Wolfe, I moaned inside.
Yesssss, Wolfe said, already working on it. You shouldn’t go charging into—
“Spare the lecture,” I said for the benefit of my psycho and also my brother. Two for one. My wounds started to knit themselves together and my right leg jerked back into alignment as it healed itself. “Yowwwww.”
“What happened?” Reed asked, voice thick with worry.
“I thought the bad guy was running but it turned out he was lying in wait,” I said as I got up and dusted myself off. It required a lot of dusting.
“You didn’t consider an ambush to be a possibility?”
“I consider a lot of possibilities,” I said, trying to brush some particularly stubborn wood dust off my knee. “The most likely one when I see someone running from me is that they’ll continue to wisely haul ass away, not take the 1.2 seconds I give them to escape as an opportunity to bushwhack me without so much as a weapon at their disposal.” I turned my neck and heard a crack as bone set back into place. “That guy said he was going to kill me.”
“I heard him run off as I caught up,” Reed said. His eyes flared with anger. “You know, if you’d waited for me—”
“If I’d waited for you,” I said, breaking into run toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where light was flooding down from my assailant’s likely exit, “I’d feel like I was running with weights on my legs.”
“I caught up with you, didn’t I?” Reed snapped, hurrying after me.
“Because I had to stop and try and converse with a witness who had been so traumatized by the sight of a corpse that she couldn’t construct a sentence with heavy machinery. Talk about a drag on your speed.”
I burst out of the walkway at the other end of the street and shot into the air, scouring the sidewalk for hints of my foe. The streets weren’t exactly packed, but they were damned busy, and it seemed like every fourth person had dark hair and a black jacket. “Son of a …” I muttered.
Reed drifted up next to me, only fifteen feet up or so, his hands throwing off massive amounts of wind in order to keep him levitating. “See anything?”
I sighed as I looked in all four directions. I saw something, all right. Desperation. My own desperation and about a hundred people of medium height in black coats, only half of whom were actually looking at me at the moment. “This guy’s gone,” I said, letting myself slowly drift back to the ground at the corner of Michigan and Lake Shore. “He got away.”
12.
Veronika
San Francisco, California
It was a dismal day outside Veronika’s mother’s window, her little view of the world shaded darkly by cloud and sky. The sun was just barely up, hiding somewhere behind the layers of clouds. It wasn’t that unusual for San Francisco at this time of year, but it could have been better. The clouds threaded across the sky in layers, deep and thick, blocking out the sunshine and making it feel like a cold, damp winter had settled over the whole world.
Veronika Acheron was used to feeling like this when she came to visit her mother, like a wet blanket had been draped over her, even in the summer, and it was why she tried to stay away as much as possible.
“Are you getting enough to eat?” Veronika asked. The smell of something roughly approximating chicken hung in the air in the nursing facility. Veronika’s hands were clutched together under the coat she had hung over her arm. It was long, and velvety, and it felt reassuringly heavy hanging there.
She waited for an answer from the woman in the bed before her. Her mother had always been strong, always been … unbreakable, resolute of will and tireless of body. Now she reclined in the bed, sitting at a forty-five degree angle, propped up by pillows, eyes lazily pointed at the window, looking about thirty seconds from drifting into sleep. This was how she always was nowadays.
“Of course you are,” Veronika whispered. There was no reaction from her mother. There never was. She’d seen her fed; it was a messy ordeal, not terribly unlike watching a toddler eat against their will. How funny, that she tied this period in her mother’s life with the earliest days of her own. Helplessness lay on both sides of life’s spectrum, Veronika supposed. She found no humor in that thought at all, just a cold, burning fear that she’d live long enough to see it visited upon her again.
The ringing of her phone was a welcome interruption from the stink of the food and faint, lingering scent of disinfectant that couldn’t entirely cover the smell of bodily functions. Veronika coolly went for her phone and turned away from her mother and the window on the cloudy world. “Excuse me for a moment,” she said to her mother in a quiet voice before pressing the key to accept the call.
