Devil's Bargain by Rachel Caine Page B

open, then snapped her gun up into an effortlessly graceful firing position and flowed forward, shouldering the door flat against the wall with a soft bump. The speed with which she checked and dismissed blind corners was incredible. Jazz shut the door and dead-bolted it again, then went to the gun safe in the corner and keyed it open.
    The familiar weight of her H & K nine-millimeter pistol felt cool and heavy, weighing her down, grounding her against that feeling of having been blown off course by the day’s events.
    Lucia stopped appraising the room from a tactical point of view long enough to say, “I like your taste in colors.”
    “You’d be the only one, then,” Jazz smiled. The rug was olive green, the furniture a throwback to the worst of the seventies—dull oranges and duller golds, a truly obnoxious plaid that somehow captured all three colors plus a muddy brown for variety. She’d finished it off with a kitschy velvet painting of a matador and a print of one of Dali’s lesser works from his conquistador period.
    “I was being polite,” Lucia said, and ran her fingers over the gold armchair’s back. “Possibly even sarcastic. Tell me the place came furnished.”
    “Nope, it’s all mine. However, in self-defense, I did have to match the carpet. This was the best I could manage.”
    “Plus,” Lucia said thoughtfully, “it makes people think you have no sophistication. Which is all part of your persona, isn’t it?”
    That came as a shock. Not a pleasant one. “What?”
    “You, Jazz, are a lie. A subtle one. It probably works very well for you. Under all that ragged hair and frumpy clothes, you’re good-looking. You could make this place look sophisticated—you deliberately choose not to. I think you like having people underestimate you.”
    Jazz blinked, nonplussed. “That’s a load of crap.”
    “Yeah?” Lucia’s carefully shaped eyebrows rose and fell. “My specialty is in controlling perceptions. I do it consciously. I have to take command in a psychological way when I enter a situation. I have to make people believe that I’m capable of anything and everything to avoid a fight.”
    “You don’t strike me as the kind to avoid a fight.”
    “My point exactly,” Lucia said, and smiled. “I’m not nearly as strong as you are, Jazz. It’s better for me if I can avoid the fight instead of taking things head-on. Not that I can’t win if I’m pushed, but I can’t do it fairly, like you can. I fight dirty, and I try not to fight at all. Like most women, actually.”
    Jazz cocked her head, trying to get all that through her head; she knew, intellectually, what Lucia was saying, but she’d grown up fighting just as hard as her brother, and the idea that most women weren’t wired that way…it had always thrown her off. She’d blamed it on wussy girl attitudes about not mussing their hair or breaking a nail, but she had to admit, there was nothing wussy about Lucia. And she didn’t strike Jazz as somebody who admitted to shortcomings just for the hell of it, either.
    “Okay.” Jazz shrugged. “So maybe I like to sucker people in. You like to intimidate them into avoiding a fight. We can agree to disagree.”
    “Actually,” Lucia said, and picked up a particularly hideous ceramic bull getting ready to gore a gaudily gilded matador, “looking at this, for the first time, I believe we have something we can use to form a solid partnership.”
    “Because of my amazingly bad taste?”
    “Strengths and weaknesses,” Lucia said, and put the bull back in its place. “We complement each other. Also, I like your sense of humor.”
    “How do you know I have one?”
    “The bull.” Lucia smiled. “It’s anatomically correct.”
    “You should see the matador in the bedroom.”

     

    “It’ll be twenty-four hours before Manny gets back to us,” Jazz said about a half hour later. “You want to stay?”
    Lucia, who was sipping coffee from a plain black mug and watching low-playing