by Angel Payne
He laughs. Yeah, laughs. But at once, that has him wheezing for more air—though this time, I don’t let up on my hold. Karma has to be cackling over a cauldron of her most evil brew at this very moment.
Still, he manages to sputter, “Richards. It’s all right.”
“And what part of ‘that’s bullshit’ aren’t you getting?” The part before or after Faline fun-botted him into destroying every building around us like a child tearing apart a Lego set? Or the part where he came at me like I was just a bigger version of those plastic toys? Or the part where she compelled him into switching out the Legos for a goddamned Glo-Worm and feeding the fucking thing into my brain? As it is, the whole shell of my ear and part of the canal are still doused in the neurotic napalm of whatever that creature was dragging. But, thank fuck, my mind is completely still my own. I still abhor Faline Garand with every fiber of my being.
Especially right now.
Especially facing this.
My friend, struggling for air beneath my brutal grip. The sound of his breaths scraping the air mix with that ridiculous dance song, the yowls of more sirens, and the steady whops of helicopters in the smoky murk above. His forehead crumples as he wobbles another entreaty. “Reece…man…it—it is going to be okay…”
“Says the asshole not asphyxiating his friend?”
“F-F-Fuck you.”
“Fuck you!”
The snarl doesn’t help. Frustration and rage boil through my blood. Fear and grief engulf my senses. This is all leading to one immutable outcome. I recognize it in my soul. I watch Kane doing the same but confronting it with a lot more courage than me.
He tries to swallow, but I’m holding on too hard now. Crushing his air too deep. He changes tack, jutting his chin up, indicating he needs to say something and I need to listen the hell up. “Th-The tatts. Th-That scorpion. You n-n-need to know, man…I d-d-didn’t—”
“I know.” My voice shreds, but I suck my shit together, summoning the fortitude to add, “I know, man.” And I really do. He never would have consented to be inked with the symbol of the cocksuckers partly responsible for Mitch’s death.
With a crazy burst of force, the guy clutches me by one knee. “And I— I d-d-didn’t tell them anything, Reece. A-About the ridge.” He sucks in shallow spurts of air through his gritted teeth. “I d-d-didn’t betray you…or th-the team. Everyone is safe.”
I’m suddenly fucking glad he’s made me look. That despite his agony—the suffering I’m inflicting—my gaze is soldered on him and my soul is able to confirm his absolute truth. Only after my tsunami of relief fades can I plug into enough brain cells to form new words. “But…how?” I blurt at last.
“Tr-Trick I l-l-learned…in spec ops,” he explains. “Forced m-myself to remember the location d-d-differently. If the bitch d-did yank it out of me, sh-she’ll be ch-chasing you s-s-somewhere out n-n-near Ojai and Lake Casitas.”
I shake my head, fighting another flood of astonishment and guilt. Fuck, the guilt. “And you’re still really asking me to repay you like this?”
Unbelievably, he digs his hand harder into my knee. “I’m asking you t-t-to h-h-help me with what I’ve d-d-dreamed of since Paris.”
I drop my head all the way down. I’ve never felt more like a privileged punk who got away with everything short of murder growing up, only to be grown-up but still prancing around like a fool, taking out bad guys with the same disconnected ease with which I spiked the principal’s thermos with laxatives or charmed cheerleaders out of their panties. And I’ve been doing it while readily thinking the superhero antics have been my grand installment pay-off plan to karma.
But everything’s changed, damn it. The stakes have climbed terrifyingly high. Friends. Family. The cause I realize I’ve been called to. The woman I’ve been destined for. The choices I’ve had to make with every one of those weights on my soul. Dealing with the consequences. Living with the consequences.
So goddamned unsure about whether I can live with this one.
“Kane. Fuck. Don’t put this on me.” Air slices in and out of my lungs, harsh and heavy, as if making up for every one I’m taking from him. “I’m begging you…”
“I-I’m begging h-harder.”
