Tony’s insides wanted out of his body.
He had barely registered Bailey’s shouting as he’d exited the lot and drove from the studio without looking behind. She had come running after him, but he’d not a moment to spare. The napalm in his veins flickered and flashed, casting a blue halo of light on his surroundings. Now speeding through the Cardinal City streets, all Tony could think was to contain the intense pressure under his skin. It was an alien urge in his body, and he didn’t like it.
How did his siblings accept their new powers? Because to him, the foreign sensation felt like a demon under his skin, and every time he envisioned letting his control slip, he saw his body splitting monstrously. He didn’t want it. He wouldn’t have it. He refused to acknowledge whatever was happening to him.
Tony shook his head to dispel the thoughts.
Just get home. Get to Lazarus House.
Everything will make more sense there.
In what seemed a blink, he roared around the street that led to the underground garage. He revved on the throttle while waiting for the garage door to lift, and when it had, wheels spun as he wrested the vehicle into the safety of the darkness. He parked between Parker’s Bugatti and Liza’s Ford sedan, cut the engine and exhaled slowly, only now registering that he’d not even put a helmet on.
But he made it. And his insides were still inside. No more blue glow.
“What happened to your bike?”
Tony jolted at Liza’s voice. Tall, Amazonian, and tough as nails, his sister emerged from near her car. Dressed in her standard detective’s outfit, jeans, brown leather jacket and white shirt, Liza gathered her long brown braid over one shoulder and frowned at him.
“Lying in wait for your next kill?” he joked.
“I just got here, numbnuts. You would have noticed if you hadn’t driven in like a fucktard on steroids.”
“Shut it, Liza. I’m in no mood for your attitude tonight.”
“You know I love you.” She jerked her chin at his bike. “Is that the reason for the carrot up your ass?”
He climbed off and checked the tank. Keyed scratches covered the previously pristine black paint. The words “I know” were repeated all over, just like the dolls. A trickle of fear, of helplessness, creeped in. He bit his lip and screwed up his face as the ghost of energy pulsed again, like distant war drums beating beneath his skin. With this new emotional turmoil, his power—whatever it was—wanted out. It seized on his weakness and insisted. He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on forcing the urges away. Stifle it. Swallow it down.
“No,” he growled and clenched his fists.
“I’m sorry?”
Shit. She’s coming over. He hid his hands behind his back. “You’re home early,” he noted casually.
Garage air brushed icily against sweat on his upper lip.
“Crime’s down and I’m not stupid, Tony. You can’t deflect with me. I have eyes.” She gestured to his vandalized bike. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Probably Sloan,” he mumbled half-heartedly.
“That’s not Sloan’s doing.”
Bailey hadn’t thought it was Sloan either.
The moment his thoughts went to his mate, his body reacted, doing the thinking for him. Heat zipped up his spine and the drum beat in his blood grew to a percussion, thrumming incessantly. Phosphorescent blue light pulsed in his veins. Heat came in waves until a prickling sensation ran over his feverish skin. Suddenly, Tony didn’t feel so good. He swayed.
“What the hell is that?” Liza asked, shrewd gaze on his forearms.
“Special effects.” With the blue light from his arms to guide him through the shadowed garage, he strode toward the door leading to the headquarters. He shouldered through the heavy door, hardly hearing the warbled sound of Liza’s voice calling behind him.
Everything felt dark, despite the light escaping his body. He pushed the urge to release down and wouldn’t let it out. Only one directive rang clear in his mind—get home. Get to his apartment. Shut the door. Lock it.
The faster he walked through the dark underground corridor, the more he suppressed, and the darker his vision became.
He had to get to the elevator leading up to his room. Get there. Get in the lift. Go up to the safety of his apartment. But as he rushed through the Deadly Seven operations room, passed a surprised Parker and Flint working on technical adjustments to a Deadly suit, he couldn’t see straight. It was all shadows and delirious blue patterns in front of him.
