Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  “The new Fistigons are ready?” Gert asked.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” Chase replied, pulling them on. “If I don’t blow myself up, they should work just fine.”

  Old Lace hissed and they took that as their cue. Chase followed Gert out and used a remote to seal the hatch, still in stealth mode. The others were waiting impatiently behind the overturned SUV. Ice and snow whipped through the air, the result of Kathryn in battle. The ground shook as a police car struck the sidewalk across the side street and skidded into the abandoned UPS truck.

  “No gunshots,” Gert said.

  Nico spun to look at them. “The cops have fallen back, waiting for the outcome.”

  “Which is what we should do,” Karolina said.

  Molly tugged her koala bear hat down more firmly on her head. “Screw that,” she said, and marched around the wrecked SUV.

  Zeke muttered that incantation again, and Kurdo-Zeke stood before them. “We ready? Once we go in, it’s like Nico said. Hard and fast.”

  Chase clicked the Fistigons together and powered them up.

  “Let’s go.”

  Nico still didn’t feel right. Memories of her time in the Kurdogrim’s limbo haunted her, fleeting glimpses and echoes of images and words that seemed just at the edge of memory. Her chest still burned where Emilio Ochoa had impaled her, not with pain but with vulnerability. She felt tired and weak, but her team needed her to be something else now. Something more. They needed their leader.

  “Spread out. Partner up. Get the lay of the land. Keep your comms open,” she said. “Molly, you’re with me.”

  “I’m here,” Molly confirmed, but otherwise she kept unusually quiet, as if the danger they were in had sunk in for once. Nico thought maybe Molly had started to grow up, and it saddened her.

  They swept around the corner and into the main street in front of the hotel. All ten of them—Allis, five Runaways, three Nightwatch kids, and a smallish dinosaur, looking for trouble. Kurdo-Zeke bent and hustled over behind an upturned police car. Chase’s new Fistigons glowed softly in the night, Karolina’s colors danced urgently around her hair and arms and hands, and Carlos transformed into a gray wolf, running low and dangerously along the pavement. Nico held up her staff and Allis wielded that plasma pistol the Steins had built, carrying it like she’d watched too many cop shows. They were insane to let her come along, but weren’t they all just teenagers throwing themselves into circumstances that could kill them? Why should Allis be any different?

  Shouts and the sounds of fighting filled the air. The sizzle and snap of Blue Steel’s power beams, the white noise of Whirlwind’s churning air. The pop of Emilio Ochoa’s teleportation. Something crashed, shattering glass, and over the top of the flipped cop car, Nico saw a fire hydrant arc across the street and smash through the fourth floor of an office building. Water spouted up from where the hydrant ought to be, and then it became a weapon. As Whirlwind zipped across the sky and banked, turning to attack the Nightwatch again, the water spewing from the exposed pipe jetted upward, turned in a stream, and smashed Whirlwind from the air. He skidded across the intersection, past the Runaways, and into plate glass windows stenciled with the name of a Brazilian steakhouse. The windows shattered, revealing that the place was empty—one benefit of the shit hitting the fan in the middle of the night.

  Whirlwind started to get up. He spotted the Runaways and the Nightwatch kids, and then the water slammed him again, smashing him deeper into the recesses of the steakhouse.

  Nico stepped out from behind the flipped police car. In the space of three seconds, she took it all in. Sunstroke was nowhere to be seen—maybe taken out of commission earlier. The Crimson Cowl stood in the middle of the street, as if the police barrier had prepared a stage for this fight. She faced off against Abernathy, the bald nerd with the skinny tie who even now tore an old-fashioned blue mailbox off the sidewalk and hurled it at her, using nothing but the power of his mind. The Crimson Cowl gestured and the cloak followed her thoughts, lengthening as it reached out to grab the mailbox and redirect it toward Abernathy, who parried it with his telekinesis. A battle of wills and minds.

  With a cry of rage, Kathryn Zheng rose up from the ground on winds of her own summoning. Karolina took to the air, her beautiful colors painting the night, reflecting off the faces of buildings as she launched a volley of attacks at Kathryn. The elemental turned them aside with the wind, then with a shield of ice.

