“You really are prepared, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Normally I would drink the water from the stream here, but things have changed since I was a child and you have to be more careful now. Pity, because there’s nothing like water from its natural source. You just never know who is washing their clothing or pissing upstream.”
“That’s too bad,” Roman said as he looked for a place to cross the moving body of water. There were a few rocks about ten feet to his right, arranged in a way that allowed one to cross to the other side.
“Do not drop me in there,” Casper reminded him. “Because I’m pretty sure I can’t swim.”
“I can swim, so I’m guessing you can swim,” he said as he moved to the rocks. Roman tested the stability of the first rock, and once he saw that it was firmly positioned in the riverbed, he began to take the makeshift path across the water.
“Well, just because you can swim doesn’t mean I can swim,” Casper said, “and I don’t want to drown. I have a fear of drowning.”
“You can’t drown if you don’t breathe,” he said with a chuckle.
“You know…”
“See? We’re already on the other side,” he said after leaping to the other shore. “Before you could even finish worrying about it, we already made it over here.”
Roman watched as Celia took the rocks daintily, nearly falling into the water at one point as she tried to hop to the next surface.
“Careful!” he called after.
She looked up at him and smiled, some of her hair falling over one eye. “I really don’t want to get wet,” she said with a shiver. Roman reached his hand out to her and helped her to the other riverbank.
Coma was next, and she made it across in record time, her agility on full display. Nadine was a little bit slower, and Roman also extended his hand to her, helping her when she reached the final rock.
“Thanks,” she said as she pressed past Roman. “Let’s walk for another hour and then eat our next meal. I have enough pies to last us a while.”
“I would hate to have to rely on eating to maintain energy,” Casper said from the safety of Roman’s pocket. “That’s what you’re for, Daddy,” she said, bumping her small ass against his chest.
“Please don’t call me Daddy,” he said under his breath.
“What? It’s kind of cute, right?”
Roman heard Celia giggle behind him.
“No, it’s kind of weird.”
Nadine turned back to Roman, her face drained of all its color as something came to her.
“What is it?” Roman asked, rushing to her side.
She shook her head, and Roman suspected she’d just received an important message. He’d seen this play out countless times in his life—during a conversation with someone, they would receive a mental message whose contents would change the look on their face.
Nadine took a big breath in, then closed her eyes and started to turn away from Roman. “It’s nothing; don’t worry about it.”
Chapter Forty-Three: Brothers Apart
Margo couldn’t sleep, and after trying for a couple hours, she figured they should act on Kevin Blackbook’s twin brother now rather than later.
It was good to be distracted, and she didn’t expect it would be very hard to reach him.
This was where she turned out to be wrong.
A teleporter took Hazrat, Ian, and Margo to the front gate of Kevin’s brother’s estate in one of the nicest neighborhoods of Centralia. They left zombie Celia behind, Margo taking her life force from her just in case she needed to use any extra power.
It wasn’t strange at all to Margo to see a corpse sitting on the couch, lifeless again, but it did raise Hazrat’s eyebrow. It was something she knew he’d eventually get used to, especially if he stuck around.
“We will make this quick,” she told him, glancing up and down the street.
No one was out, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t come by soon, jogging or taking their dog for a walk. It was best to get inside quickly, and with a wave of her hand, an opening formed in Kevin’s gate large enough for Ian to fit through.
Ian had just finished stepping through when a lightning-fast blur came from his right, colliding with the big man.
The two tumbled into a concrete structure, a rectangular statue of sorts that quickly gave way, the concrete pillar falling onto Ian’s back just as he was getting the upper hand.
Margo caught sight of a blue-skinned woman just as the scenery changed.
“Paris?”
Her ex-lover stood before her, a tragic look on her face, her cheeks red, her arms long and loose at her sides, knuckles dragging against the ground. Paris sobbed as she shuffled her feet in Margo’s direction, her chin starting to fall away, her dress spilling open and her breasts falling out, sagging.
Suddenly they were in Margo’s bedroom, Paris looking up at Margo between her legs, eyes filled with lust as she sucked on Margo’s clit.
Margo leaned back and moaned, enjoying the feel of Paris’s tongue, the feeling it gave her to be in control.
It’s not real.
“Hazrat,” she said aloud, even though she was in a darkened bedroom and the powerful Southerner was nowhere to be found. “Get as far away from me as possible. You have five seconds.”
One…
Two…
Three…
Margo didn’t wait five seconds to unleash her full power, pressing her ability out through her palms and into the ground, creating a wave she knew would extend at least fifty feet in all directions.
Everything was in its right place again, aside from the crater she’d caused and the chaos on the periphery.
She spotted the blue-skinned telepath, a mercenary by the name of Beatrix, and quickly pulled roots from the garden to pin her to the ground. She yanked the woman’s head back and slammed it as hard as she could, knocking her out.
Oddly enough, Margo had encountered her before, well over a year ago.
