Hunting Shadows
By
Fade
Chapter 11
The team had managed to get away from both the squatters who had been closing in on them, and the gang's mages. The latter had been much more difficult than the former. Shadow had attacked the closest group of squatters with such ferocity that they had pulled back despite their superior numbers. That combined with the sparing use of area stun spells had been sufficient to clear a way for the runners to flee the area.
The team was a good six blocks from the cardboard and garbage village before Silk had realized that despite his ferocity, Shadow hadn't actually killed anyone. As reassuring as that was, Silk had been pulled away from contemplating the evidence that her other friend hadn't gone off the deep end as well, when Mercury had pointed out that they still had a number of mages tailing them.
Silk still wasn't sure where the gang had acquired so many mages, but even despite the losses that the gang's magical muscle must have taken when the team tried to storm their HQ, the Night Feeders had still been able to send no less than four mages after the team.
Silk had almost panicked when she realized that the astral tails could follow them wherever they went, and bring in a mundane hit whenever the four of them stopped for rest. Luckily, Mercury had been running the shadows for long enough to have the resources to deal with the unexpected threat.
A couple of calls had let the shorter elf recruit another pair of mages who ran the shadows. Mercury had arranged for the other two mages to be waiting at the corner of Whiting and Ford, and told them to come loaded for bear.
Once the team reached the meeting spot, Silk and Mercury had collapsed next to their friends in the taxi, and hurled themselves into astral space. The first few seconds had been especially tense. The four gang mages had hit the two women pretty hard before Mercury's friends had made it into the fray.
Silk had expected the opposition to break off once they realized that they were going to be in for a heavy fight, but the elf turned out to be quite wrong. The other four mages had instead entered the fight with much more relish than any of the runners had expected.
The way that the gangers glowed in astral space was a pretty good indication that they had nearly as much mojo to burn as Mercury did, and they each had at least one or two elementals on retainer which they threw into the battle.
Luckily for all their power, and assorted magical assets (at least one of the mages was wielding a pretty heavy-duty power focus), the other mages seemed to be a little shy on actual combat experience.
The way that the gangers reacted once the duel started reminded Silk very much of the kinds of things that she would have done if Mercury hadn't been priming her for the mile before the fight had gone down.
The inexperience of Mercury's opponents was only made more obvious by the cool competence with which the dark-haired elf had handled herself. Whipping out a brightly glowing weapon focus, that Silk hadn't realized that the other mage possessed, Mercury rapidly took one opponent down, while shielding herself from a number of fairly powerful spells that probably would have turned Silk into a astral cinder.
The tiny elf had then proceeded to face off with the apparent leader of the enemy mages, a black-skinned man with red eyes, and demonic horns, and fight him to a standstill. Silk and the other two runners had ganged up on the two remaining mages, wounding one and driving the pair of them away.
The ebony demon had managed to stun Mercury, buying himself time to escape before Silk and the other two mages had been able to turn on him. After thanking Mercury's friends, and promising them a pretty hefty payment once they got somewhere that they could wire it to the other’s accounts, Mercury and Silk had raced to the spot where they had arranged to meet Shadow with their bodies.
The very tired trio of runners had all but dragged Hammer for three hours as they used every trick they knew to make sure that they wouldn't be followed by mundane means now that they had driven off their magical tails.
When the four runners had finally reached the hotel where Silk and the rest of the team had been staying, everyone had collapsed as soon as Mercury had set some watchers to wake them up if anyone came looking for them.
The next day, after helping Silk throw up a couple of temporary wards, Mercury left, promising to come and help if Silk and Shadow needed her. "After all," the mage had said with a wry grin. "I'm no doubt on the hit list too, so I'd better help if it turns out that they are going to keep pushing the issue."
Silk and Shadow had spent the day recuperating. The mage had taken enough drain that she wouldn't feel like herself for a day or so, and Shadow had been injured badly enough, that it was going to take a day or two for him to recover the mass and energy that he had lost.
By noon though, Hammer still hadn't come out of his room, and Silk was even more worried than she had been the night before. The mage had hoped that if the troll got a good night's sleep, that he would be more or less back to his old self in the morning. When she finally kept Shadow awake long enough to check on Hammer, she found that she couldn't have been more wrong.
