Demigods Read online

  Just then, she heard him coming. He was still a ways away, though he would definitely be arriving soon, so she grabbed up her furry friend, and lay back down upon her bed.

  She held Abigail close, as the sound of him drew near. It was her birthday, and he should not even be coming, though he certainly was, which sent fear throughout her.

  She laid as still as she could, stroking her friend from beneath the covers, hoping to keep her hidden from the monster that was surely to enter the room soon.

  Abigail, however, seemed to become a bit frightened of his approach as well, and began to struggle from beneath her grasp, but Viper needed to protect her. He was the evil man, and he would probably eat her head if he found her.

  She heard him stop at the door, and as he did, Abby began to struggle even more. It was as though her furry friend had known that he had come to torment her, and Viper did not want her to go through such torture. If it hurt so badly to her, how much more would it hurt to her tiny little friend.

  A tear fell down her cheek, as she grasped her little friend by the head, and twisted it until she felt it snap. Abigail was her friend, and because of this, she would never allow him to hurt her. She was free now, yet he tormented her more by never opening the door.

  She swore that she could hear laughter in his heartbeat as he walked away from her door, and she then swore that he would someday pay for the death of her precious little friend.

  Then Viper awoke upon the bed in her hotel room. It would have been called a nightmare, but Viper did not have normal dreams. She only needed an hour of sleep each night, and what would be called dreams where always lucid memories.

  * * *

  Tiny little pebbles lay upon the rooftops, and Shin Tzu could have placed himself there, but wouldn't that be obvious?

  The garage across the street would have also been obvious, which is why he made certain that someone was there. He was a star pupil, but certainly not the only one near by, for there were three more in various places.

  His design was to allow her to encounter as many obstacles as he could think of, in order to get her distracted for just a moment, and that would be the moment that he would end Viper’s life.

  To be true, he had been following her across the country. He had not always been there, but he was far more than the US government thought that he was, and he would never allow them to realize it.

  His family was the Shojin clan, and they had been hiding in the midst of American society since before the civil war. Nearly three hundred of them existed today, and they had eyes from coast to coast.

  Shin Tzu was the grand master, and under normal circumstances, would never be out in the field, but he understood how important this task was. Not only was Viper inhumanly deadly, but he was on her primary target list. If he did not get her first, she would eventually discover that he was not actually the one that she had found dead in the woods.

  He sat there on the bench for a time, knowing that she should be coming soon, yet she was late, and this made him rather uncomfortable. She had requested an SUV, with a cargo of surveillance equipment, as well as an assortment of weapons, and other various devices, but it had been sitting there for twenty minutes.

  Finally, she pulled up on the motorcycle, but when she dismounted, not one of his people attacked her. If she had gotten to them, why would she have then left, only to return?

  He folded the paper that he had been pretending to read, but before he could stand, he felt a sharp pain at the back of his neck. Suddenly he found that he was incapable of moving at all, for she had paralyzed him with a narrow blade, and now wrapped her arms around him, preventing him from falling over.

  "You can't believe how delighted I am to find you alive," Viper told him as she placed a tender kiss upon his cheek. "I felt a little empty thinking that I wouldn’t be able to kill you myself."

  "If you kill me," he told her, "then my clan will be looking to make you their new master, and I hope that you will accept."

  After a brief pause, she looked him in the eyes, and smiled.

  "There is nothing that I would ever want from you," she growled at him right before she snapped his neck, and laid him down gently on the bench. “I detest everything about you.”

  She stepped up to the curb, as her stand-in pulled up in the vehicle, and stepped out. Removing the helmet revealed that she was a brunette as petite as Viper, who rewarded her with a passionate kiss before sending her on her way. Perhaps when her business was finished, she would give her a call before leaving the city.

  Pulling away, Viper headed for an abandoned warehouse where she would stash her new toys. She had not decided where she was going to use them, and to do so would be a little premature, considering that she needed to first find her prey. Where they were hiding would as much determine how she would proceed as anything else, and she would not allow them to escape her a second time.

  When everything was safely hidden away, she donned what amounted to a modern day shinobi shozoku (or ninja outfit, as it would be commonly referred to), and took to the rooftops. The city was abuzz with local authorities, as well as government agents, but that would be expected when someone decides to crash a helicopter in the middle of an expressway.

  Besides the obvious advantage of being quite concealed from the chaos below, the rooftops were a quicker way for her to travel. With such speed and agility, not to mention the strength to leap from one rooftop to another, such a course was much as the crow flies.

  There was another advantage as well, and it is the nature of a scent. It tends to eventually drift upward, and with a nose that is ten times keener that that of a bloodhound's, she began to detect a very unique one.

  Unfortunately, it was faint, yet it was a trail nonetheless, and she paused. Lifting her nose to the air, she breathed in the taste of such a scent, and though it was not her target, it was that of the witch that protected him. Wherever she would find her, she would find him as well.

