Chimera m-4

by Kelly Meding

“Yes, they did. And after the War, my foster parents were amazing.” I shrugged, hoping none of the roiling emotions inside showed on my face. “Family isn’t always determined by blood. Sometimes blood turns on you.”

  I hadn’t meant my words to be a warning about Landon, or any of the other kids we were looking for, but he seemed to take it that way. His face went blank and he straightened his shoulders. “You may be right,” he said.

  But I’m probably wrong. “Good night, Derek.”

  “Good night.” He reached out, and for one brief, terrifying moment, I thought he might actually try to kiss me. Instead, he lifted my right hand and brushed his lips across my knuckles. The unexpected gesture made my insides quivery. My mouth went dry.

  I didn’t say a word as he walked away.

  Holy smokes, what was I getting myself into?

  Fifteen

  Dead Man’s Hand

  The emergency alert tumbled me out of bed and into my uniform before I really understood what was going on. It was the Alpha leaders alert, which meant it wasn’t going to everyone’s room. I blinked bleary eyes at the clock on the wall—not quite six in the morning.

  Way to start off the day.

  In the hallway, I crashed into Thatcher, who grabbed my elbow before I could fall over onto my ass. “I can see you’re not a morning person,” he said with way too much energy for this hour.

  “Never claimed I was,” I snapped. Guess he got the alert, too.

  A few doors down, Ethan and Aaron came out of their room. Sebastian appeared across the hall, rubbing at his own eyes. We made our way to the stairs, no one really talking. I spared a glance at Aaron, who didn’t seem overly stressed. So he still didn’t know about Double Trouble. Annoyance bubbled up inside me, as well as anger on his behalf. He deserved to know, but I’d promised Teresa to keep my mouth shut.

  Teresa, Gage, and Marco were already at the conference table. The only person missing was Lacey, but she was probably still in Annapolis with her team. As we took seats around the table, another person entered who made me do a double-take. Bethany glanced around until she spotted me and Thatcher. She came over and plopped down next to him, exhaustion pressing down on her like an invisible weight.

  If she was here . . .

  “Fifteen minutes ago we received an anonymous email,” Teresa said, her booming voice getting everyone’s attention. She stood by the two main monitors. Marco was already at work at the computer, getting something ready for her. “The subject line read Lesson One. The only content to the email was an attached video file.” She swallowed. “After we were positive it wasn’t a virus or a worm, we watched it.”

  “What is it?” Ethan asked.

  Gage, who was sitting in the chair nearest Teresa, looked like he was going to be sick. “A message.”

  “To who?”

  “All of us.” He glanced down the table. “But especially to Bethany and Landon.”

  Bethany jerked in her chair. “Me? Trying to kill us on the highway yesterday wasn’t enough?”

  “Not for these people,” Teresa said with a fierce edge to her voice. She nodded to Marco.

  The main screen flashed to life with the paused image of two blurry figures against a dark background. The scene jerked into motion, and the two figures came into focus. A teenage boy and girl, chained up by their wrists, somewhere dark—a large basement, a warehouse, an auditorium. Their feet didn’t touch the floor, and both wore a collar similar to Ethan’s. They were alive, not gagged or otherwise bound, but they weren’t moving much, either.

  Probably drugged.

  “Say your names, for the record, please,” a distorted, off-camera voice said. It sounded male, but could easily be a filtered female voice.

  “Louis Becker,” the boy said.

  The girl said, “Summer Jones.”

  “Why are you both here today?”

  The camera moved closer to the pair, giving us a clearer view of their faces. They were definitely young, and both of them were crying. Summer had glowing purple eyes, and Louis’s hair was the color of my skin.

  “We’re here to send a message to the traitors,” Summer said in a voice choked with tears. Louis finished with, “We’re here to die.”

  Several chairs squeaked. People murmured. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to somehow reach through the screen and save those two kids. But this wasn’t live. Whatever happened to them had happened already. Beneath the table, Thatcher’s hand found mine and squeezed hard.

  “Tell them,” the filtered voice said.

  Summer looked right at the camera, anger mixing with her grief. “You betrayed Uncle and everything we’ve worked for. We’ll all be punished now, because of you. It’s all your fault.”

