Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  A blur moved through the water, slower than the one that had buzzed and hit the taxi cab. I still had Reed under my arm, and both he and I desperately needed air. My brother was still limp in my grasp, and I had a speedster planning to kill me. The speedster turned in the water, looping around, his limbs moving impossibly fast, and came at me again, dodging and veering so fast I couldn’t have hit him with a net if I’d tried.

  Guns were out.

  Fire was out.

  Nets were out.

  Strength was useless until he got closer, and he’d probably dodge whatever punch or kick I could throw at him.

  I turned my body so that it was between the speedster and Reed, and I took another crushing hit, this time to the left arm and side. He hit me so hard my breath left me, eight ribs shattered like I’d been flattened by a battering ram and my arm was rendered useless in an instant.

  Wolfe!

  It will take several seconds to heal, Wolfe said, and I could hear the panic.

  We don’t have seconds, I said as the speedster turned to come back again, my good arm still holding my brother and my left immobile and nowhere near fast enough to catch my foe before he pounded me into stuffing.

  He came at me again, like a shark but much faster, and all I could do was watch helplessly as the last of my air left me and the assassin bore down, ready to finish me—and my brother—for good.

  28.

  Colin

  Colin could smell the triumph. She could heal fast, but not as fast as he could come back around and deal some more damage. Truth was, she was fighting a losing battle with one hand virtually tied behind her back since she was holding her brother in it. Even if she’d dropped him, though, Colin wasn’t optimistic about her chances. Nets wouldn’t stop him; he’d faced those faerie lights before and burst right through them with a concentrated shake of his speed.

  Her gun was useless, and none of her powers were working for her. What was the best word to describe her in this state?

  Oh, right: helpless.

  Colin scissored his legs hard, coming around again for another pass, and saw the last of the bubbles leave Sienna Nealon’s mouth as she started to choke. Now she was drowning, and that’d make this all the easier, like a spiral down to death. She couldn’t fight without air, and the weaker she got, the more he’d hit her. A vicious circle that’d carry her body all the way to the bottom of the river.

  He surged toward her, eager to finish the thing. Maybe he’d even make it home in time for dinner.

  29.

  Sienna

  The last of my air left me without a ton of options. I tried to move, using Gavrikov’s flight, but it was slow, the water resistance keeping me from steering very fast. The speedster was coming right for me, and I was twenty yards from the surface and already badly wounded.

  I wasn’t going to make it in time. I knew it, he knew it, and I could see the smile on his squarish face even through the cloud of bubbles separating us.

  Perhaps I can be of assistance, Bastian said, pushing himself to the front of my mind.

  Unless you’ve got some wicked good tactical advice for an underwater battle, Roberto, I said in my mind with an aura of panic, I don’t think you’re going to be of much use right n—

  Oh.

  Yeah, he said. It’s time.

  I drew upon the power of Roberto Bastian, something I hadn’t done in years. It wasn’t a pretty thing, what Bastian could do, which was why I’d only used it once.

  It was, however, a perfect time to try, I thought, as my clothing shredded and my skin turned hard and scaly.

  The speedster hit me a second into the transformation, and while I still felt it and it still hurt, it was nothing like what he’d done moments earlier to my unguarded skin. He smashed against me and rolled off, swimming away for another pass. I’d seen his wide eyes before he turned, though. They were about all I could pick out of his blur of a face.

  He was startled, to say the least.

  My body distorted, lengthening, my legs joining together into a tail, my neck stretching like a snake and my face and jaw widening. My arms lengthened and turned flat, growing greenish-blue under the tint of the water. I kept my right carefully wrapped around Reed and left Gavrikov up front in my mind with Bastian and Wolfe, pooling my powers so I could use them all at once. The transformation took seconds, seconds in which the speedster churned water in front of me, hurrying to attack again before I could finish.

  He didn’t.

