The Princess of Wands (Villainess Book 3)

by Alana Melos

  We had to change our luck. I punched the mental block in my head and the wall gave, but didn’t break. The stretchy material felt slick and warm under my mental hand. When I pushed, it gave the slightest bit, giving me hope. If I pushed hard enough, maybe it would break like an overfilled balloon. I ducked a swing from the meta I fought and slashed at its midsection. The blade ran off like water, not leaving a mark on it. Bit by bit, I shifted more and more of my concentration to the fight. I was losing. Even though I racked my brain trying to figure a way through the block, I knew I wouldn’t have any luck. It stood too strong, too tall, too impossible in my mind.

  When he threw a right hook, I grabbed his black-light shrouded wrist and flipped him. Pain registered in my head a split second later, racing through my hand and up my arm. I shook it out, cursing under my breath. Inwardly, I pushed at the block in my mind. It merely stretched and twisted, undulating beneath my hands.

  I wasn’t going to die here, but this was a do or die situation. With the drifts outside, we couldn’t run. At best, we’d get a block or two before gunfire brought us down. There wasn’t any place to hide, and without my teke to fly us out, we were stuck. It never occurred to me to leave Rebekah behind. Gerard… yes, but not her. She deserved better.

  As the meta threw another punch at me, a hand burst out of the block in my head, through the wall of red to grab my mental hand. Shocked, I stood still, my attention going inward. It was just like my dream. Remembered anger filled me. I pulled, but it didn’t budge. It also didn’t try to yank me in either.

  In realtime, the punch connected with my jaw, sending me flying down the way to crash in old crates and debris. With the few seconds of reprieve the punch had given me (along with a killer headache and a couple of loose teeth), I focused all my attention on the hand. Without hesitation, I plugged myself into it, connecting in my head in a different way, hoping it was enough to reroute. What I expected to find… I don’t know. A repressed me? Lost memories? A younger version of myself?

  I got no sense of anything from it. It was as I needed: a tube through to another part of my brain and nothing more. Yet that hand… that hand clutched me with a firm grip, pulsing with strength unheard of. The fingers were slender and long, with the nails colored a light green… definitely a feminine hand, so maybe my thoughts weren’t too far off.

  It didn’t matter.

  This wasn’t the time to figure out my head troubles. I snapped back to reality and flexed my mental might as I lifted myself off the floor telekinetically. It took only a thought and I grinned as the meta stormed towards me, a black hurricane of power. I chuckled as strength suffused my being. He hadn’t seen power like this.

  As I tried to grab him, the telekinetic binders kept sliding off of him. Some people were like that--unable to be touched by another’s power. It didn’t matter. I stepped to the side and grabbed that huge metal machine behind me. It lifted with only a touch of effort and I threw it at him, using it as a battering ram. The machinery slammed into the tall, dark meta. It didn’t slide off of him. No, instead I pushed it forward, flying it and the meta stuck to it across the room to slam into the wall. The building shook with the force of the blow. Both the Siren and the woman she fought stopped and looked over.

  I floated forward, and the woman shook her head. “That’s not possible,” she said, her voice stained with disbelief. “You shouldn’t… you can’t…! Your powers should be gone for at least another hour!”

  Gerard laughed, a sharp sound which cut through the silence. “You’re the one who wanted her,” he sneered. “Now you’ve got her. Have fun.”

  I cut a look to him, but the meta stirred behind the machinery. I felt him through the vibrations on the machine, which in turn vibrated the telekinetic bonds around it. I’d never quite experienced anything that before. It was as if the power were alive, another appendage like a hand or a foot instead of simply being invisible force. Pulling back the metal monolith I held with my mind, I saw the meta stumble forward, reeling… then I hit him again.

  And again.

  And, hell, why not? One more time.

