06 - Vengeful

by Robert J. Crane

  1.

  Sienna

  I stood over the grave and stared at the curving letters carved into the stone. The way they were written made the name look elegant. The stone itself was flecked with grey and black, like a rock that couldn’t quite decide what color it wanted to be. A hard wind blew past me, stirring my dark hair and blowing strands in my face. I reached up and brushed them away, let them fly behind my head out of sight so I could stare at the grave.

  “This is all my fault,” I whispered, but it was lost to the wind.

  It had been months since he’d died, and the ground was covered over with snow. A cloudy ceiling hung overhead, dark grey that made the tombstone seem like gleaming ivory marble by comparison. I sniffed the air, caught the hard bite of winter as it slipped like a knife through my nasal passages and into my lungs. It cut me like the thought of him being gone, deep inside. I wanted to simply let the stiffness out of the knees I was barely standing on, wanted to fall to the cold, ice-covered earth, to curl up and wrap my coat around myself as I lay there, as close to him as I could get, until the Minnesota skies opened up once more and let fall the snow that would bury me in my final resting place as surely as it had buried him.

  It was the chill and misery that made me feel right at home, really. This was exactly the right sort of day for mourning, for stewing. Brooding would not have been out of line. And it was the first time since he’d died that I’d visited his grave.

  That I’d had the courage to visit his grave.

  “I wanted to avenge you,” I said, but the words sounded hollow, like I lacked any feeling to put into them. I probably didn’t have any left at this point. My hair whipped in front of my face again, and this time I didn’t try to stop it from tickling my forehead as I stared at the marble stone jutting out of the white earth. “I wanted to make it right.”

  You don’t need to, he said from within me.

  I looked up at the name carved into the stone, at the curving letters that spelled out Zachary Sheridan Davis. I tried to blink back tears, but they came anyway, chilling as they ran down my frigid cheeks.

  “He wouldn’t have wanted you to do it,” a voice came from behind me. I turned, even though I knew who it was. He was tall, my brother. His hair was long and dark and flowed over his shoulders like he used three bottles of conditioner per day. “He could probably tell you himself, though, I guess,” Reed said to me, hands stuffed into his black overcoat’s pockets.

  “He wouldn’t be dead if it hadn’t been for me,” I said, my feet crunching on the snow as I turned to face him, my steps lethargic. It was a half-shuffle, as lifeless as the trees that stood around the graveyard.

  “He wouldn’t be dead if it hadn’t been for Erich Winter,” Reed said softly, stepping closer, his footsteps in the snow sounding the inevitable. I couldn’t stay here, after all. I had things to do, battles to fight, a war to win. “You can’t blame yourself for the act of a madman.”

  “You’d be surprised what I can blame myself for,” I said, looking back at the grave, still and alone on an early Sunday morning. We’d spent Sunday mornings together when he was alive, sleeping in. Playing tug-of-war with the covers on autumn mornings, him careful not to touch my skin for longer than a touch, a caress, watching a movie on Netflix while we stole glances at the sun rising higher in the sky out my balcony window—

  The thought of a thousand more Sundays without him knifed into me, stole my breath for a moment. Reed’s eyes caught the small motion, and he flinched ever so slightly. “Don’t think about it like that.”

  “I’ll think about it however I damned well please,” I said. I felt my cheeks flush, and not from the cold this time. They ran hot, like someone had poured scalding water out of my tear ducts. “He didn’t die in his bed of old age, okay? He was taken from me, taken by people—”

  “Most of whom you’ve killed,” Reed said softly, without any judgment.

  “The architect of which is left,” I said, sniffing, taking in cold air as my nose started to run. “He’s still out there. Still … He got away with it, Reed. And it … it burns.”

  “You’re in a unique position,” Reed said, watching me carefully, as though he were afraid to lean in, to grab me in his embrace, to give me a big hug. Most people were afraid of that, really, given what my mere touch could do. But this time, I wanted him to. I needed somebody to, needed someone to fill the space that Zack had occupied, to just … be the person to give me a hug every now and again, to put their arms around me so I could feel the warmth of another human being and realize that I wasn’t alone. “You can actually hear the voice of your lost loved one, and I bet—if I know Zack—he doesn’t want you to go chasing after the man that killed him.”

