Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  Once again, I looked to my left, to my right, and then behind me. I couldn’t see the houses on either side, and behind me there was only a slow hill climb up to the woods, so…this was about the best I was going to get, especially since there was no sound of a human from within the dwelling.

  I reached down and broke the door, cracking the mechanism right out of the frame and pushing it in slowly. I didn’t want to turn Fido into a skidmark on the entry carpet, so I took my time and the dog yelped, skittering around and barking furiously. I debated letting the pup out, but instead I slipped inside and then closed the door behind me.

  Greeting me was a pug that was probably no bigger than a double burrito from Chipotle. His barks were low, and a little wheezy. “Hey, big guy,” I said, and he sniffed my pant leg, putting aside the barking. Dogs liked me, and I had little idea why, because I was pretty neutral on them. Maybe it was all the meat I ate, oozing through my pores. This is a kindred spirit and meat sister! they’d be thinking, and then try to lick me until they got all the good stuff. That was the only explanation I had.

  This pup was no exception, and he dutifully followed me around after I stooped down and offered him my hand, fist closed, extending it for him to give a lick or two. He backed off first, then trudged forward experimentally and gave me a couple of sloppy, cool slurps with the old tongue. After that, the barking was done and we were fast friends.

  I was pretty sure no one was home, judging by the fact that no one answered the door. That was hardly conclusive evidence, but I’d also not heard anyone, and given my super hearing, that was a little closer to proving my thesis correct. I made my way through the house quietly just in case, sweeping from the hallway next to the rear door and into the main living area. I listened carefully, trying to hear over the pup scampering along the wood paneled floor behind me.

  The whole house was dark, but, judging by the outside, not terribly big. I’d assembled a mental sketch of it from the exterior, and it looked long and linear, all the rooms built sideways with the front facing the street, and the back, obviously, facing the wilderness I’d trekked through to get here. I’d entered on the left side, and there didn’t seem to be much room for anything other than a bathroom and a coat closet on this side of the house, which I quickly confirmed as being the case before turning right and entering a small kitchen and living room combo.

  There wasn’t a light on, and the place smelled of stale cigarettes, which made me cringe. I hated the smell of smoke, and it doubly bothered me because of my meta sense of smell, which enhanced almost everything, allowing me to partake in secondhand smoke (fortunately not a health risk to me, just stinky) from what felt like miles away. I’d caught a whiff of this from outside, but what else was I going to do? It was the house best angled to prevent people from seeing my B & E, and it didn’t seem like anyone was home…

  That changed quickly. I heard something stir in the bedroom, and for a brief second I hoped it was another dog; just another pup, happy and friendly as this one, but more lethargic. Getting some zzzs, maybe. I froze halfway across the living room, my tiptoeing act coming to an abrupt stop so quickly that the pug following behind me collided with the back of my ankle. It would have been comical if the little shit hadn’t surprised me in doing so.

  I squelched the desire to let out a yelp of surprise, but the dog did not. He caught my calf and Achilles tendon right in the face, and although it couldn’t have hurt much, he seemed offended by it, and let me and whoever else was in the house know it with a series of barks.

  If there was someone stirring in the bedroom, they were either hiding—possibly having called the actual police before doing so—or else they were the heaviest sleeper in the history of man. “Archie! Shut the hell up!” someone bellowed in a heavy Scottish accent. It took my brain a second or two to translate that.

  Archie took off, apparently so offended by my sudden stop and his own clumsiness that he was going to run to his master. He shot around the corner, yelping all the way, like a kid going to tattle to mommy. “Traitor,” I muttered low enough that only the dog and I could hear it. I was probably the only one who could understand it.

  The dog jumped on the bed with a squeak, agitating his master further. Heavy Scottish brogue that I couldn’t make head nor tails of came from behind the bedroom door across the way, and I tiptoed across the living room in the interim, wondering how best to solve for this problem. I could have left, I supposed, but this problem of mine related to clothing wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, and—as the Brits might say—in for a penny, in for a pound. Hell, Americans said that, too.