  When I pulled the machinery back that time, he slumped over, the helmet cracked and broken. He struggled and twitched, yet made no sound. When he turned over, I heard a loud rasp, and blinked. The helmet had twisted some and broken wide open. Underneath the helmet lay a scarred face, any features of individuality ruined, gone. There was a slit for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth, but that was it. The rest was a lumpy mass of scars. He, it… looked as if it were Jack Torrence from The Shining… after he’d scrubbed his face off.

  When it shuddered and lay still, I turned to the woman, my eyes blazing. “Guess who’s next?”

  The Nacht Sirene snorted, taking a step back. She raised her goggles and lowered her gas mask to reveal a confident smirk and a face flushed from the exertion of the fight. “Now it’s time for the interrogation,” she said, moving over to where her father was handcuffed. With a couple of loud snaps, she broke the chains on the handcuffs, freeing him. “Are you alright?”

  The enemy’s face closed up and became thoughtful. I still couldn’t detect her telepathically, so I grabbed her telekinetically as Gerard nodded and stood up, with a little help from his daughter. “Just kill her, Reece,” he said. “You won’t get anything out of her.”

  “I think I will,” I said, floating closer and landing to examine her closer. “Where are you from? Who are you? What do you want with me?”

  She smiled. “You should have listened to him,” she said, her voice still projecting confidence. “It’s time to reevaluate, but I think my employers will be extremely interested to hear what happened.”

  “Employers?” She was just a middle man, a hired gun? “Who?” I raised the sword, knowing she couldn’t struggle or get away, not with how tight I was holding her with my teke.

  “Execute Golf Alfa Zulu directive,” she said. An explosion erupted behind me. Rebekah and I jumped, surprised, but Gerard took a few steps towards her, then stumbled, his legs unsure.

  “Kill her, kill her now!” he exclaimed, reaching for her with his splintered hand as if trying to use his own teke to paste her.

  I whipped my head around, the impetus in his voice spurring me to do as he commanded. She smiled at me, tipped me a wink, then simply disappeared as my sword came down where she had been, leaving only a soft ‘pop’ behind. She wasn’t invisible; she simply ceased to exist there. The popping sound was from the air rushing into the empty space.

  “God dammit! A fucking teleporter?!” I snarled. “How do the heroes stand it? This villain escaping thing is fucking annoying!”

  Gerard waved it off. “Let it go,” he said, now sounding weary. “You should have listened to me, Reece.”

  I turned to him, fury building, but then the hand in my mind let go. I blinked as I tried to connect to my teke again, but it was no good. Without the tunnel, I had nothing to draw on until the shock wore off. She said at least an hour, so it could potentially be longer. “I can’t use my teke… mother fuck. What if she comes back?” I asked.

  “I don’t think she will,” Rebekah said. “She knew she was beat, and she doesn’t know you can’t use your power. Besides, even without, the two of us ganging her would take her down.”

  “I think you mean gangbanging,” I said, huffing in irritation as I sheathed my blade.

  Gerard snorted. “I think she means ‘ganging up’,” he corrected.

  I waved a hand, “Same difference.”

  Now that the threat of imminent death had fled, I looked back and forth between the two. Rebekah’s fingers kept tugging at the edge of her jacket which was a sure sign she was upset or nervous. Gerard… looked like hell, but he acted like his regular self, as if the wounds weren’t affecting him at all. They probably weren’t. I tried to reach out to him telepathically, but of course, nothing would come. A telepath could muck with their own mind all they wanted, depowered or not, and he more than likely shut off or dulled down his
pain receptors.

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. Whatever was between them was their business… or at least that’s what I told myself. I didn’t want to get involved. Instead of addressing the elephant in the room, I moved over to the dead body which wasn’t splattered all over the room and burned to a crisp: the guy I’d stabbed right away. When I searched the body, I found nothing, not even a driver’s license or a business card. He did have one of those neural disruptors the woman had used. I pocketed it, then stood up.

  “There’s nothing more here,” I said. “Not unless I’m missing something?” I shot that question towards Ger.

