“Okay,” I said, opting not to point out the mounting evidence that he, in fact, had done that. “Well, why don’t we go outside or … somewhere quieter … and just talk it over?”
“I have to work,” Cunningham said, and his head shook again. “I have … work to do. This is my job.”
“If you’re planning to work in this,” Augustus said, not really helping the situation, “you might want to get a poncho.”
“That’s the fire alarm, Benjamin,” I said. “They’re evacuating the building.”
“Yes, I know that,” Cunningham snapped at me. “I’m not stupid.” His stunned persona vanished and was replaced by something that hissed when he spoke.
I looked back at Augustus and he looked back at me. I was no psychologist, but that was not normal. “Okay, well … don’t you think we should evacuate?”
“I’ve got work to do,” Cunningham said, jumping right back into that particular groove again. It was like talking to someone whose mind had completely slipped. I was instantly reminded of the circular conversations I had with my grandmother as she succumbed to dementia, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that you couldn’t get out of regardless of which conversational choice you made.
“Benjamin, no one is working right now,” I said, trying a different tack. “They’re all gone.”
“She’s not gone,” Cunningham said, gesturing to the piece of blackened human toast that used to work with him.
“Oh, she’s gone,” Augustus said, “and so are you, dude. You are gone.”
Cunningham’s blank eyes went past me to Augustus. “I don’t understand,” he said, and I believed him wholeheartedly.
“What my colleague means to say,” I took over, before my junior partner spoke enough truth to get us both broiled alive, “is that we’re worried about you. You’re not well, Benjamin.”
“I feel … fine,” he said, and I caught the hint of stress between the second and third words. It was subtle, but spoke a pretty big volume or two.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he snapped, and I observed the patience lost again. This time a sheen of steam hissed off his shoulders and head as the sprinklers continued to douse us all, like the water had reached boiling point in an instant.
“All right,” I said, “but we should get you checked out by a doctor anyway.”
“A doctor?” he asked, squinting at me. “Why?”
I tried a different tack. “You picked up something—a sickness—in Amsterdam.”
“I was only in Amsterdam for a few hours,” he said, shaking his head in that twitchy way again. “Couldn’t possibly have picked anything up while I was there.”
“Where were you before Amsterdam?” Augustus asked.
“Before?” Cunningham’s face scrunched up as he considered the question. “Why, I was staying in Bredoccia. Why?”
I’d heard of Bredoccia, the capital city of a country in Eastern Europe called Revelen. They’d had some sort of ad campaign recently to advertise how good they were for business and tourism, just like every other third-world hellhole on the planet. Like Iowa. They had tons of billboards around the Twin Cities a few years ago talking about how wonderful they were, suggesting people move there or visit. As if a cornfield were a great tourist destination or something. Maybe if they invested in a hill, people would come visit them.
Benjamin blinked his eyes, again and again, and finally I saw him catch a glimpse of his burned sleeve. “Oh, God. What happened here?” Cunningham thrust his arm out, look of disgust burning in his eyes and horror etching his mouth into a downward line broken by the gap of his parted lips. “No. No. I … no, it couldn’t … only a monster would—”
“There are no monsters here,” I said, trying to soothe the savage, flaming beast before he could flare up again. “Just people. And accidents happen, Benjamin. They happen, okay?”
“This was no accident,” Cunningham said, turning his head and taking in the burnt corpse behind him. “It couldn’t be an accident. People don’t just catch on fire.” His hand shook, and steam began to pour off of it.
“Oh, hell,” Augustus said behind me, and I watched his hands rise into the air as—presumably—he started to bring some dirt our way. He never got a chance to finish his attempt, though.
I heard footsteps in the sprinkler wash behind us only a second before I heard Augustus’s sharp, shocked cry and watched him fly, twisting, through the air to my right. He hit a cubicle wall and it shattered around him like a bowling ball rolling through pins. He disappeared under a folded, broken segment of the furniture, and I whipped my head around in time to see a very familiar face leering at me from entirely too close.
