by Lee French
“…According to eyewitnesses,” the radio voice told them, “part of the building exploded out a minute or two before the entire structure was engulfed in flames. People were seen jumping out from the second floor, and the area is now swarmed with first responders. Several unconfirmed reports— Hold on, I’m just being handed additional information about this, which is kind of a surprise. Usually with something like this, it’s just a standard…sort…oh my God.” The radio personality left two seconds of dead air, then a commercial started.
Clive reached over and snapped the radio off. “Bobby’s really spilling it all.”
“He said he would. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Bobby over the past few days, it’s that he keeps his word.” Liam let the car go quiet again. The electric engine didn’t even make any noise, leaving them floating down the road in a tense, heavy bubble. After a long pause, he asked, “Can I take you anywhere in particular?”
Clive stared down at the weapon on his lap, one hand idly patting it. “Adelphi.”
Liam regretted asking the question. “I was thinking more of a bar or something.”
“Why? Do you think getting drunk will bring her back?”
“No. It’s just what I could use after all of that. I’ve never healed so many people at once and been so utterly useless at the same time. I couldn’t save your wife, and for that, I’m sorry.”
Clive turned to stare out the window. “I want Privek to…to hurt.”
“I can relate to that.” It was a bad idea, but he got onto the highway that would take them on as much of a roundabout route to Adelphi as he thought he could manage without Clive getting suspicious. Privek probably had that place set up with even more defenses. They’d need backup. Of course, Bobby planned to assault it. They just needed to wait until he got there. A handful of them would probably be able to trash the place in minutes. He remembered the footage from Hill. That’s what happened when a small group of them worked together. This would be a bigger group.
The scenery flashed by. Liam expected Clive to break down and cry at some point. He didn’t. The man struck him as the mild-mannered type, with a boring job he did to pay the bills rather than out of love for it. The way he kept patting the weird gun seemed out of place and disturbing.
Liam’s phone rang as he rolled to a stop for a traffic light at the end of the off-ramp in Adelphi. Glancing at it, he didn’t recognize the number. Once, he would have assumed it unimportant and ignored it. Now, he sighed and answered it, expecting it to shatter his expectations or world yet again. “Hello? ”
“Hi, you don’t know me. My name is Mike.” He spoke in a hushed voice. “I work at White Sands Missile Range, on the Maze Beset Space-Time Anomaly project. I know Sam, and Bobby Mitchell gave me your phone number. He asked me to call you if I wanted to help all of you. This has been my first real chance to do that, and I don’t have long. They just successfully sent a penny through the wormhole and it didn’t collapse. When they shut it down and opened it back up, they got the penny back, along with some other stuff. A little scoop of dirt and plants, maybe some small animals or insects.”
Liam’s heart sped into overdrive. They’d done it. They’d created a wormhole to another world. An insistent horn from the car behind him startled him back into awareness of his surroundings. He flipped off the guy behind him and got the car moving. “Um, okay. Thanks for letting me know. Do you think they’re going to keep trying today, or be sidetracked by studying the dirt?”
“Best guess, they’re going to poke at it for a few hours, then go back to tweaking the machine and try it again as soon as possible.”
“Good to know. I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do to maybe slow them down a little? Like, a day or two, I mean. Not grand sabotage or anything.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I’m already taking a pretty big risk by calling you. Can you tell me something? How’s Sam? Bobby said she was in some kind of jail.”
“She’s okay.” Liam hated lying to strangers. He assuaged his guilt with the knowledge that he’d only lied in one sense—physically, she was okay. Kanik’s gift was all the more horrific for letting his victims remember everything they’d done under his influence. She’d done quite a bit. “We got her out. She’s free. You might want to give her a little time to recover from what happened.”
“Sure, yeah. That’s cool. I’ll just email her and let her know I’m here if she wants to talk or anything. Thanks. Oh, crap, I gotta go. I’ll do whatever I can here.” Mike hung up.
