“‘I’m a gonna’ give you a lesson in grammar,” I said, staring him down. There was a crashing sound at the rear of the house. I didn’t know quite how to react to that, but it was far enough off that I didn’t worry immediately. “Because apparently the public schools failed you in this regard.”
“You’re a superior sorta bitch, aintcha?” He scowled and revealed steel teeth that would have been the pride of ol’ Michael Shafer himself. “Think you’re better than everyone.”
“Not so,” I said, “just better than you and your scheming family of trash. You have to bring in a ringer just to do your thinking for you.”
He swiped at me, but he was a little too slow, and I dodged. He tried to adjust, and I’ll admit he was fast, but he ended up smashing an old couch to shreds in the process. “Hey, guy,” I said, “you keep destroying your furniture and you’re gonna end up raising the property values.” He swung again and took out part of the plaster in the ceiling as I floated away. “Looks like this place could use a renovation anyway.”
He started to come at me again, but a pile of earth burst through the nearest window and slammed into him like a battering ram, knocking him to the ground. The floor, already protesting under his weight, gave up and he disappeared through the boards into a basement cellar below, reminding me of a time his idiot father had brought a house in Des Moines, Iowa, down around our ears.
“Yeah,” Augustus said, announcing his entry to the fray with a little gusto, “back to nature, mofo.”
“You need a better tagline,” I said.
“You got a gratitude problem, you know that?” he came up to stand by one of my shoulders while Jamal eased up to the other.
“I’ve got a lot of problems at the moment,” I said, staring into the black hole in the floor as I floated back into the air. “I’ll get right on that one once I’ve settled the hash of this Clary issue.”
“You’re going to be a while on that one, darlin’,” came a woman’s voice from the archway to my right. I spun and caught a glimpse of a lady with steel skin covered over by a big blouse and pants. She was rocking a body type just a little squatter than my own, her long hair turned to steel with her skin. She even had an apron on, leaving me no doubt who she was.
“You must be Clyde’s mother,” I said, staring her down. She did not look like she’d ever been intimidated by anyone, ever.
“They call me Ma,” she said.
I passed on jabbing her with the fact that one less person called her ‘Ma’ now than did a few years earlier. “You’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble to make my life hell, Ma,” I said instead.
“It hasn’t been all that much trouble,” she said, a flat statement of fact. “You make it pretty easy.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that. She wasn’t smiling, malevolent evil, she wasn’t cocking off like a quippy a-hole, she was just looking me in the eye and telling me that she wasn’t sorry for putting me through the wringer. “It’s easy to hit someone in the gut while they’re already down.”
“Now that depends on who it is you’re hitting,” she said. “You think you’re going to make me feel bad about hitting while you’ve taken a knee? You took my boy from me. I wouldn’t feel bad about ripping your guts out and feeding ’em to the dogs while you were watching it happen.”
“Your boy held me down and made me kill someone I cared about.” My voice was hoarse, and I couldn’t have torn my gaze away from her if I had to. My skin was practically itching with the desire to pound the shit out of this woman.
“And you killed him in return,” she said, ratcheting her anger up a notch. “Now I’m gonna put it to you. You know what we call that where I come from?”
“Suicide?”
“A feud.” She didn’t smile. “Blood for blood, an eye for an eye—”
“Looks like I’m going to come up short trying to get a tooth for a tooth, because you seem to be lacking—”
“Oh, I know how you must be looking at us,” she said. “Clyde told me you thought he was just an ignorant hillbilly—”
“Your son was the dumbest muskox I ever met,” I said. “He had all the brains God gave a centipede and none of the charm.” I waved at the hole in the floor of her living room. “I see breeding won out.” I tensed, ready to make my move.
“You think you’re better than everyone,” she said, “and that’s your weakness. You got a superiority complex that’s gonna be the end of you.”
“There’s only one end you’re gonna see here,” I said, “and it’s your own ass as you put your head between your legs and kiss it goodbye.” I launched at her, and she reacted quickly, like I figured she would, throwing her own hands up to ward me away from hitting her. It was a common mistake from people who hadn’t fought me, who didn’t exactly know what I was capable of. I went right at her eyes to provoke that reaction, after all, and she did as expected.
I came to a stop in milliseconds, inches from her, and grasped her wrists. I yanked on them and started to spin, ripping her off the ground and spinning her like a hammer. It was my favorite move against bigger foes, because they never expected it from me. If I’d given her another second she probably could have countered by balling up and causing me to lose balance and drag her to the earth, but I released before she could, and she sailed through the roof of the kitchen, leaving a boulder-sized hole as she went about twenty feet into the air before she hit her apex and landed in a field.
“Hammer time!” Augustus yelled, and I shook my head at him. “Oh, come on!”
The floorboards exploded right then, and Junior re-entered the fray from below. He ripped down the floor near where he’d gone under, causing Jamal to scramble back, tossing a bolt of lightning downstairs as he did so. Augustus was in motion as well, jumping on a nearby stereo cabinet and clutching on like he was ready to climb it.
