I smiled as the Halon descended, snuffing out Stepane’s flame shield and causing him to waver as he blinked, exposed at last.
Rushing in while he was still getting used to his shield being gone, I pummeled Stepane’s exposed flesh, beating him as hard as I had in my dreamwalk. The rage I’d been sitting on after Scotland, and now after watching my friends hounded and hunted by this clown, after being shellacked by both him and the Terminator, from being chased by the damned law for something I hadn’t even done … all that came out, channeled through the techniques learned in a thousand training sessions with my mother.
It all came rushing out through my fists, and I remembered as I shattered his orbital bone, as I broke his jaw, as I smashed his nose—
I remembered who Sienna Nealon was.
I brought up a knee and drove Stepane into a server, denting the metal. Then I hit him with a frenzy of punches, driving him into it over and over, watching his head rock back. He was woozy, bleeding, bones broken all over his face and body.
Ripping a server out of the ground next to me, I lifted it above my head and brought it down on him, mid-chest. It shattered ribs, rent open flesh, and buried itself halfway through him. I raised it again, brought it down as hard as I could—
And Stepane Abraam was split cleanly (well … not that cleanly … ) in two just beneath his armpits.
Then, for good measure, I drove the server down again, splitting his arms off and raised it once more. This time, I was prepared to strike off his head.
I paused, the server raised high above me. I stared down at his eyes as he struggled for air with lungs that, uh … weren’t entirely there anymore.
For some reason, I cast my impromptu bludgeon aside and knelt next to the man I’d dubbed the Predator. There was panic in his eyes as he gasped to take a breath that would never come, as he tried to writhe and control a body that I’d completely shattered.
He couldn’t speak, so I brought my hand down to his face and touched his cheek, pressing my palm to him. I held my breath, staring down at this utterly destroyed human being …
Yeah. This was who Sienna Nealon was. Face-puncher was sugarcoating it. Sienna Nealon was a destroyer. An annihilator.
Death.
My fingers touched him, and my power started to work. I’d almost forgotten how this felt in the last months, burning through my skin like a pleasant flush, like I’d had a little too much to drink …
And then it went straight to my head.
I plunged into the darkness akin to the dreamwalk, and I found myself in Stepane’s mind. It was dark here, just as it had been before, but there he was, standing before me, pale as death, and clutching at himself.
He looked down, seeing his body whole once more, and breathed. “I am … dying?”
A vision of all the damage I’d done to his body flashed before my eyes. “Yes,” I said. Because what else was there to say?
He stood in silence a long moment, and then a resigned smile graced his lips. “Good.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Good?”
“He can’t reach me now,” Stepane said, smile turning to a grin. “Now … it doesn’t matter how strong I am, or how I weak I am … I move beyond his grasp.” He staggered, turning a whiter shade as death seemed to take hold of him. “But you …” he looked up at me, and his eyes were …
Haunted.
“I’m heading for a collision with ol’ Vlad, I know,” I said. I paused, trying to decide how best to say what was on my mind. “I could really use some help.”
“Your friends will be fine,” he said. “I did not hurt them badly enough that they will not recover. None of them angered me … as you did.” He seemed relaxed, almost as if this were a victory rather than a defeat that had led to his death.
“I could use some powers of my own,” I said, looking at him, keenly aware that out in the real world, my hands were firmly on his cheeks, and though time had more or less paused, within his mind … my powers were still working out there, establishing the connection between our souls that would harmonize, allowing me to draw him out completely.
He got it in that instant, and a change came over his face as he seemed to light up, though no flame appeared on him. “No.” His vehemence made me take a step back. “You cannot do this to me.”
I took a step forward. “I’m stronger. You’re weaker. Isn’t that how this goes? Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Please … do not do this to me,” he said, and his mouth fell open, desperation shaping his lips into a hideous, fearful look. “I … I was to be free. Free of him—and you—you would have me be your puppet into death as you throw yourself into his open jaws?”
I stared at him. “No. No, I wouldn’t do that to you.” He relaxed, just slightly. “Because I’ll tell you something, Stepane … strength is a nice thing if you want to live by the law of the jungle—and heaven knows more than a few people I deal with in the world want to. It’s a job and a calling for me, to greet them with force and make them realize the error of their ways, but …” I shook my head. “That’s not how we do things in this civilized society you seem to eschew. We’re supposed to persuade to get what we want. To win someone over to our way of thinking.”
“You will never win me over,” he said, shaking his head. “Not to face him. Not again.”
“I know,” I said, and the darkness started to swell around us as I began to withdraw my hand from his face, breaking the connection before my powers could drain his soul dry. “And I won’t make you.”
I stood, pulling my hand from his face, and taking up the server again as he lay there, looking up at me with glazed eyes. He knew what was going to come next, but there was no fear in them now.
Bringing the server high, I raised it above his head—
Then brought it down with lethal force, snuffing out his fire—his life—once and for all.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Iwalked out of the server room through the hallway door, letting it groan and shut behind me with the mechanical whine of a hinge. Now I was back to nearly where I’d started from, the lobby ahead. I saw the door to the power room just a few yards down the hall, and was on my way toward it when it groaned open, the Terminator staggering out, murder in his eyes.
