“I’m good,” she promised, drawing out the staff. “Trust me. The witch is back.”
Karolina led the way down through the hole in the roof. There were no guards and most of the Nightwatch were down in the street. Nobody attempted to stop them as they rushed past the ruined elevator shaft. The last time they’d gone to the left, into the private suite of Kathryn Zheng, but now they had a different goal in mind. They ran past the elevator shaft, moving parallel to the corridor in Kathryn’s suite. Fifty feet or so down the hall Karolina began to slow and glanced over her shoulder.
“Gert, you studied the blueprint. Where do you think—?”
“Right there. Maybe another six feet, to be safe,” Gert said.
The others crowded the hallway as Karolina came to a halt. She turned to the bare wall on her left—the one the blueprint showed was the rear wall of the room where Tess had been imprisoned. If they couldn’t go through the front door, there were other ways in.
“Do it,” Zeke said. “No telling how much time we’ll have.”
Nico nudged him. “Give the girl room to work. Everybody, back up.”
Karolina waited as Gert and Nico herded Molly, Old Lace, Zeke, and Allis away. It was so weird having Allis with them—weird but nice. Things were moving quickly, and Karolina knew she and Allis were going to need to have a long conversation when this was over. Their flirtation had become more than that, and she wanted to know how much more. Allis caught her eye, almost on cue, and smiled mischievously.
Focusing, she glanced at Molly. “You ready?”
“When you need me.” Molly stood a bit straighter, impatient as ever.
Karolina held up both hands. Swirling colors turned to solid light and she released a punishing laser blast at the wall. The light came from the solar radiation she absorbed during the day, stored in the cells of her body, and Karolina always felt a connection to that light as if it were an extension of herself. She knew the moment the laser blast struck the wall that the structure would yield to her. Mustering more power, she launched another attack, poured it on, and the plaster and wood began to burn. Focusing, Karolina burned a massive oval in the wall and it collapsed outward, crashing to the tiled floor of the corridor. The edges of the hole were charred black and smoking, flickering with little bits of flame.
But the hole she’d opened only went so deep. A foot further in there was a concrete surface.
“Molly,” Karolina said. “You’re up.”
Without a word, Molly ran at the wall, leaped, and threw a punch that even the Hulk would have felt. Concrete shards exploded out of the hole…revealing a layer of steel. Karolina glanced at Molly, but the younger girl only smiled, happy for the challenge. Molly punched again. The strike barely made a dent—but it did make a dent, and so Molly kept punching.
“Hang on,” Karolina said. “Let’s take turns. I can soften it up for you.”
Karolina pointed a finger at the deepening dent and hit it with a laser that began to burn through the metal.
“It’s working,” Zeke said. “But we have to hurry.”
“Don’t you think we know?” Molly snapped at him as she hammered on the wall again.
The partially melted steel began to crack, but it wasn’t yielding fast enough for Molly. She took a step back to let Karolina continue. Wondering how long her solar reserves would last tonight, Karolina took aim at the crack in the dented steel, but a chill wind blew across the back of her neck. Even before she heard the others start to shout, she knew what it meant.
Spinning, Karolina threw up a curtain of sizzling colors and forged them into a shield, which held only a moment before the icy air burst through. Ice formed on her arms and face as the wind blasted her into Molly, and the two of them blew backward into their friends. They hit the floor in a tumble of arms and legs. Karolina’s head smacked the tile and she saw stars. For a few seconds, everything went black, and when consciousness returned they were all trying to stand as a blizzard raged in the hallway.
“I swear,” Kathryn said, “I never thought the Pride’s children would be so foolish.”
Old Lace roared and lunged, plowing through the wind and the blizzard. Karolina caught a glimpse through the indoor snowstorm of the look of terror on Kathryn’s face before thunder shook the whole building and lightning arced along the corridor and lit up Old Lace from within. The dinosaur screamed. Gert shrieked in sympathetic agony and crumbled to the ground. Karolina had never heard sounds so dreadful, but although Old Lace staggered, the dinosaur kept going. Smoke puffed from her nostrils and her open jaws as she lunged for Kathryn, who turned all the focus of her snowstorm on Old Lace and turned her into a bizarre ice sculpture.