  He looked away from Rebekah to focus on me. “No, I didn’t see anything else.” His ice blue eyes bored into my own with a strange intensity. “How did you…?”

  Gerard didn’t have to finish. I knew what he was talking about. “Use my teke?” I shrugged. “I made a new pathway, I think.” I smiled a little, feeling awfully proud of myself.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head. “If you say so,” he replied, and sat down hard in the chair. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  “Why did they come for you?” Rebekah asked.

  “They didn’t,” he said, meeting her eyes, then looking at me. “I was just a lead to their real prize.”

  A cold which had nothing to do with the snow and wind outside caused me to shudder. The same people Harry had made a deal with those months ago, who’d been looking for me. That had been the whole reason for his double-cross, which one could argue had set all of this crap into motion. They weren’t being that subtle now, yet I took solace in the fact they didn’t know where I lived. More than likely, they had seen Gerard and I together, tried to follow me, and I lost their trail in the Underground.

  Lifetime ban… well, that wasn’t going to happen again.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t do anything about it right this second, so I pushed it to the side, as I was so good at doing. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you cleaned up while we wait for our powers to come back.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A couple days later found me at a contact’s apartment. He was a friend of a fixer who knew things about a lot of different stuff and I had some questions to be answered. It’d cost me a pretty penny to get the name and location. I hoped it would pay off.

  The guy--whose name was Hal--was a little chunky from not getting a lot of exercise. His dark red hair was rough, uncut, and he had to keep brushing his bangs out of his eyes. I had a ton of questions and not many answers. He served as a means to get at least a few of them, those which had a scientific way to get at them.

  The apartment could barely be called an apartment. It was more like a really low tech lab with some interesting thing-a-ma-bobs stuck in wherever they would fit. My first question was this: how did my blade cut an invulnerable metahuman? Was it reliable? Or was it that she just had a particular weakness to something in the blade? He took a small sample to analyze the mineral makeup, and we were waiting on some other machine to finish measuring its ‘vibrations’. When the machine beeped, I pushed myself off the desk I’d been leaning on and approached him as he read the data.

  “Alright, this is… hmm… that’s interesting,” he said, his voice trailing off as thoughts left him. My telepathy and telekinesis had come back an hour or so after I’d been hit with the disruptor and I’d flown everyone to a safe place. Since I was whole once more, I kept a lock on Hal’s emotions, monitoring him with care. Most of them were boring: interest, curiosity, determination, a shade of lust for me, and so on. As he went through the pages the machine spit out, his excitement grew, a bright silver thread. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my. Oh my.”

  “You mind cluing me in on what it said?” I asked.

  He turned to me, his muddy brown eyes bright and shining. “Where did you get this katana?”

  “It’s an o-wakizashi,” I corrected. “And I inherited it.”

  “That’s… really interesting,” Hal said as he removed my sword from the machine. “Something this big? It’s hard to believe.”

  I reached forward and plucked it from his grasp. He let it go, his cheeks coloring red and he rubbed the back of his neck. “What’s hard to believe?”

  “That… o… sword isn’t from this dimension, it’s from Origin,” he said, his eyes still alight with childlike wonder. “I’ve never seen anything from there before, not outside a lab anyway. And nothing that big. I’ve heard rumors, but--”

  “Origin?” I asked, cutting him off. He’d just continue to ramble anyway. “I haven’t heard of it.” This was no surprise. Other than the few major alternate dimensions--Axis Earth, Roma Earth, Indigenous Earth and so on--which affected Prime here in some way, I knew almost nothing. Other realities or dimensions didn’t interest me; this one did.

  “The first, the original,” he said, still eyeballing my blade.

  I sheathed it, frowning. “I thought we were first. Prime, you know? Number one?”

  Hal shook his head, the spell my o-wakizashi had over him broken as I put it away. “Prime… first? No, no, you misunderstand,” he said. “We were the first ones ever contacted by Origin, so that’s why we were called Prime.”

