“So, you have your boyfriend with you now? I think I’d like the two of you to come onto the plane. I have a pilot who can fly us out of here.”
He thought Duke was my boyfriend, and Brain was a hired hand. That would keep Brain a little safer, at least. I analyzed my options, and talked to him a little to buy myself some time to come up with a plan. “You think I’m just going to walk right onto the plane?”
“You know what I can do to a human body. How long do you think this geek is going to last under my tender ministrations before he tells me where you live, and the names you use? You’ll have to start all over again, rebuild your life from scratch in a new city. It’s just me and one guard, plus a scraggly pilot. Surely you can take us? The big, bad, Ice?”
He said my name as if I’d been on his mind, annoying him, for years. Maybe I had.
“You’ll let Bob go if I come on board?”
“No, but I’ll offer him a job with my organization. Seems he has some skills I can use.”
“I’m nearly thirty minutes away.” We were five minutes away, but needed time to plan.
“I’m gonna let my guy punch him in the stomach every five minutes. You remember what that’s like?”
“We’ll drive as fast as the traffic lets us.”
I hung up and Ranger said, “You are not walking in there.”
I looked at Duke, who held my gaze a few seconds and turned to Ranger. “Brain’s my brother, I won’t leave him with the Russians. I’ll go in with Harmony, figure out why Brain hasn’t shifted and killed them all, fix the problem, and then the two of us can take them out together. Harmony has her own skills, and she’s still wearing the vest. You can come later and help, if we need it.”
Ranger shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it,” I told him. “You just have to back us up. I’m not leaving Brain to them.”
As it turned out, we didn’t need long to plan, and fifteen minutes later Duke had put his face back to the one he used in the bank, and we walked into the airplane hangar together.
They had a man at the foot of the stairs on lookout, and he waved us in. I didn’t like having him outside, at my back, but nothing I could do about it, so I dealt with it.
They had Brain’s hands duct taped behind his back, his feet taped to the chair. They also had six guys, and the inside of the plane was pretty much trashed. He’d put up a good fight, but he had several deep slashes on his arms where they’d gotten him with a knife.
I glanced at him as if he didn’t really matter, and then focused on Ivankov. “I’m here. Now what.”
“Take your clothes off.” His sneer was just as disgusting as my memory of it. Ignoring the fact it was straight out of my nightmares, I took a few steps towards him, acted like I was going to play the temptress as I took my pants off, and grabbed my home made taser and shot it at him. I fired at his shoulder, in case he was wearing a vest, and hit him dead center, so he jerked and writhed on his way to the floor. I yanked the wires loose from the taser and crammed it back in my pocket as I pulled my knife and put my back to a row of seats and faced the other five guys. Duke took two of them out with no trouble, and I engaged the one closest to me.
I needed to get to Brain and cut the tape on his wrists, so he could shift and heal. Duke was already mostly in his beast form, and two guys ran out of the airplane, but I knew Ranger would take care of them. I fought my guy nearly a minute before Duke swiped the asshole’s face and took him to the ground, and I rushed to Brain, cut his wrists loose, and then his ankles.
“Shift,” I told him. “Ivankov’s mine, but everyone has to die. They’ve seen Duke, I know the rules.”
They were going to die, anyway, but it was nice the decision was out of my hands.
I was on my way back to Ivankov when one of the guys managed to get a knife in my leg, through the thigh muscle until it hit and then scraped across bone. I fell to my knees, and used my knife — already in my right hand — to stab him in the thigh as well, since it was right in front of me. I sliced through his femoral, and deep red heart-blood came out in spurts as I pulled my knife from the wound. On his way down, I buried my knife in his gut, and cut him worse as a yanked it back out. Brain swiped him from behind and knocked him most of the way across the airplane.
“I’m good for now,” I told Brain. “Take the rest of them out, but Ivankov’s mine.”
A quick inventory of the anatomy around my wound told me it hadn’t likely hit a major artery. He’d angled in from the side enough, he was inches from the femoral. I couldn’t be certain he hadn’t hit one of the perforating arteries, but my instincts told me he hadn’t. I pressed the dull side of the knife into my flesh so I wouldn’t cut myself worse when I pulled the knife from my thigh, and I gave a short scream as it came out. I kept it in my left hand as I knee-walked four steps and landed on my butt beside Ivankov. His eyes were open, and he was aware, but didn’t have full control of his body, yet.