  The smell drifted down from a building that was much too high for her to simply jump up to, for that is the nature of the big city. Although she could find her way around it to encounter the scent on the other side, this was hardly her way. She was the most instinctive of animals, with one of the most brilliant of minds, and she reacted accordingly.

  The sprint upon the lower rooftop was short, but more than enough to launch her to the place that she had predetermined. It was a place about a hundred feet below the top of the skyscraper that she was now quickly approaching, and she pulled a metal tube from the strap that had been holding it to her ankle.

  Carefully she pointed the object at the large structure, in mid air, and pressed the button on the side, which shot out a simple titanium spike. It did well to embed itself within the steel structure, and gave her more than enough time to plant her foot there, before launching herself straight upward to the point were she could touch the edge of the top of the building.

  A simple twitch of her hand could change her momentum at this speed, and it allowed her to flip forward, and land back on her feet. Her stride, however, was never broken until she reached the other side, for this was were the scent had led her.

  She leaned over the edge in a way that would cause normal people to fall, but she was far from normal. She moved her head around in hopes of following such an old scent, but it led to the skies, and though it was a scent that she could not follow directly, it had pointed her in the direction that she needed to go.

  "I'm coming, witch," she softly spoke with a sly smile, yet it was not because she hated her so. Mirage was the same as she was, but she abandoned her, and even though she gave her a chance to reconcile, she chose not to.

  "Sister?" she whispered out to the wind. "I love you, anyway."

  Then she sobbed upon the rooftop.

  * * *

  Captain Brandon Jacobs arrived at the station, knowing that he had forgotten to change his sim card. This was just enough time for something important to happen, and now he had to deal
with it. There were messages about a crime scene that he had made clear he needed to know about, if just such a thing happened, and he missed the call.

  Sure, he was preoccupied by his friend who seemed to trust no one, and the beast that he was hunting, but that made it even more obvious that there was no room for mistakes. He hated himself as he entered the building.

  “I’m here to see detective Nickels,” he formally announced to the female receptionist, yet found that she had little to help him with.

  “I would like to know what the hell is going on here!” a stout man shouted in his direction, and his demeanor, and lack of hair upon the top of his head made it obvious that this was the man that he was looking for.

  “I know that you Washington guys like to hide shit, but I have real people out there… good people trying to find this rogue bitch that I keep hearing about, and you can’t even answer your phone!”

  Obviously, this was the guy.

  “Care to tell me what happened?” Captain Jacobs asked without ever showing any expression.

  “Yeah, I would like to tell you,” the stout detective continued as he approached him. “I have five of your people on a slab in my lab. Four were dressed like high tech ninjas, and the other was some Chinaman with gadgets that we are still trying to figure out!”

  “And how do you know that they are our people?” Brandon asked calmly, despite the fact that he wanted to squash this little bug of a man.

  “Because an informant of ours told us that your girl was making a pickup there”, he continued, “and don’t even try to tell me that they weren’t, just because they had no badges. This has you written all over it!”

  Brandon would have known such a thing, if it had come from his end, but it had not. This was something different, and he needed to figure it out.

  “Let me see the bodies.”

  “Sure thing, Sherlock”, the detective answered as he began to lead him down the hall.

  “And I would like to talk to your informant as soon as possible.”

  At this, the detective stopped to speak to him directly.

  “I would too”, he said sarcastically, before turning to continue down the hall, “except he seems a little exhausted after playing catch the .25 caliber slug with his forehead.”

  Brandon was beginning to get a little worry to mix with his confusion, but he understood that he could tell this little man nothing about what was actually happening, so he simply followed.

  Finally, the stout man opened the door to the lab, and allowed him to walk in first.

  “Wanna act like I’m stupid now?”

  Captain Jacobs entered the room, and saw the bodies lying on the tables, but before he could even look at one of them, the CSI doctor approached in a hysterical way.

  “God, Nickels, you’ve gotta see this!” he exclaimed before looking up at Brandon. “Who is this?”

  “This is government,” the detective told him in distain.

  At this, the doctor got quiet for a moment to think about what he was going to say.

  “Do you mind if I show him the tattoos?’ he asked in almost a whimper, “because I can keep it a secret if you like.”

  The old guy seemed so excited about his find, and Brandon had no idea what he was talking about, so he gave the best possible answer that he could think of.

  “It stays in this room.”

  The gray haired lab technician had to think about this for only a moment, before becoming excited by the fact that he realized that it was ok.

  “Ok,” he said before turning to one of the bodies. “Check this out.”

  At this, he raised the left hand of one of the dead men, and wiped a wet sponge across the back of it. The moment that he did, two symbols appeared, and neither Brandon nor the detective knew what they meant.

  “It took me a moment to figure it out, but I did,” he said before turning to the captain.

  “Wanna tell him what it means, or is that supposed to be a secret too?”

  Brandon smiled, acting as though he knew the answer.

  “Feel free.”

