“And so we meet at last,” I said, staring him down.
“This isn’t what you think,” he said.
“Really?” I looked around at the scene of chaos. There were no civilians in sight, and the police cruisers and fire trucks that had been parked on the lawn were in flames, along with a half dozen other cars. The neighborhood looked like a war had come through, and Augustus’s lawn was ground zero. “It’s not a battlefield?”
He paused, like he was thinking it over. “Okay, maybe it is what you think. But I’m not who you think I am—”
“You’re a lightning-wielding killer,” I said and let my hands flare into flame. I let my gaze settle on the smoking ruins of a man with an assault rifle clenched tightly in his blackened hands. It looked like he’d been hanging onto his weapon for dear life when something (lightning COUGH COUGH) hit him. “I can see the evidence for it from where I’m standing, and it’s looking pretty compelling.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and he went from uncertainty to coldness in a flash as he realized he wasn’t going to talk me out of beating his ass.
“Wolfe,” I said. Ready, the voice came.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.
“I’ve kinda always wanted lightning powers,” I said.
He let the first volley go and I barely dodged it. I went low to the ground and it surged past my ear and hit the ground. I could feel it run through my body and give me an instant headache as I caught the trailing edge of it. It made me want to puke, but instead I sprang up using Gavrikov’s flight and flung myself at lightning man’s jaw with a punch.
He was fast, I’ll credit him with that. I wouldn’t say he moved like lightning, but it was clear his meta reflexes were way up the scale. I altered course and slammed a forearm into his jaw, knocking him back. It was the sort of thing you could only do if you had some control over gravity, which—hey, lucky me—I do. Also lucky for me, most people don’t really take that ability into account when fighting, since it sort of violates the laws of physics.
He fell over onto his back, and I was on top of him in a second. He channeled lightning through his fingers and I grabbed his wrist with a flaming hand. He screamed as I burned him, pinning his wrist to his chest. I could smell the charred flesh as smoke wafted up. I headbutted him and heard his nose crack, knocked his glasses askew and watched his eyeballs roll from the impact. He made a faint grunt, a noise like I’d taken most of the piss out of him, and I punched him again in the face for good measure.
It felt good to finally have a face to punch. Take that, lightning man.
I felt my powers start to work on his burned wrist, and I just held him there. I felt vaguely like I was doing something wrong. I hadn’t eaten a whole soul in years. I’d been afraid to, really, afraid to add any more crazy to the circus of nuttiness already in my head. Afraid that the meta stigma against eating souls would reflect badly on me in my newfound fame.
But you know what? Screw it. Everybody already hated me. And I had always wanted to be able to throw lightning. That was a badass power.
I stared into lightning man’s eyes as I felt the burn of my succubus power begin to work. I could hear his voice in my head as I caught the first hints of his soul, the first stirrings of him in there. He was screaming, crying out as I grasped at him. He was clawing to hold on, raging against the burn of my power on his skin, and I held him down and realized that no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried …
… they were never going to love me.
… they were always going to hate me.
… Kat was always going to win in the end.
I was never going to be like her.
I never was a hero.
I was a soul eater.
And it was time to accept that fact once and for all.
I ignored the screaming, ignored the shouted pleas and cries, and kept my hands on his skin as his agony drew to a crescendo, ready to embrace what I was once and for all.
43.
Augustus
I practically crawled over to Taneshia on my hands and knees. She had a giant, fist-sized hole in her back and I started to panic. Blood oozed out of it. I wanted to freak out but tried to hold it all together. I let out a stream of curses.
I took a breath and realized I was about ready to hyperventilate. She was bleeding hard, and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t a doctor, I wasn’t a nurse. I was a dude who was about to lose his shit because a girl he lov—errr … had known for a very long time was dying in front of him.
Then I realized … she wasn’t squirting blood out. It was a steady ooze, and the bones the dude had broken when he had pulled his hand out of her back already looked like they were—very slowly—growing back together.
And there were scorch marks all around the edges.
“Shocked … myself,” Taneshia said, speaking into the dirt. I could feel the vibrations in the soil, could barely hear her. “Tried to … cauterize … until my healing could kick in.”
“You are smart, girl,” I said. “Knew there was a reason you were the one that went to college.”
“Damned right,” she muttered. Her wound looked clear, but … did metas have to worry about infections? That was something I’d need to ask S—
I looked up into the sky as a sonic boom shook the world around me. Sienna came jetting down in front of my house, and I saw her disappear behind the roofline, smoke hanging in the air above the street. “You going to be okay?” I asked Taneshia.
“Go if you need to,” she said. “I’m a little … sleepy …”
“I’ll be back,” I said, staggering to my feet. I limped along, not because my legs were injured, but because I was just so completely wiped out from my exertions that I was having trouble putting one foot in front of another. “Just hang out here.”
It took what felt like ten minutes to get to the corner of the house, and then I slid around it. The whole street was heavy with smoke now. Looked like the fire engines had caught on fire, along with the cop cars in front of the house. Looked like Mr. Cavanagh and Mr. Weldon—if they were the ones behind this—had done a real number on the neighborhood. Dammit, this was my home.
