Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)

by Crane,Robert J.

  His smile grew wider, and I felt reassured as he delivered the cherry on top to his speech, a warm reassurance in a world that had felt suddenly cold. “You do it because protecting people is important to you.” He grew quiet for a long minute, and when he spoke, he sounded serious. “You do it … because it’s who you are, Sienna.”

  7.

  A couple hours later, I had transferred from Dr. Zollers’s couch to my own. My attention drifting, I half absorbed the constant analysis being fed to me by the cable news channel on my TV. The reporter on screen at the moment was framed by wooded land in the background, and the chyron of streaming words at the bottom proclaimed, “METAHUMAN DETAINEES RELEASED FROM MINNESOTA PRISON.” It said other things, too, and so did the reporter, but I barely noticed them as I lifted a margarita glass to my lips and took a long sip of salty goodness after first raising a toast to the moron jabbering on the screen. “Here’s to you, decision makers,” I said. “I hope you’re wiser than I am. Cuz releasing all the meta criminals sounds like a stupid idea to me, but I guess I’m kinda drunk.”

  There was a click of a key in the door, and I turned my head in time to see it open and Ariadne appear in shadow, her red hair highlighted by the fading rays of the sun. “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said, letting out a sigh of very obvious relief as she shut it behind her.

  “Where else would I be?” I wondered as I sipped my margarita. It was homemade, from a mix and a lot of tequila. “Work seems kinda pointless at the moment.”

  “Well, that’s where I was,” she said with some annoyance. “I just—I heard this morning, and when the rest of the gang came back without you … well, I worried how’d you’d react to all this.”

  “Did you try calling?”

  “About fifty times, yeah.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, swirling the ice in the bottom of my wide-mouthed glass. “What did I do with my phone?” I shifted in my seat and sent a probing hand down the back of my pants. I fished it out of my pocket and pulled it up to reveal the screen lit with about twenty missed calls. “According to this, you overstated it by thirty.”

  “Well, it was a lot,” Ariadne said, peering over my shoulder at the phone.

  “Why were you worried how I would react to all this?” I asked, tossing my phone on the table beside me. “Clearly I’m fine.”

  “Because drinking a margarita big enough to fill a toilet bowl is ‘fine’?”

  “I also went to see Dr. Zollers,” I said, raising my glass to hide my mouth. “Whatever, I don’t question your coping mechanisms.” I paused as something occurred to me. “And, hey, these are your margarita glasses!”

  “I’m not questioning anything,” she said. “I’m just worried. I don’t want to see you do anything rash.”

  “I’m not going to do much of anything at all, thanks,” I said, tipping back my glass. “I’m just gonna sit here, finish my drink, maybe have another, and wait for the world to explode so I can say, ‘Haha, no thanks, for real just help yourselves.’”

  She sagged a little. “You’re not … really going to do that, are you?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But sometimes it’s fun to imagine you’re more important than you are. It’s a good salve for wounded pride, you know.” I sipped my margarita. “And so is this.”

  Ariadne made her way around me toward the kitchen where she dropped her bag, then hung up her keys on the ring over the counter. Light from the rear windows of the house illuminated her fiery red hair here as well, and she looked stern. “You know what else is good for that?” she asked. “Sensible action.”

  “We don’t do that sort of shit around here, thank you very much.” I snorted. “Sensible action. Puh-lease. That’s a contradiction in terms to this girl—”

  I was going to say more, drunkenly expound upon the idea of my role in society as both arbiter of justice and also occasional dragon of furious vengeance, but I didn’t get a chance to finish waxing rhapsodic because a long shadow stretched through my living room window and then the wall exploded inward.

  I held tight to my margarita glass as the window shards dusted my face and pieces of wood and drywall plaster plumed into the air in a cloud of dust.

  “Hellooooo,” came a drawling, country-fried voice that was filled with raw anger and dumb amusement all in one. A hulking shadow swayed into my living room, followed by another. Sunlight glinted off the steel skins of the two morons who’d just had the raw nerve to invade my living room. A couple more feminine figures followed behind, one of them coughing and hacking at the dust in the air. “Anybody home?” came the bullhorn voice again.

