In the Wind (Out of the Box Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  “She gave you everything!” he shouts and blasts at me. I throw up enough of a gust to cancel most of it out and duck under the rest because he aims high. I’m ready for his next move, and he does as expected—goes low to try and rectify that error. He’s got it in his mind to blast me the hell off this train, and if he does, I know I’m not going to be able to get back on.

  I leap as he fires, with the aid of my own gust. It’s like nails in the forearms this time, and I’m not talking the kind Isabella might deploy if she got feisty; more the kind Father Emmanuel’s Lord and Savior got staked to a cross with. It effing hurts, but it doesn’t stop me from landing nearly on top of him.

  Lorenzo reaches out and grabs me by the shirt, clearly aiming to take this fight up close and personal, and I’m damned sure ready for it. I punch him in the face and he rocks back, throwing a counter of his own that catches me across the jaw. “Keep your mommy issues to yourself, okay, Oedipus?” I manage to spit out in spite of the pain.

  He snaps out of my punch like it’s nothing and slams into me roughly, taking control of the situation. We hit the roof of the train and I fight to get him off of me, forgetting there’s not a ton of room for rolling around.

  Whoops.

  I feel the train drop away and we’re in mid-air, free falling toward the ground below. I’m on top and he’s got hold of me tight with one arm. I can see the ground racing toward us, and I let go of him to throw out my arms to keep from slamming into the dirt and grass at killer speed. I summon a gust with all I’ve got left. The agony is astounding, pain up my arms all the way to the shoulders this time, but I keep myself from slamming into the ground.

  Unfortunately, dipshit Lorenzo hangs on for the ride. And then he does something really stupid, presumably out of panic.

  He blasts out with a gust of his own using a hand he’s got wrapped around me.

  If it had hit me, it would have thrown me into the air and him into the ground, which would have been a beautiful—if ironic—end to our little battle. Unfortunately, it goes past me and hits the ground, sending the two of us into a horizontal spin.

  Right toward the train.

  But it doesn’t send us into the side of the train. Oh no. That’d be too easy. It sends us right at the tracks.

  I can see the wheels slicing past at high speed. A couple cars have shot past in the moment since we’ve fallen off, and we’re nearing the back of the train. I watch those metal wheels spinning, almost in slow motion, like my brain can sense death is coming.

  We’re heading straight for them.

  I don’t even have time to scream before they pass and we dive right under the train. I can feel the carriage going by about a half inch above my head. Wheels streak past, lightning fast, and I’m only controlling my panic barely. We’re still moving, and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be bisected any second now. I imagine derailing the train with my head, getting split in half because the guy who’s clinging to me is too stupid to know when to quit.

  And then we pass under the train unharmed, and I flare the gusts again, this time sending that shattering pain into my biceps while sending us five feet into the air.

  I can feel the world drifting around us as Lorenzo takes stock of the situation. It’s on his face as we’re hovering there, suspended in the air a few feet from the train. His fear is almost a tangible thing, and I know in that moment that he’s fully aware of how close to death we both just came.

  And then his face crumples into a fury and he puts a hand directly against my chest and fires a gust.

  His move drives us apart at high velocity, ripping me from him at furious speed.

  I fly through the air until I crash into something—glass, heavy, with shattering sounds that fill my ears. I tumble down, falling over a table, landing facedown on carpeting, and it takes me a moment of disorientation to realize I’m inside the train.

  People are staring at me. There’s shattered glass in my skin, not that I can tell over the throbbing, screaming pain in my arms and shoulders. I see eyes, countless eyes, fixed on me in shock. I think I’ve crashed their tea party or something, and I’m just sitting in the middle of an aisle, rolling in the foot or so of space between chairs.

  It’s a rude shock, getting heaved through a glass window, and I’m just about over it and ready to try standing when someone comes flying in to land at my feet. He does it right, sideways through the narrow window, exhibiting a kind of flight control I wouldn’t have believed possible from an Aeolus without seeing it.

