Fire and Thunder: A Superhero Novel (Sons of Thunder Book 2)

by Bowen Greenwood

  Drake said, “Sebastian, at first, took us to our old base — the one the government raided. That’s when Pitch ditched the Legion for Connor and, of course, to Sebastian that’s Pitch’s crime. That’s why he thought of himself as being the one who would get revenge against Pitch if we found you. But there was nothing there. No one. Just empty desert and memories. So I gave Sebastian a pretty cold stare and told him I could think of one other place where Pitch had committed a crime. That’s when we came to the Star of Fortune and found you — and Connor.”

  Terri shrugged. “None of that tells us who’s the person with a nuclear abnormal ability, or where they are.”

  “Except maybe it does, Terri. To have two prophecies about the same thing at the same time — and both the Legion and the Sons of Thunder wind up at the same place because of it —that place must be significant. And plus, there’s the radiation signature that brought you there.

  “Whoever we’re looking for, they’re probably at what’s left of the Star of Fortune.” He paused for a sigh. “The last place on Earth I want to go.”

  Terri reached over and took his hand.

  “I’ll be with you. Your prophecy only says the chance for vengeance. I’ll help you remember you don’t have to be like that.”

  ***

  Connor’s eyes snapped open and immediately he knew he had overslept. Bright sun poured through his dorm room window, and that meant he had to be hours late for Philosophy 101. Why hadn’t Linc…

  First, he remembered Lincoln Blunt wasn’t his roommate anymore. Then, he remembered the Sons of Thunder, the fight with Sebastian, and nothing after that. What had happened?

  He rolled his head to the side and threw off the thick comforter. He was in his room at the Tower of the Son. To his surprise, Mr. Moses was in there with him, relaxing in the chair by his bed, reading a book.

  “Hello, Mr. Merritt. I’d say good morning, but it’s far from it. How are you feeling?”

  “What happened, Mr. Moses? The last thing I remember I was fighting Sebastian.”

  “Apparently, he clocked you good. Anna and Kila brought you back unconscious. The older Ms. Wales said you had a concussion and some nasty bruises. She healed you right up, of course. Be sure to thank her when you get a chance.”

  Connor bounced to his feet. “Sebastian! I remember now! He had Anna when we showed up. But you say they brought me back here? Good. That means they got away from him. Where is she? I want to hear how it worked out.”

  Mr. Moses replied, “Easy, Mr. Merritt. Ms. Wales said you needed to rest. Apparently you got punched harder than usual.”

  “Yeah, but it can’t hurt to just talk to Anna. Where is she?”

  Mr. Moses sighed. “She and the Wales sisters went out with Kila to find Pitch — the reason you and Kila went out in the first place. Please at least sit down and listen to me before you rush off headlong into danger.”

  Connor choked down his desire to say “Make it quick” or something like that. Patiently, he let Mr. Moses fill him in. Objectively, he knew the knowledge might help. But waiting stretched every nerve in his body. It hurt to know Anna was out there in danger while he sat comfortably in his bedroom.

  Chapter 21

  From her apartment, Terri produced a satchel of Geiger counters and other scientific gear. She gave them to Drake to carry as they returned to the parking lot of the Star of Fortune. The derelict hotel seemed almost naked without bright lights and a parking lot full of hopeful gamblers. Like most major Vegas casinos, it rivaled small towns in size. Built on hundreds of acres, walking from one end to the other became an unpleasant saga when the desert sun rose to its noontime power.

  All that space now held almost nothing living. No cars stuffed the parking lot to bursting. No tourists thronged through the front doors to try their luck on the slots. Only as the coffee shop where they met came into view in the distance did they finally see a few people. Between them and the cafe, an empty parking garage sat off to the side. The tinted glass exterior of the casino itself remained forlorn and unkissed by electric lighting.

  Drake’s eyes instinctively went up to the blasted out top floor. There “empty and dark” failed to describe the exterior. Shattered glass opened on a dark interior of damaged structural girders. Between Pitch’s heaving furniture around and Hope’s liquefying half the floor, destruction ruled the restaurant at the top of the Star. The damage and financial losses had reached such a level that the entire casino had had to close.

