Deke shook his head. “A heroic attempt. Stupid, yes, but heroic. I can respect that.”
It was also convenient. He was certain the cops had heard the gunshots. The young man wasn’t dead, but he’d die pretty soon without medical attention. The authorities would be getting desperate.
The gunman looked at the other four. The young woman was wracked with hysterical sobs, so he fixated instead on the single mother. She was barely five-foot-two and vulnerable-looking.
He grabbed her by the upper arm and pointed his pistol at her face. Her jaw fell open and she tried to say something, but all that came out was a wordless gasp.
Her son gasped, “No!” but was frozen in place, too frightened to try anything.
Exactly the sort of drone who was better off dead.
Deke pulled his new primary bargaining chip toward the window. “Okay, then. Come along and cooperate. They always hate to see a woman get hurt. March thousands of us off every year. Bothers them less when it’s a man. Why do you think that is?”
She was making a gurgling noise, trying to find words for an answer he didn’t care about when the door from the rear of the building was blasted off its hinges.
Everyone screamed except Deke. He pivoted smoothly, arm swinging to aim. It was impressive, really, that the SWAT team had managed to sneak in so quickly without him noticing. He appreciated that in an opponent, but it changed the game.
A second later, before he could so much as make out the first target, the flying door struck him in the face.
He grunted as he staggered back. The door had lost most of its velocity, but there was still enough to flatten his nose and cause a temporary brownout of neural function in his brain as it rattled in his skull.
Keep moving. He always kept moving. Blindly, he raised his right arm and fired three shots from his pistol.
The hostages shouted in terror as a dark shape streaked into the room. Deke heard the windows crack all over the third floor as canisters of tear gas were shot into the building. The police had finally made their move.
But when Deke managed to focus at last, he saw that the person who’d charged him was neither SWAT nor a rank-and-file cop.
Kera commanded her mind into a state of absolute focus, caring about nothing in the universe except reaching the man before he could aim his pistol and fire accurately. The flying door had messed him up pretty badly, and with her greater-than-human speed, she was almost on top of him. But his eyes were turning toward her, and his gun hand was coming up again.
Trained, she remembered. He knew what he was doing with his weapon, and pain wasn’t going to slow him down as much as it would someone else.
She had to move now. Her left hand chopped the man’s right wrist, knocking the weapon aside, though he retained his grip on it. Then she head-butted him with her helmet, aiming for his damaged nose. He let out a strangled cry of pain but clawed her neck with his left hand while kicking with his right foot, which caught her in the stomach.
Kera let out a grunt of pain and doubled over. The moment’s delay gave the man enough time to fix his eyes on her despite the blood streaming from his nose and forehead and raise his pistol once more.
“No!” Kera cried and dashed straight at him, a mixture of terror and rage surging through her veins. Channeling the extra speed and strength she’d summoned just seconds before, she landed a flying side-kick on the gunman’s chest.
He flew straight back, his feverish eyes staring at her, and crashed through the wall-sized window. Man, wood, and shattering glass flew into the air and plunged toward the earth three stories below, then there was a sickening thud, all too loud even without her enhanced hearing.
Kera didn’t need to look out to see what had happened.
The police didn’t miss a beat. Distantly, she could hear shouting. “That was him! Move in! Extinguish the fire!”
Help was on the way. She turned to look at the group of people behind her, examining the four people who’d huddled into the corner.
“Okay. Is everyone...” Her voice trailed off as she spotted the fifth person lying in a bloody heap on the floor. “Fuck! Is he, uh, alive?”
A young woman, seemingly his girlfriend, had rushed over to the wounded man, who groaned. Not dead, clearly, but he’d been shot in the torso and the leg, and he’d lost a lot of blood.
Kera threw a generalized healing spell at him—lower-middle powered, not enough to reverse the damage, but it ought to stabilize his condition. Doing more than that in a hurry would risk debilitating her as well as take time she could not afford.
Outside, the LAFD truck had advanced and white spray engulfed the building’s lower reaches, bringing the fire under control. At the same time, the SWAT team began storming the condos.
Kera had a minute at the most. Her mind ran through its limited options.
Forget spell. A weak one. These people need to tell the cops what happened, but I can’t have them spilling too much about me.
She recalled the incantation, whispered it, and waved her hands over the five huddled figures, channeling the minimum amount of divine energy it would take to accomplish much of anything.
The hostages were so flustered that not much change was visible, but the young boy who’d been staring at her blinked and shook his head. Meanwhile, the wounded man had been looking at his girlfriend, but his head sagged, and he stared at Kera instead.
Okay, next order of business. The footsteps of the SWAT unit pounded closer to them. Kera needed to get the hell out of here. Was her “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” spell still active? It was hard to judge how much time had passed.
But there was no time left.
Kera ran farther out of the lobby and into the hall, where a cloud of tear gas had risen. She held her breath, gave thanks for her helmet, and jumped out through the window the canister had shattered.
