The oxygen returned shortly and I felt my head start to clear. My eyes narrowed against the wind and I felt a seething rage. I could still see the Atlas, clawing at the stump of his leg. He was probably out of action for the moment. Probably. Which still left me with the Rudra and Amaterasu.
I could still feel the cold chills that the Rudra had given me with those disease arrows, whatever they were. I flew hard left and took myself out of the center of their sky, hoping they hadn’t seen me. I came low, around the corner of the warehouse, and saw them both near the wreckage of the town car. Amaterasu had Janus slung over her shoulder, and I didn’t have to wonder very hard where the agents were that I’d sent with him. I could see at least one corpse near the wreckage of the car, blood seeping across the pavement.
Rudra and Amaterasu looked deep in conversation. They were heading back to the warehouse. Amaterasu’s clothing was torn and burned where she’d used her powers. She wasn’t even bothering to look around; I guess she figured I’d run off after the fight. Which made sense, because she probably thought my recovery time from the injuries she’d dealt was best measured somewhere in hours or days, not seconds.
It was going to be the last mistake she ever made.
I sped sideways, looping around them at top speed. Within seconds I was directly behind them. They were spaced just far enough apart that I couldn’t get them both in one, but that was okay. I didn’t want it to be all that quick, honestly.
I sent myself to high velocity and flying side kicked Rudra from behind at top speed. I landed the blow at the small of his back and heard the compression from impact break vertebra all the way up the line before he flew forward as if I’d hit him with a semi truck. I didn’t know if I’d killed him, but I’d definitely put him out of the fight, and that was enough for the moment.
I spun on Amaterasu and she dropped Janus like he was nothing. Which he wasn’t. He was actually either a hostage or an impediment to her fighting, depending on how you looked at it; it seemed her instincts ran to defending herself before thinking to barter with the life of the man I’d come here to rescue. I could respect that.
I mean, I was still going to kill her, but I’d at least try to make it quick.
She started to flare and I interrupted her with a punch to the face that would have put a hole in concrete. I actually felt my knuckles break upon impact, but Wolfe knitted them back together for me as I followed up with an inside elbow to the back of her head. It would have killed a human, but it just knocked her to her knees.
I saw the glow start on her skin again, and I kicked her in the chest hard enough to send her flying a few paces away. It was a sloppy kick on my part, rushed, but it killed the glow for a moment. Mom would definitely not have approved of the technique, but I was all about getting the job done at this point.
“Aldkngh ahhawa—” She said, her jaw moving unnaturally, as she got back to her knees.
“Can’t understand you,” I said, launching into a kick that hit her in the sternum and sent her flying. That one wasn’t sloppy. I could hear her ribs break upon impact. All of them, maybe.
Amaterasu lay flat on her back on the pavement, head hanging half off the curb onto the street. We’d been battling in the dirt of a vacant lot outside the warehouse, but now we were on the street beside it. She was bleeding from a half dozen different places—eyes, nose, mouth, assorted cuts—and her eyes were glazed. I sauntered over to her, trying to be a little cautious and not just cocky. Probably failed at the latter.
“Hey there, bright lady,” I said, and grabbed her by the slightly charred remains of her blouse. I lifted her up and was surprised at how light she was. I hadn’t noticed how thin she was while she was trying to kill me. Probably because she’d blinded me. “I’d say, ‘Let’s talk,’ but I think your jaw is broken and will be for a while, so why don’t you just—”
She went from dazed to focused in less than the space of a second. Her hands leapt up and landed on both sides of my head, clapping me hard. Not hard enough to break anything but hard enough to jostle me. I kept my grip on her, even though I stumbled, and met her gaze. Her eyes were glowing bright, and her skin was already pulsating with a soft light.
“Frckng diiii—” she started to say, blood running down her chin and boiling as it ran. I got the meaning before she finished.
I spun and threw her, as hard as I could, toward the entry door to the warehouse. I was only thirty yards away, and she impacted just inside the threshold. I could see her, still glowing, as her body struck the ground and rolled inside.
I dove for the pavement, burying my face in the half inch of cover below the curb. I doubted it was going to give me much to work with, but I wasn’t that big and—
I forced my eyes shut as the glow of a dying sun lit up the warehouse. I wondered if this was what it felt like at ground zero of a nuclear bomb, and I smelled something an awful lot like flesh burning. My face was pressed into the dirt of the gutter, the grains of individual sand burning and scorching my cheek as I lay there. Even through my shut eyes, I felt like I was staring into a sunny sky, the red cast of the blood running through my eyelids visible as I lay there. I held my breath and felt the hairs in my nose catch fire, the inside of my sinuses feeling like someone had lit a Q-tip and shoved it up there, twirling it as they went.
After painful seconds that flowed like hours, the burning passed, the brightness died away. My throat felt raw, like I’d screamed while gargling acid. I pulled a hand up and felt my face. Cracked and burned skin greeted my touch, and I felt for my long, brown hair. It was gone.
Working on it, Little Doll, Wolfe said calmly.
