“Just because I can read your mind doesn’t mean I always know what to say.” His eyes ran over my kitchen. “Because sometimes you don’t even know what you want to hear.”
“You know what I don’t want to hear right now.” The jacket settled on my shoulders, more comfortable than the giant slab of space rock that had been on them only a few minutes earlier. “That’s a starting point, right?”
“You’re not in the mood for a challenge, I know.” He took a few more steps into the room and cocked his head at my dog, sleeping on the heating grate in the living room. “But, then, who enjoys being challenged?”
“I’ve got enough of those coming my way on any given day, let alone today,” I said, holstering a spare gun. I hadn’t even carried one earlier, when I’d done my various vengeful runnings around this morning. “But you’re right, I don’t like arguing with the people I know. Feels a little too much like what I get from every other quarter.”
“‘Our critics are our friends, they show us our faults,’” he said, looking at me with a reserved amusement that would have made me want to kill anyone else I saw wearing the expression.
“Then I’ve got a shit-ton of friends.”
“No, you actually don’t, by any other standard,” he said, jabbing me for the first time in a long damned time.
“Thanks for the reminder,” I sniped back.
“At this point, a lot of people consider you invulnerable, power-wise,” he said as I started past him. “Yet you’re one of the most wounded people I’ve ever met.”
I stopped, showing him nothing but my back. “I wasn’t always invulnerable, and you know it.”
“And now you never let yourself be vulnerable in any way.”
“The last time I did,” I said, turning around to look at him with one of those dangerous looks I usually reserved for others, “you know what happened.”
“You trusted, Winter betrayed you,” he said, “I get that. You’ve got history.”
“Yeah,” I said, smirking because I didn’t want to let him see how I was really feeling. Not that I could hide it from him, but still, I didn’t want to feel exposed. That’s why I put on clothes, after all. “You know I didn’t quite grow up in the cupboard under the stairs on Privet Drive, but …” I paused, thinking about it. “Actually, maybe I had it worse.”
“You keep talking about your history,” Zollers said, “but I’m here to talk about your destiny.”
“My destiny at the moment involves finding more people to hammer into the ground,” I said, adjusting the leather coat around my shoulders. It felt damned uncomfortable after flying with flaming skin for a while.
“You begged me to stay here,” Zollers said, bringing me up short. “Why?”
“You know why,” I said, and I could tell my face was ashen.
“I am rather calloused to pain,” he said, and he took a couple steps toward me, looking at his feet all the while. “I have walls. Defenses. It’s a natural thing to develop when the thoughts of others start breaking into your own in your teenage years, when you don’t even know who you are yet. The struggles of others … now, that’s pain. Pain funneled right into the center of you. A six-lane freeway of raw, bare nerves.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with pain,” I said.
“Of course you are,” he said. “You’ve been feeling it on a near-constant basis since before then. Not that of others, though, just your own significant amounts of it.”
“I know you’re coming to a point here.”
“Why?” he asked, and now it was his turn to smirk slightly. “Do you have somewhere else to be, or do you just want to wander around beating up random strangers as you try to get a line on what to do next?” That took a little bit of my defiance away, and I knew he sensed it. “I feel your pain like no other, is my point. I get it. It’s unique on a level that I don’t experience much, but it’s also the same as that of everyone else.”
“So, what are you aiming for here?” I asked. “You want me to talk about it? How I feel after seeing my brother in the hospital, tubes coming out of him because of people who hate me? How I reacted to his girlfriend telling me she doesn’t blame me, when—I mean, hell, she damned well should.” I took a breath, and it felt hot in my skin. “You know how I feel about all of this, all of it, and—”
“I don’t, actually,” he said, staring me down. “Because sometimes, especially at a moment like this … you don’t know how you feel, either.”
“I know how I—” I paused right in the middle of my sentence, and tried to take inventory. I knew rage. Blinding, angry, yeah, that was there.
“That’s level one,” he agreed. “Like the icing on the cake, it’s something we can all see.”
“I’m sure the gooey center beneath has some more of the sugary same,” I quipped, not feeling that witty.
“You’re reacting,” he said. “You don’t know exactly what you’re going to do, you’re just flying like a missile, going after whatever heat source crosses your path. That’s dangerous, especially for you—”
“Because I’ve killed before?” I smiled bitterly.
“Because you’re the most powerful woman in the world,” he said, serious.
“Because I’m dangerous,” I said.
“You’re capable of it,” he agreed, though I could sense it was only partially. “But you’re also capable of good, like any other person. I think you should have seen that plainly after this morning.”
“This morning I burned down a house and dragged its occupants kicking and screaming to prison,” I said, and my shoulders slumped, “and I drained their memories looking for any hint that they knew who hired them to do … this thing.”
“To kill you,” he said. I looked at him and my mouth fell open a little hearing him verbalize it. “That’s the thing they were doing. They may have bombed your brother’s car, and that may be what makes you angry about it all, but … they tried to kill you, Sienna. The Brain is trying to kill you.”
“Who hasn’t tried that before?” I asked, weariness settling in on me as I recovered my composure.
