Authors: Robert J. Crane
“Maybe we should keep our eye on the prize,” Eric Simmons said. Ma watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had a hand over his mouth, tentative-like. She hadn’t known him for but a few months, but she’d seen enough to know the game he was running on Cassidy. She was sure Simmons would defend his little girlfriend; he knew he’d have to in order to keep the girl from having one of her little fits. Ma had spied a couple cracks in that relationship and knew a little leverage would pop it apart easily, but for now, she let him do his thing, keep his ass out of that particular fire. “The drug we arranged … that was supposed to kill Sienna. Painfully. So …”
“So why’s she popping her not-so-pretty face out of a car after sucking out all the fire like she just went down on a—” That was Denise, and Ma cuffed her right across the back of the head, stopping her before she could finish her dirty, profane thought. “Owww.” Denise rubbed the spot on her crown where Ma had got her, looking up resentfully.
“That plan clearly didn’t work,” Ma said, trying to move the discussion along.
“Neither did sending Anselmo after Reed Treston,” Cassidy said, looking Ma in the eyes only for a second. If there was one thing that drove Ma nuts about that girl, it was that she couldn’t even look a body in the eye for a few seconds. Just slyly looked at you and then looked away, like it was some sort of physical imposition to try and make eye contact. Ma judged her some sort of coward for that, maybe like a rodent. A wet one at that, one that climbed out of the nearest toilet and scampered around the house, constantly underfoot.
“I did that to get rid of Anselmo,” Ma said, shrugging. “I make no bones about it. The man was trouble, and I didn’t want him in my house. He didn’t want to be here, so it seemed like a natural fit to set him loose on the Treston boy.”
“Anselmo was really useful,” Simmons said, still hiding his disappointment behind the hand in front of his mouth. Someone had told Ma once that people who spoke from behind their hand were liars. Looking at Simmons, she believed it. What amazed her was that Cassidy bought her boyfriend’s lies hook, line and sinker, like a widemouth bass on a good lure. She had all the power of technology at her fingertips, and she never once used it to expose herself to the obvious truths sitting right in front of her. The girl was brilliant, too, easily the book-smartest person Ma had ever run across. But she lacked the common sense God gave a garden snake, which was why Eric Simmons had her wrapped around his thin, earth-shaking, sissy-manicured little fingers.
“He was a bomb ready to go off any time,” Ma said with some force, yanking that carpet out from under Simmons without worrying about it giving him a burn on his soft, probably-lotioned face. There was a flash of anger in Simmons’s eyes, but he held it back. He didn’t like it here; that was obvious to anyone, but by now Ma knew that he specifically didn’t like her or any of her clan, either. The feeling was more or less mutual, too, and that city-slickin’ son of a bitch could go back to LA or New York or wherever the hell he wanted to be for all she cared.
After she was done using him, anyway.
“We’re still down a team member,” Simmons said, recovering. “And now we’ve got no plan.”
“Plus,” Denise said, making that face she always did that turned her ugly as sin, “now Sienna Nealon’s gonna be mad as hell when she wakes up, because we done killed her brother—”
“He’s still alive,” Cassidy said, a little meekly, drawing every eye in the room.
Of course she didn’t mention this before she started showing us the video of her little “triumph.”
“I was thinking about—”
“Don’t,” Ma said calmly. “Don’t lose focus on what’s important here, and it ain’t her stupid brother. That was Anselmo’s grudge, not ours. I got no grievance with that boy.”
“Odds are good he’s gonna have one with us, now,” Junior said, looking a little pensive as the security camera footage looped on the widescreen again. He was watching it closer than a football game. He cringed when the car blew up, mouth a jagged line of genuine pain, and she knew it wasn’t because of what happened to the people inside.
“He’s in the hospital,” Cassidy said. “All it would take is a dose of poison—”
“Will you just lay off it already?” Ma turned her eyes on the girl. “Don’t we have a big enough problem to deal with already? Is your head so far up your own damned disk drive you don’t see what’s coming?”
Cassidy looked chastened, blinking away from Ma’s hard gaze. “No one uses disk drives anymore,” she said sulkily.
Ma ignored her. “Have you seen what happens when Sienna Nealon gets mad? When she goes whole hog on someone she’s pissed off at?”
