The Power of Mercy

by Fiona Zedde

  Through her alternately dimming and sharpening senses, Mai knew her cousin condemned her with his cold eyes while the others in the room watched her with a little more concern. One of the men guarding the door came closer, gesturing wildly to her, trying to get her cousin’s attention, but Ethan’s eyes focused only on her. She knew she was dying. Not just from the water, but from the panic flooding her body. Frantic, she pulled at the ties behind her back, but the cuffs were strong and she was weak, so damn weak.

  “You’re nothing!” Ethan shouted at her through the glass, his face pressing close enough that his nose touched the tank. His eyes burned with madness. “You, the weak humans, and those pieces of meat who didn’t deserve to be called Meta.” Spit flew from his mouth and flecked the glass. “You’re not a real Meta. You’re not even a real Redstone. You should have protected him and our family, just like I did.”

  Protected him?

  Mai twisted wildly to get close to the glass. She banged her head against it, her chest tight from holding her breath while she tried and tried to last until someone came to save her. She was the one who needed Mercy now.

  She banged her head against the glass again, the pain and booming sound ricocheting through her, begging for someone to do something.

  No matter what he said, Ethan didn’t want her to talk. He wanted to shut her up. That much was obvious with each second Mai fought for breath. This wasn’t about torturing her for information about the Absolution Killer, although he probably did want to know who it was so he could kill them. More than anything else, though, he wanted to kill her. And he soon would.

  “She’s dying!” one of Ethan’s men shouted from very near the tank. Mai heard the words as clearly as if he had whispered them in her ear. “Mandaia didn’t tell you to kill her.”

  “Get her out!” the other man called out. “The hook came loose.”

  “Her mother didn’t want this!”

  “Fuck Mandaia. This is between me and this bitch, no one else.” Ethan stared at her, unblinking, and she silently—desperately—pleaded with him. With anyone.

  I’m dying. The faint voice, which sounded too much like the twelve-year-old her, ramped up Mai’s panic.

  Terror blind, she bucked and jerked in the water, her breath leaking out in weak bubbles, even as she tried to hold it. A too-hot flame roared through her, forcing her mouth open wide to scream. Water rushed into her mouth.

  Her pulse drummed in her ears. Her body burned. It felt like her insides were splitting open, her skin peeling off.

  So fucking hot.

  Mai slashed at the shirt over her chest. She’d broken free of the zip ties. She panted with relief, hands flying up to bang against the glass and beg again. Her fingers were spread wide against the glass and tipped with long nails that curved hard like talons. They scraped the glass with a sound like a scream.

  She stared at her hands, then at the people gaping at her from outside the tank, their shocked faces a mirror of what she was feeling.

  Her cousin gaped at her neck. Mai touched herself there and felt the slits. Gills. Mai panted, her mouth open.

  Breathing. She was breathing.

  Her body was light enough to maneuver in the water despite her ankles being tied together. But they didn’t have to be. She bent double, slitting the zip ties with a fingernail. The superhardened plastic parted like paper.

  Ethan stared at her with wide eyes. Mai stared back. And banged her fist against the glass. Fury destroyed her fear. She rattled the glass with her fist again, and the entire tank shook. That seemed to galvanize her cousin. With the cattle prod in hand, he surged toward her, and Mai shrieked with anger, tensing her body in preparation for the electric shock. But the current passed harmlessly through the water. Mai’s jaws snapped together in surprise, and she felt her newly sharp teeth, the deadly and eel-like fluidity in her body.

  She and Ethan realized at the same time what that meant. He jumped back, and she leapt up to the top of the tank, its smooth glass edges sliding under her scaled palms. In the air, she felt her body warming again, changing to compensate for the abundance of oxygen.

  Mai landed on top of Ethan and latched onto him before he could take another step. The cattle prod clattered against the concrete floors. He tried to scuttle backward away from her. But she sank razor-tipped fingers even deeper into him and stared down into his fear-wide eyes while the pleasure at his helplessness fizzed through her like champagne.