The telepath would do anything for a buck, no concern for which side she was fighting for or the reason she was fighting in the first place. Margo would have ended it right there had it not been for an incredibly large blast of green energy.
Hazrat rescued her just in time, his shadow lifting her into the air and depositing her a safe distance away. There were two assailants left, the strongman Ian was working on and a female energy user. If Kevin Blackbook was indeed home, he may have teleported away already.
But if he was like every other non-exemplar she had come across, Kevin would be curious to see how this played out, which meant he was likely looking out one of the windows.
Rather than rejoin Hazrat and Ian below, who seemed to have things handled, Margo lifted tiles from the ground to form an archway leading to one of the windows. She peeled away the glass and the frame like one might open the top of a burlap sack.
She hopped from tile to tile, growing closer to the opening in the window. When a green blast of energy took out one of the tiles, Margo leapt over the missing piece, each tile falling to the ground as she raced to the opening she’d made in the mansion.
To her right, Ian continued to take damage from the muscled exemplar, the red man biding his time, waiting to get in close before unleashing his true potential. That moment came when the strongman grabbed hold of Ian, hoping to do some sort of suplex on him.
Bad idea.
His cries of pain echoed across the courtyard.
Margo cleared the last tile and made it into Kevin Blackbook’s home.
She saw Kevin scrambling as she moved inside. In response, she animated one of the pictures on the wall, the frame coming down and moving on all fours like an animal with white legs and an incredibly thin body.
Her picture-frame creation propelled itself forward, slammed into Kevin’s back and brought him to the ground.
“I will rip both your arms off if you even think to call a teleporter,” she told him. “I won’t be here for long; I just need a few an
swers. Call off your men or else…”
Margo looked over her shoulder to see Hazrat standing over the green energy user. It was a gruesome scene—the shadow wielder had sliced off her arms and legs, her body flopping in a pool of blood as she screamed out.
“I believe you will need new security after this,” Margo finally said as she crouched beside the quivering Kevin Blackbook.
“What do you want!?” he shouted, a huge vein pulsing on the side of his head near his missing eye.
“Relax, Mr. Blackbook. There’s no need to scream. I just need a little information from you,” Margo said, crouching next to him.
The picture frame she had concocted into a four-legged creature latched on to Kevin’s back, holding him to the ground.
A tiny mandible grew out of the floor, clamped the back of Kevin’s head and turned it to the right.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Kevin whimpered. “I don’t know why people keep coming to me for answers!”
“Oh, I believe you know exactly what I’m looking for. I’m assuming you’ve been in communication with your brother; have you not?”
“My brother is a piece-of-shit fuck-up, and if this has anything to do with him, that’s between you and him, not me. I’ve washed my hands of him. If I never had to see him again, my life would be a thousand times better,” he spat. “I mean it. If this is between you and him, keep me out of it!”
“Yes, Paris told me about your encounter with your brother. I’m assuming you’ve had other encounters since?”
“Will you let me up? I’m not going to teleport away.”
Margo remained crouching. “You’re not in a position to negotiate, Mr. Blackbook. I want to know what your brother is up to. If you recall the woman who paid you a visit alongside him when you lost your eye…”
“You mean that wretched cat girl? The one who took my eye? Fuck her too!”
The mandible holding Kevin’s head tightened and he let out another whimper.
“Your brother is responsible for Paris’s death, and I want to know why,” Margo told him, losing patience. “I also want to know why he’s so hell bent on finding Centralia’s last healer. If you are feeling gracious, you will also tell me why Centralia has killed so many healers, but that’s not the information I’ve come for, nor do I think you know it.”
“I don’t know why,” he whispered. “That much is true.”
“And do you know why your brother killed Paris?” she said, gritting her teeth.
“How should I know that? All I know is that he was looking for the healer because the turquoise-haired cat girl is injured. And fuck them! You see the cuts on my face? Fuck them.”
The dots connected in Margo’s head. Somehow, one of the cat girls had gotten injured, which was why Kevin had met with Paris. When Paris wouldn’t provide any information, he’d moved on to his brother, killing the former spy in the process.
“All this is about a healer,” Margo whispered. “I just can’t believe it’s that simple…”
“That’s right,” Kevin said, spittle flying from his mouth, “and I told him where we are holding the healer. That’s all. I didn’t tell him anything else, because I don’t know anything else. And if I knew something more, I probably would have told him, because the damn cat girl had me doped up. I wish they would all die, Kevin alongside them. You know how hard it is to keep what happened to my eye a secret?”
“I don’t care about your eye,” Margo said in an offhand way. “All I need to know is where Kevin is planning to go next. So, where are they holding the healer?”
“Like I’ll fucking tell you…” he growled, but his heart wasn’t in it, and Margo knew she didn’t need to put much more pressure on the man to get the answer she wanted.
“Do we really need to go into this, Mr. Blackbook? You and I both know authorities will be here in the next minute or so, if not sooner. I don’t want to have to bring you with me. I don’t want to have to keep you alive while I torture the information out of you. I would rather just get the information now, leave you be, and go somewhat peacefully. Now, I’ll only ask one more time: Where is this healer, Mr. Blackbook?”
