Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)

by Crane,Robert J.

  I wasn’t unreasonable, though, he huffed.

  “You were spying on me for Winter at one point,” I said. “That’s reasonable?”

  Bjorn guffawed in my head. The instinct for blood is strong. I look forward to the fights to come, the foes yet to fall. You should kill them.

  “I’m trying to play nice,” I said.

  A losing strategy against these odds, Roberto Bastian said. You used to play smarter than this.

  “It’s not a game anymore,” I said. “Screw up before, I had the authority of the government behind me. Screw up now … they’re against me. Scott Byerly’s whole goal in life is to arrest me.” My face felt like a concrete mask. “President Harmon wants me out of the way.” A little thought flittered across my mind—but no, he couldn’t have had anything to do with this decision. I was no fan of Harmon, but he only had so much sway in Washington, and the SCOTUS ruling had reversed his own policy on meta detentions. This had been his program, through and through, and although I hadn’t caught a statement from the White House, I didn’t see how he could view this as anything other than a major repudiation of his handling of metahuman justice from the big reveal until now.

  You’re driving another man away, Eve Kappler said. It sounded suspiciously like crowing.

  “Well, there are several billion of them yet, so I suppose I don’t feel starved for choice.” That was a lie.

  Not too many lining up to date you, though, she sniffed. Especially of quality.

  “Zack,” I said, “aren’t you offended by that?” I didn’t really care what she’d said, I kinda just wanted her to leave me alone.

  I’m dead and thus exempt from standing in that line anymore, Zack said, but he sounded a little miffed. I can’t really disagree with her. This Hampton guy, his tone got tighter, isn’t bad. Better than some of the other guys who have come and gone in the last few ye—

  “I think my dead ex just made an oblique comment about my sex life,” I said, staring off into the darkness, more amused than irritated. “This isn’t the moment to talk about relationship goals.”

  What do you want to talk about, then? Wolfe entered the conversation. He tended to do that, play lead in the arguments in my head. It was hard to tell whether he was sucking up to me or just fancied himself in charge of the other souls who occupied my skull, like he had seniority because he’d been living there longest.

  “I want to talk about killing these assholes before they cause me problems,” I said, a little emotion causing me to shiver. “But I can’t.”

  You did with Nadine Griffin, Wolfe said, just teasing a little.

  “This is different,” I whispered.

  She was guilty, Wolfe said. They’re guilty. No difference.

  “And if I get caught … I’ll be guilty, too,” I said, imagining a line between me and them. I may have crossed that line a few times before, most recently with the aforementioned Nadine Griffin, but I had purer motives for what I’d done to her. Lives were being destroyed by that woman, and no one could seem to trip her up. So far, the morons who had come after me had been easily tripped, beaten, and subdued. “I’m not doing it,” I said, dismissing the thought. “Let them come to me. If it gets heated and I have to end one of them in self-defense … then that’s what I’ll do. But it has to be a righteous kill.”

  All my kills were righteous, Wolfe said, and I could almost see his grin in the dark.

  “Shut up, Wolfe,” I said, but I wondered if maybe I was irritated at him because he sounded just a little too close to justifying himself the way I was doing.

  12.

  Reed

  “We have to go,” I said, looking into her brown eyes. The skeptical look I was receiving in return didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that I was going to have much luck with this line of argument. Which was funny, because when my sister had told me to get the hell out of Dodge, I’d almost fallen over myself agreeing with her. Not for my sake, but for that of the lovely woman in front of me.

  “Why?” Dr. Isabella Perugini asked. She was sitting comfortably on the couch in our apartment, her copy of this week’s National Enquirer spread open across her beautiful, olive complexioned legs. She was wearing a very short robe, the sort that might normally have given me ideas about something other than fleeing the greater metro area, but right now, getting the hell out of town—and not for a romantic getaway—was the only thing on my mind.

  “Because these assassins are out,” I said, “the ones that blew up Baby—my car.”