Shit. We sound like a couple of teenagers messing around with each other in the schoolyard, comparing our piss streams, except there’s nothing juvenile about what he’s asking of me. “We’ll…we’ll find another way to get you away from her, okay? If you and I learned about this trick by accident, there have to be some more loopholes around her shit. We can block the signals somehow. Wade and Fersh can make you a helmet or ear plugs. Maybe there are liquid firewalls we can formulate. We can inject you… Fuck. Listen to me. Kane.”
“No.”
“The guys—Wade, Fersh, Alex—have amassed a lot of data about those fuckers.” Not the exact information I’ve been looking for but a lot we never knew all the same. “Just listen to what they have to—”
“No.”
I shove up, resulting in my hand plunging harder on his windpipe. “Just like that? No?”
“Not j-j-just like that.” His gaze alters, darkening to the texture of twin onyx chunks. Glittering. Impenetrable. “Not just like that, and you kn-know it.”
I lock my teeth. Another roar brews in my gut, as dark as the smoke turning the sun into a ball of burnt oil, but it lodges in my throat like a rag in that oil, soaked in the awful awareness of what he’s implying. But I have to hear it for myself, perhaps because I still don’t believe it for myself.
“How many times, Kane?” I lean over him, hyper-alert to how he frantically glances to the side. I twist my free hand into the collar of his fatigues. “How many times have you already tried to kill yourself, damn it?”
His breathing gets shallower. His eyes tighten at the corners. “F-F-Five.”
I release his collar. “Five?”
“T-Twice in Paris,” he rasps. “Three more times in Sp-Spain before those f-f-fuckers f-f-finally came for me.”
He finishes by scrabbling his grip up to my waist, causing his jacket sleeve to hitch back.
Revealing the scabbed-over gashes in his wrist.
Fucking. Shit.
I lock my teeth and curl my lips, readying to spit the same words, but the bastard blurts out, “You…you see now? I…I d-d-don’t want firewalls or magic helmets or f-f-fixes.” As he rummages his hand back to my wrist, I once again have to confront the black ink along his knuckles. Brandings he never asked for. A fate he never deserved. “I…I just want to be with Mitch again.”
A love he knows only I will understand.
Because I do.
Because if it were me having to live with the memory of Emma falling to her death, could I stand to confront another sunrise or sunset?
If my plan to avenge her death wound up in becoming Faline Garand’s remote-controlled hit man, would I want to take one more step? Even one more mortal breath?
The answer is an instant, unstoppable swell from the center of my being. It crashes me into a glass window of a destiny I do not fucking want—but now, in a moment in which all the chaos around us seems to stop, I can’t ignore.
I slide my hands up, bracing them on either side of Kane’s neck. My fingers are wet and wobbly. My friend’s proud features are blurry.
I inhale hard, steeling myself. Psyching myself.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“So am I,” Kane rasps back.
“You?” Scowling puzzlement. “Why?”
With my padlock of a hold on him, his head shake is implied more than implemented. “Doesn’t m-m-matter anymore. I’m done taking her orders. Th-thank fuck. It’s…done. All…done…”
He drifts his eyes closed.
“Now, Bolt Man. Send me back to him now.”
And then he smiles.
And I pray.
For his soul and for mine.
Chapter Three
Emma
Trixie, Chase, and I watch the L
APD helicopter carrying Reece approach the wide field behind the ridge.
The rotor wash slaps the wild grasses against our shins and knees, whipping the air into chaos that matches my mind. We lift our elbows to shield our faces from the swirling dust and pebbles, ideal stand-ins for the thousand-plus questions comprising a lot of that turmoil.
Funny how those questions build up when a girl has a few hours to do nothing but wait after her fiancé has survived a trip to a burning war zone and a confrontation with the soldier responsible for all of it.
Soldier. I still can’t believe I’m aligning the word with Kane Alighieri. Though I first met him under violent circumstances—the night so many months ago when he helped Reece save me from the trap Faline had set with ’Dia and me as bait—I’ve since discovered the real person: the nerd who spent hours at the public library, knew every line of Cats, and deliberately held back when working out at Muscle Beach so he wouldn’t make the other guys feel bad. But that was the guy I knew. As soon as Mitch took that fall and left this realm behind, part of Kane departed with him.
