Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  I started by heading full speed toward the end of the alley.

  The brake lights flared a halo of red in the white smog as the van slowed. I was after it, closing the distance as it eased across the road at the side of the gallery. It crossed the empty street and detoured around a pile of rubble caused by the collapse of the building across the street as it darted into an alley. They were taking their time, watching for obstacles in the road.

  I did not waste any time with such precautions.

  I came up on a pile of broken stone and glass and leapt over it in one bound. I landed in the alley across the street, forty or fifty yards behind the van. It was going faster now that it had cleared the bomb damage, speeding up as it shot down the narrow, dim space between the two buildings.

  My legs pumped as I came after them, pouring on the speed. I was probably going forty or so miles per hour myself, keeping to the ground and drawing on my stamina to keep me going. My breath came in shallow bursts, my lungs taxed by my efforts. It had been a couple years since I’d had to work very hard at this. A very long couple years in which I was either stuck at the office or away on a hunting trip for work. I hadn’t even realized how complacent I’d gotten. At first I’d worked out every day, honing my skills, keeping my edge sharp. That had been the first six months, before everything had hit the fan and I’d realized…

  I’d realized that there was no one out there who could really match me.

  Stupid.

  Oh, so stupid.

  Somewhere in the exhausted haze of the job I’d lost sight of the fact that training was a way of life. Preparation for moments like this was my life—or at least it had been until I’d gotten so frigging tired that I spent the few spare moments I had left splayed out on the couch watching Netflix or sleeping.

  Dumb. I was kicking myself for being so dumb.

  I caught the van because it slowed down in a parking lot just beyond the mouth of another alley. It was a triangular space surrounded by buildings on all sides, the narrow passages set up to allow cars to come and go. The van slammed on the brakes and came to a halt in two seconds.

  I came to a halt just slightly more slowly.

  I ricocheted off the back of the van, fortunately unhurt but a little dazed. I rolled back to my feet, breath coming and going in gasps. I was a little slumped, too, back hunched as I stood there, waiting for someone to emerge so I could kick their ass.

  Then the back doors opened, the front door opened. I saw two people coming toward me, and for the first time in a long while, I felt a pang of concern.

  Chapter 39

  The person who came out the back of the van was a woman, there was little doubt about that. She had on a pink ski mask, some sort of abomination that didn’t go very well with her black tactical vest and…

  It took me a second to realize that she was wearing the black tactical vest over normal clothes, and another second to put together that it had come from one of the downed SWAT team members. It was unzipped and a white tank top was visible beneath, as was an extremely flat chest and stomach. She wasn’t small, but damn she was in shape. Military-style conditioning, at least it looked like to me.

  And she had two knives in her hands.

  Bingo.

  I didn’t get much of a look at the guy getting out of the front of the van before knife-lady came at me. She wasn’t that fast, but I was feeling pretty damned slow at the moment. I didn’t even get a chance to squeeze off a shot before she was on me. She had some training with those weapons; that much was sure by her motions, which were confident and practiced. A couple years earlier, I could have dusted her in seconds. Now I felt slow, not only from my recent lack of practice but also from the drain I’d experienced from absorbing the fire. I was faster than she was but punchy at the moment, and she pressed on me harder than I would have expected someone to come at an unknown quantity like me.

  I turned her aside, but just barely. She drifted out of my sight every time I tried to get the gun barrel lined up for a shot. She took a chunk of my elbow, and I felt a thin slice of the blade cut through my coat and draw a paper’s width of blood from me. It stung, but it got my brain working a little faster. She came back at me again, and this time I knocked one of her hands aside with a pistol whip and lifted a knee to strike her in the gut. I heard nothing more than a grunt, and she kept coming, so I pushed her out of the way to give myself space to maneuver.

