deserved it
—that was … just horrible.
But not as horrible as this. Benjamin turned his head to look at Anselmo, who lay flat on the ground. His skin was back, returned from where Benjamin had seared it off a few inches at a time. The man had passed out partway through, but his urgent screams had driven Benjamin forward like a horse-drawn carriage that had lost its driver. He followed the road, the commands given before Anselmo departed him, and it looked like his work had paid off. Despite the lack of hair, Anselmo looked like a man again, all traces of the marred flash gone, replaced by new, hairless, smooth skin.
And all it had cost Benjamin was a vision of a man being burnt to the point of flaying, flesh sloughing off as it melted and charred like marshmallow on a s’more.
Benjamin shuddered at the thought, wondering if he’d ever get the vision out of his mind. He’d watched faces burn off before, but it had seemed distant enough to give him a certain peace. He wasn’t in control, after all, not him. Not meek, mild, Benjamin, who took what came along and accepted it without question, even when it wasn’t what he wanted. That was his lot in life, after all, and he was resigned to it.
“Oh, good,” Anselmo said, sitting upright.
“Gyahhhhh!” Benjamin shrieked, pure, uncontrolled panic causing him to let out some of the pent-up emotions that he’d just been working through. “You nearly scared me out of my skin,” he said, once he’d gotten control of himself.
“At least I did not burn you out of it,” Anselmo said, amused. He glanced down at his arm and saw the new flesh there, and a wide grin broke out on his face. “Did it work?”
“You look normal,” Benjamin said, glancing quickly away from Anselmo’s unclothed crotch. He’d thought about re-dressing the man after the healing had completed, but decided against it, instead leaving his naked ass against the weedy dirt.
“Mmm,” Anselmo said, letting out a sensual moan, “it feels good to be back. To have … all of me back.”
“Yep,” Benjamin said, not looking at him. He heard Anselmo rise and dress in near-silence, the sound of him rubbing himself to check the skin obvious even to his unpracticed ear. He heard sand being slapped off skin as well, and a muttered curse. Then another noise, something more guttural and satisfied, and he dared not turn around.
“I think we should go and visit our enemies once more,” Anselmo said.
“Don’t you think they’ll be ready for us this time?” Benjamin asked, a painful tug of fear ringing through him.
“You can breathe the fire of a nuclear bomb anytime you choose,” Anselmo said as the sound of a zipper being tugged up filled the air behind Benjamin. “Tell me how they would prepare for that?”
“You want me to …” Benjamin swung an arm around to indicate the crater around them, “do this?”
“No, no,” Anselmo said, appearing at Benjamin’s shoulder. He was shirtless, and the man’s skin looked just a little red, like he’d been mildly sunburned. “Well … perhaps, if the occasion calls for it.”
Benjamin felt himself swallow heavily. “I don’t … I mean, I don’t think I want to do what happened in the airport … again. Can’t we just … confine our vendetta or whatever it is to the people who deserve it?”
“You speak the word vendetta but you know not what it means,” Anselmo said, slipping on his button-up shirt. “A true vendetta requires a commitment beyond that which you Americans casually intend, throwing it in to suggest two co-workers prancing about in a war of slap-fighting and practical jokes. A vendetta is a blood feud, and requires blood to sustain it. Our enemies have drawn our blood, and we have not answered in kind yet.”
Anselmo grabbed Benjamin by his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “But I mean to have blood. I mean to have it. Now. I will be revenged upon them … and you will help.” The wide smile on the Italian’s face somehow reminded Benjamin of how he’d looked a few hours earlier, a grinning skull, bereft of flesh, a death’s head that smiled its horror in a way that made him nauseous and sick at the thought of what was inevitably going to happen next.
53.
Sienna
“You are descended from Hades,” my mother said. “You are descended from death, true death, and you are his heir.”
I took it all in. “Don’t you mean heiress?”
“Don’t interrupt,” she said. We were in our house, and the world was dark outside the windows, like a perpetual night had fallen.