  “Get the fuck off me!” he shouted and tried to buck her off him.

  But he didn’t get to tell her what to do. Shrieking down into his face, Mai slashed her talons across his chest and shredded through his shirt, down through layers of skin. Blood and screams burst out of him, rushing over Mai in an orgiastic flood.

  Around her, she suddenly became aware of the other men, one scrambling to open the steel door, the other rushing toward her with his gun. She jumped over her cousin’s limp and bleeding body, finding the gun lifting to aim at her.

  Everyone except Mai moved slowly.

  So slowly that it was nothing for her to grab the gun and disassemble it in the air, the semiautomatic pistol falling in separate pieces away from the hand that held it. The pieces were still falling when Mai reached through the air and cut the big man’s throat.

  Her body felt warmer than ever before. Cooler air brushed over her skin as she leapt over the dying body for the man fumbling with the heavy door and trying to get out. Mai grabbed him, ignoring his shouts of terror, and slammed him into the steel door. With a crack of sound, the man broke. He crumpled to the floor at Mai’s feet.

  Then she turned in time to see her cousin teleporting away, a throb of energy in the room warning of his intention just before he began to disappear. She grabbed him and dragged him back into the hard room. Her fingers locked into his shredded shirt, into his skin. His blood erupted under her fingernails.

  “Fuck you!” He shouted and jerked under her. “You can’t kill me.”

  He panted and tried to fight her off, but Mai held on. She snarled down at him, wrestling him under her to the ground, knowing she was moving faster than he could see while he thrashed, his gaze dashing into space, looking for her in locations she no longer occupied. He looked terrified, and Mai was gloriously glad.

  The pulse throbbed in his throat, a trapped guppy for Mai to rip out. She curled her fingers.

  “Stop!” A voice thundered through the room and froze Mai’s claws a breath away from Ethan’s jugular.

  The room shivered again but in a different way, a more subtle ripple of space than when her cousin used his power. A woman stepped out of the wall toward Mai and Ethan. The clothes she wore, an all-black uniform with the red and yellow sunburst insignia of an enforcer, were very familiar. But the woman herself…

  “Don’t kill him,” she said to Mai. Her voice thrummed with Power, echoing in the massive room.

  She stopped only a few feet away, her hands held away from her body to show she had no weapons. But they both knew that meant nothing. Her slender but powerful figure radiated power in controlled waves. After a brief hesitation, she pulled the green-tinted goggles from her face, and the eyes that came into view almost undid Mai.

  In them, Mai saw her reflection, as clearly as she saw her cousin under her. Her own eyes, narrowed and predatory, were assessing the best way to harm the woman, then get back to the business of killing Ethan. With a rippling of dark-green scales all over her body, slicked wet but drying now, she was no longer in the water. Most of her shirt had torn away to show her black bra and the scaled skin of her belly, superficially torn by her own talons but already healing.

  She looked feral. A creature of dark water and violent nightmares. She’d completely transformed. Mai drew a shocked breath but didn’t release Ethan.

  Because she saw something else in the enforcer, something very familiar despite the maske
d features and the voice reverberating in the room the way no one else’s had.

  Under the press of her knees, Ethan moved again, his efforts to teleport away warping the air around his body. But her blood grip on his shoulder was enough to trap him.

  The woman slid closer. “Don’t do this, Mai.” She said her name like they knew each other.

  But the only way Mai knew her was from the photos of her work. And, Mai suddenly realized, her unwelcome appearance in Mai’s bedroom a few nights ago. She dug her fingers harder into Ethan’s shoulder, ripped off a piece of his shirt, and stuffed it into his mouth before he could cry out. She’d heard enough of his bullshit to last a lifetime.

  “Why are you holding me back when you’re the one who started all this? Isn’t this pig’s death”—she clenched her fist in Ethan’s hair and shook him once—“what you wanted all along?” Mai felt Ethan stiffen under her hand and shout a curse toward the enforcer, but she ignored him. It didn’t matter now if he knew this was who’d killed Stephen.

