“You don't believe her, do you?” AJ put a hand on Scout's shoulder and gave her a solid shake.
That seemed to jar Scout out of it. A wave of emotion swept over her face in sequence – disbelief was replaced by anger, anger was snuffed into smoldering rage, and then something akin to pain congealed with desire to hurt me back manifested in the form of a twisted smirk. “You know,” she said, rage just threatening to burn out of every syllable, “I thought you'd be tougher.”
“And I thought you'd have some meat on your bones, skinny Minnie,” I fired back. “Also, I'm plenty tough.”
“You haven't stopped us at all,” she said, and now I could see she was trying to turn the tables on me. I'd inflicted psychological pain on her – fear, uncertainty, and finally, actual emotional agony. Credit to the girl was due; she'd left fear behind and now she was aiming to hit back in the only way she thought she had available. “We've struck a blow against the oil and gas industry that's caused billions in damage.” She gave me a crooked grin. “What are you going to do when we switch tracks and you have no idea where we're going next?”
“Track you down,” I said coolly. It wasn't my first interrogation, and certainly not the first where the subject decided they'd flip things around on me. “Bring you to heel. Throw you in the Cube. Or end up killing you and your friends. It's at least a little up to you.”
She barely reacted to the threat of the Cube, but the mention of killing her friends got her face to jump a little. “Our world's coming to an end. I'm trying to save it, and you – you supposed hero – you're trying to stop me. You're picking corporations that are destroying the world over the people trying to do good.”
“Life's a little more 'shades of gray' than that, kiddo,” I said, because condescension was a tonic guaranteed to light her ass up, and sure enough, I could see the fire burning in her eyes. “You can blame the oil and gas industry for that if you want, and paint them as evil, but they're really just people doing a job, and that job does a surprising amount of good, not that you'd ever reflect on how many lives are saved per year by electricity and heat provided by them. Hint: it's a lot.”
“I don't care,” she said, now shaking with rage. “They are killing the planet.” Her eyes burned. “You...are killing the planet.”
“Wow, I just got casually shuffled into the category of evildoer because I didn't immediately fold myself into an origami shape trying to agree with you,” I said. The dream around me was starting to change, taking on characteristics I wasn't putting into it – trees were forming out of the darkness that had swept back in once I'd finished showing Scout the vision of her friends boinking. “There's really just 'good' and 'evil' for you on this, isn't there? Anyone who disagrees with you is pure darkness, anyone who's on your side is composed of absolute light?”
“There's right and there's wrong,” she said, and her skin began to glow with the light of plasma. The shadow of the guy next to her was grinning. “I'm trying to save the planet and you're trying to stop me. Guess which of us is which?”
“I'm going to say the one of us that's not so high on her own certainty she can't see that she's literally killing people to do zero good in the long term and is absolutely damaging the environment in the short term,” I said, but I knew this battle of words and ideas was lost.
Scout exploded into a blast of burning plasma that burned its way through the dreamwalk, and I screamed as it seared my every nerve, vaulting me into the next stage of things:
The battle.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
“Okay, you snotty little bitch,” I said, trying to shake off the pain she'd just caused me. My skin and nerves burned like that lightning chick had come back and resumed baking each one individually with her powers, though I knew it was all in my head. “You want to play this the hard way?” My eyes blazed with fire as I summoned forth the memory of Gavrikov. A distantly faint shadow appeared beside me, the last remnants of Aleksandr that remained in my head. It said nothing, unlike her plasma guy, because his spirit or soul was long gone.
But he stood by me as I lit up, preparing to pour a little dream pain on this skinny hussy.
I lit off like a nuclear bomb, bringing light to every corner of the dreamwalk. Scout's screams and agony were loud. I could hear her pain across the entirety of the dreamscape, and...
It felt goooooood.
“You–” She opened her mouth, looking up at me with spiteful hate as my attack faded.
I opened my mouth in reprisal, and I stared down in loathing at my fellow millennial. Another person popped into my mind: Brance Venable, the country music singing villain with the vocal powers that I'd chased around Nashville as he left people with bleeding ears everywhere.
My scream reverberated through the dreamwalk, seemingly shaking the very fabric of reality itself. Scout screamed, too, but it was drowned out in mine, blood spraying out of her ears in a representation of her distress as I attacked her in a way she definitely didn't expect.
“Get it together!” her male shadow screamed over the painful ruckus I was causing.
Scout's eyes flashed, and she did just that.
She came at me with a blast of plasma channeled through both hands. It wasn't real plasma, but it felt real as it hit me as though directed through a hose ten inches from my face.
My physical representation in the dreamwalk burned alive, scorched down to bone and blackened.
I felt it, every bit, and my scream went from Brance's pain-soaking screams to agonized, to weeping, before I crumbled to my knees.
“Hit her where it hurts,” Brianna Glover said, right into my ear. I looked over; she was next to me, a hand on my elbow, trying to help me to my feet. A spectral outline, she was still more substantial than Gavrikov, and I could see the clarity of her features. She arched her eyebrows.
“Oh,” I said, getting it. Scout seemed to be recharging for the next attack.
I didn't give her a chance to execute it.
