They were all so focused, they didn’t notice a familiar (to me, anyway) figure step out of an alley across the street. “Uh, guys?” I felt the pressure of so many sets of eyeballs lock onto me, but I kept watching Gavrikov as he stepped onto the road, heading toward us. “I have eyes on target,” I said, prompting them all to swivel.
“Scatter!” Bastian’s words echoed through the night as Gavrikov burst into flames in the middle of the street and shot twenty feet into the air. Three fireballs lanced out from his hand and destroyed the front van in an explosion that sent me to my knees. He sent another blast at the jewelry store behind us, a bigger one that caused the storefront to burst into flames.
Zack was huddled behind the car, along with Kurt. One agent was down after the explosion of the van and I couldn’t tell from where I was whether he was hurt badly or not. Disregarding most of my good sense, I stuck my head up over the top of the car and yelled to Aleksandr. “Is this the message you wanted to send?”
“Hardly,” came back his reply. “That was to get your attention. You have two minutes to get back in your cars and leave this town. After that, you have until tomorrow morning at six A.M. to bring Klementina to me at the top of the IDS tower in Minneapolis. After that…” He let his voice trail off and even from where I was behind the car, I could see a smile. “Well…you’ll see in two minutes. Let us call this town…a warning. For what will happen if you don’t deliver.”
I heard Bastian scream behind me. “Back in the cars! Move out!”
I ignored the frenzied action around me and focused on Gavrikov. “Aleksandr…this isn’t the way.”
He drifted to the ground as the first van shot out of its parking place. Agents were hanging from the side and I looked back to see the one still left on the sidewalk. He was not moving. I heard Zack shout my name from the car. His hand extended toward me, fingers dangling in the air between us. Kurt was struggling with him, trying to pull him into the vehicle. One of the agents in the back punched Zack in the back of the head and he crumpled forward, slumping against the dashboard as the car pulled away, slinging snow and mud.
“They left you behind.” His words were calm, icy even, as his burning eyes continued to stare at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “They didn’t try to shoot you, either. I’m guessing they took your threat seriously.”
“They should.” The flames around his hand died, revealing his fingers, then his arm. He took hold of my hand, and I let him. “These are men who understand nothing but force. They are weapons, turned loose when necessary, meant only for destruction.” He sounded weary, bitter even. “I know these men. I was one of them, but on a grander scale.”
“Should I be afraid?” I said it without fear, but I had the beginnings deep inside, the smallest well of concern.
“You have nothing to fear from me; you are not one of them.” He pulled the glove from my hand as he said it, twisting the leather in his grasp. The cold in my hand didn’t bother me. “There is only one thing that matters to me now. I want her; she is my penance. Freeing her is all I have left. Everything else…” He grasped the glove and it burned in his hand, turning to cinders and slipping from his fingers into the wind. “…is ashes. Those who stand between us have everything to fear.”
He stepped closer and I blanched. “Not to worry, little matryushka . You could not run fast enough to escape what is coming to this town if you had to.” His hands, now flesh, reached out and enfolded me and I felt the ground lift away under my feet. “I will help you.” I was flying, the wind whipping my hair, the freezing cold streaking in my eyes, drawing tears and an exclamation of joy from me. The fresh, cold air hurt my nose and lungs as I breathed it in. He held me tight, carrying me through the night, his flames gone and his body pressed against me.
I felt us slow as the ground approached, and my feet touched solid pavement. I felt his arms let loose of me and his face drifted away. My teeth chattered involuntarily, and I looked behind him to see the town of Glencoe, the faint city lights glowing against the clouds above. “Remember my words,” he said, hovering in front of me. “Six in the morning—less than twelve hours, on top of the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis. Otherwise…” He burst into flames again and streaked into the sky, headed back toward the town.
Headlights on the highway raced at me, slowing at the last possible second. A van rolled up and the passenger window came down. “Girl!” Clary opened the door before the car even came to a stop. “Get in here! Old Man Winter will have all our asses if you get left behind.”
