Chapter 4
"No, no, Fell I've told zou don't bring Bane into zis, le mec est un trou du cul." Ragnor Fell must have said something in his American friend's defense because Solomon's face scrunched up as if he was eating a lemon, "I know e'z your buddy, but zis can just be between us, zou will see, iz better zis way," it appears Sol is busy doing buisness on the phone when she comes in, he is curling a finger around one of his white horns sticking out of his green hair, running a purple hand down his equally purple neck. "No, no, I will send Lennie when ze time comes," his bright green eyes mark her when she comes in, "oui, oui, I will get back to zou."
Lennie waves at him, and her boss frowns deeper, "I have to go, oui you too, au revoir."
Before he slams the phone onto the receiver, he screams at her, "Don't bleed on my floor!"
"I'm not!" She screeches back, showing him the hand that was holding most of the blood.
"Zou are!" He groans as if she shoved Azriel into him, "come on Lennie, I told zou a hundred times!"
She self-consciously touches her bleeding scalp, "but this isn't my fault, I can't get it to stop."
"Baise le." He cursed in French, proofing right in front of her, and bending down at her feet to clean up the pool of blood, and then shoving the whole row of paper towels in her bloody hands. "Clean it before it gets worse."
"Sure boss." She didn't see what was wrong, it's not like she wanted to get on his bad side.
Solomon Ash is such a clean freak when it comes to blood, it is a bit hypocritical. When he calms down enough, the High Warlock of Paris stops going back to his tinkering to point his finger to the restroom. "Be a good girl and go 'eal your forehead with ze cream in ze cabinet."
Lennie tip-toed through the empty parts of the floor that wasn't covered by trash and his warlock toys she didn't have the name to or care to have. "I told you Solomon. I don't want to be lady. I want to lure men to their death and laugh at when I pawn their sexy asses for money."
That got her the french Warlock's attention. Terror. Disgust. Lennie doesn't really know what went on in the Solomon mind anymore, but she never failed to feel victorious in making the immortal old grump uncomfortable. She could appreciate that he wore his emotions on his face, so unlike the young people of this age...
She flicked the dripping blood from her temple to the floor as he glared at her.
"By all ze gods and demons Lennie! The blood! At least put pressure on it," he pointed a purple finger, threatening, "before I make zou clean every drop."
She looked at the gruesomely filthy room, it would take weeks, if not a whole month to clean this place out. "It's not like you keep it clean in here anyways, why are you giving me such a hard time for some little blood?"
He could care less about that, apparently, she was worth more than the junk he keeps around here. "Zou are going to make zourself look all banged up. How am I going to sell zour expertise when zey see that someone got luckeey?" So, he was still hadn't got over the ugly ass scar that would form if she didn't use his healing cream. He was not one to hide his concerns for their public image. "I thought zou were supposed to be indestructible?" He muttered as if he had been duped. "What if zou would have died?"
Ah, there was that aloof concern she had been waiting on. "Don't worry Sol," she swung the cabinet, seeing spiders scatter from her view, as she searched for the cream amongst things that were outdated by decades, and found it only to open it and smell the foul healing potion. "I'll live to fight another day, maybe we could spar and we could see which of us is getting rusty? I promise I will be gentle." She fluttered her eyes at the Warlock.
Solomon knew who he was dealing with, and so he could hear her voice tempting misconduct. "Lennie, zou are a manipulative diamond do you know that? And zour tactics won't work on me." He was meaning the flirting bit. "So, you can stop before you waste our time."
"You wouldn't get rid of me," Lennie chuckled as she put back the healing potion, shutting his old ass cabinet, and then for some reason the thought troubled her, she leaned over the door separating them, "would you get rid of me?"
She saw the humor still on his lips, and gave a sigh of relief. "Honestly, I am reeelly tempted," the wizard said and began levitating bottles and elixirs to the light of his flat's window and then going to his tinkering over something metallic and smoldering with heat.
