Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I need to find Isabella,” Reed said, staring straight ahead across the infinite horizon.

  “What are you doing in DC?” Augustus asked, pacing back and forth behind them. “Never mind. I’ll come to you. I’m—yeah, I don’t know, but it’s—I’m sorry I didn’t call, baby. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ll be there real soon, though. I love you, too.” Augustus hung up and stepped in front of them, his face set and determined. “Man, I gotta go home. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I haven’t been going to class, I haven’t—” He held up a hand in front of his own mouth. “What the hell happened to us?”

  “Something pretty fucking awful,” Reed said, still staring straight ahead.

  “That’s truth,” Augustus said, and he caught sight of the town at last. “What do you think? Can we get an Uber from there to the nearest airport? I’ll go in with y’all on it.” He fished out his phone again, staring at the screen. “Oh, hell yes. We are on. Fifteen minutes and they’ll pick us up right over there.” He pointed to a dirt road in the distance, only a few hundred yards away.

  “I’m in for that,” Scott said, and he stooped to grab Reed under the arm, helping him to his feet. Reed accepted the weight slowly, as though unsure he wanted to be standing. “You need to go home, Reed. You need to find Isabella and go home.”

  “Do I even have a home anymore?” Reed whispered, still staring straight ahead. “Do I have … Isabella anymore?” He shoved off Scott’s help and staggered a step before pitching over, landing on one knee, planting both hands palm-first in the dirt. He breathed heavily, so heavily his shoulders shook with the effort. “What … did … we … DO?” He turned his head around and his cheeks were coursing with tears, washing away the thick layer of dirt that covered them.

  “I don’t know, dude,” Augustus said.

  “It wasn’t us,” Scott said, keeping his distance. He felt like stepping closer would just enflame Reed, make him likely to run or freak out again. There was good cause for freaking out; Reed had done terrible things while under Harmon’s grip. Scott felt a shiver crawl up his spine. Things Scott even felt guilty about, even though he hadn’t done them himself.

  “I pulled the trigger on …” Reed whispered, and he turned his head to the ground and threw up, emptying the contents of his stomach, the smell of bile mixed with coffee hitting Scott’s meta-enhanced sense of smell and nearly causing him to gag. “What did I do?” he whispered.

  “Reed, you couldn’t have—” Scott started, but he didn’t finish.

  Reed planted both hands in the earth and with a blast of wind that swept the dust into the air around him, he launched off. A tornado reached down out of the sky and swept him up, lifting him into the air and carrying him off. He disappeared into the clouds as they rolled away, off toward the horizon, heading east.

  “Yo,” Augustus said, pulling his hands back from his face as the dust storm caused by Reed’s exodus started to recede, “you’re still in on splitting this Uber, though, right?”

  100.

  Harmon

  I felt like I was suspended from a hawk’s talons, being taken back to the nest to be stripped to pieces and eaten. It probably wasn’t far from the truth, that metaphor. The cold had long since chilled my cheeks to numb, and we were now passing over snowy ground, leaving the endless ocean behind. I was hard-pressed to determine where I was being flown, other than northeast, but I was seriously regretting giving Sienna my jacket, for more than one reason.

  I reached a hand up again and caught her wrist, rubbing my fingers and palm along hers. “Just making sure you’re still there,” I said, lying through my teeth and suspecting that Dr. Zollers couldn’t tell. He was doing a magnificent job of fending off any attempts I made on her mind, but fortunately my defenses were not so weak that he was able to access my thoughts.

  Very fortunate, actually, because I had a plan, and it would have been terrible if he could have seen it coming.

  “If I were to let you go, I think you would notice,” Sienna said, brushing my hand off again with a shake. “This is far enough,” she announced after another few minutes, and we started to descend as the darkness fell around us. I looked around; there wasn’t a light anywhere on the horizon.

  She brought us down on a floe of ice a little off the coast. My shoes landed in a patch of snow several inches deep, crunching as she dropped me. Snow came easily over the sides of the loafers and soaked my socks, and I squirmed against the chill.