  “Police Scotland!” I announced, trying to throw on as general of an Edinburgh accent to my words as I could. “Come out with your hands up!” I said it bullhorn loud and forceful, and it produced an immediate reaction from inside the bedroom.

  Archie let out a fury of barks as he hit the floor, preceded by a yelp that suggested he’d gotten bounced from the bed in his master’s haste to exodus the tangled sheets. The smoke smell was even heavier over here, and my already uneasy stomach was moving toward queasy. A burst of furious Scottish came out the open door to the bedroom, and I took a second to loosely translate it as, “What the hell?” It didn’t really sound like that, though.

  “We know you’ve got methamphetamines in there,” I shouted. “Come out with your hands up and make this easy!” I knew no such thing, but I knew it’d get one of two responses, and I hoped for it to be the one that most harmonized with my needs.

  “I don’t have meth in here,” the outraged Scotsman said, coming around the corner with his hands up, and speaking a little more clearly, but not much. I’d crept up to just next to the door while he’d made his way over to it, and as soon as he emerged, ready to protest his innocence at what was clearly a huge mistake, I jumped him.

  There was a difference in how I approached this guy versus how I would have approached a bad guy, and it was night and day. I caught his arm and dragged it down, clamping my left around his wrist as he walked out the door beside me and wheeling him around to put my right forearm squarely against his left elbow. If he didn’t move where I wanted him to move now, I could really do some damage to his joint, and like most people do when you put them into a painful situation where their arm could break in about two seconds, his gut got the point before his brain caught up.

  I whirled him around and put his face in the wall—but gently. Mostly. “Hi,” I said, once he was good and planted there, not moving. “Know who I am?” I dropped the Edinburgh accent.

  He nodded sharply. “Uh huh.” That I understood instantly.

  “I’m going to take some of your things,” I said. “Some clothes. Some food. And I’m gonna hang out here for a while. I might borrow money when it’s all said and done. You’re okay with all this, right?” I asked extremely sweetly, though I did still obviously have him in a position where I could shatter his arm like a candy cane against concrete.

  “Uh huh,” he said, nodding as best he could with the wall in his face. He really rubbed against it, like he wanted to shave the first layer of skin off. “Take whatever ye want.” Man, his accent was thick.

  “I’m going to tie you up now,” I said. “Don’t scream, and you won’t get hurt. Fair enough?” He nodded. “Do you live with anyone?” I doubted he had a girlfriend by the state of this place—clothes were strewn across the floor, dog toys everywhere—but he surprised me with another nod. “Who, and when will they be here?”

  “Kytt,” he said, smacking his lips together. “She gets home from work around six.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. I’ll be out of here well before Kytt gets home,” I said, nodding along with him. “So she’ll find you here tied up, and you’ll have a fun story to tell all the reporters. You’ll be famous.” For about five seconds, I didn’t bother to add, Until I assault some other poor schmoe, or wreck a town while passing through, and the media forgets about my last grievous offense in favor of the next one. “What�
�s your name?”

  “John,” he said, blinking. “John Clifford.”

  “All right, John,” I said. “You have any rope I can tie you up with?” He shook his head and I sighed. “Clothes it is, then.”

  I trussed him up with a bunch of old flannel shirts, tying them tight enough that he wasn’t going to easily get out, but not so tight it’d cut off circulation. The truth was, clothing was a terrible choice for binding people, because ideally whatever you used would produce chafing and resistance so they didn’t try and worm their way out. Clothing was too smooth for that, the fibers easier to rub up against repeatedly in the course of wriggling your way out, but I did the best I could with what I had and knotted it meta-tight, to the point where the sleeves sounded like they were going to rip off.

  Once I was done getting John all bound up, which was mostly for psychological effect since he could most likely have escaped them with concerted effort, I led him like a submissive puppy into the next room. “Do you have any duct tape?” I asked, something I should have asked earlier. Duct tape wasn’t much better for binding than clothes, honestly—you could escape duct tape with a reasonable amount of torsion against it—but there was a profound consequence to mentally surrendering, and I wanted John to experience it fully, so that he wouldn’t do something dumbass like try to escape. Because that would really put a kink in my plans for how today was going to go.