  “Stop,” came a proper British accent from behind, and I turned in time to see the man in the black ski mask. I recognized the eyes, of course hiding as they were behind the wire-framed glasses. I backed up to put myself at the bottom of a triangle of knife lady and the man in the glasses. He wasn’t making any offensive moves, but I didn’t expect that to last. I had my pistol back at low rest, but my elbow was burning, interfering with my aim. I started to summon Wolfe to fix it, but I couldn’t muster the will to do it. Bad sign.

  “So, it is you,” I said, keeping my hands up defensively and trying to focus on all three of the threats before me. The guy who’d gotten out of the front of the van was just standing there, a rolled-up cardboard cylinder tucked under his arm. The stolen painting, I presumed. Now our murderer—murderers, I should say—had branched out into art theft and the wanton killing of police officers. I thought about firing a shot at Mr. Ski Mask, the leader, but I didn’t exactly have a great backstop here and he’d already proven adept at dodging bullets.

  “’Tis I,” he said gamely. “And it’s you, as well. Sienna Nealon, look at you. The girl herself. The face of metahumans everywhere.” He stared at me, and cocked his head. “I didn’t really notice this when we were staring at each other across the kitchen, but you look taller on the telly.”

  I wanted to grind my teeth. I was average height for a woman, dammit. “So, you know my face. Why don’t you show me yours? We can be on a first-name basis.” I asked, just playing him for time. His knife-wielding flunky was keeping her distance, hovering just out of reach, which suited me fine. I wasn’t super enthused about my chances of taking her, because at the moment I just wanted to go back to bed. I didn’t like my odds, not feeling as weakened as I did. If she came at me, I was definitely going to have to take a shot at her, backstop be damned.

  “I don’t think so,” he said with a light chuckle. “You wouldn’t know my face anyway. My power lies in anonymity. Let’s just say I’m one of countless people you’ve had some influence on. Though probably not in the way you intended it.”

  “Is Angus dead?” I asked. I watched him carefully, but he looked utterly composed. And utterly unsurprised at the question.

  “He did meet a bitter end,” the man in the mask said with a glee he didn’t bother very hard to hide. “I was trying to decide whether it was even worth it to leave him for your friends at the Met to try and put together. See, he’s in so many pieces that it’ll take you a while to sort him out, and I rather suspect New Scotland Yard is going to be a bit busy for the near future.”

  “What about Janus?” I asked. “And Karthik?”

  I caught a hint of something in the way he answered. “You’ll just have to wait and see what turns up, I’m afraid.” There was a glimmer of triumph in his eye. “Though I expect the capacity of the police to deal with all I’m about to throw in their path is going to be rather limited, what with the stunning casualties they just took—”

  “That SWAT team was a real loss,” I said, managing to break into a taunting smile of my own. “The snipers, too. But that’s all they lost.”

  He hid his outrage well; it cropped up in a twitch of his brows for less than a quarter of a second before he blunted it, covering his slip with an amused grunt and smile that didn’t feel at all real. “So… ever the hero, everywhere you go.”

  “I do what I can,” I said.

  “What you can do is so limited that it falls easily into the category of ‘pathetic,’” he said with a barely concealed hiss of anger. “I’ve seen your interview; your arrogance is astounding gi
ven your utter lack of true ability. You strut around the world as if you were some being of high accomplishment.” His face hardened, the smile turning into a sneer. “As though you didn’t preside over the massacre of some eighty percent of our kind.”

  “I didn’t preside over anything,” I said tautly. “I did everything I could to stop it—”

  “Oh, yes, you did everything you could,” he said in smug, cool fury. “You turned to the very devil of our world himself looking for succor in the heart of conflict. Your high-minded rhetoric, your moral fortitude? You threw it all away when you were going after Sovereign, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I genuinely didn’t, but he was clearly pissed about something.