  “They are ancient Norse symbols, meaning warrior and strength,” he continued to tell the detective, before turning to the captain. “How do you guys do that?”

  Certainly, he had no idea, because he did not have such a tattoo, though he needed to act as if he knew everything, and he needed to figure things out quickly.

  Without expression, he simply said, “let me see the faces.”

  One by one, he examined the bodies, not recognizing any of them until he got to Shin Tzu. He knew who he was, because he met him once before, and had read his file on the flight over, yet he was supposed to be a man considered to be a loner. He was the Seishinryu Ninjitsu master that was used to instruct Viper in her martial arts abilities, and Brandon understood that he would be on her list of targets.

  What troubled him was the fact that he was laying here with four other men that had the same mysterious tattoos.

  “Unless your rogue agent can fly across rooftops, and kill your own people,” the detective interrupted with an angry tone, “I would say that there had to be at least four others!”

  Brandon heard him, but chose not to respond. He understood that Viper was quite capable of such a thing, but he certainly could not reveal it to the local authorities.

  “Hello!” the detective shouted. “I have good men out there, and I need to know what the fuck we are up against!”

  The captain turned to the little stout man and pierced him with his eyes, before saying what needed to be said.

  “Compile all your files, and everything that you got from the scene,” he said sternly, “and someone will be here shortly to retrieve them.”

  At this, the detective was infuriated, and began to shout, though when Brandon pulled out a hidden derringer from his sleeve, and placed it to the man’s forehead, it changed the mood.

  “Do what I said,” he spoke with fire in his eyes, “and get the bodies ready for transport.”

  For a moment, he heard only silence as he walked away, but it was soon interrupted by the loud-mouthed detective.

  “I’ll have your badge for that!”

  “Good luck with that,” he mumbled to himself, as he left them standing there.

  * * *

  Reaching his rental car, he sat down, and felt a brief moment of relief just being in a space of basic solitude, though it was short lived. Viper was every bit as deadly as her file suggested, and she needed to be dealt with. Why they thought they could create such a creature, and control it as well, simply baffled him.

  He had already corrected their first mistake when he shut down Mirage, but this one was a bit different. This one was all about combat, and she was better than him in every way about it, yet still he did not fear. His cause was the right one, and with a little luck, and the help of a higher power, he could not fail.

  He started to reach forward to turn on the radio, but as he did, his cell phone began to ring. He thought that it might be the detective with more irrelevant information, but his caller ID listed it as an unknown name and number.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Love,” he heard the soft voice speak. “I think that it’s time we met face to face.”

  It was not a voice that he recognized, but he was well aware that it could only be one person.

  “Viper?”

  “Yes, handsome,” she answered with a smile in her voice. “I need to talk to you.”

  This could not be a good thing, in any way that he thought about it.

  “Where are you, little one?” he asked, but she only laughed on the other side.

  “I need to talk to you in person.”

  Surely, it must be a trick, for that is what Viper was. How could she ever offer him anything except death?

  “I know a secret,” she let out with a chuckle, “and it involves your friend.”

  “You know nothing!”

  “What I know comes with a price.”

&
nbsp; At this, he stopped to listen. Obviously, she knew something, and he had to find out.

  “What price?”

  For a moment, there was brief silence before she answered.

  “I want you to declare me dead, and I will go away.”

  What an offer this was. Certainly, she did not believe that he would hold to such a thing, and he knew that she must have a trick up her sleeve.

  “Tell me,” he said snidely.

  “I’ll tell you the secret when you meet me,” she returned, “and you had better come alone, or I will kill whoever you bring with you.”

  “Say where.”

  There was a pause before she answered.

  “I’ll see ya at 305 Harrison Street.”

  The click made him certain that she had left him hanging, though he knew that he had to go there.

  “I’ll see you there, sunshine.”

  * * *

  The Northwest Folklife Festival was an interesting event. It brought in the summer in the Seattle area, and it was about diversity. Different cultures, and people celebrating together was the theme, and he knew that Viper chose it for that very reason.

  He wandered about, looking at the artwork that they had on display, admiring the tents that they used to create workspaces. There were people everywhere, and despite the friendly atmosphere, he felt ill at ease. She was out there somewhere, and he knew it.

  Finally, he found the tent that had bratwurst, and almost found comfort in it until she came from behind, and whispered in his ear.

  “I think you might be looking for me.”

  “Two brats,” he told the man behind the counter, without ever looking back. “And a couple of Cokes.”

  “I don’t do soda, handsome,” she whispered to him, as she wrapped her arms around his waist. “It’s bad for the heart.”

  “I’m thinking that you might be bad for the heart as well,” he returned, without ever turning. “You said you had something for me.”

  To be honest, he did not care what she had. She was the target, yet he knew that she was well prepared. The fact that she was not killing him at the moment meant that he had a second to try to figure her out.

  She took one of the bratz from the vendor, and looked up into his eyes, before biting into it.