7.
There was a sound behind me of rubble shifting, and I prepared myself to deliver another attack to my downed foe if necessary when I heard a familiar voice. “Damn, that sucked,” came Clary’s stupid baritone. “What the hell was that?”
“Our enemy, you brain-dead jackass,” I said. “You’ve successfully almost gotten us killed, you unbelievable moron. I just have one question for you—are you working for us? Because I honestly don’t think Mormont or Zollers could have made worse choices for us than you just did.”
Clary’s husky figure emerged from the shadows and rubble in the corner of the basement. “Well, yeah, I’m working for the Directorate,” he said as he stepped over Scott’s body to stand next to me. “I mean what do you think—”
I grabbed him with my bare hand around his neck and heard a GURK! “You. Idiot. You almost got Reed and Scott killed—not to mention me—and you’re so damned oblivious you don’t even realize it.” I watched his piggy little eyes move back and forth and I saw the pain emerge on his face as he felt the first stirrings of my power working on him. He didn’t resist, even as he began to grunt. I threw him loose and let him fall in a pile of broken boards. “If you…ever…come on a mission with me again and fail to follow my orders when I’m in charge, do you know what I’m going to do?”
His double chins obscured his neck, but I saw the bob of his Adam’s apple. “You’ll…uh…kill me?”
I leaned down, and wondered for a beat why he didn’t turn to rock before I realized that he was afraid of me. “I won’t kill you, Clyde. I’ll drain so much of your mind that what’s left will have all the cognitive ability of a pumpkin.” I narrowed my eyes to glare at him. “Which, in your case, will be nothing but the sharpest of improvements.” I brought my hand around and patted him gently on the cheek, which he flinched from. “Clear?”
“You…” his voice wavered as he regained his capacity for speech, “you can’t talk to me like that!”
I grabbed him again around the neck and lifted him up. He was taller than me by a full head, so I tilted my back at an angle so that he was above me and his feet couldn’t touch the ground. I felt the swirling start in my head, and he shrieked, so I let him go, and he fell back into the refuse pile he had landed on a moment earlier. “I can. I will. You will listen to me while you’re alive or I’ll make you my slave after you’re dead.”
There was a moment of glare between us, and then I raised my voice. “Kat! KAT!” I kept watch on the space where the door had been when we had first come to the house, and I saw a blond head peek in from the porch, her face waxy pale, as though the life had been drained out of it. “Get Reed in the van,” I said. “We’re moving in five, just as soon as Clary and I can get our prisoner and Scott up there.” I looked down at Scott, who was still bleeding on the floor. “And I hope you saved some of your strength for your boyfriend.”
It was an operation, and I cursed Clary a dozen times over the next few minutes for cutting off our easy exit by destroying the stairs. The clouds of dust had cleared, and Clary gave me a boost up to the front of the house after I asked him only once. He was strangely silent, cowed into submission at last, no trace of guile or anger on his face; he reminded me of a shamed child, someone bullied into submission and broken in their will. I didn’t have time to feel bad about it, though, because Scott was still bleeding profusely. With Kat’s help I got him up and into the van as the sirens became audible in the far distance.
“Dammit,” I said under my breath. I looked back to the house to see a body ejected out of the basement, hitting the second of the four supporting pillars that held the roof off the porch before taking a slow arc and landing on the same Honda that the van had rammed into my opponent during the fight.
“Oh, God,” Kat said, wavering, as though she might fall at any moment. Against the backdrop of the gray skies and leaf-strewn wet street, she looked like a leaf herself, ready to wilt and fade. “Do you think anyone noticed that?”
“I think we’re pretty much out of time and luck if we want to get clear of this ridiculous turkey of a mission,” I said grimly. “And I hope like hell that the body that just flew out of there wasn’t Clary, because we have no time to subdue that other jackass again before the cops get here.”
“You don’t have your FBI ID?” Kat asked me in slight surprise.
“I don’t think an FBI ID is going to explain us out of this disaster.”
