But I didn’t get the Hollywood ending. I didn’t even get the happy ending, or the marginally happy ending, or even the kind of dirty, hollow happy ending that politicians pay for at a massage parlor. I got the drunken funk ending, where I retreated into my own shell again and stayed in a cloud of booze for months without resolving anything until shit in the world went so far sideways that even I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
At about that moment, I was wishing the room had a minibar.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I wondered, then remembered. The Terminator wasn’t my only problem, and the mysterious Sigourney Weaver wasn’t my only mystery. I had another one, one that had brought me here, and one that had left a trail of complications behind it.
Reed. Augustus. Scott. The team.
I scrambled for the TV remote on the nightstand between the beds. It clicked on easily, and the flatscreen on the wall lit up, going straight to a news station. I needed to know if my team was okay, if they’d had any fatalities, if Reed was conscious, was—
Trying to control my breathing, I waited the infinite seconds for the screen to brighten. It was already on a breaking news alert, fortunately, but …
I stared at the screen, which was a live feed of downtown Minneapolis. I could see the Nicollet Mall in the background where it crossed 6th Avenue. The sign for Murray’s, Scott’s favorite downtown steakhouse, was visible in the background shot. I could see Oceanaire, the awning for Ike’s, and a Starbucks all in the foreground, and one of the skyway bridges that connected downtown buildings together like a webwork for easy traversal during Minnesota’s bitter winters was in the foreground.
And there, in the center of the shot, occupying the middle of a downtown intersection—6th Avenue and Nicollet Mall—
Was our big bad guy.
He glowed, wreathed in fire like Gavrikov when I’d first encountered him, every inch of his skin engulfed in flames. There was another barrier shimmering around him, water vapor in the dry, cold air, and I had a guess what that was. There was also the sound of wind whipping, which was usually natural in Minneapolis streets, but in this case I had a worse feeling … that it was not natural, that it was totally related to the enemy hovering there.
A gunshot cracked through the downtown canyons, and there was a slight movement on the screen, the high-def image of the man on fire darkening around the shoulder for just a second, then a little drip of liquid running off like he’d been hit by a large, leaden raindrop.
He hadn’t, of course. He hadn’t been touched by it.
It only took me a second to figure it out; a police sniper had just taken a shot at him from down the street, and a couple things had happened that my meta eye caught. One, this barrier of water vapor and wind the bad guy had created had slowed the sniper bullet just slightly—or maybe more than slightly, it was tough to gauge that sort of thing even with meta eyesight at 2,500+ feet per second.
And when the bullet had gotten close enough to this man on fire, it had completely dissolved under the intensity of the heat, melting and running off like liquid slag channeled down a drain pipe.
I’d seen Gavrikov do something similar to bullets, at least relatively small caliber ones. Unless the police brought something bigger out there to challenge this guy, it looked like he was impervious to any threat they posed.
As if in response to being shot at, a rumble echoed through the ground, and the street beneath him started to shred as an ovoid wall rose to surround him to the waist. It paused there, crushed gravel and street sorted down to its base earthen components, this guy’s Augustus powers clearly functioning at a reasonable enough level to allow him to rip up a street that was probably more synthetic components than actual dirt and sand and whatnot. I’d seen Augustus do this kind of thing before he’d had his power boosted and it tended to take a toll.
But this guy … he was moving water, earth, air and fire, all while maintaining an easy hover. So he had flight, too, because if he’d been using wind to keep himself aloft, the strain would have to have been too much.
“Shit,” I whispered. That number of powers narrowed things down for me. He had to be an incubus who’d jacked a bunch of people. There was no other way I knew of that he could get that many powers together.
I had a brief flash of memory, back to a village in Northern Scotland where I’d faced someone else with those seemingly unstoppable abilities. The thought of Rose’s vicious grin made me shudder even now, set my heart to racing, and part of me wondered …
Was this some sort of afterstroke for her? Some reaching-from-beyond-the-grave attempt to swipe at me, one last time?
