Masks (Out of the Box Book 9)

by Robert J. Crane

  Jamie steadied herself, suddenly feeling stronger, like she’d blown past the threshold for weariness and come out the other side. She could see hints of flame beneath the structure of the fifth floor, but she didn’t dare take it apart now; there were firemen inside, doing their work.

  “I’ll just hold it all steady,” she said, under her breath, as she watched the others work. There was still a massive amount of debris in her grip, and she couldn’t send it all to the river. No, she’d just have to hold still here, keep it from falling until things were settled down. She’d play Atlas, and hold the sky back from collapsing on New York’s Finest, as long as it took. She settled in to wait, the weight bearing down on her and her bearing it right back. She’d hold it all night if she had to.

  22.

  Sienna

  I could feel the burn, and it wasn’t the good kind, the kind that told me I’d gotten off the couch and put down the Cheetos to build some muscle mass. No, this was the other kind of burn—err, well, one of the other kinds—a kind exclusive to me and my kind, the kind that told me I was about to get another passenger in my head.

  Needless to say, I freaked the hell out.

  “Ahh!” I shouted and dropped the dude immediately. He clunked hard on the floor, shaking the exposed, smoldering plywood beneath us. I cringed because I felt bad for him, but not as bad as I would have felt if he’d ended up ride-sharing my brain forever. “No! No! No!” I said, brushing myself off as I tried to stave off panic.

  We could use some new company, Wolfe said. So very lonely in here with only the same faces to stare at.

  I think you mean eat, Zack said. Faces to eat.

  You still have yours, pretty boy, Eve Kappler sniped back, so clearly he hasn’t devoured it yet.

  “Plus you’re all in my head,” I said, reaching my hands out to try and draw away the fire toward me to extinguish it. “How is he going to eat your face in my head?”

  Oh, Wolfe can do it, Wolfe said, and I had a flash of a Cheshire smile tinged with blood, and then a brutal image of him ripping and rending someone’s face off. I jerked as it overwhelmed me, catching me unawares, and a stream of fire shot up and hit the ceiling, clinging to it and starting the timbers alight again. I stared at my accidental handiwork and felt the rage bubble inside.

  Sowwy, Wolfe said, playing cute, which was irritating in its own way.

  My face! Zack screamed in my head, like I hadn’t just seen what Wolfe had been imagining.

  “Shut up, you don’t even have a face to get eaten anymore,” I said, trying to get the fire above me under control. I coughed, the air getting heavy with smoke again, the sound of footsteps on the ceiling above clunking past as I assumed the firemen on the ladders evacuated the floor. I ran a hand over the ceiling and sucked all the fire out of the place where I’d just accidentally hosed it. I glanced down at the man at my feet and muttered, “You should consider yourself lucky you’re not getting stuck in my brain. You see what I have to deal with? And people think I should absorb more souls? Hah,” I said, not really finding any humor in that idea.

  The man at my feet stirred, and the ceiling in front of me collapsed even further, more fiery debris raining down as I yanked the guy back while retreating.

  “Dammit,” I said. The fire was really going now, completely cutting me off from the windows and my escape. I glanced behind me, but the situation there wasn’t any better. If I tried to draw the fire in from above, it was entirely possible some poor firefighters were gonna get roasted alive as I pulled it; if I tried to retreat downstairs, I doubted the guy at my feet would survive the trip because he had maybe ten seconds left before I absorbed him, and there weren’t any ways I could carry him without touching him. Way to sleep nearly naked, guy.

  I set my feet, determined to draw off the fire in the debris ahead. If I could get it out, I could maybe worm my way through with this guy and get him to the ground in time to save him from being absorbed. Or from dying of smoke inhalation. Or building collapse, because I had a feeling that was coming, too.