  “I may want him dead, but the enforcers need him to live.” The woman darted a glance toward the wavering portal she’d just come through. “My team will be here any moment. I wanted to make sure—” She cut herself off with a low curse. “Are you all right?”

  Before Mai could respond, the portal shivered, and three uniformed figures stepped into the warehouse, their boots thudding against the cement floor as they fanned out in the room with guns raised. She easily recognized Denali, Ty, and Nuala behind their masks.

  How did they…?

  Taking advantage of her distraction, the enforcer fell into a crouch beside Mai, bringing the scent of oranges laced with the sweetness of vanilla. Suddenly, the woman’s features became as clear as if they weren’t covered at all. Mai drew in a shocked breath but said nothing, too aware of the other official-looking figures busy checking on the crumpled bodies around the warehouse.

  They didn’t know the Absolution Killer was one of them.

  Xóchitl.

  The woman’s name fluttered at the back of her throat, but she swallowed it and swallowed her secret. Their secret. And just like that, Mai wasn’t ambivalent anymore. Her mind buzzed with everything she knew now about herself and about the enforcer by her side, about everything she thought was possible.

  She dropped her gaze to Ethan’s and gripped his shoulder again. Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because he bucked in her grip, spitting noises around the gag in his mouth. With a growl of irritation, Xóchitl slapped handcuffs on him, both his wrists and ankles. The cuffs glowed a bright gold and hummed with an invisible force.

  With Ethan subdued, Mai relaxed her grip on him. With each breath, she felt her scales and talons receding, her teeth losing their sharp points. His blood remained a brilliant red under her fingernails.

  Boots thudded closer, and Mai looked up to see Denali’s covered features. “All clear here?” he asked.

  Mai jerked her head in a nod, unable to look at Xóchitl with what she was about to do. “I think it’s Ethan,” she said to Denali, trying to look bruised and properly victimized. Not hard to do with the blood on her face and the shredded clothes hanging off her. “He’s the killer you want.”

  Nuala appeared at Denali’s side. “Are you sure?” But she tore into Ethan with her pitiless stare as if she’d caught him stuffing the I CONFESS note down Stephen’s throat.

  But before Mai could answer, the steel door to the warehouse flew open and slammed into the walls. Her mother surged through it, power rushing from her outstretched palms. Energy swirled around her, and a wild breeze whipped her hair around her face and fluttered back her suit jacket. But she was twenty years too late.

  “Mai!”

  Mandaia was as close to frantic as Mai had ever seen her. But she stopped as if she’d slammed into an invisible barrier when she saw Mai and Ethan with the enforcers. The very air crackled once, then began to simmer down as she lowered her hands. The breeze she brought with her quieted. Cayman and two of Mandaia’s longtime guards rushed into the room behind her. Horror and regret twisted Cayman’s face, and he immediately sought Mai’s eyes. But she couldn’t look at him.

  “Mai has done nothing wrong, enforcer,” Mandaia said to the woman kneeling next to Mai. Her tone was almost...pleading. “She was only protecting herself.” Her eyes swept over Mai and the carnage in the room, the tank with its large red stain and massive crack across the front.

  Mai was grateful her brother stayed on the other side of the room and away from her.

  “We are well aware of what has been happening.” The woman Mai knew as Xóchitl took off her mask and rose to her feet, leaving the handcuffs glowing around Ethan’s hands. And even though Mai had already known what face lay under the mask, seeing those familiar features revealed still left her breathless with shock. “The Tribunal of Enforcers asked me to intervene once Ethan Redstone became a suspect in multiple assaults,” Xóchitl said. “I’ve already taken action as a lead commander of the region, and this man must pay for his crimes against the Families.”

  Mandaia looked surprised. “Against the Families?”

  “Yes.” Xóchitl looked down at Ethan, who flinched into the floor as if still trying to disappear from the warehouse. “He destroyed and defiled, just like his father did, and helped to hide the evidence of both their crimes by planting false clues.” She paused for half a breath, though Mai thought she was the only one to realize it, “and becoming a supposed vigilante killer the humans call Absolution.”

