“Always the smart mouth,” he said, and started toward me again. “You always have a smart-assed comment, don’t you?”
“I’ve always found it preferable to having some dumb-assed thing to say.” I steadied myself, trying to brace as he approached me. “I don’t think you’ve learned that lesson yet, which is sad, because it sounds like you’re really old compared to me—”
He moved toward me fast, and I saw a crow in my mind’s eye again ,a dark shadow in flight, and it froze me. I felt him hit me, a short, low punch to the gut that rocketed me into the wall, higher up this time, and I fell something like eight feet to the ground in a crunch of pain that left me breathless. “I bet I can beat that sarcasm out of you. I bet I can make you scream it out. Really, all you need to adjust your attitude is a good beating, a few dozen broken bones to set you straight—”
The flash of lightning that hit him was epic. I’d always seen the weapon that Kurt used fired in light or at least semi-light places. In the darkness it was as though Eleanor Madigan had unleashed everything at him, and it took a moment for me to realize it was Kurt, standing behind him, uber-taser cannon firing into Bjorn’s back, causing the big man to buck from the fury of it. He didn’t fall, though, not completely, instead dropping to one knee as the discharge of lightning halted, leaving Bjorn bathed in a blue glow as the electricity died. “I don’t think you’re gonna be beating anyone today, you steroid-pumping freak.” Kurt’s face was lit by the glow of the barrel. “Now back the hell away from her before I light your ass up with another 1.21 gigawatts.”
I pushed to my feet again, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. “Did you just make a movie reference?”
“It was one of my favorites,” Kurt said, keeping the weapon trained on Bjorn, who was still on one knee.
“You attack me with lightning?” Bjorn spoke, a low rumbling, and I saw his head shift toward the side to look at Kurt. “Me? The son of Odin? Do you know who my brother was?” He stood, and I swore he was even taller as he stared down at Kurt. “I’ve been taking hits from lightning bolts since I was no bigger than a foal—”
“Did you say fool?” I asked and launched myself at Bjorn before he could take a step toward Kurt. Fair was fair, after all, and he had just saved my life, even though I knew I was going to pay for this one. “You’re still a fool, though you’re a bigger one these days than you probably were then—” I tackled him, causing him to slowly begin to tilt over. I brought my working arm up and clobbered Bjorn in the jaw with the hardest punch I had in me, then another as we started to fall to the ground. “And you have to tell me—did your brother look like Chris Hemsworth? Because—”
“Enough!” He hit me with a backhand that caused me to flip off of him. I heard a popping in my jaw as I spun through the air and hit the ground. Another flash drew his attention away, and I saw Kurt fire three times in rapid succession. A red light lit up on Kurt’s face, and I knew from experience that the weapon was running out of charge. I threw myself at Bjorn again, more pain overwhelming me than I knew I could honestly take. I grasped at his leg and he kicked me in the head, hard. I faded out for a moment and awoke as I saw Kurt get lifted and thrown through the glass doors, the shadows wrapping around my eyes as I thought about the time limit I had left to get out of the dormitory before it exploded.
Bjorn let out a roar at the kids, the students, the metas that were here to be protected by the Directorate. A stray thought washed through my mind, wondering where M-Squad was when they should be protecting the kids, but that disappeared quickly. A lone figure stepped out of the crowd, interposing himself between Bjorn and the rest of them, and my eyes, though unfocused, recognized Joshua Harding’s glasses even before I saw his face, that still damnably familiar face.
“All the little children of the Directorate,” Bjorn said, a tickle of glee in his voice. “Little sheep. You’ll all be part of our flock soon.” The big man focused on Harding. “It looks like someone needs to be culled from the herd. Our success as metas is predicated on strength. The weak, the stupid, they should not live, polluting our bloodlines to the next generation.” He closed on Joshua, shoulder down, as though ready to charge, “They should be killed before infecting us with their—”
“I’m afraid I disagree,” I said, leaping onto Bjorn’s back, my hands free of their gloves. I jammed my skin against his neck, holding on tight, “though in your case I am sorely tempted to make an exception to that ‘no killing’ rule I’ve got going.” I felt the throb of blood in his veins as I wrapped my fingers around his throat. He bucked, trying to throw me off his back, his hands prying at mine, trying to wrench them free. I felt the first pull of my power at work, felt the tug of his soul against mine, heard the first grunt of pain from him as his strength began to fail. He screamed, and his legs buckled, and I rode him to the ground, catching it with my feet, holding him in a sleeper hold as he flailed ineffectually against me.
