In the Wind (Out of the Box Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  Anselmo stifles a laugh. Lorenzo is a young man, and his ego is that of a young man. Fragile, easily damaged. The boy puffs himself up and tries to look strong, but he does not yet have the true confidence of a true man. “So someone has been reading your emails.” He humors the boy. Why not? “What do you wish to do about it?”

  “I need to deal with this, Capo,” Lorenzo says. He is asking permission, his tone is hushed and supplicatory. “I will take a few men to Rome, and dispense with this … Giuseppe.”

  Anselmo needs only a moment to ponder this. His plan is moving, always moving, and now clattering toward fruition like a train on the last mile to the station. Lorenzo is a part of it, a part of his future. An important part. So is his little friend in Rome. The boy is distressed, fretting. What is one more body on the pile, after all? Anselmo waves at him, imagines the gesture sending him forth like a servant. “Go deal with your problems, then. You have your Capo’s blessing.”

  “Grazie, Capo,” Lorenzo says, and bows his head sharply. The respect is obvious, and the young man retreats as soon as he has what he wants. He is a good boy, Anselmo thinks, still clamping his lips around his cigar and taking a puff. Young. Headstrong. Concerned about some of the wrong things. But good. A very good boy.

  Anselmo dismisses the thought as soon as Lorenzo is gone. It is a detail, and not worth fretting over. He pays others to do this for him, after all. The sun is sinking lower in a deep blue sky, and Anselmo has a craving for a drink of wine. This Giuseppe, whoever he is, is fast approaching his last sundown, Anselmo thinks as he motions for a servant lurking in the shadows to come forth. Anselmo smacks his lips together as he anticipates the flavor of the wine, and any further thought of what he has just casually ordered is stricken from his mind as he turns back to matters of real interest.

  6.

  Reed

  There’s an energy in a city like Rome that you don’t find in a rural campus like we have at the agency. I’ve tried to explain this to Sienna, but she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t like crowds, though. She’s claustrophobic about people, if that’s a thing. That’s a thing, right? There’s a name for it, like agoraphobia, but it’s not the wide-open spaces that bother her, it’s the people. We’ve been to cities; I’ve taken her to downtown Minneapolis, although it hasn’t been very crowded when we’ve been. Uptown is worse on a Saturday night in the summer, with its slickly dressed women and hipster men. Younger, edgier, busier. Yeah, that’s uptown, and she doesn’t like it. I can’t get her to New York City, either. She fears it.

  I love it.

  The streets of Rome can be crowded. It’s got bustle, and I thrive in that. People walk to and fro, pass you on the street. Smoke wafts because cigarette smoking is like the national pastime here, right up there with driving mopeds like you just had your sense of fear surgically removed. Shopkeepers and random beggars come out at you, accosting the pedestrians. One of them I throw some euros at, the other I studiously avoid. You decide which is which, but my hands are empty as I walk.

  I like the energy of Rome. It fills me up, makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself. I get a sense of electricity in a crowd, carried along on the currents. I walk most of the way back to the hotel, and the layout of the streets is coming back to me now. It takes a while, sure, walking through old Rome. I see what they call the “Wedding Cake,” which is really a World War I monument to someone or another. It’s a white building on a hill that has a lot of tiers. I use it as my guide to find the Via Nazionale then start heading east toward the Piazza della Repubblica. It’s a bit of a walk, but I manage.

  My hotel is off a side street not too far from the train station. I make the jaunt in less than an hour, careful to not get run over crossing the street. It feels like a danger here. Rogue mopeds and all that.

  The clock reads 4:18 when I close the door to the room, and I sigh, knowing I’ve got time to kill and little to kill it with. My fancy government cell phone has no internet connection in Rome, but I can make calls or text if I’m of a mind to. I’m not, though; pretty much every friend I have is … well, Sienna.

  I watched the drawdown of the agency after we beat Sovereign, and it was a slow bleed to death. Janus and Kat left first, giving it a respectable few weeks before they took off. Zollers went next, quiet and serious, off to seek his fortunes—or whatever—elsewhere. I sensed that he had some skepticism about how the government would handle a telepath in its employ and decided to get lost before they figured out what they had their hands on. I couldn’t blame him; I consider myself fortunate that they haven’t figured out a military application for a strong breeze yet.