I wanted to drag both those bastards out into the light of day.
Instead I dragged my feet along, slow and steady, moving toward my house. I’d seen Sienna head that way, and Jamal had gone that way a while earlier. I’d almost forgotten about my murdering brother. I had no idea what to do about him. I could hear sirens in the distance as Atlanta’s finest finally got around to organizing their response to this calamity. I couldn’t blame them; this was disastrous. It wasn’t like our whole area broke out into a literal war every day.
I crossed the second lawn, watching out for the holes I’d left. I looked to my right as I saw water bubbling up out of the ground where I’d buried the dude that shot the jets of water at me. I guessed he was still working his way through it. I used my hand to shift some mud down in that hole, block the bubbling. I didn’t have the strength to fight anyone else right now.
My legs were hurting now, and I started to get the feeling maybe I’d skinned my knees at some point. My rib was killing me, my whole side on fire. I wanted to stop. To fall down. To just give up and let myself rest.
But I couldn’t.
Sienna and Jamal were still in the smoke, somewhere, fighting the good fight against these guys. I couldn’t let them soldier on alone.
I pulled myself over another lawn, and I knew now I was only two houses away.
The smoke got thicker, hung in my throat. I couldn’t hardly breathe, and that bitter taste was just caught on my tongue. My eyes were tearing up, but I kept putting one foot in front of another.
And then the smoke started to clear, and what I saw nearly took what was left of my breath away.
Sienna Nealon was atop Jamal, hand clutching hold of his wrist. Jamal’s mouth was open, locked in a silent scream, and he was writhing under her
grip.
Her grip.
“Sienna!” I shouted. “No!”
When I thought about it later, I don’t know what I was expecting. Her to ignore me, maybe. To shout back some argument. To double down and grasp him even tighter.
I didn’t expect what happened.
I didn’t expect her to fly into the air ten feet in an instant, dropping her hand from him so fast it looked like he’d flung her into the air. Her head whipped around and her body hung there, and I knew she’d done it herself, not because of anything Jamal had done to her. He was too busy clutching his arm tight to his body, sporting a sickening burn on his forearm that was blistered and charred.
“What?” Sienna asked, standing there, staring at me through the dusky smoke. “What is it?”
“I … didn’t expect you to stop just because I said so.” I said it because I was a little stunned.
Her answer came out kind of cross. “Well, I did. So … what’s the deal?”
I nodded to Jamal. “He’s my brother. You can’t … do whatever you were going to do to him.”
She kept her cool, but I saw a hint that she might have been rattled. “Oh. You know he’s the lightning man, right?”
“Yeah, but he’s not in league with Cavanagh,” I said, stumbling closer to Jamal. “Are you?”
“No,” Jamal said, shaking his head through gritted teeth. “I hate that man … now that I know it was him.”
“Know it was him that … what?” Sienna asked. She floated closer to the ground.
“Killed Flora,” Jamal said, still clutching his burn gingerly. “He killed Flora.”
“Who was Flora to you?” I asked, offering him a hand. Smoke swirled around us, the wind picking up and driving it west as it billowed off the nearby fire engine.
He looked at my hand for a long moment. “She was my girlfriend,” he said and took my hand. I pulled him to his feet. “She was my first girlfriend, Augustus. And your boss and his thugs killed her.”
The wind picked up and blew smoke between us all as we stood there staring at each other. I looked at Sienna; she looked back at me and then at Jamal. “We should probably get out of here,” she said finally. “Unless you want to try and explain what’s going on to a very unsympathetic police force.”
“We’re sitting in the middle of a meta warzone,” I said. “No, I do not want to try and explain this to the police, because anything I say is probably going to be used against me since I buried at least three people during this fight.”
“Grab your brother,” she said, “and hold on tight.”
“We need to get Taneshia,” I said. “She’s around the corner. She’s hurt.”
“Fine,” Sienna said and grabbed hold of me as I threw an arm around Jamal. “Any idea where we should go?”
“Where’s Momma?” I started to ask in a panic, remembering now that we had no place to go, really, because our house had been burned down.
“I got her out,” Jamal said. “It’s why I was late joining the fight. I got her five streets away. She’s at Mae Grubb’s house.”
I felt my feet leave the ground and Jamal followed behind a moment later. “Great,” Sienna said. “One less worry on the mind. But that still doesn’t leave us anywhere real convenient to go, unless you want to have what’s bound to be a super interesting conversation right in this Ms. Grubb’s house?”
“I know where we can go,” I said and looked at Jamal. “I think Flora Romero’s house is still empty.”
He looked at me, and the sun hit his glasses right when we broke free of the smoke. There might have been just a little extra reflection behind the glasses, though, the first time I could really remember seeing any emotion from my brother in … years. “Yeah,” he said. “Flora’s house is empty.” He pushed his lips together, and they twisted as he turned his head to keep from looking at me.
44.
Sienna
Flora Romero’s house was an empty mess of broken windows and scuffed up floorboards. Plywood hung in place to cover up some of the worst, most shattered windows, and the glass was spread all over the floor in the kitchen.