  Bethany made a soft, choked sound. Thatcher leaned closer and put his arm around her shoulders, without ever letting go of my hand. My chest ached and my eyes stung. We were watching a nightmare unfold, and my only small consolation was that Landon didn’t have to see this.

  In the foreground of the screen, a hand came into view. A hand holding a familiar black box—the collar trigger.

  I closed my eyes. Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I covered my eyes with my free hand. I couldn’t watch it. But I heard it. The buzz of electricity, the short screams that turned into gurgles. The clank of chains. Then silence from the screen, while gasps and soft sounds of disbelief and anger erupted around the conference table. Bethany dissolved into hysterical sobs. Thatcher let go of my hand as she threw herself at him, and he held her while she cried. I glanced up at the screen, at the pair of swinging bodies, and I swallowed hard against the sudden urge to vomit.

  “They were just fucking kids,” Ethan said.

  “I’ll make this easy for you,” the filtered voice on-screen said. “The bodies are closer than you think. You may even hear the lion’s roar.”

  The screen went blank, but the images of those two dead kids were burned into my brain. I glanced around the table, catching the same horror and rage on everyone’s face. The need to find these other kids before Uncle executed them, too.

  “ ‘You may even hear the lion’s roar,’ ” Aaron said. “What does that mean? A zoo? A place with a lion statue?”

  “Perhaps,” Marco replied. “I am already searching for potential matches within a two-hundred-mile radius.”

  “He wants us to find the bodies,” Teresa said, as furious as I’d seen her in a long time. Her eyes flashed bright with tears, but her jaw was tight, her shoulders back. “Which means we could very well walk into a trap.”

  “He’d have to know we’re expecting that, though,” Aaron said. “No one’s going to walk in blindly.”

  “No. We’ll be ready for anything.”

  “That floor looked like wood,” Ethan said. “Marco, can you zoom in on just the floor?”

  “Of course,” Marco replied.

  He did, and Ethan was right. The floor was old, unpolished, and badly in need of repair, but it was definitely wood of some kind. It kind of reminded me of a gymnasium floor.

  Ethan slapped his palm against the table, which made most of us jump. “Lions,” he said. “I know where they are.”

  * * *

  The mascot for Lincoln High School in Jersey City was the Lions. Granted, the school hadn’t functioned as anything except a place for transients to roost for the last ten years or so, but Ethan’s prediction turned out to be correct. We found the bodies of Summer Jones and Louis Becker hanging from the rafters of the old gymnasium, near the three-point line. Gage and Panther-Marco sniffed the room for clues while Ethan, Sebastian, and I cut the bodies down. Teresa watched everything with a frozen horror that worried me.

  The bodies weren’t stiff, so they hadn’t been dead long. Calling the police felt wrong, somehow, and yet taking them back to HQ with us seemed even worse. We were waiting for Teresa to make the decision. Involving the police now meant explaining the video, which could be a problem for Bethany and Landon’s current anonymity.

 
; “Huh,” Ethan said after a few minutes.

  “Huh, what?” I asked.

  “Nothing has exploded, shifted, or otherwise attacked us since we’ve been here.”

  “Doesn’t mean it still isn’t a trap.”

  “If it’s a trap, it’s taking its sweet time to spring.”

  Fifty feet across the gym, Gage and Marco were sniffing around in a shadowed area, probably trying to pick up any clues left behind by the Overseer—or whoever the executioner had been. Panther-Marco lifted his head and growled, a low sound that carried across the distance. Teresa’s head snapped toward them. Gage froze, listening.

  Oh, Windy, I think your trap’s about to—

  “Get down!” Gage shouted.

  The gymnasium roof exploded, raining noise, glass, and wood debris on top of us. We scattered. The gym had no actual cover besides a single section of open bleachers on the opposite side. Sunlight streamed down from the bus-sized hole in the roof, creating a giant dust moat illuminating the debris-covered bodies. A quick glance around told me everyone was on their feet.

