She crouched under another desk, but the fire closed in. Thea realized she’d effectively put herself in an oven. They wouldn’t be able to wait much longer.
Then there was a deafening crash. Something slammed into the desk, sending Thea flying across the hot floor. In her panic and confusion, she was barely aware of the pain. She rolled. Someone was shouting. Then someone was tugging on her arm.
Her broken arm. There was a white-hot shot of agony that nearly made Thea pass out, but she managed to hang on. And the pain made her alert, at least.
She could see nothing but fire and smoke and the blackened face of the guard who was trying to pull her up. Thea pushed off with her feet and flew upward, hoping against hope that she’d find empty space instead of a ceiling on fire.
She did.
Gasping and coughing, they all collapsed onto the lawn where they’d left Elon.
Red lights were flashing, and there was shouting from the street. The fire trucks had arrived while they were inside.
“We should get back,” she said, and was shocked by the sound of her own voice, ruined by smoke. “The humans.”
They all had burns that would need tending, and sooner rather than later. But one of the guards was in especially bad shape. Half his body seemed to be burned, and he was sobbing.
“Is there anyone else in there?” Thea asked.
The other guard shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She looked at Nero. “What about the ones who were chasing us?”
“One of them was flying back to campus with the one who got shot in the knee,” Nero said. “The other one, I knocked out of the air when you were on the roof. I don’t know where he is now, but he was definitely outside when the place blew up.”
A few feet away, Elon groaned. Thea dragged herself over to him. She didn’t even have to look at his leg. She could smell the blood. “Shit, Nero, we’ve got to get him back.”
“Cassius, too,” one of the guards said, nodding down at the crying one.
But before they could pick up their wounded, there was a shout of such intense rage that they stopped and stared in the direction of the inferno that had been the lab.
Thea stepped toward the side of the house and saw two men in their pajamas, dangerously close to the fire, fighting like they wanted to kill one another. She flew toward them.
And then she felt it.
“Get back!” she shouted at the others, as she jumped back herself. “Get them out of here! I can handle this!” She wasn’t at all sure that was true, but Elon and Cassius couldn’t wait. “Go!”
Nero and the guard flew off, carrying their charges. Thea turned back to the house.
It was the superhex, some cloud of it, like fumes from a chemical fire. Thea steeled herself to resist it, and moved toward the fighting men. In the street beyond them, she could see a woman in a bathrobe, sitting on the pavement and laughing hysterically. One of the firemen was running away. Three of the onlookers had turned on one another, and two others were grappling on the ground, whether in wrath or lust she couldn’t tell.
And that was all she saw before it hit her, and one of the men she’d been approaching became a giant wasp. A swarm of yellow jackets came out of his mouth as he screamed.
His companion started shrieking, running from what looked like a horde of rats. Thea’s mind felt sluggish, and she vaguely wondered whether she was seeing his hallucination, or her own.
She fought against the hex as the man tackled her. He was trying to get his hands around her throat. Thea pushed with her one good arm, trying to get away, while at the same time fighting against the hex.
Thankfully, whatever residue of the superhex this was had an even shorter lifespan than Hex Nine had in the lab. As suddenly as it had come, it passed.
The man who’d been attacking her gagged, coughed, then reeled back in horror.
Thea stood and looked around. The bathrobe woman and the fleeing fireman were standing, shocked, staring at the fire. Some of the neighbors who’d been fighting were crying, some arguing. One had her hands over her face and was screaming in pain, while blood flowed through her fingers.
The man who’d been running from the rats was on the lawn a few feet from Thea, crouched with his hands over his head. By the way he was screaming, the rats were still biting. The hex hadn’t let go.
“Hey!” A fireman was approaching them, walking fast.
Thea ignored him and went to the howling man. She searched for the sulfur and smoke—difficult to pick out, when the sky was full of that same smell—until she found a flimsy veil of the hex still stuck to him. She focused, pulled it away, felt it drift into the foul air.
The man collapsed in a dead faint.
“What is going on here? What were they doing in that h—” The fireman stopped dead, staring at Thea, taking in her wings. He shook his head, then turned to the man who had attacked her, still sitting on the lawn.
“I tried to tell the police,” the man said with a shrug. “These monsters have been flying around the neighborhood for months. But of course everyone just wants to call me crazy.”
Thea was about to just fly away and let them sort it out, now that they seemed to be out of danger, but just then a fury flew down and landed in front of the fireman. Thea caught a flash of the fury’s arm moving, and then the fireman smiled, sat on the lawn, and began plucking at blades of grass.
It was the guard who Nero had knocked down. He seemed to have no interest in shooting Thea now. He just shook his head and said, “What a mess.”
The men who had been fighting clearly wanted nothing more to do with this. One helped the other to his feet, and they hurried away.
“Why would you hex him?” Thea demanded, pointing at the fireman. “We haven’t just had enough of that?”
