In that plane was almost everyone in the world that I cared about, and the few who weren’t in it were leaving Minneapolis-St. Paul. Giving me room to work. Giving me space to breathe, to stalk, to hunt.
To do what I did best.
The plane turned west, and I followed a few hundred yards back, eyes sweeping in front of me and behind. I’d watch them until I felt sure that they were clear of Cassidy’s—or whoever was orchestrating this—clutches. Then it was going to be time for me to turn around and head home.
Time to go to work.
18.
I breezed into a diner on the west side of the cities a little after sunup, half frozen from my flight across South Dakota and shivering just a scosh. The hostess waved me up to the counter without bothering to ask if I wanted a table, because I came to this restaurant fairly often and I never wanted a table unless I was with someone. The place was somewhat crowded, TVs going where they hung behind the counter, stupid news networks doing their usual “Feed the audience scary bullshit until they become too paralyzed to change the channel” routine. In this case it was footage of all the metas being released from the Cube, apparently taken yesterday. Maybe they meant it to seem like Suicide Squad, but it looked more like dark SUVs rolling past the cameras with only brief glimpses of some of the faces of my greatest hits barely visible in the tinted windows.
“What’ll you have, hun?” Karen was manning the counter. I knew her from coming in before. She was of the old school of waitresses, probably nearing fifty, and had clearly been doing this for a long while. She knew me, and probably knew who I was, though she was too Minnesota Nice to comment on it. She just treated me like any other customer, and I kept coming back because of it.
“Coffee,” I said, and she had an empty cup in front of me almost instantly. “A world of coffee.”
“Preference on kind?” she asked.
“I honestly don’t care,” I said, “as long as it’s coffee. It can be unfair trade, sprayed with every toxic chemical known to man, genetically engineered from sawdust and sarin gas, harvested by child slave labor, and brewed in the skins of the innocent, so long as it’s not decaf.”
She took this in with bleak amusement. “I don’t think we have any of that.”
“Just as well,” I said as she tipped her carafe to fill up my mug with a steaming helping of black coffee, “I probably don’t need the guilt that would come with it.”
“Rough night?” She kept her eyes on the coffee as she poured.
“I haven’t slept in a couple days,” I said. “Just got back into town yesterday afternoon, in time to get some shit news. To celebrate that, I did some drinking, then I got in a fight. Then I had to say goodbye to … some people.” I picked up the cup and burned my tongue as I poured it down. Wolfe, I commanded, and my tongue and esophagus felt better instantly. “Anyway … it’s been a day.”
“Sounds like,” Karen said, darting a look at the TV over her shoulder. “You see this?”
“Hard to miss,” I said with a fair dose of irony.
“Can’t believe they’re just lettin’ ’em go,” she said, close to mutinous. “World’s gone crazy. Hardened criminals. Why don’t they just open the gates at Stillwater Prison, too, let everybody out?”
“Might be less dangerous,” I agreed, downing another gulp of coffee.
“You see what happened out there this morning?” She waved a hand toward 394, which was about a hundred yards out the front door. “Cops came in this morning, said they identified two bodies. Two of the prisoners that got out yesterday.” I wondered about then if she maybe didn’t know who I was, or if she was just really slick and fishing for info. “Figure they were chasing somebody. Somebody with powers, and that somebody got the better of them.”
“You don’t say.”
“I guess there were a couple other incidents already, too,” Karen went on, leaning an elbow on the counter and looking up at the TV. “Attacks, they said. They shoulda just kept these assholes locked up forever.” She turned around on me, looking aghast. “Not that I’m against metas or anything. My brother-in-law’s sister is one, and she’s the sweetest thing, but …” She shuddered and shook her head. “These ones seem pretty damned irredeemable. Doesn’t seem right to let ’em loose after what some of them have done.”
“I can’t disagree,” I said, holding in the rest of my thoughts.
“You know what you want?” Karen asked, and I thought about it for a second. “The usual?”