  Alpha Male is definitely not Alpha Aeolus. Which is good, because that’s an alliterative nightmare.

  “She gave you everything!” Lorenzo says again.

  “God, are you still on about that?” I ask, rolling to a sitting position as I pluck a shard of glass out of my arm. Blood wells up in the wound. “We just went under a fricking train and barely survived. Take a moment and—”

  He throws his hands in a sideways motion like he’s summoning Tony Stark’s armor to him, but I know that’s not it. The wind launches me from the floor and I feel the pain as I smash through the window on the other side. The glass shatters as I go through shoulder first, and I feel weightless, once more, as I plummet to the ground.

  50.

  Anselmo

  “You seem like a man who has careful control of himself and all around him,” she says. The flattery is all the sweeter for being the truth.

  Anselmo cannot help but smile more broadly. This is a very astute and observant woman, to have picked up on this so quickly. “It has often been said,” he agrees. Cordial conversation is a mark of civility and class—and this woman? She is among the classiest he has met.

  She leans in a little closer, toward the aisle that separates them. “To have set things up in such a manner, to conceal your means and motive … it is impressive.” She shrugs slightly, as though it is a compliment hard given, and he revels in it all the same.

  “There is an element of planning,” he says, “of fastidiousness. To orchestrate great things, one must be great.” He is not one for false humility; why should he be? “The old gods, they had flair. They could move openly, show their greatness to all. Impose fear where needed. Hiding like dogs?” He waves his hand. “This is the challenge of a secret society like … well, you know. Our kind—metahumans—we were fools to ever accept that we should hide ourselves.” He inclines his head in thought. “And the same is true of La Cosa Nostra, ’Ndrangheta, and the others. It takes a strong man to walk tall in the face of his enemies.”

  She nods, and he can tell she understands. “You are such a man, then.” She plays a little coy for a moment. “But if it is as you say, then you mean to … walk tall in the face of those who oppose you?”

  He smiles. “Si. I do.”

  She blinks, bats her eyelashes. “But how would you do such a thing? There are so many who would stand against you …”

  He feels the thrill, the excitement. Months of planning, months of work, of considering possibilities and trying to find the way to bring them to fruition. “They are of little consequence.”

  She cocks her head shrewdly. He loves the look in her eyes. “How …?”

  He smiles and tells her—just a hint, really. It is enough to cause her beautiful eyes to widen, and very much worth it.

  51.

  Reed

  I almost hit the ground before I spin enough to blast a gust off the dirt just in time. I throw everything I have left into it for the millionth time, and my chest hurts all the way through my lungs this time.

  The gust is good enough to propel me about six feet up, then I start to drop. I throw up a hand and catch the edge of a window again. I hang there, getting my bearings for about half a second.

  I’m on the last car of the train.

  Again.

  I sigh at the utter lack of progress. Two steps forward, one step back would feel like a prize-winning performance compared to this. All I’ve done since Lorenzo has showed up is lose ground, and I’ve
got pretty much none left to lose.

  I’m resigned to slinging myself back up onto the roof of the train to try again when a guy appears above me with a gun, and I remember I left one more of these goons back here to deal with. Aw, hell. I thought I at least knocked his gun away.

  I go to throw air at him and nothing happens. It’s almost as embarrassing as the time when I was a teenager and my car sputtered and died on a date, right in front of the girl’s house after I’d picked her up.

  Almost.

  He fires, and I sling myself to the side, channeling my inner Spider-Man and hurling myself up onto the car faster than he can bring his gun around. I’m lucky it’s a pistol because he’s at least halfway through the magazine on gut instinct before I get up on the carriage.

  He swings it around, and I try to throw wind again. A short blast ruffles his hair and that’s it. Which would be fine if I was just trying to be affectionate with the son I don’t have, but unfortunately I’m trying to knock over a guy who’s about to shoot me.

  He’s four feet away, has his gun in hand, and he’s drawing a bead on me. I’m exhausted, my powers are depleted, and I have pretty much of nothing left to give.