She looked for a moment like she was going to answer, then paled and promptly got sick on the road, hitting her knees.
“Are you gonna be okay?” I asked as I trotted over to the wrecked Honda. I cast a look at the house, where I saw Clary climbing out of the wreckage, then to the road, where Kat was on one knee still retching, and the Honda, where the Omega stooge was laying limp. In the distance, the sirens drew closer.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I just…need to get to Scott.” She crawled into the back of the van.
I dragged my Omega enemy off the wreckage of the car and tossed him in the van next to Kat, who was already ministering to Scott as Clary trotted up. “Clary…” I said, favoring him with narrowed eyes.
“What?” he said, perturbed. “I was just trying to make sure we got out of here! If you had a better, faster suggestion to wrap this up other than tossing him like a lawn dart, I would have loved to hear it.”
There was a creaking noise from behind us and I turned my head. The porch roof began to cave in where Clary had taken out the support pillar with his throw, which prompted an additional collapse of some side rooms as the second floor came down on the first. A cloud of dust blew out in a billowing, bellowing mess that swept over us, obscuring my vision.
I held my breath, closed my eyes, and let myself stand there immovable as the white cloud swept over me. I counted a slow count to ten, and when it was done, I opened my eyes and saw Clary standing in front of me, still, his lip quivering, his face caked in white. I looked at my hands and surmised I was likely covered in the dust of the collapse. It was in my nose, my hair, and I felt it cake my face like the worst, driest facemask I could ever have imagined. I glanced briefly at the house; it was as near as it could be to gone, fallen in on itself, with little to show but wreckage, a crater of boards, beams and roofing tiles with almost no structure left on display. Clary stared back at me and I almost thought he was going to cry.
“Let’s go,” I said, controlling my instinct to toss Clary back in the cellar and let whoever found him deal with him. I made my way to the driver’s seat. “Clary, cuff that Omega stooge. Hands behind his back. Then cuff his ankles together, and then handcuff the cuffs together like—”
“You want me hogtie him?” The cornpone was a little too evident in the way he said this.
“Whatever you call it, just make it happen,” I said as I stepped on the accelerator and heard the sputter of the van’s engine. “Kat, get on the phone and call HQ, we need a new vehicle, this one’s been seen leaving the scene of a…” I thought about it for a moment, “…a housing crisis.”
“She’s passed out,” Clary said.
“What?” I looked back, at the pile of bodies on the floor. Kat was indeed passed out, her skin pressed against Scott. “Get her off of him!”
“What?” Clary frowned at me, one eyebrow knitted. “I thought you told me to cuff—”
“GET HER OFF OF SCOTT!” I swerved to avoid oncoming traffic, and I heard flesh hit metal in the back and prayed that Clary could carry out my command.
“Okay, okay,” I heard Clary after a moment. “She’s moved, but, you know, there ain’t much space back here with all the damned bodies—”
“Shut up, Clary,” I said, reaching into my coat pocket. I fumbled, pulling out a cell phone that was shattered into three distinct pieces. I dropped all three of them onto the floor and started rummaging; Kat’s coat was on the seat next to me. I searched the pocket while keeping one eye on the road and pulled out a phone in a pink plastic case. “For real, Kat?
” I thumbed it on and was presented with a screen prompting me to enter the eight—digit lock code. “Dammit!” I shouted and swerved again, trying to drive the heavy, overladen van with one hand. I tossed the phone onto the seat. “Clary, do you still have your phone?”
“Yeah, hold on a second.” I waited, almost holding my breath, the cars streaking by as I got us onto the interstate. “Here you go,” he said, handing it to me, a small, thin lump of plastic about half the size of the phone I carried.
“Thanks.” I started to hold it up to my head but stopped, looking at it, confused.
“Hey, you want the rest of it?” I glanced back; he still held the other half of it.
“DAMMIT!” I started to hit the steering wheel out of sheer frustration and thought the better of it at the last minute, realizing my meta strength would enable me to break it into pieces and leave us stranded. I hit the gas instead as we made the turn onto the on-ramp, and I throttled up the gas as we raced up the interstate.