“Sure, let’s make it easy,” I agreed. My brain was flatlined anyway, tired after all the running and fighting and bad news and crushing disappointment of these last couple days. Also, jet lag. And non-jet lag.
“Coming right up,” and she wrote out my usual order on a little slip. It was a fried egg sandwich with oozy yolk, tomato, mayo and avocado on thick slabs of sourdough toast with a side of lovely fried potatoes. I drooled as I watched her slap the order under the pass to the kitchen and someone breezed by to collect it.
I sat there, lost in thought, my brain slowed to a crawl by fatigue as I tried to catalog everyone who had reared their ugly heads at us in the last day. Lorenzo Benedetti and the four Clarys were in custody, Garrett Breedlowe, Tasha Breedlowe Kern, and Fintan O’Niall—none whom I knew well—were all dead, removed from the board by my friends.
That left, by my reckoning, a shit ton of bad guys either probably stalking me or else out of sight, status undetermined. For all I knew, Timothy Logan had already banded his four assholes back together and decided to switch their objective from robbing a lab in Oregon to plastering my brains all over the sidewalk as revenge for ruining their plans. It was a long shot, but I couldn’t rule it out. Plus, if Thunder Hayes and his cronies were to be believed, Rosanna Borosky and Michael Shafer (a.k.a., Iron Tooth) were definitely intent on killing me. With Cassidy out there, and Eric Simmons possibly still with her, and a goodly number of other associated assholes just floating in the wind, I wasn’t too happy about where I was standing in all this. Not that I objected to being surrounded, but I felt both surrounded and blind. Not a great combo, especially for someone as powerful as I was, because lashing out blindly in all directions meant you might just hit someone you didn’t mean to. In a city of 3.5 million people, that was a lot of collateral damage I needed to avoid.
“You watching this?” Karen asked as she came back by. I stirred and realized she was talking about the news. A morning show had replaced the taped feeds of the prisoner release, and the volume tab was sliding up. I realized Karen had the remote in her hand, and suddenly my meta hearing kicked in to deafening proportions as I focused in on the TV and she kept turning it up.
“—new allegations this morning,” the hostess was saying, staring right into the camera with that grave concern mingled with morning pep, “of prisoner abuse in the metahuman containment facility in Minneapolis as well as wrongful imprisonment claims. I have with me as my guest Owen Traverton.” The camera panned out to show the hostess sitting on the couch next to a skinny white guy who looked like he’d been whacked with a rolled-up newspaper a few too many times. In fact, he hadn’t been hit with one nearly enough, in my opinion. “Owen has spent the last eight months incarcerated in what is colloquially known as ‘The Cube.’ Good to have you here with us, Owen.”
Owen twitched. “It’s good to be here. It’s actually good to be anywhere now that I’m out of that …” He shuddered, leaving his cruel torment to our imaginations.
“That son of a bitch,” I said, not even bothering to hold it under my breath.
“You know him?” Karen asked, not even giving me a glance, riveted by the scene unfolding before us.
“Thought I did,” I said. “He’s a dog.” I meant that mostly literally; Owen Traverton was an animal shapechanger who had posed as my dog for several months in order to spy on me for Cassidy and the Clary family.
“—and so you were—you feel—wrongfully incarcerated?” the hostess asked, full of sympathy for poor, poo
r abused Owen. I wished he were right in front of me so I could have whapped with something harder than a newspaper, like my fist. I wasn’t at all in favor of animal abuse, but he could have turned into dog form, stared at me with sad dog eyes, and I still would have smashed his face in.
“They had no reason to hold me,” Owen said, poor puppy dog eyes looking oh-so-beleaguered. “Sienna Nealon threw me in there before she quit working for the government. The guards said when they released me that they didn’t even have a reason recorded on my file.” He shook, ever so slightly. “She left the government months ago, and no one ever even asked me why I was in there. They had no idea.”