  I burst out of the water using Gavrikov’s flight power rather than my own wings, one of which was busy keeping Reed from drifting down to the bottom of the river. It must have been quite a sight, a sixty-foot-long, snake-like dragon with wings shooting out of the Chicago River during rush hour. I took a breath and roared, blasting into the sky and skimming the bottom of the bridge as I rose, the hard concrete and metal scraping against my scaly skin.

  Screw the FAA, I thought, leaving the traffic and the river behind. I also left behind the speedster, my gun, my cell phone and my wallet. My toiletries, too, though the likelihood that I was ever going to use a toothbrush that had been submerged in the river was less than zero. I was disappointed that I’d lost Shadow, though. I loved that gun, and it wasn’t exactly a common weapon.

  Water streamed off my back as I headed west, my tail dangling behind me. I let it roll a little, slithering in the air. This was the way to do it, I reflected as I soared over the city, heading west. I let the sky carry me away from the assassin, away from the skyline, and hopefully away from the troubles that were dogging me, at least for a little while.

  30.

  Colin

  Colin watched Sienna Nealon shoot out of the water before he could so much as land another hit, and he cursed himself for his foolishness. He’d forgotten about that dragon power, probably because she hadn’t used the damned thing since that first video had revealed her to the world. Out of sight, out of mind and all that, and it had been out of sight for a damned long time.

  He swam back around, breaking the surface for a quick breath. He looked up and caught sight of her soaring west, her long, blue tail dangling behind her. It was kind of majestic, really, at least as majestic as watching a snake with wings defying gravity could get.

  He sighed, and water burbled between his lips. He wanted to chase after her immediately, but his sense of social responsibility held him back. The cab was, after all, surely leaking oil and gas by now, and right into the river. Gritting his teeth, he steeled himself to get to work on that. He’d catch up with Nealon again later, and this time he wouldn’t screw it up and make a mess when he went to kill her. He’d just get the job done.

  31.

  Sienna

  I squeezed Reed under my wing and he coughed, water dripping out of his mouth. His eyes fluttered and I watched him, turning my head sideways on my long neck to observe him. I wanted to make sure he was okay, of course.

  He opened his eyes and saw me, and I immediately realized that I’d made a tactical error.

  “Holy sh—!” he screamed as he came back to consciousness tucked under the wing of a giant dragon flying over west Chicago. My wing was scaly and slimy from being underwater, and he was wearing wet clothes and had meta powers, so he promptly slid out of my grasp, blowing wet air all around as he did so.

  He dropped out of the sky, flailing his arms as he fell. I darted around like I was chasing my own tail, trying to catch him. I went into a hard dive, using Gavrikov’s flight power to execute, and pushed my wings back as I did so.

  He plummeted toward the earth, now only a few hundred yards from the ground, twisting and spiraling as he fell. I came right after him. He was probably already at terminal velocity, I judged, which meant he wasn’t getting any faster. I, though, came with flight abilities that allowed me to exceed 187 miles per hour.

  I was about to catch him, only a hundred feet from the earth, when he pointed both hands down and started spraying air out of his feet. His shoes blew off in a
n instant and his socks shredded like my clothes had when I’d gone dragon mode. He looked up at me as I zoomed toward him and gave me a look that was irritated rather than furious. “What are you doing, Sienna?”

  “Trying to save you?” I asked, the natural menace in my throaty dragon voice somewhat undermined by hesitation.

  “I’m fine,” he said, floating to a halt a foot above the ground, using his hands to stabilize his flight. He settled on the earth like he was stepping gently off a curb to cross a street.

  “I—” I started to say, still a couple hundred feet up, but the roar of a jet engine drowned me out. I turned my head a hundred and eighty degrees to see a commuter jet with a Delta logo on the tail fin making an abrupt and ugly turn. I looked in the opposite direction and saw runways a few miles off. “Oops,” I said.

  “That’s why the FAA doesn’t want us flying,” Reed yelled up at me.

  Dammit.

  32.