“At some point you’re going to have to reconcile your feelings about that,” he said, “because—”
My phone chirped at me, and like Phillips before me, I was the asshole that answered it trying to find a way out of this uncomfortable conversation. Zollers’s face registered a note of surprise that he concealed expertly before I spoke. “Hello?”
“Hey,” J.J. said, a little tentative. “I have something for you.”
“Let it be a face to punch.”
“Uhh … not mine, I hope?” J.J. asked, sounding a little worried.
“I don’t punch your face,” I said, “I just hover over it ominously until you wake up screaming while looking into my angry, sensual eyes.”
“Uhhh …”
“J.J.,” I said, dropping the smartassery. “What?”
“Those emails,” J.J. said, “I’m not done sorting yet, but I got a fresh contact on something that just came through. A bartender as near as I can tell, someone who’s doing some ongoing work for your Brain—”
“The Brain employs its own bartenders?” I paused, eyes flitting around as I processed that. “It must have a hell of a drinking problem—”
“—and he’s got, like, spy reports,” J.J. went on, apparently knowing when to ignore me, “about you.”
I paused, letting that sink in. “Spy reports?”
“Yeah,” J.J. said. “Like, real intelligence gathering stuff. I searched back through the history of emails from this guy, and this bartender has been sending some real nasty nuggets to the Brain, stuff she’s been sending to reporters everywhere—”
I saw red, and I knew by the look on Zollers’s face that he knew that crimson was my color today. “Oh, my,” he said.
“Hey,” came a voice from outside the door. “Anyone in here?” Augustus Coleman peeked around the corner and looked straight at me, then Zollers. “Sorry. You left your doo
r, uh … on the floor.”
I looked down at my hand, which shook, and I knew in that moment that the frosty cake of my emotions was definitely hiding veins of anger throughout, like chocolate. Sweet, vengeful chocolate. “Name and address,” I said, and my phone beeped before I even finished saying it, the map popping up automatically.
“Way ahead of y—” J.J. said as I hung up.
“Sienna—” Zollers started to say.
“Don’t.” I breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth. I came up with a solution before I’d even had time to think it through. “If you’re that worried, you can come with me.”
“Is this a field trip?” Augustus asked, his head sticking out from behind the scuffed wall. He looked better without the cervical collar. “Because I need to get out of here for a little while. Think those pain meds made me all itchy inside.”
“Sure,” I said, stalking my way around the corner and out the door. I could sense Dr. Zollers following me, and Augustus behind him, could hear their footsteps even as they tried to be quiet enough not to waken the furious crazy that was leading the procession. “The more the merrier.” Even though I knew that when I found this bartender, there damned sure wasn’t going to be much merriness to be had for anyone but the funeral parlor that got to bill for overtime after scraping him back together.
16.
I broke down the door without regard for property, or a warrant, or public safety, or … well, much of anything, really. It busted inward, swung on a shattered frame, and hung in my way until I just ripped it off with a second hit and sent it spiraling into the drywall behind it.
“Honey, I’m home,” I said as I pushed my way inside and saw someone spring up off a couch to my left, coughing on a cigarette that dangled between astonished lips and that flew out on the next good hacking. It gave the room a stink, that lit cigarette, reminding me a little of when I’d breathed in the toxic burning of a car’s interior a few hours earlier.
The smoker in question was a shade under six feet, skinny, heavily tattooed, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and clearly scared shitless by the sight of someone crashing into his house without announcement. I knew from what J.J. had sent me that this bartender’s name was Charles O’Shea. He didn’t look Irish to me, though sometimes it’s tough to tell when someone’s scared shitless.
He bolted for the archway behind him, where I could see a dining room, and I caught up with him before he got more than a few steps, seizing hold of his naked shoulders and shoving him roughly into the waiting arms of Augustus, who had followed behind me. He grabbed the guy with a little nervous gusto, like he was afraid he was going to get caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
I walked over and stubbed out the cigarette with my boot on the carpet, but I doubted it was going to cost him a security deposit since by the look of the place he’d lost that a long time ago. There were holes in the walls, probably a hundred dollars' worth of stereo equipment that looked like it had been dragged right out of the seventies surrounding one of those old-school widescreen TVs, the sort that weighs tons because it has to project the image on the front of the TV like a movie theater exists inside the huge contraption. “The hell?” I wondered, looking at it all. “Is this some kind of mania for vintage or do you just not have the money for a modern flatscreen?”
“Picture’s better on this,” he asserted, surprisingly defiant for a guy who was being held in something close to a submission hold whilst nearly naked by a pretty tall man, while a humorless woman picked over his choice in electronics.
“Yeah,” Augustus said, “and eight tracks sound better than CDs.”
I eased closer to the guy and caught sight of the fear in his eyes. “You know who I am?”
He blinked, looking left and catching sight of Zollers. “No,” he said sullenly.
I didn’t even need to look at Zollers to know he was lying. “That was a rhetorical question,” I said. “Everyone knows who I am.”
“Try to pretend like you don’t enjoy it,” he scoffed, with way more courage than I would have had in his utter-lack-of-shoes.
“Hey, I know this guy,” Augustus said, turning Charles’s head to look at his face in profile. “This is your brother’s bartender.”