When the pair of runners opened the door to Hammer's room, they found him curled up on the floor, slowly rocking back and forth. Silk tried a couple of times to get the troll to talk to her, but finally gave up and let Shadow pull her out of the room.
The shape shifter had shrugged as he went back to bed. "He'll be ok in a couple of days."
The next day Silk found herself sitting outside Hammer's door, debating how to handle the situation. As far as the mage knew, Hammer hadn't left his room at all during the last forty-eight hours, and she somehow knew that Hammer wasn't just going to wake up one day and be ok.
Silk finally took a couple of deep breaths, and knocked on the door. There wasn't any response, so the mage gently slide the door open. Hammer was still on the floor, not surprising, since the bed wouldn't hold his weight, but he wasn't rocking back and forth anymore. For a second Silk let herself hope that the big troll had finally lapsed into a peaceful sleep, but then she saw the needles.
There were just three of them, but two of them were empty, and there was enough other paraphernalia around, that Silk had no doubt but that the troll was shooting up.
***
Shiver sat silently in the apartment that he'd rented for the month. The elf had been sure that killing the teammates who had tried to sell him out to the gang would stop any future teammates from trying anything similar.
In all actuality, Shiver was still sure that nobody would try that again, but he didn't have any proof because since the word had gotten out that he'd gunned down the other runners, nobody else had been willing to work with him on any other runs. As a grizzled razor had put it, even those runners that had no intention of fragging the elf over didn't want to be part of a team with him because there was a fairly decent chance that someone else on the team would try something stupid, which would result in Shiver coming after them all.
The elf had figured that he could run solo, but he was finding out that there were relatively few runs where you didn’t need at least some backup.
Between the payment for Shiver's last run, and the gear that he had looted from the teammates who he had killed, the elf didn't need to go on any runs for the next little while, but he felt restless.
The runner finally shrugged and pulled on an armored duster as he stood and walked over to the door.
Shiver was a couple of blocks from his apartment when he felt a curious tingling between his shoulder blades. The sensation was so strong, and came so unexpectedly that the elf nearly tripped again. Without thinking, Shiver threw himself to the right as a large caliber bullet tore through the spot where his head had been a split second before.
Ducking into an alley, Shiver realized that he had somehow known the shot was coming, even before the sniper had pulled the trigger. The elf heard the sound of feet following him, and filed the thought away for latter consideration as he sprinted down the alley in an effort to outrun whoever was so determined to kill him.
The sensation came back, and Shiver threw himself forward into a roll as the pavement behind him exploded in a wall of fire. Realizing that the gangers had brought along at least one mage this time, Shiver cursed softly as he came out of his roll and ran towards the only door in the alley that didn't look like it was made of metal.
The fact that the mage could hit the gillette with spells as long as Shiver was in his line of sight meant that the elf needed to get inside while the spell slinger was still seeing stars from his last spell.
Shiver spun, concentrating all the force he could generate into a blow that blew the sturdy door right off of its hinges. As the elf was stepping through the door, the mage got another spell off, and the channeled mana hit Shiver with enough force that he staggered, and fell through the door.
Trying to shake his head clear, Shiver realized that his nose was bleeding, and that bruisers were forming on every visible inch of skin. Looking up, the elf realized that the footsteps had almost caught up with him, so he scrambled to the side so that he wasn't directly in front of the door.
Noticing that his primary pistol had gone skittering away when he fell, Shiver drew his backup firearm, and aimed chest high where he expected the first pursuer to appear.
The ganger came charging through the door, and was shot twice before he even realized that the elf hadn't kept running. The second pair of feet stopped well short of the door however, and Shiver heard someone yelling for a barrier spell. The elf's stunned mind managed to work out the fact that he was in trouble as the feet started moving again, and a hulking male human stepped around the door, and opened up with a pair of Savate Guardians.
Shiver got a shot off as he tried to dodge out of the way of the bullets flying towards him, but the bullet whined as it ricocheted off of the barrier that the unseen mage was maintaining. Not fortunate enough to have the same kind of protection, Shiver dimly felt a pair of rounds tear into him. Fragging pain editor is the best piece of 'ware I had put in me, though the elf as he continued to dodge move away from the shooter.