  “I know who Baby is,” she gave me a poisonous look, the one she directed at me when she thought I was being stupid. I recognized it from its all-too-frequent employment. “How do you know these assassins will even come after you? Do you have some vendetta between you?”

  I pondered the answer to that one carefully. “Well,” I finally said, “I can’t say for sure that they’re going to consider the contract to kill me unfulfilled, but how badly do you want to find out?”

  “You are so dramatic.” Isabella made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat. “You say your sister is dramatic, I say you both are. It is a family trait.” She leafed through a page of her Enquirer without looking at it, then brought her brown eyes back up to me, all warm and showing the barest edge of worry. “This troubles you, these convicts being released?”

  “The Clarys already made a run at Sienna,” I said. “Three other guys are just sitting outside the office, stalking and waiting. They said Borosky and Shafer are keen on revenge. That worries me, since the last time they came at us, I ended up having to regrow my hair.”

  “You did not look right bald,” she agreed, taking a moment to run fingers through my long, dark hair. It wasn’t as long as hers, but close. She sighed deeply, disentangling her fingers. “I hate to leave because of something like this. How long might we be gone, if we run from these stronzi? And when the next threat comes along? How long will we run then?”

  “It’s not just any threat,” I said. “Remember, Fintan O’Niall and Lorenzo Benedetti were among the guys that released—”

  She looked at me with near inscrutability, which I knew by long experience meant she was mad. “I remember well Lorenzo and Fintan, the happy servants of Anselmo the dickless.”

  Anselmo would not have responded to her favorably for calling him that. Fortunately, he was good and dead. I’d personally made sure he ended up on the ash heap of history. “Well, if you recall, they have something of a grudge against me—or us, possibly—”

  The front door burst off its hinges in a storm of wind, as if Lorenzo had timed it for full dramatic effect.

  He blew in, dressed all in black and with his Aeolus winds swirling around, knocking pictures off the wall and ripping the drapes off the curtain rod. “I am returned for you, Reed Treston,” he said ominously, gliding into the room on a little gust of wind, his bare feet exposed so he could channel his powers through them.

  “Where’s Fintan?” I asked, rising up and putting myself between him and Isabella.

  “I have no need of Fintan,” Lorenzo said, hovering there like Sienna, except he was producing gusts while doing so. “Our concerns are our own, and my anger with you is my own—”

  I put my head back slightly as I looked at the ceiling, and then rolled my eyes all the way back. “Please, Lorenzo … Hera died years ago. Can you please just get rid of these unresolved issues with a therapist like a normal person? This isn’t healthy, dude.” I nodded toward the curtains just as the rod ripped off the wall on one side and clanged against the tile floor. “Also, that drapery? It took forever to get her to decide on a freaking color for that. Literally forever. You could have worked through all your mommy issues with Hera in the time I spent in that store.”

  “I think you should insult your enemies and be wary of insulting your lady,” Isabella said from just behind me, and I was suddenly a lot more scared of her than Lorenzo. Actually, there was nothing that sudden about it; it was a fairly constant state.


  “I’m not insulting you, dear, but you have a difficult time making decisions, especially about design elements,” I said. “I mean, really, it’s a cream color. It goes with beige, no prob—”

  “I wanted it to tie the room together, and there were issues of the other pieces of decor—”

  “I’m just saying, it’s a neutral, it—”

  “ENOUGH!” Lorenzo said, thrusting a hand toward me and blasting me with a tornado of wind that I dispelled with a wave of the hand.

  “—goes with anything,” I said. “It felt like you were agonizing over it just for the sake of agonizing, you know? I just don’t like to see you get all worked up over—”

  “You will die!” Lorenzo said, and he blasted at me again. I dispelled his furious gale once more.

  “—it’s just not that big a deal. A few shades in either direction and we’d still be good.”

  Isabella was watching me with wide eyes. “I thought you were worried about this man.”

  “Fintan’s not with him, so no,” I said, barely giving Lorenzo consideration. I was still watching him out of the corner of my eye, but a lot of my angst had died out.