“They usually come around from the serenity hex with foggy memories of what went on,” the guard said. “I figured that would be best for him. Luckily they gave us a couple extra when they sent us out here. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on everything, but…” He gestured back at the street, where neighbors still stood gawking at the house. “Whatever that was hit them, and it was pretty ugly for a couple of minutes.”
“What’s your name?” Thea asked.
“Damon.”
“Well, Damon, you’ve just been introduced to the superhex. Or just its leftovers, I guess, but that was bad enough.”
He gaped at her. “You set off—”
“Of course I didn’t, you idiot,” Thea snapped. Her arm was broken, she was burned, her head ached from having that hot desk thrown into her. She was in no mood. “It was in the house.”
“But they said it had been destroyed,” Damon said. “They told us they were just cataloging all the other evidence here.”
“Yeah, well, they told you a lot of things.”
Damon looked uncertain. “I’m going to have to take you back,” he said, although Thea could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He was still shaken up. She wondered what he’d seen when the superhex had hit him.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll come willingly. I need to know what happened to my friends.”
“I can tell you, if you mean Alecto,” Damon said. “Some guys in my department were watching Cora—”
“Why?” Thea interrupted.
“They caught her communicating with Alecto or something,” Damon said. “They put her under guard, and Alecto tried to break her out.”
“And they both got caught?”
“I guess they came willingly when reinforcements from Security came and Alecto saw she wouldn’t be able to fight her way out without serious injuries. To tell you the truth, I thought that was kind of cool of her. I saw her in action once. She could have killed those guys, no problem.”
When Thea told Damon about Cassius, he agreed to stop at Wellness before he took her to Graves. Thea was beat up pretty badly, but at least her wings worked. Thanks to the homing signal, they made it in less than five minutes.
“Langdon is at Administration,” the assistant added. “Urgent meeting, got the whole board out of bed.”
Damon escorted Thea there. They found the board gathered in a conference room, where Graves appeared to be questioning Alecto.
“Thea! How convenient!” Graves said. “Saves us the trouble of looking for you. I understand you broke into the lab in an attempt to steal some data.”
Of course Philip was in the room, sitting in the corner and smirking. The guard who had flown Cassius back was there too, but there was no sign of Nero.
To Damon Graves said, “Thank you for catching her. Your good work will be noted in your file.”
“I didn’t catch her,” Damon said. “She came willingly.”
“She saved my life, and Cassius’s,” the other guard said. “Her and Nero.”
“After she hexed you, by your own account,” said Graves.
“She may have saved some humans’ lives too,” Damon added. “A few of them seemed bent on killing one another, and at least one couldn’t shake the hex without her help.”
Graves tried to dismiss them after that, but Gordon insisted on hearing what his men had to say. Damon and the other guard, whose name turned out to be Jacob, told them all that had happened. Their stories matched each other’s, and Thea’s.
When they finished Gordon said, “You mean to tell me the superhex was in the building?”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Graves snapped. “She obviously had it with her and used it to create a distraction and try to get away.”
“We were with her when it went off,” said Jacob. “She didn’t have anything. In fact, she was trying to help Elon and Cassius, who are both in Wellness right now in really bad shape.”
“Thanks to the fire she started,” Graves added.
Jacob squared his shoulders and looked Graves in the eye. “Thanks to the fact that you were still developing the superhex in that lab. And lied to everybody about it.” He looked back over the board. “Thea didn’t release that hex, and neither did Nero. I’ll swear to it. It had to be in the house, and the fire set it off somehow.”
Graves narrowed his eyes. “How much has she paid you to help her? I hear she’s quite wealthy.”
Alecto, who hadn’t said a word since Thea came in, stood. “Surely the board will strongly consider the testimony of these guards. And we have other evidence against Graves. Cora and Nero both have emails they’ve received or, in Cora’s case, dug up through the network.”
“That’s not all.” Thea didn’t meet Alecto’s eyes as she told them about the email she’d found from Megaira.
“But nobody else saw this email, and the fire has no doubt destroyed that computer,” Stefan said. “How convenient.” He looked around at the board. “This is a waste of our time, and it’s late. Obviously Alecto and Thea—”
“It’s not obvious!” Iren’s voice was uncharacteristically loud, and her eyes hard as she looked at Graves. “If you have tampered with the account logs and led me into false testimony—”
“You’re being silly,” Graves interrupted.
“She’s not.” Langdon stood beside his wife. “There’s clearly at least enough evidence here for us to investigate the matter. Gordon?”
“I agree. Put Graves under guard until we get this straightened out.”
Hexing House was recovering.
The poor burned guard, Cassius, was recovering slowly but steadily. Thea’s arm was recovering in its cast. Elon was recovering from his gunshot wound, and seemed to think walking with a cane gave him flair. Everyone was recovering from their burns. Their voices had already recovered from the smoke.
The neighborhood where the lab had been was also recovering, with the help of some well-placed bribes to help smooth things over and provide satisfactory official explanations. Rumor had it that the owners had been cooking up some new kind of street drug, and the explosion and subsequent fire were related to that. If some toxic fumes had gotten loose and caused a few ill effects, well, that wasn’t surprising for a drug, was it?
