“Gavrikov,” I murmured to myself as we fell, expecting the lightness of gravity peeling away from my body to follow. It was natural to me by now, this feeling of flight. I waited a second, two. Three.
There was no answer.
26.
I twisted my body as I fell out of the building, but I felt sluggish, slow, and barely got around in time to land with my knee in Volkov’s gut. He grunted as the air rushed out of him, and I felt pain lance down my knee and into my leg as I slammed into him and the ground. It hurt a lot.
I felt the disorientation, though it took me a few minutes to realize what it was. I blinked, slowly, felt the Russian stir beneath me.
It wasn’t like Gavrikov not to answer me. He could be as childish as any of us, sure, but I hadn’t had an argument with him, and he had no reason to ditch me now.
“Wolfe!” I said aloud, rolling off Volkov onto the ground. Hard-packed snow greeted the back of my neck, my legs, and I felt the rush of chill across my back even through the dress. My breaths were coming hard, the frigid air rushing into my lungs and adding to the aches of my body.
Wolfe didn’t respond, either, but I felt a faint touch in the back of my mind, like a voice too distant to hear. I looked down at my leg, and I saw blood falling into the snow from my lips. My head must have hit him on the landing, and I was dazed. I hurt.
I saw movement to my side, and realized that Volkov was coming to as well. Security would be here in a moment, with guns, and—
No. No, something was wrong. Why the hell had this Russian attacked me?
A memory made its way up. The caterers, awkwardly moving their trays around like newbs, offering food to the security personnel in the entry—
Aw, hell.
I staggered to my feet, my thin shoes tainted by snow as I felt the frigid wind whip over me. I cradled myself with frozen fingers, running my fingertips over icy flesh, already starting to feel the freezing air do its work on my unprotected skin. “Wolfe,” I said again, seeking protection. I felt my leg get slightly better, the pain recede, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of Wolfe or because I was going numb.
“You won’t … be able to use him,” Volkov said. He was looking up at me, drooling into the snow. He laughed, a husky sound that echoed in the night air. “Or any of your powers.”
I stared at my fingers, remembered the blue smoke that had blown through the reception just before Volkov had seized me by the neck. “What the hell did you do to me?” I managed to get out through chattering teeth.
“You like it?” Volkov laughed, and blood ran out of his open mouth. “It’s called … Suppressex. Or that’s what your government calls it.”
“I’m assuming it doesn’t just lower your sex drive.” I felt a chill unrelated to the weather. “The chemical weapons stolen from Kentucky.”
Volkov looked at me with glazed eyes. “You’re not stupid, that’s for sure.” He propped himself up on an elbow, but only with some struggle. “You’re weak now, you know. Essentially human. Your strength is gone.” His beard dripped with red and white, like some perverse image of Santa. “We’ve drugged your security personnel. You and your brother are powerless.” I watched him getting stronger by the minute. I may have turned the tables on him by forcing him to accept most of the impact, but it wasn’t going to keep him down for long. “Every one of the caterers is a mercenary that works for our employer. Your little agency is ours, and nobody outside of here even knows it yet.” He laughed, and the blood had stopped flowing. “So what are you going to do?”
I reached my hand behind me, lifting up my dress. “Whatever I have to.”
I watched his eyes widen in amusement, and I realized what he thought I was doing. It made me feel more than a little disgusted. “That’s not going to save you,” he said. “Even if I didn’t want to rip your skin off, the person who hired us wants you to die.”
My hand found what it was looking for, the Smith and Wesson at the small of my back, and I unsafetied it as I drew. I fired.
And found out that without my meta strength, my aim was way off.
A small circle of red spread across his belly, and I steadied myself for a second shot as Volkov looked up at me in surprise. “It was a reception,” he said, like he couldn’t comprehend the gun in my hand, like it had materialized from thin air. “A diplomatic—”
I shot him again, and this time I was ready for the recoil. The hollow point caught him in the forehead and I saw pink mist paint the snow behind him. “Never trust a Russian,” I said as I looked around for my purse. I’d had it in my hand before Volkov had grabbed me, and I had hope that it’d be nearby—
I froze as the first sounds of voices hit me. I shuddered again from the cold, which was settling in on me like I was standing there naked. I had way too much exposed flesh to just sit here. It had to be below zero, and the air burned me from the cold. I looked up at the window we’d fallen from and saw faces looking down at me. I wondered if they could see me out here.
A burst of automatic weapons fire answered that question, and the snow at my feet exploded from the impact.
I ran, losing first one shoe, then the other, racing for the nearest tree and barely finding shelter behind it before another burst of weapons fire slammed into the bark behind me.
I stood there, freezing, and now fully realizing just how bad my predicament was.
My agency had been taken over by unknown forces, leaving a hundred hostages under their control.
There were countless mercenary soldiers in the building just behind me, armed to teeth and looking to kill me.
And I was hiding behind a tree, as another burst of weapons fire filled the night. As it faded I could hear more voices, these on the ground, snow crunching beneath booted feet as they headed in my direction.
