Or should have.
She should have had her by the throat. Or, rather, by the whole fucking head and neck, if you were going to be technical about it, her arm wrapped around from behind, squeezing the receptionist’s windpipe shut, knocking her out cold, except that the receptionist wasn’t even fucking there.
Nothing was there.
Not the computer, not the Sudoku, not even the goddamn desk, all of it some image or hologram, probably the same make as the image or hologram that dropped her down that fucking bottomless pit (yeah, now that she was out and away from it, bottomless, why the hell not?).
But who the fuck cared because whatever it was, hologram or magicks, what it also was was a trap, most definitely a trap.
10
There were three guys waiting for her in her mom’s living room, and they grabbed her and she screamed and one of them clamped his hand over her mouth and she bit, and then he screamed and let go, and she kicked back with her right leg and felt it contact something — his knee, maybe — felt something crunch, heard someone fall. She stomped another’s foot, hard, and then yanked her arm out of his grasp, but the third one grabbed her free arm and pulled her to him by both her wrists and smashed his forehead into her face, and she saw stars, actual stars, little motes of light that swirled around in front of her eyes. And she heard him chuckle and say, “Jesus, guys, this was too easy,” and then she kicked him in the balls and he crumpled and let go of her wrists, and she grabbed him by his shirt, and then fell backward, pulling him forward on top of her, and in one swift hard kick, she threw him over her head so that he landed hard on his partner, knocking them both down.
How she’d done this, she had no fucking clue.
The closest she’d come to a fight was when she’d kicked Akard in his balls.
She scrambled up, looked around, and found Henry leaning against the door, his lips pursed, his eyes regarding her coolly. He nodded.
“That was pretty good,” he said.
Then he said, “These guys, they weren’t amateurs.”
Then he looked around the room at them and said, “But they did underestimate you, didn’t they?”
Said, “People always underestimate you, Rose. Isn’t that right?”
She didn’t ask him how he’d gotten inside, didn’t ask him what he was doing there, what he wanted, who those guys were, didn’t waste her time screaming, had let go of the hitch in her voice, that or had let it grow into something else, and instead she focused her energy on charging straight at that fucker, and then, as she was charging, then she yelled.
He watched her as she charged him and smiled and said, “But not me,” though that could’ve been her imagination since it didn’t feel like she could hear much of anything.
He stepped to the side and he grabbed her by her arm, pulled her in close like they were ballroom dancers, trapping her strong arm against her side, and then grabbed her by her neck with his other hand, so tight she couldn’t breathe, and then his leg swept her off her feet and she landed hard on her back against the hard, thin carpet that reeked of her mother’s Pall Malls, her free arm suddenly trapped under her own body weight and his weight as he bore down on her, and she could see his eyes, calm, blue eyes, and she could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him, there was too much noise already banging around in her head.
Then, as he choked her, as he tried to choke the life from her, she swung her leg, she didn’t know how, but she swung it high and hard and kicked Henry in the side of the head, hard enough to throw him off her, hard enough to make him stumble, and she hand-sprung onto her feet and before anything else could happen, anyone else could pop out of the darkness and surprise her, she ran straight to Henry, ran at him as he got himself to his knees, though to her last dying day some part of her will always wonder why she didn’t just run the other way, didn’t just do what any sane person would have done, why she didn’t push her way out and run like hell. She ran at Henry instead and delivered a swift kick to his side, and then another, and then she realized there were more parts to him to be kicked or scratched or punched and she was aiming her next kick for his face, his not-ugly, not-handsome face, when the lights in the house shut off and everything went dark, darker than normal when the lights were shut off, and Rose couldn’t see anything, and a woman’s voice called out, “Enough. That’s quite enough.”
11
Training. Remember your goddamn training.
So the receptionist isn’t here. So this is a trap. So what? She’s been in traps before.
She jumps up — straight up like fucking Luke Skywalker in Empire when Vader tries to freeze his ass in carbonite — and then flips herself around to a) get a good look at the shit gunning — literally gunning — for her and b) push herself off the ceiling, which isn’t that drop-tile bullshit but nice wooden planking, thank God for egotistical directors of demonic organizations and their urgent need for evil-lair trimmings of the fancy, Nate Berkus sort.
What she sees before throwing herself into the fray:
1. Gun turrets, five of them, already out and targeting her since probably as soon as her hand grabbed the door handle.
2. Some real Last Crusade or Dr. No shit, by way of blades, half as tall as she was, spinning vertically and horizontally across the room.
3. Strange-as-shit whirling-dervish-type miniature robots spinning round and round like some kind of hybrid of the gun turrets and the spinning blades, in that they’re shooting out lasers (pell-mell enough that, in the nanosecond she took to get her lay of the land, one accidentally took out a gun turret) and have spinning blades spinning out of their tiny torsos and thin robot arms, Maximilian style. (The Black Hole, Henry. Please do try to keep up.)
And last but not least:
4. Gas pouring into the room out of secret cubbies.
Jesus Christ, this Niles guy sure is a nervous fuck.
Take a deep, deep, deep breath and hold it.
Don’t think about what kind of mess is waiting for you in his actual office if this is what he has lined up for anyone who dares approach his receptionist.
Don’t think at all.
Pivot.
Shove.
Handspring.
Land.
In between handspring and land, of course, grab one of the whirligig ones by the top of its whirligiggly head and throw it slicing into one of the big spinning slicers, the side-to-sider, not the up-and-downer, to cut the dervish clean in two, but which won’t quite stop the whirling, which will keep the laser-gunning head going long enough to knock out another gun turret (that’s two, three more to go) and the bottom going just long enough to mangle one of the other dervishes.
She doesn’t see this, not in real life, anyway, can only picture it in her head before she leaps.
Land.
Throw.
Double back handspring.
Super jump with a backflip.
Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number, stop it cold, and turn it vertical to act like a shield against two of the gun turrets on her weak side.
Another kick to knock it off its spinny hinge-arm doohickey.
Henry would know the name of this shit. Hell, so would everyone else, but she could never bring herself to give a fuck.
Knock it off its hinge, catch it by its center before it sinks into the floor, and discus that bitch at two more gun turrets.