“Here we stand again,” Anselmo said, a broad grin breaking his scorched face, identical in so many details to the body just over Cunningham’s shoulder, “eye to eye, man to man, once more …”
27.
Sienna
I’m not much for publicly attended pity parties, so when Brant asked me to go with him to the bar to “hang out or help out, whichever you prefer,” I begged off. I’d just told him more about me than I’d shared with anyone in recent memory (not that anyone but Ariadne had asked of late) and I felt … exposed. And that didn’t even factor in the recent ghostly attacks on my mind that the telepath had been staging.
So instead of going back to the bar and drowning my sorrows in the time-honored tradition of my people—by which I mean working human beings—I decided instead to sit in my cabin and stare at the walls while the snow fell outside.
So far, it was really boring.
And the flakes just kept coming, too. I had my window shades up, and I could see the ground getting covered over a little at a time, gradually accumulating. The flakes were getting more sizable, too, it seemed, and coming down at more of an angle. I could hear the wind against the side of the cabin when it blew particularly hard, and it started me thinking about the tale of the three pigs. Should have gone for a brick cabin instead of a stick one, I guess.
I sat in my wooden chair and sulked, thinking over what I’d said to Brant—and what I hadn’t. I’d bled my bitterness all over him, but he’d asked for it. At least I hadn’t just stumbled into the bar and vomited my emotional nausea everywhere.
Uh, unless I’d done that last night while drinking. It could have happened.
I realized about the time that the snow had completely blotted out the last of the green that my car wasn’t parked out front of the cabin anymore. I panicked for a few seconds until I remembered that Brant had had to drive me home last night due to drunkenness, and cursed my poor decision making—or maybe my desire to just forget for a little while. If I had Gavrikov’s flight abilities at my disposal, this wouldn’t have been an issue. As it was, town was a good five to ten minutes’ drive away, and that meant I’d have to either walk or run, or reconcile myself to being stuck … in a cabin with no food … until the snow cleared.
I’ve been called many things, but a little shrinking daffodil who didn’t eat? Never been accused of that. Had jerks in the press say quite the opposite, in fact. I hadn’t killed any of them … yet … but they were on my radar.
I decided to just stick with what I was already wearing, since it was dirty from the day before, and pulled on the light jacket I had in my suitcase. It wasn’t exactly a winter coat, but it was the best I had available. It was a fall coat, and here winter was showing up months early, the rude bastard. Reminded me of another jerk named Winter I’d dealt with in the past who’d showed little consideration.
I put that nasty trip down memory lane out of my head and walked toward the door, the steady clicking of my thin, steel-toed boots against the linoleum. I paused, listening, as the echo of my footsteps … kept going?
I turned around, looking around the dimly-lit cabin as the light from the windows began to fade. It went quickly, like someone had drawn the shades, and suddenly I found myself steeped in darkness just inches from the front door. I sighed and fu
mbled for the light switch, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the door frame on either side of the door. The light from the windows was down to nil, and I narrowed my eyes in hopes that it would widen my pupils and allow me to see better. Futile hope, but that was all I had at that moment in the dark.
Then I heard the sound of footsteps again. I couldn’t tell if they were coming from over by the little kitchenette, or the bathroom, or even somewhere beyond the back wall. They were crisp, slow, measured, like someone was strolling with soft shoes on a hard surface, the rubber soles kissing the ground as they peeled off with each step.
“What the hell,” I muttered under my breath as I renewed my search, sliding my hand along the wall for a foot to the left of the door. I thought about cracking the door, but given that the light outside had just died—which happened sometimes in howling snowstorms—I doubted it would do much other than sweep a ton of wet snow into my cabin.
My fingers ran across the ridges of the wooden wall paneling. It was smooth, save for the normal knots and pits in sanded, varnished lumber. I gave up after searching three feet out from the door in a two foot radius near my hand level. There was no light switch on this side, I’d have bet my life on it.