  “Wait, they named us? We’re… we’re a reflection?” I continued to frown, trying to figure it out. My education hadn’t been heavy on books or history, by which I meant non-existent as far as they went.

  Hal was already shaking his head even as I spoke. “Jeez, this is all remedial stuff,” he groused. “What, didn’t you graduate from high school?” When my frown deepened into a scowl, he held up his hands. “Alright, alright, let me get remedial.” He paused to collect his thoughts. When he spoke again, some of the excitement had drained from his voice. “You know what the Big Bang is, right? The singularity it came from? Where everything came from?” I nodded. “Origin is like that. It’s the first world, the original world. When something makes a decision--a being with free will and cognizance, though some theorize animals can make alternate worlds too, but that’s….” He trailed off and I cleared my throat loudly.

  “That’s beside the point,” I said, tapping my fingernails on his desk. “Go on.”

  “Right, er… where was I…. Yes!” he gave me a sheepish glance. “When someone makes a decision, turn left or right for example, both possibilities are created: one in the dimension a person is in, and the other in an alternate dimension, made on the spot.” He paused to peer at me once more, “This really is basic quantum physics, you know.”

  I reminded myself I needed him as he still hadn’t gotten to the explanation. “Just go on.”

  “Origin is the first dimension, the one from which all alternates have been created. Of course, those alternates go on to make others, and those make more, and so on and so forth.”

  “So, why can it cut someone who’s invulnerable?” In spite of myself, I was interested. I’d always been interested in science, though I really only knew basic stuff. It wasn’t a major drive, else I’d be something other than a criminal, but it was there and indulged infrequently.

  “Ok well, each dimension vibrates at its own frequency,” Hal explained. “Uh… sort of like a radio frequency. You get close enough to the main one, you’ll dial it in. The smaller ones, like hey, that dimension where everything is the same except Bob didn’t brush his teeth that morning is a lot harder to dial in. The bigger the difference--like Axis Earth with the Reich winning the war--the easier it is to find. But all of them… every single one… originates from Origin, hence the name. That frequency is like… I don’t know, a trump card. It overpowers everything else.”

  “Why can’t it cut through metal then? Or armor?” I leaned on his desk again, fascinated.

  “Metal is still metal,” he said. “If it can pierce it with its normal strength and enough force, then it will. Metahumans, their powers? Totally different. Their abilities operate because of the cells in their body. The Event unlocked all human potential, m
ore or less letting them jitter and jive with the building blocks of creation. They, well… hey, you’re a metahuman, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “Of course,” I said. “It’s pretty rare for someone to be in the biz and not be.”

  “Yeah, well, eventually everyone will be,” he said. “Heck, technically we are right now, everyone that is. Ah, what was I saying… oh yes, well, metahuman powers operate off of energy, which vibrates at the same dimensional frequency of the meta’s home dimension. Origin being the trump card…”

  “It negates the energy of the metahuman’s powers by overcoming the connection between the energy and the dimension, essentially severing it,” I finished.

  “Hey, not bad, Remedial,” Hal said, smiling to show his uneven teeth.

  “What about magic?” I asked, ignoring the insult for now. “It didn’t… there was a shield. It didn’t break it.”

  Hal shook his head. “That I don’t know about,” he said. “I’m a scientist. Ask a mage.”

  “I’ll have to,” I replied, thinking over what he said. “The guy I fought… he wasn’t wearing armor. At least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t armor, since it blew up pretty good. I’m pretty sure it was resistant to damage, but not real armor. His power was doing the heavy lifting.”

  The rogue scientist rolled his eyes. “You’re a smart girl,” he said. “Do the math.”

  I bared my teeth at him and he winced, flinching back. Satisfied at my show of dominance, I turned the question over in my mind. A few seconds later and I had the answer. “It didn’t work on his powers because he was from Origin.”