  So I kick him in the kneecap just as he fires, and I swear I can feel the wind as the bullet passes my cheek.

  He looks angry, not agonized, because my clumsy kick is not enough to shatter his patella—total bummer, I know—and he’s bringing his gun around so that I can look straight down the barrel when the first piece of good news I’ve had in quite awhile comes to my attention.

  The slide of his gun is back and locked. Hallelujah. He’s as empty as me after Dr. Perugini – never mind.

  I am all over him like a Doberman on a fresh steak. I knock his ass over and pummel him into unconsciousness in about five seconds. If I were fully awake, I might be enjoying the sound of his skull rattling against the top of the carriage. As it is, I’m overjoyed when his eyes roll back in his head, because I don’t really want to beat a man to death on top of a speeding express train to Florence today. Or any day. Or anywhere, ever.

  I stagger to my feet with a sense of rough satisfaction that I’ve spared this asshole, and then I feel my heart sink within as I see what’s standing in front of me.

  Lorenzo.

  Again.

  And still—shit, even still—he looks mad enough to chew through the steel skin of the train with his own teeth. And I’m standing there, in front of him, completely exhausted, without anything left to give.

  52.

  “Dude,” I say, “aren’t you tired of this yet?” I know he’s not by the look in his eyes. Lorenzo wants to kill me. He’s been trying since he first ran into me. This would be obvious to anyone watching, really, but I’m so exhausted I just want the fight to be over.

  He doesn’t say anything, just screams in fury (technically, that’s not saying anything) and comes at me. I don’t know if he caught my windless act with the flunky, but he doesn’t bother to hit me with his powers. He just comes at me all raging bull and slams hard into me. I punch him twice in the head and it does nothing. He shakes it off like he’s Taylor Swift and lifts me into the air over his head. It’s a precarious position, and I get the feeling of danger as I tower above the ground—

  And then he throws me over the back of the train.

  I realize as I drift toward the ground that he’s seriously out of his gourd with rage. Apparently my tight relationship with Hera was more of a point of contention in Alpha than I ever knew. I throw my arms back as I fall, and kick my legs beneath me. I reach deep one last time for my power and find it, and this time it feels like a heart attack, like someone rips through my chest cavity with a buzz saw as I blast wind out of my hands and my feet, knocking my shoes clear off in the gust.

  The wind kicks me back up to the back of the carriage where Lorenzo is standing, stunned. He may not be as exhausted as I am, but his mind is clearly going, since throwing an Aeolus over the back of a train is probably not the most effective means of killing one of us.

  I catch him with an extremely weak kick as I land, and he staggers back with a grunt. I follow up with an uppercut to the face that staggers him. “She wasn’t even your mom,” I say as I smack him. I go low and work the gut with a couple of solid hits that have him on the ropes. You know, if a train had ropes. Something occurs to me. “She wasn’t actually your mom, was she?”

  His gaze hardens and he gets even more royally pissed. I can’t decide if he’s raw because I’m kicking his ass or because she actually was his mother, but either way I hesitate for a second (stupidly), and he catches his furious second wind. He comes at me like I said something about his mother (jury’s still out on that one), and he nails me under my guard, right in the groin. It’s a cheap shot, and it’s full of meta power, and it sends me to my knees.

  His anger is boiling over by this point, and maybe that’s what saves my life. Rather than engage in reasoned debate, or cold, calculated revenge, he kicks me while I’m down, right in the ribs, and sends me over the side of the train for the last time.

  I’m in agony, and I’m falling. I throw out my hands and produce just a small burst of wind as I land, enough to defray some of the momentum and force of the seventy-plus mile-an-hour impact. I roll through tall, yellow grass, countless rocks that feel like boulders pounding into my legs, my ribs and everything else.

  I come to a rest staring into a blue sky overhead. It’s pretty, I reflect, but it seems so very distant. I stare into it, and the clouds seem particularly white. They glow, they brighten, they fill the sky. I feel my eyes dragged shut by gravity, but the brightness lingers. I let it take over the world around me, dissolving everything into it, and I slip away into blissful unconsciousness.