  John nodded toward the kitchen, and I dutifully led him back there and found the duct tape. I wrapped him up tight around the wrists, then checked the knot on the clothing. It wasn’t coming off easily, and he seemed fearfully impressed, so I just left it along with the double precaution of the tape. I led him back toward the bedroom, not willing to let him out of my sight for long. Once there, I started to raid his closet.

  Well, Kytt’s closet, anyway. John was too tall for me.

  Kytt looked to be a few sizes too tall for me, but unlike Goldilocks, I didn’t have a “just right” third option to choose from, so I made do by rolling up Kytt’s pant legs. Archie wandered around the entire time, not looking particularly upset by the fact that I’d bound up his master and was now raiding his mistress’s wardrobe. He came up and gave me a sniff, like he was trying to decide if whatever scent Kytt offered—it smelled a little lilac-y to me—was better than the sweat of meat that was my signature. He didn’t seem impressed either way, and licked my ankle until I put my shoes back on.

  I’d kept John’s face in the wall while I changed; no threat or anything, just a subtle physical reminder as I turned his head for him that I could break him into tiny, tiny pieces if he pissed me off. I wasn’t going to threaten him at all verbally, though he would probably not realize that until later, if ever. Words were slower than pressure applied to a sensitive joint in getting a point across, after all.

  “Mind if I hit up your fridge?” I asked once I was done, pulling John off the wall and pushing him toward the living room/kitchen again.

  The sound he made was awfully discomfited, but it squeaked out politely enough, and clear, thankfully. “Help yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and pulled him along, Archie trailing in my wake, to finally, finally, get something to eat, and settle in for a few hours until I needed to make my way to the airfield so I could get the hell out of this country before anything worse could happen.

  7.

  Reed

  To her credit, Isabella didn’t ask me if I’d seen the news when I came walking in. She probably didn’t need to, because we’d been together long enough at this point that I was sure she could see the gears turning just by looking at my face. The smell of her perfume wafted lightly through the air of our small apartment in Eden Prairie, just a few short minutes from my work.

  And the gears were turning. They’d been turning the whole drive home.

  “How was your day?” she asked instead, her Italian accent ever present. I didn’t notice it most of the time, unless she was yelling. Then it tended to get really pronounced. She asked neutrally, without a hint of irony, or leading, like she really just wanted to know.

  I pondered my answer as I plopped down on the couch next to her. My white collar was already unbuttoned, my tie loosened appropriately, as though I’d been swilling liquor behind the cafeteria at a school dance with the other guys, instead of crammed in a hot bullpen watching cable news report over and over that my sister was the subject of a manhunt in another country for more crimes that I was pretty sure she didn’t commit.

  “Like someone wiped their ass on my toast,” I said, picking a random metaphor out of the air. It made her frown in contemplation, which I took as a failure, because I’d been hoping to lighten the moment. “Like crap,” I said, and the frown lessened a degree.

  She nodded. She didn’t have to ask if I’d seen. “What are you going to do?” she asked instead.

  “Nothing,” I said, parroting back what I’d told the boys outside the office. “Sienna’s a big girl. She can take care of herself better than any of the rest of us can, our new boosted powers notwithstanding. She did kick all of our asses, minus Jamal, last time we fought, remember.”

  “It would be hard to forget,” she said dryly, probably thinking of how I had disappeared after that for a while. “But…just because she can handle the problem doesn’t mean you’re not going to agonize worrying over it. How do you feel?”

  I put my head back against the soft, white leather couch. It sank back slightly, but I was still able to meet her gaze, even with my head tilted just so, my neck angled uncomfortably. “Powerless,” I said. “You and I know this thing, this hunt for her, it’s all a farce—”

  “She does a fair amount of damage wherever she goes,” Isabella said, playing devil’s advocate once more. Though, honestly, if she were advocating for the devil, you’d think she’d be on Sienna’s side, at least based on the way our world’s theology was tilting. Sienna was rapidly achieving boogeyman—or boogeywoman—status. But not woman-who-boogies status, which was a shame, because seeing her dance? Hilarious.