If so, it had worked. She’d taken out my whole support team, had ripped them all away from me, cast their fates into doubt. If Rose’s dead hand was still tormenting me from the other side, her aim remained unerring.
But no, I couldn’t just jump to that conclusion. Maybe I was being egocentric. Maybe this had nothing to do with me. Maybe—
“Sienna Nealon,” the man said, voice echoing through the TV speakers as I sat, alone, in that hotel room, and listened to him speak my name.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“Where … is Sienna Nealon?” he asked in a European accent, which leant a little credence to my ‘It’s Rose!’ theory, at least in my mind. “Where is she?” His face, consumed by fire, spoke like some kind of horrifying deity of flame. “Where is the protector of this city?”
And he looked right into the camera.
Right at me.
“Come out,” he said, no joy, no taunting, just a direct command. “Come out and face me. Once and for all. Our meeting is destined … it is inevitable …”
I blinked. I had gone beyond having a bad feeling about this; I was in the next county, where it looked like an impending passenger liner shipwreck combined with a three-plane crash and maybe a space station landing on the whole mess for emphasis was about to go down.
“Come out and face me, Sienna Nealon,” he said, those black, shadowed eyes hiding beneath the glow of flames, “and we will meet our inevitable fate … together.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Sonofabitch,” I muttered as I walked out the front door of the hotel and was hit by the frigid Minnesota air. It was well below freezing and my thin windbreaker was somewhat shredded. Even if it hadn’t been, it was completely inadequate to the task at hand. It was a Florida winter coat, not a Minnesota winter coat, and I felt the difference everywhere. My nostril hairs stood up and froze, goosebumps sprinted down my back and arms, my knees felt like they were going to knock together uncontrollably—all that within two seconds after I walked out the door.
I hurried across the parking lot, shoes crunching in the hard-packed and hard-frozen snow. It looked like it’d been a while since they’d had a fresh powder here, which sorta worked in my favor and sorta didn’t. I didn’t tend to drive much, and that went double for when there was snow on the ground. I probably hadn’t driven in snow for almost two years, given that I’d been driven out of the state and gone on the run before winter had come last year.
Also, I could fly back then, a loss I was keenly feeling as I tried to nonchalantly stalk up to an older-model Ford Explorer. It looked like an early 2000’s edition, which suited me.
I tried the doors, very casually, then looked into windows of the cars next to me, just to see if the doors were unlocked. No dice. I could scour the parking lot and hope to find someone who’d been sloppy about locking theirs, but this was about as good as I was going to get, I figured.
I busted the rear window on the driver’s side and reached up, unlocking the driver’s door and slipping into the Explorer. It was cold in the car, overnight temps having dropped, the chill long seeped in. There was a partially drunk diet cola in the cup holder in the center of the vehicle, and I lifted it, just to see. It was completely frozen through, the cola a hard chunk of ice at the bottom of the can.
“Yep,” I said, leaning down to pull the wires out
from under the dashboard, “welcome back to Minnesota.”
It took me a couple minutes to strip the wires I needed and hotwire the car. It would have been easier with longer nails, but meta strength and my enhanced fine motor skills got the job done eventually. The engine purred to life, and I looked back as I shifted the Explorer into reverse and eased out of the parking space. Once out, I threw it in drive and engaged the four-wheel drive which had drawn me to this vehicle.
I pulled out of the parking lot and onto Snelling, gunning it down a side road a few seconds later. In order to get downtown, I’d have to cross the Mississippi River, and most of the easy routes would be jammed with people trying to get the hell away from the scary metahuman who was tearing up Nicollet Mall.
Such a shame. They’d just finished with what felt like a fifty-year reconstruction project down there.
My easiest route would be to approach from the north, Hennepin Avenue bridge. I’d sneak into downtown that way, and if the roads were too logjammed, I’d just ditch the Explorer and head north into the city on foot. I could cover the mile or less between the bridge and the intersection where my adversary was waiting in a matter of minutes.
