Ninja Girl
Chapter Two

As late as it was, the highway was deserted. The concrete glistened in his headlights, still freshly wet from a late afternoon drizzle. This part of town was fairly developed, but most businesses in the area had already closed for the day. Up ahead, the hospital glowed brightly like a singular monolith against the dark and dreary world around them.

The woman in the passenger’s seat moaned and stirred. A moment later she woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in her seat and her hands dropping to the blades at her sides. Her heightened senses only needed a single heartbeat to draw in her surroundings and get a hold of her situation.

“You okay?” Nick started to ask, but before the words could even roll off his tongue her hand flashed out quick as lightning, drawing one of her kunai and leveling it at his throat.

“GAH!” He screamed and jerked the steering wheel to the side as he slammed on the brakes. The car skidded out against the slick pavement and for a brief moment he lost control. Recovering, he wrestled the car back into place, slid over to the side of the road and parked.

The woman’s dagger miraculously remained perched mere centimeters from his throat during the entire process.

“Are you insane!?” Nick shouted. “You could have killed both of us!”

“I would have survived,” the ninja lady replied, her voice soft and even.

“Right,” Nick growled, pounding his hands on the steering wheel. “Of course you would have. I’m not even surprised. ’Cuz surviving a car spinning out on the highway at seventy miles an hour and crashing would only be like… What? The third impossible thing I’ve seen you do tonight?”

“Where are you taking me?” She demanded, completely ignoring his outburst.

“What?”

She leaned in, pressing the knife closer so that Nick could feel the cold steel prick against his neck. “Where are you taking me?” she repeated again, slower this time as if she thought him an idiot.

“The hospital! I was just taking you to a hospital!”

“Liar!”

“What the hell lady? What was I supposed to do when some strange woman randomly appears in my bedroom and then collapses on my living room floor? Just leave you there and wait until you die? Hope you’ll magically teleport back to whatever planet you came from? I was just trying to help.”

“Why did you not call for help?”

“My phone was dead. No, I swear! I realize how stupid that sounds but it really, really was. And I don’t have a landline, and I didn’t want to involve the neighbors because I was concerned about how that might look.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you think? ‘Oh, hello there, neighbor. How’s it goin’? It seems I have a mysterious woman passed out on the floor of my apartment. Do you think I could just borrow your phone for a minute so I can replace a way to get rid of her?’ Yeah, I’m sure that would go over real well.”

“You could have just told her you had a medical emergency and asked her to call for help. No need to go into details.”

Nick swallowed. “Okay, this is going to sound really, really stupid but I honestly didn’t think of that. But even if I had done that I probably still would have been questioned by the cops, and something tells me they would not have been too happy with the answers I had for them. I could have gotten in serious trouble just for trying to do the right thing. I’m sorry, but I didn’t want that.”

“So you decided sticking me in your car and driving me somewhere was somehow less sketchy?”

Nick felt his cheeks growing red hot with embarrassment and looked away. “Uh,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Well… kinda. Yeah. Look, okay, I can see how this doesn’t look good. But I didn’t know if you were going to wake up or not, and I figured if I could get you to the hospital and drop you off then, you know, you get help, I don’t get in trouble, everybody wins. Right?”

For a long moment she simply stared at him, her eyes narrowing dangerously. She did not seem to believe him.

“Look,” Nick said, motioning with his left hand – the one further away from her so that she would not feel threatened by the movement – at the window. “See? The hospital is right there!”

She leaned back from him, still holding her weapon at the ready but putting as much distance as she could between the two of them in the confined space of the small car. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder in the direction he had indicated then looked back at him. She frowned and then cast a slightly longer glance over her shoulder. Her frown deepened but she lowered her weapon a little. “Fine. There is a hospital there. What does that prove?”

“You have serious trust issues, you know that lady?”

“What reason do I have to trust you?”

“Maybe the fact that when you collapsed I could have done just about anything to you – including whatever it is that you’re clearly expecting me to do – but instead what I did was put you in my car and drive you towards a hospital? I mean, if I wanted to hurt you, couldn’t I have done that while you were knocked out? If I was trying to kidnap you or something wouldn’t I have tied you up and taken your weapons away? But I didn’t do any of that. Look, I even buckled your seat belt.”

She considered this and, reluctantly, seemed to accept the logic of it. She sat back down in her seat, and only then did Nick realize she had removed her seat belt at some point. Yet despite that she had managed to maintain inhumanly perfect balance during all the skidding and rocking of the car moments earlier. It also made his last point completely invalid , but neither of them seemed interested in mentioning that part.

“You wanna tell me what you’re so paranoid about?” Nick asked.

She cast him a sideways glare, her expression icy and dangerous. “Would you not be paranoid if you had been ripped from your life and thrust halfway around the world into a stranger’s bedroom without any warning?”

Nick pursed his lips and mulled that comment over for a moment. “Okay, touché. Dumb question.” He drummed his hands on the steering wheel and looked around. The world seemed almost eerily empty around them. Turning back to the woman he said, “Look, maybe we should start over. My name is Nick. Nick Lombardi.” He held out his hand for her to shake.

She stared at his hand passively for a moment, but made no indication she intended to take it. “Anya,” she replied simply.

“Anya…” Nick prompted.

“Just Anya.”

Nick sighed. “Fine. Well, I’ll just take you to the hospital then–”

“No hospitals!” She interjected.

Nick’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Are you sure? When you collapsed you looked like you were dying…”

“No hospitals!” Anya repeated.

“Okay, okay! Jeez. So what then? You want me to just leave you on the side of the road here?”

She looked around her as if taking in her location for the first time. “This will be fine.”

“You’ve got to be joking. Do you even know where you are?”

“I will replace my way,” she said. “I always do.”

“Look, okay, not that I’m doubting your abilities or anything, but you’re clearly not feeling well. No,” he said, holding up a finger to cut her off before she could object, “no matter how stoic you are it’s obvious. You look sick. You’re shaking. You look ready to collapse.”

“I’m fine,” she argued, but it looked as though even she did not believe it. She shrunk back a bit under Nick’s doubtful glare, which just further proved to Nick that she must not be feeling well. This was a woman capable of seemingly impossible feats, and here she was shrinking under the gaze of the man that had trouble lifting her over his shoulder. “Really, I’m fine,” she continued. “I… I think I’m just a little hungry.”

“Hungry?” Nick echoed.

“Yes, hungry.” She gave a sturdy, definitive nod of her head, as if this cleared up everything. “I haven’t eaten in days. Is there anywhere around here I could get something to eat?”

Nick thought about it for a moment. “Uh, yeah, I suppose. What do you like?”

Anya blinked, not sure exactly what to say. “Japanese food,” she settled on.

A mental map of the area ran through Nick’s head. There were a few sushi bars he could think of not far from their location, but this late at night they would all be closed. A thought occurred to him but it made him cringe a little.

“What? What is it?” Anya asked, noticing his expression.

“Well,” Nick said, a bit reluctantly. “There is one place. But I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”