Fuming, Kathryn spun on the rest of them.
“My son’s problem,” she said, “is that he always assumes he’s the smartest one in the room, when really he’s a baby throwing a tantrum.”
In that quiet moment, just before the battle would begin again, Allis aimed the plasma pistol Chase had given her and shot Kathryn in the chest. The energy blasted her backward, but whatever magic or mutation gave Kathryn Zheng her powers, they were more than elemental, because though the pulse knocked her back a few steps, she remained on her feet.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Zeke said, although he didn’t sound sorry. “You brought this on yourself.”
He muttered that same guttural phrase in that ancient tongue. The air in the hallway seemed to flex and darken and then Zeke’s body was gone, the Kurdogrim in its place.
Kathryn stared at him—her fourteen-foot son hunched over in the corridor, bloody ax in hand, locked inside the wine-red, leather-gnarled body of an elder god.
“I still can’t believe the depth of your betrayal,” she sneered. “Look at you.”
Kurdo-Zeke reached for his mother, grabbed her by the throat with one massive hand, and smashed her against the tile floor.
Kurdo-Zeke lifted the ax. Kathryn’s eyes went wide. Karolina stared at the blood on the cruel edge of that ax and she knew she couldn’t stand by and let this happen, couldn’t let Zeke murder his mother. Couldn’t let him live with that.
“Nico!” she shouted.
“I’m on it!” Nico said, pushing between Karolina and Molly and past the ice-packed form of Old Lace. She held up the Staff of One. “Go Play with Your Friends.”
Kathryn Zheng vanished just as the ax came down and shattered the tile floor.
Kurdo-Zeke spun on Nico, face etched with fury. “What the hell did you just do?”
“Stopped you from killing your mother!”
Karolina stepped between them as Kurdo-Zeke and Nico seemed about to come to blows. Molly, Gert, and Allis had started smashing the ice and snow away from Old Lace, and they’d cracked off enough of it that the dinosaur had started breaking herself loose, shaking away the cocoon of ice like a dog shaking off water.
“Where is she, Nico?” Zeke growled in his Kurdogrim voice, backing off slightly, perhaps realizing they were supposed to be on the same side.
“Down on the street with the rest of them,” Nico said, and then she dropped her head. “Which means…shit! The others are going to know we’re up here.”
“Good job,” Kurdo-Zeke rumbled. “For your information, I planted that ax right next to where her head would have been. I wasn’t about to split my mother’s skull.”
Old Lace hissed at him, unafraid despite the size difference between them and the fact that Zeke smelled like a Kurdogrim. Karolina frowned. She’d seen where the ax had smashed the tiles, and she thought that if Zeke hadn’t meant to kill Kathryn, he had misjudged that blow, because it would have cracked her head in two.
Molly smashed her fist into the cracked steel plating separating them from the prison-room. She pounded the metal again and again. With a shrieking of metal, the plating began to tear.
Old Lace snarled at Zeke again.
“Gert, can you get your bitch to heel?”
Karolina saw Gert flinch.
“I guess you
can turn the charm on and off,” Gert said. “But it’s definitely off right now. I can handle you whipping out your attitude to my friends, because they have their own voices. They can speak for themselves. But Old Lace can’t speak. If I let her deal with your crap her way, she’ll eat your face.”
Kurdo-Zeke swallowed his pride. Karolina saw it happen, saw the big, ugly Kurdogrim face turn from angry and arrogant to sad and frustrated.
“Gert, I’m sorry,” he said.
And he did sound sorry. Any other time, Karolina would have been curious about Gert’s reply, but Molly had stopped pounding on the steel. Shoving her hands into the crack, Molly peeled the three-inch-thick steel plating open like it was aluminum foil. Now that the girl had leverage, the metal tore with a terrible grinding noise, and then they were all staring in through the ruined wall at the two faces that peered out.
