I put my head down, in my hands. “I am tired. So tired. It’s like … like a poison, like June’s clouds. It creeps in, steals your will to fight, wears you down.”
“In a way, that’s true,” Harmon said. “That’s what a toxin does, albeit more quickly—it steals life, a little at a time. It cuts off the flow of oxygen to your cells, and your body starts to die. The mind withers. Hope does the opposite, it’s like breath in the lungs, and you … you lack that hope.”
“I don’t suppose you have any to spare?”
Harmon smiled, but it was thin, almost sad. “I’m stuck in here. Life without the possibility of parole. If you die now, I die, too, but … I find no comfort in that because to my mind … that is simply the end. Meaningless. But if I go on … all I am is a shade. A pale imitation of myself, watching in the corner of your mind with little influence of my own to peddle. You need to understand … for someone like me, someone who has worked the levers of power for as long as I did … the only thing worse than the existence I’m living is no existence at all. There’s no joy in you to reflect onto me, no happiness to cling to. You’re a being composed almost entirely of sorrow at this point. I’ve seen enough of your mind to know that it wasn’t always so—but it is now. You ask me if I have hope? Well …”
I kept my head in my hands, and a thin tear streaked down my cheek.
“Oddly enough … I do have a small, almost infinitesimally small sliver of it.”
I composed myself before raising my head. “Oh?”
“Yes,” Harmon said stiffly. “For you see, I am the prisoner of a woman who once beat a conspiracy that should have left her dead. Who once crushed the most powerful metahuman to walk the planet, a woman who somehow—maddeningly, in fact—keeps defying the impossible odds thrown at her. So, yes, I have hope. A very thin hope. And it is, strangely enough, predicated on the bizarre faith I find myself imbued with, against all evidence of my past, pre-Sienna experience. It’s based on the fact that in spite of everything that has happened to you, Sienna, including this very dismal, potentially fatal turn of events …
“Somehow, I believe that if anyone—anyone at all, on the entire damnable planet—could dig their way out of this and somehow triumph? It’s you. Nobody else.”
I stared at him in wonder as he sat stiffly on the edge of the bed staring straight ahead, as though he’d just said nothing at all.
And I laughed.
Harmon snapped his head around in supreme irritation. “What?”
“I just …” I couldn’t stop giggling. “I’m stuck in my own head, dying, with a supervillain who wanted to mind control the entire world … I’m a fugitive wanted for murder after murder I didn’t commit … I have basically no chance of overturning that result because of the murders I actually did commit once upon a time … I’m almost certainly clinically depressed … but you just told me you believe in me.” I finished chortling and it trailed off into a sad sigh. “That’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in a while, and I laughed at it.” My mirth died. “I’m sorry.”
“We react oddly to things,” Harmon said, still a bit stiffly. I think he was insulted at my initial burst of laughter. “I once burst out laughing at a State Dinner when I found out through mind reading that a certain South American president was a furry.”
“A wha—oh.” I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, staring at the memory before me. The emotion was thick in the air, like a dressing on this salad of suffering. “I don’t think I need to see the rest of this. Do you?”
“I don’t know what it would prove to you or me,” he said. “You were in a dark place when you made this decision, though.”
“I know.” I looked up at the vision of me and Scott, locked in perpetual combat to the end. “I thought I was doing him a favor by taking this … this weight … but it only helped bog me down. For years. If I could give it back, I would. I don’t want to say it was my greatest mistake, because I’ve probably made bigger ones, but … it’s right up there.”
“It’s getting very dark now,” Harmon said, and I realized he was telling the truth. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him so somber before. “I don’t think it’s going to be very long.”
“No,” I said, a little sadly. Should I have felt relief to know that my long struggle was about to be over? I didn’t even know. And I didn’t know how to feel. In my heart was just a great numbness, events moving along without my attention or choice.
“That’s my way of saying that if you’ve got any miracles on hand, it might be a good time to spring one,” he said.
“If we really are cut off from Wolfe and his powers … I think my miracles are kind of at an end,” I said, resting my elbows on my thighs as the darkness kept creeping in, millimeter by millimeter. Scott’s face was now shrouded in the dark, his mouth frozen open in angry reply.
“Such a shame,” Harmon said, with a tinge of amusement. “I was just starting to like you, too.”
I laughed again, but it was an empty sound, hollow of joy. “Yeah. You ain’t so bad yourself, El Presidente. At least when you’re restricted from world-conquering activities.”
He chortled a little bit at that, then turned sober. “Shame to get out this way, though. A bullet in the head from some Bonnie Parker wannabe.”
“Is it bad that the thing I feel most right now … even over that weird relief that maybe it’s finally over … is regret that I didn’t get a chance to at least finish out that case before I leave?” I asked, almost plaintive.
“Not bad … it’s just you,” he said, as the darkness started to settle. “Seriously, though … last minute reprieve? Final, amazing, out-of-nowhere plan to save your own life?”
“Wolfe?” I called, into the encroaching darkness.
Only silence replied.