I took the north route to circle around; Snelling started to turn into a freeway around just before the State Fair grounds; I could see the tower in the distance, and it gave me a little thrill, being this close to home.
The Explorer skidded on the slick roads as I hit the overpass at Larpenteur and slid through the intersection as I hung a left. Larpenteur became Hennepin under the bridge, and suddenly I was racing through a faded industrial area, passing old warehouses and shipping concerns as they slipped past at fifty miles per hour. Trees with no leaves hung over the street, their branches like skeletal bones trying to wave me off from doing what I was hell bent on doing.
Which was racing into a confrontation with a guy who had me so grossly outpowered as to make my fight with the Terminator look completely fair by comparison. But hey, I’d almost beaten the Terminator, so … I had to at least stand a chance with this guy … right?
I tried not to allow myself the luxury of negative thoughts, but reality is a mean mistress, and she came crashing in on me while I tried to accentuate the positive. This was madness, possibly suicide, which was a phase I thought I was past since I’d crawled my way out of Rose’s clutches.
The Explorer shot under a rusted railroad bridge draped with ice stalactites and through an intersection where someone blared their horn at me for failing to acknowledge the rules of the road. Give way, idiots, I’m trying to save lives here! Or possibly kill myself in a blaze of glory and martyrdom.
How had my life gone so far off the rails? A year and a half ago I’d been living in this city, I’d been the most powerful meta in the world, I had a boyfriend, I had friends who were like family, I had half a billion dollars in the bank and was secretly working for myself, lived with my surrogate mom Ariadne, I was a hero who was instrumental in stopping the tide of metahuman attacks, was respected, and was just generally …
Happy.
Shit. I was happy.
Now I was on the run from the law, and Ariadne didn’t even remember me thanks to the machinations of the villain who’d borked my life from the highest office in the land. I had almost no powers. Who even knew what had happened to my boyfriend, my family and friends were beaten down, I’d lost most of my money and couldn’t access the rest, and I was pretty much thought of as a villain throughout the world.
As the Minneapolis skyline appeared in the distance between a couple of leafless trees, I had to ask myself …
Was this really the consequence of some shitty decisions I’d made back when I was eighteen?
Did this really come down to the bad press I’d gotten from killing Clyde Clary, Eve Kappler, Roberto Bastian, and Glen Parks? From my intemperate actions as a metahuman superhero law enforcer, when I’d occasionally lost patience with people like Eric Simmons? From Cassidy’s character assassination campaign against me a few years ago?
I was wanted. Hunted. In spite of my best efforts to save the world, I’d been framed for things I didn’t do, and tarred because of the things I had done years ago.
Was this just the deal? Was I a villain, now and forever? Irredeemable?
I mean, it wasn’t like the law was likely to just forget the Eden Prairie incident, since that was the pretext for my arrest. It was somewhat compounded by the LA nuclear incident (thanks, Greg Vansen) but astute eyes had at least blasted all over the internet the fact that “Sienna Nealon can’t produce a nuclear blast!” which had apparently staved off any charges there, though I was still very much a person of interest in that investigation.
All the things I’d done, both good and bad, seemed totally weighted against me. The good counted for nothing, the bad weighed tons and was pressing down on me with the force of a dumpster filled with plutonium. And on fire, because my life was a nuclear dumpster fire.
I was passing the occasional house now, zipping past stores as I shot over Interstate 35W. I flew through more intersections, got more honks, flipped the occasional bird in response. Traffic was picking up in the opposite direction, and I was passing in the center lane, laying on the horn anytime I caught up with someone who was traveling the speed limit.
After blowing through a whole series of intersections, things started to build up. Condos and apartment buildings began to rise around me. Newer restaurants and stores had sprung up through this part of town. Disused industrial and light commercial sectors gave way to an aging and refurbed cityscape, the kind of neighborhoods where hipsters dwelled with their lumberjack beards and flannel shirts (no, seriously—a guy in a flannel shirt, in a perfect imitation of the Brawny Paper Towel man, was hauling ass down the street in the opposite direction).