“That’s appalling,” the hostess said, and her mouth open to convey shock and disbelief. “So you’re saying they had no cause to hold you?”
“That’s what the guards told me when they let me out,” he said. “That’s what my lawyer said, too, when he got a chance to look at the file. If not for this court decision, they might have kept me imprisoned there … forever.” He poured it on, like a terrible actor, hamming it up for the camera. I restrained myself from throwing my silverware, which was the only thing within easy reach, at the TV. It wasn’t easy.
“Yeah, I just bet,” Karen scoffed, turning the volume back down. “You just happened to get thrown in jail for no reason. None at all.” She shook her head and turned back to me.
“I hope other people see it the way you do,” I said, taking another long drink of my coffee.
Something jangled, loud enough to get my attention, and I swept the restaurant with my eyes before realizing it was the TV again, and one of those “BREAKING NEWS” alert noises had just played, interrupting the sad-sack-fest with Owen the dirty dog. The screen switched back to a studio with a newscaster behind the desk, this time one of those distinguished gentlemen with a voice you could trust. Or so you were meant to believe.
“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you breaking news,” he said, looking right into the screen and speaking, leaning heavy on his solemn credibility. “Two sources within the Harmon administration have confirmed for us this morning something that’s been long rumored—” A picture flashed up in the corner of the screen. A picture of me. “—That in the closing days of Sienna Nealon’s war on Sovereign, she received a presidential pardon for several murders she’d committed before that fight’s conclusion. We go live to Robin Judd in Minneapolis, who has more—”
Karen didn’t look at me, didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “Well, hun,” she said, shaking her head, “I guess today’s not going to be any better for you than the last one.” And she filled my cup again.
19.
After breakfast, I headed to the office, circling the area around it a few times. It was hardly a conclusive sweep, but I didn’t see any obvious evidence that it was being watched—no unattended cars I didn’t recognize, no mysterious silhouettes in the windows in surrounding buildings. It was just after sunup, and everything seemed to be as it was supposed to be, at least in the area surrounding my office.
Unfortunately, one of the things that was apparently now normal was the presence of Thunder Hayes, Bronson McCartney and Louis Terry at the ice cream parlor next door, which wasn’t even open yet. I came down for a landing just out from the overhang where the three of them were all chortling at some joke, prompting them all to gawk at me.
“Morning, boys,” I said, pretty skint on amusement.
“Heyyyy,” Hayes said, lifting a red Solo cup to me in salute. “Heard you got problems, Nealon.”
“Oh, yeah?” I watched him and his cronies carefully. They didn’t seem to be making any overtly threatening moves, but that was hardly conclusive with this rabble. “How’d you hear that?”
“With my ears,” Hayes said, and McCartney and Terry burst out laughing. I let them have their moment, and as Hayes started to settle down, he said, “It was on the TV at the diner down the road.” He looked faux-earnest for a second. “Murder? Really?”
“You seem surprised,” I said. “As though you didn’t watch me empty Crow Vincent’s head right in front of you.”
Hayes froze, ruddy skin flushing red. “I do recall that. That was damned vicious.”
“He was asking for it,” I said lightly, looking them all over. “Kinda like you, right now.”
“Ohh, scary,” McCartney said, the big lug. “You gonna attack us?”
“You know how I know you’re stupid, McCartney?” I asked, sidling up to him and putting my foot right on the bench next to him. I leaned forward, and what with me being so short and him being so tall, I had to look up to smile sweetly in his eyes. “Because you know who I am, you know at least a little of what I’m capable of, what I’ve done to you and to others—when I was restrained, which I’m fast approaching not being—and you’re still here taunting me.”
“Maybe we’re just counting on the better angels of your nature to spare us poor, innocent souls who haven’t done anything wrong,” Hayes said with a sneer.
“I wouldn’t count, if I were you,” I said. “You’re not smart enough to do it properly.”
“Yeouch,” Terry said. “Hurtful words.”
