“Nah?” I asked, playing like I was more hurt than I was. “Same goes.”
I swept his legs with a wave of sand I dragged from the edge of the road, summoning it to me to ready a shield, but also preparing to go on the offensive. I was going to hammer this fool. Not just with shields, but dirt spikes, dirtball bullets. By the time this was over with, he was going to need everything, including his mouth, washed out with soap.
So when I came up, ready to deliver wave after wave upon him, I was a little surprised to find another dude hanging over him like an angel without wings.
“We gotta go,” the angel dude said, gripping Mr. Hippie under the arms.
With a sonic boom, they were gone.
“Aw, shit,” I said, cringing at the pain from the bullet impact in my side. Using my dirt armor's grip, I pulled it out. The bullet was tinged crimson at the tip, and I packed the wound with dirt to keep the blood loss to a minimum. Turning my head to the sky, I shouted: “Reed! They're running!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Reed
“I saw!” I shouted back to Augustus. He extended up over the cloud on dirt stilts, just high enough for me to see him and wave acknowledgment before he took a look around for himself.
Flashes were coming from all over the cloud now, gunfire popping off in earnest. It seemed concentrated around one specific area of the battle and I realized...
“Jamal.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Jamal
“You got no chance against me, sweetheart!” the punk rock princess shouted as she blasted at me with a full boat of lightning powers. We'd stumbled across each other in the cloud moments after I lost both Sienna and Augustus. Responding to an almost magnetic pull of electricity, I'd been drawn to her. She'd come out of the darkness in a frenzy, already firing bolts at me the moment her silhouette started to emerge from the cloud.
Her face was pure triumph as the lightning streaked at me, enough to fry a full-grown man to a crisp. “For the planet!” she shouted. So cringeworthy.
With the wave of a hand, I sucked it all in like it was nothing.
Then I grinned, letting the static bounce around between my teeth, even in my eyes.
Her smiling triumph vanished.
Then she turned and ran, tossing more lightning over her shoulder as she went.
“Aw, sonofa–” I said, and I was after her at a sprint.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Scout
The smoke was thick and Scout stayed low, like they'd taught her in school. So many things she'd learned in school that were staying with her even now. This was important, and she heeded it, crawling along in the darkness, suppressing her desire to cough and cough and cough until–
She almost bumped into an ankle. She could see the pants leg, and it was definitely not one of hers. It was khaki, leading to a black, polished shoe.
Cop.
Scout felt a tinge of fear.
How was she supposed to do this? A police officer right there, and she was alone, no AJ, no Francine, no Isaac...
She could do this. A trill of confidence ran through her, warm memories of last night. She wasn't a scared little girl.
With a soft breath, she reached for the leg. Her hand was open wide, grasping...
When her fingers were around it, she clamped down, hard. A yelp of exclamation–
Scout ripped the leg as hard as she could. With meta strength, that was pretty hard.
The cop lost footing, cried out as he fell, and Scout threw herself at him. She backhanded him across the face, even though she couldn't really see him very well. It snapped his head back, and he raised a hand–
Scout batted aside a gun like knocking away a baby's hand. The gun rattled and clattered and slid across the pavement, out of sight in the cloud.
She pressed down on him, pushing his face to the ground–
He punched her sharply in the chest, but she held on, hand around his throat. Just a few more seconds and–
Ah.
That sweet, burning tingle came to Scout's fingertips where she touched the cop. Thoughts and feelings flooded her mind – his. It burned a little, but in a wonderful way, almost like what she'd experienced last night with Isaac but different. She threw her head back, felt the rush–
Something hit her hard from behind, knocking her off the cop and sending her tumbling. Her bones rattled as she rolled, and she came up again, warm blood trickling down her forehead. She looked up–
And there...
There...
“Dammit,” Sienna Nealon said, a black bandanna hanging around her neck. She stood over the cop, fist cocked from where she'd just hammered Scout off the officer. She raised her voice to a shout over the gunfire and other noise of battle around them, “Guys! We've got another succubus here!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Sienna
I hate succubi.
No, it isn't some stupid self-loathing. I'm fine with myself. Long since reconciled with my powers and the pitfalls they present, and their inherent symbolism that makes me some kind of life-force vampire who literally sucks the souls out of people, blah blah blah.
The internet was maybe still wrestling with who I was and what I could do, but I'd long ago made peace with it.
But other succubi? Other than Lethe, now?
Ugh.
Of course, my experience was limited to my mom, Charlie, Andromeda/Adelaide, Rose, Lethe and myself. A decidedly mixed bag with some real poison apples tossed in the mix. Throw in incubi, Sovereign and James Fries, the case got worse.
Ergo, people with my power set were like half okay, half rancid shits. And when they were bad, they were the literal worst. Sovereign, Fries, and that hellbitch Rose being at the top of the shit list.
So when I'd come upon the skinny girl in the low-hanging jeans with a barely-there ass hanging out under her boyish crop top sucking the soul out of the NoDak sheriff's deputy, I'd known what I was witnessing. Immediately.
