Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  The officer sauntered over to answer without yelling, hands resting on his hips. “Well, ma’am—”

  She iced him around the midsection with a quick blast and opened the car door, knocking him over.

  “Hey!” The next cop down the alley reached for his gun, immediately seeing what she’d done.

  Brianna fired another ice blast down the alley at him and it caught him in the center of the chest. Far from freezing his heart, it splashed around his arms and iced them into place like a hard steel vest.

  “Let…me…out!” the cop nearest her said, struggling to get free.

  “You’ll melt free shortly,” she said, striding past him. She aimed down the alley and iced the other two at a hundred and a hundred fifty paces respectively. It was just like shooting, really—steady yourself, let out your breath, aim, and fire. The only difference was that she’d incapacitated rather than killed. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  This time…she was going to give Warrington the death he deserved up close and personal, with the touch of her own hand.

  He’d get the ice in the heart this time…but she’d deliver it personally.

  With that, she pointed a hand at the ground and rose on a pillar of ice that grew beneath her feet, rising like an elevator that carried her up to the 16th floor.

  73.

  Sienna

  I was down the street in the Ruby Slipper, enjoying day two of Bananas Foster Pain Perdu French Toast when I heard the screaming. My breakfast wasn’t quite filled with enough rum to break my sobriety, but it was good enough that by God, I was working through it like I’d never quit drinking. The sound stopped me, though, because screaming had a tendency to get my attention, even in the middle of the best French toast I’d ever eaten.

  After my talk with Michelle, I’d hit a wall that I figured could only be broken by waiting for either inspiration or something to happen. There was no point in waiting on an empty stomach, so I decided to stick close to the hotel and get something.

  The screaming was like a gunshot past my ear telling me I’d made the right call. Tossing a couple twenties on the table, I sprinted out the door and in the direction of the sound.

  74.

  Brianna

  The first step was to stop interference. Once she’d reached the 16th floor, Brianna knew exactly what to do to block interference, and it only took a minute or so.

  She blasted ice against the side of the hotel, sliding along it in a quick orbit, sealing the entire 16th floor before she smashed in one of the windows, then iced it closed behind her.

  Brianna had entered exactly where she meant to, in the middle of the floor. The room was unoccupied, and she hustled through, opening the door to the main hallway.

  The beige walls and fluorescent lighting gave the area a dull, calming feel. She took it all in with a glance, then hurled blasts of ice to her right, where two troopers waited outside a door—

  The suites. They were just over there.

  To her left was the elevator bank, and a clamor as troopers that had been piling out of rooms and preparing a defense realized she’d done an end-run around them. They started to come around the corner as Brianna unleashed her powers in the hall—

  And iced it up completely, sealing the state troopers on the other side of the barrier.

  She made it heavy, two feet thick, and then, a foot past it, made another just like it, then another: three solid barriers of ice between her and the troopers on this floor.

  Her breath came out in white wisps, the cold infusing the air. The exterior windows had been covered over, the governor’s escape prevented. She could hear the radios of his remaining troopers crackling through the door to the suite behind her. The two she’d frozen were shouting warnings, howling about the cold that encased them.

  She didn’t care enough to mute their cries by frosting over their mouths.

  Warrington was through that door, along with men with guns.

  Drawing a deep breath, she put up another barrier on the other side of the hallway to block access from the emergency stairs. A foot thick, two feet. Once finished, Brianna started to ice the locking mechanism on Warrington’s door with one hand while simultaneously forming a shield hard enough to stop bullets with the other…

  75.

  Olivia

  I held in a scream as my momentum started to fade and I came down a few blocks east of the Strip. Bouncing off the wall of a pawn shop, I rocketed backward into a parked bus.

  Uh oh.

  “Up, up, up!” I shouted, trying to concentrate on pushing my direction back to skyward as I flew toward the bus. Someone was looking at me with wide eyes through the driver’s window, but I ignored them, thinking, UP UP UP UP—

  I nearly hit it but rocketed off at the last second, flying back in the right direction and over the faux Eiffel Tower of Paris Las Vegas. I missed it by about a foot, reaching out with my bubble to guide me—

  It caught and launched me toward the black cloud, which hung over the hotel directly ahead. It was the Bellagio, and the fountains were going, the smoke pouring out of the cylindrical tower at the center of the hotel building.

  “Okay, okay,” I whispered, coming down again in the center of the fountain. This was going to be a different sort of bounce. I still felt incredibly out of control on every bounce, but it was getting easier. I kept my eyes on the center tower as I came down to the water, wondering how my momentum powers would interact with a non-solid surface like water.

  As it turned out, they worked just fine. I bounced off and shot right toward the tower, targeting one of the windows where the smoke was billowing.

  About a second before I hit, I realized…I’d just launched myself into a place where a fire was very likely raging.

  Brilliant work, Olivia. Bang up job, there.

  I blew through the black cloud of smoke and into the open window before I realized…

  I didn’t really know how to stop.