The gifted wizard began levitated the smoldering hunk of metal in the air, it filled the suddenly to small space of the room, and it changed shapes faster than she could imagine them. It made a pulsing noise like an alien spaceship taking off into the sky, and then quite disappointingly went black, dull, and unmoving. Solomon cursed in German. That was obviously not what it was supposed to do.
Lennie changed the subject before he started throwing his own impersonation of World War III, "besides you would be pissed with my replacement. Giovanni, Eurielle, and Candy…" those were her competitors, all in the league of people Solomon would have wanted, "they can't hold a candle to me." She bragged. "They also have a bigger pocket than I do."
"Zen don't get zourself banged up zen." He told her smartly, "or else zour value decreases like everything else that doesn't fulfill its' purpose." He threw the piece of metal to the ground in disgust, "that took me twelve hours, and now I'm going to have to start from scratch…"
"That's rough." She really rubbed the rest of the the lotion, not wanting to lose any of the value Solomon saw in her. She knew that as his leading mercenary, her untouchable prestige would be tainted if someone saw her like this, banged up, but the more irrational part of herself knew it would be fun to get her enemies morale up, and see them get sucker-punched into the next year. "No one can finish in record timing like me, that's that you keep me around."
That got his attention, "I keep zou around," he corrected her in that tone she was sure he had used with all the assassins before her, and probably with the ones long after she was gone, "because no one is indestructible like zou. Why'd zou zink I put in all the time and effort to make sure zou stay zat way?" He commented hotly over his shoulder, refusing to give up his tinkering for a minute of socializing.
She couldn't find a decent mirror when she found a bandage, she asked the only person in the room, hoping he would drop his toys for a second. "Solomon, could you help me put it on?" He didn't even look her way, "Solomon are you -you are not listening to me," and he hummed in agreement.
"You must like me so much, I'm the best assassin you have ever had," Lennie said leaning back against one of his moth-eaten walls, and puffing out her chest, even bringing down her shirt a bit as she brought her bra cups closer, he didn't even look. "Did you hear me I said, I'm the best you ever had," he hummed again. She knew he was not paying attention.
"Really feeling the love Sol." She rubbed his Warlock cream against the bandage before securing it, feeling it tickle and heat her forehead, and hopefully erasing his worry at this getting out. "Well, in the future, I'm not indestructible in the seventh circle of hell."
He pricked up at the word hell, "Ze seventh circle." She could already hear the judgment in Solomon's tone. "What were zou doing zere?"
"Someone needed a demon dead." That was where her job usually started, "and that demon was smart enough to hitch a ride with a Greater Demon, and I was stupid enough to follow."
That would be the last time that Lennie ever took the chance to do inter-dimensional travel, because she was now learning that her indestructible Adamas skin did not hold so well in the devil's actual playground. "Whatever, he's obliterated with the friend-enemy I made. Now we know some Realms just don't like my angelic rock, and I might be exiled from some too, but that should be kept on the down-low."
"What iz zis?" Solomon's oldness was showing, "Friend-enemy?"
"Yeah, he was like 'worship me mortal'." Lennie dropped herself on the couch with a drawn-out sight, after she moved some of the boxes, and placed them to carefully to the side so Sol wouldn't scream his lid once more. "And I was like no, not today Satan. Our friendship was dead when he dropped me off at the Métro."
"Greater Demons." Solomon sniffed in that racist warlock voice he would use. "Zeir arrogance knows no bounds," he said before going back to his potions and gadgets strewn across his living room. He was in the process of adding some other fancy tool to his growing plethora of a Downworld hoarder's delight, but thought better and just made it disappear altogether. "I'd have told zou that. How did zou get in here anyways?"
"I heard this story about a girl that grew up on the black market after her mother sold her as a baby for drugs. She was the German and Soviet underground now, and supposedly she is doing pretty well for herself, have you heard of this Solomon?"