  “But that’s not why they’re after her,” I said, shoving up off the couch and taking care not to overturn it, and my paramour, with excess zeal as I did so. “They know she didn’t mini-nuke Los Angeles. The government knows she didn’t blast the crap out of Eden Prairie for the heck of it. Those criminals were after her, were going to kill her, and President Harmon—”

  Isabella held up a hand to her lips, a single finger stretching across their rich, lustrous red. I’d almost let it fly with everything there, and admitting that Sienna had confronted Harmon, resulting in his death, was probably not the sort of thing it’d be wise to say here and now. We were pretty sure the FBI had us under surveillance as part of their general Sienna Nealon investigation. At first it had been really awkward, but after a while we’d simply adapted to the fact that we were probably being constantly listened in on.

  On the plus side, I suspected now that Isabella had a bit of a voyeurism fetish, based on her rise in—

  Never mind.

  Gross.

  Anyway. I changed course mid-speech. “It’s not fair that she gets blamed for what happened when those crooks came after her. Or what happened to Harmon, because—I mean, let’s face it—no one knows what happened to him.” I knew what happened to him, at least in general terms, actually, but it wouldn’t do to say aloud on an FBI recording, “Yeah, Sienna inadvertently killed his ass, and boy, did he deserve it,” however true all that might have been.

  “Yes, but people have reason for their suspicions,” Isabella said, patiently. Which was funny, because, of the two of us, I was generally the patient one. “Everyone knows she’s killed people before. And not just killed them, but cold-bloodedly murdered them. Clyde Clary. Glen Parks, Eve Kappler—”

  “I know their names,” I said, looking away at the TV, which was dark, thankfully. The last thing I needed at this time of night was to get sucked back into the news cycle.

  “She’s done so much damage,”
Isabella said. “The YouTube video of her assaulting a prisoner—”

  “I know. I was there, and Eric Simmons could have used a good punching after that—”

  “That reporter she slugged—”

  “Geez, they blindsided her—”

  “I could go on,” Isabella said quietly, but seemed to resign herself to not pressing it. I knew she was right anyway. “Everything she’s done, right or wrong…it’s all bricks in the wall they’ve used to block her in. Box her in, I guess you could say, if you were feeling…what’s the word…ironic?” She made a face that expressed her distaste. “Your sister is a scary person to those looking from the outside. However much good she’s done—and I’ll admit it’s a lot—it doesn’t erase the bad, you know.”

  “I’m not so blinkered I don’t see that.” I pushed my fingers against my forehead and cheekbones and gave a solid press, battling against sinus pressure that wasn’t actually there and a headache that was. “I don’t view her as some flawless goddess, all right? But she’s saved the world a few times, and she’s put a lot of criminals away.” I pulled my fingers back from my eyes. “She’s fought against people who have no ethical line, who have—in some cases—practically no limits on their power. I mean, look at this Edinburgh thing.” I gestured to the black TV screen. “Whoever she fought there, they’ve got a power tailor-made for massive amounts of destruction.” I thought about that red beam ripping through the city on the shaky, camera-phone footage. “How are you supposed to bring someone like that down calmly, without it getting wild?”

  Isabella shrugged. “How do you do it?”

  I sighed. “Wildly. And sometimes it gets out of control. Recall that I ripped apart a commune outside Orlando earlier this year with a custom-made hurricane. People like us…” I bowed my head, taking a long breath. “We’re not human, but we’re subject to human laws, and sometimes it stinks, especially when you meet a person who’s hell-bent on destruction. I don’t think I have to explain to you that there are just certain people out there whose only allegiance is to wrecking everything they possibly can, to hell with who gets hurt in the process.” I tried to let out another cleansing breath, but it didn’t really cleanse me. I felt as tired, and knotted as ever. “Sienna puts herself up against those people all the time, and she doesn’t really get much credit for when things go right, only for when they go madly wrong. Sometimes I wish…” I put my head back again. “Sometimes I wish that she hadn’t been found out, that metas had never gone public. Or that she hadn’t been around when they did, that we just had a few years of this rising chaos without a Sienna Nealon around to ride herd on it. Let people see what the world would be like without her for a while, let people know what they’re missing.”