“But death interrupts,” I said, words bubbling out of my mouth. “He gets you when you’re in the middle of a dream, takes you when you’re spelling a word out in black ink on crisp paper, will drag you screaming out of your hospital bed or carry you from around the primeval fire while you’re roasting your day’s kill for dinner.” I stared at her dark eyes, partially hidden in shadow, and the smell of my brother’s cologne, so out of place, washed over me. “Death interrupts when it pleases.”
“You are rude,” she said, lips pursing together into a blade-thin line.
“I am death,” I said simply.
She stood, and I realized now that we were in our basement, and the sunken egress windows seemed to stream pure darkness around me, like beams of light tinged with tar and corrupted for the purposes of night. “I think you need to spend some more time in the box.”
“You can’t confine death,” I said. “Can’t hold back the tide.” My voice was monotone, lifeless, droning. I felt so very little, like the darkness had come in around my heart and squeezed me tight, pushing out the air and all my feelings with it.
“Did you ever think that maybe I didn’t lock you up to protect you?” she asked, circling me like a shark, like a wolf, like a Wolfe, preparing to spring and shred me like she was death and not me. “Did you ever think that maybe I locked you up to protect the world from you, you human cancer? You Midas of pain. You hateful girl.”
“It’s not as though she’s done a bang-up job of protecting anyone,” Breandan said, sliding out of the shadows to stroll in front of me, an angry red dot streaming blood from his forehead on down.
“I can see your brains,” I said. “You must be smart.”
“Look at me,” Athena said, drifting out behind me, animated like she was being pulled along on a cart, legs unmoving. Her olive skin was bled of all color and her neck hung to the side, limp. “Look at what you did to me.”
“And me,” Breandan said, poking a finger into the hole in his forehead.
“I died for you,” my mother said, drifting in front of me.
“You died for death,” I said, strangely amused at that thought. “Dead for death, bled for death—”
“Suffered for death,” she said, eyes blazing in that cold blue-green, given an otherworldly light. “Suffered for you.”
“They’ll all suffer for you,” Breandan said. “Suffer for knowing you, for being around you. Because you—”
“Because I am death,” I said, the cold reality drummed into my head. The world faded dark around me, and I was alone in it, resigned.
I am death.
And soon, I would be dead.
And in spite of a strange cry in the back of my head, that news made me oddly peaceful.
54.
Reed
“She’s cold,” I said as Isabella stooped over Sienna’s bed to examine her. It was true; my sister’s skin was ice-cold as if she’d been outside all night and all the warmth had leached from her. She’d never been the warmest person (metaphorically or literally), but now she was chilled to the bone.
“Her respiration is slow,” Isabella said, using her fingers to separate Sienna’s eyelids. “Pupils unresponsive to the light.” Isabella pitched to her right, catching herself on the bed. “Also, I cannot touch her again until I get some gloves.” She lifted a hand to her forehead and took a step back from the bedside. “Her power is still working.”
“Dammit,” I said, and cast a look nervously over my shoulder. Ariadne was watching in a gown of her own, somewhat more conse
rvative than the one Isabella wore to bed. Scott was gone, sent to run and fetch a gurney from the medical unit for us to use in transporting her.
“How long has she been here like this?” Ariadne asked.
The room stunk, and my sister’s clothes were sticking to her. “A couple days, at least,” I said, and gestured to a bag I’d knocked off the bed. “Looks like she was packing when she just keeled over.”
“There has to be a medical reason for this,” Isabella said, leaning against the nightstand, looking positively exhausted. It was the middle of the night, after all. “Perhaps narcotic.”
“It could be a telepathic-induced coma or something,” Ariadne suggested.
“It could be that she just laid down to die of annoyance,” I said, with more than a fair amount of annoyance of my own, “but it’s unlikely and we’re not going to find any answer without tests, right?” I waited until Isabella nodded her head. “Speculation is pointless. I mean, I suspect that Anselmo, Simmons, and the Brain are the ones responsible for this, but I can’t say for certain until I rip the truth out of their still-breathing lungs—”
“This sounds familiar,” Ariadne said, “but not like you.”