  Gasps echoed around the room, but Xóchitl continued. “Stephen Redstone preyed primarily on human children, but this one harmed only Meta young, very passive ones or ones with no power.”

  Mai heard the sound her brother made, as if he was going to be sick, but it seemed to come from far away. Relief seeped into her. Xóchitl was accepting the bloody gift she offered. On the ground, Ethan yanked desperately at his handcuffs and tried to shout denials from behind the gag.

  “I- I…” She thought her mother would say she didn’t believe any of it, but instead Mandaia cleared her throat and started again. “For how long?”

  “Ethan has been active for at least six years,” Xóchitl answered. “His father for much, much longer.”

  Six years. The same amount of time Absolution had been killing for. Mai jerked a look at Xóchitl, but the woman’s face was cold and unreadable.

  Mandaia smoothed her hands down the front of her suit, easily regaining any lost composure. “I should have known.” She stood over Ethan, her high heels within easy striking distance of his face. “But I allowed my brother to turn me away from the truth.”

  “There are many things you should have known and should have done,” Xóchitl said.

  Her lips drawn in a thin line, Mandaia looked up. “Like protect my own daughter.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mai stumbled to her feet as the two women continued their conversation, not knowing what to think. Her mother’s face hardened into familiar, unyielding lines, but her eyes displayed a shocking swirl of emotions.

  Xóchitl nodded once, a sharp and unforgiving motion. “Ethan and his helpers”—she sneered at Mandaia as she said the word and spared one hard glance at Cayman—“made it seem like you knew the entire time what your brother was doing, and that you helped him get away with it.”

  Alarm rattled in Mai’s chest. He made it seem like her mother knew? Mai looked from Xóchitl to her mother, but they stared only at each other.

  “Earlier today, my secretary showed me some files, proof of things I’d supposedly helped Stephen hide.” Mandaia’s hands tightened into fists at her sides. The windows rattled as if a storm were passing through. “That’s when I knew.”

  Xóchitl settled her mask back on her face. “You have some things to set right in your house,” she said. “Just as I do.”

  With a nod from her, the ot
her enforcers stepped forward and yanked Ethan to his feet. “We’ll take this one now,” Xóchitl said. “If you wish to speak on his behalf—”

  “I won’t,” Mandaia said.

  “Very well.”

  Denali raised a hand, and the wall they’d walked through before rippled. He and the other enforcers walked toward it with Ethan gagged and struggling between them.

  “See you another time, Mai,” Xóchitl called out softly just before she, too, disappeared.

  As soon as the enforcers left, her mother’s guards got to work, silently cleaning up the room. One, with fire at her fingertips, incinerated the bodies where they lay, while the other gathered the guns and tools of torture. Mai flinched when the guard picked up the cattle prod. She was too numb to do much more than stare at them, at her brother and mother, who warily watched her in return.

  Cayman broke the tense silence. “Mai, I didn’t know he’d go this far. I didn’t realize—”

  “What? You thought he’d only torture me a little bit?”

  He flinched and took a step back. Then a familiar look carved his face in stone. “I would’ve done the same thing if somebody murdered you.”

  “Enough.” Mandaia stepped between them and put her back to Cayman. An emotion flickered briefly behind her eyes, like a light going on, then off. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  Mai stared at her in disbelief. “But I told you!” Beyond her control, her voice rose into a high wail. The sound of animal pain. “I told you what he was doing to me.”

  The past rushed over her in a heaving flood: Mai carried in her mother’s arms through Piedmont Park, her fingers lifting to touch the bright-white dogwood blossoms they walked under. The two of them on their backs in the yard, pointing up at the sky and naming the stars.

  All mere illusions of safety and affection, all beautiful and cruel lies.

  And the worst of it all, being twelve years old and powerless, sobbing as her mother abandoned her to torture and then to Stephen, waiting for a rescue that never came.