back of his head. “I need privacy, not her looking at me naked.”

  I crossed my arms, shaking my head at him. “You know that’s exactly what sex entails, right?”

  “Ah . . . You know, I didn’t even think about that.”

  Aggressive knocking against the front door of the suite came, much more aggressive than the knocks I had been doing earlier. It made Charles gasp. “Ugh, what is it now?”

  “Cockblockers anonymous,” I said, and dragged Charles out of the bedroom into the living room and toward the window that led to the fire escape. The knocking on the door grew louder and more aggressive. “Shit.”

  “Are you sure you two aren’t the cockblockers?” Charles said and faced Emily. “And how did you get in here?”

  A cell phone began to ring, one that didn’t belong to any of us three. As it continued to ring, the knocking on the door came to an end. How much do you want to bet the caller and the person outside were the same? The ringtone of the phone led me to where it had been resting, up top of the kitchen counter, Belyana’s phone I figured. The display screen on the phone listed the incoming caller’s name as ‘Vlad.’

  I picked up the call on behalf of Belyana and said with a sexy voice. “Talk dirty to me, baby.”

  “Who is this?” Vladimir’s voice replied back.

  “An unhappy customer from the car dealership.”

  “Reika, you fucking bitch!” The banging on the door resumed, I’m pretty sure they threw a bunch of kicks in as well. It was only a matter of time before that door came off the hinges and the orgy began. An orgy of mayhem and destruction.

  “I take it you want to talk with Belyana?”

  “You’re dead, bitch! You’re fucking dead!”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, hold on, she’s in the shower I’ll get her.” I went to move back into the bedroom and its connecting bathroom as I shouted to Emily. “Vladimir wants in, got any words to say to him?”

  “I have some words for you,” Emily said as her hands formed into the complex mudra gestures, imbuing her hands with flaming kunais, and pushing Charles out onto the fire escape platform outside. “Don’t kill him, please. I need to know what happened to my father.”

  “Vladimir, still with me?” I said, placing the phone back to my face as I entered the washroom, navigating through a cloud of hot rising mist, like a lost sailor at sea. I drew the shower curtains to the side, probably not the best way to greet a showering call girl who thought she was alone with her client. But I had a job to do, and that was to get this girl back home. “Sorry, girly, but your mother is worried sick, and your angry pimp is on the phone—”

  I had to stop myself.

  Belyana’s blonde hair had turned to a light aqua color, while her body was covered with twirling water waves absorbed by the shower. She gave me a look full of evil, a grin fueled by lust, and yellow glowing eyes that drilled holes into my soul.

  “Incredible, isn’t she?” It was Lexi’s voice again. I felt Lexi’s chest press against my back as her visage appeared and her fingers slithered across my arms, forcing me to lower the phone from my face.

  “What the fuck,” I said, unable to keep my eyes off the drenched body of Belyana, and the small pillars of water continuing to circle around her form.

  “She’s one of us, Reika,” Lexi whispered to me. “She’s a fellow succubus.”

  And that’s when the front door got kicked in, and the guns came out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The popping roars of weapon fire went off nonstop. I forced Belyana’s possessed and spaced out body onto the shower’s floor, hoping she got the message, stay down or die. I wasn’t in their visual range as I crept closer to the opened door leading into the suite’s living room. I heard screaming and yelling from the living room and apartment halls, yells that were mixed in with a pair of blades cutting through the air and perhaps a few kicks, or was it punches? Every five seconds there were fewer and fewer guns discharging, and after a minute, there were two pistols heard, then one, then none.

  Looking out the door, I saw Emily backtrack across spent ammo casings, across the once clean carpeting, twirling a pair of kunai doused in flames. Her ninjutsu and martial arts moves caught the thugs off guard, though we weren’t out of the woods yet. Clicking noises came from outside the main entrance to the suite, someone was reloading. I counted a grand total of one dead bad guy, laying face down with flaming slashes across his body, and he wasn’t Vladimir. Of course not, Emily wanted him alive. Alive bad guys were still a threat if armed.

  Emily gave me a nod as she hid behind a wall and pointed to the fire escape, Charles made it out alive. It was up to us to get Belyana out of here without getting our heads blown the fuck off.