The ganger had an incredible advantage right now, and now that the mage had cast the spell, he didn't have to be able to see the recipient to maintain it. The ganger fired off another pair of bursts, and Shiver reversed directions faster than the human would have believed anything could move. In the time it took the guardian to cycle new rounds in to replace the ones that were just fired, Shiver closed with his opponent, and opened him from crotch to neck with his hand razors, cutting through three arteries in the process.
As the ganger fell to the ground in a shower of blood, Shiver reversed direction again, and ran unsteadily out of the inventory receiving area, and through the showroom of the furniture building.
The elf made it out of the building just in time to see a Lonestar squad car pull up. The policemen saw the bloodied elf running towards them, and sprung out of the car with their guns drawn and pointed back inside the building where Shiver had just come from. The closest officer, a slightly overweight caucasian male yelled for Shiver to stop, but the elf knew exactly what they were thinking. The razor's clothing marked him as someone with money, and combined with the fact that he was bloody and running away from something indicated that he was one of the innocents that they were hired to protect.
Shiver maintained his panicked appearance until he was even with the first officer, and then he smoothly killed the human with his razors, while his right hand pulled a pistol back out. Before the second officer could do more than begin to turn, Shiver had shot him twice, and continued on his way, secure in the fact that the mage who had made his life so difficult for the last few minutes was about to have a hard time getting away from the twenty or thirty cops that were about to descend on the area. At least you can count on them to always swarm an area if one of their own goes down.
***
Shadow had initially been unconcerned by Silk's revelation that Hammer was shooting up with Acid. Silk had proceeded, with some furious gum chewing and bubble blowing, to explain just exactly how much trouble Hammer was getting himself into, and in the end a fairly cowed Shadow had agreed that the matter was much more serious than the shape shifter had initially thought.
Silk and Shadow had searched Hammer's room while he was lost in a drug induced coma. Consequently they knew that he had used his last dose earlier that day, which meant that if the troll wanted to stay high, he was going to have to go out on a shopping trip once he came back down. Silk spent the day reinforcing the wards around the hotel suite, while an increasingly-worried Shadow spent the time in meditation, and unarmed combat practice..
After watching Shadow for a few hours while she was working on the wards that Mercury had left, Silk started to understand his initial reaction to the news that Hammer had started shooting up. The shape shifter, for all of his time in Seattle really had very little experience with people.
The were-tiger still though very much in terms of absolutes, and direct action. That was why Shadow had been so bothered by being forced to kill so many people earlier. The physad hadn't had direct proof that the racists were bad, he had simply viewed it as a case of them trying to protect their 'range'. Consequently, Shadow had been forced in a large part to take the word of the rest of the team that the killing that they were doing was justified, that in a sense it was right, or good.
The fact that Shadow hadn't been able to take some kind of direct action had been a large part of what had been tearing him up. Not even knowing for sure which way to jump had just been a kind of demonic icing on the cake.
That had been then. Silk had noticed that Shadow was adapting remarkably well in the last few days to the idea that direct action wasn't usually the way to go in the new world where he found himself. The mage thought is was mostly because he had taken to thinking of it all as the direct action of lying in wait for one's prey to come into one's reach.
Regardless of whether that was really what explained Shadow's change, Silk had noticed something else. The shape shifter seemed to have substituted his excess love for direct action for an equivalent increase in his need to make sure that his actions were right.
Silk knew that Shadow tended to trust very easily, so much so that he had been burned by a number of people over the last few months. For all that Silk like to consider herself to be an honest individual, she knew that she tended to bend the truth pretty drastically when it served her purposes, especially if she could convince herself that doing so was in the best interest of whoever she was lying to.
The problem came in the fact that Shadow was observant enough to know that. Consequently, he didn't feel like he could really trust her on the important things, the black and white things that he knew she would tend to view in shades of grey.
This had all led the shape shifter to look elsewhere for his moral guide, a guide that he seemed to have found in Hammer. During the last couple of weeks, except for the couple of times that Shadow had been too mad to be thinking rationally, Silk had almost been able to see the gears turn in his head as he measured each action against what he thought Hammer would do.
