I really like that title.
Part one. Hunting in the Heat.
40,00 feet above the capital of Venezuela a private jet cruised, the shining toy of a wealthy man. It didn't show up on any radar, not because of any high technological magics but because of the near magical power of money. Watchful eyes turned blind under the gaze of printed presidents, computer records were corrected by helpful hands to reflect the new reality. What else was magic about, if not altering reality to your desires? Money was magic. And magic could be money.
Expensive modifications had been made to the already expensive plane - sealed inside surrounded by velvet luxury, the man who owned it sat in a hard backed office chair in front of a wall of screens and displays, sipping cold water and watching the data flows with tired eyes.
It had been a long flight. They'd been halfway to Europe before new information had made him turn the plane around and head for South America. He'd had to settle for mid-air refueling - he would have preferred to avoid that, but time was running away from him and he could tolerate the inevitable interest from the americans. They'd agreed to arrange the refueling at very short notice, for unspecified future considerations. Needs must when the devil rides, but it was just one more hassle piled on top of an already ruined day.
He moved his hands over the keyboards reluctantly. This had never been his preferred method of manipulating the world, but power was a demanding mistress. He'd adapted. He'd been working all night, calling hired agents and bribed officials, checking records and cross referencing data on his screens. It was exhausting grunt work he'd have much prefered to delegate, but there was too much of his empire involved in the work, and he couldn't entrust it to anyone else. The life of a powerful man, he considered, consisted of an endless struggle to keep both power and life. But it wasn't something you could walk away from. And it had compensations.
"Melissa!"
His private study occupied the forward third of the passenger cabin. There was no access to the cockpit forward - he'd had an armoured panel installed instead. The pilots had no reason to be in his presence. He'd never trusted anyone more than he absolutely had to.
The middle third was a lounge area. The door to the cream leather nest slid open silently and a young blond vision of sensual beauty emerged, tight white leather tube top and short skirt clinging to a perfect hourglass figure. Flawless skin with the hint of a tan, she slid through the door with perfect poise and stood inside the darkened cave, practically glowing. Golden eyes framed by golden hair regarded the stick figure man in the black office chair owlishly; she looked around at the monitors and screens, examined his face and smiled.
It was a very strange thing, that smile. The air of youthful sexuality she extruded drained away around it, golden eyes sharpening, perfect teeth lengthening, manicured nails suddenly clawlike. The word that described her now was predatory.
"Father. Do have someone for me?"
"I do. Here."
He span his chair back around, tapped his mouse and brought up a photograph onto his displays. He was always very careful when he briefed Melissa. He made sure he aimed her well.
"This the leader of a cult. His name is Madison. I have determined his men were responsible for attacking my convoy in italy. They stole twenty crates of artifacts and killed five of my mercenaries. You knew one of them, I believe."
Melissa's perfect expression clouded slightly as she thought about it. ""Ricky Rock". He was funny. Is he dead?"
"Yes." Her father picked his words with extreme care. "How do you feel about that, Melissa?"
A few seconds passed. "Sad. I feel sad."
"Thats Ok, Melissa. You can feel sad about him dying. Do you feel angry about him being killed?"
"...No."
"Ok, Melissa. thats ok. Feeling sad is enough. But we do have to do something about it, don't we?"
"Yes. Kill them all and make people scared of us again."
"Well done, Melissa. Thats exactly what I want you to do. Kill Madison and his cult and make an example of them for our enemies. Take back what they stole from me... both my artifacts and my prestige."
"Yes father. Where are they?"
"In the city below us. They flee back to their fortress in the mountains. Don't let them reach it. Take Madison alive if you can - I want to question him before you kill him."
"Yes, father. I'll go now, shall I?"
Her father turned in his seat again to look at her, and regarded her clothes properly for the first time since they'd boarded the plane. "...not dressed like that you're not."
She sighed. "Yes, father."
The last third of the plane was Melissa's space, as she thought of it. A metal cave of weapon racks and lockers, the far side of the room was dominated by a giant armoured metal coffin wrapped in inch thick bars. She glared at it for a moment as she entered, but the hated thing wasn't going to be needed for a while yet. If she was quick tonight, they might even get home before she had to use it.