“Bro!” Liza shouted, jogging after him.
“Leave me alone,” he growled.
He kept going. One foot in front of the other until he’d passed the medical room, the gym, and the weapon’s room. He hit the “up” button next to the elevator and braced himself against the wall, breathing deep. The power inside wasn’t listening to him, it had a mind of its own and it wanted out. Keep it down. Keep it down. He exhaled slowly through his mouth and waited for the car.
“Stop,” Liza ordered.
Her authoritative tone had Tony lifting his head only to be confused by what he saw. His sister had her state-issued firearm aimed at him. She stood, feet slightly apart, arms braced, and with a determined scowl across her face.
“I won’t say it again,” she warned.
“Are you shitting me?” he snapped, anger rising.
“You’re behaving erratic, Tony.”
“Get lost.” He hit the “up” button again.
“Goddamn it, Tony, talk to me.”
“You won’t shoot.”
“You’ve met your mate, haven’t you, and you’re trying to hide it.”
He tensed and his world came crashing down. She knew. They all knew. He shook his head and grit his teeth.
She continued, “Step away from the elevator and let’s talk about this.”
“Get that gun out of my face.”
“No can do, bro. You’ve got this look in your eye. The last time one of us was separated from our mate and became out of balance, an innocent almost died. I won’t let that happen.”
She referred to when Sloan accidentally sent a room full of them to sleep with her power, and then tried to kill Barry Pinkerton, the ex-Syndicate geneticist. Sloan had snapped out of her berserker state just in time to avoid strangling the man to death. Everything flashed cold in Tony and he leveled his glare at his sister. “You think I’m out of balance?”
She widened her eyes in accusation. “You’re always out of balance.”
“Screw you. I’ve been sober for months.”
“Show me.”
He shouldn’t have to, but he did. He held out his wrist tattoo out. It told her jack about his sobriety, but it was a clear indicator to whether gluttony saturated his system. Shaped in a Yin-Yang symbol, the black bio-indicator ink would darken to cover the entire symbol if he had too much gluttony present in his blood. If he held not enough gluttony, the ink would fade to leave a white, empty symbol. Both unbalanced states were equally dangerous and conducive to a berserker rage. Except, since his time with his mate today, it was still virtually balanced.
The elevator door pinged open to reveal two more of his siblings, Wyatt and Sloan. From the look of their battle-ready faces, they’d been called down the moment he’d entered the basement.
Great. Just fucking great. Everyone was here to watch the show.
He tried to push his way into the elevator car, but Wyatt, the invulnerable mountain, put his palm to Tony’s chest and stopped him.
Tony backed up like a cornered animal. From the corner of his eye, he could see Parker and Flint come up from the operations room. So many pairs of eyes were on him, watching, assessing. Judging the monkey in a cage.
“Go away,” he said. It was meant to be a shout, but the words came out a snarl. He wiped the back of his hand against his feverish forehead and his vision flickered, but the worst thing was the undeniable urge building under his skin like a pressure cooker about to blow. “Why can’t you all just leav
e me alone?”
“Because you’re family,” said Parker, and then he instructed Wyatt to secure Tony.
Family.
The word bounced around in his head. And just exactly what was family? Someone you could boss around? Someone you took for granted? Someone you never truly saw.
As Wyatt advanced, the pressure beneath Tony’s skin strained to bursting point. He didn’t know why he kept holding it back. They already thought he was a screwup. He should know by now that nothing good ever came of bottling things up… so he let it out.
An almighty roaring filled his ears, burned through his veins. Ozone drenched the air. Someone shouted to take cover. A blinding blue light turned white and then Tony’s vision closed in. He remembered no more.
Six
Wayne Bosch always thought he was an agreeable man, perhaps too much. He gave his wife whatever she wanted. Diamonds, a yacht, a house on the river. He even took a job with a morally ambiguous company because it paid better, and he could provide more good things. Well, that wasn’t completely true. It also let him gray the lines of science in the name of human advancement. One day he hoped to have his name up in lights for making the next big scientific break, and until this day, everything had been going swimmingly… or should he say, growing swimmingly.