  “And you were worried how I’d react?” I tossed back at Ariadne, thankfully far from the front of the house, her eyes and the top of her head barely visible where she was ducking behind the kitchen counter. I settled my gaze on the intruders who’d just burst through the front of my home, and the surviving members of the Clary family—newly freed from the Cube—locked their ratlike eyes on me through the dust.

  “We got a bone to pick with you, Sienna Nealon,” one of them—I think it was Clyde, Jr., but it could have been Buck. I couldn’t keep track of them, especially with their skin all covered up in steel coating.

  “You want to fight me again, you miserable little skidmarks?” I tossed back the last of my margarita in one gulp before tossing aside the glass. It shattered against the wall (because why not?), and I floated upright out of the chair, secretly happy for an outlet with which to vent all the frustrations of the day. “Let’s rumble, you shitstains.”

  8.

  Alcohol plus the events of the day conspired to make me angry enough to drop kick a Clary or four, and lucky me, here they were. Like a pizza with all the right toppings showing up to your door when you’re hungry, but you didn’t order it. (That happened to me once.) Four Clarys, two fists, no waiting.

  The two big guys bum rushed me, because of course they would. They thought with their tiny metal dongs and not anything inside their skulls. Ma Clary had been the brains of that family; the rest were a bunch of bottom-of-the-barrel yokels for whom I spared all the consideration I might for a pile of dog crap. I don’t care where it comes from, what it looks like, but if it gets on the bottom of my shoe, I will go ape shit.

  I rocketed at high speed against the first of them, slowing and darting between his legs. He tried to track and follow me, but he was a little too slow, in terms of both coordination and cognitive process. I grabbed his ankles and gave a solid, Wolfe-powered yank. His face met the carpet, and then I grabbed his legs and suplexed him into the girl standing behind him. Her bones crunched against his steel skin, and whatever her power or name might have been, it no longer mattered, cuz she was out of the fight and hopefully dead.

  What? It was technically self-defense, and in spite of whatever bravado I might have projected to these four numbskulls, the last thing I needed right now was her to rise again and stab me to death while I was tangling with the other three.

  “You li’l bitch!” the other Clary female screamed as I came back up after my suplex. Her hair snaked forward, a living thing. Ugh, I hated Medusa types. Her hair wrapped around me, snug and tight around my arms, rising up to my neck like a noose.

  Did I say, “like a noose”?

  I lit off the Gavrikov power and she screamed as I burned my way through her snakey locks. I reached up and grabbed her hair just north of where I burned it, dragging her toward me. I directed the fire out of my hands and up her hair, and watched it climb up her locks. She screamed and danced, somewhat trapped by the way I was holding her hair as the flames crawled toward her head. I kept up the fire and she tore free and fell into the bushes, screaming and rolling as she tried to stop the flames from burning her scalp. I bet it was going to leave her with a dandruff problem regardless.

  “What the helllll—” the last of the Clarys left standing was another of those stoneskin mooks, and he apparently had some deathly slow reflexes, because he’d just stood there and
stared as I ran through three of his relatives like White Castle mixed with Ex-Lax. I didn’t waste a second waiting for his ineptitude to vanish. I lunged forward with two fingers extended and gave him the ol’ Three Stooges right to the eyes, sinking them in up to the knuckles. “AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!” he screamed.

  I could have killed him with a simple release of firepower, but I decided—or maybe the alcohol did—to be merciful. I turned and used my super strength to pick him up by the eye sockets, ignoring his mewling cries, and rammed him and his metal head right into his brother/cousin/lover/all of the above. The resulting sound was like ringing a gong. It echoed through the neighborhood and sounded a little like the noise Screamin’ Amber had produced back in Portland before I shut her mouth.

  “Unghhh,” one of the male Clarys moaned as the sound of their stupid skulls clanging together died down. For good measure, I banged them together again, and it produced another rich, resonant tone. It sounded kinda good, like maybe the start of a classic metal song, so I did it about eight more times, until they stopped moaning.

