Wesley Snipes - Talon of God

Step by step, she inched forward, creeping through the door at the end of the entry hall to peer around the corner into what appeared to be a ballroom. But as she was easing her head around the wooden doorframe, something black flew right at her face.

Lauryn jumped back with a scream, swinging Talon’s huge sword before she could think better of it. In front of her, the black thing squawked and fluttered away, leaving her gasping. A crow. It had just been a startled crow. Now that she’d knocked the doors open with her wild swinging, she could see the ballroom was full of them. They were coming in through the veranda, where someone had left the glass doors open to the night. A great deal of snow had blown in as well, covering the stacks of pillows from what had clearly been an orgy room in an ironically virgin blanket of white. But while the rest of the room was still, the crows were having a grand old time pecking over the abandoned buffet table. Lauryn watched them squabble over the leftovers, using the normal behavior to try to coax her heart rate back down to sub-cardiac-arrest levels. She’d just about managed to return to something like calm when she heard yet another sound behind her.

Just another stupid bird , she told herself firmly. Don’t freak—

That was as far as she got before a gloved hand closed over her face.

This time, Lauryn couldn’t even scream. She barely managed to breathe as she swung her sword wildly, not that it did any good. She was facing entirely the wrong direction, and whatever had grabbed her was stronger than any person had any right to be. Since fighting wasn’t working, Lauryn dropped the sword and her phone so she’d have both hands to work on prying the gloved hand off her face. She was still trying when a man’s angry voice growled in the dark.

“Didn’t expect to see you here.”

The words cut through her panic like a jagged knife. She knew that voice. She’d heard it less than an hour ago, but that was impossible. She’d already won that fight. But her miracle earlier must not have been as complete as she’d thought, because when the hand finally slid down to grab her shoulder, spinning her around before slamming her back into the doorframe, it was Victor Korigan’s face that sneered down at her.

Or, rather, what was left of it.

Lauryn had seen a lot of Z3X cases by this point, but Korigan’s bath in the pure Z3X powder must have been hundreds of times the normal dose, and the end effect was enough to turn even her iron stomach. His eyes were masks of blood, and his skin was entirely blue gray. It even seemed to be rotting in some places, which explained the stench she’d noticed when she’d first entered the house. But while the doctor in Lauryn was amazed at how someone could still be alive with so much obvious necrotic decay, the rest of her was fighting not to vomit. All of that was bad enough, but what really got Lauryn was how Korigan was still standing after taking multiple shots to the chest .

That mystery, at least, was quickly resolved as she spotted the bulletproof vest beneath his shot-up shirt. A safety measure she got a much better look at than she’d wanted when Korigan lurched forward, slamming her body into the wall with his own.

She dove for Talon’s sword immediately, but whatever was going on with his body apparently didn’t slow down Korigan’s reflexes at all. He beat her by miles, snatching up the weapon with one hand while grabbing her neck with the other, his fingers digging into the tender flesh of her throat as he straightened up to glare at her.

“I should have known you’d find this place,” he said, his voice rasping. “From the moment you first stumbled into this case, you’ve shown up everywhere you didn’t need to be. But tempted as I am to kill you for doing this —” he turned to give her a better look at his gray, rotted face “—I’ve got a better idea. You’re going to help me.”

“You know,” Lauryn said, choking the words out against the fist wrapped around her throat. “If you want me to cure you, you might want to try being a little nicer.”

“Please,” Korigan scoffed. “I don’t actually believe in all this satanic crap. But St. Luke does. He’s the one running this crazy train, and you’re my ticket off it.”

By this point, Lauryn was utterly lost. “How do you think that’s going to work? I don’t even know—”

She cut off with a gasp as his hand tightened. “Shut up,” he snarled, sending little bits of rotted flesh pattering against her cheek. “Your opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing. All that matters is that the SEE warrior St. Luke and his lackey Black are obsessed with thinks you’re important enough to give you this .” He tapped Talon’s sword against the wall right beside her face. “That makes you leverage, Dr. Jefferson. Leverage I’m going to use to get out of this mess, and if you shut up and do as I say, you might even live through it.”

That was a lie if Lauryn ever heard one, but she was screwed either way, so she played along. “Okay,” she said, relaxing her body in a show of submission. “But even if you do trade me, what do you think St. Luke’s going to give you in return? There’s no medical treatment for Z3X exposure.”

“Nothing you know about,” Korigan said. “But St. Luke isn’t stupid. Z3X is his creation, and you don’t start a chain reaction this big without building yourself a way out.”

Lauryn’s heart skipped a beat. “You’re saying there’s a cure?”

The arm pinning her moved as Korigan shrugged. “Cure, antidote, treatment, I have no idea. But this is St. Luke. The man built his empire on drugs, legal and not, and now he’s using one to take over this entire city. This whole thing was planned from the very beginning, and there’s no way during all of that, St. Luke didn’t build himself an escape.”

For the first time since he’d grabbed her, Lauryn felt a surge of hope. Korigan was actually making sense. Of course St. Luke would leave a back door for himself, which meant there might really be a cure. Maybe finding it was why she’d been sent here! But elated as that thought made her, Korigan wasn’t finished.

“There has to be a way to reverse this,” he rasped. “But St. Luke’s not going to give it away for free, and that’s where you come in.” He lifted his ruined lip in a terrifying grin. “I don’t know what your connection to Talon is, but you’d better play your part and act like a good little font of mystical knowledge. ’Cause if you don’t sell him on your value enough to get me access to that antidote, you’re never going to see another dawn. Now—” he let go of her throat only to grab a handful of her hair, using it like a leash to yank her down the hall “—let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”

Lauryn didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but with one of his hands holding Talon’s stolen sword and the other clutched tight around her hair, she had no choice but to try to keep up. The pain in her scalp brought tears to her eyes as Korigan dragged her across the trashed, crow-covered ballroom to a door on the other side that led deeper into the house.

If someone had told her Chicago’s most eccentric billionaire had a secret satanic lab hidden inside his house, Lauryn would have been understandably skeptical. Now, however, after Korigan had dragged her through the debauched ballroom, down a long hallway filled with blasphemous art and then through a false wall into a secret elevator, she was just wishing St. Luke had built his laboratory somewhere more convenient. As much as it hurt, though, she refused to show weakness, though she couldn’t quite stop a sigh of relief when the crooked police chief finally let go of her hair to shove her inside the hidden elevator. But lovely as it was to finally be released from the horrible pain in her scalp, Lauryn’s relief quickly gave way to fear as the elevator descended deep below the house.