Augustus was an honest man, and while that wasn’t a fault, it certainly cost him a little trouble this time as I not-gently-at-all ripped Charles O’Shea the bartender out of his loving embrace and put the bastard through his own glass coffee table. His ashtray got caught up on the metal frame and followed a second later, delivering a nice thump and a load of nastiness to the back of O’Shea’s head and leaving a knick on his scalp the length of my forefinger.
I dragged Charlie up and slammed him into the drywall with about a hundredth of the force and a millionth of the rage I had available on hand. His eyes squinted shut in pain, then opened just a sliver experimentally. “I’m still here, dipshit,” I said, and rammed him into the wall again. Lightly, I swear. If he died of this, it’d be from embarrassment or an undisclosed heart condition, because these were my version of love taps. “I am not a figment of your imagination.”
“What do you want?” Charles asked, two steps past panic.
“Not interior decorating tips,” I said. I tried to decide if I should just steal his memories here, in front of everybody and ruled it out. I caught a knowing look from Zollers as he made his way over to lean against the wall so I could see him plainly even as I held Charles an inch or so off the ground against it. He knew what I was thinking, knew what I’d done, and knew I was ashamed of it. Partaking of someone’s memories, their soul, it always felt like something dirty to me, like something I should hide from. I had an easier time knowing that there were pictures of my blurry, naked ass streaking across the skies of various cities where my clothes had been burned off in fights than coping with the idea that anyone would see me taking memories out of someone’s head.
It was private, it was weird, and it was the last thing I had left that I didn’t want to admit to anyone.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Zollers said, sparing me the awkward discomfort of reaching into Charlie Boy’s mind to figure that out for myself. Dr. Zollers plainly didn’t think reaching into minds was that awkward, but his method didn’t result from inappropriately long and awkward touches that released a feeling inside me that was akin to—well, you know. In that regard, I felt way, way too close to the succubi of fiction, the ones that everyone in the press seemed super eager to lump me in with. Like an idiot with a hammer who saw nothing but nails everywhere, everything was about sex with these bastards. Put the hammer away, you dinks. “If you want,” Zollers said, “I’ll take him to the police in his car, let you two drive back to HQ on your own.”
I let Charles go, frowning. “Why?” I asked, turning to look at him.
Zollers shrugged lightly. “Do you trust me?”
I started to smart off, then stopped myself. “Yeah.”
He held out a hand, and I shoved Charles roughly toward him. As I did so, I saw a glazed look run over Charles O’Shea’s face that told me he wasn’t going to escape Zollers’s custody of his own volition. “See you back there.” Zollers smiled weakly, and Charlie walked behind him in perfect sync.
“Was that weird?” Augustus asked me, stepping up to stand at my side, scratching his head.
“Yes.” We watched them go, and I shook my head, trying to figure out the next move. “We should …” I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Go back, I guess.”
“Yeah, all right,” he said, shrugging. He was walking a little tentatively, and he led the way back to the car, one of the dark agency SUVs that we took everywhere. “You think you’re gonna calm down anytime soon?” He looked at me sideways on that one.
“Sorry,” I said as I made my way to the driver’s seat and unlocked the door. I hated driving, but every time I suggested Augustus do it he called me Miss Daisy, another of his never-ending attempts at humor.
“You about ripped tha
t guy out of my hands,” he said, getting in the front seat of the SUV and slamming the door behind him as I did the same. “I mean, I’m just recovering here, thought I’m going out on some nice, light little detail where we go to brace some punk, and …” He frowned as I started the car. “You know, we didn’t even get anything out of that.”
“I know,” I said, sighing, letting my head slump forward a little. “We’re on the wrong side of the email wall, here, chasing this guy and those assassins I got this morning. It’s like there’s a watertight compartment between us and the Brain, and—” I paused, catching a hint of something in the air.
“What?” Augustus locked eyes with me and must have seen the alarm in my face, because he started to look a little panicked, too.
“Watertight compartments can get busted open, too,” said a voice from the back seat as I spun around to look at the young man waiting there, his glasses catching a gleam from the sunlight outside, his dark skin only a few shades off from the leather he sat upon. “You just need someone like me to make like an iceberg and do the work.”
17.
“Jamal!” Augustus half-hissed, half-screamed, looking more than a little perturbed at his brother. “You scared the hell out of me! Who creeps into the backseat of a fricking federal agency car and just sits there? What if she’d killed you, scaring her like that?”
“Hey,” I said, nonplussed. “I haven’t even killed anyone yet today, and if ever there was a time for it—” I looked him up and down. “Also, I’m not the one who looks scared.”
“Well, he startled me,” Augustus said, more than a little nonplussed himself. Looking like he had a wicked case of the shakes, he rounded on his brother again. “What are you doing here?”
“Heard you broke your back,” Jamal said, all cool. I didn’t know him all that well, but he struck me as that sort of guy, calm almost all the time. I’d implicated him in a series of revenge murders that he’d performed down in Atlanta after the woman that he loved got killed by a criminal conspiracy, but he’d done the deed with lightning powers and brought an even bigger problem to light, so I’d let him skate.
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