  I don’t, you know.

  “You have no idea,” I said, pretending I couldn’t hear the voice within, pretending Reed didn’t know what he was talking about. “I may have other things on my plate right now, but if Erich Winter crosses my path, I’m still going to kill him.”

  There was no mistaking the sadness in Reed’s eyes at my pronouncement. “I know.”

  “Good,” I said, wiping my eyes with the cold, rough sleeve of my coat. I turned and looked back at the headstone with its flecks of grey and black, and felt the cold of the season, the grey blanket of the skies settle over me like a strange comfort.

  “But if you do this,” Reed said, charging on, heedless of my feelings and pissing me off with every syllable, “you know you’ll become the kind of person Winter wanted you to be all along.”

  I steamed where I stood, practically able to feel the heat rising off my forehead, like I had the world’s highest-running fever. I kept my eyes anchored on the grave stone, stared at the curve of Zack’s name written across it, and when I’d finally composed myself to make my counter-argument without yelling loud enough to wake the dead, I rounded on him—

  And he was gone. My shoulders fell, the tension bleeding out as the fight I’d expected failed to emerge. A set of footprints in the snow was the only thing to mark the passage of my brother, my silent guardian, as he left alone with my grief. I stood there for a while, the cold wind ripping into me as I faced the direction my brother had gone, up over the hill, wondering if I should follow after him or simply stay where I was and mourn for a while.

  2.

  Five Years Later

  There was fire all around me, an oven of heat and flame rolling up the leather and plastic coverings to the doors of my brother’s Dodge Challenger, blackening the inside of the window glass. My skin charred and melted, the conflagration sweeping up to envelope me where I sat in the passenger seat, the fire moving so fast I didn’t even have time to think how to respond.

  My thoughts were sluggish from days of being drugged, of being in a forced coma, from having emotions of guilt and horror forced on me. I blinked in the flame as a wave of explosive force rolled over my body, rippling my skin and jarring my internal organs. Standing across a field from the destruction of my brother’s car, I probably wouldn’t even have felt the force of the bomb going off. Here, it was like firing a shotgun into a lead-lined coffee can. The force rippled around and blew the door off next to me. Bones broke within me, organs ruptured, and skin split open even as it burned.

  And dimly, through it all, my mind barely held on to consciousness with the tenacity of a … Wolfe.

  Sienna! he shouted in my ear. The flames danced across raw nerve endings, searing my skin off. I lifted my hand and watched it blacken as my eyes burned from the smoke and fire. Then the skin on my fingers grew back like a fast-spreading fungus, like a creepy virus from a sci-fi movie. I watched it happen dully, barely aware, not sure what was going on—

  Sienna! Aleksandr Gavrikov cried, and flame surged toward my fingers li
ke I had a magnet for fire, a vacuum to take it all in. I felt powerless in my own body, barely awake, and seeing flame pulled into me like it was drawn to a gravity well under my skin was like an alarm clock for the ages, sending a message to my mind that Oh dear God it’s time to wake up—

  I snapped out of it and panic rushed through me. I was in a burning car, fresh air feeding the fire from where the door next to me had been blown off, cool night so buried under flame and heat that I couldn’t even feel it. Or maybe it was because my skin was burning and being regrown in the space of seconds, my nerve endings flash-fried and regenerated by the power of Wolfe as I watched them go and come like a child staring stupidly at a car barreling down the street at him.

  SIENNA! Zack shouted at me from within my own mind.