In the two weeks since the fire, Alecto had been reinstated. She was cleared of all suspicion, largely due to emails Cora had recovered—including the one from Megaira to Lucien—by hacking into the network of the local cable company that provided the lab’s internet service. It seemed the lab employees, many of whom were human and had no grasp of Hexing House politics, were less careful about putting things in writing than their employers were. Graves and Megaira were both implicated several times over.
With Megaira gone, Nero was promoted to head of RDM. Cora was being showered with bonuses for her work in Tech. And Thea had finished her exploratory meetings, with an eye toward working for HRI as an Investigator. She liked the idea of making sure no human was hexed unfairly.
The only people who hadn’t resumed business as usual were Graves and his cohorts. Stefan and Philip had already been put to trial and found guilty. Like several others who were involved one way or another in the superhex scandal, they claimed limited knowledge of what Graves had really been doing. Unlike some of those others, the board didn’t believe them. While neither would lose their wings, both would be demoted to menial work for the rest of their lives.
Thea hadn’t attended either of their trials, having been busy with her meetings. But she went to Graves’s.
Despite what was now a mountain of evidence against him, Graves continued to insist that it was Alecto who’d orchestrated the superhex research, and that she was desperately trying to frame him. He accused Cora of manufacturing the emails, and the rest of them—including the guards who’d been there the night of the fire—of lying, probably because they’d been bribed with Thea’s ill-gotten money.
Those were his exact words, ill-gotten money. Thea supposed it was possible he had a touch of his mother’s visionary powers, and knew that for a fact. Or that he’d had her investigated and they’d somehow found out. But she thought it more likely he was taking a shot in the dark in his attempt to cast as much of a shadow over all of them as he could. Any money earned in Hollywood was an easy target. She refused to worry about it, or wonder whether people were shifting in their seats to stare at her.
His defense almost certainly wouldn’t have worked in any case. While he still had friends on the board and throughout the colony, there were just as many who were outraged at being lied to and made fools of. With Langdon and Iren leading the charge, a conviction was probably inevitable.
But probability became certainty when Nana pounded the final nail into her son’s coffin.
The packed auditorium quieted except for a few whispers as Nana came down the aisle. Thea caught enough of these to gather that Nana was universally revered, and that her visiting the campus had become unheard of.
“My husband was the head of this colony for forty years,” she said when she finally, with the assistance of Alecto, made it up onto the stage. “I probably would have gotten the job myself, mind, but back then even fury women didn’t get to be openly in charge.”
Nana waited until the chuckles passed, then her face hardened.
“My son took over for my husband, and his daughter for him. So I’ve been pretty closely involved in the running of this place for almost seventy of my ninety-six years. And in all that time, I have never seen anything so disgraceful.”
“Mother—” Graves began, but Nana silenced him with a look.
“You will keep your place,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” Graves muttered.
Thea hid a laugh behind her hand. Others were less polite, and snickered openly at Graves.
“The honorable thing,” Nana went on, her eyes still on Graves, “would be to end this now by taking responsibility. But honor was never your strongest virtue. Nor honesty.”
�
�Mother!”
“Hush!”
Thea didn’t bother hiding her laugh this time. The whole audience was roaring at the elegant, prideful Graves being publicly dressed down by his mama.
“But since my son can’t seem to do his duty, I’ve come all the way out here today to do mine. He wouldn’t come to visit me, you know. Not for months.”
Graves scowled, but didn’t bother saying anything.
“So I’ve had to come to see him,” Nana went on. She flew lightly over to where Graves sat and, before he could react, put a hand on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
Of course she hummed. She seemed to be quite enjoying her performance. Thea supposed this was where Graves had gotten his own talent for grandstanding.
Nana stayed that way for what Thea guessed to be about two or three minutes while everyone, Graves included, kept quiet and waited.
When she opened her eyes, she cuffed Graves in the back of the head. “You were already talking to potential buyers? Bad enough you were developing this illegal product in the first place, without you compounding it by selling it before it’s ready and promising things you can’t deliver. There is no excuse for that kind of customer service.”
She turned to the table where the board sat. “As I expected, I saw him in meetings. I saw him at the lab. I saw enough to know he’s responsible for this, at least partly.”
“Surely we have not reached the point where we’re accepting the imagination of an old woman—” Graves began.
The whole auditorium exploded with outrage. It seemed you didn’t mess with Nana. Thea couldn’t say she was surprised.
“Nana has used her visions to help us through crisis after crisis, as you well know,” Langdon said when calm was finally restored. “I imagine I speak for most of us when I say I trust her testimony more than any of the hard evidence presented here.”
Thea could see the exact moment when Graves accepted that he had lost. He didn’t slouch or hang his head or look guilty. If anything, he looked more proud than ever. For a brief flash, his eyes glowed violet, as if he was hexing somebody. His expression was cold and hard.
Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) Page 20