Chicks Kick Butt Read Free

admired that—from a distance. “She was a thief and a con artist as a human. She’s carried that over as well. No matter how many times I tell her being Djinn isn’t a license to cause chaos…”
    The primping apparently had concluded, and now the still photographer was having his day, having Whitney pout, pose, and lounge with the backdrop of the sports car. She was, I had to admit, good at it. I wished my best friend, Cherise, was at my side; surely she would have had some good, snarky asides to make me feel better.
    Especially since Whitney kept glancing at David between shots, as if all her pouting, sexy posing was personal.
    If it affected him, he wasn’t showing it. He watched her with a cool, intense stare, arms folded, clear warning in his body language.
    The photos went on for a while, but they were finally done, and a round of applause sounded around the crew.
    “Get her set for the video,” the director ordered, and ran over to check focus on his two high-definition rigs, much to the bored chagrin of the camera operators. “Come on, people, the light’s going to go soon!”
    “Well, this is exciting,” I said. “And our champagne is getting warm in the car, you know.”
    “I know,” David said. “But she’s not here for the chance to look pretty.”
    “Then why
is
she here?”
    “She’s a sociopath and a thief, and as far as I know it could be anything. The thing is, if I leave, there’s nothing to stop her.”
    Whitney must have heard him, because she straightened from a casual lounging position against the shiny Bugatti, smiled with blinding intensity, and said, “Oh,
honey,
please. There’s nothing to stop me
now
!”
    In between one breath and the next, she opened the Bugatti’s door, slipped inside, and fired up the engine, which caught with a full-throated, intimidating roar. The director jerked upright, staring, utterly astonished, and dug in his pockets. He came out with a set of keys—the car keys, presumably—and stared from that to Whitney, who was playfully gunning the engine. “How—”
    Whitney held up a finger. Her middle one. White bolts of electricity sizzled around it and reflected in her purple eyes. “Greed is bad,” she said. “I’m just helping save all those people who’d see this ad and feel all inadequate about the size of their cars, that’s all.”
    And then she put the Bugatti in gear, and arrowed it straight for the cameras.
    Somehow, the people managed to scramble out of the way—David probably helped propel them, actually, from the way they were tossed around—and one of the cameras was blown into junk by a leading wave of invisible force before the car’s bumper could touch it. The other was just knocked over like a big, ungainly insect. There was screaming. Some of it, I realized, was coming from a suited man who’d been sitting off to the side. From the horror on his face, he was the owner of either the Bugatti or the diamond bikini, and his insurance had just lapsed.
    “Crap,”
David sighed, and turned to me. “Would you mind…?”
    “Do you really have to ask? Of course I’ll do it.”
    I raced for the car, and David took the faster route, blipping directly through the aetheric from where he stood into the passenger seat. Fast as I was getting settled and the engine started, I knew that seconds were ticking. I didn’t think the car I was driving, sweet as it was, had a hope in hell of chasing down a Bugatti with a Djinn driver, but what the hell.
    I like a challenge too, Whitney. Let’s play.
    * * *
    I wasn’t the only one on the trail of the fleeing Bugatti. Behind me, the state troopers had finally gotten their act together and were blaring a siren in the distance, trying to make up distance. They’d never make it. Even their fastest car wasn’t going to catch me, much less Whitney.
    “They’ll block her in,” I said as I shifted, pushing the car faster around the next turn. The curves would get worse, and I knew I’d have to