Augustus and Scott teamed up next, hitting her with a furious wave of dirt and water like a fire hose of the mixture was being sprayed right at her. She stuck out a hand to defray some of the impact, and it blew off her like it was being shot from a sandblaster. She leaned in and kept charging, slightly slower against the resistance.
Reed stepped up, and I caught his eye just as he added his own wind force to the spray hitting her. It was enough to break a building’s facade, but it didn’t stop Ma Clary in her state of rage.
But that was all right, because I was just waiting for her to remember that I was hovering behind her anyway.
Augustus, Scott and Reed ceased their attack and scattered in three different directions. Zollers stayed put, presumably because he just didn’t think he needed to worry about Ma for whatever reason. Ma lurched forward with her bulky arm still extended, and it took her a second to realize she wasn’t being sprayed with three of the four elements any longer. When she realized it, she blinked and removed the impromptu shield she’d thrown up in front of her eyes to find the space around the car empty save for a telepath standing there calmly, leaning against it like he was waiting for his ride.
“What the—” she said, and swung her head around, taking in the three men who had zipped off in different directions. It was like they’d planned it, except they hadn’t, and it had looked like a Three Stooges moment as they all bounced off one another and the car figuring out which direction each was going to run.
“What are you thinking right now, Ma?” I asked, calm as I could be. If she broke for any of them, even Zollers, I’d have some time to react. She may have been the Woman of Steel, but she wasn’t exactly golden at the moment. If I needed to, I could even do to her what I’d done to Junior, though probably less effectively since I was sure she was expecting it now. That was all right, though, because I had another plan in case of emergency.
“She’s ready to kill the next one of your allies she comes across,” Dr. Zollers said, and there was a mournful quality to the way he said it.
Ma’s head swung around and locked on him. The message was clear: target acquired. She bolted for him, and I knew she wouldn’t let the car get in the way. Her steel-clad footsteps thundered against the ground with the fury of a piston pounding a steel support into the earth on a construction site. She had about ten yards to get to him.
And I had ten yards to stop her.
Dr. Zollers just stayed there, content to let it all play out.
“I’m gonna make you pay!” Ma Clary shouted, clearly pissed beyond pissed that she’d gotten so damned thwarted. She’d walked me right into her ambush at a time when I should have been blinded with rage, and here I was, cool as a winter’s day while she’d had the picnic tables turned right over on her, a big bowl of egg salad on her face.
But hey, at least she still had a face.
For a few seconds, anyway.
I shot in front of her, interposing myself between Ma and Dr. Zollers. He knew what he was doing standing there, and he knew just enough about her intentions to know what she was going to do, even without reading her mind, presumably. It was as obvious as the rage on her face.
And he knew what I needed to do, too, and he put everything right into place to make me do it.
She didn’t let up when I flew in front of her, and I didn’t force a clash by running into her. It wouldn’t have stopped her; it would have just hurt us both. I could see the rage in her eyes, squinted and furious under steel lids, and there was no reasoning with the mind beneath them. She was going to kill, as sure as I was going to breathe, and she wouldn’t let a puny punch or a simple distraction stop her.
She was going to murder Dr. Zollers simply to spite me, and there was no way to stop her save for one.
“Gavrikov,” I whispered as she surged forward into the last few feet between us and Dr. Zollers. I didn’t wait for the reply.
I stuck my hand out and blotted out my vision of those hateful, furious eyes and waited as my palm started to glow. A blast of fire hotter than any simple flame flew out of my fingers and superheated the air between us as it shot, unerring, into her eyes.
It didn’t stop there, though. Just blinding her wouldn’t do the trick, and I knew it all the way to the core of me. She’d still strike out in a rage.
No, this was something else. This was a burst of fire so intense that as it hit her eyes, which were still organic, it immediately boiled the fluid they rested in, transferring the heat through her entire socket even as the fireball continued forward. It vaporized the soft tissue upon contact, so quickly that she couldn’t even feel it to scream. The flame traveled through the cavity where the ocular nerve stretched into the brain. It didn’t let a little thing like spare organic tissue stop it, though, and so a burst of heat that ranged up into the four figures, Fahrenheit, wormed its way into Ma Clary’s brain cavity. As much as I might have wanted to mock her and say her brain didn’t exist, it did, and in less than one second it reached way-beyond-boiling temperatures, then the solid became gas and—
You know what? I’ll spare you the technical detail.
Claudette “Ma” Clary died so fast she didn’t even know what hit her.
Her massive steel body seized up and I gave her a kick to the chest that turned her momentum away from Dr. Zollers. The metal surfacing that coated her flesh was already disappearing, returning to skin, and what was left of her head was—well, it was gross. It wasn’t quite Cousin Blimpy, but it was yuck to the max. She rolled to the side and came to a halt, facedown, thankfully, smoke rolling out from beneath her thick mane of her.
“Thank you,” I said to Dr. Zollers and caught a pained look as his hands fell to his sides. I let that hang for a minute before I finished my thought. “This is why I wanted you to stay.”
46.