They reached the facility. Liam stopped the car on the street about ten yards from the driveway, acutely aware he had no real way in on his own. “We can wait here for the others. With them—” He stopped because Clive tossed the door open and got out. Liam hit the button to shut the car off and stepped out, too.
Clive pointed the gun at the guard shack and fired. Liam expected a laser beam or some sort of projectile. Instead, the ground trembled and some force churned up and tossed a wide cone of asphalt, dirt, concrete, grass sod, and everything else in front of Clive. The gun pitched upwards in his hands from the recoil. Some kind of shockwave flung the debris at the guard post, crashing into it and ripping it apart.
Liam cringed away instinctively. He also screwed his eyes shut, not wanting to see what happened to the soldier inside. That guy had been doing his job a few days ago, and Liam had blustered their way past him. Now, he probably had been battered to death by one man’s grief.
Looking down at the gun, Clive fiddled with the levers and fired it again. This time, he held it steady. He’d made the cone more precise: narrow, focused, and longer.
“Clive! Stop, you’re going to kill people.” Liam hurried around his car to find the gun pointed at him. “What are you doing? I’m on your side.”
Now, when he’d found the perfect tool to vent his rage, tears streamed down his face. “Leave me alone. You sit in your fancy car and wait for the others. I’m going to take care of this, once and for all.”
Liam raised his hands in surrender and tried to imagine how the other man felt, tried to stand in his shoes. “This isn’t the way, Clive. If you go in there by yourself, you’re going to get killed.” The moment he said the words, he realized that was the plan. “At least try not to hurt anyone else, Clive. They’re just doing their job. Most of them don’t even know what’s going on here. It’s a research facility, not an evil mastermind lair.” How long would it be before the others showed up? He had no idea how long he could keep Clive from rampaging by talking to him.
“Ignorance is no excuse!” Clive shot the gun at the ground between himself and Liam, then turned and ran for the gate.
Wiping his face made things worse, smearing the dirt into his mouth and eyes. He rolled to his hands and knees, coughing and spitting and blinking. Something plastic scraping on the asphalt reminded him that he’d managed to keep his phone in his hand. There had to be someone he could call that would actually be helpful somehow. Paul was dead. Dianna and Brian were dead. Ray had a phone. Andrew had freed him and those three women, so he’d be safe. He’d stayed with Bobby, so he’d also be useful.
“Answer, Ray, pick up. Pick up, c’mon, pick up.” When he really needed them, where were they? Ray picked up on the third ring. “Ray, listen to me. I need help at the Adelphi facility. Whoever can get here fast. No time to explain, just grab whoever can fly and get them here, now.” He hung up without giving the other man a chance to ask questions and hurried over to the guard post.
Picking himself up off the ground, he surveyed the area and caught sight of dust clouds leading deeper into the base. Clive had a plan, apparently, and it included causing a lot of damage. Liam had no way to stop him. Movement at the guard post caught his eye, and he forced his feet to carry him in that direction.
Someone bigger, faster, or stronger would have to stop this. Meanwhile, he’d slog along in Clive’s wake and heal anyone he left alive.
His superpower sucked.
Chapter
16
“You can stand there and try to deny it, but we ain’t special effects, and we ain’t going away.” After only ten minutes of media circus attention, Bobby wanted to smash a camera or shove a microphone someplace unpleasant. A sea of both devices had been shoved at him, their humans jostling and shouting at him to be recognized and have their special question answered. Past them, a fleet of vans with TV station logos blocked them all in.
They’d put on a show already, and kept it up. His left arm being dragons meant every single cameraman had a chance to get a close-up of one. Lizzie let fire dance across her hand and arm and body over and over again. Jayce changed from steel to cloth to concrete and back again and again. Ray held up his shield and changed its size, color, and shape. Stephen lounged in the air, not touching the ground.
With all of that, every reporter asked the same stupid questions.
Someone’s phone buzzed behind him, and he turned to see Ray holding his out, looking to Bobby in question. Bobby nodded. For all he knew, it could be important.