I unleashed something on her I hadn't used in a while: The warmind. A dark psychological projection that prevailed on the deepest fears in the mind, taken from one of the more loathsome souls I'd ever made contact with – Bjorn Odinson.
But I added a little twist.
The warmind shoved itself into the brain, a psychic invasion that ripped into the consciousness with the force of invisible fingers shoving themselves through your ear canals and nasal passages into the skull. Visions of ravens dominated the attacked, distracting them, giving them one hell of a headache.
To this, I summoned forth the power of the ghost of Gerry Harmon and added a little twist.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Scout shrieked, rattling my bones.
I'd dropped in that vision of her pals boffing in the control room to the raven/pain cocktail, and rammed it home repeatedly into her fragile psyche.
“Press the attack,” Brianna said. “Don't let up on her.”
God, I loved how aggressively vicious this girl was, but without the psychological baggage of being a serial killer. “Right you are.”
I tried something a little different; this world was my oyster, and I decided to really use that to my advantage. It being entirely of my creation, I could decide to do something completely different on the fly.
Which I did now.
The world around us became a lavascape, volcanoes flaring all around us. Scout's footing disappeared and she fell into a floe, the burning heat adding to her already agonizing discomfort from my psychic attack. She screamed, she cried, she ignored the pleading advice of her ghost soul:
“Scout! Come on, Scout! You can – come on! You can–”
She was weeping, she was shaking, she was gripped in my attack and the pain inflicted by the battlefield itself, and suddenly–
She was gone.
A moment later I jarred awake to find my grandmother sitting on the bed opposite me, watching with unconcealed worry. She let out a long, slow breath and her shoulders sagged the moment she saw me sit up
, and I knew she'd been watching me writhe in agony, barely able to keep herself from waking me up the whole time.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Scout
“Hey! Scout!” The fierce shaking at her shoulder jarred her awake, and Scout nearly took the head off Isaac when she snapped out of the nightmare.
“Whoa, hey,” Isaac said, catching her fist as she threw it. Smoke was wafting off of it, but she wasn't burning plasma – yet. “Hey,” he said again, eyes rimmed with concern. “It was just a nightmare. You're okay.”
Scout felt the knife twist in her soul, acid burn in the back of her throat. “No.” She shook her head. “No, it wasn't 'just a nightmare.'” She looked him in the eye. “Sienna Nealon just tried to attack me in my dreams.”
Isaac's face drained of all color in a second. “Damn.” At least he believed her. For a split second before he'd reacted, she worried he wouldn't. “Are...” He brushed her hand. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Scout said, nodding, her breathing ragged. “Yeah, I am.” Something about the experience hardened her resolve, though. Anger flared in the back of her mind.
“You're right,” Isaac said. “We do need to hit something different. I found a car factory that I think is a good target. We'll hit it, throw everyone off our trail.” He brushed some stray hairs out of her face. “But, uh...I don't know what to do about...this. You think she'll come after you this way again?”
Scout pressed her lips together hard. “I don't care,” she decided. “I know we're right and she's wrong. She can come after me all she likes in our dreams, it's not going to change a thing in the real world.” That loathing seemed to grow, her anger coalescing within her until it was almost a physical force. “We're going to keep going until we finish this thing, and if she wants to stop us...” She looked up, and grinned with the absolute certainty that she'd keep five steps ahead of this bitch, “...she better get ready to run her ass ragged.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Sienna
“I take it you didn't get a clue?” Lethe asked, offering me a glass of water.
I accepted it, drained it in one drink, and took a long breath before answering. “No. Nothing useful, at least.”
“That was pointless, then,” she said, shaking her head. “And you might have just given your enemy a tool to use against you – or against your friends.”
“I did finally beat her ass in the dreamwalk,” I said. “Once I got the hang of things. But she's strong. Or at least, with the help of her lone soul, she's got some oomph.”
“Souls have a compounding effect when they're added to your consciousness,” Lethe said, always the patient lecturer. “You probably know this, but if you've got a couple solid souls in your corner, you can absorb just about any meta, no matter how willful or ornery, and bend their power to your use.”
“Because forcing a soul to do your will really is a matter of, well...will,” I said. “I understood that at a gut level. Absorbing someone like Brianna...”
“She adds her will to your own,” Lethe said.
So be nice to me, Brianna said, and I glimpsed a Cheshire-cat like grin out of the darkness in my head.
Am I not nice to you? I asked back.
Well, the killing me wasn't very nice, but since then you've been fairly hospitable. When the Olympics roll around this summer, though, I'm going to need you to carve out some time to watch the shooting events.
“Done and done,” I said, and when I caught a look of WTF from Lethe I said, “Just keeping my lone soul happy with a little bargaining.”
“Good call,” Lethe said.
“Here's a question,” I said. “The remains of the souls that have...moved on. I can use their powers...”
“I've always called them 'shadows,'” she said.
“Artful description.”
“I got it from Dad,” she said. “He always fancied himself a bit of a poet.”
“It's not that poetic,” I said. “I called them shadows, too.” I frowned. “Wait...I might have gotten that from Charlie.”