  “Of course you don’t,” he said, somehow even more smug. “Everyone thinks you’re the hero, don’t they? They saw what they saw, the end of the fight. The last battle. Do you think they’d canonize you if they knew what you did before that?” He took a step toward me, menacing. “If they knew the lines you crossed? The enemies you embraced in your mad dash to stop Sovereign? How many serpents did you clutch close to your breast and give succor to in your struggle to survive?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is that a metaphor? Because if so, you lost me—”

  He launched at me, stepping closer in a move that was more fury than direct action. I recoiled a step, defensively, and he moved to counter so fast I would have sworn he knew what was coming. If I’d been at full capacity, I might have been able to block him effectively; as it was, I barely bounced off a hard punch thrown at the side of my head.

  I staggered back a step, lurching. His hit hurt; even though it was a glancing blow it still caused my vision to shift from the impact. I sidestepped—

  And ran right into a blade that penetrated into my kidney.

  The pain was staggering, and it was followed by another knife to the ribs that was withdrawn so quickly it took a second for it to register exactly how badly I’d been hurt. I stayed on my feet, turning away from the woman with the knives. I turned to shoot her, but my gun was gone from my grasp. Her smile showed through the pink ski mask’s mouth opening, and it made her look all the more demented. My pistol was in her hand, clutched with one of the blades.

  “I admired you, you know,” the man in the ski mask said. “When I first heard about you. When I first saw you. I thought you might be the sort of person who could help me. Who could aid me in getting the satisfaction I was due.”

  I felt the blades hit me again, and I looked to the left in time to see that the woman had swooped in again while I was distracted. Stupid mistakes. Amateur mistakes, really. I felt the shock of pain, the screaming of nerves as she twisted the knives in my side. I cried out to Wolfe, somewhere deep inside, to help me, but his voice was near-faded, the over-exertion from controlling the fire coming back on me now and stopping me from healing as fast as I needed.

  I called on another soul to help me, reaching out for Eve Kappler, and the answer was nearly non-existent. I shot a faint web of light out my left hand that pushed the knife-wielding woman away from me only a few feet before it disintegrated like dust in the breeze.

  “Gavrikov,” I muttered under my breath. I needed to fly or needed to burn.

  Neither came to me.

  My legs folded beneath me, and I looked up into the masked face of my enemy, his cold eyes staring down at me. “I admired you until I found out what you really were,” he said, taking another step toward me. I took a clumsy swipe at him, but he dodged with ease. I saw motion out of the corner of my eye and there was suddenly a blade at my throat. The woman had me by the arm, holding me up. Hell, she was the only thing holding me up; without her, I would have pitched forward onto the alley floor. The blade dug into the skin of my throat, and I could feel it breaking the flesh, the trickle of blood running down the front of my blouse. She did not even bother to hold my own gun at my head; she didn’t need to.

  “I know who you are now,” the man said, squatting down in front of me. I reached out for him but felt the blade dig in and the woman’s strong hands pull me back. “What kind of person you are when you’re cornered. What sort of options appear to you, the ideas you’ll embrace, the desperate gambits you’ll attempt to save yourself.” He slapped my hand down, breaking my wrist in the process, a perfect hit that even I might not have been able to pull off at the height of my training. “I know your past as well as your future.” At this, he smiled. “You’ll be the last of them to die, because you were the last of them to join.”

  I wanted to cry out, to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but I couldn’t. I felt the knife slash across my throat, opening it up, and the warm flood ran down my chest like I’d spilled a cup of water down my shirt. I felt lightheaded, but the pain was already fading, along with the light. My eyes fluttered as I stared at him, my mouth moving futilely.

  “You’ll probably survive this,” he said as I hit the ground, no longer supported by the woman. “If you do, I know we’ll meet again.”

  I heard his words as I faded into the darkness. “Sienna Nealon—the last head of Omega.”

  Chapter 40

  Philip watched her bleed with a strange sense of detachment. It was supposed to be joyful, but it wasn’t, really. She would survive this, he was certain. That was both a relief and a curse. A relief because in spite of what he’d said, she really could be useful as a last stopgap. Beating her would be easy. Containing her for very long, though? That would be nearly impossible.

