Authors: Robert J. Crane
“Is he going to live?” I asked, cutting right to the quick.
She turned her head to look at me, and I saw a woman who didn’t honestly know the answer to the question. “I am not sure.”
That one hit me right where it hurt. My stomach dropped like someone had just hit it and used a sledgehammer to do the job. I leaned against the bottom edge of his bed, felt the pressed wood crumple under my unexpected strength. I sucked in a deep breath like I had to fight to get it back, which I did. It felt a little like I’d been hit in the gut, hard, like I’d dropped out of the sky and landed belly button first on a flagpole. Which I had done, once, when I was still learning to fly. It hurts about as much as you’d expect.
“The next twenty-four hours will be the most crucial,” she said, back to playing the role of the cool doctor and shutting off the fiery Italian lover like she was twisting a valve.
“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
We stood in silence for a while, maybe minutes, maybe hours, it was tough for me to tell. I got lost in a memory, the reminder of how Reed had approached me the first time I’d visited Zack’s grave, after—
Well, after.
“Do you know who did this?” Dr. Perugini asked, still fixed on Reed, standing in the middle of her damned domain, the medical world, and looking as helpless as I was.
“No,” I said, “but I can guess. Eric Simmons. His little friend the Brain. They’re the ones with the grudge—”
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked, and her hand moved like she wanted to touch him, but she held back.
“I think you can guess.”
Her fingers returned uselessly to the base of her throat. “He wouldn’t want that.”
“He wouldn’t want me to catch who’s responsible?” I gave her one of those sidelong glances that they make internet memes out of, my best,
Oh, you’re just an idiot
look.
“He wouldn’t want you to go after them furious,” she said.
I listened to her words, read her movement. “You don’t mind, though, do you?” She tensed only slightly, and I asked a really stupid question that I was sure I already knew the answer to. “This is my fault, isn’t it?”
She tilted her head to look at me as she answered, and she looked … thoughtful. “I don’t think so.”
I blinked in utter surprise. “No?” I’d been ready for her to whirl on me, to start hurling insults and accusations right in my face, to let loose that full head of Dr. Perugini steam that she’d unleashed on more occasions than I could count. I wanted her to do it, to have my brother’s lover fuel my internal fury. I could feel it boiling inside, the guilt and the rage, looking for an outlet, already on the stove. I wanted someone else to stoke the flames, the give me that last push by making me complicit.
“I don’t blame you,” she said finally.
“Why the hell not?” I smacked dry lips together after forcing the question out of my mouth.
“You want to feel bad,” she said, nodding without looking at me. “Wronged. I don’t have it in me to do this thing for you, and he wouldn’t want me to anyway.” Now she looked at me and quivered. “I’m not angry at you. I don’t blame you … I’m too busy being scared for him.”
I staggered back, taking it harder than if she’d struck me, than if she’d grabbed the IV tree and impaled me on the end. I felt so weak, so tired, so out of sorts that the world around me was starting to feel surreal in its wrongness. She watched me stumble back with something akin to concern, maybe the closest to it I’d ever seen from her when aimed at me. “Are you—?”
I didn’t even give her time to finish the question. I took a last look at my brother, burned almost beyond recognition, breathing with the aid of a machine, and I ran from the room. I ignored the agents who asked me if I was all right, paid no attention to security, and stumbled straight to the window at the end of the hall, breaking through the glass and leaping out into the night with my hospital gown flapping behind me, possibly more wounded than if Isabella Perugini had attacked me with everything she had.
By the time I got back to the agency, I was calm enough to stop off at my quarters to change into some clothes, to dump some kibble in a dish for the dog, then fly to the roof of HQ, calm enough not to Kool-Aid-Man my way through the fourth-floor windows. I descended the stairs like a human being, resolving to hold together even though I really didn’t want to adult right now. I wanted to scream like a toddler who just lost a juice box, wanted to go to sleep and wake up a year from now. Or a year before now.
I had many powers, but those weren’t in my set, unfortunately, so instead I went to go see a man about people I could vent my rage on.