“I think I’m all out,” I said sadly. Harmon nodded once, then bowed his own head.
There was nothing left to do but wait for death to take us.
48.
Scott
It was close now. Her pulse rate was dropping like some hapless soul Sienna had let go in flight. “She’s letting go,” he said, trying to figure out what to do. CPR would be difficult to say the least, and Reed was still hours away.
“We’re not going to make it,” Scott said.
The septic stink, like a hospital gone horribly wrong, filled the motel room. The dark tones as night had covered the place had only lengthened, shadows becoming beasts of darkness that had taken hold in every corner. He hadn’t turned on a lamp for fear that moving away from her, shifting his attention for even a second, would mean he missed it when she inevitably crashed, when her heartbeat finally slowed so much that her brain no longer received any of the marginal share of oxygen that her shallow, agonized breaths were delivering.
It was a death rattle, and there was nothing he could do to make her breathe.
“Sienna,” Scott said, as though she could hear him, as though there were anything she could do from within to heal herself. “You can’t go. Not yet. Not like this …”
He brushed the back of her hand, skin to skin contact, and felt the short burn. He’d touched her too much today, even in the brief, passing moments that he’d made contact. If he so much as held her hand for a few seconds, she’d absorb him, too, dragging him into the lurch of death with her.
He’d thought about it. Thought about seizing her hand and holding it until the end, letting that burning pain run through his skin, letting his soul leave his body in a rush, with a scream. He’d plunge headfirst into her dying body with her, and maybe—
No, it wouldn’t do anything. If her body couldn’t heal itself with a succubus’s high-powered regenerative abilities, even an amplified Poseidon wouldn’t add a single second to her life.
She started to choke, a desperate, guttural sound deep in the throat.
“No, no,” he said, rising out of the chair he’d pulled to her bedside. “No no no—” His helpless hands shook as he held them over her, unsure of where to di
rect them.
She barely twitched as she struggled for breath, her body fighting the last fight before it gave up. He stood there, looking down, agonized. “You can’t leave. Not—no—”
But there was nothing left to do.
No CPR—as though that would bring her back when her body seemed dead set on giving up the fight.
No defibrillator.
No last ditch effort.
No superhuman healing.
He had done everything he could do to save her …
… And he’d failed.
“I’m sorry, Sienna,” he said, taking her hand through the thin bedsheet. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I know I should have called Reed, but …”
He hung his head. “I didn’t want Reed’s help.
“I wanted you.”
The admission tugged at him, ripped at his insides. He hadn’t wanted to give it voice, this insane desire, the idea that he’d had on that beach in Florida. He could have done the smart thing, hired the people who weren’t wanted, weren’t hunted, weren’t at risk of being shot dead if they found themselves in police sights.
But I wanted you.
Needed you. Needed to know …
About us.
Needed to know … about things I can’t even remember, like whispered voices in an empty room.
She shook, jerking in spasm, but it was already fading in intensity along with the slow decline of her last breaths.
Her last breaths.
The bed rocked with a hard twitch, her meta strength causing it to squeak, to cry in a way that she no longer could. She wasn’t breathing now. He couldn’t even feel the hint of a pulse through the bedsheet.
I did everything I could for her.
And it still wasn’t enough.
Not enough to—
Save her.
Silence reigned in the room. She wasn’t stirring, not even so quietly that only a meta could have heard it.
Somewhere in the distance, a car bumped against a curb, but Scott barely noticed it.
His phone buzzed quietly in the darkness, and he ignored it.
Why did any of it matter?
She was dead.
The hammering at the door stirred him, like a shock of cold water poured down his shirt. He froze, for just a second. It couldn’t be—
“Scott!” A high voice shouted, followed by the frantic—though restrained—slamming of a palm against the door.
He rose in a frenzy, ripping the chair out of the way in his rush to get to the door.
He tore it open without disengaging the lock, almost ripping it from the hinges—
And there she stood in the Florida moonlight, waxy-pale and tired from the long flight, her supple skin lacking the usual make-up, her blond hair hanging in stringy ringlets, unstyled—
“Kat,” he breathed, “she’s—” and made it no further before Katrina Forrest shoved past him unceremoniously, into the room and toward the small figure lying still and silent on the bed.
49.
June
They “traded” cars in a small town along the way that she never even caught the name of. They just stopped at a gas station where cars had been parked overnight, maybe an auto service place or something, found one unlocked with the keys behind the shade, and started it right up. It was a seventies car, and June liked it, because she could lean against Ell as he drove with one hand and kept the other wrapped around her shoulder.
It smelled like a steady diet of air fresheners and something else—smokeless tobacco, maybe, long ago used and long ago discarded. It had a kind of sweet scent to it, lingering in spite of a lack of evidence that it had ever been here at all. It reminded June of her grandfather and the way his car smelled, and something about it soothed her.
Night had fallen and they’d found a quiet place to park in a wooded grove. They’d gone back roads the whole way but Ell was tired and June was tired, and so they pulled over and held each other, kissed, her salty tears that she couldn’t stop not spoiling the quiet, intimate moment they shared. When they were done she pulled her pants back up and her tank top back down, ignoring the red splotches on the white so as to keep from throwing up the nothing she’d eaten the last few hours.