“Prison South,” he said under his breath. “The healer is at Prison South. That’s all I know, I fucking swear.”
“Thank you for making that easy for me.”
Margo made her way to the giant circle she’d formed in the wall.
She looked down at the courtyard to see Ian and Hazrat waiting for her, the energy user a bloody torso and the strongman Ian had been fighting long since dead. Margo stripped the siding off the building as she formed an angled path that brought her to the ground.
She saw the blue-skinned telepath lying on her side, wincing as she sucked in air. Clenching her fist, Margo lifted a spike out of the ground that impaled the woman, lifting her eight feet up. She simultaneously created an air bubble in the woman’s skull, exploding her brain to make sure no part of her mind was recoverable.
Margo’s private teleporter appeared, stepping out of thin air as if he’d been there all along.
The man didn’t look at the carnage as he waited for Margo, Ian and Hazrat to step into a semitransparent doorway he’d spawned with a wave of his hand.
Once they were in, the doorway vanished, leaving Kevin Blackbook’s estate a bloody mess of torn limbs, toppled statues, and crushed egos.
Chapter Forty-Four: Basement Discovery, Sudden Recovery
Roman used his power to push a few trees aside, giving him a better look at the smoking hillside village.
They were about a quarter mile away from it now on a sidehill mostly covered by thick trees and fauna. They had been walking for hours, and the sun would set soon.
“That’s the village,” Nadine said. “Do you think they already got there?”
“Impossible. We would have seen or heard that many men moving through the woods.”
“Not necessarily,” said Casper. “If they’re good soldiers, they probably know how to keep their mouths shut.”
“I just don’t think they could have gotten there that quickly,” Nadine said, picking up her pace.
“We have to be careful,” said Roman. “This could be some type of ambush.”
“We’ll approach slowly; I’ll go in first, just in case I need you as backup.” Nadine checked the electric shield on her wrist guard. Once she made sure it was in working order, she turned it off and moved forward, ready to flip it on at a moment’s notice.
Roman waited for her to get a little ahead of him.
After reminding Celia and Coma to stay close and Casper to stay quiet, he started advancing towards Nadine’s position, his hands at the ready, sensing everything around him.
It was an incredibly nerve-racking experience watching Nadine approach the entrance of the smoldering village, her wrist-guard shield on and her body in a defensive position. There really was no other way to approach, not with the way the village had been positioned on the side of the hill, craggy rocks impossible to climb on its left.
Nadine moved along the perimeter, out of Roman’s direct line of vision. This caused panic to rise in his chest, panic that only dissipated after she’d appeared again a minute later, walking in his direction and waving him over.
“Find anything?” Roman whispered when he reached her position.
There were about ten smoldering huts, a few cut into the side of a rock. It was interesting how these people built their homes, partially out of red clay with the fronts made of wood.
They looked cozy, and seeing them in such a terrible state made Roman grimace. Whoever had done this had done it quickly, violently, and it looked like they had killed all the reindeer people and their namesake animals.
The charred bodies of humans and animals were scattered about, like someone had swept through, torn the place apart and tornadoed away.
It was unsettling, and as Roman turned to one of the larger homes, the top of which was still smoking, he slowly opened the door
and let himself in.
“I’ll be careful,” he called back to Nadine before she could say anything to him.
He looked up at the support beams to see that they were still intact, then pushed his power forward just in case, strengthening them to allow himself time to take a look around the home.
He could see Celia and Coma entering the next building, this one much worse off than the one he was currently in.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Casper said, her cat ears moving up and down in his line of vision. “This place is totally giving me the creeps. And did you see those dead bodies outside? This is bad, Roman.”
“We have to figure out what happened here,” he reminded her.
“It’s pretty easy to tell what happened here. Some powerful exemplar came through and destroyed the place. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
“I’m just looking for any signs, any clues…”
“Roman!” Casper shouted as the plank beneath him gave way.
Roman fell, the sharp wood floor catching on his pants and digging in as he tried to catch his balance.
Instincts kicking in, Roman managed to stop himself before hitting the ground of the cellar, lifting the soil to meet him. But his leg and foot were screaming out in pain, and as he stopped the ceiling from caving in on him, he noticed that he couldn’t move his toes, a numb yet stinging feeling already moving up his leg.
“Shit,” he started to whisper.
“Are you okay?”
Casper scrambled out of his pocket and then jumped, slid down his chest, and brought herself to a run when she met his waist.
It only took her a few seconds to reach Roman’s ankle, which was pretty badly shredded.
“There’s so much blood, Roman—you’re really bleeding a lot. Can you stop the blood?”
“I don’t know,” he said, focusing on the blood vessels in his leg and foot.
Maybe it was something Roman would be able to do, as he had managed to affect people’s bones before, but he was too panicked, the pain was too strong, and things were beginning to dim.
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