Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  Angel just stared at her. “You … did you just …?” She pointed at the burnt places where fire had been raging just moments earlier but was now gone, with only whiffs of smoke to herald its passing.

  Sienna just shrugged and looked at Miranda. “I dunno, counselor. What do you think? Is there any way I’d get convicted on this one? Because it looked to me like the fire he set got out of control and just … burned him up. Terrible way to go, but, y’know …”

  “Under our current legal system,” Miranda said, already composing herself, though Angel was trying to decide whether that was worry or doubt or maybe even just a hint of remorse that it had come to this behind her eyes, “no. I don’t think anyone could prove that, from across the room, you had anything to do with his …” She shook her head. “He tried to hurt Angel, and he got tossed into the flames.” And here she looked at Angel. “What’s that old saying? Play with fire … you get burned.”

  Angel felt a dry, cottony feeling once more in her throat. “But … he said he had friends. Allies. He called someone’s name. Adoncia. What if—”

  “What if we all just sat around here and drank margaritas until the cops come and take our statements?” Sienna asked, threading her way back across the room. “I mean, based on the theme, I’m guessing you have margaritas here, right?” Angel nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do that, then. And worry about … whatever follows after … him …” She turned her gaze to the charred corpse by the front entry, “… later. If ever.”

  “I don’t mind that idea at all,” Miranda said. “And Angel has a very good margarita recipe.” Sirens were already sounding in the distance; someone had called the fire department. “Though as a lawyer, I suggest we give our statements first, let them do the cleanup—and then margaritas after?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Sienna said, and looked at Angel. “You, uh … good with that? You look a little …” She shrugged. “A little something.”

  Miranda turned her attention to Angel now. The world was fuzzy around her; the restaurant was quiet, front window shattered, carbon scoring all around the walls and carpet, and a burnt corpse lay against the wall. “Angel?” Miranda was looking at her, concern knitting her brow. “How do you feel?”

  Angel started to say, but something slowed her. How did she feel?

  Scared.

  Terrified.

  Buzzing. Her heartbeat seemed to be rocketing off the charts.

  But strangely … here with Sienna Nealon, with Miranda … she felt …

  “I’m all right,” she finally decided. And for now … she was.

  Tomorrow, she’d start to repair the damage to the restaurant, maybe. Or maybe she’d figure something else out. She did have these new powers, after all. Chopping onions had suddenly gotten so much easier.

  But that was tomorrow. For now she just listened to the sirens get closer, and stood there—not frozen, not anymore—and waited for them to come.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sienna

  Now

  Adoncia’s laser eye blast hit the rock we sheltered behind, sending chips of it flying in every direction. I could hear the dull bark of the rifle on the hill above, and someone screamed above the rim of the quarry. My overwatch was taking out the stragglers, and it was a beautiful sound.

  “Who’s your sidekick?” Angel grunted. She looked pretty beaten up. “The shooter, I mean.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said, casting a glance over my shoulder, “but I suspect it’s Harry.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “The guy you broke up with yesterday?”

  I shrugged. “He didn’t like the direction I was going.” I couldn’t blame him, at least not at the moment, with a laser eye beam cutting into the cover behind me, making a whining noise as little splinters of rock peppered me.

  “She’s not making much progress on this,” Angel said, turning to look at the rock.

  “If guys with construction gear and professional rock splitters and whatnot left it here without turning it into gravel, I imagine it must be pretty dense.” I had Ariadne’s stolen work phone in my hand. “Besides, I think Harry might be tossing a few bullets her way here and there to keep her from annihilating us.” A momentary flicker in the beam light as it went in a different direction after a gunshot seemed to confirm my theory. “But … that won’t last.” Harry only had a single mag, after all. As good a shot as he surely was with his predictive powers, that wouldn’t last him all day.

  “So what do we do?” Angel asked. “Charge her?”