She looked at the white leather tube top. Her G-cup breasts were straining the leather and she knew it would be a pain to get out of it and into her catsuit. She'd been working on her breasts all flight, but they were too large now. Regretfully, she concentrated for a few moments.
For few seconds nothing happened. Then she shrank. The suddenly loose tube top hit the floor as the short skirt slid down, her breasts and arse losing their sculpted perfection and becoming something far more manageable. She gathered her clothes up and loaded them into a bag for later - if she concentrated she could rebuilt the look, with a bit of effort. In the meantime, her hair was slowly shrinking upwards as it changed from mid-back length to a bob cut. She didn't bother changing the colour though. She liked being blonde.
Now stark naked, she walked down to a full body mirror mounted on the wall. Muscle would be useful... She built her arms and back up, filling out her skin. Shorter legs? She lost an inch of height. Maybe a little more breast... no. More or less happy with her new form, she opened another locker and took out a loosely dangling mass of matt black rubber. Her catsuit wasn't modest, but it had its uses... She skinned into it quickly, fitted herself into it easily and then stood in front of the mirror again. A few tweaks were needed, and she adjusted herself until it fitted her properly. Shapeshifting was hard - all the stories and TV shows had it instantly happen at will, with perfectly precise features appearing instantly. Melissa had to work at it - it was more like methodical sculpting than flicking between images of herself. She had to move fat, muscle, rearrange her pores and adjust her eyes - it was like changing dresses when you had to sew each new dress you wore around you, including all the fiddly little bits at the back. Get it even a little bit wrong and everyone noticed. You really needed a lot of time and mirrors.
The rubber catsuit was straining at her breasts and crotch by the time she was finished. It was stupid, really, but Melissa was vain. She freely admitted it, but she could shapeshift. Why not look great? Besides, no-one was going to see any of it. The catsuit was her father's idea, and sex appeal was not its purpose. She fitted the belt unit, plugged it into the suit and flicked it on. She disappeared.
Not entirely. Her head was still there, and with that reference you could see the rest of her, barely. The catsuit was adaptive camouflage, the most expensive you could get - it projected a pattern adapted to its surroundings, not a perfect image but a blocky, blurry set of outlines that more-or-less showed what was behind it to the viewer. A few seconds was all it took to see through the illusion, but a few seconds could be a lifetime if Melissa was after you.
She fitted the helmet to a backpack - her father had insisted on an armoured helmet with the suit, but she hated wearing it - and picked a few more clothes for the evening in case she had to blend in somewhere. She grabbed a weapon - something smaller, suitable for the city. A modified 40mm belt fed automatic grenade launcher and a Desert Eagle seemed appropriate. By the time she was done her father was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, tapping his foot. She had the grace to look a little bit abashed.
Melissa pecked her father on the cheek and closed the door to the cabin. She flipped a buzzer by the door - a warning for the pilot - and opened the door to the night sky. In the roaring gale of the depressurising room, she saw the brilliant lights of the city, twelve kilometers straight down. Beautiful. She lept.
It was a long way down. Melissa amused herself as she plummeted, spinning, arching, enjoying the freefall. It was glorious freedom, with the hunt to come. The best times.
The air was thick enough to breath by the time she stopped playing. More than halfway down. Getting a hold of herself, she pulled her helmet off the backpack and put it on.
It was horribly restrictive, like a metal box over her head. It covered her completely in an armoured face mask without a single hole in it, not even for her to breathe though. She liked breathing. No eyeholes - she had two ultra high definition displays instead. She never quite trusted them to tell her the truth. The whole thing was ruthlessly practical and coated in the same stealth gear as the catsuit and backpack, but she avoided wearing it wherever she could.
It did let her father call her, though. It had taken her a long time to realise the little voice from the helmet was her father speaking to her, and that she was supposed to do what it said. Even now she treated orders from the box as suggestions. It wasn't her father and it couldn't tell her what to do. But he'd be annoyed if she didn't, so she obeyed, mostly. Such was life.
"I'd suggest landing somewhere here-" The virtual reality around her lit up a road between the airport on the coast and the city inland, miles long and winding along the mountain pass linking Caracas to the sea. "I believe they landed half an hour ago but I don't have any report of them leaving the airport... Oh damn." Melissa waited patiently for her father to finish. She could be as patient as a stone. "I'm sorry, Melissa, I've made an error. I gave too much credence to the police reports. I seem to have been... misinformed."
