Fearless (Dominion Trilogy #2)

by Robin Parrish

  The book was entitled The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

  Julie glanced at the book's cover. "I hate to admit it, but I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to read again anytime soon. Things are so hectic around here-"

  "Oh, no worries, dear. A story as profound as this one deserves to be held onto for a special occasion," Morgan replied, casting a sideways glance at Grant.

  Grant's attention wandered off, his eye catching an image on another of Fletcher's computer monitors-a different news channel reporting on a large nursing home in L.A. that had caught fire from an adjacent property. A text scroll at the bottom said that more than seventy people were still trapped inside and rescue workers were having difficulty reaching them.

  "Where is that?" Grant asked.

  Fletcher swiveled in his chair, his fingers doing a quick dance across the keyboard. "Union Avenue, off West Sixth."

  "Tell Alex to meet me there five minutes ago," Grant said, moving toward the door. He stopped one last time to turn around as Lisa passed by, offering him a hardened gaze that told him he would be held to his promise to talk to her as soon as he got back.

  An image floated through Grant's mind of a single man, alone somewhere and facing a very dangerous situation. He didn't recognize the man's surroundings.

  "What about Payton?"

  More than one look of alarm greeted this question, but Julie offered a calm reply. "What about him?"

  "Has anyone heard from him lately?" he asked.

  Fletcher made a kind of alarmed bark and quicky turned to his workstation, pretending not to listen.

  From several yards away, Lisa, her voice worried and disappointed, was the only one to answer. "Do you really think we will?"

  Paris, France

  There really was nothing else quite like the sound of a man's jaw breaking.

  Payton considered it a truly singular, remarkable sound-one he relished. It was without equal.

  A second security guard backpedaled away from him on his hands and feet, crab-like, as the first landed on the floor nearby with a thud.

  "S'il vous plait!" the guard cried. "I speak English! Don't kill me!"

  Payton almost smiled.

  French nancy boys ...

  "Please! I have a wife, son-"

  "Sucks to be you, mate," Payton said. In a flash, he whipped out his sword, flipped it end-on-end, caught the blade, and sideswiped the man on the floor with its hilt.

  Two security guards now lay on either side of the front lobby door to the small building on the outskirts of the French Government Plaza, out cold. It was early morning, long before dawn, and the building was all but empty.

  Payton eyed the ceiling for any sign of cameras while sheathing his sword; the building seemed to have very low security measures, with only a minimal staff and no electronic surveillance that he could detect.

  A small computer workstation rested on the far wall to the right, which included a telephone and walkie-talkies holstered in battery chargers. Payton darted to the station and turned it into shards of metal and plastic in seconds with his long steel blade.

  His footfalls echoed loudly as they clomped across the foyer's shiny black tile. Very little light was available in the empty space, though as always, Payton had no interest in stealth.

  Besides, he hated this place. Almost as much as he hated his reason for being here. He would not waste his greatest talents on this task.

  He burst through a set of walnut double doors and broke into a sprint. He never slowed to check for additional security or orient himself to his position in the building. There was no need. He knew exactly where he was going.

  He was here tracking down a hunch. A hunch that annoyed him significantly.

  France, after all, was the location of his death and rebirth. The place where the love of his life had left him to die after a cave-in, without attempting to dig him out or call for help. The place where he'd first heard the word Secretum.

  And the French are rotten little gits.

  Every last one of them.

  Several turns, more running, and a swish of his sword that broke through a padlock, and he had arrived at his destination: an enormous records room. A domed, rococo glass ceiling showed an ocean of stars and the moon sailing through it high above. Opulent pillars held up the high ceiling throughout the room, which stretched at least three hundred feet long and one hundred and fifty wide, accompanied by elaborately patterned carpet and entirely too many paintings adorning all four walls.

  In the center, on a large raised platform that took up most of the room, resided a series of twenty colossal rolling file cabinets, each at least twelve feet tall, with flashy golden knobs about the size of steering wheels on the end of each cabinet. Payton mused that it was built to look like the strength of Hercules himself would be required just to turn one of these things and make the cabinets roll. It wasn't hard to figure out how the mechanisms were operated. The trick was not to roll a cabinet without checking to make sure no one was inside the aisle, in its path. Each cabinet had a lock that held it in place once moved to expose the desired files.

  Whatever, Payton thought. He had neither time nor patience for caution.

  He dared not turn on any lights due to the skylight; anyone outside might see.

  So in the darkness, he found that the files rolled quite smoothly and quietly, and it was only minutes before his skilled hands were searching through the particular files where he believed he would find what he was looking for.

  His gift-incredible speed and dexterity-meant it was only minutes until he'd narrowed down his search to the correct shelf, and then the correct file. Inside a cardboard box he dug until he came across a manila folder that bore a very familiar name.

  And just as expected, it was there. The tiny marker in the upper right corner of the file's hand-written label. It was a symbol, which to the untrained eye might be nothing but the doodle of a pen. But Payton recognized the shape at once.

  That same moment, the vast room's lights came on from overhead, and the cabinets on both sides of him began to contract inward, squeezing the space in which he stood. The row he was in was over thirty feet long. Two more adjoining cabinets on each end weren't moving along with these two that threatened to squish him, so escape was impossible on both sides.