Carlos they already knew. His sister Tess had a thick head of copper-tinted brown hair and an infectious grin. Tess jumped through the hole, wrapped her arms around Molly, and kissed her on the top of her koala bear hat. Then she went to Zeke and punched the Kurdogrim giant in the chest.
“Ow,” Kurdo-Zeke rumbled. It seemed ridiculous, and Karolina thought it was mostly his pride that had been hurt.
“Took you long enough,” Tess chided him. Then she turned to take in the rest of the group, scanning Karolina, Allis, Molly, Gert, and Old Lace. Her eyes widened a bit when Old Lace sniffed her, but she didn’t seem frightened. “Carlos and I are grateful you came to get us…particularly that you came back to get us. I blame Zeke that it didn’t go well the first time.”
Gert smirked. “Oh, I like this one.”
Nico tapped the comms unit in her ear. “Chase, we’re on the move.” Then she turned to Carlos and Tess. “Originally, our plan was to snatch you guys and take off. But we’ve got an opportunity right now. We tricked the Masters of Evil into assaulting your parents. If Zeke is right and they intend to kill you—and us, for that matter—we can’t afford to leave them running around free. The Nightwatch might be too much for us, but the Masters—”
“Losers,” Molly interrupted.
“Yes, the Losers of Evil,” Nico went on, “are definitely going to make things interesting for them. They might even win. I propose we hit the street and take them all down.”
“Agreed,” Carlos said, radiating fury. “This has to end. I’m not going to be caged again.”
“I get it!” Molly said amiably. “‘Caged,’ because you shape-shift into animals and stuff!”
Carlos shot her a withering look, which Molly happily ignored.
Karolina turned to Kurdo-Zeke. “I want to be clear on this—we’re not going to kill them. We’re going to capture and expose them and turn them over to the police.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Zeke said, glancing around for support and finding none. “They’ll escape ten minutes after we’ve handed them over.”
“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Nico said.
Molly nodded emphatically and crossed her arms. “We’ll call the Avengers, or maybe even S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“One or the other,” Karolina said. “Too many of those guys and things get complicated.”
Even Zeke agreed, though with obvious reluctance. He muttered his guttural incantation and swapped back to his human body, knowing the Leapfrog would be jammed with all of them in there.
Nico turned toward Tess and Carlos. “Now that you’re free, what’ve we got for weapons? What are your powers?”
Carlos shrugged. “Told you guys before, I’m a shape-shifter, like my mother.”
Gert looked at Tess. “So are you a teleporter like your dad?”
Tess reached her hand out with a flourish, and her arm vanished up to the elbow. For half a second Karolina thought all of her would disappear, and then she saw the way the air shimmered around Tess’s arm. Tess grinned, reached a little further into nothingness, and then pulled her hand back out of wherever it had been, now holding a massive broadsword with a silver handle and a blade made entirely of fire.
“Oh, that’s cool!” Molly said. “That’s your power? Fire Sword Girl or something?”
Tess nodded slowly. “Or something. I have access to a kind of pocket dimension where thousands of nasty weapons are stored. Mystical, alien, future science. The coolest crap you’ve ever seen. Some of them are harder to get than others, but this one…” She brandished the fire sword again. “This is my favorite.”
Karolina couldn’t help but like her.
“That’ll come in handy,” Nico said. “All right, everyone. Let’s move. Stay together. Fight together. Cover each other’s backs. And remember, no killing.”
They started back along the corridor, made it to the pile of debris from the fallen ceiling, and started climbing. Karolina hung back, waited to make sure they all got up safely, and then followed. Out on the roof, in the glare of that neon sign, she could hear the noise from the battle far below. Police sirens wailed in the distance. Gunshots rang out. Something shattered.
Allis waited for her at the Leapfrog’s hatch. She looked scared, and though the girl had acquitted herself well against Kathryn Zheng, Karolina wished they had left Allis behind at the Hostel.
“You okay?” Karolina asked, pausing outside the Leapfrog to take the girl’s hand.
“I think so,” Allis replied. “I just…it would be so much easier to kill the Nightwatch than to capture them. If that’s what Zeke and the others want to do, why would you want to stop it? I mean, you didn’t do it on purpose, but you and your friends basically killed your own parents.”
