Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)

by Crane,Robert J.

  “Oh, hell,” I muttered, putting a hand to my forehead. Ma had kept them at least somewhat disciplined in their approach. From what I’d seen of Junior he was a chip off the ol’ blockhead, without much in the way of a brake on his emotional appetites. “If they go nuts in a crowd of reporters—”

  It will definitely be Must-See TV, Wolfe said.

  I would watch that over and over, Bjorn agreed.

  “You … people … are … sick!” I yelled, and spun around again, pacing back in front of the bathroom door. I shot a look at the TV for the millionth time since Junior had made his little admission that no one else had caught. There was no sign of violence, but the Clarys were still there in the background with the other Three Stooges, Terry, McCartney and Hayes. “I count seven of them and one of me.”

  Bombard them from above and be done with it if you must intervene, Gavrikov said.

  Nuke them from orbit? Zack asked. Seriously?

  It’s the only way to be sure, Bastian quoted with glib amusement.

  “Doubt that’s going to improve my standing,” I said. “Or keep me out of jail.”

  Then what the hell are you going to do? Zack asked. Strut in like you own the place and hope they throw the first punch?

  I sighed, and looked into the open bathroom, where my bloody clothes were waiting, strewn over the bathtub’s edge, dripping red on the tile. “It is my office,” I said, coming to a grudging decision. It wasn’t the one I wanted to make, but it was the one I had to make. “And if I walk in and they attack me … then we’ve got our answer, and a justification for fighting back.”

  There was a long pause as the voices in my head shut up and digested that. Wolfe spoke first. And if they kill you before you can retaliate?

  “Then I guess my problems will be over,” I said, stepping into the bathroom and flipping the switch. It was time to suit up, and in this case my suit was my clothes, drenched in my own blood and probably quite cold. I couldn’t stop shivering as I pulled them back on, the only part of me that was still warm was my cheeks, the teardrops rolling down as I dressed in silence to go out to meet my fate.

  34.

  I came leaping down about a hundred yards away from my office building, and the scene, which I could hear even at a distance, went pin-drop quiet in an instant. The night was dark, the gleam of a hundred nearby lamps and lights holding the black sky at bay. Reporters with spotlights shone in their eyes looked up from their live reports, dazed at the sound of my feet thumping against the pavement as I landed.

  The silence held for only a second, and then the shouted questions started:

  “Ms. Nealon, how do you respond to the allegations that you were involved in an assault in Bloomington this evening?”

  “What do you plan to do now?”

  “Sienna, who designed the look you’re sporting tonight?”

  Who the hell was that idiot?

  I ignored the questions, using Gavrikov’s power to elevate me a couple feet off the ground. Most people who saw me on TV were always left with the illusion that I was taller than I actually was. In this case, I wanted the height because at 5'4", there was no way I could keep an eye on the Clarys or Thunder Hayes’s contingent of troublemakers through the crowd of reporters that mobbed me as I approached.

  The whole Clary family was watching me, just watching, from about thirty feet away. They were staring at me with surly, sullen gazes, Hayes and his crew clumped together with them like old fraternity buddies. The Brotherhood of Sienna-Kicked-My-Ass, surely. They didn’t do anything more than watch, though, as I made my way through the crowd toward the front doors.

  “Excuse me,” I said, keeping my voice low and polite. If the Clarys didn’t start anything, I damned sure wasn’t. I would just go in, try and find one of the spare cell phones that J.J. kept on hand for me in case of my inevitable destruction of my current one, and saunter back out.

  Easy as pie.

  “Please,” I said to the reporters shoving cameras in my face as I kept my gaze anchored on my enemies across the crowd. “Excuse me.”

  “Sienna!”

  “Ms. Nealon!”

  “How do you respond to the allegations—”

  “Who does your hair, Sienna?”