  “It’s over, Mother!” Zeke shouted in that rasping Kurdogrim voice. He hefted that massive battle-ax and then hurled it, end over end.

  Kathryn reached toward the street and the ground came alive. A torrent of rock and soil and broken pavement shot upward and blocked the flying ax, then turned toward Kurdo-Zeke. The ugly giant staggered backward as stone and dirt pummeled him, and then he fell, while thousands of pounds of debris hammered down on top of him, burying him alive.

  “You bitch!” Nico shouted. “That’s your son!”

  “Not anymore!” Kathryn cried back.

  Nico held up the Staff of One, racking her brain, trying to remember a particular word. When it came to her, she smiled. “Becalmed.”

  The wind died out completely. Kathryn Zheng dropped from the sky. With a gesture, the woman brought a stream of water from the spouting fire hydrant to break her fall, but she plunged through it and struck the pavement with a sickening crack of bone. The water had slowed her, but not enough to save her left leg. For a few seconds, Kathryn writhed in pain, but then she looked up and sneered as she turned the blasting water against first Zeke and then Nico, hurling them backward.

  Nico sputtered, slammed into the overturned police car, then took cover behind it again. Karolina arced overhead, wreathed in colors, and began to attack Kathryn. Nico took a deep breath, thinking about that word, becalmed. For sailors, it was the moment when the wind died completely. It could mean death for them, in the days when sails were all they had. She’d taken the wind from Kathryn’s sails, but only temporarily. That broken leg would last a while longer, but they were already taking too long. They needed to end this. She had to find a way to capture the Nightwatch and she had no doubt that meant magic. If only she could come up with the right combination of words to forge a spell that would contain them all. A simple sleep spell would do no good unless they were all together, and even then she had to come up with new wording—she’d tried that trick in the past.

  “Think, Nico,” she whispered to herself.

  Racking her brain, she peered back around the police car and scanned the rest of the unfolding battle.

  Blue Steel fought a tiger—Rosie Ochoa. The armored man picked the tiger up and smashed it against the pavement, then raised both hands, blue smoke pouring out of the small circles in the palms of his gloves, about to incinerate her. With a loud pop, Emilio appeared between them. Blue Steel’s energy blast struck him instead of his wife and he flew backward in a tumble of arms and legs, his chest smoking. At some point he’d teleported back to his apartment to retrieve his sword, but now it flew from his hand again.

  The tiger became a gorilla. Rosie jumped on Blue Steel, pummeled his helmet, and as he raised his left hand to fire a pulse blast into her skull, she grabbed his glove and crushed his hand. Inside his armor, Blue Steel screamed, even as the gorilla ripped off one glove and then the other.

  The gorilla tried to tear off Blue Steel’s helmet…but then the wolf jumped at her. Carlos—her son, her fellow shape-shifter—transformed into an enormous Bengal tiger mid-leap, crashed into the gorilla, and began to rip into his own mother.

  Emilio saw it happening. Burned and battered, he shouted at his son to stop.

  “Carlos, no!”

  Nico knew they had to defeat the Nightwatch, but this was wrong. It hurt her to watch, no matter how evil these people were.

  Old Lace barreled into the Carlos-tiger, knocked him into a car with such force that the tiger flopped to the ground, unconscious…and then its flesh and fur shifted back to being
Carlos, knocked out, arms and legs splayed. Nico smiled. Gert was out of sight but controlling Old Lace through their psychic connection, doing the right thing as always.

  The gorilla, body slashed and bleeding, climbed to its feet and advanced on Old Lace and the tiger, but Molly Hayes ran to intercept.

  Hands on her hips, koala bear hat on tight, Molly looked comical facing the gorilla that Rosie Ochoa had become. Bloody and staggering, Rosie growled as she reached for Molly, thinking she was an ordinary girl. Molly grabbed the gorilla’s wrist, twisted, and smashed her to the pavement as gently as a superstrong eleven-year-old could.

  Tess strode across the ruin of the intersection. Her mother and brother were fighting Molly and Old Lace just so they could keep fighting each other, but Tess’s father saw her coming. Tess reached her hand into nothing, into that weird pocket dimension, and pulled out the burning sword she professed to love so much. Her father’s eyes went wide at the sight of that burning blade.