  I spent the next twenty minutes coiled up behind a mini-mall in suburbia as Reed went and bought me new clothes and shoes. Fortunately my scales kept me warm as I lay on the cold pavement. A car came around the corner once and saw me draped in a giant mass at the rear of the mall. I lifted my head to look and let my forked tongue slide out to hiss at them. Needless to say, they hit reverse and peeled out, never to return.

  Reed came back with an armful of stuff in a plastic shopping bag. He was still dripping, his hair plastered in an unflattering way across his scalp. He nodded toward a stand of bushes nearby and I floated toward them, shrinking back into human form and diving behind them for cover as my scales turned into naked skin.

  “Here you go, Eve,” he said, and tossed me the bag. “Women are not easy to shop for, by the way.”

  “I told you I don’t care what you got me,” I said, tugging on a t-shirt first on the assumption that if the cops came wheeling up to investigate reports of a giant snake menacing shoppers, it’d be more workable to tug the tail of the shirt down to cover myself than to try and do so by tugging up on an underwear waistband. Priorities, people. I tore into a three pack of cotton panties that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a grandma and held up one of them so Reed could see it. “Okay, I’m revising that. Really?”

  “It was cheap,” Reed muttered, glancing at me, clearly trying desperately to give me some small measure of privacy even as he nervously watched the road. “Hurry up. I want to go get replacement phones so we can call an Uber.”

  “A what?” I halted, my granny panties halfway on. I shivered in the cold April air. The midwest clung stubbornly to winter, breaking only occasionally for breaths of spring. I didn't find it at all reassuring that Chicago was just as schizophrenic as Minneapolis in this regard.

  “Uber,” he said, kicking at the pavement, scuffing his shoes and causing dust to cling to their leathery black surface. “It’s this whole new thing replacing cabs.”

  “Why couldn’t we just get a cab?”

  “Stop being such a stick in the mud.”

  “Listen, brother o’ mine, there’s only one of us who almost became a stick in the mud, as in river bottom mud, and it wasn’t me, okay?” By now I was floating my way into my too-tight jeans and hoping he’d gotten me shoes that fit.

  “I’d be more excited if we hadn’t gotten dumped in the Chicago River to begin with. Why does this shit always happen to you?”

  “Like you’re blameless. I seem to remember Phillips being pissed off about having to try and settle with some Chinese buffet you tore up in the north metro during your manhunt for Anselmo Serafini—”

  “Fine, whatever,” he said, trying to shut off the conversation before I went and hammered him with any of his own countless acts of destruction. “Just get dressed and let’s get our phones.”

  “No time,” I said, pointing to the darkening skies. “We need to talk to Dr. Stanley before she leaves for the night, remember?”

  Reed sighed, a deep, rumbling noise of discontent. “How do you know she hasn’t already?”

  “Because I called and made an appointment under a fake name,” I said, trying to force my wet feet into tight socks. A seam tore loudly. “Shit.”

  “Take it easy there,” Reed said.

  “Whatever, I’ve got like two more pairs of socks.” I won the battle with the clinging cotton and then slipped on the shoes he’d bought me. There was at least half an inch at the toe, and the damned things had a heel on them. “Who were you shopping for? Your girlfriend?”

  “I did the best I could,” he snapped. “You threw like ten sizes at me—”

  “Yes, one for each article of clothing—”

  “Well, it’s a lot to remember.” He was red. “And, I, uh … was in a hurry. It’s awkward shopping for women’s clothes.”

  I emerged from behind the bushes, wobbling on the shoes he’d gotten me. I wasn’t going to be able to fight in these, not easily anyway. “Why?”

  Wearing black dress pants with a yellow t-shirt, I teetered on my new shoes as I put on a cheap brown suede coat with no belt. They were just low enough to guarantee that if I had a tramp stamp at the base of my spine, the world would have seen it below my jacket. “Oops,” Reed said mildly, looking me up and down once with a pained expression on his face.