Silk had been in favor of the change, she hadn't ever met anyone more dedicated to his values than the troll. Shadow had put Hammer on a pedestal, which was part of the reason he had been so sure that Hammer would bounce back from whatever was bothering him. Now however, Shadow seemed to be suffering a crisis of consciences as bad as the one that he had gone through after the team had taken out the racist organization. In all honest, Silk couldn't blame Shadow for feeling like he didn't have anyone he could trust.
All of which meant that there was even more riding on what Hammer was going to say when Silk and Shadow confronted him than there normally would be.
A stirring from inside Hammer's room brought Silk back to the present, and Shadow over from where he had been sitting. Silk heard herself gasp slightly as Hammer opened the door, but she was so shocked by how badly the troll looked that she didn't even care that she was gaping.
Hammer's eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was incredibly pale for someone of his coloring. Silk had seen more than her fair share of excess growing up, and Hammer wasn't the first person she had seen after they finished up with a two-day drug binge, but he looked far worse than the others. As the troll unsteadily made his way across the threadbare carpet, Silk realized just how badly the events of the last week or so had been taking their toll on her friend.
"It wont help," stated the mage hugging herself. "You'll just keep going back for one more dose, and the next thing you know, you'll be out on the streets, and dead shortly after that. It is too obvious that you have mods-someone will decide that they can make some quick money by selling your corpse for parts, and by that time, you'll be so far gone that you won't be able to do anything to stop them."
Hammer stopped for a second, seeming to be having a hard time understanding what Silk was saying. Once the troll stopped moving, he started swaying very badly, so he walked over to a chair and sat down, only to have it splinter under his weight.
Not bothering to get up from where he had fallen, Hammer wrinkled his massive forehead in confusion. "What the drek are you talking about?"
Silk still had her arms wrapped around herself, she knew the situation probably called for a more aggressive posture and she hated herself for her inability to do anything else but huddle in her chair like a little girl.
Hammer seemed to take the mage's silence as evidence that she indeed didn't have a clue what she was talking about. The troll snorted, and then started the arduous process of getting to his feet, while still so doped up that it was all he could do to sit up straight. "Stupid slitch keeb. Never didn't know anything worth knowing. Stupid as fragging trying to take one off of the street and teach it drek."
Silk felt her cheeks flush with anger, and she opened her mouth to give Hammer a piece of her mind, when Shadow stood up with a jerky suddenness that was extremely atypical for the shape shifter.
The physad walked over to Hammer, and stood in his way. Silk expected Shadow to give Hammer pause, but the troll reached back and backhanded the shape shifter into the wall. Silk had a split second to wonder if the fact that Hammer was drugged was somehow throwing off Shadow’s combat sense, and then the physad was bouncing back to his feet with murder in his eyes.
_____
The fog seemed to take on a life of it's own as the sun set. Sounds, even from a few feet away became so muffled that the few pedestrians still outside had a hard time convincing themselves that they weren't alone, the sole survivors in an abandoned city.
Peter wasn't worried about the weather outside. The little fixer had turned on the security measures that helped secure his office, and then sat down to figure out where he stood financially.
Things still weren't looking too good. When the yak boss hadn't paid like had been expected, Peter had taken a pretty big loss. Things had been doable still until Hammer had started wanting the money that he had on deposit with the fixer.
Peter had met people like Hammer before, and although a part of him had to respect the troll for sticking to such a demanding belief system, the troll had set himself up to get raped when things went south. Under normal circumstances, the fixer would have honored his commitments to the runners, but he really didn't have a choice this time.
To finance the massive operation that had rescued the little brat, Peter had been forced to take out some very high interest loans from some disreputable individuals. If the fixer hadn't been able to make some sizable down payments, he would probably have been dead by now.
The fact that the fixer had all that money sitting there in Hammer's name, had been too much of a temptation. After all, if Peter was killed, the runners wouldn't get their money anyway.