"You're stalling." He had not been paying attention to a thing Lennie had just said. "How did zou get past my enchantments? I doobled zem since the last time zou broke in."
She was glad he had noticed that at least. "You caught me." Lennie moves the hair from her wound, not wanting to dirty her hair too. "Your mother let me in."
"I knew it." Solomon gets up, his knees cracking, and his eight-year old body looks a bit ridiculous in the grown-up V-neck and designer jeans. He ruffles his pink hair, and his purple skin has this glow around his cheeks. "I told her time and time again that everyone is impersonating you, letting in another mercenary iz dangerous. I've told her not to let people in wizout giving me ze time to inspect first."
"But it was cold outside." Lennie pouted. "And she was making breakfast."
He gave a long sigh, rubbing his darkening purple face, and Lennie wondered if he knew how intelligent his mother really was. "What did zou promise her to get in zere?"
Lennie took out the piece of chicken-sandwich that she had stuffed in her pocket, "that we would try this again."
Solomon Ash glared daggers at the offered meal in her hand, his rib-cage so much more prominent when he stretched his back like he was doing now. He was one of those people sat for so long in once hunched position that they were sure to ruin their back. Lennie was convinced if he wasn't still in a kid's body he would have got a hunchback for leaning over his work for hours on end.
He rubbed his rib-cage. "Zou know it won't work. We've already tried everything Lennie."
"We still can try." She hoped that he would try it again, for his mother, and partly for her.
He did try.
The moment Lennie put the sandwich in Sol's hand, it turned to ash, the back particles slipping through his suddenly lax fingers, and landed in a too perfect pile of black ash before him.
"I'm sorry Solomon- "
"Don't." He didn't even look at the pile of ash, instead he ceremoniously went to pick up the cobweb dustpan and broom. He only used it for occasions like this. "I don't want to try zis again."
"We won't." Lennie watched him throw it away in the empty trashcan, out of sight and out of mind.
"I mean it Lennie." Solomon wasn't quick enough to wipe the tear that dropped down his cheek, so foreign on his no-nonsense face that it quickly changed her mind of trying again as well. "I don't want to keep hoping that this curse will end one day. I don't want to keep my mother's hopes up. She has dealt with zis for seven hundred years, I'm teered of this, and I know she is too."
"I know." Lennie growled at the shadow of the Greater Demon that had cursed the once eight-year old warlock Solomon Ash. The demon had cursed him to live as a child, a life without food ever touching his mouth, and adding his mother live out that immortal sentence. Just to watch her son suffer. "One day we'll get him Solomon."
"Zou could try," he remarked just as coldly.
"I will." That incredibly sadistic demon was in for a world of hurt when Lennie found him, and perhaps she could do it sooner if Solomon ever had the balls to fess up the name of the fucker. Her boss' pride to finish the job himself was worse than his tinkering addiction.
Lennie finally noticed something. It was abnormally quiet in his room. "Hey Sol, where is Maria?"
He waved his hand in dismissal at the very mention of their competition's head mistress, Madame Maria Claude. The werewolf female was a self-made mercenary during the 70's, and after last year she had reached a bit too far for Solomon's taste. He had abducted her and kept in the corner of the room since last April, bribing her wolf mercenary employees with finishing easy jobs, and basically running her good name into ruin.
Maria Claude's absence now meant she had run out of her use to Solomon. He rarely kept anything that he didn't need.
"You killed her?"
He didn't have to say it.
Solomon's child-like face was pinched in the same way when some gadget or instrument of his mind didn't turn out like he wanted it to. "Well she did publicly accuse me of stealing her clients. So, she had it coming, and ze got on my mother's nerves, so it was a win win scenario."
Lennie had always been curious. "Did you steal her network?"
"Of course, I did." There was the Solomon smirk she that had first won her over, "now I have another target for zou, a vampire in New Orleans is trying to get back at his Maker. He wants it done by ze end of the week-
"Sure Sol. Where can I find him?"
Just another day as one of France's high-ranking assassins.