Later, she would protest that she was completely under control when it happened, that it was only his physical presence and not his mindtouch that had prevented her from acting sooner, but nobody really believed her. As it was, she only just had enough presence of mind left to wrench herself out of his embrace, leaving behind the wig and quite a lot of the bodice, and shove him off the edge of the bed out of the line of fire before the door of the suite banged open and a blast from a Carbonizer singed the air.
She had the Cricket out of her cleavage and trained on the figure in the doorway before Radu, sprawled in an unprincely heap on the floor, could get out his first oath. "Drop your weapon!" she yelled at the UT, which spat out her command in a variety of languages. "You're under arrest for violation of sections four through nineteen of the Tycho Accords, failure to register your weapon with MIB upon purchase, discharging an illegal weapon within city limits, and threatening the life of....I said drop it!" She cocked her wrist and fired a warning shot from the Cricket. Normally this caused perps to think twice before resisting arrest, but this guy clearly wasn't bright enough to be considered normal. He flung himself into the room and got off one more blast before her next shot removed his head and most of his torso.
Radu's eyes were open so wide she could see white all around the scarlet. She stuck out an arm and caught the dead guy's Carbonizer as it fell, tucking her Cricket back into its makeshift bra holster, and opened a channel to Kay. "Shots fired," she said flatly. "One assassin down. I've got the Carbonizer."
"Are you all right?" Kay demanded.
"I'm fine." She scowled down at Radu, who was still looking up at her with wide unbelieving eyes. "Your Highness, are you hurt?"
"No," he managed. She nodded curtly, aware of how wonderful it was to be free of that goddamn wig.
"Target unharmed. Send in the backup to search the building." She snapped the communicator shut and held out a hand to the sprawled Prince. "Come on," she said, "will you kindly believe me now? We have to get you out of here. I've no idea how many others there are in the building."
He pulled himself to his full height and looked down at her. "You," he began. "You...."
"Your Highness, with all due respect, we don't have time for this." She checked the power level on the dead assassin's Carbonizer, which still had Jeebs's price tag dangling from the trigger guard. This looked like a really, really badly organized job. The guy sent to plug Radu was.....human.
She turned him over with her toe and ran a trace analyzer over what was left of the corpse. Definitely human. A quick search of the body came up with nothing beyond the fact that he'd clearly gotten one of the waiters' uniforms from the hotel and had carefully removed all ID from it before putting it on. Not much to find there. She cocked the Carbonizer and gestured to Prince Radu to follow her out of the room. As they hurried down through the hotel, she demanded, "Who do you suppose wants you dead this badly, Your Highness?"
He was rather more attractive without the invisible waves of seduction, she thought; he looked young and pale and out of his depth, but his scarlet eyes seemed alive, and he looked less like an insufferable young Anne Rice hero and more like a stranger in what must now seem like a very strange land. "I....." He cleared his throat and began again in a deeper voice. "I can't imagine."
"Oh, come off it, sir, please. Where is your staff?"
Radu made a face. "I don't know, I sent them away."
Sea pulled out her communicator again. "We're approaching the rear entrance. Search the hotel for two medium height Transylvanians, both in black lace robes with chains of office, black hair, silver streaks." She heard Kay relaying the orders to the other agents who were now in the building, and snapped the device shut. No sign of any further assassins. It was a clear run to the back entrance, and she knew Kay would be waiting in the alley with the car.
She took hold of Radu's arm and ran for it. They were almost to the door when another mind flickered against hers. She became aware only just in time that someone was there around the corner, someone who could shield better than Radu and whose mind was sick and cold with malevolence....she'd felt nothing, no presence until they were right there—and with the cold realization that she'd never be able to aim the heavy Carbonizer in time to make the shot before whoever-it-was could fire, she threw herself against Radu and knocked him out of the way. In the same instant the shot took her in the shoulder and spun her around, throwing her all the way back against the far wall. The Carbonizer fell from her hands. Fuck, she was thinking, somewhere inside the pain. Fucked up again. Then there was another shot, and then nothing.
Kay was disregarding the no-smoking-indoors rule and had been doing so for some time, judging by the number of cigarette butts littering the hallway. No one had quite had the nerve to say anything to him about it. He was leaning against the wall outside the glass doors into the medical bay, arms folded, as impassive as a rock except for the furious glow and fade of his cigarette.
Elle and Jay glanced at him as they escorted Prince Radu from the medical wing. Company policy required comprehensive checkups for anyone involved in a firefight of the sort he'd been in; he didn't have a scratch on his ivory hide, however, and he had kept insisting as much. Kay hadn't said a word to him, and didn't look as if he intended to start now. Prince Radu had other plans. He gently freed himself from Elle's grip.
"Excuse me," he said, his voice pitched low and elegant, with overtones of cream and rose petals. "You are Agent Sea's partner, are you not?"
Kay gave him a look that made even Jay wince, and nodded once. His Highness, undaunted, carried on. "I wish to express my admiration and gratitude for her heroic actions in saving my life."
Elle put a hand on the Prince's arm. "Your Highness, perhaps now is not the most, um, opportune time," she said, as Kay slowly dropped his cigarette end and crushed it under his heel. The Prince, who apparently had the same instinct for self-preservation as a disabled gnat in a blowtorch flame, took a step closer to Kay and brushed his long feathery black hair out of his face, looking into the human's eyes with an expression of innocent sympathy on his face.
"Agent.....Kay, isn't it?.....you should be proud of your partner."
The look on Kay's face made both agents back away a bit. He lit another cigarette."Yes," he said. "I am. I am also grateful to you, Your Highness, for your quick thinking."
Elle felt herself go white; the words, while perfectly courteous, were so slick with venom it was as if Kay had used the foullest language he knew. Her face felt hot. "Your Highness, please come with us," she heard herself say. "We still need to ask you some questions."