  I pushed my hands forward and tugged at Gavrikov in my mind. His relief at my awakening surged into the back of my head, and I sensed the fire rush harder toward me. I drew it in without worrying about just my hands. I opened my mouth and breathed in flame like a dragon in reverse, tearing it out of the air in front of me and letting it diffuse through my very flesh, drawn off and siphoned off and dispersed into my body. My clothes burned and added the black stench of their smoke to the interior of the car as the fire began to subside. I pulled the heat out of the air and dragged the inferno out of the dashboard, the engine, the fuel tank, pulling it all to me. It was like taking the deepest breath you could imagine, filling your lungs full to capacity and then drawing in more without letting out any of what you’d already gotten.

  And then, just when I felt as though I were completely full, I realized it was done.

  I sagged against the melted slag that was my seat. I exhaled and black smoke came out of my mouth like a factory chimney. I coughed and spit out cinders, ash running down my already scorched chin. Every nerve in my body screamed with the pain as I regrew my flesh, tender and new. My mouth tasted disgusting, like ashtray mixed with meatloaf and bad coffee, brewed in a chamber pot for six months before someone poured it down my gullet. I gagged but held it together, my neck sagging against the seat. Hard, hot metal jutted out and poked into my back, and my head rolled with the exhaustion that had settled over me. I didn’t feel like I could even move enough to the side to fall out of the car—

  Then my eyes settled on the man in the driver’s seat, and I felt sick in a whole new way.

  Oh—

  Oh no—

  Not—

  “Reed,” I breathed, my throat scratchy like I’d dragged a barbed wire feeding tube up it. “Reed.” I couldn’t muster an exclamation point, not with the amount of carcinogens I had just consumed, like a chain-smoker who went through eight cartons an hour. I fumbled, raising a hand, trying to reach him—

  His skin was black, and where it wasn’t, blisters were already bubbled up like space domes on a faraway moon, marking every crater. His eyes were closed, his long, dark air grey with ash. His clothing was black and peeled and barely any of it was still there. His belt buckle shone in the light of a nearby lamp.

  I tried again to reach my brother, stretching my hand out across the charred remains of the center console between us. My fingers shook as I extended my arm, like I’d had a lifetime of exertions today already, like my muscles were weak from atrophy. I stretched my blackened, soot-covered hand toward him, and I landed it on his cheek.

  He did not stir, did not move, save for a thin trickle of red blood that ran down his face to his chin. My arm lost all power and I dropped it hard against the scorched leather. I could see dim shapes moving outside his door—which was gone—and the only thought I could muster was that I hoped it was help that was on the way before I dropped into a darkness as complete as a silent winter night.

  3.

  Ma

  “Damn, girl,” Claudette “Ma” Clary said, looking at the dancing flames on the widescreen TV as they glowed white and phosphorescent from the surveillance camera footage, “you didn’t just stick your head into an Easy-Bake Oven this time.” She looked at Cassidy Ellis, all pale skin and gangly limbs, dripping water from that wetsuit contraption she wore into her sensory deprivation tank. Claudette knew pride when she saw it, and it was all over that girl’s face, flushed pink where normally it was snowy white, and she knew she would have to let a little of the air out of the girl’s sense of accomplishment. But it needed to happen, she consoled herself, because this—this idea, done without anyone else’s approval—this was damned crazy, and it could just about wreck them all if it came falling down like a car coming off the hydraulic lift.

  “I thought it was a good, fast reaction to our last plan falling apart,” Cassidy said, and she puffed up with a little hint of defiance, digging in to defend her plan. “I hired the assassin and had the bomb in place within minutes of—”

  “You didn’t kill her,” Junior said, staring at the screen. It drew everyone’s attention back for a minute, watching figures running up. They were pulling Sienna Nealon and her brother out of the flaming wreck of the vehicle, all twisted from the force of the explosion, the chassis exposed. There wasn’t much that was obvious on the grainy surveillance video, but Sienna Nealon spitting black smoke out of her lungs was pretty easy to see. And cause for some concern for Ma. “And you wrecked a damned pretty car in the process,” Junior almost whimpered. “I mean, I’m okay with killing people, but wrecking a brand new Dodge Challenger like that is just a sin against nature.”