  “You will fear me!” Lorenzo shouted, desperate for attention. “When last we clashed, I nearly killed you!”

  I half-turned back to him. “When last we clashed … it was a few years ago. I’ve trained a lot since then. Learned a few things. I’ve leveled up, Lorenzo. Wanna see?” He stared at me in inchoate rage, trying to summon words, but I kicked at him from halfway across the room. It probably looked funny, until I blasted a gust through the bottom of my foot and my loafer shot off and blew across the room, guided by a couple of minor crosswinds to hit him unerringly in the nose. The snap of bone was pretty loud, and his hands flew up as the blood started to slide down.

  I caught the loafer in a crosswind and blew it back around to clap him lightly in the back of the head, right in the occipital notch. Then I brought it around again to slap him in the face. Finally I vortexed it back across the room to land in front of me, and I slipped it back on while he stared at me in impotent fury. “To quote my sister, ‘Wrong house,’ Lorenzo. Wrong guy.”

  There was a red mark on his cheek where I’d shoe slapped him, and he held his hand to it. “It is you who have made the error, Reed,” Lorenzo said, puffing a little as he pulled his hand away from his red cheek.

  That didn’t sit well with me. “Oh, really?” I asked. “How is—”

  The front window exploded with glass as something leapt through and collided with me before I could do much more than push Isabella back and raise an arm to shield my face. It was a rookie mistake, trusting Lorenzo when he’d said Fintan wasn’t with him. He’d seemed so earnestly angry, though, so sure of his ability to take me out solo, I figured he was telling the truth.

  I realized, as Fintan the Firbolg collided with me in a frenzy of battle rage, that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. So much worse even than that time I’d tried wearing skinny jeans because I thought they would make me look cool.

  Fintan was atop me a second later, straddling me with all his weight. His flat nose was right in my face, and for a brief and horrible second, I thought he was about to tear my throat out with his teeth. His breath reeked like he hadn’t had a meal in a while, and his last one seemed like it might have been the ass of a vulture.

  Then my hours and hours of training with Sienna kicked in and I reacted instinctively. We’d trained for these sorts of scenarios, and my sister took a sadistic sort of glee in overpowering me and making me cope with it. I’d never had a sibling who could put my head in the toilet or rub my face in the carpeting until I got rug burn—at least not as a child. I’d had it done to me plenty as an adult, though, when I got my ass regularly handed to me by my little sister.

  My shirt rippled as I channeled a powerful gust out through my stomach. It was everything I had, thrown into one good burst, and Fintan shot into the air and smashed into the ceiling, leaving man-shaped cracks. He didn’t looked particularly harmed by his flight, but his flat face showed the signs of surprise as he started to come back down, and I greeted him with a fist to the face and another to the gut. Then I kicked him sideways and he slammed into the wall of the living room before he could tear me to pieces.

  A gust of wind hit me from the side, and I slid a few feet before I managed to reverse it. My more powerful gust sent Lorenzo crashing into the drywall behind the front door. He folded at the midsection as he went into the wall, his arms and legs sticking out like overgrown weeds in a vegetable patch.

  “GRAAARGH!” Fintan shouted, appearing above me again. He wasn’t slow, but he seemed to be acting on instinct rather than the more careful calculation I’d learned from my sister pummeling my ass until I started to think during a fight. I blew a gust from my leg and slid in a tight arc around, my shirt gliding on the tile as I took Fintan’s legs from beneath him in a sweep. I fired a couple quick gusts from my hand and flipped back to my feet, then shot another that sent him sliding into the baseboard with a crack. Again, it didn’t hurt him much, but he did look slightly dazed.

  “Sorry,” I said to Isabella as I channeled a gust in reverse and pulled Fintan toward me, along with a bookshelf, a dozen heavy books with Italian titles on their spines, and a few pictures that had been hung to give the room a warmer, homier feel. I dodged aside and sent Fintan back out onto the lawn because I was sick of messing up our modest decorating efforts while I was defending myself. “Stay here, I’ll be back once they’re both dealt with.” And with a flick of the hand I shot the recovering Lorenzo out the door in a gust that ripped the front door off its already flagging hinges.