“That’s the least hurtful thing I’ve got at my disposal,” I said, pulling my foot off the bench and turning to head to my office. I froze; there was shattered glass all across the concrete in front of the door.
“Oh, yeah,” Hayes said, following my gaze. “Forgot to tell you about that.”
“You broke into my office?” I felt the heat rising.
“Wasn’t us, honest,” Hayes said. “You should call the cops, I’ll swear a statement. ‘It was a wild raccoon, officer! Ain’t never seen nothing like it!’” McCartney and Terry were guffawing again, and I resisted the urge to turn their heads inside out.
I turned around to see them sharing a good laugh. “Wild raccoon, huh?”
“Go check your security cameras,” Hayes said, nodding, “you’ll see it’s true. I was here the whole time, watching. So was Terry. We heard an awful racket inside, and then the damned thing came busting out the front window. Skittered off down the street.”
I looked right at McCartney, the animal shape-changer. “And you didn’t see it?”
“I was in the bathroom down the road,” McCartney said, sneering right at me with a defiance that sent my blood pressure soaring. “Didn’t get back ’til it was over.”
“What a magnificent coincidence,” I whispered, my hand shaking at my side.
“Whoa, there,” Hayes said, “careful. You wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the law, trust me.” His face stretched in a nasty smile. “I assure you that their accommodations for meta lawbreakers are anything but first class.”
“Well, as you’ve just proven, Hayes,” I said, probably sounding a little choked, “you really need a witness in order to prove wrongdoing these days.” My lip twitched at the end, and I could feel interest rise in my head as Wolfe and Bjorn practically started panting.
“I think we might have a few,” Hayes said coolly as tires squealed behind me.
I spun in time to see a news van coming down the street. It was probably the first of many that would be coming, and I cursed myself for not vaporizing these three earlier. It wasn’t going to be too long before I found myself under siege here, a hundred cameras watching my every move.
“Buh bye!” Terry said, making a little wave with his fingers.
“See you later!” Hayes called after me as I stalked off toward my broken door. The front window was shattered, too.
“I should think so,” I said, casting them a nasty smile that erased Hayes’s, at least. I dodged into my office through the broken front door, out of sight of those three and trying to decide my next move.
20.
I kept the reporters outside my broken windows with threats of arrests for trespassing, the only non-violent means I had at my disposal. They filmed and snapped their pictures from outside the office, every word, every sound audible to me through the broken w
indows of the office. McCartney had busted them all, that crotchstain, and it left nothing but open air between me and my newfound stalkers in the press.
I tried to tune out their broadcasts from where I was sitting in a back conference room in the interior of the building, watching the stupid news with the sound muted. I didn’t want the vultures to know I was watching them as they were watching me, but it gave me a pretty good view of my front door, side of the building, and even the rear entrance, which was useful since McCartney had also trashed the security cameras while in feral raccoon mode. I’d watched the footage up to that point, and he had indeed done it as a raccoon.
The reporters started yelling questions at someone outside, and I heard glass crunching underfoot as an unknown person brushed aside the front door blinds and stepped into the office’s waiting area.
“Unless you want to get arrested for trespassing,” I yelled for the thousandth time in the last two hours, “get the hell out!”
“I need to hire you,” a quiet voice came back to me. A familiar voice which immediately put me on edge. Soft footsteps worked their way down the hall, and I drew Shadow, holding the barrel up in anticipation as Timothy Logan’s head came slowly around the corner.
He took in the gun pointed at his head, seemed to calculate the odds on it blowing his head off, and then eased his hands out where I could see them. “I’m unarmed, and I’m not looking for a fight.”
“As though I give a shit about any of that.” I kept the gun pointed at him, my stomach roiling in disgust. “Get lost.”
“There’s something going on here that you need to know about,” he said, keeping his hands up.
I stared at him. “I can’t even stand to look at you right now,” I said, putting the blinding disgust I was feeling into my statement.
“I … I get that—” he said.
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