Clyde Junior jumped up to swipe at another bunch of floorboards, destroying a mass of his family’s antique furnishings in the process and only succeeding in getting Jamal to move a little faster and throw a little more lighting. I was hovering above his influence and far enough away that he couldn’t do squat to me, but I threw a few of Eve’s light nets at him, the monster under the floor. He shrugged them off like I’d thrown a shot glass of water in his face. He looked more annoyed than anything, his steel face pinched.
Sienna! someone shouted in my mind, and it took me a second to realize it was Zollers. Clary Junior was destroying the house, heaving floorboards into the air with one hand as I pinned his other with a net of light, screaming frustration so loud that even the thunder of his footsteps on the cement floor were almost being drowned out. When I finally realized Zollers was speaking right to me, it was too late.
The entire house was shaking, and I didn’t even know it until the first sections of the ceiling started to come down on top of me. The first piece of plaster was all the warning I got, because the whole damned thing followed a second later, Simmons’ earthquake power coupling with whatever the hell Ma Clary had done to damage the house beyond its ability to hold together. Jamal, Augustus and Clyde Junior all disappeared from my sight as the roof came caving in along with the upper floor, dragging me helplessly down into the darkness as the world collapsed around me.
25.
Ma
“That’s gonna leave a mark on somebody,” Ma said as she dusted herself off. The landing hadn’t been too rough, more disorienting than anything. Being in steel form didn’t mean blood, bone and fluid didn’t still exist in her body or inner ear, and being thrown through the air was dizzying, if not overly painful. She watched her house collapse in a pile of dust and mess, a cloud blossoming into the air like a low hanging storm as everything came down hard.
“You all right?” Denise asked as she squealed to a halt in the van. Ma turned her head to look and caught sight of Simmons hanging onto the side of the vehicle.
“Fine,” Ma said, brushing herself off as the dust cloud hit. It wasn’t much of one, but it l
eft a little residue. She hauled the door open as it cleared and Simmons pulled himself inside the passenger door. “We just gotta wait for—”
An explosion of boards and plaster in the middle of the house wreckage caused Ma to raise an eyebrow. A steel hand shone in the sunlight, glinting like a mirror as it caught rays and reflected them. Junior pulled himself out of the rubble with a little effort, climbing up on the busted roof like he was getting out of a swimming pool.
“Get on over here!” Ma called, waving him down. He hesitated, and she fixed him with a look. “No argument now, let’s go.”
“You can’t just leave her like this!” Junior called, but he was already heading her way. Slow, but doing it. “You wanted to finish it. We could finish it right now!”
“Or she could whoop you for a while and you could end up like your daddy,” Ma called. She had a little quiver inside, knew the stakes on this one. Sienna Nealon wasn’t someone she wanted to mess with when she wasn’t ready for it. It wasn’t like she was afraid to fight, she just liked to make sure her chances of winning were a little more certain than they looked at the moment. “Don’t be stupid. You done hobbled her by taking out her support for a bit, don’t screw it up by coming at her when she’s mad as hell and has nothing else to lose.”
Junior thundered across the open space between them and turned into rubber before he climbed in the van. The shocks still moved under his weight. Ma aped his move and did the same, slamming the van’s sliding door shut as Denise floored it. Ma made a face; Junior had been smoking in here, and she hated that smell.
Simmons fidgeted in the front seat as the fields whipped by on either side. Denise was running the dirt road at close to sixty. Ma might have pushed it up a little higher, even though she didn’t feel comfortable driving rough roads that hard usually. They bounced a little and she and Junior both hit the ceiling. “Shit!” he said.
“That’s about right,” Ma said as she came back down. She didn’t mean the bump, of course. She meant losing the damned house she’d had for however many years. She couldn’t even count ’em all anymore.
“Where we going?” Denise asked as they came up on a turn in the road. She went left even before her mother answered.
“Seems to me we find ourselves in a feud,” Ma said, looking over Simmons’s shoulder in front of her. The boy didn’t look too good, but then, she’d just forced his loyalty pretty hard. “In a case like this, when you’re facing down more than you can handle on your own, I find it’s always best to turn back to family.” Denise gave her a nod. She knew where to go, where to find the help Ma was looking for. The help they’d need to finish this thing up for good.
26.
Sienna
I watched ambulances carry Scott and Jamal away from the Clary house with a deeply sick feeling inside. Especially with Scott, as I watched the paramedics struggling to keep him from bleeding everywhere, I couldn’t suppress the guilt, welling up inside me like the red that was now oozing almost uncontrollably from his neck. Dr. Zollers had staunched it until his healing had kicked in, but a secondary shot to his shoulder when he’d already been on the ground had made it much worse.
Jamal had just been knocked unconscious by a falling beam in the house collapse, but watching them wheel him away with his eyes closed and blood trickling out of his nose had been hard by itself. When you added the look on Augustus’s face, also bloody, I might add, as the paramedics closed the doors on him and his brother, it was almost unbearable.
“This wasn’t your fault, Sienna,” Dr. Zollers said as the red-flashing lights faded into the distance, the boxy ambulances rocking on their suspensions on the uneven dirt road.