“Go,” Veronika said. She was precise in her professional life. She had to be. She brushed her straight, long red hair back behind her ears. She rarely let it loose, except when she wasn’t working.
She listened carefully to the voice at the other end of the line. With something that might have been pleasure from any other person, but from her came out cool steel, she said, “It’s been a while.”
She listened again, that pleasant voice threading through her mind. “No, I wouldn’t mind working,” she answered, turning her head subtly to look back at her mother. “I wouldn’t mind at all. Do you have a contract for me? Perhaps something a little more in line with my regular … yes …”
A prickle of fear mingled with anticipation ran down the back of her neck, like someone had opened the window to let the day in. “Sienna Nealon? I can …” She paused to let the voice speak again. “Chicago? I can be there on the next … yes, that’ll be fine. I’ll catch that flight. Am I the only …? No, of course not. That’s all right, I don’t mind a little competition.” She paused, listening, and gritted her teeth for a moment before replying. “Oh, they get a head start, do they? All right. I can work with that. You give them first crack, and when they screw it up, I’ll do the job right.”
She ended the call and turned back to her mother. Or at least the shell that was her mother now. “I have to go,” she said, coolly. “Something’s come up, but I’ll be back in a few days.” She forced a smile, let it faintly tug at her lips, and pressed them to her mother’s cheek. “Take care while I’m gone.”
She watched for any hint of reaction, any sign of the woman who had once inhabited the wrinkled and tattered body on the bed. When she saw none after a few seconds, she turned calmly away and left to go kill Sienna Nealon.
13.
Sienna
Reed and I went back to our hotel, a tower in downtown only a few blocks from Oak Street Beach, and I slept for like an age. Not one of the short ages, either; we’re talking one of the long ones, enough time for humans to go from crawling on the earth like slugs to talking on cell phones and posting wombat videos on the internet.
I awoke in a dim room, hints of dull light streaming in through the edges of the blinds that shrouded my window. I had a mild headache, the sort of thing that seemed to follow using Wolfe’s power sometimes. He could fix drastic injuries, but even the healthiest human being had occasional headaches, and that he couldn’t cure. I squinted in the darkness, wishing for it to go away, but my request went unanswered.
I looked past the foot of my bed where a set of double doors with foggy glass waited, cracked slightly open to reveal the yellow light of a lamp on in the room beyond. I’d left Reed out there, hanging around on the couch when I’d come in here to crash. He had his own room, presumably because Phillips’s secretary had been decent enough not to make him try and sleep on a sofa, or maybe because government regs just allowed for a two-room suite. I could hear him moving around faintly, sniffing like he had a runny nose.
I rolled out of bed and flexed, looking around the room. It was small, as one might expect from a downtown hotel room, but it was nice and clean, and the bed was soft. I took a deep breath and caught a faint hint of very light perfume in the air. Not enough that anyone but a meta would have noticed it, but just enough to cover some of the other smells a ro
om like this might accumulate given enough time and people parading through.
The smell reminded me of something, and I remembered in a flash that I’d smelled rosemary on the killer. I’d been too distracted when he’d battered me in the ambush, but the smell had been in the air, though faint. Yeah, the guy who bushwhacked me was definitely the same one who had been lingering behind that dumpster to kill Jacobs. Or if it wasn’t him, they used the same bath products. I assumed it was bath products that resulted in the pronounced smell that hung around him. He could have been an executive chef for some restaurant, I suppose, and carried spices in his pockets.
I cracked my neck as I opened the door, and Reed grimaced as I entered the living room. Whether it was from the sound of my vertebrae realigning or his surprise at my sudden entry, I didn’t know. He sat under a lamp, the orange light shining down on him, the blinds down in here as well, TV flickering from where it was mounted on the wall to my left. “Whassup?” I asked casually.