When the troll started putting the pressure on him to pay up, Peter had decided to pass certain tidbits of information to the gang that had been looking for Shadow. If word of what Peter was doing made it out to the street, the fixer was finished, but the fixer was relying on the gang to finish off the runners before that became an issue.
Managing to pull Shiver out of the fold as it were, was a master stroke. The elf was amazing, with him on tap, Peter figured that he could offer clients completions on jobs that most other people couldn't even dream of completing. When all was said and done, Peter figured that Shiver would bring in more revenue than his whole team would have due to the fact that the elf wasn't picky about the kinds of jobs he accepted.
Unfortunately, right now the elf wasn't generating squat. First he had gone off and killed an entire team of runners because one of them had tried to sell him out to those gangers. That of course had meant that none of Peter's other runners would work with him. As if that wasn't enough, the gangers had been getting closer and closer to taking the elf out.
At this point Peter figured his best chance was to figure out where Hammer and crew were, and then approach the gangers with the information in return for a promise from them to leave Shiver alone. Once the gang was out of the picture, there was a chance that some of the fixer's more pragmatic runners could be convinced to work with the elf, and Peter could get back to the business of raking in money from his percentage on the runs Shiver completed.
Peter was so involved in trying to figure out where Hammer was likely to have taken what was left of his 'family', that the fixer never noticed the stocky, dark figure that had silently removed the grate from the ventilation system above the Azetlander's head.
The shadowrunner dropped from the ceiling, cuing Peter into the fact that he was there. The fixer screamed for his bodyguards as the figure brought up a pair of pistols with incredible speed. As Pit Bull threw the door to Peter's office open, on of the pistols went off sending a pair of darts into the ork's chest.
The second pistol went off hitting Peter's mage Jo-Juice in the neck with both darts as a sudden crackle signaled the passage of 50,000 volts along the almost invisible wire that had trailed the dart in its flight to Pit Bull's chest. The ork collapsed to the ground a split second before the mage, whose eyes had started to roll back into his head before the taser had even discharged.
The apparent street samurai then spun on Peter, jumping the fixer's desk, and throwing him into a wall before the other could finish pulling a pistol out of his desk drawer.
When Peter's head hit the spartan sheet rock of his office wall, he almost blacked out, so it took a few seconds for what the runner was saying to register.
"...didn't you? You piece of drek. I told Al'nir that you couldn't be trusted, but he said that you had proved yourself."
Peter realized that he was hanging in the air, suspended by a hand that was slowly tightening on his throat.
"I've been watching you for the last two months. You over-reported your expenses for that extraction we had you set up for that shape shifter. You're contributions to the organization have been much less than you promised, you haven't even hit three percent of your earnings much less ten."
"The master wasn't willing to act on the first, and the second wouldn't have made him do anything either, but you really screwed up when you did whatever it was you did that caused the mage and the shape shifter to disappear."
Peter groaned in pain as both hands went to his captor's arm in an effort to somehow pry the iron grip from his throat. The fixer kicked out at the gillette, but the other avoided the attack with contemptuous ease.
The runner pulled his baclava off, and Peter saw death in the eyes of the human that looked up at him. "You can talk, or I can kill you."
The fixer managed to nod, and was rewarded by being let down. "It wasn't really my fault, they decided to break with me." The runner shook his head and pulled out a wicked looking knife.
"Not good enough, I can tell that you are lying, so now we'll do it the hard way." Before Peter could fully register the meaning of the words he had just heard, the knife plunged forward, burying itself in his gut. The fixer screamed, and started to faint, but the gillette pulled out a stim patch and slapped it on his neck.
The drug cocktail brought Peter back to full awareness, and the little man started to scream again before the look in his captor's eyes convinced him that he'd better suffer in as much silence as he was able.
Gasping a little from pain Peter decided to come clean before killed him. When the fixer finished telling his story, the runner nodded.
Style pulled Peter's phone off of his wrist and tossed it from side to side. "This will be by your front door. It should only take you a few minutes to get to it even in your present state. I'd call for some medical help if I were you."
_____
Silk rubbed burning eyes, and listened to Hammer whimper in the next room. The mage had given up trying to sleep quite a while ago, but she was running on nothing but fumes and she knew it.