She sailed toward the roof of a nearby one-story building, coughing. She wanted desperately to remove her helmet and rub her eyes, but she had to focus on landing safely and then getting as far from here as possible.
With a concentrated effort, Kera slowed her course, drifting gently onto the roof and assessing the situation around her. The police and firefighters were focused on the condo, aside from a couple who were checking the fallen body of the terrorist.
There was also a pair of individuals standing just under Kera’s position who hadn’t noticed her and weren’t officials. Journalists, maybe.
She called to them, “It was only one guy. He’s the one who fell. It’s safe to go in. Tell the cops and paramedics to focus on helping the people inside. One of them was shot in the stomach and the leg.”
The two faces, a man’s and a woman’s, looked up at her in slack-jawed surprise. Then Kera ran and jumped into the shadows in the other direction. Behind her, she could hear the reporters shouting, “It’s over, but there’s a man down! Who’s in charge of the medical part of this operation?”
With the commotion focused elsewhere, Kera was able to loop back around to where she’d parked Zee. None of the law enforcement officers saw her, though another news van came dangerously close as it zipped toward the half-destroyed building.
She mounted the bike, allowed herself several deep, shuddering breaths, and then burned rubber.
Once in the clear, she put on the gas and drove, eyes stinging as much from tears as leftover tear gas.
She deliberately detoured to the north and west, taking a haphazard route via side streets, doubling back a couple times, and ending up nearly in Hollywood before looping back east and approaching her warehouse from the north, the way she would when returning from work. That way, if anyone happened to notice her, they’d see she was coming from the opposite direction from where the hostage situation had taken place.
Chapter Twenty
Twice, Kera approached her home and circled away again. She wasn’t ready to rest yet. The night’s events had only accentuated the dilemma. How could she keep doing things
like this night after night?
But how could she walk away, now that she knew what was going on in the shadows?
By the time her ride was over, the darkness was spent, and dawn’s mixture of ashen and rosy light was rising over the horizon. It had been a long time since Kera had seen the city at this time of day. She was a night owl, but she didn’t generally stay up all night.
As she pulled up to her warehouse, she saw a box on the ground by the door. It had been tucked into a shadowed nook so as not to be obvious from the street, but she had started looking around with a keen appreciation for anything that was out of place, and her eyes were drawn to it at once.
Leaving it for the time being, Kera pulled open the front door, parked Zee, closed it behind her, and took off her helmet before going to the side entrance to retrieve the package. She moved cautiously at first, but as she knelt to peer at it, she saw a note on the side.
Kera, please eat this. Healthy stuff, good for you, but also high calorie and high fat. Mr. Kim.
She smiled at the handwriting. Who else? Not only was it kind of him to give her even more food, but it also gave her something to focus on besides the events of the night, and she desperately needed that right now.
She was surprised at first by the weight of the package, then realized she was probably suffering the aftereffects of losing the strength spell, which made everything seem heavier in comparison as she grew steadily weaker.
She brought it in, closed the door behind her with one foot, set it on the table in the kitchen, and opened the top. Within were four or five dark greenish-black ovoid fruits and a couple of plastic baggies filled with nuts. She inspected them.
“Avocados and macadamias. Nice.” He was right about both the healthfulness of the fruits and the caloric density. She put the avocados in the fridge and headed to her bedroom area to change.
Unfortunately, as she peeled off her clothes, she saw in dismay that she’d lost any progress she might have made on gaining weight. Her ribs were much more prominent than they had been the day before.
“What was I supposed to do?” she whispered to herself. “I couldn’t not help them.”
A hostage situation, after all, was out of the ordinary. She couldn’t have lived with herself if she’d let the hostages die. The thing was, in a city the size of Los Angeles, there would always be another emergency, and if she helped with all of them—
She couldn’t think about this now. She returned to her kitchen, tore open one of the bags of macadamias, and started munching on them as she went through her cupboards and fridge and wracked her brain for a recipe. When her tired brain proved unwilling or unable to come up with anything, a quick search on her phone did the trick.
“Six-ingredient guacamole,” she murmured. “Let’s see… Avocado, check. Lime, check. Salt, check. Garlic…supposed to be fresh, but we’ll say powder is good enough. Red onion, nope. Cilantro, also nope. Okay, four-ingredient guacamole, it is.”
To accompany her as she set to work coring and mashing the avocados, Kera picked up her remote control and clicked on the TV, hoping the news had already put together a story on the night’s events.
The screen flickered to life, and the newscasters’ voices signed off for a commercial break.
“Damn,” Kera muttered. “Nice goddamn timing.” She focused on pulverizing the avocados while the ads played. The news returned as she was adding the lime juice.
Fortunately, she hadn’t missed the program’s most pertinent story.
“Last night,” one of the talking heads began, “downtown LA was rocked by two bombings and a homicide, after which a hostage situation developed when the bomber invaded a new housing complex...”
Kera took a deep breath. The reality of what she’d done and the level of violence involved hadn’t fully sunk in, and though she felt she’d done the right thing, she realized now that a part of her dreaded hearing about it from a third party.