“No,” he said in a strained moan, “please…I don’t want to…not with you, not my soul…”
“Don’t worry,” I said, and let him go before punching him in the jaw so hard I heard it break. “I have standards, you know. And frankly, my psycho-mutant quota is filled for five lifetimes.” I let his limp body slip from my grasp. “Looks like you’ll live to be a moron for another day, Bjorn,” I said to his unconscious form. “Bad news for you, worse news for the rest of us.”
“Hey,” a voice came to me, waking me from the slight trance I seemed to be in, squatted as I was over Bjorn’s fallen form. It was Harding. “You said the building was gonna blow up, remember?”
“Yes. Right.” I hoisted Bjorn onto my shoulder. “Let’s go, people!” I shouted, rallying the half-dozen or so teenagers. They were huddled, frightened after the battle they’d just witnessed, their hushed voices bouncing off the walls. “Last one out gets to die in a horrible explosion.” I gestured to Joshua. “Pick up Kurt, will you?”
He raised an eyebrow at me, then looked at the fallen form of Hannegan, lying prostrate in the glass partition between the doors that led out of the dormitory. “He’s kind of a big guy.”
“What, you haven’t manifested yet?” I said, drawing an ire-filled look. “I just saved your life, remember?”
I caught subtlety from him, and saw that confidence again. “Maybe someday I’ll repay the favor,” he said as he made for Hannegan, stepping gingerly out of the broken glass hole that Hannegan’s body had made when Bjorn had thrown it out the window. We fled, Harding and I following the last of the kids out of the dormitory and reaching a safe distance of about a hundred yards away as the building burst into a ball of fire. The force of the explosion threw me off my feet, sending Bjorn to the ground and me ass over teakettle into a bed of leaves.
I looked up at the orange glow all around me, saw the chill of my breath fog the air, felt the pains in my body—shoulder, back, ribs. I could smell the acrid smoke of all the destruction wrought, could almost taste the stench in the air, the oily, chemical flame smell from the campus burning—my home. I tilted my head in time to watch the headquarters go up in a blast of flame and force, the biggest explosion of the night. I felt a quiver in the ground, and I wondered where Zack was, where Old Man Winter and Ariadne were—where M-Squad was.
“You okay?” Harding spoke from above me, still holding Kurt on his shoulders, hands anchored to Hannegan’s back and pants leg.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, forcing myself to sit up and clutching my shoulder to me. “You take Hannegan and the others and get to the woods. Get off campus. Do what I told Hannegan to do and find a way out of here.”
He stared back at me through the glasses, and he looked unbowed, cool. More than I felt, that was for sure. “Come with me.”
“Can’t do that,” I said, and I stood, feeling like a zombie coming back to life. I saw the others that were with us, the kids, saw them all recovering from the force of the explosion; it looked like almost every one of them had been knocked off their feet as well. “Ther
e’s only a few of you; get to safety. Get a headcount, move together, and I’ll be along in a little bit, once I finish searching for survivors.”
He watched me carefully. “Looking for your boyfriend?”
I sighed. “Among others.” I couldn’t see much motion through the smoke and shadows that now filled the once-peaceful, tree=lined campus. “Get ‘em out of here, Joshua. Keep them safe.”
He shrugged, no mean feat with Hannegan on his shoulders. “I’ll get ‘em out of here. But I’m going my own way once they’re clear. I’ve got things to do.”
I shook my head, in no mood to argue. “Fine. Whatever. Thanks for your help.”
“So long, Sienna,” he said, carrying Kurt on his shoulders and waving to the others as I watched them fall in behind him in a sort of procession, the flickering flames of our campus lighting their passage through the smoke and destruction—their passage through hell. “I’ll see you again.”