Clearly, a more significant part than any of us understood.
More than I could force my mind to admit to itself—even when I kissed Reece goodbye and sent him off to battle the man.
Not when I knew—I knew—there could be only one explanation for Kane, or whatever the hell he’s become, to be preening like a talk show queen just minutes after destroying the city like an avenging king. Only one way he could have gone from being Team Bolt’s Gentle Ben to LA’s vengeful dragon.
Sawyer and Angie provided some theories of explanation as soon as they arrived back at the ridge three hours ago, having borrowed a truck from the city’s Parks and Rec department. Wade, Alex, and Fershan confirmed Sawyer’s original postulate could be possible. Kane’s actions likely had been joysticked by higher forces inside the Consortium. But Angelique stood firm in her stance that Kane had been infected or bitten by something, noting his near-zombie glare and oblivion to all the chaos he’d caused.
The explanations were better than anything I’d come up with but were still far from the answers I needed. The only comparison I had to what the guy did to downtown was the state in which we’d found the Brocade’s Presidential Suite after a speed metal band’s Grammy celebration party. But like then, shuffling through the aftermath only means a lot of theories and not a lot of answers—with which Sawyer and Angie haven’t exactly been helpful, aside from their insights, since returning without Reece.
Damn it, both of them stood and watched as I begged him not to leave me behind again. Both of them already know how agonizing it is for me to be waiting like a damn prairie wife on the homestead, watching the horizon for the light of her man. And God, how that last part is true. Reece Andrew Richards is my light—which makes it doubly unfair that I can’t share that horizon with him. That I can’t do anything but play the watching-and-waiting game…
Until I finally get to have moments like this.
Knowing he’s near again.
Knowing he’s alive.
However strangely that definition may play itself out.
However far I need to stretch the word strangely.
As the pilot sets the chopper down, Reece shoves open the door and jumps out. He trudges a few steps but stops, seeming to wonder where he is and what he’s doing. His hands are ridged claws. His stance is braced as if his battle has only begun. His forehead, nearly the only part of his face I can fully see, is a topographical map of anguish.
Making me nearly dread the moment he exposes his full gaze again.
But never solidifying the purpose of my prairie porch more.
Past the whipping mane of his hair, even across the fifty feet still separating us, his grief pierces my heart like flying glass. I gasp from the impact right before a similar sound erupts from Trixie. I automatically reach for her, as much to rein her as comfort her. She longs to go to him. I get the maternal instinct and even understand it because of my own aching protectiveness for him—but there’s a deeper instinct ordering me to stand back. A dictate twined with the spiritual strands of my bond to him. That intangible energy that blares a signal in my head as loud as it is clear.
“He needs space.”
“Space?” she snaps at me. “Are you looking at him?”
I nod sorrowfully—as I comprehend exactly why he’s returned three hours after Sawyer and Angie. Grasping why the two of them held back on telling me everything that happened on the rooftop with Kane. If they had, I’d be heading into the third hour of my own agony instead of throwing sandbags on my shock to keep the flood from swallowing me whole.
“Yes,” I tell Trixie. “I’m looking.” And I’m seeing.
“But—”
I’m not the one who yanks her back this time. Quickly, I follow the hand that’s encased her elbow, up a lean-muscled arm to Chase’s determined face. “I’m hurting for him too, Mom. But we need to trust Emma.” He dips his head toward me with the weight of respect. “She has the full window to Reece now.”
No sooner has he said that then the chopper lifts up and away, leaving Reece standing in the field by himself. At once, he reels back by a few steps. He lifts his hands higher but then spins around as if needing to run from them—and does. As he breaks into a full sprint, his aching bellow shudders the air and echoes through the entire canyon. As energy explodes off his fingers, he disappears into the hills that are washed into the mix of late afternoon gold and early evening black. They welcome him with restless winds that crackle from the force of his speed.
He moves so fast, Trixie and Chase hardly realize the deafening whomp is Reece and not the departing helicopter.