After Hammer had shoved Shadow out of the way Silk had decided that she had seen enough. The mage hit Hammer with her most powerful stun spell, and the troll had collapsed in a boneless heap before Shadow could act on the rage he had so obviously been feeling. The shape shifter had been surprised by Silk’s actions, but had agreed that they needed to do something to stop Hammer from going back out and getting another set of doses, and that Shadow’s intended method would have resulted in harder feelings between him and the troll in the long run.
Silk had been a little unsure how to immobilize Hammer now that he was unconscious, but Shadow had hardly batted an eye, walking to his room and coming out with five rolls of duct tape. "Hammer said it was one of the most useful things ever invented," the shape shifter had explained as he started wrapping Hammer in layer upon layer of tape.
Hammer had come to an hour later and been furious. The troll had struggled for forty-five minutes straight, trying to no avail to break free, and then had simply curled up on the floor and refused to talk to anyone.
Silk had hoped that Hammer's furry meant that he was at least done with being apathetic, but had quickly realized that nothing had really changed.
The next day the troll had started going through the physical symptoms of withdrawal. Shadow had rechecked Hammer's bindings, and then gone back to sleep with a shrug. Silk on the other hand hadn't been able to sleep for ever since Hammer had started shaking.
Drugs had come quite a ways since people had licked toads to bring on hallucinations. Acid, which bore no relation to the LSD of the 60's, could bring about addiction in a matter of days. As bad as that was, the chemists who created it hadn't stopped there. The drug also caused the body to go into withdrawal within a day or two of the last dose, and the normal person had such severe symptoms once that started, that nearly a third of all addicts didn't survive trying to kick their habit.
In all honesty Silk could understand why of lot of people chose to go through life addicted once they started using acid, but she wasn't going to let Hammer take that way out. The troll had too much good he could still do. Not only that, Silk was pretty sure that she and Shadow wouldn't survive the month without his help. There were just too many things they hadn't had a chance to learn about the shadows, and they were already in too deep to survive making any of the normal mistakes that runners usually made on their way up in the business.
Silk's head was just hitting her chest when one of her watchers appeared before her with a pop. "Someone's coming," reported the little spirit in a sing-song voice.
Adrenaline dumped into the mage's system, and she yelled for Shadow as she felt the natural stimulant hit the end of her fingers with a shock.
By the time Shadow made it out of his room, Silk had a pair of air elementals manifesting in the center of the room, and her hands glowed with energies from a spell that was ready to be let fly with a thought.
A part of the mage noticed that Shadow hadn't paused to put on a shirt, but she didn't get to follow that train of thought because someone had started knocking on the door.
Before either of the runners could respond to whoever was on the other side, the door exploded in splinters, leaving Shiver standing in the doorway.
Silk was in the process of mentally ordering her elementals to attack the other elf when she realized that Shiver wasn't moving. Shadow apparently hadn't made the same realization, or he didn't care, because he was still in the midst of drawing his katana, and springing towards Shiver when Silk's hurried command brought him up short.
The mage wasn't sure why she reined Shadow in, but she somehow knew that Shiver hadn't come to fight.
The gillette grinned as he realized that he wasn't going to have to fight the shape shifter. "Good boy. Sit."
Shadow snarled, and for a second Silk though that he was going to attack the elf regardless. "If anyone qualifies as a dog it is you, Shiver," commented the elf much more calmly than she felt. "You must have a reason for being here, get to the point, or we'll just kill you and save ourselves the annoyance of listening to you."
Shiver shot Silk a disparaging glare. "You might find that I'm harder to kill than you think, but you're right, I do have a reason for making a house call. Where is Hammer?"
Silk was about to say something very unladylike, but Shiver chose that moment to step through the door, and the mage found that the obscenities had frozen in her throat. As Shiver entered the room, it felt like the temperature in the room dropped by fifteen degrees. A cold presence seemed to accompany the elf, filling the room, questing for something living to feed on.
The tiny hairs on Silk's neck and arms were all standing on end now, and a furtive glance informed the mage that Shadow was suffering from the same kind of eerie feelings. "What the frag," muttered the mage as she took an involuntary step backwards. "Get out, get out now."