“Why do I not doubt that?” I asked as the last of them disappeared into the smoke being blown from the dormitory fire. I heard a moan from Bjorn and I stomped on his face out of pure pique. The moaning stopped, and I stood there for a long moment, staring at the dormitory—and the wreckage of my life.
26.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned, my hands raised defensively, then I relaxed. “Geez. Give a girl a heart attack.”
“Are you all right?” Bastian was at the lead, Clary and Parks a few steps behind him. I caught the glint of light off Eve Kappler’s wings as she descended to land nearby. At the rear of the procession, Zack was walking in front of Old Man Winter and Ariadne, who was holding her side, her gray suit darkened by blood coming from her nose and beneath her ribs.
“I’m fine,” I said, holding my shoulder. “I sent the kids out of here so I could go look for you all.”
“You left them undefended?” Parks said, pushing past Bastian to stand only a foot from me.
“They’ll be fine,” I said, “Omega wasn’t here for them. Nor for any of us, really. Not to kill, anyway.”
Bastian looked me over while Parks spoke. “Oh, yeah. And you look like hell because they weren’t here to kill anyone.”
“They weren’t,” I said, letting my eyes fall off Zack and back to the fire. The relief coursed through me that he was safe, and I watched the dormitory burn.
“You let them escape,” Old Man Winter said in the low rumble, speaking over the crackle of the flames.
“I stopped Bjorn here,” I said and gave Bjorn a gentle kick to the trapezoid. I squinted and looked to him. “How did you know I let them go?”
“I saw,” Ariadne said, clutching her side. “On the security monitor.”
“Thanks. I didn’t need any help or anything,” I said acerbically.
“You wouldn’t have gotten any from us,” Ariadne said, her voice straining. “ I was watching. The rest of them were fending off about thirty metas that didn’t act at all like they weren’t here to kill. Pretty damned far from it, I would say.”
Old Man Winter walked to where Bjorn lay and lifted him up by the head and neck, Bjorn’s unconscious bulk hanging limp in his hands. “Janus deceived you. He likely sent Bjorn back to retrieve you.”
“Maybe,” I said, and the smoke made my eyes burn as I turned back to them. “I don’t think so, though. They’re worried about something else, something worse.”
“They are right to worry,” Old Man Winter said, shaking Bjorn like a puppet in his grasp. “Do you know what this storm is that is coming? Do you know how it will affect us, our people?”
“Since you haven’t told us anything about it, no.” I folded my arms. “Only what Janus said. It’s tied to the exterminations.”
“You have no idea because you are not ready,” he said, countenance darkening, “because you would not know the enemy if you saw it, this destruction that creeps toward us, wiping out metas continent by continent. If it presented itself to your very face, to you, and you recognized it for what it was, you would still fail to stop it because you are unwilling to do what is necessary—to kill when you confront evil.”
I felt myself redden in the heat of the fire. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, feeling myself fade, as though I could slip into the darkness and away from the ire of Old Man Winter, who was losing his chill rapidly and more obviously than even the time I’d seen him face Wolfe. “Maybe this isn’t for me, the fight, the battle; I don’t want to kill anybody. I don’t want to be responsible—”
“Unfortunately,” Old Man Winter said, tugging on Bjorn, letting him hang in front of me, “that is not an option. I know what waits at the head of the organization—they are called Century , by the way, since you want to know what I know—and I know that you, and you alone, are the only one that stands a chance—a hope in hell—of stopping them.”
“How do you even know that?” I asked, feeling ruthless, cynical, angry. “You didn’t know who I was a year ago! You didn’t know I existed! You couldn’t even figure out what Omega is up to! How do you presume to tell me what some black box organization that sounds like a movie production company is up to a world away?”
“Because I know who heads them,” he said, and there was a rattle in his voice, “and I have feared him since he crippled me over a hundred years ago. He is without a doubt the most powerful meta on the face of the earth, and with one hundred followers—some of the strongest metas on the planet—he has assembled an army that is wiping us out, piecemeal. They burned through the compounds in India and China because they were the easiest, but even now they have split, divided their forces and run rampant through Asia and Africa, slaughtering whole cloisters of metas. Next will be Europe, and finally…” His eyes turned grim. “You are the only one who can stop him—and by extension, them. You must be willing to do what it takes—to kill him, because you, yourself, will be the only one with a chance.”