  As the cabinets inched closer, barely allowing him room to move, he zipped the file inside his black jacket. He drew his sword and punctured the back wall of the cabinet on his left. Grabbing the over-long hilt of the sword, he swung himself up and over the top, like a gymnast. He barely had time to rip the sword free-breaking the top of a cabinet in the process-before the two cabinets closed shut beneath him.

  The cabinets rolled beneath him again. He ran until he reached the end of the cabinet closest to the exit. He leapt at incredible speed to the ground and rolled until he was next to the door, but gunshots from behind pulled him up short.

  He sheathed the sword and came up off the ground with his hands up, but didn't turn around. He counted at least six voices, all shouting orders to him at the same time. He had no idea what they were saying, but he suspected it was the usual: "Get your hands up." "You're under arrest." "Turn around."

  He slowly turned and allowed them to see him yawn as he did. The shouting escalated as six handguns were pointed in his direction by six angry French guards.

  "Sorry, lads. I don't speak frou-frou," he said under his breath. And then a little louder, "If you intend to shoot me, do it now. I have places to be."

  The guards looked at one another-all except the youngest of them, who stood on Payton's far right. A squirrelly looking boy with sweat on his brow, he was clearly the team's rookie.

  His gun went off, the bullet in its chamber fired point-blank at Payton.

  The guards all started and looked at their companion in horror. A glistening of light radiated from Payton, and all six of them stared at his drawn sword. There was the tiniest plink as the flattened bullet fell to the floor.

/>   A tiny whiff of smoke rose from a small spot on the sword where the bullet had impacted, but the blade showed no sign of damage.

  Their shock and hesitation was all Payton needed. In a burst, he was in the center of them, on his knees and sweeping his arms around to bring all six of them down on the ground. Half of them were knocked out by the abrupt fall. The others floundered, scrambling to pick up their lost guns.

  One Payton grabbed by his shirt and flung into the wall on the far right, where he cracked the plaster and slumped to the ground. A second man was already aiming his gun at Payton, his finger on the trigger, but Payton sidestepped the shot with ease, and grabbed the guard with his single free hand by the throat. He squeezed as the third man rose and lunged at him, but Payton merely raised his sword, and the man ran his own body through at his shoulder.

  The one he had by the throat passed out, and Payton let him fall to the ground. He retracted the sword from the impaled man, who collapsed in pain, clutching at his wounded shoulder.

  He looked the men over carefully. These were no security guards. Their uniforms bore the insignia of the French police. Which meant they wouldn't be here alone ...

  Would've been easier to kill them, Payton thought. It wasn't as if he didn't want to. But he'd promised his employer no one would die on this job, and he considered it an interesting challenge to defeat without killing. It required a finesse that was typically lost in his more straightforward missions.

  The easiest way not to kill someone, he'd found, was to be gone when they arrived, so Payton ran, sprinting flat-out for the main entrance, which was a winding hallway path and several hundred feet away, straight through the ornate main foyer.

  He didn't see the wire until he was too close to it to stop. It had been placed right across his path, tied to two pillars there in the foyer, and it tripped him hard, breaking a nearby flag stand in the process. The sword flew from his hand and landed over one hundred feet away, sticking into the tile grout right by the front door. He was on his feet quickly, but he made no move toward the exit. A five-foot piece of the broken flagpole rested near his feet.

  He found himself standing directly in the center of the foyer, encapsulated by a concave ceiling high above. A modest chandelier hung in the center, and it flickered to life as he stood.

  Payton sighed calmly. "No need to be dainty, fellows. Who do we have?"

  A baritone seethed from the edges of the circular area. "A battalion of the National Police's finest. You're a wanted criminal and we've been onto you since you first set your dirty feet on our soil," the guardsman said, in heavily accented English. "We don't take kindly to crimes committed on government property, particularly from foreigners."

  Around the borders of the circle of light, Payton watched over twenty French police officers step into view, most of them large, and all of them well armed, with hungry looks on their faces.

  Payton thought he saw one of them slurp back a bit of drool.

  He kicked at the tile, and the wooden flagpole rose in the air before him. He clutched it in the middle and twisted it like helicopter blades up over his head and then brought it to a rest with one of the broken ends touching the floor.

  "Clearly, Paris has taught you lot how to heft about as many bulky weapons as humanly possible," his gravelly British voice intoned, still the embodiment of cool and collected. "And here I stand, with nothing but a broken wood stick."

  The guards reacted by bringing every weapon they had to bear upon him, ready to lunge.

  "Right, then." Payton eyed his prey patiently, hungrily. "Let's break something."

  The nursing home Grant and Alex approached burned fierce and blindingly hot. Inside, dozens of elderly patients huddled in terror, unable to escape under their own power. The entrance was blocked by a collapsed cement and wooden porch, with roaring flames pouring through the doorway's outline.

  He'd seen a lot of terrible things this day, but this was one of the worst.

  "We have to get in there!!" Alex screamed over the roar of the flames. "I can feel their fear, their panic!"