  “Okay, I think they’re unconscious, you can stop now!” Ariadne shouted from the kitchen. I looked back. She was standing there with a pained look on her face, fingers jammed deep in her ears.

  I clanged them together once more for good measure to bring my new composition to a close, and as I finished their skin lost its metallic luster, shifting back to flesh. “Now I’m done, I think.” But I smacked them together again. What? It wasn’t like they had brains to damage.

  “What about that one?” Ariadne pointed over my shoulder and I looked back to find Medusa Clary (I would plead drunkenness, but honestly, I never cared what these idiots were named) staggering across my lawn, still brushing lit embers out of her hair.

  “Good call,” I said, and took her legs out from beneath her with a light net. She thumped hard on the ground and I cemented her to the grass with another net before covering the other three in the same. The other female Clary was in particularly bad shape, having caught her cousin/brother/father/lover to the face, but I couldn’t tell a difference between how she looked now and how she’d looked before.

  “They came here to kill you, didn’t they?” Ariadne said, stepping through the gaping hole in the front of our house, rubbing her hands against the arms of her dark suit, which was now covered in dust.

  “I doubt they came to play tiddlywinks,” I said, dulled by more margaritas than had probably been wise. She was right, after all. They’d come here to kill me, and it was just my good luck that they were so dumb that they thought a frontal assault against me was the best way to settle their grudge. Too bad for them I settled their damned hash.

  “Sienna,” Ariadne said quietly, connecting dots I didn’t really want to connect. “These people … they’re—”

  “Stupid?” Sirens were blaring in the distance, but I didn’t care. Let the morons wake up, I sorta prayed. Giving them another dose of hell before the cops came to take them away would be a blessing for me, really.

  “Well, yes, obviously, being related to Clyde,” Ariadne said, “but that’s not what I meant.” She hesitated.

  “What did you mean?” I slurred my words, and she frowned at me. “What? Don’t judge. I’ve hard a had day. Or had a hard day. Something.”

  “The government,” Ariadne said, choosing her words carefully, “they just … emptied the Cube.”

  “I damned well know that, Ariadne,” I said, impatient. I looked at my hand and found my knuckles bloody and covered in ash. I also had rings of fire burned through my clothing where I’d been forced to torch my way through Medusa’s hair. “I was watching it on TV before the Tweedle-fricking-moron family circus came busting in. What about it?”

  She took a slow breath as the sirens got closer and closer, and in the distance tires squealed as the cops came charging in, ready to sort out this disturbance in suburbia. I belched and the strong aroma of margarita came up, flooding its way through my nose and burning my nostrils. Ariadne looked a little put off then steadied herself, as if recapturing the thought she’d had before I so rudely interrupted her. “They came running right away … as soon as they got out, didn’t they?”

  “Because they’re idiots, yes,” I said, brushing the dust off my clothes and ignoring the burn holes. Maybe a seamstress could fix them; what did I know about tailoring?

  “But there are more,” she said.

  “Yes, there are always more idiots, it’s an iron law of the universe, I’m afraid—”

  “I mean,” Ariadne said, so firmly that I couldn’t help but look at her as she spoke, “there are more metas with a grudge against you, Sienna.” She swallowed, and I could see it work its way down her thin throat like she’d swallowed a cherry. “Ones that aren’t as stupid or bullish as the Clarys. Ones that are smart, and calculating, and clever, who won’t just come running the moment the cell door opened for them.”

  My brow furrowed as I stared at her. She was starting to make sense, but I was just a little too drunk to be able to put it together. “Wait … what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying …” she swallowed heavily again, and I could almost taste the fear wafting off her beneath that dignified perfume she wore like a cloud to repel people, “… that the Clarys probably aren’t the last people with a grudge who are about to try to kill you.

  “They’re the first.”

  9.