“She doesn’t have a clue who we are,” Cassidy said, blushing a little. She looked at Ma for almost a second before she blinked away, but Ma could see her digging in again. “She doesn’t know where we are—”
“You think that’ll stop her?” Ma asked, folding her big forearms one over the other. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news for you, but that girl ain’t got an ounce of quit, and when her back’s up, she ain’t gonna stop ’til she’s done.” She glanced at Junior and Denise. “We know that by hard experience.”
Cassidy blinked, processing it all. “Because of your son, you mean.”
Ma didn’t look away from her. She knew full well that the girl didn’t mean anything by it; she just didn’t feel on the same level as a normal human being. It was all detached to her, like a garage way far from the house, maybe on an adjacent plot of land. “Because of that, yeah. She killed him, him and the others that she thought wronged her—”
“She stalked ’em like a deer in gun season,” Junior threw in, looking a little pissy.
“Drowned him,” Denise said, wearing a little fury of her own on her sleeve. “Cold-hearted bitch.”
“This was supposed to be a quiet thing,” Ma said. “We weren’t supposed to drag family into it because that’s the fastest way to a feud. It was supposed to be silent—poisoning, a bullet in the night, something fast, over. Now you got us in on bombs and explosions—the law’s gonna get involved, no way around that now, and who knows where it’s going to lead? Well, if it comes to our door, I can tell you right now, I—ain’t—gonna—be—happy.” She said the last with the hardest edge of all, and she knew how to do it. She’d raised Claude, after all, and then Junior and Denise after, and they may have been a rowdy, mischievous bunch, but they knew not to raise her hackles.
Cassidy looked appropriately cowed. “I’m sorry,” she said, muffled. Her neckline was all red like someone had slapped the skin there hard.
“Well, what are we gonna do now?” Ma asked, ready to move on. She didn’t forgive and forget, she just forgave. Didn’t do any good to keep turning it over again and again when it was plain the girl just didn’t know squat about people. Brilliant mind, probably could get a PhD in nuclear physics in a couple of months, but she just lacked where it counted. She’d probably starve to death in the middle of a Wal-Mart.
“I can work our press contacts,” Cassidy said, raising her eyes again. “Raise the heat level, get them fishing on this story, make it … uncomfortable for her to go back to work.”
“She’s still suspended, ain’t she?” Junior asked, looking around. “Because of that last paparazzi we put on her?”
“I think it’s coming time to cut the ties,” Ma said. “I’m getting worried enough that her dying painfully ain’t as important to me as her just being dead at this point.” She worked at a piece of corn stuck in her teeth. “How about we get on that?”
“How do you want to do it?” Denise asked, and she sounded almost hungry.
“Like putting an animal out of its misery,” Ma said, and she caught a flash of surprise from Simmons. He was such a weak-titted little princess. “No warning, no time to scream or even realize what’s coming … just done.” She worked that kernel loose and spit it out. She’d vacuum it up later. “Let’s just be done with her already before this gets any more out of hand.”
Sienna
I woke up screaming, my back wet from sweat or something else, my hand finding cold steel on either side of me in the form of bed railings. I sat up, a thin white sheet tangled around me as I stared into the dim light of the infirmary. A light clicked on and I had to shut my eyes quickly in order to keep it from overwhelming me.
“Whoa, there,” came the calm voice of Dr. Quinton Zollers. I opened my eyes to see him staring down at me, warm eyes and mocha skin, and for once it did little to soothe me. He brushed my arm with a careful hand, and even the flesh-to-flesh contact did nothing to calm me down.
“Chill, Sienna,” Scott Byerly said, appearing opposite Zollers. His face was redder than usual, cheeks all flushed like he’d been on a long run, or just gotten back from the gym. His normally curly hair hung sweaty, clumped, like he’d just stepped out of the shower.
“We’re here,” Ariadne Fraser said from the end of the bed, stepping into view as I sat there, bolt upright, every muscle tense enough to jump out of my own skin. The air carried a scorched smell mixed with wetness, and I realized that the mattress upon which I was laying had a more than small moisture problem.
“Well, not all of us are,” Augustus Coleman said from somewhere over Ariadne’s shoulder. I angled to try and see him, his face obscured by Dr. Zoller’s body, and the doc moved aside to oblige me, giving a glimpse of a dark-skinned young man flat on his back in a cervical collar, IV resting at his side. His eyes blinked slowly, exaggerated, and I knew he was still drugged from the night before. Everyone turned their head to look at him, and I caught the accusation from Scott and Ariadne. “What? We gonna to lie to her now?”