  “Tess, you can’t do this!” he cried. “What’s become of you? What’s become of all of you?”

  Receiving no answer, Emilio turned and scrambled across the pavement to reach his own sword. His fingers grasped the blade’s handle just as Tess slashed the burning sword down, but with a pop, Emilio vanished. The flaming blade cut deep into the pavement, melting tar as it sliced.

  Nico felt a chill up her spine. This wasn’t what they’d agreed on. She’d said they wouldn’t be a part of these kids killing their parents, and she’d meant it.

  A stream of shrieked profanity reached her and she stepped around the flipped police car, ready to call a halt, and ready to get the Runaways out of there. Ahead of her, the Crimson Cowl had Abernathy wrapped up in her cloak. The telekinetic’s glasses had fallen off and his tie was askew. He looked pitiful. The Cowl used her cloak to squeeze him, the crimson material tightening, choking, maybe cracking bone…

  Then it all shifted. Abernathy’s lips curled in fury and he closed his eyes. The tendrils of crimson fabric around him drew back from him, withdrew in quick jerks and flaps, and wrapped themselves instead around the Crimson Cowl. Her own cloak began to coil around her like a massive, murderous serpent, and she cried out, then gasped for breath. Her mask cracked and a tendril of the cloak tore it free.

  Nico knew that face from the Pride’s files and from television. Sasha Hammer, daughter of Justine Hammer and the criminal mastermind called the Mandarin. Her mother had been the previous Crimson Cowl, and Sasha herself had once been an armored enemy of Iron Man’s using the name Detroit Steel. Suddenly Blue Steel’s armor made sense.

  “Let her go!” Nico shouted at Abernathy. “Enough of this! It’s over! Stop it now or we’ll all end up dead.”

  Abernathy blinked. Perhaps for just a moment, his concentration waned, because Nico saw the relief on Sasha Hammer’s face and then the Crimson Cowl blinked out of existence, using the tech in her cloak to teleport to safety.

  “Aw, come on!” someone shouted.

  Nico turned to see Blue Steel stumbling toward her, staring at Abernathy—or more likely at the place where his boss, the Crimson Cowl, had just stood. The glove portions of his armor were gone, exposing his hands. One looked mangled after being crushed by Rosie Ochoa in gorilla form.

  Abernathy stared at him. “Go.”

  Blue Steel nodded, turned, and took flight. His boot jets crackled, nearly failed, but then they kicked in and he flew off past the ravaged side of the hotel and was gone.

  Of Sunstroke and Whirlwind, there was no sign.

  With a tremor that shook the ground beneath them, Kurdo-Zeke smashed himself free of the ton of rubble his mother had dropped on him. Rocks and dirt and pavement went flying and he roared with such vicious fury that for a moment Nico couldn’t be sure if this might truly be a Kurdogrim after all.

  Zeke strode over to his fallen mother. She diverted the water toward him and he marched through it. She opened the ground beneath him and he leaped the chasm to grab her by her broken leg and lift her off the ground. The cruelty of it made Nico’s breath catch in her throat, made her wonder who this guy was, who any of them were. For all that they’d felt betrayed by their parents, the Runaways had never been cruel. Their parents had died as a result of the conflict between them, but even after everything, they hadn’t wanted their parents dead. This was different. This was sick.

  “Now you see?” Zeke shouted, to be heard over his mother’s screams. “You are not in control of us anymore!”

  Abernathy looked at Nico and spoke a single word.

  “Go,” he said.

  Nico frowned. “What?”

  Then Allis stepped out from behind her, plasma pistol aimed at Abernathy. “Get away from him, Nico. He’ll kill you.”

  Abernathy’s face crumbled. “Not this.”

  As Allis pulled the trigger, Nico brought the Staff of One down on her arm. The plasma pistol fired, the shot burning a hole in Abernathy’s shoulder. The telekinetic spun halfway around but he did not fall. Moaning in pain, he reached out toward the fallen police car and it lifted into the air with a shriek of metal, hovering above Allis.

  “Why did you do this?” he cried. “Why?”

  Nico looked up. The police car hung over her head. She lifted her staff, but in that moment, she couldn’t think of a single spell that would save her life.