  From a distance, I watched the dance that Sienna and Scott did, and it kind of put me off love for a while. I mean, I saw what happened between her and Zack, too, but this was different. The touch of death was apparently no longer an issue (I didn’t want any details, so I never asked), but I have meta ears and I sleep one apartment away from them. Intimacy was not the problem this time. This time, it was something simpler.

  Change.

  I could feel it in the wind. I’m conditioned to by this point, but Sienna? She’s still new to this world, really. Raised as a shutaway until seventeen, the girl’s still got a lot to learn, even with everything on her shoulders. She picks it up quickly, but this whole relationship thing is complex. It’s a twist. I don’t think it’s something you can pick up in a book. Though if they made a practical “Art of War” type guide for love, she’d probably read it.

  I watched them drift. Scott got disillusioned by the war, and no matter much he protested otherwise, he couldn’t see himself doing this law enforcement and policing thing forever. So first he left the agency, went to work for his dad. Making money, building a life, but still hanging around with his girlfriend whenever he could.

  But Sienna and I? We work a lot.

  This job doesn’t come with normal hours. It comes with a mad desire to consume every waking one and the ones where you’re sleeping, too, when possible. Since the news about metas came out, we’ve had like a bajillion reports of meta activity. Most of them are false. Guess who’s in a good position to sift the true from the false? Not the FBI. Not local law enforcement. They don’t deal with metas or meta crimes on anything approaching a regular basis; how would they even know?

  I watched Scott get distant. Watched him get irritable about the time demands. He was working a job, a nine to five that gave him plenty of opportunity to hang with his buddies and drink beer on the weekends. Even as fast-paced as his dad’s company was, it wasn’t as demanding as what Sienna and I were up to. I watched it eat at him. He tried to be supportive at first, I think, but it just dragged him down a little at a time.

  At some point, I guess, after three weeks in which you haven’t seen your girlfriend, things get … awkward? Annoying? Resentment builds. What’s the point of being with someone if you’re on a catch-as-can basis? Scott was looking for someone to share his life with. Sienna didn’t have a life to share.

  I sympathized. I watched it all dissolve. After Sienna’s disastrous interview with Gail Roth, it was over.

  I pretty much took notes on the whole thing. Looked at it as a cautionary tale: people in our position, they don’t really get a chance at love in the traditional style. Spouse, kids, house in the ’burbs? Nah. For us, the demands are everything. I pour myself into my work, pour myself into training.

  Sienna lapsed after Scott left, just drove herself into the job, and I’ve gone along for the ride.

  No love.

  No life.

  Just work.

  I can get behind that.

  I guess we’re alike in that regard.

  I stumble around my hotel room staring at the walls. Time passes like that fossilized amber in Jurassic Park; which is to say it doesn’t really move at all. It’s like stasis, like liquid almost gone solid, the minutes passing like hours. I connect to wifi and dull the pain by reading websites. Trolling Reddit. I’d eat, but I’m not h
ungry. I’d drink, but I’ve got work to do later.

  The hours go like death. This is the way it is between jobs, between investigations, and I hate it. Sienna hates it. This is why I stick with her, because she and I are alike. And because there’s no one else on the planet who would put up with our crazy, all-work-no-play asses.

  7.

  Hallelujah, it turns seven o’clock as my stomach lets off its first rumble of hunger. I eat a dinner in a café on the corner, Pollo alla Romana, which tastes like chicken saltimbocca to me, but whatever. It’s good. I pick at it for longer than is probably necessary, but I don’t want to have time to go back to my room before my nine o’clock—oh, heavens, Giuseppe, please be okay with me showing up at nine—meeting.

  I stroll down the Via Nazionale as the sun fades in the sky. The city darkens, lights pop on. Cigarette smoke still hangs in the air, but the volume turns down a little. Stores are closing, they’re rolling up the sidewalks of Rome, Italy, like it’s a small town. It’s not tourist season, I guess, so why would they stay open late?