My eyes were transfixed on the distance. Glencoe sat, still shining into the winter sky, a little beacon of light in the middle of the nothingness of snowy fields. “Hey!” Clary reached out and started to grab my arm, then must have thought better of it, because he waved his hand in front of my face. “We gotta go!”
“We’re fine,” I said. “Just wait.” The second car full of agents came to a skidding stop behind the van and Kurt popped his head out, eyes bulging in shock at the sight of me.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the town. I knew there were people there; there had to be. It wasn’t just some ghost town, some empty place…
A light glowed in the middle of town like a cigarette lighter sparking, then there was a flash that blotted out my vision. A wave of force came rushing toward us and the only thing that kept me on my feet was that I reached out and grabbed Clary’s arm as he turned to steel, anchoring me in place as the shockwave hit. I turned my eyes back to Glencoe as a mushroom cloud of fire and smoke blossomed into the sky.
The smell was what hit me first, the awful smell of something burning. I could hear the rumble still in the distance as the cloud drifted up into the sky, mingling with those already hanging above Glencoe. Little pieces of ash began to rain down around me like a falling snow and my hands were numb, along with my nose, followed by the rest of me.
Zack opened the door to his car and staggered out, his hand clutching the back of his head, stumbling over to me. “You okay?” He asked the question while I still stood transfixed, staring at the remains of the small town where I had been only minutes before—and which was now wreathed in flame and smoke, the last resting place of its occupants. “Are you all right?”
His glove brushed my cheek, stirring me back to reality. The explosion had died down, but the light of the fires still burning in Glencoe reflected off the clouds, casting the night in the most surreal light. “I’m fine,” I said, barely managing to get the words out. “How many people lived in that town?”
Zack’s hand was still on the back of his head, but his gaze fell. “I don’t know. Several thousand.”
I spoke in a voice of awe. “He killed them all. He’ll do it again, Zack, he’s going to do it again in less than twelve hours if he doesn’t get what he wants. He said this was his warning—his only warning.”
“Even Gavrikov wouldn’t be so insane as to…” He didn’t finish his sentence. His eyes stared back into the distance, to the fires that still burned. “He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t.”
“He would,” I whispered. “He will,” I said, this time with firmness. “Unless we bring Kat to the tower tomorrow morning, he absolutely will.
“And you can kiss the city of Minneapolis goodbye.”
Chapter 24
We stood arrayed around Old Man Winter’s office, Zack glaring at Kurt, Ariadne leaning against the wall looking faint, the four members of M-Squad situated behind me and Kappler. Ostensibly because we were women, we were the ones that got the chairs. I didn’t care; I was tired. Old Man Winter sat behind the desk, his usual inscrutable self.
“Why’s the girl in here for this?” Clary’s words came out in a kind of low whine. “She ain’t an agent or one of us.”
“She’s here because she’s got more experience dealing with the hostile than any one of us,” Bastian said in a clipped tone. “He spared her life from the explosion, after all.”
“He did more than that,” Kappler said in a
heavy, Germanic accent. “He picked her up and carried her clear.” Her eyes were narrow by nature, now they were slitted, her thin face looking like nothing so much as a snake. “I think a good question would be ‘Why’?”
“He perceives me as the only one who will reliably deliver his message.” I was so tired, I didn’t care if they thought I was in league with Gavrikov. I guess technically I had let him loose.
“I figured it was because he was sweet on you.” Clary said it with a suggestiveness that made me assign him once more to the category of “idiot” in my head. Thank God Wolfe was quiet.
“He’s gonna do it,” I said. “You don’t get Kat to the top of the IDS Center, he’s going to send you another message and this one will be a hundred square blocks of flattened buildings and an inferno at the middle of it.”
“He won’t do it,” Ariadne said, quiet.