I hit the split of Hennepin Avenue and 7th Street and raced on, joining up with 1st Avenue. A few blocks later, downtown Minneapolis was rising above me, just ahead.
Home.
Almost home.
A little farther ahead and I saw the bridge onto Nicollet Island.
And suddenly … I was there.
The bridge ended, and I was in downtown Minneapolis.
I turned left onto Washington Avenue and raced, ignoring the honks as I pushed my way through vehicles that were blocking the intersection, forming a line to escape the carnage on Nicollet Mall. I went straight ahead on Hennepin and hung a left on 6th, fighting through another string of stopped traffic. People were getting out of their cars and fleeing on foot, some wrapped up tight, some dressed completely inadequately for the occasion.
Here I abandoned my car on 6th, pulling it onto the sidewalk and honking to get people to get the hell out of the way. There was definitely not going to be any escaping from this by car, so … I just left it, hitting the cold air as I got out, letting it pour over me, infuse my bones as I stared down to the intersection with Nicollet Mall.
The little dome of rock waited, cracks in it that provided an opportunity to see the big bad guy’s self-constructed oven. Flames were crawling slowly out of the sides, and that shimmering veil of water waited.
“Take my car,” I said to a woman who was struggling under the weight of trying to drag along four kids, two of them very young and the others maybe six or seven, tops. I grabbed her by the arm and got her attention with a sharp shake as I pointed to the Explorer. “Go south. Hit 394.” I pointed to the 394 signs just down the street. “Go the wrong way if you have to, just get out of downtown.”
Her eyes were frightened and yet somehow dull as she stared at me. She blinked, then squinted, almost in recognition. “Aren’t you … ?” she asked, like she was trying to put something together.
“Take the car, get out of town,” I said. “Hardly anyone is coming this way, so take advantage of the empty lanes.” I turned my back on her. “The Explorer’s running, just get your kids in, buckle up and go.”
“Thank you!” she called after me as she hurried them into my car. I didn�
�t stick around to watch the operation. The crowds on the street were thinning already, the buildings around us probably near empty. The city of Minneapolis had seen enough metahuman incidents that no one wanted to be caught at ground zero when one was brewing right outside their door.
I took to the street at a run, passing the big Murray’s sign, passing under the Ike’s awning and then, once I’d gone past a couple garage entrances, past Oceanaire’s windows.
Snow remained in the gutters, frozen in spite of the city’s best efforts to clear it. Piles remained, draped on the edges of the sidewalks, waiting for some sucker to try and step over them.
I didn’t try. I just jumped and landed on a spot on the road that was clear.
Approaching the little sphere of flaming, hovering stone was a daunting business. I kept my stride even and stooped, grabbing up a handful of snow and shaping it as I went. I made a snowball, of course, and walked right on up to the sphere, stopping about ten yards away.
Only one thing to do now.
I threw the snowball with unerring accuracy and it piffed right through one of the cracks, dissolving into steam and boiling water as it passed into the flames. I heard it sizzle, a little cloud bursting out of the crack where it had entered.
“Hey, Captain Planet!” I shouted, voice echoing over the street, “I’m calling you out. I’ve seen your earth, wind, water and fire, so why don’t you shed your geodesic dome of a hidey-hole and show me the power of heart, huh?”
It was pretty classic Sienna Nealon to walk up to someone like this, sitting in an impenetrable (to me) fortress in the middle of the street, roasting flames cooking out the sides, and just toss out a challenge.
At least, it seemed like the sort of thing Sienna Nealon would do. Based on what I could remember. And I remembered … most of it? Maybe.
That was the struggle, though, wasn’t it? Not knowing what I didn’t know, having no clue about what I couldn’t remember. Were the parts Rose removed from my memory things that were critical, core to who I was? I’d been a flippant ass in response to what she’d done to me while it was happening, but with three months of separation since I’d killed her …
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