  “Shall we go?” Antonio called. He had moved over to the parked BMW that was waiting for them here. The smell of drifting smoke from the wreckage around the gallery was heavy, though not as heavy as it had been in the immediate area around the destruction.

  “Just a moment,” Philip said. His mind ran through the probabilities. She was wounded but not critically; left on the street she’d be found in a matter of minutes. Too soon. “Move her to the bin,” he said, pointing at a rubbish bin against a dull grey wall.

  Liliana did it with glee, stabbing the girl under the armpits, burying her knives between the ribs as she dragged her along. It left a clear trail of blood that caused Philip to sigh in sheer annoyance. He said nothing, though; there was no point.

  Liliana tossed the girl into the bin as if she weighed nothing at all. Philip held the top for her, barely, his thumb and forefinger tingling at the thought of all the bacteria surely covering the thing. He kept from making a grimacing face, but only just. “Antonio?” he called, and the bomb maker came round the BMW to give him a look of curiosity. “Give her a little something extra for her trouble.”

  Antonio smiled, his dark goatee pushed back around the edges to make room for the fearsome expression. Keeping the painting cylinder tight under one arm, he pulled something off his belt, slipped a pin out of it and tossed it, perfectly, into the open bin.

  Philip let the lid slam shut and he started toward the car. He didn’t bother to count out loud, and he’d lost track by the time he slipped into the back seat of the BMW and removed his mask.

  They had reached the turn outside the alley when it went off, a faint pop that sounded like a gunshot in the distance. He did not turn around to look as they made the left onto the crowded road, quite secure in the knowledge that everything was in perfect placement. When she woke—if she woke up—even she could not stop him now.

  Chapter 41

  I drifted along like I was riding a tide. I floated, suspended on a calm ocean, the sound of the waves crashing in my ears and a salty, metallic taste on my tongue that wasn’t at all like water. It was so bright, the day shining down on me, and my breaths came slowly, one after another, my body utterly relaxed.

  I blinked at the bright sunshine, and realized I wasn’t actually on a beach. It felt like a beach, water and all, but it wasn’t.

  It was all in my head.

  The sand was there, gritty, sticking to my shoulders. I didn’t feel like I was wearing much, p
robably just enough to be considered beach legal. It was peaceful, though, even though I knew it wasn’t real, and I was quite content to just sit there and feel the heat radiating down on my skin.

  At least, until a voice with a thick German accent interrupted my bliss. “We need to talk.”

  I opened an eye to find Eve Kappler standing over me. Bitch was stealing my sunshine. I could see her face, knotted into an unpleasant expression. Her arms were folded, and she was wearing a black tactical vest, black pants, and high boots. She was the picture of a soldier, the picture of her I saw in my head every time I thought about her.

  Of course, she also looked very much alive, which she wasn’t and hadn’t been for a couple years.

  “Not now, Eve,” I said, waving her off. “I’m enjoying my imaginary day in the sun.”

  “Nothing wrong with taking a break every now and again,” came the voice of Roberto Bastian, causing me to crack my eye open. He was dressed almost exactly like Eve except he was taller, and instead of short blond hair, his was dark and cut close to the scalp, military-style. “But this is not a great time for it.”

  I sighed and tried to roll over. I failed, and the two of them continued to block my sun. “I disagree. It feels like a great time for it.”

  “Your life hangs in the balance,” came a heavier voice, deeper. I recognized Bjorn, one of Odin’s—yes, that Odin—sons. He was a big son of a bitch in life, and I could tell just by peeking out at him for a split second that this hadn’t changed in death. He was still big. And stealing my sunshine, too.

  “You are at risk,” came the cool yet strained voice of Aleksandr Gavrikov. He still sounded Russian in my head. Of course, he—and the others—actually were in my head, their full personalities. However happy I’d been for their recent silence, they were destroying all that goodwill here in one fell swoop.