  Teresa’s hands glowed purple as she brought her power to the forefront. I reached for my holstered Coltson, glad I’d thought to grab it before we left. Sebastian’s cheeks hollowed as he pursed his lips and did whatever he did while preparing to spit acid at a target.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The gym doors closest to Gage and Marco swung open, spilling in more exterior light and illuminating the shapes of four people. Two more shapes appeared in the roof’s giant hole, one of them flapping a pair of big, feathery wings and holding the second person in his arms.

  “Hold,” Teresa said, before any of us could make a move. They’d attacked the roof, not us.

  The flying pair (both boys) descended in a great gust of wind, stirring up enough dust to make me want to cough. The quartet (two boys and two girls) walked carefully around Marco and Gage, making a wide circle away from us to join their pals near the wreckage they’d created. No one spoke. Even in the dimness, I could tell the six newcomers were young, period. Teens or early twenties, and they all looked equal parts terrified and angry. The boy with the yellow-feathered wings was the only one who outwardly appeared Meta, but I knew better than to assume any of them were powerless.

  A girl stepped away from the sextet. She wore black jeans and a black T-shirt—a uniform shared by the other five teens. Her black hair was shorn short, accentuating her stunning cheekbones and coffee-colored skin. As she moved into the light cast from the hole in the ceiling, her eyes sparkled like they were coated in white glitter. She crouched next to Louis’s body and touched his cheek with her knuckles.

  One of the boys behind her made a grief-stricken sound. They all seemed caught somewhere between wanting to burst into tears and needing to punch something. I could definitely sympathize, having been there myself way too many times.

  Our own group had reassembled on the other side of the bodies, gathered in a U-shape behind Teresa. We were evenly matched, six to six, but with no idea of their powers . . . well, this little standoff could go down a lot of ways, and I knew Teresa was hoping for peacefully.

  “I’m so sorry,” Teresa said.

  Sparkle Eyes stood up. She was taller than Teresa, and she had a lot more anger behind her right now. “You didn’t do this, Trance,” she replied. “Our fight isn’t with you.” Her voice had a Southern lilt to it.

  “Your fight is with the man who ordered these children executed.”

  “Our fight is with the traitors who made this happen. We’ve all been abandoned by Uncle now, thanks to them.”

  “We can protect you.”

  She laughed, a sound that turned into a sneer as she pointed at former Bane Sebastian. “You made your own choices by taking in our enemies, so no, thank you.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Sebastian said. He came a few steps closer, hands by his side in a gesture of peace. “Anyone who would kill a child so coldly is the enemy of us all.”

  Sparkle Eyes glared at him.

  A boy with brown hair and a long scar across his left cheek stepped up next to Sparkle Eyes. “Let’s go, Sasha,” he said with a similar accent. “In case this is some kind of trap.”

  “I have a feeling the trap was all of us meeting in anger,” Teresa said, “and this turning into a massacre.”

  He flexed his right hand, which made an odd, crackling noise. “There’s still time, lady.”

  “Stop it, Tate,” Sasha/Sparkle Eyes said.

  Sasha and Tate. We’d found two of the kids that Mai Lynn told us about. Tate, the son of Peter Keene; and Sasha, daughter of Dana Parks. Andrew McTaggert’s half-sister. I glanced at Ethan, who was watching Sasha intently. They weren’t blood-related, but they shared a half-brother, and I knew Ethan well enough to know that meant something to him.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” Teresa said, “but Uncle isn’t the savior you want to believe he is. He’s lied to you your entire lives.”

  “He saved us,” Tate said.

  “One of the boys we rescued from Uncle? Landon? The people Uncle works for murdered his mother and stole him. They fed Landon lies about his father. About all of the Metas imprisoned in Manhattan. And they made his father believe his son was dead.”

  “Landon turned against Uncle,” Sasha said. “So did Bethany. They’re traitors. It’s their fault Uncle exiled us. We’ll be his enemies if we side with you.”

  “Maybe Uncle will forgive us if we kill the people protecting the traitors,” Tate said, giving our group a significant look. “We should have killed them when we got here.”