Then he looked at me.
“Hey, military guy,” I said, pausing as he dragged himself into my path, “I don’t want to fight you. And I damned sure don’t want to have to kill you.”
The shadow effect smoked off his shoulders, and I had a bad feeling he was about to go blurry with speed. “You don’t have to worry about killing me. But fighting …” And he put up his dukes.
“You’re awfully arrogant for a guy who got his ass launched back on Interstate 94,” I said, settling into a defensive stance of my own. “If you hadn’t put lives at risk, or if I was the kind of cold psycho the press seems to think I am, you’d be a dead man already.”
He twitched, just slightly. “Enough talk. Now—”
“I don’t think there’s been enough talk yet.” A female voice came echoing down the hall, and Eilish stepped out of the lobby, Harry a couple steps behind her. “Let’s keep talking, darling. Let’s just talk and talk and talk until we can’t chatter any more.”
The Terminator stood there, stiff, for just a moment, and then he seemed to relax an iota. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, like she was an officer he had to obey.
“You all right?” Harry asked, hustling over to me. He tugged on my sleeve, which was a little tattered from fighting and getting hit and beatings and whatnot. Also, bloody from lots of punching, and maybe a little from being punched.
“I’m fine-ish,” I said, feeling the sting of a thousand aches. Going through a wall didn’t come without some costs to your bone structure, but nothing major was broken, and hopefully if we could get out of here I’d have a chance to heal. “Cops on the way?”
Harry shook his head. “Cassidy’s got them chasing about ten different leads right now. We’ve
got ten minutes or so to get clear.” He looked at me a second longer than he needed to, then switched his attention to the Terminator. “Still … might want to ask your questions so we can get going.”
“Not a bad point,” I said, and walked over to the Terminator, who strained a little, looking like he wanted to hit me.
“Uh uh,” Eilish said when his fist twitched. “No hitting, now, my dear.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Terminator said, his voiced clipped in that stiff, military way.
“Who are you?” I asked, looking the Terminator right in the eyes.
He stiffened to attention. “Lt. Colonel Warren Quincy, formerly United States Marine Corps.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Would you kindly answer all her questions?” Eilish asked.
He looked at me, then dropped to at ease, hands behind his back. “I work for a special operations group within the Department of Defense, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” He twitched slightly. “Until recently.”
I exchanged a look with Harry, and he nodded. This sounded important. “What do you mean ‘until recently’?”
“I am currently on detached duty to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Warren Quincy said, “to aid in their apprehension … of you.” And he looked right at me.
“No surprises so far,” I said. “Who ordered you to come after me?”
“The Director of the FBI,” Quincy said.
I raised an eyebrow at that. But then, I’d watched the last FBI Director get murdered in front of me, so I supposed it was no huge surprise that this one might be antsy, thinking it was a vendetta against the office. It wasn’t; I hadn’t even killed the last guy (much as I might have wanted to when I was working for him). “That’s … interesting,” I said. “Maybe this one thinks he’s pursuing justice.”
“She,” Quincy corrected.
“What do ye think of her?” Eilish asked, probably detecting the same reserve in Quincy’s reply as I did.
“I think she’s a stuffed shirt pencil-pushing lawyer who’s probably never been in the field a day in her life,” Quincy said, staring straight ahead, stiff as a board. “If she heard the sound of gunfire she’d think it was fireworks in the distance.”
“So you’re just after me?” I asked, trying to wrap this up. “And you work alone?”
“I work alone,” he said, staring right at me, like a caged tiger, “and you are my sole mission.”
“Lovely,” Eilish said, “well … feels like we should be getting along, now.” She clapped Quincy on the shoulder. “You stay here, darling. Wait for the cops. Go ahead and forget I was ever here, or that she was—actually, just forget everything that happened since you took this mission. It was all a distant dream; you don’t have any idea at all how this happened, how you ended up here. It’s a big mystery. All right?” And she smiled at him.
“All right,” he said.
“Go ahead and sit down right here and wait for the police,” she said, and he did just that as I started past him.
“They’re not going to stop until they catch you,” he said, calling after me as I went by. “They know you killed Harmon. They want this settled.” He turned his head. “My orders said dead or alive, but I just wanted to beat you. You’re a fellow warrior to me; I’ve seen what you’ve done over the years and it’s beautiful work. But these are soft people, the ones who sent me, people who don’t understand fighting, don’t understand war. You’re a murderer to them. They won’t be as merciful next time.”
I looked down at him. “Thank you, Warren.”
He looked right back, and beneath Eilish’s control, I almost felt like he was saluting me … and warning me. “Ma’am.”
I walked on by, and Harry fell into step behind me, Eilish a few behind us. “Did Cassidy erase the surveillance footage here?”
“Yep,” Harry said. “And without any affirmative witnesses—”
“This won’t be provable as a metahuman incident,” I said, smiling that Harry got what I was driving at immediately. That’d be an insurance payout for Deltan Data Systems, and it meant my conscience could rest easy about all the property damage I’d done here. Hell, with one of their people caught at the scene, maybe the government would get involved and throw in some hush money.