But over the past few days, his carefully planned life had turned to blood colored mud. He stared at the mess in the conservatory side of the laboratory he shared with another scientist, Barry Pinkerton. Unbelievable. Once it had contained the most forward thinking scientific experiments in his field of botany genetics, and in his lab partner’s field of animal genetics. On the far side were empty open cages. Pinkerton had created a new species of animal that sensed deadly sin, hunted it down and extinguished it. On Wayne’s side, he’d created a new species of sin-sensing plant that was almost sentient.
Wolves could scent fear. Bugs could hunt using pheromones to lure their prey. Plants could actually seek out areas where the sun shone, and the water ran free. Using all this knowledge, Wayne had taken pieces of each puzzle to fit into his new sin-sensing design. The plan had been to breed and graft hybrid plant species together, introduce a little human, animal, and insect DNA to then create something far more sinister than Barry Pinkerton ever could.
Wayne had tweaked the ability to sniff out sin, to hunt it down like a source of sustenance, and then eat it. His experiment had stalled until a few months ago when he’d discovered his plant not in its cage like he’d left it, but out in the laboratory, tendrils wrapped around a rat, or the mummified husk that was left of the rat. How the plant had moved from its cage to the center of the room was beyond him, but it had moved just enough to reach the rat a few feet from the cage.
Wayne had only designed the plant to unfurl tendrils, to latch itself onto any sinner within arm’s reach. He’d never in his life expected a plant to physically shift from one location to another, like it could walk.
It shouldn’t have been able to move like that. And in the months since, he’d not seen a repeat incident, leaving Wayne to surmise that the Deadly Seven intruders must have left the cage door open when they’d infiltrated the base to extract Pinkerton.
Stupid man. Pinkerton should have done his job like he’d been told. Now there was a target on his back, and if Pinkerton ever showed his face again, he’d be eliminated. And his family too. How was Wayne going to explain this mess to the boss? He hardly understood what happened himself. A plant moving across the room like an animal? Impossible. A plant wrapping its tendrils around and then absorbing any living thing in its path? Inconceivable.
But it had happened.
And now there was a mess.
Wayne scornfully collected a dustpan and brush before the cleanup crew made their way to his lab. If they arrived before he’d taken care to preserve the evidence for further study, he’d have no chance at understanding how his virtually inert plant had become mobile and carnivorous. He was just about to resume cleaning the fallen leaves scattered around the lab when his cell phone rang. He picked it up with a smile.
“Hello, love.”
“Honey,” his wife said. “You left so quickly this morning. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes. It’s fine. I just received an emergency call to come into work.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Is everything okay with you?”
“Well, it’s just…”
“Sweetie?”
“We received a notice from a debt collector.”
Wayne took his spectacles off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was hoping to have more time. And with this latest setback, it was unlikely the boss would give him an advance on his next research grant. Wayne had already cut corners with the quality of supplies. There wasn’t much wiggle room left.
“Wayne?” His wife’s voice came through warbled. “Why are we receiving a notice from a debt collector?”
“Must be a mistake, Gabrielle. I’ll sort it out. Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes. Now you go off to your salon day with your sister and enjoy yourself. I have to get to work. Actually, maybe you should stay with her for a while. I’m going to be tied up here for a bit.”
He cut the call just as two men in white overalls and face masks entered the lab. The taller man gestured at his companion, and they made moves to begin cleaning up the biological mess.
“Wait!” Wayne shouted. He scuttled over. “Please don’t start. I have to secure the samples.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Bosch.”
Wayne’s blood turned to ice at the sound of his boss’s cultured and confident voice. Standing in the doorway to the lab was Julius Allcott, the man who ran the Syndicate show, and the man who had Wayne’s fate in his hands. Behind him was the infamous Falcon, the Syndicate’s enforcer.