The fourth-floor lights were on in a few places, but I could tell pretty much no one was home. It was somewhere near five in the morning, I reckoned, and the entire agency had been in manhunt mode the last few days. Since the manhunt had been resolved hours ago, that meant everyone was crashed out at their homes, probably.
Probably.
I checked his cubicle first, and when I didn’t find him there but saw the computer was still running a compiling program, I knew he was nearby. I floated into the air and did a three-sixty of the entire floor until I found a conference room with its door shut. I shot across the massive open space, blasting about ten thousand pieces of paper into a storm behind me and putting the lie to Director Andrew Phillips’s ‘paperless office’ policy.
I similarly managed not to burst through the door of the conference room, or the wall, but only by using some of that vanishingly small amount of restraint I carried with me almost nowhere. I opened the door without concern for its occupant, and I was standing over him before he had a chance to realize there was a presence in the room and that it was a human being inches from his nose. He’d set his thick-framed glasses on the table. I snatched them up and jammed them onto his face so I wouldn’t have to wait through that step.
His eyelids fluttered, slightly exaggerated by the thickness of his lenses, the fluorescent lights from outside spilling into the conference room. His dark hair was flattened in the back from leaning against the chair he was sleeping in. When J.J. did finally open his eyes—and keep them open this time—it didn’t take more than a couple flutters for him to realize that shit just got real.
“Oh, f—” he said as he tried to sit up abruptly. It was a doomed maneuver, and he started to topple back in his chair. I, however, was prepared for this and lifted him by his lapels into the air with me as the chair came crashing down on the conference room floor. It had a five-point base, supposedly making it harder to overturn in the name of idiot-proofing. Clearly, the designers had never met idiots of the sort I had to deal with.
I carried him by his lapels through the air as he struggled instinctively against my mother-bird grip on him. “What are you doing?” he managed to cry out by the time I was halfway back to his cubicle.
“I need you to work,” I said, drifting down and dropping him into his own chair.
He hit gracelessly, spinning it halfway around thanks to his flailing limbs, nearly overturning this one as well.
You had one job, J.J.
“Have you thought about just asking—like a normal person would?!”
“Do I strike you as a normal person?” I let gravity reassert its dominion over me and thumped to the ground feet-first, landing like a badass.
“I hope you’re not going to hit me at all,” he said, fiddling with his glasses.
I looked him straight in the eye. “Let’s skip the threats. The explosion.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking sort of like he was returning to business mode, though giving me a wary look. “Figured you’d be in about that. Let me tell you, that going off outside the window was actually a little more gentle than what you just did. Just for future reference.”
“Information,” I said.
“Manners,” he replied, and I got right up in his face, causing him to squirm. “I can see you’re … uh … strained at the moment, and not of the ‘re’ variety, so why don’t I just …” He tapped on his keyboard while turning to give me a close-up view of his cheek. I just kept right there, like I was going to Hannibal Lecter him and take a bite if he pissed me off. “Here we go.”
I pulled back enough to get the stink of cat out of my nostrils and so I could see his monitor. “What the hell is this?”
“These are email accounts tied to IP addresses of your much-vaunted ‘Brain’ villain,” J.J. said, apparently deciding to wisely forgo any additional unamusing witticisms in favor of extending his life expectancy. “I caught them last episode, while we were dealing with Anselmo and Bryant Cunningham. They’ve been waging a PR war against you, tipping off reporters to all sorts of stuff that’s … well—”
“They’ve been messing with my public image,” I said, adding that fuel to the fire that was burning not-so-deep inside of me. “She’s been upping the speed on the treadmill as I try to outrun these media shitstorms.”
“Bad analogy,” he said, shaking his head, “there’s not a treadmill out there that you couldn’t outrun ’til it smoked—” He caught the look on my face and stopped. “Yes. Right. So … these are the Brain’s emails … and this is what went out early this morning, while I was sleeping.”
He punched a key and brought up a wall of text, six emails in a chain with replies and everything. I blinked as I scanned, and my blood grew colder and colder. “Who the hell is the recipient?”
