Prodigal Daughter Pt 16 (Patreon)

Part Sixteen: Making an Impression

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Kaiser

"Are you certain this is a good idea?" Krieg shifted uneasily in his seat. "If Lung gets the idea that we are weak because you called this meeting before he did, who knows what he is likely to do."

Max sighed. "Bradley may have been one of our strongest capes, but he was by no means our only strong cape. Lung has Oni Lee. Yes, the ABB is slightly stronger against us than they were before, but they also just lost a good deal of face with the damage to their casino and the loss of a certain chunk of their clientele. Even the survivors are likely to go elsewhere, now that Lung has betrayed his inability to prevent this Rictus from attacking at random. He wants her taken down just as badly as we do."

"Yes, this is true." Krieg stared out the window of the limousine at the passing scenery. "Still, I cannot help but wonder if we're making the wrong move, somehow."

"You worry too much." Max poured a measure of aged Scotch into his glass and toasted Krieg with it. "Yes, Lung is an uncivilized savage who barely knows what to do with what he has. How many men does he have in the ABB? Seventy? Eighty? We can muster that and more on an off night with half our members still guarding our safe houses. If he tried for a coup, we would beat him down. Our men would decimate his. Yes, he could hurt us, but we would hurt him more. By the time we were done with him, the ABB and Lung himself would no longer be an issue in this city, and he knows it."

"And Oni Lee?" Krieg refused to concede the point. "That damned man is a menace. He makes it so much harder to get close to Lung. He'll dance through our men, leaving grenades behind at every step. We would take him down, but I doubt very much that the price would be worth it."

"Oh, it probably wouldn't be," agreed Max. "This is why we tolerate the presence of the ABB in Brockton Bay. Besides, their very presence provides a convenient example of what the city faces if we were ever to allow them free rein. Who's more likely to contribute to our cause; someone who thinks he has nothing to fear, or someone who's just seen half a dozen men wearing red and green walking down the street?"

Reluctantly, Krieg nodded. "So how are you going to play this?"

"A simple information exchange," Max said candidly. "If we see her in our territory and we can't bring her to battle, we push her toward ABB territory. Then we drop a dime, as the saying goes, and wish Lung's forces all the luck in the world bringing her down. Should they encounter her in their territory, they will do the same for us." His expression became hard and ugly. "She will learn very quickly that attacking everyone merely serves to win you many enemies and no friends."

"Ah, so you think she may have been banking on the old saying 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'?" Krieg tilted his head. "Does she perhaps believe that the Empire and the ABB are too much at odds to ever cooperate?"

Max laughed and drained his glass. "If she does, then she will find herself sorely mistaken. I'll make a deal with the very devil himself if it will get me ahead in this world."

<><>

Lung

Kenta was uneasy. The city was out of balance. With the demise of the Merchants, people were having to find another gang to say, "At least they aren't as bad as …" and all too often, it was the ABB being pointed out as the bad example. Worse, the woman that the PRT called 'Rictus' had not been satisfied with merely destroying one gang. She had gone on to very publicly attack both the Empire and the ABB, stealing substantial quantities of money from both gangs in the process.

Descriptions of her varied, but the common denominators were easy to pick out. Rake-thin build, unsettlingly high-pitched (or sometimes low-pitched) laughter, a grin that was too wide for the face; and glowing eyes, lips and teeth. The bone-white skin and green hair could easily be the product of theatrical makeup, though he wasn't certain about the rest of it. Perhaps it was all a product of a particularly unpleasant Changer power. The reckless attitude certainly suggested someone was drunk on their power.

Later reports had her accompanied by a large man with equally white skin and a clown nose, armed with a shotgun. Kenta wondered how she kept her minion in line; in his experience, mastermind-style villains (especially those that were much smaller and weaker than their henchmen) were prone to having their gangs jacked out from under them by ambitious underlings.

A few of his younger members, once word of Rictus got around, had come to him and spoken of an experience they'd had with a terrifying woman who had taken on half a dozen of them with a knife and an iron bar, cackling like a demon and immune to knives. According to the youngsters, she had been at least seven feet tall, but her eyes did not glow, nor was her skin pale white. Her hair was indeed long and curly, but it had been black at the time. Still, she had sent them fleeing in abject terror, bleeding from non-lethal wounds and nursing broken arms and hands.