“I’m getting pretty sick of that patently false refrain.” I stared after them for a minute and then cast a look back at the fallen house and the half dozen police officers that were standing around, not really sure what to make of the whole scene. At least they’d accepted my ID as a federal officer without getting all up in my face. They seemed to give me a wide berth, actually. “This was one hundred percent my fault,” I said. “This entire thing, from the Clary clan to Eric Simmons, is all down to me.”
Whether his powers were telling him to keep quiet or he just knew me well, he did not respond.
“If I hadn’t killed Clyde Clary,” I said, shaking my head, “none of this would have happened. And as for Simmons—”
“If only you’d let him get away clean with robbing the Federal Reserve,” Zollers said, and here he was smiling slightly, “maybe his girlfriend might have decided to leave you be?” Now I didn’t know what to say. “You’re looking for ways to blame yourself,” he said, “looking for ways to justify your withdrawal from humanity.”
“I’m death, Doc,” I said, gesturing back at the destroyed house, “you can’t tell me being a little isolated isn’t good for everybody.”
“It’d be terrible for everybody,” he said, serious as he could be.
I didn’t quite do a double take. “How do you figure?”
“Who was the last person that had power like you and no connection to humanity?” Zollers asked, a little more coy than he needed to be.
I blinked a few times. “Sovereign? You think Sovereign became who he is because he—what, didn’t have any friends?”
“Sovereign was so withdrawn from humanity, so detached,” he said, “that he might as well have been a different species. He didn’t view himself as one of us, not really. Not meta or human. He was ‘a man apart’ by his own admission. He wanted to create a better world for us, like a benevolent deity smiling down on his subjects.”
“Being one of the people he wanted to create that world for,” I said, staring at the wreckage of the house, with the roof cracked in three specific segments, “I remember all too well what his benevolence felt like. But that wasn’t just from being a recluse for a while. I mean, he had other issues.”
“He had limitless power and no accountability from normal people, people he could he listen to, whose dreams he could hear, whose fears he could taste,” Zollers said, looking at me with those warm eyes. “He wanted to change the world, but the way he wanted to do it wasn’t by leading; it was by crushing all opposition. He lost touch with humanity, especially the humanity of those who he perceived as standing in his way. He wanted to kill every single guardian of the old order because he didn’t see them as people anymore.” He straightened up and brushed the dust off his shirt, making a small cloud in the air between us. “When you withdraw from humanity, you cut yourself off from your own in some way, and when you’ve got amazing power coupled with it, suddenly you’re convinced you’re the impartial observer with all the answers, and why can’t you just fix the problems? It’s in your hands, after all.”
“Sounds like a long road from there to here,” I said, looking away from him.
“Because you never take aim at a problem and go forth to solve it without worrying about the consequences to yourself?” I turned around and caught him smiling, though faintly now. “It’s always closer than you think.”
“Uh, ma’am?” A cop’s voice interrupted my opportunity to contest Zollers’s assessment, and I turned to see a young guy in full uniform with a military style haircut waiting tentatively, like he was afraid I’d turn him into a toad or something.
“Yes?” I asked, probably a little higher than my normal conversational tone. It’s like when you’re in an argument with someone and you try to pretend you’re not. I probably wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all the young cop in front of me.
“We’ve got something over here you should see,” the cop said, and I followed him around the house as Zollers came with me, looking a little mysterious. We passed a crushed-in corner of old white paneling that probably hadn’t been replaced since the turn of last century judging by the peeling paint, and moved behind the house where part of it was still kindasorta standing. In the back, the floors hadn’t taken as much damage as they had where Clyde Junior had crashed through, so the walls had
just fallen in, leaving a room at the back—well, not intact, but with the roof collapsed in and the wreckage still above ground.
No one had started excavating yet, which seemed wise given the structural integrity of the place was suspect at best. I paused at the back wall, folded neatly in half where it had dropped in on the room and listened, hearing something faintly tapping somewhere inside. “What the hell?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” Zollers said, still coy.
“Great,” I said and seized hold of the back wall at the corner. I waited for the young officer and Dr. Zollers to step clear, and then I lifted into the air and ripped it up, tossing it into the middle of the wreckage pile that had once been the Clary household. I revealed what looked like a room that had partially sunk into the ground, the floor collapsing downward and threatening to spill everything into the fallen middle of the house like a black hole had formed to drag everything toward it.
I paused as the pieces I’d just thrown settled and listened again past the raised voice of the cops who were surprised by my little feat of strength. That same tapping came again from just in front of me, and I peered into the cloudy darkness of the collapsed room until I located its origin.
There was a cylindrical thing in the corner that looked kind of like a coffin or a photon torpedo from Star Trek, but bigger. It was bulky as hell and it took me a second to realize there was something—no, someone—inside making the noise. “Huh,” I said.
“It’s a sensory deprivation tank,” Dr. Zollers said, answering my question.
“A whut?” the officer asked.
“It’s filled with salt water and insulated against outside noise so that someone can remain inside, afloat with nothing but their thoughts,” Zollers said. “They were quite popular for a while.”
“Lemme get this straight,” the cop said, “you’re saying there’s someone in there right now. Someone locked up in there with—like a bunch of salt water.”
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