  Sweat was rolling down my forehead. “No. Not yet.” I pulled up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “Hey … it’s me,” I said, when my brother’s groggy voice answered.

  “What … the hell?” Reed asked. “Why are you calling me? And in the middle of the night, no less—”

  “I need your help,” I said as Adoncia’s laser beams hit the rock again. I’d really wanted to avoid making this particular call, but … as flakes of stone showered the back of my neck from Adoncia’s shredding through my cover, I knew …

  I was out of options.

  “Angel and I are at that giant quarry complex in Maple Grove, pinned down fighting a bad guy. Need an assist, big time. Cavalry, if possible.”

  “That the place across from the Costco?” Reed asked.

  I paused before replying. “Yeah. There. Way to go, becoming one of those suburbanites who defines their life in relation to the nearest Costco.” The rock let out an epic crack. “Haste or we get wasted, please. You’ll see us when you get here.” And I hung up.

  “That your brother?” Angel asked.

  I took a deep breath. If the FBI was listening in on him, I’d just made it sound like I was asking for a favor of the sort that would be called ‘aiding and abetting’ in legal terms. Now … I needed to do something to muddy those waters.

  I dialed 9-1-1.

  “911, what’s your emergency?” the operator’s voice came through on the other side.

  “My name is Sienna Nealon,” I said. “I’m at the quarry in Maple Grove across from the Arbor Lakes shopping center. Send the FBI, send SWAT, hell—send every-damned-thing you’ve got. And come get me.”

  I hung up and tossed the phone.

  Angel stared at me with slightly wide eyes. “That … is going to complicate things.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.” The intensity of the laser beam died again, but I could see by the glow that Adoncia’s didn’t have much further to go before she’d carve her way through. I pulled the Sig and its two rounds and fired them blind over the rock, then tossed my empty gun to the side in as obvious a manner as I could make it.

  “Did you really think you would get away?” Adoncia asked, her voice a raised screech. It sounded like she was taking cover behind the trailer. Another shot rang out, and she giggled. That explained why Harry wasn’t able to settle her hash. She was hiding. “After what you two did?”

  “Angel did get away, genius,” I fired back. “And the cops are on their way. You could maybe still outrun them if you tried, but I think we all know you are way too Khan or Ahab or whatever to let us go now.”

  She giggled again, a kinda horrifying sound. The noise of someone who’d gone off the deep end at the realization there was no escape to be had. “It was, perhaps, always going to come to this.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, looking down at the dust and rock at my feet, and meaning something way, way different than she did. “It was always going to come down to this.” I pulled the Walther and surveyed around for any other thing I could find to use as a weapon.

  Shoelaces. Dismissed those. Belt. Unstrapped it and held it in my left hand, wrapping it around my knuckles. My ass was doing a perfectly fine job of holding up my pants anyway. Car keys; I’d leave those in reserve.

  That was it. A Walther PPK and a belt were my best fighting options at hand.

  And yet … I knew somehow that this was all I’d need, because this was what Harry had given me before we’d p
arted ways.

  God … I believed in him. I lo—aw, hell.

  “What do we do?” Angel asked. She was clearly in pain, too much to be doing much in the way of fighting.

  “Wait for it,” I said, shaking off my previous thought vis-à-vis Harry. “And stay here. I’ll handle this.”

  She shook her head, slapping a bloodied hand on my wrist. “I can’t let you do this alone.”

  “I’m not alone,” I said, feeling a little chill run over me. “I haven’t been for a long time.”

  But I probably would be again, very soon, though I didn’t say it. My choices had led me here again.

  Inescapable fate.

  “Just stay under cover, okay?” I stared her down, and finally, Angel nodded.

  Then I waited, counting the seconds … one … two … three …

  Before I got to ten, and just as Adoncia started to pipe up again, the wind picked up, roaring through the quarry just as she’d blasted the boulder again. The nice thing about her power was …

  Well, hell. It was like a beacon.

