In one mighty lunge, he upset the balance of the guy’s hold, and they were grappling again. He’d seen it, the sonuvabitch. He knew. A flash of the truth had been in the man’s eyes, and Creed was going to kill him. The betrayal was an abomination.

J.T.

My God, he’d died a thousand deaths in his heart, endured a thousand nights of shame for not being able to save his partner, his friend, and J.T. was here.

Creed was going to kill him.

His rage was boundless, like the opening of a floodgate.

And in an instant it didn’t matter. The guy landed one blow, and Creed’s lights went out in a burst of agony.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Something terrible was happening to the Asian woman, something besides her being consumed by an ever-growing madness. When she’d dragged the dead German out of the bottom of the boat and hauled him up onto the shore, and then kept going, Suzi had seized her chance, using her feet to pull the dead captain closer-but she couldn’t get him close enough to grab his gun, not while she was cuffed to a piece of metal bolted into the boat. Dammit.

She was going to die here.

The woman made another trip with the Sphinx before coming back for Suzi, and the minute she undid the cuff from the boat, Suzi lashed out, pushing hard against her chest and sweeping her leg out to kick the woman’s legs out from under her-and it worked, just the way it worked in training, when she was exhausted and Superman kept pushing her harder and harder, being mean, being tough, roughing her up.

When the woman went down, Suzi kicked her hard and made her escape, leaping over the side of the boat and letting herself sink under the dark water.

Freedom.

She stroked for the bottom, trying to become as invisible as possible, but didn’t get far before a hand buried itself in her hair and dragged her back up to the surface. For a second, Suzi thought she could fight the woman off, but in the next passing second she realized the Asian woman wasn’t just strong-she was very strong. Stronger even than Superman.

There was no hope, no chance. The woman had her under control, her hands cuffed back together, and was hauling her up onto the shore in less than half a minute, dragging her up through the grass like a half-drowned rat.

Suzi spluttered and choked, and for good measure, the woman hit her in the face before dropping her next to Erich Warner.

Damn. Suzi didn’t even care that he was dead. Dead people were not the ones beating the crap out of her. She was never going to be afraid of another dead person, not ever.

A cramp hit her, and she wrapped her arm tight around her middle and threw up on the ground, a whole stomachful of river water.

Geezus. She was probably going to die from that.

But then she thought no, not really. She was going to die bleeding out for Erich Warner and the Memphis Sphinx-unless she could figure out a way to kill this bitch with the knives.

She threw up again, and used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth, and then she launched herself at the Asian woman, right over the top of Erich Warner’s dead body, her hands going for the woman’s throat. If she could just get a grip-but the woman knocked her away, and the blow left her stunned.

For a moment, she lay there, trying to catch her breath, trying to clear her head so she could think, but all she could think was that she didn’t want to die-not now, not in this place, and not by this woman’s hands.

Dax gunned the twin Mercs on Farrel’s go-fast boat, going even faster, driving the thing in curving arcs up the winding Tambo River. He didn’t know where Suzi was. He only knew the worst place for her to be, and that was with Shoko, and Shoko had gone up the river, undoubtedly not very far-unless she’d already gotten what she needed. So the farther he went, the surer he was that the Blade Queen of Bangkok had gotten the Sphinx, and probably Suzi, too. Both those things had been promised to him by Conroy Farrel, and both of those things had been missing from the house.

Shoko had a use for Suzi. He wasn’t kidding himself about that. Warner was dead. The Blade Queen was either going to try for immortality for herself, which would only make sense, or she was going to try for magic trick number two, which was resurrecting the dead.

Dax had a feeling that for whatever reasons, and she probably had more than one, Shoko was going to go for magic trick number two, which required copious amounts of fresh blood.

And he had to wonder, really, who in the hell dreamed this stupid shit up? Like life wasn’t complicated and mysterious enough without that crap.

Geezus. His life was plenty complicated, and if a guy wanted mystery, well, hell, that’s why God created women. All the mystery a guy ever needed was wrapped up in a soft mouth and a racetrack’s worth of curves.

He throttled down for a tight turn up ahead, pointing the bow and letting the back end of the boat slide in behind before he gunned it again.

Two more winding turns in the river later, he saw the gunboat, and it was empty. Twin Mercs didn’t leave any chance for a silent approach, but that hadn’t been his plan. He wanted Shoko to know he’d found her. He wanted her attention on him as quickly as possible. He wanted her to be faced off with him, not Suzi-and sweet geezus, he wasn’t a second too soon. There was movement in the grassy field, low and to the ground, and the furtiveness of it just about stopped his heart.

“Shoko!” he called out. His next move was to pull the rock-crystal eye out of his pocket and hold it high in the air. “Shoko!”

He didn’t tie off the boat; he ran the bow up close to the shore and kept the engines running.

“Shoko!”

In the fading light, he saw more movement, bodies moving, but he couldn’t tell which was Shoko and which was Suzi-and he was praying one of the moving bodies was Suzi. There was a small mound in the field that looked like a nonmoving body, like a dead guy-and that would most likely be Erich Warner.

Except that was Shoko up there, and knowing her, she could have killed half a dozen people by now.

“I have the eye!” he shouted.

All movement stopped, and he hoped to God that he had her attention.

“You’re running out of time, Shoko. If you want the eye, you need to give me the woman now!” He was still shouting, making himself very clear. “If you shoot me, the eye goes over the side.” He had very deliberately moved his hand over the river, and was leaning in that direction.

“She’s hurt, Killian. If you want her, you’ll have to come and get her.”

Hurt.

He took a breath, tried to slow the racing of his heart.

“Show her to me, Shoko. I need to see that she’s still alive.”

He wasn’t going to tell her again that she was running out of time. She knew it. The sun was dropping like a cannonball now, with the full moon scheduled to come into view over the eastern horizon as soon as the last rays of sunlight faded from the western sky.

“Your bitch, Killian,” Shoko said, and two dark forms rose up from the ground in the deepening gloom.

He jumped off the boat and started forward.

“I want to hear her voice, Shoko.” It was an old negotiator’s trick, to keep using someone’s name. There was nothing like a person’s name to get and hold their attention.

After the last command, he stopped. He could hear the river and the rocking of the boat, hear the waves lapping against the hull, and he waited to hear Suzi’s voice.

“Dax… Dax…”

That was his girl all right. He started across the grassy field, moving quickly but carefully.

“Let her go, Shoko, and you can have the eye. I-” His next words were cut off by a keening scream that rent the air, a wailing cry of pain, more agony than he’d ever heard.

The two women crumpled back to the ground, becoming nearly indistinguishable from each other, and he started to run.