“Fine,” I said, cowed by the conviction in his eyes. “Fine, I’ll…make ready. I just…” I blinked back the feeling. “You know I will, to save lives, to save people.” I licked my lips. “I have before. With Gavrikov. I can do it again.”
“It will not be enough,” he said, glaring at me. “You fear it, your power. I can see it in your eyes; the fear consumes you. You are afraid of it, to unleash yourself—and yet that will be the only thing that will save us all.”
“I don’t need to unleash anything,” I said. “I’ve got Wolfe in my head, remember? Unleashing has a special meaning with him—”
“Kill Bjorn,” he said, and held up the Omega operative, near lifeless. “If you truly mean that you will do whatever it takes, then show me you can do it. Show me you are willing, that you won’t hesitate, that you won’t falter when we need you most.”
“Are you frigging kidding me?” I waved a hand at him. “He’s out. I’m not killing a lump of inert matter like that.”
“Take his soul,” Old Man Winter said. “Show me.”
“I want that crawling around in my head,” I gestured at Bjorn again, “like I want to take a lit blowtorch and stick it in my ear. No, thank you.”
“Kill him,” Old Man Winter said, and pushed Bjorn forward, dangling him in front of me.
“No!” I said, and backed away. “I’m not…no.”
“Is that your final word on the matter?” There was a dangerous glint in his eyes which I ignored, and I felt the stubbornness come back, like I was talking to Mom.
“I’m not killing an unconscious man, even if he is a monster,” I said, backing away. “I’m not a murderer. I’m not like him.”
“Clary,” Old Man Winter said, jarring the big man out of listening to the conversation, watching all that was taking place, “restrain Sienna, please.”
“What?” I recoiled, almost not believing. I saw Zack move in front of Old Man Winter, as if to interpose himself between us, but a net of light hit him, and he spun, dragged to the ground by Eve Kappler’s abilities, her hands out as she turned toward me. “What the hell are
you doing?”
“Clary,” Old Man Winter said again. “Take hold of Sienna, please.”
“I, uh…” Clary faltered, unmoving, unsure, his eyes wide.
“ Clary .” Old Man Winter’s voice crackled like thunder, and Clary shook, his skin turning metal as he turned, hesitantly, toward me.
I tensed, ready to dodge him, ready to run, but Eve’s net took me to the ground unexpectedly. I struggled against it, fighting the light, writhing hard against the ground, but it held me tight to the dirt. My head hurt from where I’d hit a rock when I went down, my shoulder screamed at me as I railed against it.
Clary’s shadow extended over me, a long, dark face cast in metal. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he dragged the net off me and anchored his hands on each of my wrists. He turned me around, pressing my back against him, carrying me, my arms twisted, in front of him. I thought about ramming my head back against his face, trying to knock myself unconscious, but I decided it was pointless.
“Sir,” Bastian said, “this is…”
“Not now,” Old Man Winter said, dismissing Bastian. “Clary, hold out her hands.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said as Clary pried my hands loose and extended them, walking me along like some sort of ragdoll as I tried kicking to free myself, to no avail. “Clary, you douche!”
“I’m sorry,” Clary said. “But the man’s spoken, Sienna. He knows what he’s talking about.”
“This is for your own good,” Old Man Winter said, advancing on me, Bjorn held in his hands. “For the good of all of us. You can save us, but only if you are prepared.”
“I’ll prepare,” I said, struggling. “I’ll train, I’ll do whatever you want, please just do not…put this sicko…in my head with the others!”
Old Man Winter pressed Bjorn’s shoulders against my palms, held open by Clary’s grip. I felt the drain of the soul begin, the cumulative effect of touching Bjorn earlier drawing the process faster, as my head started to spin. I whimpered, and closed my eyes tight as the burning began, like the joints of my fingers were on fire where I was touching him. Blissfully, Bjorn made not even a sound, though I could clearly hear him screaming in my head as the last of him left his body and joined me in my own, a searing, joyous, agonizing, pleasurable experience as my body reacted and I felt myself shake from all my nerves tingling.
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