“Are you the leader of all of these ‘superheroes’?”
Someone had already asked that question. He answered it again anyway. “I’m the group spokesdragon.” The loose dragons trilled in glee. While an amused chuckle ran through the small crowd, Ray touched his shoulder.
“Everyone who can fly needs to get to—” Ray looked up at the cameras and microphones. “The other A site. One’s there already, and there’s a problem.”
Not sure what to make of that, Bobby nodded and turned back to the cameras. “Sorry, folks, we got more work to do. Like I said, some of us are still prisoners, and we gotta do what we gotta do to be free. We’ll be available for questions again soon.” Turning away from the reporters, he smirked and waggled his eyebrows at Lizzie and Dan. “Keep ‘em off our back for a minute. Don’t hurt nobody.” The rest, he waved to follow him.
Lizzie squealed with delight and Dan wrapped an arm around her waist. The pair of them would be enough to tie up those reporters for a few minutes. “It’s Adelphi, everybody get there fast as you can. Stephen, take Jayce and get there already. Riker, you guys drive the rest. Ray, if’n you got phone numbers, use ‘em. I’ll round folks up and be there soon as I can.”
Head Cowboy watched in satisfaction as everyone leaped into action without arguing. They’d decided to accept that he had a level head and wouldn’t knowingly lead them into disaster. Even better, no one questioned his suggestions—he delicately avoided admitting the word “orders” fit better—for how to get things done.
He let his dragons peel off for pure showmanship and scattered the swarm. It was a real shame he couldn’t spare the time to ride over with Lily. They had things to talk about.
Chapter 17
Liam coughed on the dust and dirt covering the base in a thick haze as he knelt by a downed soldier and checked his pulse. This one had a concussion that Liam took from him. The one next to him had no life- threatening injuries and already had gotten to his hands and knees. They’d both be fine. He left them both without a word as soon as the splitting headache faded.
Clive still ran rampant, smashing and chewing up walls and vehicles with that weird gun. At odd moments, Liam caught his voice screaming Privek’s name in rage-filled challenge. Then he’d destroy something else, filling the air with more dust, more dirt, and more noise. Eventually, he’d have to stop on his own, too torn up and frustrated to do anything but collapse and weep for his wife. They could all hope so, anyway.
“Liam, what’s going on?”
Looking up to find the source, Liam had to blink several times to understand what he saw. Cant—Stephen, the vampire—dropped down out of the sky, carrying another of them and with some kind of strange, thick cloth thing covering his head and hands. They landed in the shade of a partially destroyed wall. Stephen set the man aside and pulled the cloth off. It shimmered with silver and stood as a person.
He racked his brain for their names and came up blank. Too many names and faces too fast and in the midst of chaos and crisis left him unable to place the two other men. Paul would’ve remembered them.
“It’s Clive. He’s…upset. He has that gun-thing.” Waving his hand around, he hoped they didn’t need any additional explanation. “So far, he hasn’t killed anyone.”
The silver one nodded grimly and ran off. Stephen grabbed the other guy before he could follow and took him by the shoulders. “I know you can control yourself while you’re in wolf mode, Matthew. I know you can. Believe it. If I can keep my blood lust under control, you can tell your wolf to fuck himself. We don’t want to actually hurt anyone, remember that. Hold onto that.”
Matthew nodded, took a deep breath, and curled his hands into fists. “I’m in charge. I run this body, not the wolf. I make the decisions.”
Uncomfortable with overhearing the conversation, Liam turned away to give them the illusion of privacy. Matthew reminded him of Bobby asserting dominance over his dragons. How many of them had that kind of control problem? More than would admit it, probably.
That one word, brother, made him feel a twang of something. As much as Paul’s death left a gaping hole in him, he’d only known the telepath for a couple of weeks. Time, he knew, would have given them inside jokes and shared struggles. They’d complemented each other well enough that he felt confident they would’ve become great friends.