The van was waiting in the parking lot, and Harry slid open the door for me as I stepped up, cringing at a couple of my lesser-realized pains that adrenaline had wallpapered over during the fight. Cassidy was waiting inside, face in a tight moue, watching me.
“You got him?” she asked. “I couldn’t see on the feed. Which is erased now, by the way.”
“I got him,” I said, and she slumped back in her seat as I slid in next to her and fastened my seatbelt. Eilish and Harry loaded up in the front, and then we were on our way, before the first siren even reached my ears.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
We pulled up in front of the wrecked house in Richfield, Minnesota, the street deathly quiet and a light snow starting to fall around us. Cassidy had already gathered her things, and I was left staring out at the destroyed house as I opened the door on the silent street and let the frigid air rush in, chilling me. “Are you sure about this?” I asked, nodding at the house. My brother had wrecked it while dragooning Cassidy into his service to rescue me from Scotland; it didn’t look like she’d done much to repair it yet.
Cassidy frowned at me. “I own the one next door, too.” She shrugged. “I liked the neighborhood, and it felt right to expand, so …”
“Oh,” I said, glancing at the wrecked house again. “I just … thought you were sleeping in the ruins of the basement or something.”
“I need an active power supply for the sensory tank,” she said, shaking her head as she crossed over in front of my chair and I squeezed my legs to the side to let her pass. “And the computers. And—well, everything, really.” She stepped out onto the curb. “Though I think I've missed the sensory deprivation tank the most these last few days.” She glanced at each of us, then lowered her face. “Good times, people. Let's never do this again.” Then she looked at me. “Except us. We have a future date.”
“Way to make it weird, Cassidy,” I said, then added, “So … we’re not square, huh?”
She hesitated, yellow light from a nearby streetlamp casting her pale face in shadow. Snowflakes came down around her, giving her a case of artificial, frosty dandruff around the shoulders. “No. But …” She looked me right in the eye. “This … thank you.” Then she glanced away. “Your friends … they’re all in stable condition. Some are waking up now, others will be within hours.” Now she looked right at me. “They’ll all be fine, every one.”
“I know,” I said, feeling my breath catch in my lungs, and not just from the rush of cold. “But … thank you, anyway, Cassidy. And … I’m sorry about Simmons.”
“I know you are,” she said, looking down again. “Which … is strange, because were I in your shoes … I wouldn’t feel the same.” She shook her head, like she was trying to rid herself of troubling thoughts. “Let me know when you go to Revelen,” she said, looking me straight in the eye once more. “And we’ll call it square.”
“I like how you’re the only one that believes that I’ll be able to square things if I go to Revelen,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Because everyone else is all like, ‘You’re going to die if you go to Revelen.’”
She blinked a couple times. “Who told you that?”
“The voices in my head before they died,” I said, “Stepane—the Predator—that’s where he came from. Where he got his powers. Their serum.”
She took this in, processing. “That affects the calculus in my equation.”
“Unfavorably, I assume.”
She nodded, just slightly, as she stepped up onto the driveway, which had been plowed, despite the house being wrecked. “Yes, unfavorably.” And then she started to walk away.
“Do I even want to know the odds?” I asked, wondering how she
could even render such an equation without any freaking idea of what we’d be facing in Revelen.
“No,” she called back, not turning around. She picked her way around the snowy lawn, walking down the cleared sidewalk, bag on her back comically large for her thin frame.
“Maybe we should go right now?” I asked as Harry eased the van forward.
“No,” Cassidy and Harry chorused as one. I looked back at him, he shook his head.
“Bad odds,” Cassidy said and gave me a little wave.
“Very bad odds,” Harry agreed. “The worst, in fact.”
I frowned, and slid the van’s back door shut as we passed Cassidy, now making her way up her driveway. Any other time, even when I had her locked up in prison, I would have dreaded seeing her again.
This time … and for some reason, related to this growing fear and awareness that the nation of Revelen was a growing menace I was going to have to deal with at some point … this time … I almost looked forward to seeing her again.
Almost.
I mean … I wasn’t totally crazy.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“Oh … it’s you,” Reed said, sounding a little dazed, like he was suffering from cotton-brain, that medicated feeling where your head feels like it’s stuffed with … well, cotton. He was blinking at me furiously against the darkened backdrop of our dreamwalk, and smacking his lips together like the cotton feeling had spread to his mouth.
“You sound surprised,” I said, slipping out of the darkness toward him.
“I guess I am,” he said, peering around, that dazed look in his eyes. “I didn’t really expect to see you again for a while after our last talk.” He frowned. “Wait … what happened after our last talk?”
I hemmed for a second before I composed a straight answer. “You got on a plane to Minneapolis and as soon as you got off, you got your ass kicked by the bad guy.”
“Oh, man,” he said, closing his eyes, putting fingers on the bridge of his nose to knead it. “The team.” His eyes snapped open and he looked straight at me. “What about—”
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