“Just watching the coverage,” he said, nodding at the TV. I glanced over to see the paramedics wheeling a gurney with a black body bag on it out of Oak Street Beach Park. Naturally, there was a big, emblazoned ticker running down the bottom of the screen: “Murders Downtown Shock Locals.”
“Of course it shocks the locals,” I said, yawning. “We wouldn’t want any murders to occur outside of their duly appointed murder zones, after all.”
Reed smiled faintly. “You know, there just might be some truth to that.”
“It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn’t,” I said, stretching. “If fifty murders occur in one area, the one we expect murders to occur in, it’s all shaking the head sadly and wondering, ‘What can we do?’ But the minute they cross certain borders …” I waved my hands. “Freak out.” I yawned.
“You given any more thought to this job offer?” Reed asked, and I could tell he’d been holding it in since I entered the room. All of five seconds, wow. My brother was almost as poorly restrained as I was, but his temptations seemed to run in the direction of annoying people with his strongly held beliefs. Mine ran to assault and homicide.
I rolled my eyes. “No, because I was, in fact, sleeping. But I have thought of an exciting new career path for you—Veterinary Dental School.”
He frowned. “That’s not a thing. And no.”
“Then stop trying to perform amateur dentistry on my gift horse,” I said, slumping my shoulders and walking toward the window.
“I thought we decided that saying came from the Trojan horse?”
“We don’t really get to decide these things,” I said, scratching an itch just below my collarbone. “It’s not like we were there for the origin of the saying. I mean, I guess we could ask Janus—” I tugged on the chain to raise the blinds. It wasn’t really a blind, per se—more like a solid window shade that rolled up. When I finished, I looked out through a second shade, this one more like a mesh that blocked light and prevented people from clearly seeing into the room. They probably had a good view of my silhouette, though.
Lake Michigan lay a few blocks away, and I could see it surprisingly well through the screen, down one of the avenues, white caps raging on its surface from the stiff wind blowing off the lake. There were a few buildings between us and the lake, dark towers with black-glassed windows, the occasional lit room in them the only signs of life.
“Looks cold, doesn’t it?” Reed asked, nodding at the window. “And cloudy. Kind of depressing, which was why I left the shades down.”
“I just wanted some natural light,” I said. “And yes, the lake looks cold.” I pondered it for a second. “At least I didn’t end up in it this time. Or naked.”
“What?” Reed had a look of WTF upon his face. The TV was still playing faintly in the background, just noise, a string of jabber.
“Never mind,” I said, and started tugging at the mesh shade’s chain, raising it up. I heard something on the television that made me turn—
“—the first victim, one Dr. Carlton Jacobs, was a noted professor of research on the genetics of humans and metahumans—”
—just as a bullet crashed through the window behind me, hitting me in the side.
I dropped to the ground and yelped in surprise and pain. I threw a hand out and grabbed Reed by the ankle as I came down, shattering the glass coffee table and ripping him off the sofa. “Get down!” I shouted once I had let out my initial cry of pain and had my wits about me again. Wolfe, I said inside my mind.
Working.
“What the hell?” Reed muttered as I dragged him closer to me, under the shade of the wall below the window. I looked up and could see the hole the bullet had made as it entered our hotel room. It was not small, and if I hadn’t moved, it might have ripped my heart out. Could I from heal that? Very possibly, if the shot hadn’t rendered me unconscious from sheer shock, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to try just for kicks.
The sound of glass shattering was followed by the sound of bullets impacting against the wall and the couch that Reed had been sitting on earlier. Stuffing filled the air like we’d walked into a plush animal strip club and some douche-bro was making it rain. Uh … internal organs of the … you know what? Never mind.
I tensed, dust and stuffing wafting through the air, ready to move, and Reed laid a hard hand on my wrist as I started to rise up, prepared to zoom across the distance between us and the shooter. I was going to find them, rip the gun out of their hand, and then thread the barrel into a very uncomfortable orifice for them. It was going to be great.