  I didn’t answer anyone, especially that last jackass, just kept making my way through, slowly but surely. The Clarys and their crew started to move, edging toward the front door to my office. I took a deep breath and watched them out of my peripheral vision. They were too big to miss, so there wasn’t much point in turning this into a staring contest. They were taking it real easy, too, not shoving or elbowing their way over. They just slowly eased until they were standing close to the door, lined up along my parade route, waiting for me.

  I made it through the crowd of reporters and someone bonked me on the head with a boom microphone. They didn’t apologize, but it didn’t hurt, so I just ignored it, rubbing my head where it had hit. I could feel the crowd around me, their chatter overwhelming my meta senses, the strange sensation of all of them just there, inches away, like I could still feel them even if I closed my eyes, blocked my ears and held my hands close to my chest.

  I didn’t stare directly at the Clarys. I just kept walking, set to pass right in front of them. I took it nice and slow, waiting for them to say something.

  “So they already let you guys out of Arkham, huh?” I asked as I went by.

  “Looks like someone did a number on you, bitch,” Janice Clary said, spitting at my feet. I’d remembered her name once I was sober. She didn’t even bother to take a shot at me.

  “Cool it,” Junior whispered. “You are looking a little worn, girl. Someone got a bite out of you, huh?”

  “More than a bite,” McCartney pronounced, hulking, his massive frame overshadowing me even now that I was walking a couple feet up in the air. “That’s a lot of blood.” All of them were talking at such a low, meta-only volume that there was no chance even a press mic would have picked them up over the crowd noise.

  “Good,” Denise Clary sneered without letting her face get too sour. They had apparently been coached for the camera, because they were really holding it in.

  I paused, and looked over at them, keeping my demeanor calm, even sad. I could play this game, too. “Where’s Cassidy?”

  A wave of visible discomfort ran through them, and stares were exchanged. “Whatchoo talking about?” Louis Terry said awkwardly.

  “Never mind,” I said, and went for the door, taking slow paces, waiting for one of them to open up on me.

  No one did.

  Once I was inside, I hurried to J.J.’s office. I only hoped McCartney had overlooked something in his haste to trash the place. It didn’t take me long to find the spare cell phones, hidden in a box in the bottom drawer of J.J.’s desk. It didn’t really look like anything special, though, so while McCartney had overturned the desk, the phones within were just fine.

  I couldn’t chance carrying the box out, for fear that having something that big in my arms would interfere with my ability to fight, so I activated one and waited for it to boot up while I stuck two more in my pockets. That was a primary, a secondary, and a final backup, and it emptied the box of spares. I’d need to be careful with them; this was likely the last time I’d be able to get my hands on any until I got to California and hit up a cell phone store.

  I debated waiting for the phone I’d picked as my new primary to sync and decided against it. I’d walked past the Clary gauntlet and waited to see who’d hit me with it. They’d passed, at least on the first round. They were being remarkably restrained, which suggested to me that they had no intention of starting shit that would get them in trouble. That suggested something further, in fact, which had been revealed with their discomfort at a single question.

  Cassidy was running this show. And whatever she’d said to them, it had them fearful enough that they’d mended fences with her and were now taking her orders. Orders which appeared to extend as far as not starting a wa
r with me in full view of the media. Oh, they’d fight one with me, for sure, but apparently they didn’t want to be seen as the aggressors. It made sense, really, because half the hell Cassidy had put me through last time had been turning the press against me so viciously that I’d begun to wonder if anyone out there in the world didn’t hate me.

  All I had to do to walk out of this … was to walk out of it. The press would still hate me, my enemies would still be lurking out there. But I wouldn’t have to fight them to the death, at least not today, and not here, at this place of their choosing.

  And not alone.

  I held the phone in my hand as the little bar indicating that it was loading continued to scroll across. I needed to get to California, needed to get back to my friends, to the only family I had left. Dealing with this in isolation, alone, was a terrible strategy. Nothing had gone my way since I’d chosen to stay here and fight on the ground my enemies had chosen for me. I’d barely escaped death, and if I stayed here, waiting for them to come at me again, I’d be lucky if I survived the week.