After living the violence and panic of muggings, car crashes, and more, it was surprisingly jarring to hear the events stripped down and presented without much emotion.
The majority of the information the news channel had received came from the two reporters who’d “saved” the young man who had been shot. He had lived, and Kera closed her eyes for a moment in thanks.
On the downside, though, he remembered more than he should have. He recalled a person in a black motorcycle helmet hovering over him and seeing his reflection in the visor.
And he claimed to have seen a person in black flying through the air away from the building. Another reporter who’d been at the scene hastened to say that according to one of the paramedics, the man had probably lost enough blood to be delirious, and his memory was likely to be imperfect.
But other people had corroborated seeing someone in a bike helmet.
“Shit,” Kera muttered. She hadn’t cast the spell of forgetting with enough energy, or perhaps their intense fear and the pain of the man with the gunshot wounds had interfered with the mental effects of the spell. She couldn’t be sure one way or another.
This was where having a proper teacher would be helpful.
She finished making her guacamole, nodding with satisfaction at how good it looked and smelled, and pulled out a bag of tortilla chips she’d been saving for something like this. She intended to eat the entire bag since it would probably take that many chips to dispose of the massive amount of guac.
As she sat down, though, the news story wasn’t over. They’d also learned several things about the terrorist.
“The suspect,” the newscaster continued, “has been identified as thirty-one-year-old Deke Anastidis, who was killed at the scene when he plummeted out of the building’s third-story window after struggling with the mysterious rescuer.”
Kera stared at the screen, her face morose. She had doubted that the man had survived his fall, but now she had confirmation. He was dead.
“According to an anonymous source,” the woman on the screen went on, “Anastidis had previously been a non-combat civilian contractor attached to a peacekeeping operation in Syria. In 2016 he returned to the U.S., apparently suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after he and his co-workers were ambushed by insurgents. His doctor has informed us that he began having financial problems recently, as well as complaining about his landlord, and they’d had no choice but to cut off his medications after he was unable to pay several bills. The doctor believes that the effects of withdrawal may have contributed to the mental breakdown that led to his criminal actions.”
Kera stopped eating. Her eyes remained pointed at the TV, but she was no longer hearing what was said, her brain in a muffled haze. The gravity of the whole thing struck her, and she shoved her chair back and buried her face in her hands.
She tried to hold back the flood of tears, but it was useless. The first sob seemed to rip its way out of her chest, and no matter how hard she bit down on her fingers, she could not hold back the rest of the sobs.
“What…what…” She gasped for breath. Her words probably would be indecipherable to anyone listening. “What the hell? What the hell, what the—”
Had she just killed some poor man who went crazy because he couldn’t afford his prescriptions? The tragedy of the whole thing swelled up inside her, and she saw the poor bastard’s face again as he tumbled out of the window. He had been so cold, so calm—and so determined to kill her. He’d been raising his gun. There was already a hostage down and bleeding out. She had no idea what else she could have done…
But right now, that didn’t help.
It took some time for the sobs to die. When they did, she sat breathing quietly for a moment. Then she raised her head and wiped her face, first with her hand, and then with a napkin she’d left there from the last time she’d had takeout.
The talking heads were still speaking. One was asking another if the recent surge of violence nearby might have contributed to the man’s decline in mental health. The other, a psycho
logist brought onto the show as a guest, was grave. It was impossible to say, he explained. Anastidis had made no demands of the police, and there seemed to be no notes or other clues.
Kera frowned and turned the TV down.
Her mind was racing. Two nights ago, she had walked into what was clearly a trap. An attempted mugging wouldn’t have been meant to lure random bystanders into the alley. It seemed like more than a good bet that the trap had been specifically for her. For the person who’d been messing with robberies and carjackings.
Was it a coincidence that after she had taken down almost a dozen gang members on her own, this had happened?
Her hunches, which had not led her wrong yet, told her it wasn’t. Still, it felt too paranoid. There was no sign that Anastidis had been working with anyone else. Violence tended to touch off more violence, an escalating spiral that spun quickly out of control.
She was being crazy, she told herself firmly. Just because all these things had happened to her, it didn’t mean they were related. The man with the Mustang had shown up right before the car crash, but those two events clearly weren’t related. She might have some basis for thinking he was involved with the fake-mugging trap, but the rest of it…
She just couldn’t rid herself of the feeling.
“You attracted attention,” she told herself, shaking her head. “Mr. Kim warned you. Last night of all nights, you should have just come straight here from work and gone to sleep.”
But she knew that if she had, she’d be waking up to the news of the bombing and dead hostages. She would be sitting here crying, not because she felt guilty about killing Anastidis, but because he had taken hostages when she wasn’t around to save them.
As much as she wanted to follow in Mr. Kim’s footsteps, go back to healing and leave the rest to the police, she’d seen firsthand how helpless the police were against things like this. Something was happening and the city was under a type of siege, and she’d found out about her powers just at the right time to help.
How To Be A Badass Witch: Book Two Page 16