  I held up my hands, said, “Gavrikov,” and I could feel the Russian’s wariness. We will try, he said, and I started to pull the flames to me—

  A sizzling burst of smoke stopped me before I could even get to it; water was streaming in through the windows at high pressure, steam filling the air, giving it a damp sensation, a sudden swampy sense that somehow made the smell of the flames so much worse than they had been a minute ago. I could see the water streaming in, dousing the flames in the debris ahead, and in that moment, I saw an opening on the right hand side, a clear path right out of the building.

  “Thank you, New York Fire Department,” I said, and I snatched up the guy at my feet, not wasting a second. I clutched him close and felt the burning start in my arms as I pressed my flesh to his. I zoomed out the front of the building as he started to jerk in my grip, and I backflipped into a landing, setting him down on the street a little inelegantly, but just before I started to take his soul into me.

  The stream of water in the front windows stopped as soon as I was clear, moving up the building to the top as firemen piled onto their ladders and started to move away from the building. I got a feeling I knew what was coming in the next few minutes—collapse, probably, though I wasn’t experienced enough with these things to know.

  I thumped down right on my butt, exhausted, and sat there with the guy I’d just saved at my feet while the paramedics came rushing over to attend him. I blinked as they rushed up, letting out a breath and expelling smoke and nastiness in a cough.

  “We got a pulse,” one of the paramedics said. “Pretty weak. If it had been another minute or two …” He looked at me and nodded appreciation.

  “Yeah, well, thank the firefighters for that one,” I said, my neck sagging under the weight of my head. I was exhausted, like I’d just gone through all my adrenaline and had to borrow some from a neighbor. I closed my eyes and the flash of flame and the lights blinked in the darkness. “If they hadn’t gotten their hoses going—”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the fire department,” the paramedic said, and my eyes snapped open. He wasn’t even looking at me, he was tending to his patient. “They’re still charging them. Ran into a water pressure problem, I guess.”

  I felt my brow furrow. If it wasn’t the FDNY, then who sent the water geysering into the front window to save …?

  I found the answer a second later, as I saw the blue flashing lights in the government SUV’s grill—the kind we’d had in the agency. He was standing right there, clad in a suit, sandy blond hair catching all the colored lights, but unmistakable in its coloring even still. I caught him looking at me, though he turned his head at the last second to try and play it cool, and in that moment I knew I’d just seen my successor at the agency.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, and the paramedic turned his head as Captain Frost came wandering up, his oxygen finally put aside.

  “Hey,” Frost said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder, “isn’t that your ex?”

  Before I could construct an answer, and apropos of the moment, the building fell down in front of me in a long, controlled destruction that sent a billowing cloud rushing over me and obstructing my vision. When it faded, I was left spitting out dust and smoke, and blinking out the remainder of the cloud from my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said finally, wishing Captain Frost had kept his stupid oxygen mask on so that he couldn’t speak from his stupid mouth. I caught a glimpse of Scott Byerly through the fading haze, and he was looking at me again, but harder this time, like he didn’t care if I saw. “Yes … it is.”

  23.

  Jamie

  When Jamie felt the building start to go, she knew there was no way she was going to be able to stop it. It was too much tonnage, too much uncontrollable force and not enough counterweight. She felt the pull, knew it was coming, knew the firefighters were clear, and then there was only one thing to do for it.

  She hitched as many gravity wells into place a
s she could to slow it down, to control the collapse, and she let the building fall.

  The floors came down, one by one, and she used the gravity channels she’d set up to push the debris inward rather than letting it bloom uncontrollably outward. It took some doing; she had to set up the pushes so that they didn’t catch too much weight in any one place, destroying the other buildings around the fire site. The bricks came caving in, the floors burst, and the remainder of the top floor collapsed onto the one below, which could not hold the weight.