And I knocked her ass into next week.
Then I'd gone to scoop up the cop's gun, only to find it lost in the smoke.
“Shit,” I said, locking eyes with the succubus.
Well...the other succubus.
She had dark hair, freckles, and her eyes betrayed her fear. She was huddled on one knee, having not recovered her feet after I knocked her sideways. Her nose was bleeding, a bubble of scarlet covering one nostril.
“Don't move,” I said, raising an ice-covered hand. “You're under arrest.”
Of course she moved. She bolted. Like the damned wind.
I fired an ice burst after her, but didn't hear it make contact, and she'd been looking like she was set to weave as she launched into the smoke, disappearing in the cloud.
“Reed! I need some visibility!” I shouted to the heavens, taking off after her. Hell if I was going to let another of these damned troublemakers get away so she could become my next arch nemesis. With my luck, her skinny ass would probably use this encounter as a pretext to upend my whole damned life. Because that was what succubi did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jamal
Taking in as much electricity as the punk rocker chick was throwing out was not an easy thing for me. It was making her simple to follow in the smoke, though, because every five seconds or so she'd toss a look back, make sure I was there, then feed me another bright blue 1.21 gigawatts, steady as clockwork.
“Hey!” I shouted as she blasted me again. It rippled through my skin, attracted to my lightning rod hand held in front of me. It was good I was catching all her attention. We shot past a cop that was just standing there, staggering in the endless smoke, coughing, rubbing his eyes because he couldn't see shit. “Just give up already! Ain't nothing you can do to me.”
Her response to that was to cackle again. I wasn't even trying to be funny.
She leapt up out of the soup of black smoke, then dipped back into the black morass on the far arc of her jump, still cackling like she wa
s lady Joker.
“All right, I see how it is,” I said, keeping low and determined. “Fine, I'm gonna–”
A sonic boom blew the smoke back around where she'd just landed. I sprinted forward, leaping over a car to find a ten foot in diameter space clear of smoke. She was there, with another guy, and he had her by the arms–
A sonic boom almost knocked me over as they launched into the sky, disappearing into the clouds of thick, black smoke above.
“Reed!” I shouted, trying to get my message to the man at the center of our battle. “We lost one!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Reed
I heard Jamal echo in as another double sonic boom informed me of the message he was delivering.
Our criminals were fleeing. One at a time, they were launching up into the dark clouds where there was roughly zero chance any of us could track them. Even me; trying to feel out people I wasn't attuned to over any distance longer than a couple football fields was futile when I couldn't see them. I could move people I was attuned to, ones I'd sent into the sky, over hundreds and thousands of miles without dropping them, even when sleeping. I could detect a system of distant wind current forming a tornado, but only when I was in the winds, not listening to anything else, not distracted by any mundane concerns like conversation and thought and catching criminals.
Feeling a couple hundred or fewer pounds of humanity traveling at supersonic speeds through this gunk that was clogging the air?
Not a chance.
“That's two,” I muttered, trying to think. We'd had four suspects, originally. Two had been grabbed, and were probably dropped off nearby. Once up, they could head in any direction. I just wasn't feeling them. “One's in the sky...”
That meant we had one left running around. Presumably the succubus Sienna had just shouted about.
If we were going to salvage this mess at all, we needed to take down at least one of these crooks.
Likelihood we could do that without seeing them?
Zero.
“Time to clear the air,” I muttered, confirming for myself that there were no sounds of gunfire going off, no lightning being thrown around, and that the threat to the cops was gone save for a lone succubus somewhere in that mess, creeping through in the cover of the darkness I'd created.
All was quiet save for coughing and shouting.
That confirmed, I closed my eyes and concentrated, preparing myself.
“Hey team!” I shouted, making myself loud enough to be heard, “Brace yourselves!”
Then I started to go to work.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Sienna
I heard Reed's call over the fog of smoke and that hacking cough that kept issuing forth from my lungs, racking my body even as I tried not to let it. I ran blindly after her, trying to search her out through my teary eyes. The stinging, oily burn was singeing the inside of my nose as well as my eyes, and seemed to perch on the back of my tongue like I'd deep-throated a gas pump, the residue everywhere from my teeth to my uvula.
Pausing, I waited, taking a knee as the wind started to blow around me in earnest. I directed my flight power downward, pushing me to the ground as strong, torsional wind forces picked up on either side of my body.
Reed was cleaning house around us, blowing the smoke out of here. I was curious how he'd keep from blowing away the cops, too. I had my answer a second later.
Black spots remained, small, swirling vortices around people-sized holes in the field of clear air. The wind stopped, and then the smoke seemed to fall from them like it was coming off a fog machine, black tendrils vanishing into the now-empty volumes of air that surrounded our field of battle.