Shiver shook his head slowly, seeming to relish the unease that he was causing in his former teammates, especially Silk, who’d come so close to bringing his defenses down. "Sorry love, I'm not going anywhere until I talk to Hammer."
Silk was about to sick her elementals on the elf, and turn Shadow loose to do what he so obviously wanted to do, but then she heard a faint, but surprisingly firm voice instructing her to bring the elf to it.
Shadow and Shiver both had much keener hearing, and their heads whipped around, Shadow in amazement, and Shiver in a considering confusion.
Shadow looked at the mage as if to ask if they should honor Hammer's request, but the way he backed even further away from Shiver indicated his preference.
Silk jerked her head back towards Hammer even as she backed slowly into the troll's room. Once she was in the room, Silk felt a brief moment of even greater trepidation. Hammer very well might be mad enough about being tied up that he might hurt her while trying to escape.
The moment passed though as Silk looked down and saw the old Hammer looking back at her. The troll was obviously still fighting some inner demons, but he managed a wry smile before Shiver walked into the room.
The cold presence preceded the elf, and Silk saw Hammer stiffen as the troll felt Shiver enter the room. "Well, well," snickered the gillette. "How did this happen?"
"Shut up and get to the point," hissed Silk.
Shiver wagged a finger at Silk, but otherwise ignored her, spending the next few minutes considering Hammer. Suddenly the elf started laughing. "You fragging went back to shooting up didn't you." Shiver shook his head before lashing out with a kick that scored against the troll's shoulder. “The other fossils in the monastery warned me that you had turned to the needle for absolution once before. I just couldn’t believe that the great Hammer was capable of ever doing something like that. Frag but I was stupid, you always seem to fold when the going gets tough. Running to the needle, running away to Seattle.” Bending over slightly the elf seemed to be struggling not to dissolve into laughter.
Silk felt a white-hot rage flow through her, and she summoned energies to lash out at Shiver with a spell, but her reaction was nothing compared to Shadow's. The shape shifter might be very bothered by Hammer's failure to hold to the standards he purported to believe in, but Shiver had already moved himself into that class of people that Shadow had no compunctions about killing.
Shadow's katana slipped through the space separating him from Shiver, aimed precisely at the back of the elf's neck. Silk had seen both men fight often enough that she knew their capabilities fairly well. For all that Shadow was blindingly fast, normally Shiver was even faster. It was hard to avoid what you couldn't see coming though, and the elf had his back to Shadow when the attack was launched, so by all accounts Shiver should have died in that instant.
Defying everything that Silk could have imagined happening, Shiver somehow knew that the blow was coming, and spun standing fully erect so that Shadow's katana took him in the side.
Silk had seen Shadow cut through armor like it wasn't there, so she still expected the elf to come away bleeding. Amazingly, the mage saw the blade cut through the elf's duster, and then bounce off of something else under the visible armor.
Silk was just about as astonished as Shadow appeared to be, but she still managed to get her ram spell off, which threw the elf into a wall. Silk thought that she heard a rib crack, but she couldn't be sure from the way Shiver bounced of the wall, and landed on his feet like a cat.
Shiver extended his hand razors, and laughed as he shook his head. "I told you that I was harder to kill than you thought that I would be. It looks like I don't need to talk to Hammer after all, just the two of you."
Shadow snarled at the elf, shaking in rage. "We don't have anything to talk to you about."
Shiver shrugged, "I'm looking for some help getting rid of those fragging gangers. I'm sure we can come to some kind of agreement towards that end."
Silk found that she was shaking too, and it wasn't all just due to the incredible amount of mana she had crackling through her system. "No deal. We know that we can't trust you. You can get lost, or we'll see just how hard you really are to kill."
"We can always just go Peter's route. I can call these guys up, and sell the three of you out in return for a promise for them to leave me alone."
That gave Silk pause. For some reason, even though she no longer thought of the elf as being anything approaching a friend, she hadn't considered the possibility that he would be able to find them so easily, and would then be willing to sell them out so casually.
"What is stopping you then," asked the mage as she put a new stick of gum in her mouth. "That certainly sounds like the easy way out, and you've always been a big one for looking out for number one."