"One of my local hires arrived at the airport a few minutes ago. He reports that not only have the cult already left, they've already been attacked. The cult's convoy left the airport twenty minutes ago. Halfway to the city they were hit exiting a tunnel and appear to have been overwhelmed. No information about the attackers available... Melissa, I need you to track those attackers down. Find the site of the attack and start there. I need to reorganise my intelligence gathering... the police appear compromised."
"Understood, father. This is an interesting hunt."
The tunnel was hard to miss, where the bright lights of the motorway from the airport disappeared under the highest level of the mountain pass. It was also on fire, which helped. She was running out of down, she noticed. You could only plummet so long. Wings were called for.
On each side of her body a flicker of reflected light from below sparked, spread, grew...
Melissa didn't shapeshift her wings into being - they were more like projections of will over reality. They were as hard and sharp as a headache, changing shape, snapping into and out of existence - they caught the air and filled out into two nightmarish black distortions, each forty feet wide and swallowing light. It was as close to manifesting as Melissa normally got, and it took an effort to stay like that, half into reality and half out. It never failed to make her hungry.
Feeding would have to wait - father had given her other prey today.
She landed next to a burning truck, a fuel tanker lit on fire a hundred meters or so in front of the tunnel exit. They'd blocked both carriageways with it and opened fire from the sides of the tunnel. Heavy weapons. Six armoured trucks were trapped in the traffic behind the crashed tanker, riddled with bullets and rocket fire. A lot of bodies. The cult had returned fire with some heavy machine guns and some kind of flame weapon, judging from the scorch marks on the sides of the hill, but the ambush was well armed. This fight had lasted seconds. At least ten minutes ago.
Probably should have been faster getting changed.
A few police were standing around, smoking, despite the spilled fuel everywhere. They weren't paying much attention. Considering they were just traffic cops and had nothing but shotguns on them they seemed awfully unconcerned by all the carnage. In Melissa's experience, police responding to acts of extreme violence tended to be nervous and trigger happy for a while afterwards. These looked downright cheerful.
Melissa considered examining the dead cultists for a moment, then realised they likely had very little information on their attackers. She didn't even consider the half dozen dead civilians scattered across the road. Instead she jumped up and focused her wings into shadowy existence again, flapped once and hopped the hundred meters to the tunnel - the wind smacked into the scene below, sending the police scattering and cursing, looking up and seeing nothing as Melissa landed ahead of them, her wings vanishing into mist. She found the barricades the attackers had set up easily enough, scouted the ground find shell casing and discarded rocket tubes - they seemed to have been careless about evidence. And the police had lied to her father, and these ones seemed relaxed and unconcerned...
She didn't find anything obvious in the wreckage. a few bloodstains showed someone had been hit, but there was no body and not that much blood. He was likely still alive. Melissa stood up and considered her options. Then she jumped off the hill.
She flapped once, dropped low to build some speed and body tackled one of the police below. She grappled him, braced her wings on the ground and kicked off again as the others panicked and tried to open fire on the shadowed form that had taken their friend. The bullets were wildly aimed, but Melissa felt one hit - it lodged in her back as she hauled the screaming man up the mountainside with pounding wing beats. She ignored it and examined her policeman. He wasn't in great shape - on reflection she should have picked a thinner target - but he looked senior and had a sergeant's stripes. He'd also pissed and shat himself when she'd grabbed him. Unpleasant, but not unusual, that kind of thing happened when she did things like this. She found a convenient spot in the trees well away from the road and dumped him, then dissolved her wings and followed him in.
He'd landed badly - from the way he was screaming he'd probably broken both legs. They didn't look right, she considered. Well it was as good a way as any to start an interrogation. She dropped lightly onto her feet, barely disturbing the dirt, and walked over to him while she took off the helmet and switched off the camouflage. Being confronted with a gorgeous, buxom young woman in a tight rubber catsuit was less enthralling when both your legs were broken, however, and Melissa was a little disappointed at the lack of reaction in the sargeant. He simply lay in the dirt and brawled. Oh well.