I snapped my head around, surveying the scene. I was in the middle of a four-lane highway, black cop cars scattered here and there reading SHERIFF in big letters on the side. Fifty feet behind me stood Augustus, in the middle of a pillar of dirt, an oil pump mechanically rising and falling as his backdrop. Jamal was forty or so feet to my left, standing next to a cop car, looking around. He paused, shoving his glasses back up on his face, then pointed toward me. “There!”
Spinning, I caught sight of my quarry. She'd gone off road, was now a hundred feet or more away, sprinting her skinny ass full out toward a corrugated metal building just off the highway.
Cops were coughing all around us, some on the ground, some on their feet, none looking like they were in top form.
“Stop right there!” Leon's voice crowded out all other action, and I turned to find him standing with a rifle, pointing it at my skinny-ass counterpart succubus. “Stop or I will shoot!” And he raised the gun to his shoulder, drawing a sight picture on her back.
I didn't even think; I flung a blast of ice right at his weapon and it struck, knocking it free of his hand. He got a shot off, probably by accident, when it hit. The gun spun out of his grasp and hit the ground, the action closed by ice. It wasn't going to be firing again anytime soon.
“Damn you!” Leon shouted, angry storm clouds boiling over his face.
“You cannot shoot an unarmed suspect as she runs away, officer!” I shouted back at him, hopefully reminding him to get his head out of his ass and back in the game. I didn't wait for his reply, because I needed to catch her, so I sprinted.
She was damned quick, I'd give her that. She'd also had the advantage of the time I'd spent keeping Leon from murdering her.
But I did need to catch her.
I sprinted, using a little flight power to supplement the speed of my run. I couldn't get away with much, because there were likely dash and body cams filming me even now, but I gave myself a little tailwind as I chased the girl.
She'd reached the corrugated building, which had a sign on the front that said Smithers Quality Welding Co. Slamming into the front door with her shoulder, she smashed the metal frame right off and disappeared into the blackness within.
I made it to the edge a few seconds after her and found myself staring into a dark, yawning abyss with no light inside. “Dammit,” I muttered, checking instinctively for the gun I didn't have.
Instead I drew a slow breath. “You with me, Brianna?”
You're in the middle of a chase. Where else would I be? Let's get her.
“Yes, let's,” I said, and let out that long breath as I headed into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Reed
The smoke was clearing, and I watched Sienna hurry up to the door of the building at the edge of the battlefield. She paused just outside, muttered something to herself that I couldn't hear over the winds that were keeping me aloft, then ran inside.
“Augustus!” I shouted down. He was already striding toward the building in his dirt armor. “Circle ar–”
This time there was no sonic boom, the movement of a human cutting through the air somehow reduced – sneaky, I would say. It occurred to me later that he'd slowed himself, trying to catch me off guard.
It worked.
Something – someone – slammed into me with a catastrophic punch, knocking me sideways. It landed perfectly in the base of my spine, carried with the force of impact at a hundred miles an hour.
A bone broke.
The winds ceased. Darkness crept in around the edges of my consciousness, cascading in as my eyes fluttered shut and I fell to the earth below.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Scout
She plunged through the warehouse, knocking over a shelving unit that came down with a terrible crash of metal against concrete. It echoed off the walls as Scout stumbled and caught herself, hopping over a hand cart left in the aisle.
This was a warehouse, and it was filled floor to ceiling with shelves that held...whatever. Useless things, she figured. Something that nobody really needed, but was made from precious resources ripped from the earth in factories around the world that polluted, destroyed, despoiled.
She knocked over another shelf, this one out of spite and frustration. She didn't even feel bad about it.
/> “You're just racking up the charges, you know.” Sienna Nealon's voice echoed from behind her, sending a quiver through Scout's stomach. “Property damage isn't sexy, but when it adds on three to five years to your sentence, you'll regret it.”
Scout almost answered her. Almost. If she said anything, she'd give away where she was. Instead she ducked down, dodged around a shelf, and started looking for the back door to this place. Surely there had to be one.
“Hey, skinny succubus?” Sienna called. “I'm going to call you that, until I get a name. Skinny Succubus. SS. I know it sounds bad, because what does that make me, right? Being the only other succubus people really know? But I'm okay with it. My diet and exercise program is on point lately, and I challenge anyone who wants to complain about my ass size to do it to my face. After we run a marathon together.”
Scout brushed against something – a wall. She'd found the far wall. Easing along it as hastily as she dared, she felt the seams of corrugated metal. A door, there had to be a door...
“You've set half of North Dakota on fire,” Sienna called. Her voice echoed like they were in a cave. “Hope you're proud of yourself for that. Not sure what it looked like before this, but you've really turned it into a hellscape. Are you some kind of Hades worshipper, trying to make the world all...hell-y? I don't really know how to say it. Pits of Tartarus-y? Cuz I'm searching for motive here, and I'm struggling with why someone would get up this early in the morning to burn a bunch of oil wells, then get into it with the local cops. It seems, well...really, really stupid.”
Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39) Page 11