  I pocketed the last phone, and turned. Part of me wanted to sneak out the back, or head up to the roof and fly away into the darkness. But I couldn’t get Clyde Jr.’s seeming threat out of my head.

  They let you pass, Wolfe said. You’ve done enough.

  This is plenty of danger for any sane person to expose herself to, Bjorn said. I liked how he included me in the ranks of the sane.

  “I need to be sure,” I said, taking a deep breath. I could hear the crowd outside, reporters filing their on-scene reports about how I’d just walked through to my office in the middle of the night. I imagined the Clarys wading through them with steel fists, pulping skulls and leaving blood on the pavement.

  I couldn’t walk away from that without being sure.

  My phone buzzed in my hand, already set to vibrate, and I slid it to unlock. There were a few voicemail notifications, but I didn’t want to check those, not yet. One popped up: Kat Forrest has shared her location with you. I clicked it, and it brought up a map of North America that zoomed slowly in to the San Francisco Bay area. It closed on a suburb east of the city, and finally on a house, popping up a little balloon with an address that I repeated to myself six times, just to be sure I had it. Just in case something happened to my phone.

  “This is it,” I whispered to myself. I took a few deep breaths, in and out, and then walked out of the office, into the waiting chill of the autumn night.

  35.

  The noise level outside exploded once again as I stepped out. The Clary family was glaring at me, their backs to the media scrum so none of the watching cameras could see them give me the stink eye. Clearly the press thought nothing of them being here. I couldn’t decide whether that was because they were hoping to see a brawl break out, or if they really just didn’t think anything of them being here, in spite of my arrest of them in the past. It was hard to tell whether they were just so negligent they didn’t know these people had been prisoners at the Cube, or if they didn’t care. Maybe they thought they were all innocent victims of my authoritarian ways.

  Whatever the case, the Clarys and Hayes and his boys all stood in a line as I came out the door. I looked at them warily as I walked past, keeping my hands at my sides. All it would take would be one of them reaching for a gun and I’d be legally justified to pull Shadow and start emptying the magazine at anyone who came at me in a threatening manner. I still had the gun riding at my back, but I was scared to pull it for anything less than certain death coming my way. I felt pretty confident that if I used my weapon in anything less than a scenario where my death was assured, I’d be crucified for it.

  “See ya later, guys,” I said amiably to the whole line of scowling faces as I went past, taking particular care not to infringe on their personal space. Denise Clary started to step out at me, but Junior caught her by the shoulder, and she stopped.

  “Yeah, you will,” Junior said. “We ain’t gonna forget what you done to our momma.”

  “Or our daddy,” Buck Clary said.

  “You’re talking about the same person, right?” I asked, playing innocent. “I mean, it was Iowa, so … I assume they were the same person.”

  “Always got a smart answer for everything,” Thunder Hayes said. He didn’t look nearly as amused as he had the last few days when he’d been taunting me.

  “I leave the dumb answers to you,” I shot back, walking on past. Three of the Clarys were out of my peripheral vision now, and any one of them could have stepped right up and decked me from behind. A good, solid hit would probably even kill me. I took a breath and kept moving, listening as hard as I could, waiting for a tingle across my scalp that might warn me someone was coming at me from behind.

  “Counting on the cameras to save you, Nealon?” A voice came from my left, and I turned to see a ruggedly handsome man standing there, faint scar across his nose and a sneer on his face. Lorenzo Benedetti was standing there barefoot, his sleeves up. “Where is your brother?”

  “Where are all your little friends?” Bronson McCartney asked. I looked right at him and realized something very chilling.

  The press had stopped talking. Completely. Not one of them was saying a word.

  “I approved their vacation requests, McCartney,” I said. “No need to keep them in town when everything’s so quiet and under control.” I stared at the mass of press in front of me, wondering what the hell had suddenly gone wrong with them. There were a lot of glassy-eyed stares, like they’d been struck dumb. Not just dumb, actually. Clary dumb.