The Transylvanian's red eyes didn't leave Kay's face as he murmured "Of course. Forgive me," and let himself be led away. Kay remained where he was, leaning against the wall, impassive, but the cigarette end he dropped to the floor was bitten almost in half.
Hours later the duty surgeon came and found him in the canteen, alone except for the overflowing ashtray and the coffee cup beside him. Word traveled quickly in the agency; it was already known that Sea had been hurt in the attack on Prince Radu's life and that Kay was a trifle concerned about his partner, and everyone had carefully left him the hell alone. Kay was a founding father in the MIB and deserved respect purely because of his long history of excellent work, but he was also not a man who dealt well with emotionally trying situations, and nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of an emotionally tried Kay Look. Zed was the only one who'd spoken to him since he'd finally moved from the medical bay doors, and that only to tell him that the doctors said she would be all right.
Now, the duty surgeon approached him with considerable diffidence. Kay looked up, his eyes unreadable, as the man drew close. "Well?" he demanded.
"She's going to be fine," the surgeon said. "The shot went clean through, didn't even break her arm. We had to do a bit of careful vascular repair, but there's no major damage, and it'll heal cleanly."
Kay's impassive look cracked a bit round the edges. "Let me see her."
The surgeon only hesitated very briefly. Protocol insisted that post-surgical patients weren't allowed visitors for twenty-four hours, but there was in fact very little he could do to stop Kay if he chose to ignore this rule. "Follow me."
She had come to in a world of white—white ceiling, glowing roundels of whiter white, pale curtains all around her, a white smell of antiseptic and plastic in the air. There was no pain; rather, her head was full of a thick fuzzy cotton-wool feeling that meant she was heavily drugged against the pain, and her left shoulder and arm were stiffly held in place with yards and yards of bandage. She wiggled her fingers and was glad to know that she still seemed to have all ten of them.
Reaching out with a mind that felt bruised and shaken, she reassured herself that she was back home in headquarters; the building had a strange kind of mental signature that she'd vaguely attributed to the constant working of so many different types of mind so close together, which was immediately recognizable. I wonder who got me out, she thought. Wonder if they shot him? Serve him bloody right for delaying me so long..........giving them a chance to start the attack......
But of course it wasn't fair to blame the Transylvanian. It had been her error that had gotten her shot; her failure to anticipate, to notice the danger before it was too late. It was all her own damn fault, and if Prince Radu was dead, that was her fault as well. What the hell am I gonna do? If I let a visiting royal get assassinated right in front of me when I was specifically sent in to protect him..........
She let the thought go and drifted, wearily, aware of the shock chemicals still sluggish in her bloodstream.
Some time later she came out of the whiteness again to find her head splitting in agony and her shoulder beginning to join in with glee. It wasn't all physical pain, though. She looked up, aware of what she'd see before she could blink away the drifting whiteness. "Hello," she croaked. "Did he get away?"
The duty surgeon tactfully withdrew. Kay fell into the plastic egg chair beside her bed and took her good hand in his, hard enough to hurt. "Sea," he said roughly, just as he had before she'd minced into the hotel in the first place. "Sea. Oh God."
She realized that a lot of her headache was because of him; his mind felt like a thunderstorm, swirling and shot with anger and fear. "It's all right," she said inadequately. "They fixed me. I'm okay now."
He didn't say anything, merely held her hand in both of his. She could feel him fighting for control, and as gently as she could she reached out with a clumsy tendril of energy and sent him a pulse of comfort and strength. He gasped, and looked up from her hand, and met her eyes. "Kay," she said tiredly. "It's really all right. I just screwed up and let my guard down."
"I thought......." he began, staring at her as if he couldn't quite believe she was there. "I thought you were dead, you idiot, you were just lying there covered in blood and that Radu individual was waving a Carbonizer around and trying to look like Rambo and not answering me and....."
She couldn't help smiling a bit at the thought of the Prince with a gun in his hands, especially a nasty-looking bit of hardware like a reverberating carbonizer with mutate capacity. "What.......happened? I remember grabbing the Prince and making for the exit—and I only realized too late that someone was around the corner.....I think I managed to knock the Prince out of the way before they fired...."
Kay swallowed hard. "Yes," he said. "You took a .45 slug through your shoulder. As far as I can make out, your friend the Prince had enough presence of mind to grab the Carbonizer and fire at your assailant, who managed to escape, dropping his weapon. I.....came on the scene a few seconds later."
"Oh, God," she said. "You thought............you didn't think Radu shot me, did you?"
"No," he said, and she was absurdly pleased to hear the edge of irritation in his voice, "of course I didn't, I can tell the difference between a Terran gunshot wound and the kind of wholesale destruction you get with a Carbonizer blast. But....you have to understand you looked dead.......you were so white and there was so much blood......." He trailed off, rather white himself.
"Must've hit the brachial artery," she murmured thoughtfully. "No tendons cut?"
Kay made a little wordless noise. "Would you stop being so goddamn clinical! I have been scared out of my fucking mind for the past five hours, Sea. I thought you were going to die. I thought I was going to lose you, too. When you went into that goddamn hotel dressed up like the Queen of the Damned I....was about to tell you that I..."
"........love you, Kay," she said dizzily, looking up at him. The whiteness was coming back in waves. "Did anyone ever tell you you're really handsome when you're mad?" she inquired.
Kay had more self-control than most human males, but there are limits. He reached down and took her head firmly between his hands. "Shut up," he told her, and kissed her savagely. The rhythmic beeping of the ECG monitor jerked and sped up. Slowly her good hand crept up to the back of his neck, pulling him firmly toward her. He reached out, without pausing in his task, and clicked off the monitors one by one.
(stay tuned for more)