  I mosey and meander, and I hate every minute of it. If this is stopping to smell the roses, all I’m getting is a whiff of the fertilizer. I’m bored and cranky, and the walk takes even longer because I’m dragging it out. I stop and look at architecture I’m not really interested in, and wish that I’d brought my iPad on the trip because at least if I had it, I could read through my comic collection to kill time. It’s more fun than trolling Reddit, which is kind of like fishing with dynamite in a barrel.

  I skirt the edge of the Piazza Navona, which is pretty quiet compared to how I’ve seen it in the past. I dip down the alleyway toward Giuseppe’s place of business. When I used to visit him, he wasn’t living in his office. No cot, less clutter. He almost looked respectable. Times are tough, though, I suppose. I don’t exactly read economic forecasts, but I get the sense that although tourists probably still swarm this town in the summer, it’s probably not all sunshine and roses for the Italians, either. Mostly fertilizer in their case, too, I guess.

  It’s easy to lose track of yourself on a city street, especially if you’re distracted. As I’m walking, I’m not so distracted, though. The alleys are tight, the quarters are close, and I’m acutely aware of every moment of it. I don’t love confined conditions, and I certainly don’t mind crowds, but on a night like this, in an alley in Rome, you’d be hard pressed to find a crowd.

  I find one anyway.

  They’re malingering outside Giuseppe’s shop front. I say malingering because it’s obvious that they’re not up to any good. Oh, they’re dressed casually enough. To the untrained eye, they probably look like they belong. Hell, on a summer day, when the alleys are booming and burgeoning, and people have set up those little cloths and laid out their wares so they can run from the cops in five seconds flat, these guys would maybe—just maybe—blend in.

  On a near-winter night, when everything’s closing early and it’s almost nine o’clock? Not so much.

  I become aware that a couple have fallen in behind me. They’re all cautious, not giving much of anything away. It’s their body language that tips me almost as much as the sudden crowd. Ten guys all bunched in an alley is suspicious. When they’re all holding themselves stiff and straight, heads swiveling to look in every direction, even the most head-up-his-ass tourist is gonna notice something’s afoot.

  I consider glancing back to confirm what my ears are telling me—that there are two of them easing along behind me, cutting off my retreat. Giuseppe’s shop is closed, no doubt, even though the storefront is very open and the lights are on. The guy who was behind the counter earlier is missing as surely as good taste from a Nickelback listener. In his place are a couple of these mooks, standing in the aisle between the tables and the counter, blocking the path. The message is clear: move along.

  Getting into a ten-against-one fight in an alley in Rome is the kind of stupid that I pride myself on not being. I keep it casual, drifting along, pretending to ignore these guys. I can see their skepticism, every one of their studious eyeballs on me. They’re thinking about it, trying to figure out who I am.

  I try to make it easier on them. “Hey, how’s it going?” I ask, putting casual emphasis on my English as I nod at one of the guys and keep moving. I like a good fight, but I’m not exactly a heavyweight like my sis. My mind is racing, and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way I can help Giuseppe without getting myself killed. These guys look like they could be armed, and I’m very definitely not. I’m not the hugest fan of guns (also unlike my sis), but right now I’m wishing the Italians would have let me come into the country with a gun. Instead I’m pretty well down to a pen and my powers. It’s not nothing, but these guys have coats on that suggest they’re concealing.

  The lead one acknowledges me with a nod, and I can see him put at ease by speaking English. I’m a tourist, clearly, here in the off-season. I keep walking, threading through their little crowd like it’s no big deal, I’m just wandering through. They’re relaxed now, put off their guard by what they’ve seen of me.

  Then a heavy shout of something in Italian that I don’t understand cracks from somewhere in Giuseppe’s storefront, and I can feel the mood change in an instant. Burly Italian men at instant attention, ramrods driven down into their slouching spines, hands fumbling in their coats as they go for their weapons.