  Karolina thought she must have screamed, but later she would wonder if the scream had just been in her head. She rode the air, rode the rainbow of light that slid around her as she arrowed down toward Allis and Nico. Both hands thrust ahead of her, she took a breath—needed that moment to focus. A narrow laser might burn through the police car or slice it in half, might make it explode.

  With a burst of hard light, she blasted the police car backward.

  In the same moment, Allis shot Abernathy again. The plasma burst struck him in the chest, low and to the left, and the thin man crumbled to the ground.

  “No!” Karolina called. She landed between Allis and Abernathy, glanced at Nico and saw that her friend seemed just as horrified as she felt. “What are you doing, Allis? It’s over. We’re not murderers.”

  Karolina turned and went to Abernathy. The man groaned, eyes closed.

  “Hold still,” she said. “The police are nearby. They’re just waiting for this to end. They’ll help you, and they’ll decide what to do with you now.”

  But Abernathy wasn’t looking at Karolina. His gaze had found someone else, just over her shoulder.

  “Allis,” he said.

  Karolina froze, breath caught in her throat. “Wait. How do you know—?”

  “My dear Allis,” Abernathy went on. “You wanted power, I know. But how could you do this to me? You’d murder your own father?”

  No, Karolina thought. He had to be disoriented, thinking she was someone else. But he’d said her name.

  She turned to face Allis, saw the lopsided smile on the girl’s face—the lips Karolina had kissed—and found nothing inviting in that smile now. Only smug revelation and malice.

  Allis tapped the side of her head. “Daddy’s girl. Just a touch of telepathy, the tiniest ability to influence those around me—like making sure none of your friends argued when I wanted to join the fun. Gert’s fairly sensitive, by the way. She felt it. I had to push her a little more than the others. And I know you’ll be wondering, Karolina. You’ll probably wonder forever, but I didn’t influence you. I didn’t have to.”

  “I thought…”

  “You thought right.” Allis arched an eyebrow. “It was nice while it lasted.”

  Sick with rage and betrayal, Karolina put herself between Allis Abernathy and her father. Allis raised the plasma pistol and aimed it at her, but Nico shifted around to stand beside Karolina.

  “You really think we’re going to help you, now that we know the truth?” Nico asked.

  “I don’t care what the rest of you do,” Allis said. “Only Karolina. What do you say, Kay? You’re a beautiful girl. We could have a real fu
ture together. Serve the Kurdogrim with us. We’ll hunt down the Gibborim and execute them, just like we’ll execute my parents.”

  Gert and Old Lace were moving carefully toward Allis, as if they could help. Old Lace snarled. From the shadows another figure emerged—Chase, both of his Fistigons aimed at Allis.

  “But Zeke said your parents served the Kurdogrim—” Gert began.

  “Our parents? How stupid are you? Our parents have spent their lives fighting the Kurdogrim, keeping San Francisco safe—or trying to. No glory, no fame…just secret heroes, protecting the innocent. Well, to hell with the innocent! When the Kurdogrim came to us—”

  Abernathy struggled to rise, first to his knees, then slowly to his feet. “Allis, how could you do this? You know what the Kurdogrim are, what they’ll do if—”

  “We know what they’d do for us,” Allis sneered. “They’ll give us everything we’ve ever wanted, everything you would never give us. All you ever cared about was protecting strangers, but while you were doing that, your daughter was alone. And the Kurdogrim were so persuasive. They’re going to win eventually, Dad—the Elder Gods will rule humanity. Tess and Carlos, Zeke and I, we’ll have everything…and we’ll live forever.”

  From thirty yards away, beside the unconscious bodies of Carlos and Rosie Ochoa, Molly shouted at them all. “You liars!” she called, her face red with fury.

  With a rumble of laughter, Kurdo-Zeke dragged his unconscious mother by her broken leg and tossed her onto the ground next to Abernathy. The stinking, leathery giant stood to his full height and glared down at them.

  “I don’t get it, Zeke,” Nico said. “You saved my life. You said you wanted me to join you.”

  “I did want you to join me,” he growled. “With your powers, well, it was easy to convince the Kurdogrim that you could be useful if we kept you alive. I figured…clever goth witch, lonely even with her supposed friends, never seems to get comfortable…you were ripe for the picking. It was worth a shot.”