“Time to give up the dream, Lenny.”
Caren stalked toward her cornered quarry, flipping her balisong with a lazy motion of her right hand, rainwater smacking with each heavy tread of her Docs.
Lenny had crammed his stocky body as far as he could into the corner of the alley. His belly was visibly expanding and contracting with each breath. His round face glistened with rain and sweat, his small brown eyes switching this way and that.
“Seriously.” Caren sighed, snapped the knife shut and pocketed it in her long leather jacket. “Jig’s up. Let’s do this the easy way for once, huh?”
“Come on, Neneng,” Lenny whined, in his faintly accented English. “How ’bout you just let ol’ Lenny go free…just this once? For old times’ sake.”
Caren slid the dampening bracers from the adjacent liner pocket of her jacket. “No way, man.” She jerked her head. “Let’s go.”
Lenny cowered, blinking at her—then popped a sparkling capsule out of his right sleeve, crushed it with a grunt, and flung its contents in her face.
“Fucking—!” Caren threw her arm up to cover her eyes, too late. A disembodied diaphanous giggle grazed the air as an explosion of flares and misty shapes filled her vision, as her surroundings kaleidoscoped: a thousand Lennys bolting in a thousand different directions.
Caren blinked furiously for several seconds, stumbling in a vague circle, waving the pastel smoke out of her face, till things had returned to normal.
“Motherfucker!” she yelled.
Lenny was nowhere in sight.
The ratcatcher took a deep breath, funneled her mana through the tiny agimat beneath her right eye; stood stock-still, attuning her now-heightened senses.
With her enhanced hearing, Caren soon homed in on the sound of Lenny’s stumping footfalls in the next alley over.
Caren pulled the mana current out of her super-sense agimat, rerouted it through the super-reflexes one implanted in her left shoulder.
The brick of the alleyway blurred as she streaked in the direction of the sound. Turned one corner, then another, and spied the squat frame of Lenny making a beeline toward the street.
Caren glanced around to make sure no mundanes were in view, then surged ahead, parkouring off the brick wall, using a first-floor fire-escape landing as a springboard, and finally flipping midair to land in a low crouch smack in front of Lenny before lunging and tackling him to the ground.
Lenny lay on his back, wheezing, and let out a hoarse whimper as Caren planted her boot on his chest.
She crouched and dangled the bracers. “Dude. Just fucking play along. You being back on your bullshit already made me miss my Tinder date tonight. I don’t wanna have to deck you again this time, but you know I’ll do it. Don’t fucking test me.”
Lenny bared his crooked teeth in a watery-eyed grin. “Man’s gotta make a living, Neneng! C’mon, you don’t really wanna do this to your Tito Lenny, do you? Just think of all the good times… Remember how I used to babysit you when you were little? And I would take you to play at all those fancy arcades in Atlantic City?”
Caren leaned more weight on the foot on his chest. “What do you think I am, an idiot? Those weren’t arcades. They were casinos. And they wouldn’t let kids in ’em, so you always left me by myself at the motel with nothing but free Jolly Ranchers from the front desk and a VHS copy of Baby Geniuses.” She leaned lower, applying more pressure. “The rooms didn’t even have VCRs!”
Lenny coughed. “Well,” he croaked. “What about family vacations to Wisconsin Dells? Remember I always took you outside to make snow angels? Ah, you were as happy as a little clam! You always loved snow.”
“Dude, I fucking hate snow. You’re thinking of your own kid right now, Rory. Remember her? Rory fucking loved snow and making fucking snow angels. Which you might’ve known if you’d seen her even once in the past, oh, ten years.” Caren bored her boot-heel harder into Lenny’s chest. “You’re really digging yourself in deep here, bruh. You can’t even not get me confused with your own kid.”
Lenny gave a sudden convulsion and started hammering with his fists at Caren’s leg. “Goddamn it, Caleb!” he barked. “This is no way to treat your uncle, you no-good fucking little—”
Caren reactivated her reflex agimat and brought her other foot up, jumped, and spun with her boot out, landing a kick that sent one-and-a-half of Tito Lenny’s teeth flying. “The name is fucking Caren”—she landed on her feet, straddling his bawling frame—“you old fucking useless fucking stupid fucking transphobe piece of shit.”
Lenny rolled his body weakly, tried to slither away.
Caren dropped, pinning him flat, and backhanded him with both heavy bracers encircling her fist, knocking him cold.
She slouched there a moment atop his lifeless body, panting, grimacing down at his stubbled face, his bloody split-open brow. “For real, though, Lenny. Fuck you.” She spat.
With a grunt, she rolled her uncle over onto his stomach and cuffed him, then eased herself to her feet and glanced around, resisting the urge to vent the rest of her anger by way of a super-hard kick to his ribs. Much as she felt he’d been asking for it, she knew she’d probably end up feeling shitty about it later. Not to mention Arcanus Enforcement usually preferred their wanted criminals not-overly-banged-up.
Caren covered Lenny’s nose and mouth with a rag soaked in Morphean miasma till his pulse slowed to forty-one beats per minute—a little extra insurance he wouldn’t be waking up earlier than was convenient—then dragged him out of sight behind a dumpster before pulling Porkchop, her rusty Grand Marquis, into the alley. Wrestled Lenny’s dead weight into Porkchop’s trunk, then slammed it shut.
Lit a cigarette. Checked the time.
Almost one A.M. She’d been chasing this motherfucker around Passyunk Square all night.
“Next time, I’m using a fucking binding circle,” she muttered to herself as she stamped the butt out in a puddle, slid behind the wheel, and wrenched the key a few times in the ignition till the engine turned over. Preparation of any kind always felt like overkill when Lenny was her mark, but his apostasies were mostly so petty—common illusion-based cons that took next to no brains, talent, or effort to execute—that the bounty for his capture was never good. And these cat-and-mouse games he always played were shaping up to be a serious drain on her time.
Not to mention dealing with his bullshit always left her in a really bad mood.
Porkchop’s radio blared to life, in the middle of “How Simple” by Hop Along.
“Wow,” mumbled Caren. “So not in the mood for this.”
She jammed the eject button, swapped out the mix CD entitled “Bitch Feelings” (scrawled on the disk itself in black Sharpie) for another from the slapdash pile in her car-door pocket labeled “We’re All Gonna Die.”
“Dead Cops” by ACxDC came roaring out of Porkchop’s shitty speakers.
“Aiight, bitch. Time to get paid,” Caren grunted to herself, jerked the gearshift, and stepped on the gas.
By the time the CD had played through (the last track was “Eve of the Last Day” by The Secret), Philly had dwindled away in Caren’s rearview mirror, and the suburbs had begun to give way to South Jersey wilderness.
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