I shuffled over to the other side of the door, pausing to listen again. That sound came again, that noise like footsteps. But it couldn’t have been footsteps; this cabin was small. Like, one room. I would have smelled someone if they’d been in here with me, would have heard them breathe. Maybe the noise was coming from the roof. It certainly wasn’t coming from behind the back wall, because the sound was all wrong for footsteps on snow, and there was nothing but snow out there.
I ran my palm across the wood on the left side of the door, more urgently now. I found the same imperfections in the wood as I found on the other side, and in my haste, I sped up my search. I jabbed my hand up and down, and felt something bite right in the middle of my palm, drawing a sharp sting right in the center. I yanked my hand back and clapped it over my mouth in surprised. As I extended my tongue, I tasted blood.
Great. Either my hand hadn’t healed properly, or I’d just reopened yesterday’s wound. Of course, I was reopening all sorts of wounds today, but so far they’d only been metaphorical.
This one was more than metaphorical. Blood dripped down my hand in lines that I could taste and smell. It was a grim feeling, standing in the dark, holding my cut and bloody hand up to my face. It never took this long for one of my wounds to heal, not even when I was a plain old vanilla meta, bereft of Wolfe’s healing abilities.
“Messing with my head,” I said to the darkness, “messing with my abilities. Let me tell you something—that’s not going to end well for you. Mark my words.”
The darkness in front of my eyes shifted, like smoke blown from a strong wind. It was one of the spookier things I’ve seen; pure eeriness brought to life, like something straight out of a ghost story. I saw it move, coalesce into blurred features, like the face leaning out of the mirror, but it held only a little better clarity. A low rumble shook the cabin as power channeled in from some unknown source.
“Get … out …” the voice said, and the windows rattled at the force of the suggestion.
Maybe I was supposed to feel scared at that suggestion, but I let more than a little of my irritation slip out as I opened the door and a blast of frigid wind hit me full in the face. “Way ahead of you there, dickfish.” And I stepped out into the storm and slammed the door shut behind me.
28.
Reed
“You’re not much of a man,” I said to Anselmo through the artificial rain that poured down between us, and watched as my attempted goat-getting did, indeed, get his goat, as well as the rest of his petting zoo. Anger flashed through those partially obscured eyes, the scarred flesh hanging around his eyes darkening as he flushed to the shade of a tanned piece of leather.
“And you are far too close to being a woman to deserve the one you have,” Anselmo said, surprising me by holding back from swinging at me. “The good doctor is plainly settling for a lesser stag.” The ridge where his eyebrows had been in less-burned times raised as he stumbled on a thought. “Perhaps you need a good cuckolding—”
I shot a double gust of wind at him using both hands that tore him free of the ground and sent him sailing backward six feet in a wash of spray. Anselmo rolled through the puddling water as he landed, his off-the-rack suit not quite conforming to his figure. The douche was wearing a dress shirt, which came untucked when he rose, but he showed a surprising lack of concern for the fact I’d just physically hurled him through the air. I hadn’t been able to overmatch him with that particular strength when last we’d fought, but to see his reaction, you’d think I hadn’t done anything at all.
“You are a tiresome thing,” Anselmo said as the sprinklers tapered off above us, the fire system deciding that maybe its job was done. “Full of sound and fury, sig—”
I channeled a hell of a blast right at him, and this one sent him back ten feet, right into a cubicle. He hit the wall with a crack, breaking the board and ricocheting off. He came down in a crouch and sprung upright to standing like it was nothing. He looked down at his sleeve, which was torn, plucking a splinter while wearing a look of—I assume, tough to tell with all the scarring—mild annoyance at the damage to his garment. “You fight like a little girl, slapping about at your opponent, afraid to get close, to share the look in the eyes as you attempt to best one another. I will show you what it is like to fight a man, to be beaten by a man, to have what you care about most taken by a true man—”
I shot another gust at him, but he dodged with blurry speed, ducking behind a cubicle. My gust hit it and the top wall folded, but the bottom of the structure remained snug to the floor. It was a good twenty feet from me, if not more, and my range for directed gusts fell off fast when someone was that far away. I could hear his faux-leather shoes scuffing as he bent low and circled toward me. “I can hear you crawling around like a rat, Anselmo,” I said. “I can hear y—”
The heat was the first sign I was in trouble. The second was the scorching fire that went crawling up my sleeve a moment later. I recoiled in shock, spinning around to see Benjamin Cunningham standing a few feet from me with a furious look in his eyes, like he had a fire of his own dancing within them.