  With a jerk, he pulled his eyes away. The past. The pain and loss of Hope stalked around the edges of his consciousness, growling to be let in. Was he being disloyal by building a relationship with Terri? Would Hope approve? Futile questions and yet, while he stared at the devastation at the top of the Star of Fortune, they demanded answers.

  All the anger at Pitch came back full-force. Yes, Sebastian gave the orders. Yes, it was his ideology that drove the entire thing. But Pitch was the one who won that fight — without him, Sebastian and Kila could never have overcome Hope and him. Pitch was the one who got the order at the end — take her out in the desert and kill her.

  Pitch was the one who obeyed.

  Terri distracted him, digging into the olive-drab canvas bag slung over his shoulder. “I need to fine-tune some of my instruments,” she said. “Before the mugging, I tracked the signal in the general direction of the building itself. It may be inside, or it may be in the parking garage. Once I get the counter dialed in, that should tell us for sure.”

  Drake nodded. He stared at her. Not that she said anything weird; he just needed something to stare at. Otherwise, he feared sinking beneath a rising tide of emotion.

  Unfortunately, as Terri and Drake turned the corner into the parking garage, they spotted the very man Drake couldn’t pull his thoughts away from.

  Pitch stood on one side of a group of four people, Kila on the other. Two red-haired girls occupied the center of the group — they looked similar enough to be sisters. One of them, Drake recognized. He had caught a glimpse of her that morning as she had pulled Connor Merritt away from the fight.

  That one began the conversation. “Ms. Jackson. If you told us you hung out with the Legion, we could have saved a lot of time trying to teach you about gifts. Why did you lie?”

  Terri dropped her Geiger counter and backed away. “It’s not like that! I—”

  Accusing Terri of lying? Put that on top of the sight of Pitch and being at the place where Hope died? Drake lost control almost at once.

  A fireball blazed right at Pitch’s head before Terri’s explanation could go any further.

  Pitch threw himself to the ground to dodge it. At the same time, Kila shouted, “Wait, Drake!”

  Too late. Another fireball flew at the place where Pitch laid face-first on the ground. At the last minute, he rolled to his side, escaping by the narrowest of margins.

  Terri added her voice to the cacophony of shouts and sizzles, but Drake didn’t hear — maybe he didn’t want to.

  The younger of the redheads — teleporting girl, Drake didn’t know her name — charged at him, launching herself into a flying kick as soon as she drew near enough. Drake stepped to the side to dodge it, only to realize the older girl had come to her sister’s aid. She arrived just in time for Drake’s move and swung her foot backward in a heel kick. It caught him in the back. He grunted in pain and stumbled forward a step or two before turning to face his assailant.

  “This isn’t your fight, whoever you are,” he said. “This is between me and Pitch. He killed the woman I love. The bill for that comes due today. So why don’t the rest of you just teleport out of here?”

  The young women held their fists in a low guard position, not quite covering their faces. Inexperienced fighters, Drake judged.

  “That’s the old Pitch,” the older one said. Her hair was a lighter shade of red. “He turned his back on that life. You can, too.”

  Drake answered her with the hottest fireball he could throw — a
boiling pustule of superheated gas heading right toward her head.

  She ducked, dropping into a crouch with her hands covering her head as the burning projectile singed off a few hairs, then she exploded up and forward. She caught Drake around the midriff in a tackle, throwing him down to the pavement. She grabbed him by the straps of his tank top and opened her mouth to speak.

  Before she could, Drake saw her pulled back from him slightly. Terri had her by the back of her T-shirt, pulling her away.

  “Don’t hurt him!” she cried.

  Drake rolled out from under his attacker and scrambled to his feet. Just in time! He saw the younger redhead charging at Terri. She cried out, “Don’t touch my sister!”

  Drake felt just as strongly about her not touching Terri. He let fly with a ball of fire that hit the red-haired girl right in her midsection. She screamed and stopped in mid-charge, swatting at herself, trying to put the flames out. Her clothing caught fire, and she dropped to the ground, rolling around.

  Drake started toward Terri and her opponent, only to find Kila trying to wrap him in a bear hug from the back.

  “We don’t have to fight, Drake! I’ve learned a better way since I left the Legion. Please! Let’s calm down and talk!”

  He twisted his arm to get it under hers and prepare her for a judo throw straight over him from the back. But Kila was gone before he even moved. Drake blinked in confusion until he remembered the first rule of Chojin Ken: Don’t fight with your fists if you can fight with your powers. Kila knew the future. She must have seen what he had planned and had pulled away.

  In the background, the girl he’d set on fire still cried for help.

  He twisted to face Kila, shouting, “Now you don’t want to fight? Hope never wanted to fight you, but you made her fight. You and Sebastian and Pitch. You forced us to fight. I’m not going to give you any more choice than you gave her!”

  “That was Sebastian’s idea, not mine!”

  Drake threw a big, sweeping crescent kick at her head. When she stepped back, he flung a fireball at her, which she also dodged.

  “You were just following orders, is that it? You don’t get off that easy, Kila. You should be glad it’s just me you’re fighting. If Hope were still alive, she’d murder you. I just want to hurt Pitch a little bit, but Hope swore to kill every last one of you—”

  He froze partway through the sentence, his mouth hanging open in mid-word. His right leg, lifted for a kick, dropped comically back to the ground. Crystal clear, in the way Kila had always described her visions, he saw a very different scene from the one before him. But it wasn’t the future. It was the past.

  Hope held in midair by Pitch’s telekinetic grip. Her face contorted into a rage he had never known from her. Her fists thrashing violently as she tried to get her hands on any of her tormentors. And that burning, enraged voice he hated to remember:

  “I’ll kill every last one of you, I swear it!”

  Like the wheels on a slot machine, the facts fell into place.

  Kila was here.

  Pitch was here.

  And Sebastian and Spooky lurked nearby, waiting for Drake to draw out their enemies.

  A nuclear weapon would kill everything for miles.

  Hope’s words about why she loved her science major: “The only hard part about making a nuclear bomb is getting the plutonium. The rest is just physics.”

  And lastly, in his mind’s eye, Drake remembered Hope holding a common stone chipped out of a mountain cave, transforming it before his eyes into gold.

  Terri was wrong. There was no new person with nuclear destruction as her power.

  She wasn’t new, and her power wasn’t nuclear. It was just that getting plutonium was the only hard part of making a nuclear weapon. The rest was just physics.

  And Hope’s power allowed her to create any substance she wanted.

  “Oh no.”

  ‘If Hope were still alive… Hope swore to kill every last one of you.’

  He whispered it like a talisman.

  “No no no.”

  Chills broke out over his body and ran through him. Goosebumps tingled on his skin.

  Drake drew himself to his full height and turned to face Pitch. His face twisted into a mask of rage as he screamed, “You liar! How could you let me go so long without telling me?”

  Then he spun away on his heel, shouting, “No, Hope! No!”

  Drake turned and ran from the fight. He put the redheads and Pitch and even Terri behind him as fast as he could, racing for the barred doors of the Star of Fortune. A jet of his hottest flame melted the glass as he neared. Drake raced into the condemned, decrepit, old tower, shouting, “No, Hope!”

  Chapter 22

  Renee completely ignored Terri and Kila. She sprinted the few yards between her and Anna, slid to her knees beside her, and grabbed her hand. Anna still sobbed, weakly swatting at flames no longer there.

  “Oh Lord, I need you now more than ever. Please heal her. Please heal my sister.”

  The bottom half of Anna’s shirt was gone, burned away, leaving a singed, ragged border over her navel. Renee watched, feeling the wonder she still felt, no matter how many times she saw it. The raw, red flesh seemed to shimmer and become blurry. When her eyes worked right again, Anna was whole. She was healed.

  Terri barely even noticed Renee and Anna. Her distraught face turned to look after Drake as he disappeared into the derelict building.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Renee lifted her shoulders up and down. “I don’t know. I’d like to know more about what you’re doing, though. When last I saw you, I thought you were an innocent civilian we saved from a mugging. Now I find you hanging out with the Legion and unpacking all kinds of electronic equipment. Care to elaborate?”

  “Drake’s not like the rest of the Legion.”

  Renee set her eyes very deliberately on the scorch marks all around them from fireballs. She looked at Anna.

  “You can’t tell it from how he acts.”

  “You can when he’s not around you people! Or at least, when he’s not around…”

  She looked over at Pitch, then quickly looked away and let her sentence trail off.

  “When he’s not around me,” Pitch finished. He sighed and looked down at his feet. “He has every right.”

  Renee said, “Pitch, Kila told us a bit about your history with Drake. You know God forgives. It’s going to be alright.”

  Terri cut in sharply. “No, it’s not! Drake just ran off into a structurally unsound abandoned skyscraper. He could be killed. He could fall through a floor or something. We have to help him!”

  Renee said, “She does have a good point. Not so much about helping him, but at least about wondering what’s going on. Why did he suddenly run in there?”

  Anna answered, “When he left, he kept saying ‘No hope’ over and over again. I don’t know about what, though. No hope for winning a fight against all three of us?”

  “No.”

  The word came from Pitch. He made a conscious effort to improve his posture and stepped forward. He squeezed his hands into fists and set his jaw.

  “That’s not what he said. Not ‘No hope.’ I…I can hardly believe what he did say. It doesn’t make sense, but I have to find out if he’s right. I’m going in there. I have to. I have to deal with my past. Kila, if I don’t come back, tell Spooky something about how I felt.”

  As they shouted after him, Pitch walked away from his friends into the abandoned Star of Fortune.

  ***

  Together, they watched Pitch walk into the remains of the Star of Fortune. Then, all the young women turned to face each other.

  Renee spoke first. “At some point, Terri, you’re going to have to explain yourself.”

  Being about the same age, the older Wales sibling didn’t feel bound by Mr. Moses’s rules about addressing elders by their title.

  “I…” Terri sighed and tried again. “I’m a Special Agent with the Abnormal Abilities Ag
ency. I know I should have told you that when I was with you this morning, but I was trying to investigate.”

  “What’s a Special Agent — Oh, no.”

  Anna and Terri turned to look at what had drawn Renee’s attention. From the direction of the coffee shop, uniformed police officers ran toward them. In the distance, the sound of a helicopter grew louder.

  Terri said, “Drake’s fireworks got their attention. Now what do we do?”

  Renee shot back, “We? They’re your people. Why would you worry?”

  “Look, I’m not… I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. You three go and make sure Drake’s OK. I’ll hold off the agents as long as I can. Please. I know you don’t trust me or him yet, but just don’t hurt him. If you all really believe what you say you believe, you won’t hurt him.”

  ***

  Drake ran through the Star of Fortune looking for an emergency staircase. No lights shone in the building. Only sunlight from outside drifted in through the windows. The deeper he ran inside, the dimmer it became. Most of the casino floor stretched empty like a desert. The green felt tables of yore long since encountered their destiny on the auction block, sold to other casinos. The slot machines and video poker games had met the same fate. Only a few broken blackjack tables leaned against one wall, legs missing, unfit for the fire sale.

  The Star of Fortune was a rotting husk. With the damage they had done in their fight, Hope, Pitch, Drake, and the others had truly killed it. The once-bright carpets faded toward gray with the dust of demolition ground into their fibers. Opulence turned apocalypse.

  Drake barely cared. He knew there had to be a fire exit somewhere. Every hotel in the world displayed signs advising their guests to use the stairs instead of the elevator in case of fire. The Star of Fortune must follow the same rules. Somewhere in here, he knew an emergency staircase waited for him.

  He found it near the center of the building where sunlight from outside was weakest. He could barely see the old, unlit exit sign.