Without my powers, I couldn’t fly away, couldn’t throw flames at them, or shoot nets, or even heal myself from the nagging injuries that were already causing my body to ache. Their bullets could kill me, injure me, cripple me. And all I had was a little bitty .380 with five shots remaining.
The voices got closer, and I huddled there behind the tree as the rifles in the building fired again, my feet frozen against the snow, bark ripping in the night as I stood there, shivering, skin hurting from the chill, without a clue of what to do next.
27.
I listened to the bullets sing around me, peppering the tree trunk I was hiding behind, and felt strangely vacant of fear. I should have been scared witless; this was the most vulnerable I’d been in years.
Instead I felt strangely alive. And cold, though that was fading fast into numbness.
The wind blistered around me, howling like a primal force. My ears felt like they were encased in ice, and I shifted against the tree and felt fabric tear; I’d partially frozen to the wood in mere seconds.
I needed to get the hell out of here.
I looked into the distance, searching for an answer, and the only probability was right there in front of me.
When we’d rebuilt the campus, we’d done so using funds that Ariadne had pulled together using some complicated strategies that basically boiled down to insider trading. Okay, so it wasn’t that complicated. Before its destruction, back when the agency operated independent of government oversight as a plausibly deniable cat’s paw for the United States, we’d had a full scientific research staff. So when we rebuilt the place, we rebuilt the science building, not really counting on the fact we’d be back under full government scrutiny and operating under a federal budget that viewed us as a liability. So the science building had sat, unfunded and unloved, pretty much abandoned, for the last couple years.
And it did that sitting right in front of me.
I checked the angle quickly; if I kept the tree between us, I could make it most of the way to the science building without exposing myself to the broken window where the gunfire was coming from. It wasn’t my best plan ever, but it was better than sitting there and waiting to freeze to death or
for searchers to come put me out of my frigid misery.
I started off at a run, and was amazed at how slow I was going. The cold air hurt my lungs. My knees were aching. My skin burned from the wind, hurting in a dull way, like someone pressing pins into it. I stumbled after a half dozen paces, my feet numb. I clutched my gun close in my fingers and kept going.
It was slow, painfully so. I was used to being able to spring ten feet in the air at a jog. I could leap short buildings in a single bound without using my powers of flight.
Now I was running like a normal person, and it felt like I was already frozen.
I had to choose my steps carefully, acutely aware that my life was on the line here. I glanced back to see flashlight beams dancing over the ground behind me, trying to find me in the darkness. They were a ways back, but that was irrelevant; with the snow, they’d be able to follow my footsteps right to me.
This was not a good day. Not a good night. Not a good anything.
The building was ahead a hundred feet by this point, but it felt like it was two miles away. I felt like I was swimming toward it, bobbing in syrupy solution. I was dimly aware that frostbite had to be taking hold, that I was a mess, that I needed to be warm—
Oh, dear heavens, to be warm.
I almost fell and realized it was because my body was shivering so hard I could barely stand straight. I raised my gun hand and found my finger frozen to the trigger. Even if they caught me now, I’d have a hell of a time firing a defensive shot. Or maybe not, since my finger was stuck to the trigger.
I could see the single light of the science building ahead, like a lighthouse in the middle of a cold, empty ocean. My jaw was full-on chattering by now; I was going to lose some teeth if it got any worse. I couldn’t feel my toes, or the bottom of my feet. I stepped on the slippery sidewalk and up to the entry and slipped in. The science building opened into a small foyer with a biometric scanner just inside. Back when we didn’t have a budgetary crisis, we could do things like biometric locks.
I shoved my hand against the scanner and pushed the damned button. It buzzed at me and glowed an angry red, denying me entry. I swore under my breath and rubbed my hand against the material of my dress. I couldn’t feel it, but I tried for friction, tried to warm up my extremity. I pressed it against the glass again, hoping that Andrew Phillips hadn’t suddenly changed my authorization to go anywhere on campus. If he had, this was going to be a messy end for me.
The light glowed green and I heard a lock click.
I fumbled for the door handle, frozen fingers failing to grasp hold the first time. I heard the lock click back into place—time expired—before I could get a grip on it, and I wanted to cry from exasperation.
I looked behind me, out the glass entry door, and the flashlights were drawing ever nearer.
I slammed my hand against the scanner again, got the green, and ripped at the handle with fumbling fingers. I got it open and squeezed into the dark, empty hallway, pulling the door closed behind me. I sighed, but not in relief.
Now I was in a science building that hadn’t ever seen a single worker use it, still powerless. I had five bullets and a frozen/impaired trigger finger, and a host of what I presumed were mercenaries on my trail.
This is why I don’t do formal occasions.
28.
I figured I had something on the order of sixty seconds to search the building for useful things before my enemies had me dead to rights. I couldn’t outrun them, and my lead was vanishing with every second I spent trying to elude them. I damned sure couldn’t outfight them, especially not with five .380 bullets, strength absent to steady my aim and my hand still shaking and numb.
I took a deep breath of the stale air in the science building and pondered the layout. It was all labs on the first floor—chemistry, and … uh … other stuff. The medical staff was originally supposed to move over here at some point, but since the building had been mothballed, that idea had been scrapped.
