“Ears?” Eleanor asked as if reading my mind. “His skin is too hard even for us.”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said.
A hand dropped on my arm. Noah.
“We have time. Let’s go before he gets his feet under him.” He gave me a tug toward the open door.
Simon waited, his face calm. He knew I wouldn’t leave without dealing with the rhino now. That’s not how this worked. If you were attacked in the abnormal world, you saw it through to the end, one way or another.
I grimaced. Damn it. I’d been hoping to leave Simon behind, because with him taking calls while I slept, I wasn’t sure I could trust him anymore.
Noah was a far better liar and I didn’t need to be second guessing myself, but I would take him with me. The devil you knew was not always better than the devil you didn’t, but in this case, I would make an exception.
“I don’t leave a mess behind.” I jerked my arm out of his hand and it cost me. My shoulder spasmed as the rhino stepped out of the hole, shaking his head.
“Killing you now,” he said. “Killing you good and hard.”
“Feeling’s mutual, big ugly,” I tossed back. He roared, showing off his monstrous flat teeth and thick purple tongue before he charged. Again, I waited for the last second before pivoting on one foot and just letting him slide by me. I brought Dinah up and squeezed off a round as I aimed for his ear. Like his eyes, they were tiny pinpricks, and had plenty of that hardened skin rolled around them.
Showing an agility that did me no favors, the rhino twisted as he passed, and Dinah’s bullet missed its mark, bouncing off the bones of his cheek.
“Son of a bitch!” she screamed and shot twice more at him without my finger squeezing the trigger. The bullets bounced off the side of his head as well, missing the ear entirely.
Rhino grabbed a table and lifted it over his head.
Oh, this was not going too well.
He flung it at me, the laminate table top screeching as it flew toward my head. I dropped to the floor and the table whipped past me and into the hole he’d already put in the wall. The two giant feet attached to the rhino slammed toward me, mashing the floor with massive dents, breaking up what was left of the tile.
Being trampled was not in my morning agenda, so I had to move fast.
I rolled down the pathway between tables, and shoved myself under one to catch a breath. Rhino ripped the table above me off its metal stand and threw it out the window behind my head. Glass tinkled down around me.
“Incendiary,” I said as I brought Eleanor up and aimed at his nose. A click in her inner workings, and I pulled the trigger.
Her bullet left her muzzle in a bright trail of flame that erupted as it slammed into the rhino’s face. He roared and clapped at the flames as he stumbled back from me. I tucked Eleanor into her holster, then Dinah next.
“Wait, we have to kill him!” Dinah snarled. She never did like missing a mark, and even worse when she knew it should have been an easy kill.
I pulled a silver tool from under my shirt. The tool—Linx was his name—was similar to Dinah and Eleanor in his sentience. I kept him strapped to my bare skin, because as I’d learned, you never knew when you might be forced to strip naked and still want to have weapons on hand.
“Yeah, boss?” he asked.
“Ice pick,” I said.
His silver body shimmered and slid from the pair of oversized tweezers he’d been into a perfectly thin long ice pick.
The rhino stumbled around, the flames on his skin dying but not before leaping to parts of the diner. The walls and several tables lit up one by one. Fine by me, it would cover evidence of me and the abnormal and our rather messy fight. I stepped up beside him and rammed the ice pick deep into his ear. His whole body convulsed once, then he went to his knees and from there he fell flat on his face. I pulled Linx from his ear, blood dripping from the tip. I wiped it on the back of the rhino’s shirt. “Sorry about that, Linx.”
“All good, boss. Tool is a tool, is a tool,” he said. I tucked him back under my shirt and wrapped him with the strap that held him tightly to me. “Abe, hier.” I snapped my fingers and Abe crept out from under his table, his eyes wide and his tongue lolling as he panted hard. A good guard dog he was, but he didn’t like fire and I couldn’t blame him. I was not the only one with singed hair after that last go around in Hollywood.
I walked out of the diner and into the open parking lot. Simon stood by the car, waiting, as did Noah. Fuck me, neither of them was going to let me go easily. Jaw ticking, I strode toward them through the crowd of people. All the hurts from two days ago had lit back up, and I was pretty sure the stitches in my shoulder had been torn open. But even I knew I was lucky. That abnormal had not been provoked, and that was strange enough as it was.
What had set him off? Usually the abnormals—if they realized who I was—avoided me like the plague of 2019. And what had he meant by a payday? I rubbed a hand over my face, knowing we had minutes, at best, before the local police and fire department were here.
“You are not both coming with me,” I said.
Simon smirked and I looked at Noah. “You want revenge on Romano?”
“I do.”
“Think you can keep from lying to me?”
His jaw tightened and Simon pushed between us. “Wait, I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.” I shoved him back. “You’re taking calls when I’m asleep.”
His jaw dropped and he spluttered before he actually spoke words. “I can’t talk to a friend?”
“Fuck off, you’re a damn liar,” Eleanor shouted. “Those were not friend words. You were scared.”
I flipped the keys to Noah. Whatever energy I’d gained from my food and short nap was gone after the fight. “Seeing as the two of you aren’t good for much else, you’re driving. I need to sleep.”
Simon slid around and got between Noah and the car. Noah glanced at me. I shrugged. He wanted to come with me, he was going to have to prove that he could keep himself alive. I surely wasn’t going to do it for him.
“Nix, I am coming with you,” Simon growled, but his eyes never left Noah.
“Who were you on the phone with?” I asked, taking note that the sirens were suddenly audible. Running out of time, we were running out of time.
He shook his head. “An old buddy, he had a job for me and I turned it down. I turned it down so I could stay and help you.”
I narrowed my eyes and stared hard at him. He wasn’t lying. But was he telling the whole truth? That I couldn’t quite dig.
“Noah, give him the keys. I have something else I want you to do. If you really want to help.” If he wanted to help, I’d give him a job. One that involved finding that family bible. Call me curious, but I suspected there was more to it than just being able to decipher the glyphs on the coded papers.
Noah shook his head. “I’ll follow and we can have this discussion down the road.”
He handed the keys to Simon and strode away to a motorbike parked off to the side of the lot. I slid into the backseat of the car.
My shoulder ached with a deep throbbing pain, and I was going to have to bandage it back up if the warmth spreading down my upper arm was any indication. What a clusterfuck.