  Showing my brother exactly where I was.

  “What the—” Adoncia shouted.

  And I charged.

  Walther out, I started filling the air with lead. She saw my motion and snapped her gaze to me, still partially hidden behind the trailer. I drilled the corner of her cover as she dipped behind it, running and gunning in a charge straight at her. She screamed as chips of vinyl siding peppered her the way she’d been hitting me with gravel the last few minutes.

  I fired twice more as I cut down the remaining ground between us. She peeked out around the corner and her visible eye started to glow. I didn’t have a great shot, the corner of the trailer stopping me from drilling her perfectly, and I didn’t dare stop, because I was running sideways in order to not get zapped—

  The trailer grunted as winds ripped at it, pulling it out of the ground with a scream of metal. Adoncia screamed and ducked behind it, perfectly timed as I drilled out a double tap that glanced off the bottom of the trailer. Her eyes glowed again and she looked right at me, the blaze lighting up, and I aimed right at the middle of her forehead as I cut the distance between us to thirty feet—

  Her eyes flared and the trailer dropped between us, her beams shredding it like lettuce. They punched through the flimsy material, and I tried to fire back to their point of origin, but failed, wasting another shot. I only had one left, and I hit the dirt, rolling behind cover as Adoncia slagged her way through the trailer.

  “Where are you hiding, little—” she shouted as she stepped through the wreckage. I snapped my gun up on a perfect line with the side of her head just as she looked toward me. I fired, she brought her beam in line with me—

  She caught the bullet inches from her eyes, dissolving most of it. What was left must not have been much, but it did hit her in the left eye, a little stream of blood shooting out like black liquid in the night as she screamed and staggered back. “You little putana!” She looked unsteady on her feet, squinting, screaming at the sky, blood squirting and running down her cheek.

  I didn’t hesitate. I threw the Walther at her hard, and it cracked against her skull, staggering her back again. She still had one good eye, and apparently the bullet hadn’t done much other than ruin one of her eyeballs, because she looked pissed rather than dead. I was already in motion following the Walther, letting the belt droop out of my hand, a makeshift noose, and I slipped around her blind spot and threw it over her head—

  Once it was around her neck, I cinched it tight and drilled my shoulder between her shoulder blades. Given time, I could choke her out, put her down gently, let her enjoy the fruits of unconsciousness and arrest. After all, it wasn’t like she could laser me from here, now that I had her face pointed harmlessly up into the sky. I could wait her out, let her zap the empty air, drop out when she lost enough oxygen to the brain, see her conducted through the quiet dignity of a trial, with lawyers and decency and appeals and all that fundamentals of justice stuff.

  To hell with that.

  I pulled that belt so tight her head popped off a few seconds later, before she even had a chance to call me a little bitch again. Her lower body dropped, freed from the resistance of the belt, and her head went thumping over my shoulder, drenching me with blood (again) as my makeshift noose swung free now that it had lost all the weight it had been holding up.

  “Who’s the putana now, Adoncia?” I asked her headless corpse, breathing hard as I stared down at it. I was wiped out, completely and totally, nothing left but adrenaline. Her lone, unshot eye stared up at me blankly, and her lips twitched as though she wanted to reply but couldn’t. “No, wait, don’t answer that. Cuz you can’t.” I dropped the belt.

  “Jeez,” Reed said as he drifted down on the wind to a perfect landing, stirring a little dust as he came. He was shirtless and wearing flannel pajama pants, which made me chuckle. “I guess you finished the fight. What did you even need me for?”

  “Distraction,” I said. There was blood all down the back of my shirt. Ew. “If you hadn’t been here, I would have been annihilated by her eye powers.”

  Angel came straggling out now, limping. “Hey, boss.” She stopped halfway to us. “Uh … you’re not wearing a shirt.”

  I snickered. Reed … did not look bad with his shirt off. Added bonus: maybe if there were lady cops they’d pay so much attention to him shirtless that I could sneak off unseen.

