Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(74)

His suit insignia flared, bright as the flash on a camera bulb. Blinding Smiles, throwing him off-balance—

Luke barreled into him. Slammed a palm into his elbow, forcing his fingers to splay and drop the knife, then blasted his fist into Smiles’s face in a decimating right hook.

Bone crushed and blood sprayed.

Luke wasn’t done yet. As Smiles reeled to the right, Luke swept his leg out, turning the criminal’s already uneven balance against him.

Smiles went crashing to the wooden planks, groaning.

Luke was on him in an instant, his Batarang firing right onto his chest.

Smiles slumped against the planks, nose leaking. Unconscious.

Luke didn’t dare pause and let his adrenaline wear off. Not with a wound leaking down his side, not with the pain barking through him at every movement.

He managed to make another call to GCPD before he hurled Smiles’s knife into the dark river, sending his own DNA washing away, hoisted the slim criminal over a shoulder, and carried him out of the docks. Here, any manner of lowlife might easily find him.

Luke gritted his teeth with every step. But he made it.

And when Smiles was chained to a post office box, whimpering into consciousness as cops began arriving on the scene, Luke managed to leap to a nearby rooftop.

Gotham City had never seemed so large. Endless. He’d have to make it home before he could risk pausing to catch his breath. He could barely focus enough to land and tuck in his wings.

And find her waiting for him.

Catwoman let out a sultry laugh. “Did you wait for me at the gala tonight?”

He had. And she’d made a fool of the GCPD on a night in their honor.

Luke lunged for her.

But his body chose right then and there to remind him that it had its limits. And they had been reached and then some tonight.

His step forward turned into a sway back. Back, back, back as darkness closed in.

Clawed hands reached for him as the drop off the roof loomed.



* * *



—

Luke barely remembered how they got there.

How he didn’t wind up shoved off that roof and splattered on the street below.

Everything was veiled in a pain-filled fog. The slice to his ribs must have been deeper than he’d realized. He had the vague sense of being half carried. Of a slender body holding him upright, helping him down and over things…But he had no idea where he was when she led him into a small, yet clean, apartment. Dark and quiet. All he knew was that it wasn’t his apartment. A shiver skittered down his spine.

The bedroom she shut them in was also neat and tidy. Pretty, but not fancy—no sign of wealth in the aging paint, the chipped dresser. The mattress she plunked him on groaned softly beneath the weight of him in his suit.

She’d given him something before they’d started walking, he remembered. A shot injected through the small sliver of skin between his neck and shoulder. Adrenaline—or a compound like it. It had steadied him enough to move. And now it seemed to be kicking in more. Clarifying things.

A small light clicked on, dusting Catwoman’s black suit in its golden glow.

She took a seat beside him and said, “Either I can patch this up for you here, or I can take you to the hospital.”

Luke managed a half smile. “You offer me another option now?”

She didn’t answer, instead opening a small pouch in her utility belt to remove what seemed to be bandages, a sterile needle, and thread. Along with two vials of what had to be antiseptic and some local numbing agent.

“You know how to use that stuff?”

“A skill I picked up at the League,” she said, bending to examine the gash visible through his armor. “Can you remove this?”

Luke hesitated. The helmet and the suit were separate, but taking off the suit required more movement than he could muster right now, and being prostrate before her, his brown skin exposed—well, it’d certainly narrow any potential list she had for who Batwing might truly be. There were plenty of black guys in Gotham City, but ones who might have access to tech like this?

She didn’t wait for him to decide. The drug she’d given him or perhaps his blood loss made him unable to react fast enough, to block her, as she flicked a steel claw free and carefully sliced away sections of bloodied metal. Carving out a hole in his suit, as easily as she’d sliced that circle in the glass display case at his family’s estate.

Luke watched, his head heavy, while she removed the overlapping metal scales, setting them on the bed. “You’ll have to take those with you, or else the DNA might be a problem,” she advised.

She was right. If someone analyzed it and matched it against the Marines database, his cover would be completely blown.

Catwoman adjusted something in her helmet’s lenses as she examined the wound. “No signs of foreign objects inside,” she said, more to herself than to him.

“Your helmet can tell you that?”

“Among other things.”

He hissed as she dabbed the antiseptic onto the slice down his ribs. And just to keep himself from thinking about what she was going to do with that needle and thread, Luke asked, “Where did you get that suit?”

She stabbed him with a syringe, numbing the area. “I made it myself.” Perhaps she had a shred of pity for him, because she went on, as if to distract him from the stitches. “I’ve always loved science and technology.” A rasp of laughter, muffled by that helmet. “I won a state science competition when I was a kid. It probably put me on the League’s radar long before I even knew they existed.”