  “Maybe we should keep our eye on the prize,” Eric Simmons said. Ma watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had a hand over his mouth, tentative-like. She hadn’t known him for but a few months, but she’d seen enough to know the game he was running on Cassidy. She was sure Simmons would defend his little girlfriend; he knew he’d have to in order to keep the girl from having one of her little fits. Ma had spied a couple cracks in that relationship and knew a little leverage would pop it apart easily, but for now, she let him do his thing, keep his ass out of that particular fire. “The drug we arranged … that was supposed to kill Sienna. Painfully. So …”

  “So why’s she popping her not-so-pretty face out of a car after sucking out all the fire like she just went down on a—” That was Denise, and Ma cuffed her right across the back of the head, stopping her before she could finish her dirty, profane thought. “Owww.” Denise rubbed the spot on her crown where Ma had got her, looking up resentfully.

  “That plan clearly didn’t work,” Ma said, trying to move the discussion along.

  “Neither did sending Anselmo after Reed Treston,” Cassidy said, looking Ma in the eyes only for a second. If there was one thing that drove Ma nuts about that girl, it was that she couldn’t even look a body in the eye for a few seconds. Just slyly looked at you and then looked away, like it was some sort of physical imposition to try and make eye contact. Ma judged her some sort of coward for that, maybe like a rodent. A wet one at that, one that climbed out of the nearest toilet and scampered around the house, constantly underfoot.

  “I did that to get rid of Anselmo,” Ma said, shrugging. “I make no bones about it. The man was trouble, and I didn’t want him in my house. He didn’t want to be here, so it seemed like a natural fit to set him loose on the Treston boy.”

  “Anselmo was really useful,” Simmons said, still hiding his disappointment behind the hand in front of his mouth. Someone had told Ma once that people who spoke from behind their hand were liars. Looking at Simmons, she believed it. What amazed her was that Cassidy bought her boyfriend’s lies hook, line and sinker, like a widemouth bass on a good lure. She had all the power of technology at her fingertips, and she never once used it to expose herself to the obvious truths sitting right in front of her. The girl was brilliant, too, easily the book-smartest person Ma had ever run across. But she lacked the common sense God gave a garden snake, which was why Eric Simmons had her wrapped around his thin, earth-shaking, sissy-manicured little fingers.

  “He was a bomb ready to go off any time,” Ma said with some force, yanking that
carpet out from under Simmons without worrying about it giving him a burn on his soft, probably-lotioned face. There was a flash of anger in Simmons’s eyes, but he held it back. He didn’t like it here; that was obvious to anyone, but by now Ma knew that he specifically didn’t like her or any of her clan, either. The feeling was more or less mutual, too, and that city-slickin’ son of a bitch could go back to LA or New York or wherever the hell he wanted to be for all she cared.

  After she was done using him, anyway.

  “We’re still down a team member,” Simmons said, recovering. “And now we’ve got no plan.”

  “Plus,” Denise said, making that face she always did that turned her ugly as sin, “now Sienna Nealon’s gonna be mad as hell when she wakes up, because we done killed her brother—”

  “He’s still alive,” Cassidy said, a little meekly, drawing every eye in the room. Of course she didn’t mention this before she started showing us the video of her little “triumph.” “I was thinking about—”

  “Don’t,” Ma said calmly. “Don’t lose focus on what’s important here, and it ain’t her stupid brother. That was Anselmo’s grudge, not ours. I got no grievance with that boy.”

  “Odds are good he’s gonna have one with us, now,” Junior said, looking a little pensive as the security camera footage looped on the widescreen again. He was watching it closer than a football game. He cringed when the car blew up, mouth a jagged line of genuine pain, and she knew it wasn’t because of what happened to the people inside.

  “He’s in the hospital,” Cassidy said. “All it would take is a dose of poison—”

  “Will you just lay off it already?” Ma turned her eyes on the girl. “Don’t we have a big enough problem to deal with already? Is your head so far up your own damned disk drive you don’t see what’s coming?”

  Cassidy looked chastened, blinking away from Ma’s hard gaze. “No one uses disk drives anymore,” she said sulkily.