An uneasy silence settled over the room, broken by me. “Um, yes he will. He’s already done it once tonight just to prove his point. If you’ve already killed several thousand to make a point, why not a few hundred thousand to actually get what you want? Just because you hope he doesn’t, don’t think that bears any resemblance to what will actually happen.”
“He will do it,” Old Man Winter said, quieting the whispers I heard from M-Squad. “Let there be no doubt. But equally certain is the fact that we cannot turn Kat over to him. She is an innocent and he is…unstable to say the least.”
“Sir, we’ll do as you order,” Bastian said, “but the girl compared to a several hundred thousand lives…”
“You will eliminate him,” Winter said.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted again. “But you guys had a chance to go a few rounds with him down in South America, as I recall, and it’s all well and good that you captured him, but it seems like the nuclear option wasn’t on the table for him back then, for whatever reason. Now it is.” I turned around to find Bastian staring at me, along with Parks, while Kappler glared and Clary looked on with a kind of cluelessness. “If you couldn’t take him down then, when he wasn’t up to using his full power, how are you going to do it now?”
Bastian turned to Parks, the wizened guy with his long, gray hair and goatee that looked like it was almost white. “This time,” he said in a gruff voice, “we get to kill him instead of playing the capture game, ma’am.”
“Oh, good,” I said, “you get to try and kill the walking nuclear bomb. That won’t piss him off at all.”
“We’ll kill him, ma’am.” Bastian’s voice was filled with conviction. Too bad it didn’t convince me. “With the kid gloves off, my team can take him down.”
“Glorious.” I’m pretty sure the wearying effect of the drug I’d been taking leeched any chance of me pulling off false sincerity, so I didn’t bother. “Couldn’t you maybe…I don’t know, lay the situation out for Kat and see what she thinks? She might consider it an acceptable risk to jump through his hoops for a bit to keep him from blasting the city into rubble.”
Old Man Winter’s reply was like a crack of thunder. “Placing her into that situation is unacceptably risky.”
“For her? Or for the city of Minneapolis?” I leaned forward, tossing all caution aside. “You’re playing a hell of a game here. You’re placing the survival of an entire city on the idea that these guys—no offense,” I waved vaguely at Kappler, who was still glaring at me, and the rest, sitting behind me, “can kill him before he can go critical. That’s a pretty big risk considering he dropped me off in the countryside, flew back to the detonation site and I bet he wasn’t there for more than ten seconds before he went off. That means if they err even slightly, a lot of people die.” I saw no change in any of the faces around me, except maybe Ariadne, who had grown slightly paler. “More than I let die, that’s for sure.”
Old Man Winter’s cold gaze burned over my head to Bastian. “You have your orders.”
I bit my lip and wrenched myself to my feet. “I sense my presence is no longer needed here. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find a quiet place to hide until the atomic apocalypse is over.” I didn’t exactly storm out, but I did break the door behind me. Because of my super-strength, not because I was in a snit. Well…maybe a little bit of both.
I seethed in the hallway and all the way down to the lobby, which was quiet save for a few guards standing around. Different than agents, they wore tactical vests and held submachine guns slung across their chests. A few of them had stood guard outside my door back when they held me in the basement room where Kat was currently residing. I wondered where they recruited all these yahoos. They should have given them all red shirts.
I started toward the front doors, intent on leaving, on running far, far away, wanting to go someplace where I’d never again have to be put in a position where all I could do was sit back and watch a massacre take place. I slammed into the glass doors at the front of Headquarters, sending them rattling open on their hinges. I would have been far more satisfied if they had broken, but apparently they were designed to be abused by metas, because they started to pull shut on their own.
I stood outside, sucking in the cold air. It all came down to power—it always did. With Wolfe, I didn’t think I had the power to face him, to beat him. It turned out I did, but I didn’t know that at the time. Now, with Gavrikov…I was really unsure. It wouldn’t take him much to vaporize me if he got pissed, that was certain after what I saw him do in Glencoe.