Mopping up the mess at the crater took a while. Junior didn’t wake up until after backup showed, which came in the form of local SWAT, our helicopter support with the first transport cells hooked to the belly of the Chinook, and a bevy of local cops that I could tell were wary enough of the goings-on that they had absolutely no reluctance to pull a trigger if they saw shit going sideways. They all knew about what had happened here in Glencoe, and I suspected their tolerance for rogue metas was not a thing that I’d want to test. I watched them watching our prisoners, leery as hell for good reason. Junior was the first into a transport cell, followed by Simmons. Janice, Denise and Cousin Buck had to wait until the Chinook came back. All the while, Cousin Buck looked menacingly at us. The cops and SWAT were all quiet, and there were a lot of guns pointed at those clowns.
Meanwhile, Simmons and Junior floated peacefully in their storage tanks, dreaming the dreams of the peacefully stupefied.
“Well, that went well,” Reed said, easing up to me as we watched Cousin Buck scratch his head with an air of confusion.
“I killed two of them,” I pointed out.
“It’s a low number,” he said. “I consider it a personal victory given the circumstances.” I looked over, and he was smirking slightly.
“Time was, you wouldn’t have found humor in this,” I said, eyeing him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I figured it’d be one of Junior’s boots based on the size of his feet. Looked like he was walking around on hams.
“Time was, you would have killed them all and been done with it.” He made a smacking sound with his lips, and I avoided looking at him. He had a five o’clock shadow forming up his neck, all the way across his upper lip and over the top of his head. And yes, the eyebrows. It was all conspiring to freak me out. “Like I said, progress. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and maybe just knowing you need to dial back the throttle a few degrees … Especially after what they did, I think you did marvelous.”
“Your insurance is covering the car, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah.” He arched his utter lack of eyebrows, and I shuddered. “All I have to pay is the deductible.”
The Chinook came choppering over
head again with another pallet of two meta storage units, blowing dust everywhere as they swept low enough to drop them off about two hundred yards away. I’d ordered them to do that, because I didn’t want our fugitives to think they had a chance of escape with the distraction or the dust cloud being stirred up. They didn’t have a chance, after all. I could fly, and if I had to chase them down, I was going to beat them for at least a full minute, which was a lot to take from me. I told them all this, of course, and got the requisite sullen looks in return from all of them but Janice, who looked like she was still suffering from the spark gun. She was twitching randomly, and it was making her look like she had some neurological issues.
Not bad, Wolfe said.
They know who’s boss, Bjorn agreed.
Whoa, whoa, I said without speaking, don’t go getting all gushy with that praise, boys.
Tactically speaking, that was awesome, Bastian said.
A sedan came rolling to a stop about a hundred yards away and Ariadne got out. She was still wearing what she’d worn to the meeting, but she had a Caribou coffee cup in hand now. She looked surprisingly sedate given the circumstances, surveying our prisoners as she walked up calmly. “Looks like you’ve got things in hand here,” she said.
“Only two fatalities,” I bragged, and she tried hard not to show her discomfort with that. “Hey, it’s not bad considering the circumstances.”
“Glad to see you netted Simmons,” she said, coming to stand next to me. “Phillips is flaming mad about the campus.”
“You think he’s going to take the heat for it?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Or am I going to?”
“How could you?” Ariadne asked with a faint smile. “You were suspended.”
I blinked. Oh, yeah. I looked over at Simmons, suspended in the liquid gel of the storage container, still unconscious. “Swing and a miss, big guy.”
“Yeah, lucky we all got out,” Ariadne said. She frowned. “Even your dog.”
I felt a slight chill run down my spine at that. “It was a near thing,” I said. “So … any idea if we’re still going to be working on Monday? Cuz our headquarters is gone.”
Ariadne’s face fell. “I guess I’m going to have to start looking for a new place.”
I shrugged. “You can stay with me for a few days if you want.”
She gave me the eye. “You have a … oh, right. Your old house.”
“It’s remodeled and has a roof and everything,” I said with a shrug. “Spare bedrooms.” I looked over at Reed, who was talking with Scott. “Which is maybe going to come in handy in the next few days.”
“What about them?” she asked, looking at our nice collection of prisoners. “With HQ collapsed on the prison …?”
“Gonna have to open the emergency exit,” I said, running it through in my head. “Guess that’s going to be the main entry for a while, until they rebuild headquarters.”
She froze, taking a moment before posing the question that was hanging on all our minds. “What if they don’t? Like … at all?”
I’d been considering that all morning, or at least since I’d finished cleaning up this mess. “Then that’s just the way it goes,” I said, and I didn’t have to try too hard to be chipper about it.
47.
Moving our new guests into the prison had been surprisingly easy. Phillips had already set up the secondary entrance by the time we got back. It took some digging on Augustus’s part, since the secondary entry was buried about a foot under the lawn in an isolated corner of the campus, but he had called out all hands, and we had so much security on site by the time we got back that I would have bet he didn’t need to worry about a jailbreak.
We got them all down there into their new homes. Junior woke up just as we were dumping him in. He swore and swore at me, and I didn’t really care all that much. He stared at me, face all distorted behind a wall of energy-absorbing liquid, and pounded on the door until the vent above him started spraying the liquid absorbent into his cell. He was back up to his neck in it in less than a second, and gasping for breath while standing on his tippytoes like a fish trying to stick its face out of the water. I left him like that; figured he’d be all set for a while.