  I launched myself out onto the lawn and came down with a gust punch right to Fintan’s abdomen. It was a thing I’d been working on, channeling a wind in a tightly focused cone so it hit hard and fast, and on a small amount of surface area. Augustus had given me the idea, using his dirt projections as spears from time to time. I brought another gust punch around and caught Lorenzo beneath the chin as he started to rise. His legs got watery weak and he plopped back to his ass. I could tell he was dazed from the beating, which was a pleasant reversal of what had happened the last time we’d clashed.

  I turned back to deal with Fintan, but he was already on his feet. He launched at me, and even though I tried to gust him away, he turned his body enough to deflect it. He slashed along my belly with his fingernails, and a fiery pain cut across my guts. It stunned me, paralyzed me, and my legs gave out from the pain.

  Fintan took me to my knees, and then he came and smashed me across the face. My right eye closed involuntarily, stars blew across my field of vision, and I lost a few seconds of my life. When I came back to myself, Fintan hit me again, then again, and I barely felt either blow. I could tell by the way the night rocked around me, my house and the ones across the street swimming into view and then out again, that he was pummeling the hell out of me. I hit the lawn and stared up at the night sky as he railed on me again, and something in the side of my face gave way.

  I put a hand up, and he started to come at me again, feral savagery all I could see, and I blew him lightly from the ground, but only a foot or so. I felt like I was floating, too, which was a measure of how bad a shape I must have been in. My hand shook trying to keep him aloft, out of reach, so he couldn’t tear me up any more, but I knew this wouldn’t last long. He was swimming against the tide of my power, teeth bared, furious, ready to rip me apart the moment his feet touched the earth.

  A thundercrack exploded in the quiet suburban night, a flash like lightning preceding the sound by less than a second. Fintan spun in midair, and another crack followed, and another, flashes lighting the sky. Blood flecked my face like a warm rain, and Fintan’s belly was open, guts spilling out, horror and anguish lighting his face. Then another thunderclap bellowed forth and Fintan’s face disappeared in a shower of blood and bone and muscle, and he went limp as he fell out of my field of vision.

  I stared into t
he dark night for only a moment before Isabella’s face came swimming into view. “Oh, Reed,” she breathed, sounding terrified in a way that a doctor never should. Doctors were supposed to have seen this and worse, and her lack of professional distance caused my heart to drop. She tossed her shotgun aside and her hands found their way to my face.

  “Still … think I’m being … dramatic?” I asked, but I didn’t get a chance to see her response before the night faded before me and I lost consciousness.

  13.

  Sienna

  “Reed!” I shouted as I came in for a rough landing on my brother’s lawn. Dr. Perugini was crouched over him on the stretcher, ambulance and police lights flashing blue and red and white against the jagged shards of the shattered front window of his house.

  I craned my neck to look over the shoulders of the paramedics who were working over my brother, and Perugini gave me a sidelong look as I lifted off the ground again for a second, trying to see his face. When I did, I let out a gasp. I couldn’t help it.

  “He will be fine,” Perugini said brusquely, with her usual lack of sunny disposition.

  “But his face—” I said.

  “It will heal,” she said with more confidence than I felt. It was true that metas could heal all manner of damage done to us, but Reed was an Aeolus, which was not nearly as high on the power scale as I was. I could regrow a burnt-off limb even before I got Wolfe’s powers. With Reed, I wasn’t really sure what kind of damage he could recover from before scars started forming. “He will need time, though,” she said, and the paramedics lifted the gurney up from the ground with a click as it settled at wheeling height.

  I cast a look at the mess on the lawn. I saw at least one corpse that I didn’t recognize because it was missing a face, but there was another guy all cuffed up and trussed, out like a light. Him I recognized as Lorenzo Benedetti, one of Anselmo Serafini’s pieces of Italian trash. Another paramedic was tending to him, and he had an IV going right into Lorenzo’s arm. “Is that—” I started to ask.