On the plus side, while the air was hardly warm, it was certainly warmer than it was outside.
I stood there for a ten count in the hallway, trying to think of something I could do. I took a few tentative steps forward, and realized that—once again—I was leaving a trail behind me. This time it was wet footprints.
Crap.
I hurried forward and looked into the room to my left. It was a chemistry lab with a sweeping view of the snowy terrain outside, complete with large black islands in the middle of the room, independent sinks with an eyewash and a shower in the corner, silver fixtures with gas taps to run experiments with fire—
Hrmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hehehehehe.
I darted into the science lab and out of it less than thirty seconds later, skedaddling along the central hallway and around the corner. I ran for the back exit, hoping that I could pull this one off. It was a long shot, but if I could make it happen it would solve a couple of my problems.
The science building was a square with four exits, one at each corner. I’d entered at the bottom left of the square and now I was sitting at the top left, with the chemistry lab taking up all the space between the two. I listened, waiting to hear—
There it was. Tinkling glass. My pursuers were on my trail like the dogs they were.
I could hear them breaking through the glass and forcing entry into the science building to pursue me, and I hoped they were feeling overconfident. I suspected they weren’t, since I’d already left Volkov dead behind me, and they’d surely found him. But maybe there was still room for some arrogance. There were a half-dozen of them and one of me, and I couldn’t have been carrying much in the way of guns, right? If they were smart, they’d pursue with care, but still speedily.
So far, so good.
As soon as I heard them enter, I ran out the back door and angled my path to take me straight across the wide glass windows of the chemistry lab. They stretched roughly waist-high to ceiling, black glass that I could barely see through from outside.
As far as schemes went, this was probably one of the more harebrained I’d come up with. After all, I was placing myself directly in the line of fire with these guys and essentially saying, “Here I am! Shoot me!” Given my prior experience, they, being bad guys with guns, probably would oblige.
Hopefully quickly and without giving it much thought. Or smell.
I glanced back through the chemistry lab’s windows as I took off across the snow. I was moving at the speed reserved for a grandma whilst napping, struggling across the vacant snowfield as the freezing chill dropped down on my exposed flesh. Why hadn’t I worn something more formal to this party, like a bearskin rug? Or a Gore-tex jacket? You know, on the off chance I’d be thrown out a window and hunted through the winter night, as they do at most formal events.
No, they don’t? I’m just special, I guess.
I hoped, hoped, hoped that the mercenaries pursuing me wouldn’t do something smart, like make for the exits and run me down. They could definitely do it. The only thing ahead of me was the training building, and it was a long ways off. If they were even in average shape, they could catch my tragically limping ass with ease.
But whoever had hired them hadn’t paid them to capture me alive.
I saw the movement when I looked back, the shadow in the hallway beyond the chemistry lab. It was a man with a rifle, raising it to his shoulder in preparation to fire. I threw myself down into the snow and waited as I heard the first shot crack over my head. I waited and hoped for another.
I didn’t have to wait long, though I didn’t end up hearing it.
The first shot broke the window from the hallway into the chemistry lab, where I’d run through and slapped the valves for every single gas line in the place on full blast a couple minutes earlier. They were designed for heavy-duty flame experiments with Bunsen burners, and I’d left them wide open. I doubted the lab had completely filled up, but it had filled up enough. One shot broke the glass dividing the mercenaries from the ga
s.
The second shot exposed the propane—or butane—or whatever-ane—to a lit flame in the form of muzzle flash.
Mom wasn’t big on chemistry when she home-schooled me, but she did teach me what happens when you expose an explosive gas to an open flame.
Kaboom.
The lab exploded and propelled flame and glass over my head. My ears echoed from the force of the blast, even though I’d covered them with my hands as best I could. After they stopped ringing, I rolled over and looked at what I’d wrought.
Destruction of government property. Whoo-ee.
Lots of destruction of government property.
Flames blazed out of the wrecked windows and billowed up the side of the building to light up the night. I could feel the heat like it was reaching out for me, even though I was a good hundred feet away by this point. It was warm, felt kinda nice for a second. Then it started to get way too hot for my taste. It spread too, and I realized that the explosion had ripped through the structure to leave a lot of the guts of it exposed.
That ought to get someone’s attention. Hopefully local PD, then the FBI, because I could use some help.
I looked toward the entrance to the science lab on both sides, but all I could see was flame, crackling within. I’d blown my pursuers up but good.
I sighed into the wretchedly cold air, staring straight ahead, my eyeballs feeling like they were going to freeze, and then I stumbled to my feet and off into the night, the fire guiding me toward the training building.
And the armory within.
Don’t fuck with me, people. Powers or no, I will hunt your sorry ass down.
29.
Natasya
Natasya stared at the billowing flame in the distance, at the building that had exploded in the night. She stared, mouth slightly agape, and listened. The detonation had broken windows all along the side of the headquarters building, filling the air with the freezing temperatures of outside, causing the sheep that they were overseeing to gasp and cry out.
Ruthless (Out of the Box Book 3) Page 13