I felt the flesh pucker under my touch, felt it smooth after another few moments, and felt my breathing return to normal. I opened my eyes and looked up in time to watch strands of newly grown hair fall down in front of me. I brushed them back behind my ears and stood haltingly, like I was taking my first steps.
My clothing was burned all the way around. One of my boots was just gone—the left one, the one closest to the warehouse. I felt something insanely hot still in my other boot and shook out of it. I glanced down to see my backup pistol, my Walther PPK/S, melted into a silvery piece of slag. I sighed and mentally billed the Agency for another.
I stood in my bare feet, glancing down at my body. I had enough clothing still intact—but scorched—to be considered legally decent on most American beaches. But that was about it. It looked like I’d gone incredible Hulk, and all that was left was the tatters, except it was all ashy and scorched. Plus I was pale, pearly white, not green.
The warehouse was no more. There were still some girders half-standing, but they looked slagged in a major way, like they’d been melted down at the top. Some of them were bowed and falling, like wax instead of steel. There was very little fire in the aftermath, just a few places where combustible things had caught, presumably.
I looked over to where I’d left Janus. He’d been a little farther from the explosion than I’d been when last I’d seen him.
He was gone. Utterly gone.
The green weeds that had sprung up in the years of neglect of the vacant lot were completely vaporized, and I saw some of the sand had turned to glass. I cast my gaze to the next nearest thing, the Atlas that had been lying like a wall across the lot where I’d dropped him.
And I wished I hadn’t.
He was scorched and shrunken—well, not really shrunken. He looked like a twelve-foot tall mummy that had gotten really burned. The skin was coal black, the hair was gone completely, and if he survived I’d have been so shocked—
Then he moved.
I stood there, gaping. A huge chunk of what had been muscle flaked off his shoulder as the body rolled over, and I realized something was underneath him.
Janus.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the former Omega operative crawled from beneath the giant corpse. He looked badly burned, but alive. Half his face was red and broken.
But he was alive.
I hurried over to him and he waved me off with a hand. “Don’t … touch me …” he said. His wire frame glasses were gone, and there was congealed blood running through his grey mustache.
“I need to get you to medical assistance,” I said, and started to bend down to him.
“I think I will live,” he said, fixing me with a gaze that held just the faintest hint of amusement, “provided you do not rip this piddly remainder of a soul from my body in the next few moments.”
I glanced down and remembered that, oh, yeah, I wasn’t wearing much in the way of flesh covering for my extremities. And apparently I’d forgotten that my primary power was to drink people like a cold can of Pepsi on a hot day. “Sorry,” I said.
He waved a hand, and when he spoke again, he sounded choked. “It is nothing to worry about. It seems I found a use for a Century operative at last.”
I chuckled, then again, then felt the inescapable sense of dirge-like mirth flowing from me in fits and starts. I laughed, loud, and long, equal parts sorrow and sickness and gallows humor. And I only got quiet as I heard the sirens of ambulances approaching, growing louder as they came, the heralds reminding me that the crisis was far, far from over.
Chapter 32
“Well, that went well,” Reed said through the open window of the town car as he rolled up to the curb at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. Scott was beside him in the passenger seat, and thankfully the backseat was clear. I got in and shut the door, my hospital gown fluttering behind me. I was so sick of these things.
“Yeah, it was great,” I said as I gathered my gown behind me. I had left against medical advice, and the one security guard who’d given me a look as I left had been convinced to sit his ass back in his chair with a single glare. I guess he figured it wasn’t worth it. “We lost our only lead to what Century’s planning in Minneapolis, landed Janus in the hospital, and were responsible for three square blocks worth of destruction to the city.” I rubbed my temples. “I’m sure that’s going to be another lovely addition to my record when it’s made public. Then I’ll get to watch the news as they burn my skin off in the not-literal way.”
“No other deaths, near as we can tell,” Reed said, voice shot through with sympathy. “The warehouse was isolated, the shock wave was powerful but localized. Didn’t do much once it got past a block or so of distance, and it looks like the warehouse helped absorb the heat in every direction but the one you were in.”
“If only I could have gotten that door closed after I chucked her in,” I said, leaning my head back against the leather seat. Amaterasu had been one hell of a tough one. “I have to admit, I didn’t see these Century dicks going suicidal in such a big way when they lost.”
“Yeah, you must have really pissed her off,” Scott said, glancing back at me. He had the puppy dog eyes on, too, which normally I might have found annoying. Now I thought it was kind of acceptable. Kind of.
“Of course I did,” I said. I could still smell the ash on my skin. I doubted it was something a shower would immediately cure. “It’s me we’re talking about, after all. Pissing people off is what I do.”
“That and killing them,” Reed agreed. “You couldn’t have left one of them alive for questioning?”
“I did,” I said. “I left several alive. Rudra, I think, barely. The Atlas. And that lady with powers like Gavrikov.” I cleared my throat. “Unfortunately, Amaterasu did not share my enthusiasm for taking prisoners.” After I’d made sure Janus was okay, I’d walked the area around the incineration site. Lady Gavrikov was still looking bisected where I’d left her, missing an arm and covered in scorched skin. Rudra hadn’t looked very structurally sound, either, so I’d nudged him with a toe. He’d flaked into ash. He’d been awfully close to the building when it went up, though.