  Panic seizes me as I stand there, in the middle of a pack of enemies who are reaching for their guns, tight in a Roman alleyway, and oh shit, do I feel really damned far from the safety of home; just a lonely man in the middle of danger in a foreign land, without a friend to call my own.

  8.

  I see guns emerge from coats like they’re drawing in slow motion, a John Woo-style vision of gunplay granted me by my meta abilities. It’s not that slow, though, and I don’t have a ton of time to respond, so I let my panic give me a little strength, and I twist as I thrust my arms out in both directions, forward and back.

  A gust of wind tears loose from each hand, creating a short-duration wind tunnel effect. I catch four guys in the sweep, and for a moment it’s a scene out of a Weather Channel wet-dream hurricane report; full-grown men are ripped from the ground and tossed in the air. I feel it down my arms, the power draining from me. It’s a quick exertion, a sudden, high-weight, low-rep workout for my abilities. I throw everything into it, send those guys tumbling, and I feel my head rush as I let off the power.

  I don’t even have time to assess what happens to those four, though, because I’ve got others whose weapons have nearly cleared their holster. A quick assessment tells me that I’m very lucky; only half of the six remaining actually have guns. Whoopee.

  I throw a hand behind me, pointing at a wall of the alley, and trigger a gust. It launches me forward, straight into two of my quickdraw opponents. I’m still panicking a little, the sheer weight of the numbers daunting me. I’m solo, after all, no one to watch my back, and this is not what I was expecting when I hopped the plane. I launch into the two gunmen with a shoulder check. They’re grouped tight enough that I bowl them over like ten pins, hitting one in the sensitive belly so hard he goes, “OOOOF!” Another commonality shared by all mankind. Knock the wind out of us, do we not make the same noises?

  I barely have time to punch the other in the face before he raises his gun to shoot me. Fortunately, my punches are somewhat harder than a normal human’s, and his head rockets into the cobblestone street, knocking him stupid. I fumble for his gun, figuring this might be the moment to put all that practice sis has forced me to do, to work, and I roll, coming up ready to shoot.

  But the last gunman? He’s got a damned arrow sticking out of his head.

  It looks a little like one of those comic props, where you wear it like a headband, but there’s blood dripping down on his coat, and the angle is off, like it came in above his ear and is sticking out of his lower jaw. His eyes are registering shock, but his brain hasn’t quite figured out what happened yet.

&nb
sp; Judging from the wound, it never will.

  There are still three guys in play by my count, and they’re wielding clubs and blunt instruments. I want to know how an arrow came to be sticking out of that guy’s head, but I want to live through the next five seconds a lot more, so I focus on the matters at hand.

  I know a thing or two about fighting. When you’ve got strength beyond that of a normal human’s, it makes a street fight kind of a trivial thing. There was a time when Sienna would have killed these clowns, probably, and without much thought. She didn’t used to be that way, but she got to a point where she realized that some people are just bad. People who want to kill others are generally not easily redeemed. Those with super powers that want to kill others are usually not easy to contain, either.

  But these are garden-variety human idiots, so I just beat the living hell out of them in three moves and leave them drooling blood on the cobblestones.

  I’m not Sienna. I still have some mercy left in me.

  I’m just about to look up to see where that arrow came from when I hear a slow, clapping sound coming from the storefront. It’s really dramatic, and I get the feeling I’m about the meet the leader of this little expedition. Why are they always dramatic? Why can’t there just be a low-key villain, for once, someone who’s clearly read the Evil Overlord List and is just going quietly about their malicious business?

  On second thought, that would probably be really bad. Scratch that.

  “Reed Treston,” the man says, and I realize he’s wearing a frigging ski mask. It’s not quite cold enough to justify this, and none of his thugs are wearing one, which gives me pause. His voice is accented, Italian, and I am suddenly sure he’s the one who shouted the warning to the men in the alley that set this whole shitstorm to flying.

  “Overly dramatic villain,” I say, acknowledging him for what he is. I catch a flicker of confusion in the eyes as he steps into the alley to face me. A hunch occurs to me. “Or should I call you … ‘Axis’?”