Yes, Little Doll, like that—
“I don’t need any help right now, thanks,” I muttered as Phil looked at me one last time before his eyes rolled to unconsciousness. I held my contact with his skin for only a moment more before letting him go, and his body sagged, half-stretched over the desk. I gripped his shirt as I walked around and slid him back into his chair, letting him rest in a sleeping position, head leaned back. “I’ve got this.”
Of course, Little Doll.
I felt the seething at that and knew he was pushing me, trying to make me angry before what was about to happen. “I don’t need your help getting pissed off at these people, Wolfe.”
But the Little Doll works so much better when she is angry. It’s almost like art, and anger is the flavor, the expression. Wolfe’s best works always had some sort of emotion put into them—tragedy, pathos, terror—
“Please don’t recount your greatest hits right now,” I said, and strolled back to the elevator, “unless you want me to go from angry to nauseous.” I pushed the button for the twenty-eighth floor and then hit the elevator’s close button.
Oh, of course. This reminds Wolfe, though, of a time in London, not long before he came to Minneapolis and met the Little Doll—
“Before I killed you, you mean?” I felt a self-satisfied smile creep on my face.
Killed the Wolfe, oh yes, the Little Doll did. But the Wolfe made a glorious show of it before he went, made many, many people go before him, made much art in the days before he went out. There was a little smile in his voice, too, that I could hear in my head. The low sound of the elevator ascending was background noise for the maniac in my head telling me about his finest hour. To go out after a full life of work such as that, well … it is all that Wolfe could have hoped for and more.
The elevator dinged. “And here I thought that Wolfe would have aimed to keep living and keep killing,” I said acidly. “But no, all this time you were just looking for a way to leave a legacy of carnage that will only be dimly remembered given time.”
Little Doll teases, but Wolfe isn’t dead, not so long as the Little Doll remembers him, keeps him safe inside her—
“Ugh,” I said. “Enough.” I unbuttoned my coat and let it fall in the hallway. I pulled the H&K MP5K submachine gun that I wore on a strap across my midsection into my hand. It was the same weapon I had been trained with, and something that I’d pulled from Parks’ basement along with four pistols I had holstered on my hips and under my arms. “Time to kill a faerie.”
I paused outside the door of number 2883 for only as long as it took to check to make sure I had a bullet chambered. A moment later I kicked down the door with a crash and burst through. The smell of something spicy, like peanut noodles, hit me as I threw myself into the room. It was a kitchen and living room, barely lit, and all it took was a quick sweep with my eyes to see that the finely appointed but sparsely furnished space was empty. Bookshelves lined the wall to my left. I heard movement beyond a door in the middle of them and I ran for it, sweeping into a bedroom in time to see two figures in motion coming out of the bed. One was already on her feet, the other was going more slowly at half speed, struggling to get free of the sheets. I smiled predatorily as I raised my weapon at the target on the left side of the bed.
Eve Kappler was standing there, naked, her chiseled muscles and flawless skin making her look positively statuesque as she threw a hand up at me. I pulled the trigger and felt a three-shot burst echo through the room and lit the entire place in a flash of the muzzle. By the light of the flashes I saw the bullets impact, and her flat belly distended as the first shot hit her on the left side, the second in her ribcage under her left breast and the third presumably missed. The muzzle flash went off again as her net of light energy caught me, pulling my gun up and against my chest, causing me to pull the trigger again. Another three-shot burst went off, this time stitching the ceiling and walls as the net carried me back and slammed my back into the counter as the web knitted itself to the first surface it came across, the island in the center of the kitchen.
I felt my ribs break in my lower back as I hit, and the jolt caused me to fire again, the bullets shredding the light-based filaments of the net and forcing the barrel to poke out of where it had torn through the web that had me restrained. I tried to ignore the searing pain in my back; I was bent at an almost L-shaped angle backward, my lower torso and abdomen cemented to the kitchen island, the granite countertop anchoring part of my upper body where the net had caught me from just below the collarbone all the way to mid-thigh. I strained and felt it give at the weak point where the gun barrel had slid through, so I tried to force my weapon into the tear. I felt it rip a little at a time there but give very little on the hold it had around the rest of my body.