  The odds of that being Uncle’s intention were pretty high. Six powerful, pissed-off teenagers hell-bent on revenge, not only for the deaths of two of their own, but also for losing the protection of the man who’d raised them? We could have been in serious pain right now if Sasha had been a little less in control. If she’d been as volatile as Bethany.

  Sasha looked at Tate, then at us, like she was actually considering his suggestion.

  Bring it on, sister.

  “Do you really want to be our enemies?” Ethan asked. “To go off on your own, the six of you? When you have family out there who will help you? When we want to help you?”

  Sasha snorted. “What family? The Banes who murdered children? Who murdered your friends and parents?”

  At least they knew their War history. Sort of.

  “Your mother, Sasha?” Ethan said. “She had another son. You have a half-brother.”

  She stared at him, then narrowed her eyes. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. And I think he’d like to meet you one day.”

  “You’re not buying any of this, are you?” asked the boy with the yellow wings. His longish hair matched the feather color, and even the shape of his face was somewhat birdlike. “We decided as a group we wouldn’t go against Uncle. That we’d find a way to fix this.”

  “Of course I don’t buy it,” Sasha snapped back.

  Big fat liar.

  “Please consider my offer,” Teresa said. “We’ll do our best to protect you. Some of you do still have living family who would love to see you.”

  “No.” Sasha stepped back, closing ranks with her group. “Don’t ask again.”

  “So what now?” Tate asked. “We can’t just walk out of here. What if Uncle thinks we’ve made a truce with these people? He might think we’re working with them, or that we talked.” His hands crackled again. Kid was spoiling for a fight.

  “We’ll deal if that happens.”

  “Sash—”

  “No, Tate. Let’s go.”

  The gymnasium doors burst open, startling everyone in the room. We turned as a group, and the air sparked with energy as instinct brought our powers to the forefront. Two uniformed police officers walked in, firearms drawn, balanced across their flashlights. They stared at us openmouthed, probably trying to understand exactly what they were seeing.

  “Nobody move,” Co
p One said.

  “Officer—” Teresa started to speak, to move forward, and she froze when Cop Two aimed right at her.

  “Nobody move, he said,” Cop Two said. “We got an anonymous report about two dead bodies at this location.” He looked down and his eyes widened.

  Uncle. Uncle had to be the one who made the anonymous call. He’d set us all up.

  Cop One tucked his flashlight under his arm, then reached for his radio.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the tall boy who’d flown down with Wings. His hands sparkled with blue light.

  Cop One paused, then squeezed the radio control. “Central, this is—”

  The boy flung his right hand at Cop One. A haze of blue energy, like a baby firework, zoomed across the gym and slammed into Cop One’s radio with amazing precision. Cop One squawked in surprise and squeezed the trigger. Safety off.

  My left forearm burned. Something forced me down onto my knees.

  Chaos erupted around me. The kids went for the cops. We swooped in to protect the human officers. Guess what happened next.

  The fight we were trying so hard to avoid.

  Wings swooshed up toward the ceiling, and a big purple orb from Teresa dropped him fast. He hit the floor with a thud that made his friends shout. The cops got off two more shots before a spinning whirlwind knocked them both around like human bowling pins. The whirlwind stopped briefly, revealing Sasha as the source.

  Someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me closer to the pile of wreckage from the roof. Took me a second to figure out it was Gage. He ripped off part of his shirt and tied it around my forearm.

  “Fuck!” I yelped as white fire raced down my arm. Then I looked at my arm and saw the blood. “I got shot?”

  “Yeah, you did,” Gage replied. “Stay put.”

  Panther-Marco growled from the other side of the wreckage covering us from the fight. Something exploded. An unfamiliar male voice screamed in pain and anger.

  “Try not to hurt them!” Teresa shouted.

  Yeah, good luck with that.

  I didn’t hear Sasha issuing similar orders.

  Speaking of whom, Sasha’s whirlwind spun high into the air above us, swirling the dust and debris. Three of Teresa’s orbs missed, smashing chunks out of the gym walls. More air turned, and then Ethan sailed through the air. He slammed bodily into the whirlwind. Ethan and Sasha both hit the far gym wall, then tumbled to the ground. A blue firework hit him in the back, and Ethan screamed.