He was inclined to discount the extreme height of the woman and the invincibility to blades, but the rest was interesting. If it was true and they were not remembering wrongly, then she was merely an ordinary cape using a few cheap gimmicks to sow awe and confusion among her enemies. Very effective gimmicks, he was willing to concede, but gimmicks all the same.

The deaths of the Merchants was a wrinkle he had yet to figure out. She could've killed his people but had chosen not to, and yet the Merchants were poisoned with their own drugs to the point that they died writhing in agony, grinning like maniacs. Perhaps, now she had established her place in the city, she'd decided it was time to make her mark?

Kenta was all for enterprise; he himself had started with little and now had much. But he drew the line at someone using their enterprise to profit from him. Whatever agreement Kaiser wanted to reach regarding the disposition of Rictus, Lung would agree to, so long as it wasn't too one-sided. He suspected it would not be; after having lost face almost as badly as the ABB had, the Empire would be prizing revenge over and above any petty idea of scoring points against the opposition.

The Empire would still be there tomorrow, and they knew how the game was played. Rictus did not, but she would soon learn.

Death, after all, involved a very final kind of lesson.

<><>

Kaiser

Max allowed Fenja and Menja to precede him into Somer's Rock, if only for form's sake. He was already armoured up, and if Lung wished to try anything the Asian crime lord would find Max ready for him. But he didn't think it would go that way.

They gave their drink orders to the new waitress, who also appeared to be deaf—really, he wondered, where do they find these people?—and settled down to wait. Soon enough, Lung arrived, along with his demon-masked underling. In keeping with the tradition of Somer's Rock, only handguns and hand weapons were on display; no grenades or other explosives.

The waitress reappeared again with the drinks as ordered, looked to see if Lung and Oni Lee wanted anything, and was sent away empty-handed. It appeared the leader of the ABB was not interested in idle courtesies. That was fine; Max was interested in getting down to brass tacks as well.

He gestured, and Victor unfolded a map of the city, which he laid on the table and used ashtrays from surrounding tables to weigh down. Each of the places where Rictus had clashed with the Merchants, the Empire or the police were marked. There was also a discreet cross at the location of the Ruby Dreams casino.

"These are where we know Rictus has struck," he said bluntly. "Do you have any more?"

After a moment of hesitation, Lung leaned across the table and touched the map at a certain point. A thread of smoke arose; when he took his finger away, there was a distinct scorch mark left behind. "She attacked some of my people in that alley."

Max had to give the man points for style. "Good. The more we know, the quicker we'll be able to take her down. Now, she's known to only go out at night, so that's when we'll concentrate our forces." He ran his finger along one of the main arterial roads that ran clear through the area where she'd been operating. "If we run quarter-hour patrols along …"

He paused as he realized that the waitress had come out again and was looking at the map with interest. A slim hand reached out holding a pencil, and made another cross. It took him a second to register that the location marked was Somer's Rock. Another few seconds passed before it came to his attention that she now had white skin, green hair, and glowing eyes and teeth.

She smiled, altogether too widely. "Say, anyone here know what the pencil said to the paper?"

"Fuck!" yelled Alabaster. "It's her!" He ducked around Cricket, who was apparently just goggling at her audacity, and made a grab for the slim girl.

Moving fluidly, as though she had all the time in the world, she jammed the pencil into his left eye. Then, while he made an ugly sound of pain and clawed at his eye, she grabbed him by the back of the head and slammed him face-first into the table. He convulsed and went limp; holding his head still, she struck him sharply at the base of the neck, snapping his spine with a spiteful crack.

Looking up as she released him to slump bonelessly onto the floor, she managed to smile even more widely than before. "I dot my eye on you. Get it?" Then she threw the tray across the table like a lethal Frisbee, catching Oni Lee in the throat. He subsided to the floor, making choking noises.

"Somebody get her!" yelled Max, finally breaking out of his shocked stupor.

The girl, halfway across the room, glanced back and tossed a handful of light metal objects across the floor. For a moment, Max suspected caltrops, but a second glance ruled that out. They appeared to be bent metal pins attached to circular ring-pulls. Still, they were worryingly familiar …

"Grenades!" yelled Victor, just as the girl yanked a handful of strings that had been tied up under the counter.