  At every turn she tried to anchor, to push inward, to hold it back, to buy a few more seconds, to break the fall of each story as they came down. It was exhausting, it was frantic, and she wasn’t even sure she was doing any good. Anyone caught inside was doomed regardless of her efforts; this was intended to spare those below from a fall to any side. She pushed it in toward itself, pushing a gravity channel, the biggest yet, right into the center of the building like a black hole. She dumped all the little pieces, pushing them off from the buildings around and funneling them right into the center of the mass, like water circling a drain, and watched it all fall together.

  It was, in its way, rather spectacular. Especially from above.

  When it was all in motion, she felt herself go weak, the nets she’d cast to catch falling pieces of the building gone, the only remaining channels in place the ones she was using to hold herself aloft and the massive one at the center of the building collapse. The ones holding her up were faltering, and she walked herself backward, landing a little harder on the building across the street than she’d intended.

  Jamie’s legs buckled when she hit the gravel rooftop, and she fell, collapsing as she heard the job finish across the street with a thundering boom. She killed the last channel, the one at the center of the building collapse, landed on her backside hard, then slumped, pitching over, her head hitting the rooftop as the exhaustion came over her in a wave.

  She’d never done anything like that before. The scale, the scope of taking apart even the top floor of a building as surgically as she had … it had taxed her powers to the utter limit. She raised a hand up in front of her eyes and it shook like the muscles had been through a hellacious gym workout after years of couch living.

  “Did … it,” she mouthed, staring up at the cloudy sky above. She felt like she was lying in her pillowy bed after a long day. And it had been a long day, hadn’t it? She blinked, and the sky was dark, like someone had switched out the lights. It must be time to sleep, she figured, and she closed her eyes and drifted off right there.

  24.

  Sienna

  It didn’t take long for Scott to ditch the furtive looks and come wandering over to me. Which was good, because I was sitting there in a combination of dread and utter exhaustion and couldn’t muster the motivation to get to my feet just to go speak to him. Though part of that was because I had realized shortly after seeing him that he wasn’t alone.

  He came shuffling up coolly, hands in his pants pockets, his partner at his side, hanging back a little. His partner didn’t wear a suit, because he couldn’t really fit in one when he was using his powers. His arms were the size of hams, and he wore a black mask with a slit for his eyes and his mouth, and when Scott came to a halt a few feet away from me, the dude took up position behind him and crossed his massive arms in front of him in a totally forbidding way.

  “Sienna,” Scott said, with a note of obvious disgust.

  “Scott,” I replied, cool in my return. My gaze flicked to his partner. “Gimp.”

  Guy Friday’s eyes narrowed beneath his mask slits. “My name is—”

  “Yancy,” I said. “I know.”

  He guffawed. “It’s actually not. Fooled ya.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’ll always be Guy Friday to me.” I turned my attention to Scott. “What are you doing in the Big Apple?”

  “You don’t get to ask me questions,” he said snippily.

  “Why? Because you’re a federal bigwheel in charge of an FBI meta task force now?” I asked, trusting he would go leaping at the bait in surprise that I’d figured him out.

  His eyes widened. “How did you know—” His face darkened. “Hey! I said—”

  “I’m a contractor for the NYPD.” I turned my head away from him under the pretense of surveying the damage. Really, I just kinda wanted to look away for a minute as I got the lay of the land around us; my ex running the meta task force suggested nothing good to me. He probably hadn’t gone looking for the job, since he’d been done with law enforcement. Which meant either he’d changed his mind or someone—probably President Harmon, that ass—had recruited him, and either way, he was here because he had an axe to grind with someone. Someone who was five-foot-four and sitting here in my pants, which were soot-stained and slightly burnt. “If you want to pull your federal credentials out of your pants and wave them around, there’s not a lot I can do to stop you, but last I checked—at least when I was in your job—I couldn’t forbid people from asking me questions. First Amendment and all that.” I looked back at him, composed, and smiled with irritating sweetness.

  “Last I checked, the First Amendment didn’t block a punch to the face,” Guy Friday said with menace.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Did you just threaten a city employee? Because that’s against the law, even for you federal types.”