“Don’t lie,” I said, voice low and throaty, yet not remotely sexy. More like I was out of breath, which I was. I coughed and tasted the acrid aroma of the smoke I’d inhaled while breathing in the fire. “Not now.” I turned my head to look at Dr. Zollers. “Where’s Reed?”
I saw the hesitation before he answered. “He’s in Methodist Hospital.”
I pulled my arm away from him. “I need to go.”
“Sienna,” Scott said, leaning over me, “you were just in a car that was blown up underneath you—”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I said, looking to see if there were any IVs I needed to rip out before I got up. There weren’t, not a hint of them, and I realized the other presence that was missing from the room—Dr. Isabella Perugini. There was no sign of her dark hair and even darker countenance, of her white lab coat trolling its way through the wrecked and sodden infirmary with a black cloud over her head. I knew in an instant where she was, where she had to be given the circumstances.
“Sienna—” Ariadne started.
“Not now,” I said and slid down the wet mattress. I heard water rushing out of it under my weight as I moved, a reminder of what had happened in this infirmary only hours earlier. I skirted the edge of the bed railing and Zollers did not move to stop me. He wouldn’t have been quick enough to in any case, but from the way I saw him standing there, silent, reserved, I knew he’d opted to pick his battles and that this wasn’t one he was prepared to fight.
“You can’t just run off—” Ariadne said.
“I won’t.” I slid out of bed, looking down at the hospital gown that was draped over me in lieu of my burned clothes. I didn’t even care at this point, not even a little.
“Bad wording, Ariadne,” Augustus said, continuing his role as drug-addled comic relief. “Now watch her fl—”
Gavrikov
, I thought, projecting the words deep inside. It was second nature by now, and Aleksandr Gavrikov, probably sensing that I was in NO MOOD, meekly complied. Gravity cut out beneath me and my feet lifted off the ground. I floated a foot in the air for a moment and then took control, leaving all their protestations behind as I flew out of the infirmary, my hospital gown flapping behind me, threatening to rip off from the wind shear as I blew out of the doors of headquarters and past the scorched wreckage of the Dodge Challenger parked just outside.
I pushed into my brother’s hospital room past the three security guards and eight of our own agents posted in the hall, ignoring their doubtful expressions. No one said anything, presumably because the look on my face and my attire told them everything they needed to know about how I’d take any attempt to slow me down. After all, it wasn’t much of a secret among our own people that only a few hours ago I’d been a human bomb about to go off.
The hospital room was small, with dull beige walls and aged tile floors like every other hospital I’d ever been in. The smell was antiseptic, and the sound of a respirator hissed in the quiet night under the sound of the beeping heartbeat monitor.
Dr. Isabella Perugini looked over her shoulder at me, her long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail that made her look somehow more severe. She wore no makeup, not that she needed much of it to begin with, but the lack of it left her looking a little faded—unless it was the stress that had done that. Her eyes didn’t look puffy at all, just tired, thinly lidded, and she only looked at me for a second before she turned back to the bed, one hand resting at the base of her neck and the other folded around her midsection.
I eased up to the edge of the bed and got a good first look at my brother. His skin was still charred and broiled, blistered in some places and peeling in others. There were a few spots where angry red skin hinted at only first-degree burns. They were few and far between, however. “Hey,” I mumbled as I stood there at her side.
She didn’t look at me. “You are all right, then.” She said it, didn’t ask, because after being my doctor for oh-so-many years, she just knew.
“I am,” I said, regardless of the fact that we were both fully aware of my near-invincibility. I moved on from the comfortable to the question neither of us wanted to ask. “How’s he doing?”
“Burns over ninety-nine percent of his body,” she said, as tonelessly as if she were delivering news about a patient she barely knew, not a man she’d been sleeping with for over three years.
“But he’ll heal,” I said, taking a breath of relief.
“Possibly,” she said, and here I caught the first hint of something wrong. “These were not third-degree burns … they stretched deep beneath the epidermis into the subcutaneous layer.” She swallowed visibly, and her hand clutched tighter at her throat, as though she were choking on the words she was trying to get out. “There are … complications. Inhalation—”