  “Yeah, I look like I’ve been dressed by a man,” I said, putting my arms out. “A blind man. With no fashion sense. This is a new low, even for me.”

  He looked at my hair, and I saw a subtle grimace that told me everything about how I looked. “Yep,” was all he dared to say.

  “Let’s go, you ass.”

  I could see the grin he didn’t quite bother to hide out of the corner of my eye. “Sure you don’t want to try and—”

  “No.” I hit a steady clip, walking with a little more care and with a little less steam than I normally would have, because of the shoes. “We need to question the doctor, and now. I want to get to the bottom of this case …” I let my voice fade off dramatically then finished by muttering. “… so I can go home and dress myself in a manner that doesn’t look like I’ve just raided a psychotic clown’s wardrobe.”

  33.

  Phinneus

  Phinneus set up at his vantage point after having crept across the campus, hiding his weapons under his coat. The pistol was easy; the rifle took a little more work, but he pulled it off. Pretty soon he had a nice view through a big-ass window of an office building on a campus out in the suburbs.

  He’d gotten the tipoff as he’d been pondering what to do next. He’d considered making calls to all the hotels frequented by government employees downtown, but he didn’t want to do that. Not only was the success rate low (Nealon was unlikely to check in under her own name after an assassination attempt) but it’d involve sitting on the phone like one of those damned telemarketers for hours.

  Yeah, getting this tipoff from the guy who’d hired him was way, way better, even if he might have to deal with a little competition in the process.

  Plus, now he had a side job to complete.

  But for the moment he was just sitting, watching the window a few hundred feet away, seeing the mousy little doctor lady behind the desk pecking away at her keyboard. If the man who’d hired him was right, Sienna Nealon would show her pretty face here in just a few short minutes. Phinneus looked over the iron sights of his Winchester and took a deep breath. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  34.

  Sienna

  “I still say we should have gotten phones and Ubered it over here,” my brother groused as we stepped out of the cab at the campus where Marabella Stanley worked, me still in my clown clothes and him still dripping slightly.

  “Stick with the classics,” I said as he collected his credit card from the cabbie.

  “You are the very enemy of progress,” Reed said as the cab headed off down the tree-lined drive and we headed up into the administration building. “You’re like an angry old man ranting about how that newfangled television thing is ruining the world.”
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  “It does rot the brains of you whippersnappers,” I agreed as I opened the door for him. He frowned and went inside.

  After getting assistance from a weary-looking undergraduate who seemed like he had better things to do, we headed on a short walk across campus toward the science building, a flimsy little visitors’ map in hand. The campus was lovely, if a little chilly, and Reed was shuddering by the time we’d reached the science building and climbed the three floors to Marabella Stanley’s office.

  It wasn’t difficult to find, being clearly marked and all that. The frosted glass-paned door was propped open to the outer office when we got there, revealing that Dr. Stanley shared a receptionist with about six or seven other professors. The waiting area was clean and carefully maintained, suggesting that either janitorial was on top of things in this building or the receptionist was some sort of neatnik. I looked at the desk and saw not a paperclip out of place. A nameplate with “Stephanie Bruszek” written in white lettering was perfectly squared off, equidistant from each of the sides of the desk, giving me my answer.

  Reed led the way to the lone office with the lights still on, a frosted glass window with Dr. Stanley’s name printed on it in gold letters telling us we might just be in luck. He rapped lightly on the glass. I let him because I still had a tendency to break windows by accident.

  “Come in,” Dr. Stanley said in a brusque tone, and Reed opened the door and stepped in. I followed him a moment later and caught her frown as she took us both in with a glance. He, still dripping slightly and shivering, and me dressed like an idiot and wobbling on these heels. “Oh my,” she said. It fit.

  “Dr. Stanley?” I asked, wishing I had my badge to flip out. I was going to surrender it in less than a week anyway, and everyone knew who I was by now, hopefully. “I’m Sienna Nealon. This is Reed Treston—”