She stood over him, considered a few ways to get him to pay attention and settled for picking him up by his collar with one hand. He didn't like that either, but Melissa was done caring about that.
"Hello. I want to know who attacked the convoy over there. Tell me. Now, please."
He started cursing her in spanish and Melissa realised the flaw in her plan. She didn't speak spanish. Damnit. With her free hand, she plonked the helmet back on and called her father.
"Can you translate, please?"
"The swearing as well?"
"Joke... Funny?"
"Well done, Melissa. He's not making much sense. Could you slap him please?"
She did so. Surprisingly, he shut up. Melissa considered just how much human interaction she still had to learn about.
"I'm using the helmet speaker now, Melissa. just keep him there for a while, please."
Melissa stood unmoving, the deadweight of the overweight police officer at the end of her outstretched arm, while her father interrogated the terrified man in what sounded like fluent spanish. She idly watched his skin change colour as the her grip choked him, then got bored and started up a game program she'd loaded into her helmet. She tapped the controls on her belt to move the little balls around the virtual screen floating of front of her. She'd only gotten to the third level before her father called her.
"Melissa? pay attention please, he's passed out."
"Oh." She paused the game and looked at the policeman in her grip. "Are we done with him now?"
"Yes, I think so. What should we do with him, Melissa?"
"...Not kill him?"
"Well done. Why?"
"Because hes not my target and hadn't attacked us. Also, killing police can create difficult law enforcement responses."
"Excellent, Melissa. Well reasoned. Just drop him here and fire his gun in the air a few times, I'm sure they're looking for him. I now have a clear idea of who attacked our targets. Head into the city and I'll brief you on the way."
Melissa flew up the pass, flowing the road. The city around her rose up on the sides of the mountains in spectacular arrays of light, clinging to every spot you could plant a building and shining brightly in the night. It was a wonderful way to build a city, she felt. She was really enjoying this.
"Melissa. I have a target for you."
Her father's words riveted her attention to his voice. Hunting was what she did. It was the one time she felt completely right.
"Yes, Father?"
"The convoy was attacked by a local criminal gang who appear to be at war with the cultists. They have the local police completely in their pockets, including the ones I thought I was bribing. I'm very annoyed about that. I may have to have you clean house before you leave - but regardless, I now know where to send you. Their senior leader lives in a compound here..." A new icon appeared on her helmet display - "His name is Adriano Cordello. Visit him. Extract the location of our property from him, but leave him alive. Everyone else in the compound is expendable."
"I understand, father. On my way."
Melissa found the house, or mansion, on the south side of the mountain that rose between the city and the sea. It was a long way up above the city, built into a pinnacle of rock above the heavily forested slopes. The only way up was a cable car, or flying. It had a helipad.
Melissa considered flying straight up, but the catsuit wasn't radar proof, and her wings sent radar crazy, so she settled for half measures. She dropped onto the cable car at the bottom of the slope and kicked the trapdoor in the roof in. it was empty. She had hoped to ride the thing up, but she couldn't find the controls. Damnit. Maybe she could just fly up... but caution was the mark of the professional. Walking would take too long, flying around the mountain and going over it to drop down... might work. It would take a while, though. It was a big mountain.
She settled on going around as the best option, climbed out the car and forced the latch of the trapdoor to hold it again. She was dropping off the back when she saw a set of big, black mercedes coming up the dirt road to the cable house. Promising.
Aa powered garage door opened and the cars pulled into the bay, while Melissa just walked in behind them. In full stealth gear, in a big, noisy dark room with lots of light and shadow, she could pretty much dance her way along and not be seen. A half dozen thugs - they were pretty easy to call thugs, they were hulking guys covered in tattoos wearing tracksuits - piled out, followed by... oh. An even dozen prostitutes. Hot, young prostitutes, admittedly, stunningly good looking, but still obviously whores. They were dressed in some expensive rags, in Melissa's not even slightly modest opinion, and had some appallingly thick makeup on. Tasteless.
She considered dumping the suit and just joining them, but she had no desire to risk being questioned. Or to spend ten minutes in a packed cabin with them. She just followed them to the cable car. It took a second's work to hop on top as it left. The suit, as ever, left them nothing to see. Easy.