“Don’t you ignore me,” he said, voice thick and husky as I batted at the flames creeping up my sleeve, burning my skin. “Don’t you—know who I am—see what I can do—kill you all—” His voice pitched and changed in the middle of what seemed like a sentence, like he was stringing thoughts together in mad sequence, performing word surgery that left gaping, obvious stitches in the middle.
Plus, he lit me on fire. I started to get the feeling Cunningham had left part of his mind behind when he came back from vacation.
I resisted my first instinct, which was to stop, drop and roll. I’d been thinking about something like this happening since I’d heard about Cunningham. During our feverish training after Sienna’s London revival, we’d practiced for any number of contingencies, including occasions when Sienna turned loose her various powers on me to ‘prepare’ me for those sort of attacks. I think she actually enjoyed it, seeing me dance around while she shot bursts of flame to either side of me, and occasionally on me, but it might also have been that she enjoyed watching me dance around like the floor was on fire and my ass was next.
Either way, it had prepared me for this moment, and to deal with it in a somewhat orderly fashion, no ass-is-on-fire-type dancing required.
Cunningham advanced on me, fury in his eyes, and when he got close enough to reach out for me, close enough for me to see the killing rage in between the lines of purest anger etched in his crow’s feet, I did the thing that Sienna’s constant flamethrowing had taught me to do, the single greatest defense to fire attacks that a keeper of the winds could possibly manage.
I took all the air in a five foot radius around me and I drove it back, creating a forced bubble fr
ee of all oxygen.
It didn’t last very long—probably three seconds—but it snuffed out the fire that Benjamin Cunningham had lit on my jacket, and it drove away all the air that he was planning to breathe and to use to burn me to death.
It also prompted his crazy, killer eyes to open wider than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s when he got sucked out onto the surface of Mars in Total Recall, which was kinda cool, too.
I, of course, being the originator of the plan, was totally ready for the lack of oxygen. I’d exhaled everything I had to prepare for the vacuum effect. Cunningham had the wind forcibly ripped from his lips and lungs, and it left him with a shocked look. He fell to his knees as the bubble around us collapsed and the oxygen rushed back in, and I wasn’t too high-and-mighty to do a Sienna and kick him right in the gut as he went down. I’m not an über-succubus, but I can hit a dude when I want to, and in that moment, I damned sure wanted to. I wanted to hit Benjamin Cunningham hard enough to knock his punk ass out of the fight so I could deal with the Italian Stallion of Invincible Doom (I’m floating it as Anselmo’s nickname. Whaddya think? Too much? You're right, too much.) without getting sucker punched. Or sucker fired. Sucker flambéed? Whatever.
Cunningham left the ground, turned a flip in mid air, and landed gut first on a cubicle wall before bouncing inside the damned thing. I lost sight of him as he fell, but the noise of the air rushing—once again—out of his body as he took the divider in the solar plexus was unmistakable. And very satisfying.
I spun around as Anselmo came right for me, the sound of his footsteps thundering across the carpet behind me as certain as the sound of doom’s approach. I’ll admit, he scared me. Scared the hell out of me. He packed a nasty punch and was well nigh invincible when it came to taking a punch. I could throw him around all day and he’d just keep springing up after each attack, fresh as a daisy and ready to do some plucking of his own.
Tormented Page 14