“I’m going through some changes,” I said. “It’s a time of intense stress.”
I heard the elevator ding down the hall and around the corner, and then Scott came rattling along with a gurney seconds later. “My access card still works for the elevator and this hallway,” he said as he rolled the gurney into the room. “Weird, huh? I would have thought they’d have removed that after I left the agency.”
“Well, you still needed it to see Sienna,” Ariadne said, staring at him as he worked his way around the other side of the bed and started untucking the sheets under my sister.
“I still needed it to see Sienna what?” he asked, not really paying attention to Ariadne as he prepared to lift my sister.
“Doesn’t matter now,” I said, cutting off that particular line of inquiry as I caught Ariadne’s perplexed look out of the corner of my eye. “We need to focus on saving her life, on getting her back out of … wherever they’re imprisoning her.”
“In her own mind, it looks like,” Isabella said. “But how do we do this? I can run tests to find some medical answers for what is happening to her, but it will take time to prepare a toxicology report.” Her eyes narrowed and her brow knitted together as Scott and I lifted Sienna out of the bed and onto the gurney with the sheet supporting her weight.
“And there’s no guarantee what’s happened to her is even chemical,” Ariadne said. “How would they have gotten chemicals to her?” She shook her head. “This reeks of metahuman abilities, of a telepath.”
“Fine,” I said, “let’s assume it was a telepath.” I steadied Sienna on the cart, carefully pushing her arms up on the gurney, crossing her hands on her chest so they didn’t hit doorways as we steered her out of here. “What the hell do we even do? It’s not like we’re prepared for this. We’d need professional help of the variety the agency doesn’t employ anymore. We’d need—”
“An expert,” came the voice from the doorway, drawing four sets of wide eyes to the figure standing there. He had mocha skin, hair that was dark, but showing signs of grey in the years since last I’d seen him. His voice was the same, deep and rich, but he looked tired, like he’d been awake for entirely too long without any respite. “Luckily for you,” Dr. Quinton Zollers said, giving us a weary smile, “there just happens to be one close at hand.”
55.
Sienna
The light outside the windows was beautiful, azure skies visible through the tinted glass. Green grass stretched out underneath perfectly sculpted clouds, and off in the distance, I could see headquarters. Its glass windows were dark and nothing moved within them, a sign that finally, perhaps, the campus was at peace.
It felt like a lazy Sunday in the spring. A slight breeze stirred my clothes. The windows were open, and white sheers that I didn’t even know I had hung from the windows, billowing as the wind swept gently through. I watched them swirl around me, painting my living room in shades of white like I was in the middle of the clouds. Then they receded as the wind died.
The smell of good food was in the air, wafting through my nose and drifting onto the back of my tongue, making my mouth water. I was hungry, and I had that instinctive feeling that I’d be eating soon. It was almost like I could feel my full belly in advance, knew I’d be satiated soon enough. There was a satisfaction that warmed my limbs, that stretched from the tips of my toes and tickled my mind.
I smiled in a way I hadn’t smiled in a long time and turned to look at my living room.
“Happy birthday, baby,” my mother said, kissing me on the forehead.
I blinked in surprise. “Is it my birthday already?”
“Of course,” Breandan said, and suddenly there was a crowd in my quarters. They filled the rooms with activity, with a healthy buzz of warmth and happy conversations. I could hear the pleasant laughter, the talking—
“—she’s cold—”
I blinked, some of the chatter cutting through into my warm, pleasant party like an icy knife ripping harshly through those wafting sheers. I felt a chill of discomfort and waited for it to pass.
“So, Miss Nealon,” Zack said, slipping up next to me and stealing a kiss, his hand on the small of my back, “what does it feel like to be a hero?”
I’d heard that somewhere before. Hadn’t someone asked me that once? “Feels like I’m hungry,” I said.