  53.

  Anselmo

  The woman is still quiet and contemplative when Lorenzo re-enters the car. He looks a bit scuffed up, with blood running from an open wound on his eyebrow, and his suit torn in several places. He looks like a man, though, a blood bubble in one nostril. Anselmo can tell by his bearing that he has faced his problems and has triumphed, and that counts for much.

  “Done,” Lorenzo says, pouring himself into the seat behind the woman. Anselmo tilts himself to look at the boy, who looks as though he is about to pass out.

  “He is dead, then?” Anselmo asks.

  “He is off the train,” Lorenzo pronounces. “He was lying unmoving in the grass after landing.”

  Anselmo ponders this for a moment, and finds he is not even angry. “Call the house. Have them send two cars with men. Tell them approximately where he landed, and have them search.” He points a finger at Lorenzo. “Tell them to shoot first. Bring rifles.”

  Lorenzo nods, and pulls out his phone, making a call as quickly as his fingers can dial.

  Anselmo turns to look at the woman, and she appears … stricken. “It is okay, my dear,” he says, soothing her. “It will be over swiftly. He is likely suffering, and should be put out of his misery.”

  Like a dog, Anselmo does not add, purely out of sensitivity.

  54.

  Reed

  Pharell’s “Happy” fills the air around me, but it’s tinny and feels like it’s playing at a distance. My eyes are nearly impossible to pry open, and I wish the song would just carry me away on the notes.

  It fades and quiets, then starts again, and it feels like it’s dragging me physically somewhere.

  I open my eyes to find that the sky is still blue. My body aches, a thousand pains registering their outrage through screaming nerve endings.

  I move a hand gingerly, trying to localize the sound of the song as it fills the air for a third time. I realize it’s coming from my pants pocket and I dip my fingers in, rustling until I finally come up with my phone.

  It’s J.J. calling. I press the damned green button and let my arm fall to hold the phone against my ear. “What?” I ask, and I sound bad even to myself.

  “Dude, you’ve been unmoving next to the train tracks fo
r like twenty minutes,” J.J. says, skipping his usual cheerful greeting. “Are you okay?”

  I sit up, slowly, taking inventory of all my miseries. There are so many. “Not really.”

  “Gotta get going, pal,” J.J. says. “You need to walk about five minutes north. I’ve got a cab on the way for you.”

  “I just wanna lie here and die,” I say and mean it.

  “High likelihood that’ll happen for real if you don’t get going,” J.J. says. “I’ve got two cars moving out of Serafini’s compound. Thermal shows they’re loaded with guys—with guns—and they’re heading your way.”

  “Awwwghhh,” I moan, leaning forward.

  “They’ve got Dr. Perugini, man,” J.J. says, and I suddenly remember why I was on that train to begin with. “You gotta make like a cow and mooooove, man.”

  “Sounds more like I’ve had a laxative if I’m doing that much moving,” I mutter in protest as I manage to get myself into a squat. Standing up is going to be a slow process.

  “Haha, like diarrhea,” J.J. says, the master of subtlety. “Seriously, though, you need to go. Cab’s gonna be there in like five minutes.”

  “I’m going,” I say, getting to my feet and shuffling along the tracks. A really dismal thought occurs to me. “What the hell am I gonna do now?”

  “What heroes do,” J.J. says, like it’s obvious. “Rescue the girl, pee in the bad guy’s cornflakes. You got this, you’re a natural white hat, dude.”

  If I had been wearing any hat at all, it would have been crushed in the last fall from the train. I hold up a palm as I walk and try to stir the wind. It’s faint, but a little comes, along with a whole lotta pain. “Owwww.” I cringe and keep walking. “Man, I don’t know if I have anything left. I assume Anselmo has guards at his compound, and even if not, he’s still got himself and his iron skin plus Lorenzo, the guy who just threw me from a moving train.”