I put Simmons in his old cell without a word of complaint from earthquake man. Him we’d actually taken the time and effort to strip down and search, and hose off since he was covered in the gel from transport. He took it all with a surprising amount of grace. Just looked like he wanted to be done, he was so pale and shaky. I’d paraded him past Cassidy, watched her thump against the cell window as he went by, eyes bulging out of her head.
He didn’t even look at her, even when it was obvious she was there. She hammered ineffectually on the window until the gel came dumping down on her, too. It set off the warning klaxons in the Cube and fired off the red lights next to her cell. Simmons still didn’t look, even when I paused him right in front of it so I could look in and see her trying to keep her head above the gel-line.
Janice and Denise went in with numb shock, and Cousin Buck didn’t do much more than glare at us as I tossed him in one and closed the door. All told, it was a grand time, and I looked around at my old inmates, wondering what they were thinking of their new neighbors.
I mean, I didn’t actually care, just was curious what went through the mind of a criminal when they saw something like that.
I stopped off at Cassidy’s cell and hit the drain release. The gel that she was struggling to stay afloat in disappeared in about ten seconds down the toilet, leaving a thin coating on every surface. The autoshower sprayed the entire cell for a good twenty seconds after that, and I watched her face crumple in shock. I’m told it’s cold, that autoshower.
When it finished, air circulated through to dry the place, and Cassidy was left standing there with wet hair, staring out at me like one of those sad-kitty-stuck-in-the-rain pictures you see online. I triggered the microphone. “Well,” I said, “I got ’em all.”
“I’m cold,” she said, and her lip shivered.
“Maybe if you’d applied your genius to astrophysics or math you could have gotten a Nobel prize and a cheesy biopic about your troubled genius instead of a one-way ticket to the Not-So-Green-Mile,” I said.
“Where’s Ma?” she asked, rubbing her hands against her arms.
“She did not come quietly,” I said, only a hint of remorse. “She tried to kill someone, so I had to put her down.”
“Figures,” Cassidy said, back to sullen. I pitied this girl’s mother, because an angry, defiant teenager—uh, wait, scratch that. I was an angry, defiant teenager.
“I got most of them alive,” I said, feeling some strange need to defend myself to this sociopath who’d never worried about the innocent people in her path when she struck out looking for vengeance. “And you know what? I managed to keep your boyfriend alive, even though he just destroyed the entire campus, so … maybe you should be thankful for small miracles, because if I’d sent like, a SWAT team after him, he’d be dead.”
There wasn’t an ounce of gratitude in those eyes. “I won’t be in here forever,” she promised.
“Well, if the day comes you ever get out, make sure you stay well clear of me, because next time I might not be so restrained in my decency.” I put my face up next to the glass and gave her a good look at the predator within. “Next time you might meet the ruthless me, the one that kills without mercy or care—especially if you do something like come after the people I care about again.” She took a nervous step back from the window and I flipped off the mic and speaker and just stood there, watching her retreat until she bumped into the back of her cell.
48.
I ran into Reed climbing into the wreckage of the dormitory with Dr. Perugini urging him on. The late light of the day tinted the wreckage with a bizarre shade of red and orange like it was on fire or something. Reed looked dirty because he was, dust and grit trapped in sweat crusting his skin from his repeated dives into a very unsafe place to look for personal be
longings. As he climbed out of the shattered frame of his balcony door, I just shook my head at him. “What are you doing, you idiot?”
“What?” he asked, shrugging at me. “Isabella needs her stuff.”
“If you get crushed by a falling concrete support …” I said, shaking my head. “Have you seen Dog?”
“Not lately,” he said, handing Dr. Perugini a bundle of clothing that he’d had sandwiched under his arm. “Why?”
I beckoned him over and he left Perugini behind, fussing over the small pile of stuff that it looked like it had taken several trips into the wreck to retrieve. I led him off to the side, and when we were far enough away, I whispered, “Tell me something about you that nobody else knows.”
“Uhhh,” he said, clearly caught off guard by my request. “Umm …”
“Quick,” I said, snapping my fingers to hurry him on.
“Uhhh, okay,” he said, eyes searching upward, “umm, once Isabella and I had a quickie to the Imperial March because I was afraid you’d hear us.”
“UGH!” I slapped him on the shoulder. “Eww!” He flinched away. “Something that I would know about you—something I’d actually want to know!”
“Oh!” He pointed a finger at me. “Who came in when you woke up in London at Alpha HQ?”
“Breandan,” I said sadly, remembering my terrible dreams of him only a few days earlier.
“I would also have accepted ‘Hera’ as an answer,” Reed said, now a little down himself. He frowned at me. “What’s with the weird question?”
I fixed him with a no-nonsense stare. “What’s with the horrible first answer?”
“You put pressure on me,” he complained. “I said the first thing that came to mind.” I hesitated before speaking, and he leaned in closer to me. “What? What is it?”
I took a breath, gathering my thoughts, and then told him exactly what was on my mind.
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