“Status report,” I said after a few minutes of silence.
There was a hesitation, then Clary spoke. “You talking to me?”
“No, I’m talking to the four unconscious people. Use your head, Clary! Of course I’m talking to you.”
“Umm,” he withered under my glare. “Scott’s still bleeding, but not as bad. Reed’s out and his face looks like someone took a brick to it.” He frowned. “What happened to him, anyway?”
“Someone took a brick to his face,” I said, clenching my jaw. “What about our friend from Omega?”
“Oh, yeah, he ain’t movin’.” Clary’s voice revealed a hint of self-satisfaction. “I got him trussed up real good, three sets of our heavy handcuffs on his wrists, two on his ankles, and one holding it all together like that plastic thingy they use on six-packs.”
“How’s Kat?”
“She looks like she ain’t been out in the sun for about a hundred years,” Clary said, no trace of irony. “But she’s breathing and all, seems all right. I pinched her on the tit and she didn’t move, though, so I think she might be out pretty hard.”
I let that settle for a second. “You did…what?”
“Well, I—”
“Never mind. Keep your damned hands off her, Clary, and see if you can find a way to call the Directorate.”
He was silent for a moment. “Maybe a pay phone?”
I thought about that. “Do you know the number?”
“No. It’s in my cell phone—”
I sighed, but not really at him. The sad truth was, I knew the number, but I was still working through things in my head. “Is Kat all right? Still breathing?”
“Yep.” I heard a silence for a beat. “She’s definitely still breathing and all. Feels nice and warm.”
I turned my head at a snap to look at what he was doing and found him with a hand on her chest. “Clary, you pervert! Hands off!”
“I was checking her pulse!”
“Her pulse is way north of where you were checking for it!”
“I was trying to see if I could feel her heartbeat, you know, close to the heart itself, because it would be stronger there, right?”
“Never mind,” I said. “No one’s in critical condition. They’ll all survive…so let’s just drive. Really fast. We’ll stop in a few minutes and change the license plates and then we’ll just haul ass to get home.” I bit my lower lip. “And hopefully everything will work out.”
8.
We pulled through the gates of the Directorate a few hours later. The ride had been quiet, the opposite of the trip down, Clary keeping himself silent. Our prisoner did not awaken, nor did any of our other passengers. When we stopped, I did a quick check of Reed and Scott. My brother’s face was a mess, but had already started to heal because of his meta abilities and what Kat had done with her powers. Scott, on the other hand, was pale from what I assumed to be extreme blood loss. He’d started to regain his color by the time we were pulling up to the gates, but I wasn’t terribly eager to hear Dr. Perugini’s assessment of what had happened (or Old Man Winter’s, come to think of it, or Ariadne’s).
We pulled up to the front of headquarters and I found Ariadne waiting for us. As I stepped out, her jaw dropped and she rushed forward. “What happened to you?”
“Clary,” I said through gritted teeth. I wasn’t over it yet. “We’ve got wounded—Kat, Scott and Reed—but we also have a prisoner.” I opened the back doors to the van. “Can you get Dr. Perugini out here?”
She nodded sharply, her phone already in her hand. “Isabella,” she said. “Get to the front of HQ, we’ve got wounded.” I heard the soft beep as she cut the connection. A cool wind picked up as I opened the back doors to the van and Ariadne let out a gasp as she looked inside. “What the hell happened? Why didn’t you call?”
“No phones,” I said. “And I didn’t want to slow down. We had to leave Iowa in a hurry.”
I heard doors opening behind me as Perugini came rushing out of the building, rolling a gurney covered in white sheets. Her lab coat matched the sheets perfectly, as though she were a part of the gurney herself. “What the hell…happened here?”
“I led a mission,” I said tightly, “and Clary came along.”
Clary stepped down from the back of the van, pulling Reed out and setting him on the gurney. “It was an accident, I swear.”
“It was a…” I held my tongue. “…Charlie Foxtrot. I’ll carry Scott, you get Kat.”