“R-Reece?” Trixie stammers. “Reece? What on earth?”
She rushes forward, bending the tall grass back the other way, easily able to escape Chase, who’s slowed by his own version of incredulity as he joins her in eyeballing the new dust cloud that billows close to the hills in the distance. A cloud that’s laced by lightning in all-too-familiar shades of blue.
Trixie’s gaze bulges. “Oh, dear heavens. What should we…shouldn’t we…”
I wrap one of her hands with both of mine. As obvious as the action seems, I do it with torn feelings. I’ll never be a mother in the biological sense, but it doesn’t take emotional rocket science to relate to why Trixie’s close to a basket case after everything that’s happened in the last twelve hours. In the last twelve months. She’s had to accept that one of her children was permanently mutated by mad scientists before another died in battle against those same psychopaths—all because of her husband of nearly thirty-five years. It hasn’t felt right to ask if Lawson’s death worsened or bettered her ordeal, but the way she’s immersed herself in caring for Reece, Chase, Joany, and me, constantly flying between New York and here to do so, has struck us all as a viable therapy regime. Since we’re all so grateful she hasn’t chosen alcohol, sex, or boy toys as her therapy of choice, the four of us have formed a tacit agreement not to challenge her decisions.
Which makes me feel like a sizable shit right now.
Still, I state with quiet firmness, “He knows you’re here for him.” I include Chase in my regard too. “That everyone is. But he can’t deal with bad days by just coming home and grabbing a hot shower and a cold beer.”
Chase moans softly. “Which sounds like a damn good plan.”
“Which you need to go do.” I clarify it as encouragement and not commandment, with a tight but sincere smile. “Please.” My addendum isn’t so tactful, because my senses start to crackle again. Yanked from their moorings by Reece’s furious, flaring beacon again. He’s alone and adrift, grieving and angry—and right now, all that matters is just getting to him. “I’m…I’m sure he just needs to clear the mental cache and cookies,” I add, squeezing Trixie’s hand once more. I look down at our twined fingers, noting that Reece definitely got his long fingers from his maternal side.
“And she’s his tech support.” Chase is
equally resolute about his message, calmly extricating his mother’s hand from mine, seeming to sense my compulsion about hurrying to his brother’s side. “So let her go and be that, Mom. Come on. I’m sure Joany’s rustling something up for dinner.”
For a second, Trixie still vacillates as if deciding between one muddy slope and another, her face crunched with conflict. “Tell him I’ll make chocolate chip cookies for dessert,” she finally urges to me. “His favorite. With the walnuts.”
The breath she hitches between the sentences sends a little hook into my heart. All too clearly, I can imagine Reece as a boy, running into a huge kitchen in which Trixie is pulling out a tray filled with those cookies. That kitchen is inside a place called Richards Hall, where the woman probably had a staff numbering in double digits who could’ve baked those cookies—but she knew that the most valuable ingredient in fresh-baked cookies was, and always will be, a mother’s love. It’s a perfect reminder that no matter what state I’m about to find Reece in, he’s a man beneath it all. The man I love, part of a family I’m growing to adore just as equally.
“Of course I’ll tell him.” It comes from the center of my soul, which flares again from the inescapable call of its mate. Reece’s need is so intense, I have to fight the rage at my human limitations as I run-walk across the distance to him. Already knowing, despite no other guidance system but the ache in my chest, that I’m going the right way.
The pain worsens, meaning I’m either about to have heart failure or I’m closing in on him. I don’t dismiss the possibility of the former, since the journey into the depths of the canyon covers some seriously rocky terrain. But just when I’m getting ready to curse the unsteady ground, the prickly coastal shrubs, and the strengthening nighttime gusts, I let out a cry of gratitude.
And then awe.
And then alarm.
Gratitude because that wind now carries brilliant blue sparks, as if a cosmic torch welder is doing repair work just around the corner.
Awe because all those lights look dipped in a puddle of blue magma. I’ve never seen the blue so rich and vibrant and concentrated before.