Familiar round shapes bounced into view from under tables and chairs right across the room, accompanied by (but entirely separate from) their attendant spoons. At that moment, all thought of revenge was superseded in favour of self-preservation. Even Lung, Max suspected, might not survive this.

The problem was, there was only one door (the one at the back was too far away to reach in time) and they probably had between three and five seconds to get out of the building before it was filled with all kinds of explosion. Worse, the windows were barred.

"FUCK!" That was Lung; without a second glance at his stricken henchman, he ran directly at the nearest window, smashed his hands through the glass, and grabbed the bars. With a tremendous effort, he pulled them apart and started scrambling through.

Cricket and Victor, both possessed of near-inhuman reflexes—why didn't Cricket react to the presence of Rictus in our very midst?—went for the door, with Krieg, Othala, Crusader and Stormtiger close behind. Max had just enough time to be glad he hadn't brought Purity or Rune along—someone had to mind the base—before Fenja and Menja grabbed him. He was farthest from the door—I just had to sit with my back to the wall, didn't I—but instead of trying to cover the distance, they held him between them and started growing.

When he realized that they were preparing to shield him from the blast with their own bodies, he slid his hands up under his helmet and clamped them over his ears. This was going to hurt, a lot, but maybe they'd survive it?

At the very last second, it dawned on him that now he knew where all those grenades which had been taken from that one safe house had ended up.

Fuck.

<><>

Taylor

From a safe distance, Frankie watched as I trotted out of the cloud of smoke. "Lung?" I asked.

"Got shot out of that window like a big ugly bullet from a gun," he said laconically, indicating a pair of legs sticking out of a hole in the frontage opposite. "Looks like it took off a couple of bits on the way through." He raised his assault rifle. "I can go and make sure he's dead, if you want."

"Nah, leave him." I turned my gaze back to Somer's Rock proper. The building was still standing, but more fire and smoke were rolling out every opening it was possible to come out of, plus a few new ones it had recently acquired. The front door was open, with bodies were sprawled in front of it. Some were moving feebly, while others weren't.

"But we could kill 'em all right now, boss," he said, clearly not understanding my point.

I giggled, just to get his attention. "True, we could. But that's not sporting. Alabaster and Oni Lee were my targets this time around, and I got them both. If we get greedy, one of those capes might just get up and surprise us. We can always get them later. Besides, you left my calling card, right?"

"Yeah, boss." He gestured at the two cars that were parked in front of the building; one belonging to Kaiser and the other to Lung. Each of them had a crude representation of a grinning mouth full of sharp teeth spray-painted on the hood. Nobody would be in any doubt as to who had done this.

"Excellent." I giggled again as I turned to the actual Somer's Rock staff that we'd tied up and dragged out before all this started. The ties were loose, so they could get out of them relatively easily; it was a measure of how intimidated they were that they hadn't tried. "Now, I could kill you all, but I don't feel like it. Leave town. Leave the state. If I ever see you again … well, you'll wish I hadn't. Very briefly." I pushed the blue field onto them to leave them absolutely certain that I meant it, then let them have a deep ominous chuckle. "Get me?"

They all nodded frantically, tears running down their cheeks. I was pretty sure one of the brothers had wet himself.

"Good." I tossed a bag of money at their feet. There was maybe twenty grand in there; chicken feed, after what we'd taken away from the Empire and the ABB in recent days. "Here's your severance pay."

As Frankie and I walked away toward where we'd stashed our car, I tilted my head to listen to the sound of incoming sirens. "Aww, they're playing my tune. How sweet."

"Boss?" Frankie looked at me curiously. "How come you didn't kill them too? I mean, we coulda."

"Two reasons, Frankie." I grinned at him, just to watch him shudder. "One, they never done nothin' to me. Two, they say everyone dies twice. Once when you actually die, and the second time when the last person forgets your face. You think they're ever gonna forget my face?"

Frankie shook his head definitively. "Nope." From the tone of his voice, I heard the words he wasn't saying. Me neither.

"Good boy, Frankie." I patted him on the arm. "Good boy."

Part 17