  "How many?" he cried.

  "At least fifty, I think, maybe more."

  He looked around, desperate to find something he could use.

  Fifty... !

  The city's firefighters were still pushed past their limits, most of them committed to a special operation intended to keep the wildfires of the city from spreading to the surrounding countryside. But as usual, the news crews were here, watching and waiting to see what Guardian would do.

  The sight of the burning facility made Grant's mind flash back to the asylum, the former home of the Loci, which had collapsed under a similar fire-induced strain. There, he'd used his abilities to push all of the building's walls high into the sky. The walls carried the fire with them, eliminating the problem. But the trapped victims there were younger and of better health; most of those inside the facility in front of him were much too frail to risk something similar here.

  He'd never been able to control wind, despite repeated efforts. There simply wasn't enough tangible substance to the atmosphere to manipulate.

  What he needed was a way to put out the-

  "Hydrant," said Fletcher in his earpiece. "Half a block south and across the street."

  Alex fell into step after Grant, who was already running toward Fletcher's suggestion.

  The two-lane street they crossed was filled mostly with wrecked cars and pedestrians who either watched with morbid fascination or tried to escape. L.A.'s usual melting pot of races was entirely accounted for among the crowd, and while many of them were cheering him on, Grant got the distinct impression that there was a well-represented segment that was waiting to see him fail.

  Don't think about that now ...

  In the far corner of the adjacent block, he spotted the red fire hydrant.

  The top of the hydrant tore off with a simple thought, but the plume of water it created high in the sky was too far away from the nursing home, over two hundred feet, at least ...

  Alex was already scanning their surroundings before he'd finished the thought. He knew what she was looking for ...

  His eyes landed on a pickup truck about twenty feet away. The truck's hood ripped itself free and Grant guided it into the air with a single hand until it was directly above them. He carefully positioned it so that it created an angled surface for the water to bounce off of, until it was aiming at the nursing home.

  But the water was still too far away. Gravity took hold a good eighty feet before it could reach the burning building.

  "Over here!" Alex shouted.

  He spun in place, his left arm still holding the pickup truck's hood above them. Alex stood by a tiny yellow VW Beetle, pointing at its curved hood. He couldn't help a grim smile.

  She's quick ...

  He yanked the hood from the car with his free hand and held it in midair upside down. He'd effectively created a scoop to redirect the fall ing water, which with some careful positioning and angling, he used to send the water straight at the front of the building. The fire went out quickly, but just as Grant was lowering the two pieces of metal safely to the ground, a whoosh was heard and the fire consumed the building once more.

  He lifted the metal into the air and positioned it once more. "Something must be feeding it!" Grant shouted.

  "Gas line, probably," Alex agreed.

  "I'll hold this; see what you can do about getting those people out."

  She was already running. He watched, arms outstretched, as she stopped in front of the large crowd that had gathered and focused her attention on a few burly men that stood off to one side.

  "Anybody feeling overwhelmingly brave?" she said, willing the emotion into their hearts. Three men shouted back ferocious affirmatives and set off after her toward the water-soaked entrance.

  Even with the fire out of the way, there was still a ton of rubble in front of the door. Grant had no more hands available, but he didn't really need them anyway. He reached
out with his mind and pushed at the wreckage that lay at the threshold of the nursing home....

  He heard an ear-splitting bang from very close by, and suddenly he felt his body losing strength.

  The wreckage safely out of the way, he allowed himself a quick glance down and saw a big red stain spreading on his shirt, right above his stomach. Time seemed to slow and he was aware of many odd details: the taste of copper on his tongue, sweat pouring off of his body in sheets, and a bitter cold that threatened to swallow him whole.

  "Who's the man now!? Huh?" taunted a voice from behind.

  Grant struggled to keep himself upright, to not pass out, as he turned slowly to look behind ...

  "Yeah, baby!" said the man proudly holding a pistol at point-blank range, less than four feet from where Grant stood. He was wearing some very familiar gang colors on his arm.

  Grant had been too distracted; he'd never even heard anyone approach....

  His eyes kept trying to roll up into his head, but he fought to stay awake and upright. He was vaguely aware that Alex and her new friends were pulling victims from the burning building and needed more time. He had to keep the water aimed at the nursing home, but he was starting to waver. He let out a loud moan as he struggled against the pain that washed over him, the two sheets of metal in the sky above swiveling and flailing.

  "Saw what you did to my boys this morning!" the man shouted. "It was all over the news, man! You think you could just get away with that kind of disrespect?! Not in this-"

  Grant wasn't entirely sure what happened next, only that the man was no longer talking and no longer standing. He was on the ground and several civilians were pinning him down, wrestling control of the gun from his hand ...

  "NO!!" Alex screamed, spotting him from the front of the building. She ran toward him while her three helpers continued pulling the elderly patients from the building. But everything had slowed and Alex ran as if frozen. She'd never get there in time to ...

  To what? What could she do?

  A wave of nausea overtook him. Grant had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting. He could feel his body trying to shut down, the hole burning through his insides, rupturing organs ... the hot blood spilling out of his front and back, seeping down his legs ...