“Don’t,” Reed said, voice firm.
“I can dodge bullets when I know they’re coming,” I said.
He shook his head and pointed right at the couch. I looked through the stuffing that was starting to settle, and my eyes widened.
Whoever the shooter was, he’d carved a perfect P into the sofa with his shots, only about three inches tall. The nearest tower was at least a hundred yards away, and this guy or gal had done their work with a rifle with much less than a second between shots.
That … was pretty metahuman accuracy.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
“A deadshot,” Reed said, his hand on my shoulder, keeping me down. “Like Diana, remember?”
I remembered Diana. As in Diana, goddess of the hunt. She’d been Reed’s companion in an adventure he’d had in Italy. She was also our old friend Janus’s sister. Her powers were something on the order of extreme muscle control, which made her able to aim a gun so precisely she could just about give a haircut with an Uzi from a mile away. Plugging my stupid ass full of holes as I flew at her would be a breeze. “Shit,” I said.
“Just be glad this assassin’s not using a higher caliber,” Reed said. “They could splatter us right through the brick facade.” He eyed the wall nervously. “Actually, they still could if they wanted to work hard enough for it.”
I pushed him to one side and myself to the other, throwing us apart. Reed slammed into the wall closest to his room; I slammed back-first into the one closest to mine, leaving a fifteen-foot dead space between us. I listened, waiting for the crack of the rifle. “Why don’t you think they’re doing it?”
“A meta just tried to sniper-shoot you in your hotel room,” Reed said, staring at me across the glass-covered floor between us. “When you fought that guy in the tunnel, did you get a sense he was a deadshot?”
“If he’d been a deadshot, I think he would have shot me instead of busted up my jaw,” I said, eyeing the broken window warily. The glass was broken in a nice pattern, but there was still a lot of it framing the edges. This guy had been precise, all right.
“This is someone else, then,” Reed said. “A deadshot could throw a knife and kill you at a distance. He could have capped Carlton Jacobs with a paper clip at ten yards, put it right in his brain.”
“You think our killer is bringing in outside hitters?” I looked up at the broken window. “That’s reassuring.”
“It answers why he
’s not shooting through the wall,” Reed said with a tight smile. “He’ll need to confirm the kill, and it’s kinda impossible to do that through brick.”
“Well, damn,” I said, lying against a baseboard in my own hotel room, not really sure what to do next, “this day just keeps getting better and better.”
“Hell of a last hurrah,” Reed said, smirking slightly from where he lay across the room, and I didn’t have it in me to disagree.
14.
Phinneus
Phinneus Chalke had been wielding guns since before they'd reached their modern form. He’d carried a musket during the American Civil War, when he’d been a Union officer from 1861–1865. The clouds of smoke those things let loose when fired in tandem had been enough to keep anyone from noticing exactly how good he was with one, but he’d done more than his fair share for Uncle Sam during those years. He’d believed in the cause. Freeing the slaves had been a plenty good enough reason for Phinneus to pick up a rifle.
After that he’d gone west, like a lot of the survivors of that war. He’d picked up a Colt Peacemaker and a Winchester 1873 lever action rifle, and had done his part to win the west, establishing a homestead out in Montana territory. It had been quite something, taming the rough and rugged land, dealing with the associated difficulties in placing a homestead in a far corner of the US. He surely wasn’t proud of some of the things he’d done, but he’d done what he’d done, and he didn’t make any apologies for it now.
Settling the west had burned some of the belief out of him. Manifest Destiny hadn’t quite manifested what he’d thought it would, and when the time came to pick up a rifle again, this time in 1917 when the US joined the Great War, Phinneus wasn’t so sure. The lines were less clear on the good he was doing; he’d heard the rumors that there was some behind-the-scenes meta jockeying underlying that particular war, making it a less clean fight than the Civil War had been. But he’d picked up the M1917 American Enfield they’d issued him and done his duty again, this time being noted as one hell of a shooter.
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