“What’s wrong?” Carter asked.
“No helicopters and no boats,” I said. “They must have cleared the waterways and airspace because of him.”
“They’ll avoid provoking him until they have a plan. God help us when they do.”
I marched faster and Carter had to hurry to keep up. Sweat stained his armpits. His face was dripping. The closer we got to the center of the span the more I thought being on the bridge was a bad idea. Getting hemmed in with the crowd made me feel claustrophobic. But I was comforted by the notion that with so many others around me I was anonymous, unless Chronos’s heightened senses were more powerful than we had ever imagined.
Some people along the jammed walkway had stopped to stare at him. This time there were very few taking pictures. Word must have gotten out. Their protector had betrayed them. As news and footage of the murder of the EMT spread, people were coming to the cold comprehension of the situation. Too bad they’d ignored the warnings of those of us who’d seen early on that it wasn’t a good idea to have superpowered beings around. The city was about to enter an era of vulnerability it had never known before, and the thought filled me with twisted joy.
The dark room in my heart was ready for company.
But for now I was just irritated it was taking so long to walk home. We finally made it to the other side with Chronos none the wiser. Was it vanity that I believed I was even on his radar?
“If we’re taking another road trip, we need supplies,” Carter said.
Carter’s place was still a good thirty-minute walk away. Mine was a little closer, but there wasn’t much there. We headed for the nearest grocery store. It wasn’t quite a mob scene, but the store was jammed with people. Many were leaving with armloads of foodstuffs, and few of them were bothering with the two open registers with long lines and exhausted-looking cashiers.
“This is bad,” Carter said.
“You may want to wait here,” I said.
He followed me inside. I still wasn’t certain about him and his moral flexibility. He seemed like such a Boy Scout, but he hadn’t stopped me from trying to put a bullet in the flying man.
The water and energy bars were all gone. There were more bare shelves than I would have expected. I saw panic in the faces of the other shoppers, and people were grabbing up items just because they were there. A few still had shopping carts and were wending their way through the aisles as if it were just a busy Saturday afternoon. I grabbed a few boxes of an unsweetened multigrain breakfast cereal and found some giant pouches of turkey jerky on an unpilfered endcap. Carter appeared overwhelmed and flinched when a pack of teens brushed past him with cases of beer under their arms. They rushed past the checkers, who didn’t say word one to stop them.
There were too many people around the canned goods. Carter inspected a picked-through array of batteries but didn’t take any of the oddball sizes that remained.
“At least we have something,” I said. “Between this and whatever’s at your place we have snacks. Can we go?”
Carter drew in a relieved breath and nodded.
“Do you have a car we can borrow from anyone?” I asked.
I used the time it took him to answer the question to escort him outside past more shoppers struggling to get in.
“Yeah,” he said. “My sister’s.” He turned to look behind us as if just realizing we had walked out without paying.
I handed him the boxes of cereal. “Come on.”
Carter was saying something about his sister, that she’d be a handful, would argue, and would insist on finding out what we were up to, when the group of beer-hauling looters blocked our path.
One kid with way too much gel in his quiff hairdo stopped Carter with a palm to his chest. Carter dropped the cereal.
“We forgot snacks,” the kid said. The others, six in all, surrounded us. There were at least twenty people around us coming and going. Not one of them paid any attention to us, or else they were trying hard not to.
“Phones and wallet,” a second kid said.
But the others weren’t waiting. Hands grabbed at Carter’s pockets and tore away his wristwatch. When two of them reached for me, I sidestepped them.
“Hey!” one of the kids barked.
“Hold still!” said another.
But stepping around them was easy. It was like they were all of a sudden moving in slow motion and I had my pick of where to place my feet. It was a quarter-speed dance with an inept partner.
One kid balled his hand into a fist and tried to drill me with a body blow. I gave him a knee and he doubled over. The second one lunged with both hands out. He was off-balance. I shifted and took him by the shirt and threw him past us. He landed hard against a parked car, denting the door.
Now I had the others’ attention. My ribs were on fire. But I gritted my teeth and smiled. This felt good. For a moment I thought they weren’t going to do anything, but the kid with the quiff was the first to make his move.
A knife snicked out in his left hand. I pushed Carter aside as I stepped back. The kid stabbed at the air and followed this with a couple of clumsy swipes. I caught the arm and twisted. Heard a pop. The kid screamed and the knife clattered to the ground. The others who were still standing around me hesitated.
Then one threw his case of beer at me.
It would have smashed me in the knees. Again, without thinking, I moved, this time a short jump that launched me a few feet into the air where I paused, suspended.
The kid who had thrown the beer stood there, mouth hanging open.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I landed ever so slowly and picked up the beer. I could hear one of the cans inside the cardboard case hissing. White suds began to leak out the bottom. I chucked the case at him even as he started to run and it knocked him down. Beer began spraying everywhere in tiny geysers. He was struggling to get up. I advanced on him as his friends scattered.
Carter stopped me. “Come on, they’re done. Let’s get out of here.”