Karolina felt a terrible pang in her heart.
“That’s true,” she said. “And you’re right, it would be easier…which is tempting. But no matter how evil our parents were, it’s a horrible thing to have to live with. That’s why we’ll do whatever we can to make sure Zeke and his friends don’t end up the same way.”
“So if Zeke tries to kill his mother again, you’ll stop him?”
Karolina squeezed her hand. “I’ll try.”
Molly poked her head out of the hatch. “You guys, come on! We need to move or it’ll be over before we get there!”
Karolina and Allis climbed inside, closed the hatch, and buckled into their seats. As Chase and Nico strategized, all Karolina could think of was Molly’s words: It’ll be over before we get there, she’d said.
But Karolina knew they wouldn’t be that lucky. They were the Runaways, after all. Even when it seemed like they had it all under control, things had a habit of going horribly, horribly wrong.
Chase kept the Leapfrog in stealth mode as they dropped toward the street. Whirlwind and Kathryn were in combat below, sending gusts and small tornado-updrafts their way. The Frog blew to one side and Gert shouted his name as they nearly crashed into the side of the hotel.
“You got this, babe,” Gert said.
Chase grinned. “Easy for you to say.”
She put a hand on his thigh and squeezed. As he guided the Leapfrog into the side street between the hotel and an apartment building, he felt the faith she had in him and the connection they shared. A blast of hurricane-force wind blew down the street but he kept the Frog steady, guided it between an overturned SUV and an abandoned UPS truck. The Frog’s legs reached, touched ground, and settled with a hiss.
“Nicely done,” Gert said, before kissing him on the cheek.
“I know, right?”
“Hold the applause,” Nico said, as they all unbuckled themselves and started to rise. “If we’re doing this, we go in hard and fast. If we can’t beat them in the first few minutes after contact, then we can’t beat them and we retreat.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Zeke said.
Carlos and Tess glanced at one another but didn’t take sides.
“You don’t have to retreat,” Nico told Zeke, “but the Runaways are dusting off as soon as I give the signal. You and the rest of Nightwatch Junior are free to do what you—”
Tess went at Nico. Toe to toe, she glared in Nico’s face. “Don’t call us that. We’re not that, not ever.”
Chase took Gert’s hand, not wanting her to get in the middle. When Tess had climbed into the Leapfrog she’d had a flaming sword in her hand. Chase had made her put it away, but he remembered the size of the thing and the heat coming off its flames. Helping Zeke and his friends had rapidly turned into a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time sort of thing.
“She’s right,” Karolina said.
“I agree,” Allis piped up. “Imagine if they called you ‘Pride Junior.’”
Nico kept her gaze locked on Tess’s. “Fine. But I’m not letting my team gamble their lives on a lost cause. If it looks like it’s falling apart, we are getting the hell out of here.”
She pushed past Tess, slammed the button for the hatch, which hissed open. They started pouring out of the cramped space. Nico and Molly were the first ones off, then Karolina and Allis. Zeke, Carlos, and Tess followed, with Old Lace sniffing after them and growling low in her throat.
“What’s her deal?” Chase asked, when he and Gert were the only ones left in the now-quiet Leapfrog.
“Old Lace? I don’t know. She’s on edge. Spoiling for a fight today, like Molly.”
“I meant Allis. It’s like all of a sudden she thinks she’s one of us.”
“I have an idea about that, but it’s none of my business,” Gert said.
Chase frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means it’s none of my business. What I will say is that Allis seems like the kind of girl who’s been waiting her whole life to be able to fight back against whatever she’s had to deal with in her past. Oh, and let’s not forget, you’re the one who gave her a plasma pistol and told her she could join the fight.”
“That was for self-defense, not for an all-out assault!” Chase said.
Gert whistled and Old Lace popped her head back through the hatch. The dinosaur was waiting for them. Chase opened a panel in the rear of the Leapfrog and pulled out a pair of oversize, weaponized gloves.
Runaways Page 20