“What about our agents?” Scott asked.
“Dead,” I said simply. I paused for a moment. “What were their names?”
“Baker and Hanlon,” Reed replied. Neither of them looked back at me.
I sighed and looked out the window as brick buildings passed on my right. “When this is all over, if I have any sway left, we’re going to build a wall—a monument—to all the people who died trying to stop this moronic genocide of Sovereign’s.”
“I don’t even know how much of this you can blame on him at this point,” Scott said, shaking his head. “They tried to kill you again, didn’t they?”
“They did indeed,” I said idly, still staring out the window.
“Seems they’re in out-and-out defiance of him now, then,” Scott said. He let that sink in for a second. “Maybe you ought to think about talking to him, let him know—”
“I’m sure he knows already,” I said. “He’s a telepath, and a pretty powerful one. If he doesn’t know what happened here, I’d be shocked.” I folded my arms over the soft cloth of my robe. “If he wants to denounce what his people are doing, he knows my number.”
We lapsed into silence, and I stared out the window again. I didn’t want to think too hard about Sovereign right now. What Scott had said was too sensible, made me feel like I’d be weak for even asking him.
And whatever else was happening, I couldn’t look weak in front of him. Not now. There was too much at stake to play this in a way that made it seem like I was willing to come to him.
Instead, I settled back in the seat and tried to plan my next move. And blissfully, they were both too courteous to break that silence—all the way back to the Agency.
Chapter 33
We rolled up to the Agency and I had them take me to the dorms. I wasn’t going to bother going through the elaborate trouble of working my way there through the basement of headquarters and through the tunnel just so I could expose my nearly naked ass to all the security guys waiting in the lobby of that building at the checkpoint. I needed to maintain some of my dignity, at least.
The dorms had been in lockdown for days. Reed pulled up in the loop outside the building and I hopped out, taking care to keep the back of my gown tightly shut. I might have tried to convince the nurses to let me keep the remainder of my burned ensemble, but it had actually started to deteriorate minutes after I arrived at the hospital, losing structural integrity shortly after they got me to my own room. Too much of it got turned to ash, I guess. The gown was all I had.
I shuffled toward the front entrance, Scott trailing behind me. When I glanced back at him, he smiled. “Sorry,” he said, “just admiring the view.”
“I invite you to kiss my ass,” I said. “Which, thanks to this hospital gown, is easily accessible.”
He let a low guffaw which I ignored as I stopped at the biometric scanner next to the door. Heavy metal shutters covered the entire front of the dormitory building. I started to lean down to stick my face into the retinal scanner, but I felt my gown part at the slightest hint of bending over.
“Here, I got it,” Scott said, and I felt the tug of a hand clamping the gown shut.
“Thanks,” I said, putting my eyes to the scanner. “Trying to hold that and give a palm scan was going to be awkward.”
I heard the beep of confirmation as the scanner agreed that I was Sienna Nealon, and the shutters rose over the doors and windows with a series of clanks. I waited until they’d finished and stepped through the glass doors into the dormitory foyer.
It was spacious and well designed but still had lingering scorch marks on the once-white walls, and more bullet holes than I could count. It had been the site of a nasty battle, one which I had won but not without significant cost. I tried to ignore all that as I strode toward the elevator, pausing only to hit the button on the security console to initiate lockdown once more.
“I think I like this place better with the windows open,” Scott said as the security shutters dropped and the sunlight disappeared behind the darkened shades.
“I do too,” I said as I paused at the elevator. “But I also like that I don’t have to worry about getting flanked through it.”
; Scott was quiet for a minute. “Easier not to worry about those British metas, huh?”
I thought about Karthik and how he had departed with the last of our protectees, a group of metas who couldn’t really fight effectively for themselves, for London only days earlier. “It’s easier,” I said. “Now that they’re out of sight and I don’t have to worry about protecting them, I can care even less if this building gets violated, security-wise.”
“Yeah,” Scott said, nodding, his face pursed with a certain amount of evident sarcasm. “Why not, right? We only live here, after all.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, we do. But we’re the only ones now—us and Reed and Kat and Janus.” And Ariadne and Zollers … “Maybe I should clear some room on the second floor of headquarters for us to live for the time being. Might be safer.”
“Heh.” Scott just shook his head. “Honestly, if Sovereign or Century comes gunning for us, do you really think being sixty seconds of run time away is going to save us?”
“It might keep us from mounting a defense effectively,” I said and stared at him. “It might be the difference between beating them and having more people die, yeah.” My mind was running through the possibilities now. We’d set up to live in the dorms when there had been good cause to—we’d had metas to protect over here and not enough space to house them in headquarters. Now that those other metas were gone, that need was out the window, but we’d failed to revisit it in our recent meetings because … well, let’s face it, there was a hell of a lot to think about. “We should do it immediately. Go tell Ariadne.”
Scott’s face scrunched up. “How do you think she’s going to react to being told she’s going to lose her private bathroom in favor of the communal showers we’ve got in the HQ locker rooms?”
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