Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(63)

She did not belong here. In this place. With his parents sleeping only a floor up—

His parents. If his mom found a body on the estate grounds, if she even heard about it, she’d demand answers. Ones he wanted to keep her far, far away from.

And it would be such a profoundly shitty way to repay them for their help tonight.

Not that Catwoman knew. Not that she had any idea that the man standing before her was the same billionaire’s son she’d stolen from twice now and had tried to rob a third time.

Luke said, “We need to move the body off the grounds for the cops to find.”

“No handcuffs for me?” A sly, husky question.

“She attacked you and then killed herself. But if you want to go to jail, sure.”

Silence.

“Consider this a favor. I don’t arrest you, and you help me get this body off the grounds.”

“Why?”

He pointed to the house. “Because the Fox family is one of the few decent ones in this city, and I’m not going to risk the League sniffing around here for information about their prized killer.” The thought of the League coming here, grabbing his parents, was enough to make him nauseated.

“So noble,” she snorted, but moved to Tigris’s booted feet. Picked them up. “Well?”

Luke grimaced beneath his mask, debating. Drained from her fight and with her hands occupied, she’d be an easy target, and he had all the evidence he needed to bring her in, and yet…

She had kept the fight silent. Had moved it outside. Perhaps to keep the risks, the casualties, contained. And whether that was because she also knew that his parents were good people, Luke appreciated it.

He stepped up to Tigris’s head and slid his gloved hands under her shoulders. “There are some woods by the road, just beyond the property border.”



* * *



—

Luke realized within seconds that while Tigris appeared slender, beneath the loose black clothes, her body was packed with dense muscle. Heavy muscle.

He and Catwoman didn’t speak as they hauled Tigris’s corpse between them, across the lawn, past the formal gardens, through the dense thickets, and finally over the property border and into the woods beyond. He could have navigated it blind, but made sure to stop every now and then, as if assessing some mental map of his surroundings.

And only when they were perhaps a quarter mile into the pines did Luke say to her, “Here is good. The road isn’t too far off.”

To his surprise, Catwoman laid the assassin’s feet down gently.

He blew out a breath as he did so as well, the sound gobbled up by the cool night winds dancing in the trees around them, making the pines sway as if they were drunkenly dancing.

She stared at the assassin. Long enough that Luke opened up a panel in his suit’s arm to send a covert call to GCPD. He punched in the first two numbers, and then—

Soft, whispered Arabic filled the space between them.

At first, he thought Tigris was still alive.

But then he realized the lilting, beautiful words—they were coming from her. Catwoman.

Her Arabic was almost perfect.

He hadn’t heard it spoken so well since he’d returned. There was a slight American accent, the same as his own when he spoke it.

He said nothing, lowering his hand from the panel in his arm. Terminating the call.

She finished, kneeling to close Tigris’s open eyes with her gloved fingers.

When Catwoman rose, she stared at the woman’s corpse for a long moment before she said, “She trained me at the League.”

Every thought eddied out of Luke’s head.

She’d been trained at the League, trained by Tigris herself. Which meant—

Catwoman’s head lifted, the moonlight illuminating the lenses over her eyes. “I am a ghūl—as she is. Was.” She flexed her gloved hands, as if shaking the feel of the assassin from them. “It’s what League assassins call themselves. When our training is complete, our final task is to dig our own future graves and recite our own final prayers. We lie in them from dusk until dawn. And when we emerge from the earth afterward…we are ghūls. Wraiths.”

He didn’t ask how many of them ever made it back to their gravesites to fill those holes in the ground.

She wasn’t just some skilled jewel thief.

A trained killer.

From the League of Assassins.

“The prayer,” she went on, more to herself than him. “It was her final rite. What is owed to any wraith.”

“Yet you didn’t want to kill her tonight.”

Even though Tigris had come here to kill her—for something she’d stolen.

Silence.

Luke demanded, “If you’re in the League, why are you working with Harley and Ivy?”

She studied him as if debating her answer. “I left.”

Luke took a moment to process those words. “No one leaves the League.”

“I did.”

Hence the assassin after her. “Why?”

“Nyssa and Talia al Ghūl have always striven to follow in their father’s footsteps.” An ecoterrorist maniac—not like Poison Ivy’s desire to save the planet, to coexist with plant and animal. No, the man wanted the earth wiped clean of all human life. Catwoman shrugged. “I found I no longer fit in.”