“Done and done,” he said with a little too much enthusiasm.
“Cancel that,” I said. “I’ll get Kat.” I lifted her up in my arms, trying to cradle her so that her thin neck didn’t bob. “What do we do about the prisoner?”
“I’ll get him,” Clary said with muffled disappointment. “You want him in the cell block, Ariadne?”
“Yes,” Ariadne said, a little pale. “That’ll be fine. What a catastrophe.”
“They’ll be okay,” I said.
“Oh, are you a doctor now?” Perugini said from where she stood over Reed. Her dark skin was flushed red in the lamplight. “No? Then shut up and carry them in while I do my work. Come back for the other one.”
I nodded and started toward the entrance when the door opened again and Zack emerged with Kurt Hannegan. Zack saw me and his face pinched in concern. “What happened to you?” he asked as he approached, his suit flapping in the wind. “You look like you got rolled in dough.”
“Here,” I said and handed Kat to him. He took up her weight, cradling her in his arms like a baby. “I’m going to carry Scott.” I turned back to the van, where Clary was lifting our prisoner over his head, carrying him on his shoulders in a bowed shape. I picked up Scott in my arms and tossed him over a shoulder with as much care as I could. “Clary, get that man to the cell block and don’t let him out of the restraints once you’re there. Let him sleep like that; he’s too strong to let loose.”
Clary nodded as we entered the marbled lobby, the black stone flecked with white that didn’t even show in the dim light. All the recessed lighting had dimmed for the night and Clary made his way toward the stairs, evading the beams shining down from overhead as though he were trying to stay to the shadows.
“I want a full debriefing when you’re done seeing to them,” Ariadne said. “The Director will want to be informed.”
“I’ll be there once I finish dropping them off,” I told her. “Give me about ten minutes?”
She nodded and disappeared toward the elevator banks while we filed down a long, narrow hallway.
“Good to see you,” I said to Zack, and got a tight smile in return. “How was your day?”
“Not as exciting as yours, I’m guessing,” he said with aplomb, repositioning Kat in his arms. “What happened on your mission?” There was a clatter as Perugini rolled the gurney down the hall ahead of us, hitting the small grooves where the tile separated from the carpeted areas.
“We destroyed the Omega safe house.”
“Uh…weren’t yo
u supposed to surveil it?” Zack asked, his face contorting as though he were trying to find a diplomatic way to ask the question that was on his mind.
“Clary,” I said simply as we walked through the doors of the medical unit. I set Scott on a bed, being as careful with him as possible. “He decided to walk up and knock on the door.”
“And then what happened?” Zack asked, laying Kat on the next bed over from Scott.
“Then Clary go boom,” I said, brushing Scott’s curly locks off his forehead. There were some scabbed-over cuts still there. “Our prisoner answered the door by blasting it off its hinges. He’s quite strong, that one.”
“What is he?” Zack asked, lifting the rail on the edge of Kat’s bed into the locked position to keep her from rolling out.
“Clary? An idiot.” I lifted the rail on Scott’s bed and started to adjust it to sit him up at a forty-five degree angle. “As for the meta we picked up at the Omega safe house, I have no idea what type. He didn’t really show any other abilities that I noticed other than an uncanny knack for destroying everything around him.” I frowned. “Is there a nuclear bomb type?”
“Yeah. Aleksandr Gavrikov,” Zack said with amusement. “No fire, though, right?”
“No fire,” I said, as he made his way around the bed and over to me. “Just a lot of property damage that resulted in a house caving in.”
Zack brushed his fingers over my forehead. “Did you get hurt?”
“Not bad,” I said, and ran my fingers through my hair. They came back coated in white dust, and I coughed involuntarily. “I did inhale a few rooms worth of plaster, though, so if I spit out a whole wall later tonight, you’ll know why.”
“I can’t believe Ariadne sent Clary with you,” Zack said, stroking my hair, brushing the dust out of it. “Everyone knows that guy is an idiot.”
“A useful idiot at times, though,” I said.
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