“Food’s coming in a few minutes,” Breandan said. “I put on a great spread.”
“I didn’t even know you could cook,” I said.
“There’s a lot you didn’t know about me,” he said with a wink. “So … is this the best birthday ever?”
The warm sepia tones of the world around me seemed so inviting, and that faint feeling of joy just settled on my bones. “Worlds better than the last one,” I said with conviction. Etta James crooned “Sunday Kind of Love” in the background somewhere, and I took a contented breath.
“What happened last birthday?” my mother asked, a look of concern on her face.
I saw the world change, the light darken, the room shift to a gloomy place, bereft of people. “Nothing,” I said truthfully.
“That’s a shame,” Zack said, his arm around my shoulders practically weightless. I turned to look up at him, but his eyes were sunken and hollow, black pupils growing to encompass his entire eye. “You should never have to be alone on your birthday.”
I pulled away from him suddenly, unable to muster so much as a yelp of shock at what I was seeing. I looked around as the light faded from the windows, as the sheers whipped as though they were in a hurricane, gale-force winds ripping them off their hangers and swirling them around the darkened room. Zack, Breandan and my mother remained there, but the rest of the party guests faded, their skin turning to dust and dissolving in the wind until they came to rest in a still calm, the room silent once more.
Silent as death.
“This is a harbinger of things to come,” Breandan said, the skin sloughing off his jaw. “We’re just the first to die around you.” He turned to bone and then dust before my eyes, joining the desert on my floor.
“We’re only the start,” Zack said, his skin crawling with bugs as it putrefied before my eyes. He, too, collapsed in on himself, became dust, indistinguishable from the rest of the drifts on the ground.
“Everyone you ever meet will follow,” my mother said through cracked and rotting lips. “You think spending your last birthday alone was bad? Imagine how you’ll feel in a thousand years, two thousand years, five … when everyone and everything you’ve ever known is nothing but ash and dust, and you know that everyone you’ll meet from now until the day you die will follow.
With that, she shriveled and joined them on the floor, and the wind kicked up and blew the remains of everyone I’d ever known and failed out of my life, out of my home, out of my sigh
t.
56.
Reed
“I can’t tell you how damned good it is to see you, Doc,” I said to Quinton Zollers as we wheeled Sienna into the infirmary, the lights springing on automatically at our motion.
“Whuzzz … going on here?” Augustus asked, sleepily, blinking his eyes as we came in.
“Explain later,” Ariadne said, still hugging her nightgown close to her.
“Sienna’s in some sort of coma,” Scott offered.
“Or now, briefly,” Ariadne said, sounding a little resigned.
“Move her onto the bed,” Isabella said, motioning us toward a hospital bed in the corner. She went ahead of us and lowered the rail at the side. “I need to get her cleaned up.”
“She does smell a little ripe,” Scott said, wrinkling his nose.
“How do you think you’d smell after being insensate in your room for a few days?” I asked, snapping as I lost my temper. “Because I’m guessing you’d be a little rank, too.”
“I need to get a catheter in,” Isabella said as we lifted her onto the bed. “Quinton? Can you be my nurse?”
“Been a while since I’ve done anything like this,” Zollers said, “but I suppose.”
“The rest of you, away,” Isabella said, shooing us. “Don’t make me get a broom.”
“Uh, okay,” Ariadne said and took a step back, closer to where Augustus lay on his bed in the middle of the room. He was watching us all with eyes open in surprise.
“You’re not dreaming,” I told him, “but she is.”
“Uhm … if you say so,” Augustus said. “How do you know she’s dreaming?”
“Because she dragged me into it,” I said. “And dreaming might be a strong word for it. Nightmares might be a more apt descriptor.”
“‘Might be’?” he asked as Sienna convulsed in the corner, hitting the railing of her bed so hard with a stray hand that it bent the metal. “Damn!”
“I see we have at least one new face,” Zollers murmured as he covered Sienna over with a sheet.
Tormented Page 25