“M-Mr. Allcott,” Wayne mumbled. “I was just telling the crew I need to collect some samples before they—”
“Like I said. Not necessary. We’re shutting this little disaster down.”
“B-but…” He couldn’t lose it all, not now. Not when he was so close to having everything he wanted.
Julius held up his hand and sneered. “You’ve accomplished nothing here, except failure.”
“My plant has achieved the impossible. The inconceivable! It’s not a failure.”
“And where is it now, hmm?”
“Um.”
“You have achieved nothing if we have nothing to show for it.” Julius stepped into the laboratory and sneered. “Nothing except dead bodies and bleeding funds. I cannot afford to keep this division open any longer. Our focus lies elsewhere.”
Wayne skirted around the central lab bench to get closer to the man. “Give me another chance. I’ll find it. I’m the only one who can.”
Julius’s fist hit the lab bench, rattling the wayward tools on top. Wayne startled.
“How did this happen?” Julius roared, fury protruding the veins in his neck.
The entire room stilled. No one breathed. This was the first time Wayne had ever heard of the boss losing his temper. Even his always-collected enforcer flinched at Julius’s outburst, and if she was rattled...
Wayne gulped. “It was the plant. Its diet was never meant to be carnivorous. It was meant to sense out sinners and poison them surreptitiously. It somehow got out of its cage.” He hesitated. “It ate a rat.”
“How long ago,” Julius demanded.
“Um. Maybe about two months ago.”
“After the infiltration to extract the betrayer from us?” Julius turned to his enforcer. “Do you think it was them? Was this the next stage of their attack and we missed it? Have they contaminated everything?”
She ran her tongue over her perfect teeth as she considered, then she looked away from her father. “It wasn’t them. It was me.”
Wayne blinked. Julius gasped. The two-man clean-up crew slowly edged out of the room.
“What are you talking about?” Jul
ius asked her.
“I only wanted the plant to be free, unbound from its cage. I sensed its despair. I didn’t expect this to happen. I apologize. I will fix it.”
Despair?
Odd, Wayne thought, that a plant could feel any emotion at all. Odd even more that the woman could sense the sin. Who was she really?
Julius stared at her for long hard seconds, and then he turned back to Wayne. “No,” he said. “You will both fix it.”
Wayne released the air he’d held in his lungs. Thank God.
“And if you can’t fix it, you eliminate it. Quickly. We can’t have this thing running around uncontrolled. We don’t want to unleash chaos until we’re ready, and we’re not ready.”
Falcon’s fists clenched at her side. “You want me to eliminate it?”
“It”—Julius waved at the cage—“him”—he waved at Wayne—“whoever. I don’t care. Just fix it.”
Her violet eyes flicked toward Wayne, then back to the leaf littered cage. “But the plant had no choice in its existence. It had no choice in what it became. It was hungry. I released it to feed. It shouldn’t die for my mistake.”
“For Christ’s sake, darling. What’s gotten into you? The plant is something we created to use. If it can’t be useful, we get rid of it. Call it a practice run, a failed experiment, a pile of trash, whatever you need to get the job done. Just bring it back and under our control or exterminate it. We do not need this kind of attention. If we can’t salvage this massive hemorrhage of Syndicate funds, we cut our losses. Understood?”
She nodded. Julius cast a disparaging glance at his enforcer, who raised a questioning eyebrow in return, then he left.
Falcon, or whoever she was, watched the empty doorway for what seemed like an eternity. She was so still that Wayne began to believe she’d turned into stone, or the plant had left some of its petrifying venom behind. Light from the LEDs brightened her silver hair and accentuated the red stains on her white leather jacket lapels. The blood wasn’t from the corpses littering the base. It was the old blood of men who hadn’t done their jobs. It was failure. When she finally moved, it was for her shoulders to droop, and a sigh to escape.
Gluttony Page 6