  Nah. That was just a pleasant fantasy.

  The sirens were getting closer now. Way more than before, now that they knew where they were going.

  “Hey, uh,” Reed said, nodding in the direction of the sound, “you need to get moving—”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Sienna.” Reed took a few steps closer to me on bare feet, and he registered a little pain as he must have stepped on a jagged pebble. “They’re coming. We can still—”

  “I’m tired, Reed,” I said.

  “So go to bed. We need to get you out of here before—”

  I shook my head. “Not that kind of tired. Tired of running.”

  “No.” It was his turn to shake his head. “We can still get you out of here—”

  “They heard my call to you,” I said. “And I called 911 and told them who I was right after, told them to send everything.” Angel nodded in confirmation, though she looked a little stricken. “Listen to me—you have to find Miranda. We think she’s in hiding—”

  “Miranda called me earlier tonight,” Reed said. “She’s with the FBI. She was cooperating with them on a major case against the Tamaulipas Cartel.” He looked around us. “Was that related to this?”

  I looked at Adoncia’s remains. “I think … this might settle most of that.”

  He shook his head. “She was worried because she couldn’t get ahold of Angel. She’d been in interrogation, cooperating with the FBI for days, laying it all out for them because she’d gotten a whiff of something coming for her.” He, too, looked at the corpse. “I guess it must have been her, huh?”

  “Yeah, Adoncia was … stirring up shit,” I said. The sirens were getting ever closer. One thing left to do.

  “Sienna, I don’t want to see you go down like th—” Reed started.

  “Reed.” I cut him off. “You have to be the one to arrest me.”

  He couldn’t have looked more stunned if I’d punted him in the nuts. “You cannot be serious.”

  I thrust my arms out to each side. “You’re the only one who will bring me in alive.”

  He stared at me, his lips slightly parted, and then closed his eyes. “Damn you, Sienna. Don’t make me do this.” He opened them again, and I knew he’d come to the same conclusion I had. “Damn you.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, lacing my fingers together and putting them behind my head like a criminal. He made his way over to me slowly. I thought for a second he’d start to pull my arms down, as one does when making an arrest, but instead he wrapped his arms around me
in a hug. I took it, surprised, and then moved my arms down to hug back, taking care to avoid touching his skin. “It’ll be okay,” I said again.

  He let loose of me a moment later, and his face was like quarried stone, trying to keep from moving. His lip quivered anyway. “I don’t think it will. But I don’t want to see you dead, so …”

  I put my hands back behind my head, and I looked at Angel. She looked …

  Sick. Just sick.

  “I’m so sorry, Sienna,” Angel said quietly. “I’m so sorry it came to this.”

  “It was always going to come to this,” I said. “Some time or another, if not this one. This was always the end of the road for me—this or death.” I forced a smile, remembering how Harry had said it. “Inescapable fate.”

  “Thank you,” Angel said quietly. “For everything.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?” Angel asked.

  “For this adventure,” I said, almost laughing. “For the last one, too, I guess—the one I can’t remember. I know it’s … ending like this, but …” I shook my head. “These cases are the only time in the last year and a half I’ve really felt alive, so … thank you. For this.”

  She didn’t seem to know how to take that, and the sirens were howling closer. “We should get moving,” Reed said. “I don’t want them to have to come looking for—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, and started my march up the ramp on the side of the quarry. Damn, it was long. “Can you—”

  With a rush of wind, he swept us up and we flew a few hundred yards to where the access road entered the quarry at a gate. There were cops there, waiting, trying to unlock the gate with bolt cutters.

  Reed brought us down just behind them, and they all had guns drawn. “Hold your fire!” he announced as we swept over them and came down for a landing, “I have a prisoner!” Once we were on the ground and still not riddled with bullets, he put his own hands up. “My name is Reed Treston, I’m with the—”