Lethe shuddered. “The patchwork quilt of mentorship experiences that makes up your life before Revelen makes me ill.”
“Hey, she's your daughter, and I'm guessing craziness is more endemic to the Hades side of the family than the Nealon branch.”
“How would you know?” My grandmother had a glint in her eyes, one that suggested something I didn't want to contemplate right now.
“Point is, the others are gone, right?” I asked. “Wolfe, Gavrikov...they are gone? Like, gone gone?”
“Very definitely,” she said. “There's only one soul, or consciousness, as it were. What you have left are just the stray pieces of imprint that remain after a long...imprinting, I guess. Stains of a soul drained from yours by Rose.”
“But I can still use powers from people I barely absorbed,” I said, setting my water glass on the nightstand between us and shooting a tiny jolt of electricity at it. It played across the glass surface for a second, then died. I tuned into Brance's power, let loose–
The glass shattered in a violent spray. The picture frames above both beds cracked, and the mirror shattered.
“Sorry,” I said, cringing in purest contrition.
Lethe sat across from me, eyes closed, pieces of glass sticking in her hair. When she opened them, she took note of the glass, brushed it carefully with her hand so it fell on the floor and said, “You're cleaning that up.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I picked that up in Nashville last year.”
“Music City? Fitting.”
“But you don't have any of those?”
“Maybe,” she said, drifting into pensive territory. “I've absorbed a lot of souls over my time, Sienna, and all of them are...digested, I guess you could say. I can't hear any of their voices anymore. Which is good for me, in a way, because you know I hate people, but bad in another – it's harder to pick them out individually so I could use their power.”
I thought back to Edinburgh, where I'd faced Rose's catspaw, Frankie, and his devastating red energy powers that seemed like they could split the earth. “I absorbed this one guy,” I said, getting up and heading for the window, where I ripped the curtains aside to check and make sure the parking lot was good and clear. “Back in Scotland, right before Rose took my powers.”
Thrusting out my hand over the empty hotel parking lot and the vacant beyond, I concentrated on my vague memory of Frankie. Truth be told, I could barely remember him, though whether that was a function of him being a part of
my soul collection for all of twelve seconds before Rose hoovered him out of me or because she'd taken my memories of him as well, I didn't know. And never would, probably, like with so many of the other things she'd torn from me over that hellish time I called the Scotland period.
My hand wavered, but no red beam came bursting forth to sunder the wall of the hotel. Which was probably good.
“You only had the power for a few minutes?” Lethe asked. She was keeping her distance. Wise lady, my grandmother.
“Yeah,” I said, giving it one last try. Not so much as a crimson firework effect came from my fingertips.
“I'm not entirely sure, but I'd guess that it wouldn't be enough to leave an impression on you,” Lethe said. “The others had been with you awhile, you'd used their powers–”
“I never used Jamal's Thor power,” I said, letting electrical bolts dance from my fingertips and ground themselves on the glass. It was a pretty display, but I doubt it'd do much more than make a person tingle if I applied it to flesh. “Or Brance's voice one. And I really don't have much juice when it comes to either.”
“A fact which I'm thankful for, especially when it comes to that howl,” she said. “There are limitations to everything, kiddo. These appear to be yours.”
I nodded slowly. “There is...one other, too, I think.”
Lethe brushed a little stray glass off the bed and lifted her legs up, propping herself up. Her voice had t
urned quiet, almost lazy, like she was ready to sleep. “Oh? What's that?”
I picked up my phone and went to the stopwatch setting. Activating it, I tossed it to my grandmother. “Watch the time.”
She stared at the phone, frowning, then at me. “Oooookay...”
Taking a deep breath, I pictured Shin'ichi Akiyama. Held the memory of him in my head...
A minute later, I opened my eyes. “Did you see anything?”
Lethe looked up from my phone. “No.”
“Bummer,” I said, taking the phone back from her. “Guess that one's just a passive immunity.”
“...To what?” Lethe asked.
“Akiyama,” I said.
“Ah.” She fluffed one of the pillows. “You mind if I hit the sack? It's been a long couple days.”
“Sure,” I said. “I need to sleep, too.” I drew the curtains. “Been shorting myself on rest, and who knows when the next attack could come.”
“Mmmhmm,” Lethe said, but she'd already stretched out and her eyes were closed. Her breathing slowed over the next ten seconds or so, and by the time I came back from using the bathroom and brushing my teeth, she was already asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
“Hey, Harry, me again,” I said, speaking into the phone as the afternoon sun streamed in through the hotel window into the empty room. “Still in Houston. Going on three days now. It's hot. Still hot. Always hot, forever and ever, really. Because...Houston. I haven't heard from you since Washington, and I can't seem to catch you in a dreamwalk for whatever reason, so...I'm leaving you this voicemail.” I took a long, slow breath. “I'm sure you have your reasons for going incommunicado, but I'm starting to worry about you. If you could call or text me back, that'd be great. I'm just chilling here, waiting for a break in this case. Did I mention it's been three days? Nothing in three days from these so-called villains? Boy, I could sure use a Cassandra to, oh, I don't know, lead me right to them so we can finish this shit!”
Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39) Page 23