“Not as much as you’d expect.”
Bill dabbed it with something that foamed the blood and made it feel like a nest of hornets was attacking it.
Jack squeezed the chair’s armrest with his free hand and said, “Okay. Make a liar out of me. Now it hurts.”
“Sorry,” Bill said. He dabbed again. “Needs to be done.”
Weezy bounced up and stepped around to the other side of the table where the Lady stood watching in silence.
“Are you all right?”
The Lady nodded. “Not the slightest harm done.”
Weezy turned to Glaeken and Jack. “I don’t get it. What happened?”
Jack didn’t get it either. He hadn’t wanted to get into the details over the phone, so he gave them a quick run-through now.
When he was done Weezy turned to the Lady and said, “It sounds as if they knew just where you’d be.”
“No question,” Jack said. “They jumped out directly in her path and began firing.” He looked up at the Lady. “Do you take the same route every day?”
She nodded. “Since I began walking again.”
Weezy turned to Jack. “You’re sure they were from the Order?”
“Sure as I can be without seeing a sigil brand.” He pointed to the Tokarev. “They used that and spoke a foreign language. Drexler seems to favor Eastern Europeans for the rough stuff and Eastern Bloc types favor Tokarevs and Makarovs.”
Glaeken frowned. “But the Order wouldn’t attempt such a thing without clearance from the One. And Rasalom knows very well that bullets can’t hurt the Lady.”
Jack grabbed the pistol and ejected the magazine, then popped out the 9mm rounds one by one.
“I thought he might be using some supersecret Lady-killing ammo, but these are standard jacketed hollowpoints.”
“If they are of this Earth,” the Lady said, “they cannot harm me.”
“Maybe he was making sure that was still true,” Weezy said. “You’ve been damaged, you’ve been weakened, you can’t change your looks, you can’t hop around the globe like you used to. If you lost those abilities, he had to wonder if maybe you’d lost the invulnerability as well. Even you weren’t sure right after you survived the Internet outage.”