The mansion was... expensive. Melissa was the daughter of a very rich man, but he rarely indulged himself with anything - the kitchen equipment back home, she remembered with a pout, had not been replaced since the nineteen sixties. This was the home of a man who indulged himself with everything. The pool, the entire olympic sized pool, was a jacuzzi. It was bubbling and foaming in the middle of a massive, brightly lit garden built on top of an artificial terrace on the mountain side. You could see it all laid out to one side as the cable car rose over it to the house. It looked like a fantastic party was going on over there. She could hear the music thumping. Fun...
Very tempting. Maybe a change of clothes... not here. She hopped off the side of the car and dropped. Directly under the cable car's path, where you couldn't see from the cab, was the more utilitarian bit of the garden - a giant vibrating pump that presumably powered the pool, while racks of lawn rollers and rakes under wooden awnings waited for tomorrow's cleanup jobs. Boring. But useful. Melissa switched off the camouflage and started shimmying out of the catsuit, cursing herself after thirty seconds struggle for making it so damn tight on her bust and hips. She didn't dare adjust herself here - without a mirror the results could be appalling - so she just persevered with it and finally pulled the clinging rubber mass off herself after a ten minute fight. Ugh.
She pulled out the clothes she'd packed before - the white leather tube top was a little tight again, but she was at a pool party filled with hookers, it wasn't like anyone would complain. Together with the leather tube skirt she looked sexy as hell. A little concentration let her hair grow out... She checked it with a little mirror as best she could, but hair was hard to screw up. She just had to extrude it. It was straight as a waterfall and perfect condition - golden blond and brand new. She let it fall to mid-back, stuffed her rubbery catsuit in her backpack along with her guns and, satisfied she was the most unnaturally hot girl in the party, snuck out to join it.
Rich people were funnnn. Melissa sat on the edge of the pool, with two very nice looking guys on her arms while she dried off from a dip in the pool. Jacuzzi pools were also fun. She wanted one. She smiled at her guys and pretended not to see the girls on the other side of the pool glaring at her. It just made it better. And drinks! Ok, alcohol had no noticeable effect on her, but people running off to get her one when she said she was thirsty was wonderful. Bobby and Charlie were both very sweet and trying very hard to talk her into fucking them. Both of them at the same time, apparently. She said she'd think about it. She actually was thinking about it, but unfortunately it wasn't going to happen. Probably. Well, no, she just did not have time. Sex was fun, but the hunt was on...
Melissa smiled at both of them, her two lovely boys, and asked if they could show her the house. Charlie got up and shoved Bobby into the pool in one impressively fluid motion. Bobby came back up like a shark, but she'd picked her guy now and Bobby could stay put. Charlie grabbed her arm as she laughed and pulled her running from the pool while Bobby made some truly violent threats behind them.
Charlie was nice. Well, no, Charlie was a career criminal and a violent gangster, but he was being nice to her because she was incredibly hot and implying she would sleep with him. Perspective, her father always told her, was important. Her perspective was happiest, she'd found, when people didn't have a clue what she was. Charlie showed her the bottom floor of the house, and, with a little prodding to his ego, took her upstairs to a room with a view over the pool and gardens. She told him she wanted to have sex where Bobbie could see them screwing. It got him to talk her past the guards on the stairs. She persuaded him show her around upstairs as well. Unfortunately, once he go to the bedroom, Charlie lay down on the bed and stopped being so useful.
Melissa bent down, kissed him - he had been nice after all - and snapped his neck with both hands. It was the kindest thing she could do for him, she felt. His bosses would have done far worse to him when they found out she'd used him. She closed his eyes - he hadn't had time to react much - and pulled his gun out his swimming trunks. She'd made sure he was armed before she said she'd screw him. The gun was loaded but not in great shape - she sat down on on the dresser at the end of the room and cleaned it first. Proper weapon maintenance was important. She left Charlie on the bed and went hunting.
The party had been very useful. she'd listened to a lot of gossip, about the house, and where the boss lived. His name, father had told her, was Adriano Cordello. His room was right at the top of the house, overlooking the city, with a panoramic glass window around it. The glass was bullet proof, rocket proof, and ten inches thick. He had a private elevator and his own dining room with an office up there. Charlie had shown her the elevator in passing, mostly to show off his new girl to the half dozen guys sitting around guarding the door. They'd given him an earful about bringing girls up to the second floor, but Melissa had dropped her sunglasses on the floor and they'd shut up when she bent down to retrieve them. She might be vain, but being sexy made it all so easy.