  “You never did figure out my power, did you, Nealon?” Terry asked, leering at me with his freaky blond hair like a beacon in the night.

  “I assume it comes out of a peroxide bottle,” I said, suddenly feeling very surrounded. With a crash, every member of the press in attendance dropped their cameras and mics. Glass lenses shattered, plastic broke, and it all made a pretty dreadful sound as it came down. They looked like they were having fits or seizures. Drool slid down chins, reporters made sounds like rabid animals, rattling deep in their throats.

  “I call it ferality,” Terry said with a toothy grin. “Shame it doesn’t seem to be working on you. I would have liked to see you crawl on all fours like a dog.” I glanced at the reporters and, sure enough, they were on their hands and knees, poised like … well, like animals, mouths open, ready for a treat.

  “Whatcha gonna do, Nealon?” Hayes asked, as the reporters all made a growling sound as one. It was pretty unnerving. “Not like the press didn’t want to see you die, but if you kill ’em …” He cackled, and a few of the Clarys joined in, like a pack of hyenas. “Well, it probably ain’t gonna help your cause none.”

  “Better think fast,” Terry said, and with a sweep of his hand he motioned the press corps forward. They sprang, like the animals they appeared to be, gone from merely out for my blood metaphorically to being out for it in a much more literal sense.

  36.

  The fight or flight instinct was settled in a hot second. Terry had turned the entire cadre of reporters encamped outside my office into his personal running monkeys, and I knew I didn’t want to hurt them (seriously. Mostly. Mostly, I did not want to hurt them, in spite of what they were doing to make my life hell) so I shot up twenty feet into the air.

  That did not stop them.

  They climbed on each other’s shoulders, like a human pyramid of angry honey badgers, not giving a shit. They bit at my ankles, leapt at me, climbed and jumped, tore at each other, and in general did a much more physical version of what they did every day, fighting and stepping on each other to get to the story.

  I lingered up there for only about a second, but it was a second too long. A blast of wind tilted me, flipping me over in midair. I caught myself before slamming into the second story of my office building, and threw out a hand. Lorenzo Benedetti was lurking below, readying another gust, so I blasted him in the eye with one of Eve’s light nets. It anchored around his face and maske
d him, and then I shot one at Terry that covered both his eyes and the top of his neon blond head. Because that color was distracting.

  The moment the net blindfold hit Terry, his pack of hungry reporters suddenly seemed to lose sight of me, as though I’d taken all their eyes as well. They snarled, they snorted, they tore at each other blindly, but not one of them looked at me, and it only took me a second to realize why.

  Apparently, Terry was indeed the brains of their entire operation. It was a sad commentary on what I was facing, but there it was.

  “Get down here and fight like a man!” Junior Clary yelled at me.

  “Um, no,” I said, and glared at him as I swept his posse for signs of the next attack. I was pretty sure with the press now blind and snarling uselessly, Thunder Hayes and Bronson McCartney would be joining the battle, and so I wasn’t surprised to see ol’ Thunder lighting up his hands with his lightning powers.

  A bolt shot past me and grounded on the office tower wall as I swept away at high speed. The last thing I needed was to get jolted right now, especially given how I’d been killed by electricity once this year already. I zoomed around the building once and came back low. Hayes must have guessed at my plan, because I had to veer off as he shot loose another bolt.

  Buck and Junior were stomping around now with their metal skin, all suited up for war. Denise’s hair snaked out and swiped out me as I flew past, but I didn’t let her get me down, either. A bolt of lightning hit her nasty locks in lieu of me, and Denise screamed below. She tossed Thunder a dirty look, but she didn’t seem to be out of the fight.

  I peppered them all with light nets, with mild to moderate success. I bound one of Hayes’s arms to his waist, re-upped the net I’d put on Terry (that hair, it was hideous) and then came low over the press monkeys, figuring Lorenzo was just waiting to take his shot.