  I folded my arms over my chest and looked around. Little particles of snow were flurrying around me, very occasionally. “What is this? Is this your hometown?”

  “It’s a giant, floating piece of ice in the ocean,” she shot back, the doctor still hanging on her shoulders. He was avoiding her touch, carefully clinging to the coat, though it looked like his teeth were chattering. She dropped him off carefully and came down herself, her bare feet hovering about three inches off the snowy floe and her husky thighs trailing up to hide beneath the tail of my jacket. It covered her fairly well, except at the neck.

  “And is this to be my grave?” I looked around, still no sign of civilization or humanity anywhere nearby.

  “Hard to say.” She just hung there in space as Zollers came around to stand next to her, still shivering against the chill.

  My eyes narrowed as I stared at her. “You’re here to judge me, then?”

  “We are a jury of your peers,” Zollers said, doing a little stomping himself as he started walking a path around the floe to try and keep warm. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, trying to time my move for maximum impact.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” Sienna said, hovering closer to me, playing into my plan. “I forgot. You’re peerless. You’re so smart. So much smarter than me …” She grinned wickedly. “Say, if you’re so smart … why do I keep beating you?”

  I started to open my mouth to defend against her allegation. “I don’t believe you have.”

  “You’re stuck on a block of ice in the middle of the ocean,” she said, extending a hand to indicate the horizon. “I haven’t frozen you into the ice like Captain America yet, but it’s not out of the question—”

  “And here I preferred the elegance of you killing me,” I said.

  “At what point do you acknowledge,” she said, rolling her eyes at me and irritating me further, “that if you keep getting beaten by lowbrow little me … then maybe you aren’t as smart as you think you are?”

  “If you’re trying to wound my vanity …” I kept as straight a face as I could, “… you’re doing a bad job. Obviously you had assets I didn’t count on. People you could rely on that I didn’t anticipate. Naturally, I didn’t come after you as early or as strong as I should have because … well …” I shrugged. “If my plan had worked, you would have been on my side in any case. Besides,” I said, figuring I’d throw a little cloud of dust in her direction, “I never wanted you dead nearly as badly as … others did.”

  That provoked a frown. “Others? Like … Cavanagh and …?”

  “Others you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet.” I smiled, and checked Dr. Zollers’s position. He was well behind me, and out of easy reach.

  “What the hell do you m—” Sienna started to say, drawing closer to me.

  I sprung on her and blasted Dr. Zollers with everything I had simultaneously. He staggered from my mental assault, putting him off guard for just a second, which I used to leap and grab Sienna by the wrist with one hand and lodge the other firmly on her neck. I took her in hand and squeezed, holding tight as the wind picked up and snow blew all around us.

  101.

  Sienna

  When Harmon jumped me, I was so surprised that it actually took me a few seconds to respond. It was pretty out of character for him by this point, leaping at me and putting his hands on me. Don’t get me wrong, he struck me as the sort of impotent weasel who would respond to a woman with violence whenever all his o
ther grandiose plans and powers had failed; I just wasn’t ready for him to leap at me in the snow and grab me around the throat and the wrist.

  I staggered back a step from the force of his aggressive maneuver; he stared at me furiously, and I could feel him lashing at my mind, at the barriers that Dr. Zollers had erected between us. The clash was bleeding through, but only a hair, and I squeezed my eyes shut as I took stock of the situation.

  And then I started laughing.

  I laughed for a good few seconds, then lifted my hand, dragging his along with it. He’d clamped on my wrist pretty good, but it wasn’t exactly painful, especially compared to the things that others had done to me in my life. His chokehold was similarly pathetic, too high on the neck and grabbing my chin as though he were about to pose me like a model.

  “Well,” I said, looking him right in the eye, “this is embarrassing.”

  He was breathless, red in the face, and staring straight at me. “Oh?” He didn’t seem to get the clue.