But what if Kat was with me? I thought about it a little harder. He wanted to save her, to keep her safe, more than anything. If I took her to the rendezvous point, I could get close to him, maybe stop him. I stared at my hands. It didn’t have to be for good, just long enough to get him contained again. I cringed. In another one of those boxes. Surely I could keep him out of sorts until the Directorate could find a way to crate him up again. I didn’t like that option, but I liked it better than the thought of him waltzing away with Kat, who didn’t even know him, or letting M-Squad and that assclown Clary take a crack at him, or worse, letting him level Minneapolis.
To save the city, to make amends for what I had let happen with Wolfe, I was going to have to consign Aleksandr Gavrikov to a fate I was all too familiar with—confinement in a coffin-like containment chamber. A box of his very own.
I cursed the irony of the whole situation, of how it had all played out. I turned back to Headquarters, studying it and wondering how I was going to make this work, when I heard the scuff of a shoe behind me and turned, ready to strike—
Scott Byerly stood there, hands in front of him. “Whoa, I’m just here to visit Kat,” he said, circling around me toward the Headquarters building.
What was it he had said about writing me that note? “Hey,” I said. “You have family in Minneapolis?”
He stopped, turned back to me. “Yeah, my whole family is from around here. Why?”
I steeled myself for what I was about to have to do. “Just thought you might want to know—the guy that blew up the science lab?”
He furrowed his brow. “Gavrikov, wasn’t it? Russian guy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He just nuked Glencoe, you know, that town west of here.”
Scott’s face paled, his dark complexion going white. “I heard about that earlier. I didn’t know it was him.”
“Yeah, well…” I tried not to belabor the point, but I wanted to draw him in a little, “…I was there when it happened. He did it as a warning to us—to show us what would happen to Minneapolis if we didn’t bring Kat to him by tomorrow morning at six.”
“Excuse me?” The reaction was immediate. His jaw clenched, he took a step toward me, his fist balled up. “He threatened the city?”
“Said he’d nuke it to the ground,” I said. “Bye-bye, City of Lakes.”
He turned without saying anything else, started to stalk off. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To stop him,” he tossed back.
I ran after him. “Wait. You can’t just attack the guy, he’d
turn you into the stuff you find in the bottom of a microwave.”
Byerly stopped, but the fury was still evident on his face. “What, then?”
“Well,” I said, “M-Squad and the boys have a kill order—”
“Not good enough,” he said and started to walk again. I reached out and grabbed his arm, keeping my grip firm enough to catch his attention but not enough to spin him around. He did that on his own, looking like he was ready to explode on me, his face red, his eyebrows locked into forty-five degree angles, and his mouth in a thin, downturned line.
“Whoa!” I held my hands out in a gesture of peace. “I’m with you on this one. I think M-Squad is gonna foul it, big time. I mean, if you heard about how things went for them in South America, or you’ve had five minutes to consider that Clary is the linchpin of their strategy, you recognize that giving them this shot means that you’re basically comfortable with turning Minneapolis into a burning wasteland. Which I am not,” I said, trying to reassure him and dislodge his angry face. “But you can’t just charge after him without a strategy.”
“I have a strategy,” he said in a kind of roar. I took a step back, more out of concern for his safety than mine. “I find Gavrikov and I drown his ass.”
“And a fine strategy that would be,” I said, suppressing all my smartass instincts for the sake of my penance, “but may I suggest one that’s got a better chance of success?”
He drew up to his full height, arms folded in front of him and said, “I’m listening.” His posture said he was not, but I was desperate enough to try anyway.
“The thing you have to understand about Gavrikov is that he thinks Kat is a clone of his sister,” I started.
“Why the hell would he think that?”
“Because she actually is his sister,” I said, “and don’t interrupt me. He feels guilty because he thinks she died or something, back in the early 1900s, and the only thing he cares about is giving her spiritual successor a chance at freedom.” I paused, taking a breath. He looked at me with less rage, but also a look that told me he didn’t totally understand. “Because he thinks the Directorate is keeping her imprisoned here.”
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