  “Hey,” Scott said to Friday under his breath in an obvious command that said, Back off! “We’re not here to threaten,” Scott said, regaining his composure after my verbal push had set him off balance.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, taking my liberty to question and running with it. “You know, as a city contractor just trying to prepare my report on the meta activity that just took place here.”

  I saw a subtle twitch at the corner of Scott’s eye at having his authority challenged. His nostrils flared. “You know who we’re with. This scene is one of metahuman activity. We’re here to monitor and assess the situation.”

  “Two metas just saved a bunch of people from a fire,” I said, frowning.

  “Three metas,” Captain Frost said from across the way. Of course the ass was using his meta hearing to eavesdrop. “You’re forgetting Gravity Gal.”

  “Two,” I said, “because you didn’t do a damned thing except cause the ground floor to steam up and then steal oxygen from those truly in need.”

  Frost’s mouth dropped open, and a bevy of firemen dragging a hose stepped between us just then, saving me from whatever witless repartee was surely coming from his mouth.

  “It’s a scene of meta activity,” Scott said with a shrug, like he had no control over being there.

  I wasn’t buying his line of bullshit. “What? Because I’m here? Or because, wherever three or more are gathered—?”

  “You’re a person of interest,” Scott said. Then, as if he’d realized what he’d said, he reddened. “But … not to me.”

  “Me either,” Guy Friday said. “I find myself very disinterested in you and your off-putting personality.”

  I’m not exactly sure what kind of look I shot at Guy Friday, but I know it included loathing and disgust. “You realize that’s the playground equivalent of saying you have a crush on me, right?”

  “When were you ever on a playground?” Scott sniped. That one hit home.

  “Yeah,” I said, ignoring his shot about my childhood, “I’m sure you guys came here from DC to see anyone but me. Right.”

  “Maybe you should watch your step,” Scott said, in perfect imitation of a Jersey mobster, but with a Minnesota accent.

  “I’m here because the city of New York asked me to be,” I said. “You’re here because apparently you have unresolved relationship issues.” I turned my attention to Guy Friday. “And you’ve got some sort of weird, third-grade crush, I guess, or maybe an addiction to pain, I dunno, psychological trauma—”

  “Pot to kettle,” Scott muttered.

  “Point is, I’m here doing my job,” I said. “You guys
are verging on stalking.”

  “Maybe if you weren’t a walking disaster area,” Scott said, and his gaze flicked to the burned-out building behind us.

  I looked at the wreckage of the building. “Oh, no, you did not,” I said. “I go places where there’s already trouble—like a building on fire, as a not-random example—and I stop it or try to help, okay? I don’t go starting problems for the hell of it.”

  “There are a lot of people who think differently,” Friday rumbled.

  “There are a lot of people who think kale tastes good, or that Iowa is a wonderful place to live,” I said. “Them being terribly wrong is not my fault nor my problem.” I eyed the big guy warily, because truthfully, he might end up being my problem. I sensed him heading in that direction now. “I’m here to do a job for the NYPD, one which, frankly, is down to just monitoring, keeping an eye on things around here in case a little meta trash-talking gets out of hand.”

  “Uh huh,” Scott said, plainly not buying it. I’d known him long enough to realize when he was glazing over because he’d shut down. “Well, we’re here watching, too. So keep that in mind.”

  I rolled my eyes harder than usual. “If I’m the lawless lunatic you seem to think I am, then why would you warn me about that? I’m destined to get myself in trouble regardless, aren’t I?”

  Guy Friday spoke first. “You know, she has a point there—”

  “Because we’re the good guys,” Scott said, way too righteously. “We’re the law.”

  “You’re the federal law,” I said, correcting him, “I’m the state law. So technically, we’re on the same side.” As per usual, I filled my words with sweet, sweet snark, and a little bit of hopeless, naïve idealism, because that goes well with irony.

  Scott just gave me a smoky look. “Just remember … we’ll be watching.”