The kid with the quiff was still on the ground and holding his shoulder. He was moaning. Tears streaked down his face. It made me wonder what the difference was between a punk like this and Chronos. I stood over him and grabbed him by an ear. He wore a gold earring with a red glass jewel and he howled as I twisted. Somehow I was stronger now. The case of beer had impacted the other kid harder than anything I had ever thrown in my life. And this kid’s shoulder had popped with little effort. Now I wanted to tear his ear off and give him something to remember me by.
“Jade!” Carter said.
I looked at him and then at the crowd of people staring at me. It was no longer a mugging everyone was trying to ignore, but a spectacle. They had just seen me trounce a few kids and fly in the process. They saw my face. In theirs I observed fear more than anything else. Something in it all fed me.
At that moment I understood my enemy better.
“Next time it’s your head,” I said as I pushed the kid aside, his ear intact.
If this was going to keep happening, I’d have to work on my lines.
***
As predicted, Carter’s sister Megan threw a fit.
She was a tiny thing, and she shared Carter’s love for all things tweed. Her hair was back in a neat bun and she had glasses around her neck, reminding me of the librarian at my high school. But Megan wasn’t quiet. The moment she arrived at Carter’s apartment she began haranguing him and wouldn’t stop. It was as if I weren’t there on the couch right next to them with an ice pack on my ribcage. I had swallowed down four Tylenol and was feeling a bit sleepy when she stormed in. Now I had a front-row seat to the drama.
But this was Carter’s rodeo and I was content to let him ride the bull. That worked for a while, until I heard Megan ask, “And who is this?”
“Hi, I’m Jade,” I said.
She gave me a once-over. In the five minutes since she had arrived she hadn’t paused to look in my direction. But now that my presence was acknowledged
, she returned her attention back to Carter.
“Is this what you’ve been obsessing over?” Megan asked, waggling a finger at me. “Some girl who you won’t tell me about? Is she the same one you met through your app? Is she living with you now?”
“Megan, please calm down,” Carter said.
I restrained a choked-off laugh.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Carter,” Megan said. “What’s happening to you? You’re missing work, the work you do is sloppy and rushed, you don’t answer your phone or texts or emails.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
The question dangled there in the air. Carter looked my way for help, but I gave him both palms in a gesture of “you’re on your own with this one, pal.”
“Is it drugs?” Megan asked in a hushed tone.
“No, it’s nothing like that. Jade and I have been working on something important. And we got mugged at the grocery store.”
Megan studied Carter’s face as if looking for a tell that he was lying. Then she turned and went to his computer. She woke it up and entered a password. I was mildly surprised when she got in.
All of Carter’s Chronos data was open, a dozen windows of spreadsheets and maps.
“You’re still doing this,” Megan said. “Why, Carter? Why? Why this obsession? How does this help you with losing Eden? She’s gone. What does stalking Chronos do for you or anyone?”
Carter didn’t have an answer. He looked like a child being chastened by a parent, who knows the best strategy is to hunker down and not reply.
I stood up and dropped the ice pack on the coffee table. “Megan, you don’t know me. We’ve never met before. But we’re not stalking Chronos. We’re trying to kill him. Your brother has been helping me. Call us crazy if you want, but that’s what’s going on. Right now we’ve had a rough day and your tirade isn’t helping.”
“Jade, don’t…” Carter said.
“You’re crazy,” Megan said. “She’s crazy. Do you know that? With everything going on, you’ve let a crazy girl into your apartment. Well I’m here now. Time to tell her to leave.”
“Last time I checked, Carter is a grown man,” I said. “It’s you who needs to lay off him.”
Megan looked at Carter and back at me and let out a short laugh. “You think you know Carter? I’ve been taking care of him for most his adult life. I make sure he takes his meds every day and gets to his psychiatrist appointments. Has he told you about any of that? Or that he was institutionalized both before and after losing Eden? Carter isn’t stable, and lately he hasn’t been responding when I remind him to take his pills. So you don’t get to come in here and tell me off. What kind of crazy ideas are you filling his head with, anyway? Because the last thing he needs is someone reinforcing his break from reality.”
“You’re seriously shaming him for having a mental illness?” I asked.
“I’m accusing you of making things worse.”
She marched into the kitchen and went into a cabinet I hadn’t gotten around to sifting through when looking for food. It was filled with vitamins and supplements and prescription medications. She took out a pill organizer and examined it.
“You’re three days behind,” Megan said. She poured some water and brought it to him. Held the pill organizer open. Obediently he took out one compartment’s worth of five pills and swallowed them, chasing them down with a couple of gulps of water.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “He never mentioned needing medicine.”
Megan snapped the pill compartment shut. “That’s because Carter doesn’t like taking his pills.”
Carter wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
“So you see why we can’t have you here,” Megan said. “Carter’s life is complicated enough without you and him playing make-believe. You don’t want to be around when he crashes, and he doesn’t need you to abandon him when he takes his next nosedive.”
An awkward pause followed, as if she was waiting for me to pick up my stuff and get out.