  “I thought we were done for the day,” Augustus grouched as he and Kat filed into the conference room in our Eden Prairie offices. There wasn’t a sign out front, but we were a registered detective agency in addition to being for hire to whichever state of the union wanted to pay us to deal with their meta problems. Hell, we’d even done a few freebies for local municipalities that couldn’t get their state to pay us. “You know, after we let those cats out of the bag from last night.”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to call people ‘cats’ unless you want this to turn into a seventies blaxploitation flick,” Reed said seriously, leaning back in his chair at a forty-five degree angle.

  “Well, that’s racist,” Augustus said, slumping into his own chair with a grunt. “Also, this office being way the hell out in suburbia is, too. Could you not pick a place closer to downtown and campus? Not that I don’t enjoy Minneapolis rush hour, but—wait, no, I don’t enjoy Minneapolis rush hour. And I was raised in Atlanta, so I know a little something about rush hour.”

  “Hi everybody,” Kat said, breezing in from behind Augustus. Her arms were laden with shopping bags, causing Ariadne to frown. I wondered idly where she’d been shopping, then remembered I didn’t really care what Kat did in her off time. “What’s going on?” She offloaded the bags with a thump, telling me there was more weight to them than seemed obvious. Sometimes even I forgot that in spite of her stick-figure size, Kat was a meta, with all the strength that came with that.

  “Sienna was nearly assassinated by the Clary family a little over an hour ago,” Ariadne said, a little more theatrically than I thought the circumstances warranted.

  “What?” Reed leaned forward so fast I heard the chair’s spring break. He hadn’t even asked what was going on before Kat and Augustus had arrived for our little impromptu meeting, probably figuring it was a tactical assessment of the sort I tended to call when we were hunting a fugitive or something.

  “I think you’re overselling it with the ‘nearly,’” I said. “They really didn’t get that close to succeeding at anything other than putting a massive hole in my wall.”

  “What happened?” Augustus asked.

  “Yes, what happened?” Kat asked, leaning forward with what smelled like a false sense of worry, like she was playing to cameras that weren’t even here. She seemed to be doing that a lot more lately, now that she was filming her stupid show again.

  “It was pretty simple, really,” I said, cutting off Ariadne before she had a chance to make things sound worse. “They came, I saw, I beat the ever-loving shit out of their hillbilly
asses. Took less than five minutes. NBD.”

  “It’s a big deal when newly released prisoners make your house their first stop,” Reed said, his voice heavy with concern.

  “Not when they get knocked flat in less time than it takes me to shovel the driveway and walk.” I hated doing that. Even with meta strength and speed.

  “Aww, hell, it’s gonna start snowing again soon, isn’t it? This town …” Augustus seemed lost in his own thoughts.

  “Sienna was nearly murdered tonight,” Reed said, looking accusingly down the table at him.

  “I kinda doubt it, based on her reaction,” Augustus said. “Did you even have to heal yourself?” This he directed at me.

  “No,” I said.

  “She’s reaching peak badass, I’m not worried about her,” Augustus said, waving it off. “Some fool messes with her, they’re heading for the morgue. But she ain’t the only one with enemies that got out today, and not all of us are nearly as cool as Sienna Nealon.”

  “Hey, I didn’t kill the Clarys,” I said. “They’re all in custody again, and this time we have fresh charges to make stick. Attempted murder, assault, destruction of property—”

  “What do you figure they’ll set the bail at?” Reed murmured darkly.

  “They were living on fraudulently obtained Social Security when we found them, so I imagine wherever it’s set, it’ll probably be out of reach,” I said. “If they’re not denied outright. This is a case of attempted murder, after all.”

  I heard the front doors open and someone came in just out of sight of the conference room doors. I knew the footsteps, though, the stride and cadence. Our visitor was wearing boots, and in the silence as we waited I could tell he was walking in a measured way.

  “Hey, Hampton,” Reed called, looking unamused and not taking his eyes off me.

  Jeremy Hampton appeared at the doorway, looking formal and professional. “Sorry if I’m late. I had to make my way over from Woodbury, and—”