Shiver's eyes narrowed as the mage's verbal shot got through. "The way I see it, those fraggers aren't likely to honor any promises they make. I figure that I can pretty much count on you bleeding hearts to do what you say you'll do."
Silk skeptically raised an eyebrow as the other elf continued. "I'll even offer some guarantees. You draw a vial of blood, do whatever you need to for it to serve as a ritual link, and give it to someone who will surrender it if I don't kill you. If I do betray you again, they can turn me into a metahuman torch."
***
Mercury walked to her door, and paused for a second. The expensive security suite that she had installed in her apartment was still reading all green, but the mage was well aware that any security system could be beaten by the right set of skills and technology.
Luckily, the mage had managed to steer clear of any enemies that were heavy enough hitters that she should have to worry about them being able to break into her place without leaving any trace to warn her. Of course, these gangers that she'd just tangled with might be a different case entirely, but Mercury had been wearing a helmet during that last run, so they shouldn’t have been able to id her.
Realistically, the gang really shouldn't have any way to link her to Hammer and the rest. Mercury hadn't put anything on the brag boards, they didn't have a visual on her, and she had taken on a different astral appearance than normal.
The mage entered a twelve digit code, and slipped into her luxuriously funished apartment. Mercury threw her armored duster onto a chair, and was halfway into the kitchen when a massive human stepped out of the bedroom.
Mercury brought her hands up in a blur, pulling white hot mana into the shape of a stun spell, but the human was faster. The slim pistol in his hand coughed, and the mage felt a sting in her neck.
Mercury's muscles seemed to have suddenly become disconnected from the rest of her, and she started falling, the energies she had just summoned dissipating unnoticed.
The human winced a little as the mage hit the floor, but he walked slowly over to her seeming to be on a Sunday stroll. "Sorry, couldn't risk you frying me before I'd had a chance to explain that I'm just after a little info."
Mercury's mind was still pulsing and trembling from the effects of whatever he had hit her with, but the gillette's words finally registered as he reached her. Amazingly, they not only registered, they made sense, a curious burning kind of sense that spun around and around inside of her head until they were all the elf could think about.
She believed him of course-most of her did anyway. There was a tiny part of her that didn't think things were quite right, but it was quickly silenced by the rest of her.
The human pulled out a small container, and extracted a curious beige cream which he proceeded to rub on the mage's face and tongue with a gloved hand.
Mercury felt the beginnings of a burning sensation that was made all the more intense by the fact that it was the only thing that she could feel.
The human nodded after a few seconds. "You should find that you have voluntary control of enough muscles to speak if you time your attempt with your involuntary exhalations. Is the shape shifter still alive?"
Mercury realized that she could indeed move her tongue and mouth now, and she was of course eager to answer the man's question. "E is ok, a ittle orn out from ight with angers. E is ith ammer and ilk, en otel."
The gillette carefully pulled his glove off as he listened to the mages's responses to his questions. The answers required clarifications from time to time, and a couple of times he had to stop her so she would breathe normally and not pass out, but within a short time a fairly clear picture of events had taken shape.
It sounded like the big troll wasn't dealing well with something that had happened on the team's latest run, but over all things were about as he had expected.
The gillette let his mind wander a little, secure in the knowledge that the voice recorder in his head was getting the entire conversation.
Suddenly, something the mage said jerked him back to present events.
"Dis orned demon mage. Owerful agger. He liked to use hell blast, about fried me a couple of times before we drove him off."
The human wanted, needed to know more, but the fact that the mage was able to speak clearly meant that he only had about two minutes before she would be able to hit him with a spell.
With a shrug the gillette stood, and ghosted out of the room.
__________
This story is copyrighted by the author. Winterhawk and Gabriel are the property of Rat, used with permission. Rat's stories can be found here. The author grants license to all parties to copy and redistribute this work, as long as it is not used for commercial gain or modified in any way. Additionally, the author must be given credit for his work, and his contact information, [email protected], should be included with any copy of his work. All other rights are reserved.
Shadowrun is a Registered Trademark of WizKids, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used without permission. Any use of WizKid's copyrighted material or trademarks in this file should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks.