“This isn’t real.” My words slurred, like I was drunk.
“What is real?” Winter said in that low voice. I hadn’t heard him speak in years, and I hadn’t missed it. “Is life real? Matter, real? Liquid, solid, gas? Are any of them really real?”
“You’re leaning pretty hard on the ‘gas’ part of it right now, arentcha?” I asked, being just as much of a smarty to him dead as I would have been in life. But with less face punching. I never really did get to face-punch him to my heart’s content. “As in filling the air with your useless gas.”
“There was a time when you listened to every word I said,” he turned, exposing his back so invitingly to me, “searching for the truth and meaning as though all of it were a revelation handed down from above.”
“You pining for the good old days when I respected you?” I stood my ground but my knees felt weak. “Maybe you shouldn’t have killed—”
“I did not kill anyone.” Winter turned, piercing blue eyes as shocking in their cerulean as if they’d been CGI’d into a White Walker’s eye. “You did.”
“Oh, screw you,” I said in disgust. “I’m arguing with a specter. A dead man who doesn’t seem to know he’s dead.”
“Of course I am dead,” he said. “You killed me as well.”
“If only,” I said with false regret. “Sovereign pulled your card. I didn’t much regret him turning you into a human flambé, though. The smell was a bit much—”
“You are responsible,” he said, as forbidding in death as he ever had been in life.
“Uh huh,” I said. “I’m totally responsible for you holding my boyfriend against my skin until he died, and I’m also responsible for you getting flash fried by a supervillain. Okay. Sure. Let’s go with that.”
“Don’t you know?” I turned my head at the sound of the voice behind me. “You’re responsible for everything.”
“Sarah,” I said, watching the dark-haired woman walk into sight behind me. It was surreal seeing her here in the ruins of the old directorate, which looked way different from the agency in all the tiny details. “Of course you’d show up to taunt me now, when I’m hallucinating.”
“You’re almost of sound mind,” Sarah said, easing into the room. I couldn’t tell whether I was imagining her or if she was effing with my mind from within the room, honestly. My stomach was quivering, though, and the nausea had followed me.
“You’re messing with my head and accusing me of diminished capacity,” I said. “Nice. There’s an irony there.”
“And you’re all about the irony, aren’t you?” Brant asked, appearing behind me. I jumped and backed away from him, but I was unintentionally caught between the three of them in a sort of rough triangle. The way he spoke, that strange accent I’d been hearing was creeping back into his words.
“I do find it fun to play with,” I said, trying to figure out how to put my back against a wall.
“No one else finds it fun when you do it,” Sarah said, standing there with arms folded. “We’re all tired of it.”
“And you’ve only known me a few days,” I said, “imagine how people who have known me longer feel about it.”
“They can’t stand you,” she said, dark eyes boring in on mine. “No one can. It’s why you’re alone now.” It did hurt, even though I knew she meant it to, because it had the ring of truth to it. “And let’s face it, no one sticks around you very long because of it.”
“You drive away everyone you don’t kill,” Brant agreed, doing that voice thing again. It was driving me nuts, like an itch in the back of my head that I couldn’t reach to scratch.
“But you kill most,” Winter said.
“Man,” I said, “this is fun. I should do this more often. Come to confession with the dead,” I nodded to Winter, “and those I’m soon to kill. Good times.”
“You have no idea.” Another voice entered the picture, causing me to whip my head around yet again. This time it was Z, and I was prepared for him. Because of course they’d add another log to this particular fire, now that it was already burning hot and painful.
“Oh, boy, it’s Zebulon,” I said. “Yay for Zebulon, and that awful name. How much did your parents hate you?”
“My parents loved me,” he said, completing the little circle around me. Now I was surrounded literally as well as figuratively, in this dream as well as this town. “You’d have known that if you’d ever met them.”
“If I’d ever met them?” I blinked at him. His hat was gone, his blondish hair styled in a very … very familiar way. “Sorry, I don’t guess I care to meet the parents of strangers. My stomach was gnawing at me again, but this time it was different. This time, it wasn’t the nausea, it was a sense that something else was wrong. A sense that I was about to have the rug jerked out from beneath me again.
I hated this feeling of exposure, this circle of heaping judgment being thrown at me. I wanted to protect myself, to find a wall to put my back against.
Sarah noticed my discomfort first. “You want to run, don’t you?” She seemed to derive a grim satisfaction from it, lips twisted in bitter triumph. I’d seen that look before.
“Not so much run,” I said, “as put my back to the sea and take you all on until you’re dead.”
“She’s got a real fire in her,” Brant said. He ran his fingers over his upper lip, playing with his mustache.
“You have no idea,” I said, thinking how much fun it’d be to have Gavrikov to unleash right at this moment.
“Must be nice,” Z said, dragging my head around to look at him again, “to live without the guilt of those you’ve left dead in your path.”
“Well,” I said, readying myself in case Winter decided to say something suitably prickish next, “it’s hard to feel guilty when you’ve killed so many classy people. Like, for example, the entirety of Century, a band who was trying to take over the world.” I had a feeling I knew, now, where they were coming from, and it was time to start drawing them out with smartassed jabs. If I could figure out their angle, I could maybe goad them into making a mistake. After all, taunting and witticisms were a power that they couldn’t take away from me.
“How noble,” Sarah said. “But you know they’re not the only people you’ve killed.”
“You’re right,” I said continuing my fishing expedition, “there was also Omega, a criminal organization of metas that wanted to squeeze the world for all it was worth. I might have killed a few of them as well. Were any of them your mommies and daddies?” I made my faux sad-face for them. “Because if so … I’m not sorry.”
“Your victims are legion,” Winter said.
“The trail of human death you’ve left behind you is staggering,” Z said.
“The cost in lives abundant,” Brant said, and now I knew that I was delusional if they were all talking as one voice in one steady sequence.
“And you—” Sarah started, but I headed her off by throwing myself at her with all the strength I had left.
I passed right through her like she was a cloud. I hit the ground and rolled, coming up on my feet and feeling the weakness of my body as my intestines quivered at the movement, threatening upheaval once more.
Sarah’s form was blurry, insubstantial, the colors of her body and clothing dissipated like a cloud blown by a strong wind. I watched as she pulled herself back together, the black leather jacket first, the dark hair gaining focus and coherence as she reconstituted. Her face remained blurred, though, even after her body had reformed, and she stared at me through the only feature that was sharp—those blue-green eyes, filled with a fury that was obvious even without a mouth to compliment it.
“You little fool,” she said, “as if you could kill me.”
“I hope you don’t think I’ll stop trying just because you vanished on me once,” I said. “Because I tend to get a lot of people who tell me that I can’t kill them, and I just keep proving them wrong.”
“You can’t kill me,” she said, shaking her head.
<
br /> “And so says half the other people I’ve killed.” I made a fake yawn. “I’m way past tired of it.”
“You can’t kill me, either,” Brant said, drawing my gaze back him. I blinked when I saw him; his face had gone blurry like Sarah’s.
“Nor me,” Z said, and I looked, knowing what I’d find: the same thing, his face was featureless, like it was vibrating so fast I couldn’t discern any of the detail.
“Really?” I tried to sound unimpressed, but the truth was … this was new. I mean, I was still going to find a way to kill them, but it was at least kinda different. “Why is that?”
“Because,” Sarah said, “you cannot kill—”
“—what—” Brant continued.
“—is already dead,” Z said, and his face was suddenly clear as if someone had wiped the glass in front of it clean.
I felt my knees lose the last of their strength, and I caved to them, barely noticing the pain.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears, the drum sound of doom, fear, horror.
Z …
I whipped my eyes around to Brant and saw him clearly, now, with the clarity that had been missing before.
Brant …
I spun my head to look at Sarah, already knowing what I’d find, and horrified when she was there, looking down on me, just the same as she had countless times in my life, with that look of utter contempt and coldness.
Brant was Breandan Duffy, my friend.
Z … was Zack Davis, my first love.
And Sarah was Sierra Nealon … my mother.
“You can’t kill what is already dead, daughter mine,” Sierra said, pitiless, looking down on me like the scum I always suspected she thought I was, “and you killed every single one of us long, long ago.”
50.
I was on my knees in stark horror, surrounded by people I’d loved and failed, people I’d killed and seen die, who’d died because of me or for me, and I felt sick in a way that my body did not currently possess the ability to express.
“Ohmyshit,” I whispered, staring from Zack to Breandan to Sierra to Winter.
“Your shit?” my mother asked. “I think you’re losing it.”
“Lost it already,” I muttered, looking up sullenly at Breandan, “thanks to you.”
“I do what I can,” he said in that lilting Irish accent of his. It had been trying to burst through in the way Brant spoke all along, and I’d never caught it.
“I did what I could, too,” I said, looking straight at him. “I tried to save your life.”
“Oh, yeah,” he nodded, “and hers too, I’m sure.” I looked where he pointed and saw Apollonia, the clerk from my cabin rental place, appear out of the shadows. Her face distorted like theirs had, and I blinked in surprise. It was Athena, a girl I’d tried to save from London before the extinction. “But she died just the same as I did, when your enemies came charging in with guns a blazin’. Even you, with a few guns of your own to blaze, couldn’t protect us.” He stepped closer to me and knelt down to look me in the eyes. His were bereft of the warmth they’d possessed in life. “You got us killed. As good as murdered us yourself.”
“I didn’t kill you,” I whispered.
“But you did,” Sierra said, stepping in and kneeling like Breandan had. “You killed him, and you killed me.”
“You died to save me,” I said. “You gave your life for me—”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have,” she said, “if I’d known what a miserable, worthless failure you’d turn out to be.”
“Then you’d just have died when Sovereign came for you,” I served back at her. Hey, she was my mom, and vision or not, I had more experience being a smartass to her than anyone else.
“You always did enjoy a good argument,” Zack said, kneeling down with the other two. Winter hovered in the background, a pillar next to their shorter figures. “But try and argue that you didn’t kill me.”
“Maybe literally,” I said, looking right at him. “But you know I wouldn’t have made that choice.”
“Choices?” Zack smiled. “Your choices led to death even when you didn’t want them to. That either makes you incompetent or a hell of a butcher.”
“Jury’s out,” I said, muttering. “Apparently not literally, though, because I appear to have been judged already here.”
“We know the truth of your guilt,” Breandan said and stood. He towered above me as he had in life.
“We don’t need a trial,” my mother said, standing, judging me from above—also, like she had in life.
“Zack,” I said, looking right at him, “if it’s really you … you know I didn’t kill you.”
A shadow fell over his eyes before he answered. “But I’m dead, aren’t I? Just as cold and dead as if you’d put your hands on me yourself, with your own will.”
Before I could muster an answer to that, Breandan closed in on me, looking at me with those piercing, dead eyes. “You’re a murderer. Killer. Destroyer. Everything you touch dies, and I’m not speaking figuratively. You carry death in your very skin, even when you’re not spreading it with guns and fire. You’re an aberration. An abomination. And you don’t belong anywhere.” He grinned, and his smile was frozen in a too-wide rictus, like he’d been hit with Joker gas. “Why, you told me so yourself.”
“Everyone hates you,” Sierra said, seizing me by the face. Her hands were so strong, and I was so weak, I felt powerless to resist. “And why shouldn’t they? You are death. Death incarnate.”
The world around me started to shake, and I couldn’t tell whether it was some symptom of the fear or the sickness, clawing at me to get out, to make itself manifest in the world, until the voice rang out through the surreal, sunlit office.
“RESIST.”
The hands clutching at me were like withered claws digging into my skin, ripping at my flesh by slowly sinking through it. It was painful, and my eyes were wide and grew wider at the sound of the voice. I looked around, trying to figure out if my visions could hear what was being said, but they gave no reaction.
“… and you’ll continue to bring death to everyone,” Sierra said, “and you’ll die alone in thousands of years, in the middle of a dead planet, all by yourself like Sovereign would have—”
“Get … help!” the voice rumbled again, deep and familiar, heavy like a weight on the ceiling of the world, trying to break through the facade of the sky.
“What help?” I cried out, and my mother clutched me harder.
“There is no help for you,” she said, “you’ve killed everyone.”
“Everyone,” Breandan and Zack chorused, with a measure of baritone Winter thrown in.
I blinked back the tears. “Not everyone. Not Scott—”
“Oh, him?” My mother turned her head to look at something, and I followed with my eyes. In the corner of the office, sitting placidly in a chair, was Scott Byerly.
“Scott!” I called out, rushing headlong into the hope the voice gave me. If he was here, maybe he could help; he certainly wasn’t dead. “Scott!” I called again.
He did not move, he did not speak, did not turn his head at my call. Instead, he stared straight ahead, eyes blank as though death had claimed him alive, and his body had yet to react to it.
“Scott!” I called again. “Please. Please … help me.”
There was a hint of movement in his neck, and my heart leapt within me. He was turning his head to look, to look at me—
And then I saw the first crack run through his neck like cement breaking under pressure.
The next one appeared in his head, running down from his hairline, spider webs lacing over his ruddy skin from out of his sandy blond hair. My relief turned to ash as I watched him crack and crumble like a broken vase fallen to the hard ground. He dissolved into pieces in the chair, taking my faint hope and dashing it, along with his body.
“He’s nothing but a hollow shell,” Breandan crowed, “like someone scooped him out and left him empty inside. So fragile, he breaks with n
othing but the slightest pressure applied.” His eyes seized mine again. “Maybe you didn’t kill him, but he’s not whole. He’s missing things, and sooner or later, your mark of death’ll hit home, and he’ll die as sure as if you’d had your way with him without a condom.”
“You’re death, sweet daughter,” my mother said, eyes boring into mine like she was performing some sort of mental brain surgery on me just by looking into my soul. “You’ve known it all along, and you’ve done everything you could to carry that philosophy out into the world, from Wolfe to M-Squad to Crow Vincent to however many nameless flunkies you’ve slaughtered over the years. You’ve killed enough hired guns to put a fifty percent premium on the worldwide mercenary market.”
“You’re making that up,” I said.
“Don’t you read the intelligence briefings?” my mother asked with sadistic glee. “Or is that another of your failings, along with the touch of death?”
“I haven’t killed everyone—” I said.
“Everyone.” Winter led the chorus this time, and I looked back at the tall man, saw the snows rising outside the office window like an ice age had settled in.
“Not … Reed,” I said, and thoughts of my brother flooded in. I pictured him through the pain, the thought of him smiling. It had been so long since I’d genuinely seen him smile at me. Now he was stiff upper lip Reed, so serious all the time, so judgmental.
I didn’t even care. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’ve let myself get too quick to anger, too quick to kill. Maybe I was …
… was …
… maybe I was a cold-hearted murderer.
… was death.
Reed was right. They all were. And part of me wanted to tell him so right then, to look in his eyes and tell him he was right so that maybe I could at least see him smile one last time before—
Tormented Page 23