J.J. smacked his lips together. “Local assassin, near as I can tell. He doesn’t have a file with Homeland Security or the FBI, which means—”
“He’s good,” I said, feeling that chill settle over my bones as I kept reading. “How do I find him?”
“His name’s Michael Shafer, and he communicates over a VPN that’s technically untraceable—” J.J. froze mid-sentence, looking at me like I was going to smack him. “You know what? I don’t want to waste your time with the technicals—”
“Good call.”
“Anyway, I already found him.” He tapped the keyboard a few times and an address popped up along with a Google map. “Sending to your phone.”
I heard a chirrup and pulled out my phone to find the map already there. I stared at it for only a second, the thought I had not really a thought, just a generalized urge to head straight for my enemy. “Okay,” I said and waited for him to say something—a wiseass comment, a word of caution, anything. He didn’t, he just sat there looking down, like his lap was the most interesting thing in the world. So … like any other man, really.
With nothing and no one to stop me, I turned and flew back to the stairwell, erupting out of the roof door and into the night.
I went cannonballing into a house right on the shores of Lake Minnetonka without worrying about how much I was probably lowering the property values just by being there. I burst through a full plate-glass window, not for the first time that night, using Wolfe to heal the massive lacerations I suffered before I bled all over the place. Shards of glass landed all over the floor and I startled the shit out of the guy who had been walking across the far side of the luxuriously appointed living room with a big ol’ snifter of brandy in his hand, a spotted maroon bathrobe knotted around his waist.
Everything about this guy screamed EXPENSIVE, including the diamond-crusted ring on his index finger, his carefully sculpted grey-tinged hair, parted on the side and sweeping back, and his fuzzy slippers. Wool or something, I think. They looked comfy.
“Hi,” I said, not in a friendly way, hovering rather ominously over his lushly appointed cream-colored couch. He didn’t even have a TV in this room, just a bar cabinet, tons of wood shelving with books, and furniture that looked like it didn’t come cheap. All that and a full view of Lake Minnetonka by moonlight. I glanced down and saw a Persian rug that probably cost more than I made in a year.
“Good God,” he said, ducking his head and raising his hands, apparently a little surprised that I’d just burst into his living room while he was having his nightcap.
“Not quite,” I said. His eyes were fixed on mine, and his mouth was only slightly agape. “God forgives, I’m told. Me? Not so much.” I stole another glance around the room, feeling like I needed slightly more from him before I commenced to pounding him into sausage meat. Probably very luxurious sausage meat, but still. “So … crime pays, huh?”
“Very well, actually,” he said, his brain apparently not getting the memo that when you’re in over your head, you should shut your mouth. Instead, he took a couple steps toward his liquor cabinet and opened a bottle on the top, taking his time, pouring another for himself. I suspected he needed it after the start I’d just given him. He pointed to a second snifter and shrugged when he caught the look on my face. “How about government service? Is it as bad as everything I’ve heard?”
Quick on his feet, back to getting a drink and having a casual conversation about the financial benefits of criminality seconds after the world’s premiere superheroine burst through his window.
Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.
I swooped down to get a grip on him so I could take him on a quick night flight/interrogation high up in the air before dropping him like Sokovia on an unsuspecting world. To my surprise, he threw the brandy in my face and dodged left fast enough that I actually had to pause to counter.
And that brandy? It must have been expensive, because it
burned
. All the way down.
It wasn’t a little burn, either, it was the kind that made you blind, made your skin smoke. The smell of alcohol was absent, a strong chemical smell heavy in my nose instead. “I wish you hadn’t come here,” he said, sounding regretful.
I turned on the Gavrikov and Wolfe all at once, felt the burning on my skin halt even as I burst into flames. “You’re saying this now, before I even have a chance to really wreck your leather-bound books and eliminate the smell of rich mahogany from your life. Let’s see how you feel after I burn this motha to the—”
Whatever he threw on me ignited with a lot more gusto than I’d expected, propelling me backward through a wall and causing me to flip from the force of the explosion. Harsh chemical flame and dust poured into my nasal passages as I crashed through drywall and wood, my body pinwheeling as I spun through the air, inadvertently lighting flame to everything I touched until I came down, hard, and the world went dark around me.