His parents loved him and would do nearly anything for him, and the same for his sister. Elena held his heart so completely, he had no need to wriggle away form her. None of them offered the same thing that Stephen just promised to Matthew. They couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t explain it with words and hope for them to help in the ways he needed. Elena would try, but even she’d fall short.
This sense of family they shared, he realized, explained why Bobby fought for them all, why he was so hell-bent on sacrificing himself to save them all, why he willingly stuck his neck out and risked everything, even for the ones he hadn’t met yet. If he chose to be honest with himself, recognizing that in Bobby had led Liam to give him the benefit of the doubt in the first place. He remembered calling Bobby a dangerous man an eon ago, and although he hadn’t fully grasped it at the time, this was exactly what he meant.
Bending down to check on a man with blood staining his uniform, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and ducked. The silver man sailed through the air and slammed into a wall hard enough to knock a hole through it. Clive must have shot him. That gun had a hell of a punch. He straightened to go check on the silver man when the guy stood up out of the debris and ran back to the fight, unaffected by the impact. Being silver apparently had advantages.
“What happened?” The man with a short length of steel rebar through his thigh groaned and tried to prop himself up on his elbows.
Liam held out a hand to get him to stop moving, because a length of steel rebar had impaled his leg. If he could keep him from seeing it, the guy would never know. “Lie down, you took a knock to the head.” He grabbed the rebar and yanked it out, doing his best to ignore the soldier’s sharp, grunting scream, then put his hand on the leg and healed it. A brand new bloodstain spread on his pants while he clenched his jaws shut to endure the pain.
While he found himself looking off in a random direction, he noticed people stumbling out of one of the partially demolished buildings. They stumbled and flinched away from the sunshine, moving in a shambling, uncoordinated blob. When he noticed that every last one of them held a sheet up to cover their bodies, his eyes flicked to the building. With a jolt, he recognized it. They’d found Elena in that one.
These people had been the ones on the gurneys.
These people each had a superpower.
These people had to be under Kanik’s influence.
His phone chirped with a text. Tearing his eyes away from the sight, he checked the message. It made him want to laugh. Standing this close to a growing mob of potentially hostile people, he didn’t dare.
Chapter 18
Thick haze drew the swarm from miles away. One regular guy with a funky gun sure did manage to wreck up a ruckus. A plume of dirt or smoke shot up into the sky, with several large things flying up, then falling down again. Jayce, Stephen, and Matthew clearly hadn’t been able to stop Clive yet, and they’d had a ten minute head start on him. Violet and Chelsea should arrive with their passengers shortly, too.
Reaching the base, he dropped the swarm down lower to survey the situation. Soldiers moved around, clumping together and checking weapons. That complicated things. He’d been hoping to blow into the base with a distraction timed to provide cover for the evacuation. Of course, he’d been hoping to do this later, after they had a chance to breathe and sketch out a plan. Food would’ve been nice, too.
Moving on, he came across a huge number of people walking around, none of them in uniform. Jayce flew into sight and hit a lamp post, breaking it in half. In the distance, Bobby made out Clive, back to a wall. His face twisted into rage-filled agony, he blasted the gun in every direction, showing off how little time it took to reset between blasts.
Bobby landed where Stephen lurked in the shadows and re-formed. “What’s going on, exactly? ”
“Exactly? I can’t get involved. I’ll burn up. Matthew and Jayce are trying to talk sense to him, but he keeps shooting them for distance with that gun. They can’t get close. Ai could probably take it from him, Dan could get him to put it down. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of options when the others get here. He wants to kill Privek, so far as I can tell.”
“He can get in line,” Bobby growled.
“No kidding. I’d like to throw him off a building, personally. Then maybe catch him and do it again a couple of times before I ‘accidentally’ forget to catch him once.” Stephen sighed wistfully, and Bobby cleared his throat to get him back from revenge fantasyland. “Liam is off in the aftermath someplace, healing the people Clive hurt already. At this point, Clive’s not really harming anyone, so there’s no point in making a grand effort to stop him. Contained is good enough until we can get him without much risk.”