  “You called me the master of the physical domain,” I said, looking at him evenly, not even bothering to throw off his hands, “but your last ditch plan is to assault me physically?”

  “As you said, it’s last ditch.” He smiled thinly. I had a feeling he’d be moving those hands in a moment.

  “You got that right,” I said. “You really are bad at this. Your grip is several inches away from doing real harm to me in either direction.” I stared at him, waiting for him to get it and try to adjust. His hand was clamped pretty good, and while I could have just ripped it off or burned it off, I figured taking the patient tack was smarter. Controlling my annoyance was good character building.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Harmon said, his hand holding even tighter to my wrist. He paused, probably for dramatic effect, and then broke into a wide smile. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”

  “Well, you’re succeeding at that,” I said as the chill started to burn at my skin, “now let go of me before you—”

  I blinked.

  He stared at me, still smiling.

  And suddenly it was very clear what he was doing.

  “Sienna!” Zollers yelled, hurrying through the snow toward us, “He’s going to—”

  Harmon yanked himself closer to me, pushing his cheek against mine and anchoring an arm around my neck. He kept that grip on my hand and wrapped his other arm around my head, pushing his palm against my face. Our skin was flush, and mine was flushed, the chill I’d mistaken for the frost actually a burning sensation across every point of skin-to-skin contact between us.

  I couldn’t see his eyes from where I was, my head practically on his shoulder, but I could see his face in my mind’s eye. “Shhhhhh …” he whispered, and I could hear him in my mind as well as in my ear, and not because he had broken through Dr. Zoller’s telepathy barrier.

  All those little touches on the flight here … all the times he’d grabbed at my hand … a few seconds here, a few seconds there …

  He’d been burning through the small window of time before my succubus powers activated.

  And now, with his hands on my skin, his face pressed against mine …

  He’d run down the clock.

  I could hear him in my head because he was almost there, his soul draining from his body and into mine. The rush of heat was unbearable, unbelievable. I hadn’t fully absorbed anyone in years, and I’d forgotten how intense it was, how much of a thrill it was …

  How much I craved to devour souls.

  I breathed hard, wanting to rip his hands from me but simultaneously not. I wanted to tear his soul out of his body but I didn’t want him in my head. My skin burned with both hatred for him and desire for his soul, and it caused me to hesitate a vital moment.

  There was a howling as my powers worked, the screaming of Harmon’s body dying as his soul left it. I could have vaporized him with the power of fire, could have thrown him from me, severed his limbs with all my strength turned loose, or simply ripped away and headbutted him into oblivion.

  But I did none of those things, because somehow I waited a second too long to do any of them.

  His soul tore free from him with one last, rattling scream, and President Gerard Harmon’s body went limp against me, his grip failing and his corpse toppling to the snowy ground with a crunch.

  “Sienna,” Zollers said, grabbing at my arms, touching the sleeves of my purloined jacket. “Are you all right?”

  Uh oh, Zack muttered in my head.

  Oh, wonderful, Eve said. More sausage for this party. As though we didn’t have enough already.

  New playmate, said Wolfe.

  Hmph, Bjorn snorted.

  Uh, Commander-in-Chief, Bastian said awkwardly.

  Bozshe moi, Gavrikov muttered.

  Roommates, Gerry Harmon distastefully, voice echoing in my head. It’s been quite a while since I’ve cohabitated with anyone. This should be … well, unpleasant, honestly. It felt like he was speaking directly to me. But not as unpleasant as dying, so at least there’s that.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered as the snows blew around me. I looked Dr. Zollers right in the eye and answered his question. “Hell no, I’m not all right. Now I’ve get this bastard in my head.” I sighed. Where the hell was the justice in this?

  Well, you are a criminal, Harmon said, and I sensed he was enjoying my torment. So this is a little bit of justice in itself, isn’t it?

  “Bastard,” I muttered, and meant it. I looked down at his lifeless body, shaking my head. This was not how I had planned this going. At all.