“We’re maybe thirty minutes from Daytona Beach,” Ell said. They’d settled back, resting, her head on his chest. They could go. Could start the car and just go. “You want to leave now?”
“No,” she said. It was right there, on the horizon, so close it wouldn’t take any time at all to get there. And she wanted to see the beach.
But somehow she sensed the danger there, too, and wanted to put it off, at least a little longer. There was peace here, in his arms, peace that might not be waiting for her in Daytona.
“Okay. We’ll wait until tomorrow,” he said, his chin brushing lightly against the top of her head.
“Mmhmm,” she said against his chest as it moved up and down in time with his breaths. She didn’t know what was ahead, exactly—trouble, she suspected—but here was like an oasis in the desert of it, and trouble didn’t seem to know where they were. If she could have, she might have stayed here, forever.
But the beach called, and she knew this feeling of safety was false, was temporary. Tomorrow they’d set out again, but for now, June was content to lie there with her head on Ell’s chest, enjoying the quiet moment with him, trying not to think about when—or if—they’d ever get another.
50.
Scott
“How long has she been down?” Kat asked, shedding her rumpled, long-sleeved blouse in favor of the white tank top she wore beneath it. It was a different look on her, lacking her usual makeup, and was reminiscent of their days together, half a lifetime ago.
“A couple minutes,” Scott said, picking himself up from where she’d shoved him aside. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
“You saw my text about the flight delay?” She pushed hair back out of her eyes as she leaned over Sienna, who was unmoving, unbreathing.
“Yeah.”
“I convinced the pilot to move his ass,” she said. “Being a prima donna celeb has its occasional advantages.” She rubbed her hands together. “I can’t do this for long without—”
“I know.”
“Pull me back if it looks like I’m too far gone—”
“I will.” Scott stumbled to her side, ungainly on his legs, as though he’d not used them in forever. “I don’t want you getting sucked down the drain with her if she’s—” He didn’t dare finish the thought.
Kat drew a deep breath, like she was steeling herself for something deeply unpleasant, and then shoved her hands down—
She made contact with Sienna’s cheeks and pushed her palms flat, skin to skin. “Come on, Sienna,” she said. “Come back to us. Just a little bit … just enough to …”
Scott stood there, watching, as breathless as Sienna. There was nothing momentous in Kat’s action, no burst of light or sudden movement. Just the two women locked together in a touch, Kat’s hands on Sienna’s pale, lifeless cheeks.
Then both of them of them jerked at the same time, and Kat started to scream, and all hell seemed to break loose while Scott stood helplessly again, watching.
51.
Sienna
“I see light,” Harmon said, looking left to right abruptly.
I raised my head from where I’d hung it, like a refugee prisoner, and glanced around. “Uhmm …”
He wasn’t wrong. There was light where darkness had started to consume us. A few moments before, when last I’d looked, the other me and Scott had both been completely swallowed up. Now, I could see our features once more, a faint glow on the horizon.
“Huh,” I said as the room started to brighten again, the table lamp seeming to increase in wattage as the scene appeared to change, the shadows shortening all around us. “Do you think … this is it? That … this is the end?”
“No,” Harmon said, face screwed up in thought. “I feel … somethin
g … again. My power starting to—”
“This is a cozy scene,” Bjorn said, the big Norseman suddenly appearing as though I’d snapped my fingers and made a wish for more annoyance in my life.
“I have never been so glad to see you,” I said, coming off the bed in a hurry. I almost hugged him, then remembered who he was. “Uh, I mean … you’re a dickbag.”
“Always the truth,” Eve Kappler said in that thick, Germanic accent, suddenly there with us, looking around at the room. “Where are we?”
“Blast from the past,” Roberto Bastian said as he leapt into fully-formed existence on the other side of me, surveying the place like a dozen meta ninjas were going to jump out and attack at any time.
“Did I miss movie night?” Zack asked as he appeared. When I stared at him in weak relief, he smiled. “I get the feeling we were circling the drain there?”
“A very astute assessment,” Harmon said stiffly, rising to stand with the others.
“Glad to see we dodged that bullet,” Wolfe said in that low, gravelly voice of his, slinking out of the darkness behind me.
“Can you—” I started to ask him.
“Working on it,” he said, his massive shoulders hunched up, his face all heavy with concentration. “Any idea what chang—”
“I know,” Aleksandr Gavrikov said, voice thick with feeling.
And for one of the first times in all the years I’d known him, the Russian was smiling.
“Kat,” I whispered, and felt a surprising rush of fond emotion.
52.
Scott
“Unnnnnnnh!” Kat groaned, hands anchored to Sienna’s cheeks as she rolled, thrusting her head back as though she were going to roar like a lioness. Her hands were white, the color leeched from them by the darkness of the room and the exertion of her contact with Sienna’s skin.
Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13) Page 20