The four of us were arrayed around the living room at the back of the house, staring at each other in the darkness as the light of day faded and the sound of sirens filled the air. Jamal was looking surly at me, Augustus looked pissed at Jamal. I was shooting occasional looks at Taneshia, who was unconscious on the floor in the corner, on her face, with a nasty wound in her back.
“Well, this is fun,” I said.
“Yeah, a real barrel full of monkeys,” Augustus said.
“What are you so sour about?” Jamal asked, voice extremely quiet.
“Uh, let’s see—my boss is apparently trying to kill me, my girl—” He froze and looked at Taneshia. “Uhh … my friend has been seriously injured … my brother’s a killer, we probably got the law after us, which is a first for me, and … oh, yeah, we still got no idea why any of this is happening. Pick one of those and it’s a bad day. Throw in our childhood home getting torched right to the ground, and it’s a full-on winner, man.”
“That does suck,” I said. “But hey, at least Momma made it out alive.”
“Yeah,” Augustus said, “now she can kill me and Jamal both when she finds out he’s a murderer and I got our house burned down. Yay. Now it’s the best day ever.”
“You didn’t get the house burned down,” Jamal said, and pointed his finger at me. “She did.”
“Me?” I asked, feeling a little dumbstruck. “I wasn’t even there!”
“They were trying to draw you out,” Jamal said, looking at me.
“Well, that was dumb,” I said. “But then, they’ve been playing this dumb the whole time. We would never have dug up Flora’s yard on our own,” I waved my hand toward the yard outside, still in its excavated state, “if those mercs hadn’t ambushed me there and Augustus forced the issue by turning up bones.”
“They only ambushed you because I tipped them off you were going to find something,” Jamal said.
I blinked. “Well. I guess we’re the dumb ones, then.”
“You did what?” Augustus was on his feet, only a thin veneer between him and full rage. I was feeling a little nonplussed myself, but controlling it better than him.
“I tipped off the next link in the chain I was following that Sienna was investigating Flora’s house,” Jamal said. “It had taken me to Roscoe and Kennith—”
“Whom you killed,” I said. “Why was that, exactly?”
“They were working with the bad guys,” Jamal said, sullen. “Joaquin Pollard got paid by Kennith Coy.”
“Kennith Coy was on parole,” I said. “He was working at a tire shop.”
“Which makes a good question how he ended up with ten grand in his bank account that made its way to Joaquin, doesn’t it?” Jamal asked. “You know what he said when I asked him?”
“Before or after you blasted him to death with a bolt of lightning?” Augustus asked.
Jamal’s expression hardened. “The man didn’t talk after death, fool. I asked him before I let loose on him. He said I shouldn’t be asking questions that were too big for me. And then he pulled a gun, so I lit him up.”
“Really?” I asked. “Where did the gun go?”
“I don’t know,” Jamal said. “Didn’t matter. But I assume some stooge of Cavanagh’s or Weldon’s picked it up since it could probably be tied to them. They own the police force in this town.”
“How’s it going to get tied to them?” Augustus asked.
“That big dude,” Jamal said, “the one that works for Cavanagh. He’s the point man on all the ugly illegal dealings.”
Augustus blinked. “Laverne?”
I stared at Augustus. “Tell me he’s got a back-up named Shirley.”
“Surely you must be joking,” Augustus said.
We both had a nice chuckle while Jamal stared at us like we were idiots. “I bet he gets that one all the time,” I said. “Still, if Ke
nnith Coy was a bagman or a money fronter, what about Roscoe? He was just a factory worker—”
“He was working in Cavanagh’s new bioresearch facility,” Augustus said. “What was he doing there?”
“Experimentation on human test subjects,” Jamal said. “Like the residents from the shelter that Flora found out were missing. Cavanagh was pulling them off the street, figuring they wouldn’t be missed.” His jaw got tight. “And he was right—except Flora. Flora missed them, and she went looking. Found something, too. Found out enough that someone got touchy about it and sent Joaquin Pollard to kill her.”
“If you knew it was Cavanagh all along, why didn’t you just kill him instead of Roscoe and Kennith?” Augustus asked, surly.
“I didn’t know it was Cavanagh until today,” Jamal said. “Roscoe and Kennith didn’t give me squat. I had to do the research to trace things back. I still can’t prove it. But Roscoe said something to someone that ended up online and I found it in an email—”
“In a random email, somewhere on the net?” I asked.
“Yes,” Jamal said.
My eyes narrowed at him. “That’s some serious hacking.”
He held up a hand and his fingers crackled. “I haven’t exactly been idle in the last year. I can use my powers with brute force, but there’s some other stuff I can do, too. Finer things. Manipulate 1’s and 0’s. It’s taken a lot of practice, but it’s been worth it. I found the link that tied Kennith and Roscoe to Pollard and the experimentation, and then went to question them both. Kennith tried to get fresh with me, pulled a gun. Roscoe … he was a whole other thing.”
“Yeah, well, don’t leave us in the dark,” Augustus said, then froze. “I didn’t mean to do that pun, I swear. And I talked to Roscoe’s wife. He was a decent dude, had his shit together—”
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