  Blasting into the floor, then the ceiling, I bounced a couple times before I realized that stopping was just a reversal of momentum. I concentrated, and before I rattled off the ceiling at increasing velocity for the eighth(!) time, I managed to somehow blow my momentum out in all directions around me, causing the fire to puff as if hit by a strong wind.

  And oh boy, was there fire.

  It surrounded me on three sides, roaring up the walls and spreading to the ceiling. Whatever the speedster had intended, chaos was certainly the current effect. Which was probably how they wanted it.

  No sooner had I come to a stop than I heard a dull roar over the sound of the crackling flames, and something whiffed behind me. Then again.

  I turned in time to see the speedster zip past, through the flames, untouched by them, as the fire spread, madly, to cut me off from the window. A couple of quick motions and the ceiling caught, too, whatever accelerant the speedster had thrown causing the entire room to burn faster.

  “Now I’ve got you exactly where I want you,” the speedster said in that quivering voice, “sucker.”

  Then they disappeared.

  Leaving me trapped in the flames.

  76.

  Sienna

  As far as ideas for killing Warrington went, sealing him in an icy tomb after a frontal assault on his hotel seemed downright sensible. Killing him not at all was probably more sensible, but once you got into the whole “cold vengeance” frame of mind, and knew that the police were onto you, coming right at the problem and trapping him in a hotel on the 16th floor seemed pretty reasonable, as plans went. Definitely a fair escalation if your “shoot him in the face at a distance” plans had failed twice.

  Unfortunately, it left me in a bit of conundrum.

  I saw Brianna slip around the building on her ice slide as she worked to put up a freeze barrier. I had a pretty good inkling of what she was up to, and put together something that I should have long before:

  She’d planned to assassinate Warrington from the Hotel Fantaisie for quit
e some time, and had done so very meticulously, down to her escape route. Of course she’d have examined the hotel blueprints in detail, which meant the Louisiana State Police troopers were effectively guarding Warrington on Brianna’s home ground.

  I wasn’t really one for standing still and doing nothing, though, so I was moving the whole time I saw her doing the same. Going in through the lobby would have been the ideal entry point, but I’d have made a definite mess of my relations with the Louisiana State Police, and who knew if they’d rather have my help or shoot me at this point? I knew I didn’t want to find out firsthand.

  That left me with an alternate entry if I wanted to save Warrington (and I did).

  The construction crane working on the building next door.

  I made it up six flights of construction stairs in less than thirty seconds, putting all that fine daily cardio work to good use. As I burst out onto the top completed floor, I saw construction workers who had stopped work to view the ice fort building competition going on next door snap out of it when they saw me burst out onto the scene.

  “You!” I shouted up to the crane operator, who stared at me blankly from under a yellow yard hat and sunglasses. I pointed once at his crane, then at the side of the hotel. “Get me up there!”

  He opened the side of his control box and said, “You don’t have a hard hat on. You can’t be up here,” like the world’s most perfect hall monitor weinie.

  “Get me up there or I’ll kill you and make that guy do it,” I said, and put enough heat on my statement to make sure he was clear that I probably wasn’t bluffing. Though I totally was.

  He sort of stared at me through his sunglasses, and even over the noise of the machinery and the street crowds below I could almost hear his gulp. He nodded, and the crane started rotating toward the hotel.

  “Really need to get around to writing that book,” I muttered under my breath as I vaulted onto the crane’s arm, which was tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle. He was swinging it around, and its center was a clear path, steel sandwiched between the metal frame, like a miniature running track to my destination. “‘How to Win Few Friends but Influence Everybody Who Pisses You Off.’” I think it would be a bestseller for sure. And definitely would have capitalized on my Slay Queen fame.

  The run up the crane wasn’t that hard. It was a thirty-second sprint, at most, like climbing more stairs, but relying on my steel-toed boots for the hard grip as I surged up, hunched over until I reached those last few steps where the crane opened up, the hotel’s 16th floor in all its ice-encased glory just waiting for me there…

  Only thirty or so feet from the tip of the crane.

  No big deal.

  Just a huge jump over open air with a killer fall waiting beneath me if I bounced off.

  “Please don’t have spent much time on this ice,” I muttered as I covered the last few steps. “Please have been so hot to kill Warrington that you didn’t bother to really seal it—”

  I launched over the gap straight at the ice, hoping that glass was waiting a few inches beneath the layer of ice that wrapped the windows of the entire 16th floor like a frozen hug. Alternatively, I hoped that my momentum in my jump would carry me through if there were more than a few inches of ice.

  Shattering through both glass and ice, I crash-landed on an empty bed in an empty hotel room, rolling off and thumping off the wall. I caught myself on my feet and drew my pistol, gasping.

  Shards of glass had caught me on the shin and on one of my forearms as I crashed in, and I brushed them out quickly, ignoring the trails of blood that spurted down my clothing as I dodged around the wall and ripped open the hotel room door.