Twelve men, no obvious weapons. Probably small submachine guns and pistols with some rifles handy. Sitting around on some classy white sofas in a lobby at the end of a ten foot glass walled corridor. It would actually be a challenge to get past them without raising the alarm if she hadn't already ascertained they were a bunch of bored, lecherous thugs.
She checked herself out in a handy wall mirror first - yep, still the sexest girl in the world - and adusted her leather top and short skirt. There were better ways, she'd found, to pass unseen then a high tech invisibility catsuit. she blew a little kiss to herself and headed for the lobby.
At times like this, subtlety was wasted. Melissa shoved her heaving chest out and strutted down the corridor, grinning as alluringly as she could manage. The guards reacted reasonably well, she admitted - two of them drew weapons and one got his phone out. The others just got up and moved to great her, blatantly checking her out and liking what they saw. She practically purred when one of them put hands on her, curved her hand up his neck and grasping his head. "Hey." She bent in and kissed his neck. The older, more sensible one with the phone moved in to break them up, yelling at his men and he yanked a couple back, but it was far too late for that. She was within arms reach of all of them.
Melissa's mouth opened, then split. Her jaw unhinged. Her perfect white teeth had vanished, replaced by the giant mouthparts of a lamprey eel from hell. Four clawed mandibles erupted and bit into her victim, drawing his neck into a jagged maw filled with grinding teeth. He barely had time to scream before his blood splattered into her mouth. Melissa fed while she warped her hands into new weapons. The flesh split, melted, pulled away, and two scythe like blades erupted from her wrist in their place.
It was a blood soaked massacre. At close range, with no warning, the beautiful sex doll the men were pawing over turned into a clawing, biting mass of razorblades. Six of them died before they had time to react, the others lasting a little longer. They might have had time to get a shot off if two fresh nightmares hadn't materialized, black and razor edged wings erupting into reality that Melissa turned into cutting arms, scything through the room like the arms of a blender.
five seconds after she entered the lobby everyone else in the room was dead. The guy with the phone never even unlocked it. Melissa finished feeding on her first victim - she wasn't supposed to eat people, although he was so tasty it was hard to let go - and dumped his body on the mangled pile of corpses in the middle of the room. She got her mouth under control, drawing back the mandible arms into the void and getting her human teeth back. She wiped her face off on her sleeve, which didn't clean her up much but at least got the blood out of her eyes, and headed for the elevator.
It was locked of course. Melissa sighed, considered forcing them and thought better of it - they were probably alarmed. She turned around, squelched back to the pile behind her and rooted through the bodies until she found the guy who'd been smart enough to not instantly start fawning over a hot girl in a tight dress. Since he was the smartest of the bunch he was probably the boss, and low and behold she found a key fob on his belt that had to be for the lift. Pleased with her own cleverness, she grabbed for it and then realised she still had blades for hands. She changed them back and grabbed a clean-ish bit of shirt on her way back to the elevator to wipe herself down.
She'd ruined her top, and the skirt, and the shoes. White leather, no longer. More pink. Melissa sighed, but she was familiar with the problem. She knew just about every household trick for getting blood out, but she still got through new clothes faster than an actual teenage girl did. Several experiments to find blood resistant clothes had ended badly. All red clothes weren't very stylish, got repetitive and dried blood just went brown and just ruined them anyway. Latex and rubber had held promise and was fashionable enough to get a pass these days, but her habit of wrapping it around herself skin tight over a heaving bosom had ended in a humiliating incident when her outfit got scratched and promptly exploded under the strain. Besides, they were sweaty, hard to get into and needed to be constantly polished or they got scuffed and lost their shine. She was vain, but she wasn't about to stop and polish herself every ten minutes. She had her limits.
She'd pretty much resigned herself to carrying a change of clothes everywhere she went and buying half a dozen backups for anything she liked. The rubber catsuit fared better, but even that had to be hosed down to get the blood off the camo-projectors. She kept meaning to use guns more, but it just wasn't in her nature.