  Vladimir and his two unwanted guests charged in with their guns doing all the talking. My talents flared while I drew my katana out, it hungered for bloodshed. Flames covered my body, masking my attire underneath. Yeah, fighting indoors with flames never ended well for the building, but the last time I faced these fuckers, my coat of ice water didn’t do much to intimidate them. Perhaps watching a flaming woman savagely running at them with a katana will do the trick.

  Three pairs of pistols aimed at me and blazed with their boisterous roars as I brandished my trusty katana. The glass windows that covered the suite shattered in the wake of the gunfire, the couch and walls filled with bullet holes, the big screen TV on the wall exploded. I was glad they fired first, as it made me not feel guilty for the damage to the suite I was adding as a result of my fire elemental talents, especially when the flames splashed away from my feet as I leapt up from my combat roll on the floor.

  Emily dashed into the battle, hurling flame-coated shurikens at our attackers to throw them off guard, leaping over them with a dazzling summersault, carving them into smoldering pieces with a quick succession of thrusts and slashes with her twin burning weapons. Thug number two bit the dust, and her hands quickly made a new mudra gesture, one that caused her delicate skin to crystallize with spikes of ice, and her flame kunai to transform into frozen diamond-shaped ones.

  The remaining pistols switched to her and fired. Their bullets shattered an ice sculpture of Emily that manifested before her. It helped take the pressure off me, as she continued to torment them with fake clones of her body that were made of ice. It was my turn to act.

  One of Vladimir’s thugs tried to get ballsy and charge over to me with guns blazing. I ducked behind the countertop in the kitchen and waited for his bullet barrage to end and his dumb ass to circle around to see where I had hidden. That’s when my flamethrower incinerated his upper body. There was no body flailing about on fire this time, only a burning skeleton remained, covered in blackened ashes, and jerky that was once human flesh and organs.

  I reached up and grasped the handle of a kitchen knife from the drawer and sprung up from my cover, flinging the knife into the air. It sunk into the neck of one of the other thugs. Warm jets of blood squirted out from the jugular where the knife sunk in. His weapon dropped as he staggered to stay up, his friends next to him didn’t seem to care, their loss. I blinked right next to them as a result, and slashed my katana, up and down, left and right, creating waves of flames. I looked like a raging phoenix as I did my thing, arms shot upward painting the ceiling red, the flesh of faces melted, leaving behind engulfed skulls.

  The thug standing
next to his now-deceased partner facing a closed casket funeral, leaped up and down with one leg, probably because the other one had been sliced and diced by my blade. He was screaming in distress while fires crept up his body starting from the blood-dripping stump on it. I made a horizontal cleave across his waist, and then kicked his halved body to the floor.

  Vladimir stood alone brandishing two pistols, one aimed at my head, the other at Emily. We approached him, sizing his brawny body up with our elemental coated weapons, impressed with the size of his balls as he stood in-between the two of us. He pulled the trigger of his guns, they went click, click. He was out of ammo, advantage us.

  Or so we thought.

  We both dove in with the intent to subdue him. I let go of my katana kicking it to the side, I had a tendency to remove heads from men with it regardless if I wanted to or not. Vladimir was fast to disable, and then kick me to the floor. Emily’s stabs and thrusts aimed to maim and wound, her precision was spot on. Too bad they hit the air as Vladimir dodged around her. I got back to my feet for the assist, using my retractable blades hidden beneath the sleeves of my outfit. It was a two-on-one melee fight, and Vladimir was winning. He wasn’t your typical mobster or pimp. His past experience as a spetsnaz made him a quick and irritating opponent to fight. His mastery of Russian martial arts powered his arms and legs to defend himself from our combined attacks and boot us backward when we didn’t see it coming.

  My fireballs were sidestepped, and my lightly powered flamethrower was ducked. He didn’t give a shit about the burns his body had taken whenever I managed to singe him. Having to hold back was frustrating, we weren’t making progress and we weren’t going to walk away alive unless we stepped it up. I staggered for a bit while I wiped the blood away from my face, taking care not to cut myself with my wrist-mounted blades as they got pretty close to my bloody face.

  The back of Vladimir’s boot crashed into Emily’s head, sending her spiraling to the floor, she didn’t get up. I was pretty pissed the fuck off at that point and his unwillingness to give up. I took advantage of the fact he stood above her body gazing down at her and hurled a shuriken into his chest. It didn’t make him flinch. That’s okay, it did allow me to blink over to him and deliver an uppercut. Did I mention my retractable blades were still out? Yeah, my bad.