  The hallway waited beyond, and I twisted, looking around, getting my bearings. Emergency exit stairs lay to my right, and to my left…

  Another wall of ice. And I could see by the lack of light filtering through from beyond it…

  This one was a lot heavier than the one I’d just broken through.

  77.

  Brianna

  She smashed through the door and was met with the thunder of gunfire. She wasn’t accustomed to hearing it like this yet, no hearing protection, and it was loud and furious. The bullets plinked against the strength of the ice shield she held in her left hand, hardened to far subzero temperatures and thicker than a steel plate.

  Brianna let out a broad-based spray of ice at waist level, extending her hand around the shield to manage it. The two state troopers let out noises as it struck them, then a second later she heard a slightly more muted reaction from Warrington and that female aide that was ever present at his side.

  With a quick look behind her shield, she confirmed she’d forced the cops to lower their guns just by the sheer instinct of hitting them with the cold blast. Taking advantage of their distraction, she planted a burst on each of them, freezing their hands in place, then binding their feet together. They toppled, one following the other, and she stepped over them, kicking their guns aside as she did so.

  And there he was, standing against the iced-over window, blinking swiftly and standing upon trembling knees. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, in that low and reasonable tone. He licked his lips as he tried to take another step back and bumped against the ice-coated window. His palm left an icy print where he touched it.

  “You know who I am?” Brianna asked, advancing slowly on Warrington. She didn’t even spare a glance for the female aide, who was sliding away from Warrington, making little gasping noises under her breath as she moved.

  Warrington stared at her, and she could see the calculation run across his face, debating how to answer.

  Brianna sent a blast of ice that lodged an inch from his head. A spike stuck out where it had landed, and if it had hit him…

  He eyed the spike, thinking it through. He came up with the right answer. “You’re Emily’s sister.”

  “We met once before, do you recall?” Brianna didn’t want to get any closer, but she forced herself to take another step. Now she was twenty feet from him, which felt far too close given that it was him. “When I got my car. I stopped by to pick her up from your house after she’d babysat for you one day.” Brianna felt the worming, seething anger she’d contained for so long, and it came out now, finally, where it needed to. “I wish I’d known what I was seeing then. I thought she just wanted to get out of there because she was done with work.” Brianna shook her head. “She wanted to get away from you.”

  “I didn’t do anything with your sister—” Warrington started.

  Another ice spike lodged to his other side, six inches out of the window, cracks spiderwebbing out as it joined with the ice pack on the other side of the window. Sweat was already rolling down the glass, and every time Warrington spoke, a puff of white vapor accompanied his words.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” Warrington said, keeping his eyes locked on her.

  “I wanted you to die,” Brianna said, that twisting feeling inside her crying to come out, to be done. “At a distance. Because I didn’t want to ever be in a room with you, knowing what you are.” She stuck out her chin. “What you did. But now? I think I’m okay with watching this happen up close. Hold still. This will only take a minute.”

  She raised her hand a little higher, taking aiming at his head like it was any other target she’d ever shot at.

  78.

  Olivia

  Fire surrounding me, I stood in the tower of the Bellagio hotel.

  Trapped.

  Out of luck.

  In over my head.

  And that damned speedster had run off with no problem.

  The smoke was thick and heavy, and I started coughing as it billowed into my face, my lungs, choking me. It was like drowning, but while drinking in the toxic aroma of flames.

  My skin wilted under the heat and I doubled over, feeling the burns crawl up my exposed hands and curling my hair like straw beneath a relentless sun.

  How had I gotten myself into this?
r />   Oh, right. I charged into a trap set for me by the chaos-loving speedster.

  How the hell was I going to get out, though? Surrounded by fire, there was nowhere to go but—

  I looked up at the ceiling. It was shrouded in black smoke, but not on fire above me—yet. It was broken open where I’d entered and bounced a few times before landing and dispelling my momentum. And the floor below me…

  It wasn’t on fire, either.

  I thought back to that metal container in the desert where I’d practiced. If I could pound it into exploding by building momentum bouncing a tire…?

  Could I do the same with my own body?

  “Only one way to find out,” I muttered between coughing fits. And with a burst of concentration, I launched from the ground into the ceiling.

  It was like being a basketball someone was bouncing, as I ricocheted from the floor to the ceiling and back again five times in two seconds. I was a human Flubber. I thought about all that momentum, my speed increasing with each bounce, the ceiling buckling with every hit—

  If I flew out the top of the building, I was going to be up in the clouds in seconds.

  But what if I took all the momentum I was building and channeled it out…?

  Worth a try.

  I did just that next time I bounced down, my reaction imprecise. The effect worked nonetheless.

  A blasting impact issued forth from my body, my personal bubble pushing out all that force in a 360-degree arc around me.

  The flames snapped out under the blast of air pushed away from my body and out of the room.

  I coughed and sputtered and hit my knees as the air rushed back in. Sparks and embers remained, but the fire…

  It was gone.

  “Oh,” I said, rising to my feet. “Yay. Got it.”