“You’re right,” I said. “Carter should have told me he needed medication, especially with what we’ve been doing. The last thing I want would be for him to get sick or suffer some kind of episode. We didn’t talk about our health problems. What we did discuss was the fact that we both lost loved ones to Chronos. I lost my mom and dad. Carter lost his wife. He’s the first person I’ve met who understood when I said I wanted to get revenge. The few other people I’ve said that to thought I was crazy.”
Megan started to interrupt but I raised a hand. Her face flushed.
“Carter’s been generous with me and has kept me grounded,” I continued. “I’ve been at this for over ten years. I learned everything I could about my enemy, all with one goal: stopping him from ever doing what he did to my folks again. I’m as obsessed with Chronos as Carter and I’m serious when I say I’m trying to take him out. But I’m not just fantasizing about it. And right now, because of your brother’s help, I’m as close as anyone has ever gotten.”
“You’re crazy,” Megan said again.
“Maybe I am. But Chronos isn’t some character in a comic book. He’s left a wake of broken lives in his path. And I don’t know if you’ve watched the news, but he’s finally gone over the edge and murdered someone in cold blood where other people could see. And today I almost got him.”
“People like you and I don’t get someone like Chronos,” Megan said.
“I shot him and I hit him and I drew blood. It was Chronos that chased me down and broke my rib.” I raised my shirt for her to see the spreading patch of yellow-and-blue bruising along my side.
“I don’t know how that happened to you but if Chronos was going to hit you, you’d be dead.”
I smirked. “Not if I was fast enough to get out of the way.”
“It’s Jade, is it?” Megan asked. “This is what Carter doesn’t need right now. More delusion. He’s obsessed with his comics and fantasy worlds and a superhero, all at the cost of not living his own life. Getting involved with another person with their head down the same hole is the last thing he needs.”
“I thought those were his wife’s comic books.”
Megan looked at Carter. “You’re seriously blaming your comic collection on Eden?”
Carter was a man trapped. He looked as if he were going to burst at the seams. I was starting to think it was time to get out and make my own way as he was no longer going to be much help. Plus I didn’t need this flavor of grief.
But finally he spoke up. “Show her.”
Megan shook her head as if irritated by his butting in.
“Jade,” Carter said more forcefully. “Show her what you can do.”
I clenched my jaw. Megan was watching. Failure would make a perfect ending to this frustrating scene. I wanted to leave. But Carter’s face said it all. This was an important moment. He needed a shred of validation and I was the person to deliver it on a silver platter.
So there in the middle of Carter’s apartment, I hopped into the air.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the plus side, Megan said she would allow us to use her Honda Civic. Among the minuses was that she was coming with us to New Hampshire and would brook no arguments.
I was just happy that I didn’t make a fool of myself trying to fly. My power wasn’t a certain thing, but in that instance it had worked when I needed it. Seeing me hover above Carter’s couch had made Megan a reluctant believer. Maybe not exactly in Carter or in me, but she had withdrawn her objections to anything her brother and I were planning, at least for now. Plus, she wanted to know how I could do what I did.
Finally she went to use the bathroom.
“Carter, we can’t bring her,” I whispered.
“She’s coming. That’s the deal for us to use her car.”
“We can rent one. We can borrow one from someone else. Where’s her purse? We can take the keys and leave now.”
“Come on, Jade. This is the best we can
do right now.”
While he spoke I went to look for Megan’s purse. “Grab your wallet. Come on.” I couldn’t see the purse anywhere. The toilet flushed. A minute later Megan came out, purse in hand.
“Everything okay?” Megan asked.
“It’s fine. We should get going.”
“Just a minute.” She went into the kitchen and began to pack Carter’s medication and water into a cooler. She browsed through his cabinets but wasn’t pleased by what she saw. When I thought she was finished, she moved on to Carter’s room and began putting a duffle bag together.
I looked at Carter but he just shrugged.
“It’s a really long drive,” I said loud enough for Megan to hear. “We don’t know how long Chronos will be just sitting there.”
I began to pace. Megan emerged from the bedroom, and I thought we were about to leave when she looked at Carter’s feet.
“You’re wearing those shoes?” she asked.
“I guess,” Carter said.
“How about we get you your sneakers.” She went back into the bedroom.
I followed her. I grabbed the duffle bag. “This is fine. We’re going.”
“Carter needs his sneakers.”
“Carter needs you to go down to your car so we can get this show on the road.”
Ten minutes later we jumped into traffic. Megan’s Civic wasn’t much more comfortable than Carter’s rental and nothing close to the Mercedes, but at least Megan was an aggressive driver. Soon we were moving along with the logjam as quickly as possible.
I obsessively checked my phone for news as the afternoon became evening. Chronos still wasn’t moving. At least a dozen live streams showed him slowly spinning in place above the East River. The police appeared content to leave him be. No doubt the powers on high were debating what to do. Cameras had caught what had happened to the EMT and the footage was online. I didn’t click the links.
I was already feeling punchy and slightly queasy. The drive had just begun and I wanted it to be over. And now, with Megan behind the wheel, Carter wouldn’t shut up.
Blood of the Masked God (Book 1): Red Wrath Page 17