The elevator delivered her to the penthouse suite without any obvious alarm. Score one for Melissa. Now to find her informant before he ran away.
It was a nice house. She admired the panorama of the city, which framed the room and lit everything gently, including the huge war table in the middle of the room. Black marble and modern underlighting, very starship. Silver enamel finish everywhere. She noted the six men huddling around the table, bent over a big glowing map of the city and clearly working. Not her problem yet. she walked over the sideboard and started looking for the food she could smell somewhere there. Ah. A quick button press and the top slid aside, opening a heated compartment loaded with dinner. She picked a chicken, grabbed a leg and started munching. It was always hard to find good food in the middle of a hunt, she found. She'd take it when she could find it. It was really good too.
When she turned around all six men had handguns on her. Good. She really hated being ignored when she walked into a room. She waved the leg in a friendly way and cheerfully introduced herself.
"Hi! I'm Melissa Lincoln. One of you has to be Adriano Cordello, right?"
"What the fuck? How the fuck did you get in here, puta?"
"Oh, I killed everyone downstairs and took the lift. Are you Adriano? I never got a picture. I like your chicken."
"She's covered in blood. Call Philip."
"If you're not going to answer me I'm going to hurt you. Also, it's rude. I told you who I was."
"You're going to hurt me?"
"Apparently. Are you Adriano?"
"... Too freaky. Shoot her."
Melissa sighed. "Fine."
She killed two of them with her wings as she kicked herself backwards, punching into their bodies and eviscerating them with shaped voids that cut with razor edges. Gunfire boomed in the enclosed room, shockingly loud, but she was already gone. It was a shadowy room. She ducked around the edge, taking her time and tracking while they panicked. She waited until the four survivors wildly searching around the room weren't looking her way and launched herself at them.
She didn't bother with claws. She needed some of them alive, after all; she punched one in the neck, broke the arm of the guy standing next to him and kicked the third in the stomach. The talkative one, who she still figured for the boss, she just grabbed by his wrists. Job done.
"I was hungry and you made me drop my chicken, and I'm annoyed about that."
She punched him in the balls. Fast; she had both hands back on his arms before his eyes glazed over. He started wheezing. Tough guy, though. He didn't scream.
"Are you Adriano Cordello, yes or no? Failure to answer or lying will have negative consequences for you."
"...No."
"Fine."
She dropped him. "Are any of you Adriano Cordello?"
"No, he's not here."
"Drat. You're probably lying. I hate complicated stuff like this."
"Ok, new plan. I torture you all to death until... no, I need the genuine one alive... Nightmare spider? Ok, that'll work. No, wait, I left the matchbox with my bag. Argh. Oh, I give up. I need a phone. Little help here?"
She tried an encouraging grin. They just stared back at her.
"Fine, I'll just loot one of the corpses then, shall I? Honestly, I just wanted to borrow one of your phones for gods sake."
People could be annoyingly petty at times like this, she'd found. She dug the phone out of the pocket of one of the two dead men she'd killed, and then someone shot her in the shoulder. Ow.
She span round, slammed her wing out and impaled the shooter in the shoulder, sending him flying across the room and pinning him to the panoramic window with it. The gun dropped from nerveless fingers as he hung off her wing, the pitch black shadow arching clear across the room.
She didn't bother letting him down. Melissa stood there figuring out the screen lock for a good sixty seconds while he dangled there. When she finally figured it out and dialed, she wandered over to him while it rang.
"Hello?"
"Red cherry's playing violins. Hello father, it's me. I'm stuck. What does Adriano Cordello look like?"
"I'll send you a picture, shall I? What happened to your helmet, Melissa?"
"Um... well infiltration seemed the best option for a potentially heavily guarded compound with unknown weapons..."
"And you couldn't have used your suit for that?"
"There was a party..."
"we can discuss it later. At length. In the meantime, I've sent you a police photograph of your target. i assume you have some candidates?"
"Yes father."
"Will you need anything else?"
"No, father."
"Then good luck. And call me when you put your suit back on."
He hung up. She found the message, the photo helpfully labelled. She'd been right, she saw; Mr talkative was Adriano. A ha.