  The best laid plans of mice and men … Harmon said.

  “He’s being sanctimonious in your head right now, isn’t he?” Zollers’s expression was a perfect cringe of sympathy. Unfortunately, his sympathy didn’t do me any good.

  “Worst. Day. Ever.” I said, torching Harmon’s body into oblivion. It didn’t make me feel any better. “Let’s get the hell out of here before we freeze to death. We need to make another stop anyway.” Although, honestly, I wasn’t sure freezing to death was a worse fate than the one I was looking at now—eternal imprisonment for the sarcastic, dickish, now-ex president of the United States …

  In my head.

  102.

  Cassidy Ellis opened the door and closed it in the space of seconds, breathing heavily the whole time. The small DC hotel room smelled of fear, which was something Cassidy reeked of in abundance. I’d had Zollers’s help in tracking her to here, and I stayed perfectly still at my place in the corner chair until she flipped the light switch, fiddling with the purse in her hands.

  When she saw me, her eyes widened and she dropped her purse with a thump.

  “Hi,” I said, not bothering with any overtly threatening motions.

  “I didn’t want to help him,” she said before I could even get a running start on any of the things I might have said to her. “He made me help him, threatened me—well, threatened Eric—” Anxiety was causing a severe case of verbal diarrhea. “But I didn’t want any part of it, and that’s why I tried to help you—well, you and Scott—”

  “Rein it in there, cowgirl,” I said, waving a hand in hopes it might silence her bout of expulsive explaining. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  You go everywhere expecting to hurt people, Harmon said in my head, causing me to grind my teeth. It’s your raison d’être.

  “Did you kill him?” Cassidy asked, and because she was so damned breathless, I couldn’t tell if she was frightened or thrilled by the idea.

  Suicide by succubus is an interesting cause of death, wouldn’t you say? Harmon asked.

  I rolled my eyes again. “Strictly speaking … yes and no.”

  “But … he’s dead, right?” Cassidy seemed very focused on this, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because she wanted to be sure he was gone or she wanted leverage on me. It could have been both, for all I knew.

  “Well, he’s not going to be a problem for you anymore, that’s for sure,” I said, tryin
g to restrain my annoyance as Harmon hummed a few bars of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow in my head.

  She stared at me, eyes almost piercing me, then she seemed to relax. “You absorbed him? No … he tricked you into absorbing him.”

  “Sadly,” I said, wishing I could roll back time an hour or two and vaporize Gerry Harmon or drop his body into the Atlantic Ocean for porpoises to feed on before he’d had a chance to use my brain as an escape pod. Did porpoises feed on dead bodies? I lived in hope, in my dreams. “Listen, about this serum—”

  “Yeah …” Cassidy said, making it a definitive enough statement that I didn’t bother to go on. “I don’t know where I hid it in the White House—”

  “Because you fried your own brain?”

  “Yes.” She held up burnt palms. “I couldn’t take a chance on him reading the location, so …”

  “What are the odds someone finds it?” I asked, thinking specifically of the Secret Service, who would probably be turning the entire White House upside down looking for clues to Harmon’s sudden disappearance. I had a feeling I knew who they’d blame, too.

  “Hopefully low,” Cassidy said. “I’m not stupid, and I was trying to hide them from a pretty smart guy, so …” She shrugged. “It’s not like we can go looking for them, and … that’s not the only place where the formula exists.”

  “Is it in your head?” I asked, frowning at her.

  “Are you going to blow my brains out if I say yes?” she asked in a whisper, almost ghostlike, specter of fear casting a long shadow over her.

  “No! Everybody always assumes I’m going to kill them.” I blew out a harsh breath. “I’m not planning to kill you, Cassidy.” I clenched my jaw. “Though I will come after you again if your dumb ass starts getting into trouble. How can a girl as smart as you keep getting into stupid trouble? I mean, really, robbing the Federal Reserve? Could you have picked a higher-visibility crime?”