The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 610: 610 | Strawberry Smoke and a Lipstick Kiss

I caught her.

I didn’t grab her arm, because I’d learned that lesson eight seconds ago when friction stopped existing as a useful concept. Instead I hooked two fingers under the faux-leather corset belt at the small of her back and hauled. Leather held where her skin wouldn’t. She swung back up over the edge of the skylight and slammed into my chest hard enough that my back hit the water tower stilt with a dull metallic clang that echoed across the rooftop.

She reacted on instinct. Her legs came up and wrapped around my waist in one fluid motion, and her thighs locked tight enough that my ribs, already complaining from the earlier impact, started filing formal protests. The scales along the outside of her legs pressed against my hips, cool and smooth like polished stone, and I could feel the muscle beneath them. That was not normal muscle. It was the kind that could fold a steel pipe in half without breaking a sweat, and right now it was clamped around my midsection with enough pressure to make breathing an active choice. Her arms hooked around my neck for balance.

Her goggles sat four inches from my face. Her breath smelled of strawberry, which was unexpected and somehow made the entire situation worse. The fire on Delancey had dropped to a low red glow behind her, and the smoke rolled between the water tanks in slow waves.

The interface picked that exact moment to exist.

〘ECCHI LOGIC: Compromising Proximity Event generated.〙

〘NEW HEROINE DETECTED. Name: UNREGISTERED. Aspect: UNREGISTERED.〙

〘Temptation Gauge initialized: 6%〙

〘Note: She is holding on for dear life. You are not as smooth as you think you are.〙

I stared at the text floating in my peripheral vision and decided the System could file its commentary under Things I Already Knew. Neither of us moved for a second. Her lower lip had caught on one of her fangs when she yelped, and when she spoke again there was a slight lisp that hadn’t been there before.

“This is a tactical position,” she said, and she tried to find the purr again. It came out a little shaky. “I meant to do this.”

“You yelled catch me three times.”

Her thighs tightened. I had a hundred Strength and a Legendary healing multiplier, and I still felt my breath get shorter. She noticed. The smile came back slow and crooked, and the fangs showed again, sharper now that I was close enough to see the serrated edges.

“Oh,” she said. “Is the golden boy blushing?”

“It’s the smoke.”

“There’s no smoke on your face, darling. I’m looking right at it.” She leaned in until the plastic lenses of her goggles bumped my forehead. “You’re much prettier in person. The news crew lit you all wrong.”

“You watched my interview?”

“Everybody watched your interview. You talked about symbols.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was very sincere, and it was a little bit boring.”

I shifted my weight to get a hand free. Her legs unwound from my waist before my fingers reached her belt again. She dropped to the tar paper and slid backward three feet in a single motion, and her boots squeaked the entire time. She landed crouched at the edge of the roof, one hand braced on the ledge, and the full bag still hung at her hip.

“You’re fast,” I said.

“I’m frictionless. It’s different.” She blew her bangs out of her face again. “You should go back to your dragon before he misses you.”

“He’s not my dragon.”

“He is on this side of the river.” She reached into a pouch on her belt, frowned, and dug into a different pouch. Then a third one. She muttered something under her breath that sounded like a street curse and wasn’t in the purr voice at all. Then she found what she wanted, pulled it free, and flicked it across the roof at me.

I caught it out of the air. The card stock was cheap, the kind that came out of a box at the dollar store, and black on both sides. A snake had been stamped on the front in green ink. It was coiled around nothing, just a serpent eating its own tail. Someone had pressed a kiss of dark lipstick onto the corner. The shade was matte and looked expensive, which did not match the rest of the card at all.

When I looked up, she was standing on the ledge. Her boots were two inches from the drop, and she wasn’t braced.

“Tell your dragon I said hi,” she purred. The voice had slipped back into something smooth and slow. “And tell him the laundromat’s dryer number four is eating quarters again. He’ll know what it means.”

She stepped backward off the roof.

I ran to the edge. My boots hit the ledge at the exact spot where hers had been, and I looked down fast enough to see her halfway to the ground. The textile building dropped four stories onto an alley full of dumpsters and wet cardboard, and she was sliding along the brick in a long spiral that made no sense to my eyes. Her body moved like friction was optional, like gravity was a suggestion she was taking under advisement. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

She hit the alley floor on her hip and did not stop. She slid twenty feet across the wet asphalt without slowing down, and rolled up onto her feet at the far mouth of the alley. She turned once and waved at me with two fingers. The gesture was lazy, like she did this every night and tonight was not different.

Then the dark took her, and the squeak of her boots faded into the traffic on Fourth.

I stood on the ledge holding a black business card with a lipstick kiss on it. The interface had gone quiet, which meant it was laughing at me. My ribs hurt where her thighs had been. I could still smell strawberries.

Four blocks west, loud enough to rattle the satellite dishes on every roof between us, a voice I had known for less than two hours bellowed my name.

“BELMONT!”