Читать книгу Planet Hate - James Axler - Страница 14

Chapter 5

“Just when you think it’s done it starts again,” Grant growled as he took a seat in Shizuka’s winter retreat. He was a large man, so large in fact that he made the seat he sat in look comical, like something out of a cartoon. Dressed in a skintight shadow suit, Grant was a well-built man with broad shoulders and skin like polished ebony. He still wore his long duster over the shadow suit, black Kevlar that looked like leather, and his dark eyes betrayed his exhaustion. His jaw was dark with the start of a beard beneath the drooping lines of his mustache, his hair close-cropped to his skull. “Damn snake-faces keep popping up every time we try to move.”

Shizuka looked at him, gracing him with the slightest of smiles as the other people in the room made themselves comfortable. They had had all of two minutes to get reacquainted once Grant and his team had arrived via the quantum window opened by the interphaser, and the hulking ex-Mag made little secret of his irritation. There were seven other people in the room besides Grant and Shizuka, including four guards standing equidistant from each other in the corners of the large reception room.

Located on a remote part of the coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the building was of classic Japanese design, reaching two stories aboveground with a pleasing curve to the roof like a folded ribbon. A simple wooden balcony surrounded the winter retreat, and several more guards from Shizuka’s loyal Tigers of Heaven patrolled along the balcony, keeping watch for any approach.

“Tiger Isle has had a few castaways turn up on her shores over the past three weeks,” Shizuka explained, referring to the Pacific island home of her Tigers of Heaven. “Missionaries, they initially claimed to be lost, the victims of shipwrecks and the like. We offered them hospitality, but each one eventually revealed himself to harbor a hidden agenda to convert my people.”

Shizuka was a beautiful woman, petite of frame—seemingly more so when sitting in front of Grant across the low table that rested in the precise center of the room. Dressed in a simple silk kimono, its wide sleeves swinging several inches below her wrists as she gestured, Shizuka had flawless golden skin accented with peach and milk. She had full-petaled lips beneath a stub nose and her dark eyes showed the delicate almond lilt of her Asian ancestry. Despite her small stature, Shizuka was a fearsome warrior, a full-blooded samurai who ruled her people with firmness tempered with mercy. She was also Grant’s lover.

“One of these missionaries tried to push a stone into the face of my majordomo,” she continued in her trilling, singsong voice. “It was most strange.”

“They worship a rock creature,” Kane stated by way of explanation, his voice betraying his irritation. “Big fucker name of Ullikummis, yet another member of the endless Annunaki royal family.”

Shizuka nodded once in acknowledgment. Like Grant, Kane wore a shadow suit, which he had chosen to augment with a battered old leather jacket of a worn brown color, its slick surface scuffed and bearing a patch across one elbow. The jacket was still dusted with the soil of the little village between the cliffs where he and his companions had been ambushed by the worshippers of Ullikummis. He also wore his favored black boots—also scuffed—one of the last survivors of his Magistrate days, and dark pants held up by a belt with a large buckle of dull, gunmetal finish.

Kane stood by one of the windows, his broad shoulders leaning back against the frame, his legs crossed at the ankles. Over six feet tall, Kane looked imposing when he stood to his full height, his steel-gray eyes boring into you like a laser beam beneath his dark brows. With his long and rangy arms and legs, there was something of the wolf to Kane’s physical appearance. There was something of the wolf in his nature, too, both a natural pack leader and a loner as the need arose.