Authors: Kelly Meding
“Who’s the Overseer?” Noah asked.
Deuce’s face went slack, her surprise quickly replaced by amusement. “I forgot. You’ve been kept sheltered in that lab for so long you don’t know anything Dr. Kinsey didn’t teach you. Let me tell you, dear brother, we may be the only Hybrid Changelings to have survived, but there are dozens of other Recombinants out there.”
She glared at me. “Not everyone was satisfied by the return of the Metas’ powers. Some people still need us.”
“Where’s Queen?” King asked, growling his way into the conversation.
“With your brothers and Dr. Kinsey.” She reached into her right ear and produced a tiny mike, which she displayed
briefly before tucking it back in. “We’ve been in constant contact. We’re smarter than you think. We received proper training.”
We couldn’t keep bantering like this. As much as I appreciated the big “villain revelation speech,” I had to check on Ethan. Get Renee out of there. Warn Gage. Find Simon. A whole host of things impeded by Deuce’s need to explain things. I had to throw her off-guard.
“Training in what?” I asked. “Patricide and long-windedness?”
Her mouth quirked. Was she laughing at me? “Hardly, girl. Abram Kinsey is no more a father to me than he is to them. He’s a genetic-material donor, just like our mother was. She said so herself when we met.”
“Mother?” Noah said. “You know who she is?”
Deuce arched her eyebrows. “You don’t? You still haven’t pieced this together?”
“Why don’t you explain it to me?”
Too much talking. I latched onto the nearest heat source—which happened to be Noah—and tried something new. I simultaneously pulled heat from him, combined it with the power I’d already drawn from the air, and pushed it outward in a neat little package. Right at Deuce.
She manipulated her ball of dirt, tossing it at me the moment my heat wave smacked her to the ground. I ducked and let go of Noah at the same time. The corner of the dirt ball clipped my hip and sent me spinning. I hit the floor hard on my left side, smacking the air out of my lungs.
Deuce shrieked, a sound full of rage and disgust. Beneath
me the ground rumbled furiously. I rolled to the other side in time to see a cloud of dirt sailing toward me like buckshot. I closed my eyes, no power left to propel it away. I heard it hit, a thousand pops of air, but felt nothing.
Hazarding one eye open, I saw Noah. He was crouched in front of me, skin pale and lips trembling from the sudden rush of cold I’d caused. His hands were raised in front of him. He’d stopped the dirt shot, using his own hybrid power against his sister’s.
“How can you keep protecting her?” Deuce asked, voice shrill. Beyond furious. “Don’t you know what she is?”
“She’s mine,” Noah replied. Dark, dangerous. An edge I’d never seen before.
I’m—what?
I peeked past Noah’s foot and spotted Deuce on her knees by the far wall. Blood dripped from her mouth. She didn’t look away from Noah. I took a glance behind me. King was gone. Uh-oh.
Please, God, let him be calling for help or tending to Ethan. Please, please, please.
“What do you think I am?” I asked Deuce, pulling my knees up and rolling into a kneeling position next to Noah. Confident he could shield us from another dirt attack. I’d never met someone who could manipulate the very earth itself.
“A mistake,” Deuce said.
I blanched, confused—horribly, utterly confused.
She sensed my befuddlement and regarded me silently for half a minute. “You really don’t know?”
“Know what?” I swallowed against a sudden, consuming urge to cry. I felt helpless under her scrutiny, unable to make sense of her words or insinuations.
She opened her mouth to respond, but stopped, her attention stolen by a new sound. Approaching thunder, growing louder and louder. It was not natural thunder. The sky outside was blue, the sun shining bright. Something else, louder still, like a freight train bearing down on our position.
“Oh, hell,” Noah said. He tackled me to the floor.
The train tore into the room, gusting wind knocking the door from its hinges with a crash. The dark blur sped past us and smashed head-on into Deuce, propelling her into the wall, through the cement and brick with a sound like a gunshot. She left a gaping, human-size hole.
Human.
He can run upward of eighty miles an hour given an open space and lots of room.
“Was that King?” I asked, nudging Noah off. He obliged and offered me a hand up. I coughed, waving away a cloud of dust that wafted into the room on a warm breeze.
“Yeah.” He bolted toward the hole in the wall.
I followed him out into the sweltering afternoon. King sat hunched over on his knees a few dozen yards ahead, a debris trail following him across the untended lawn. Deuce was sprawled on the ground in front of him, bloody and still. I bolted to the left, circling the building to the side where Ethan had come out.
He lay on his back in a sea of broken glass, blood oozing from a dozen small cuts and gashes on his face, hands, and
chest. His shoes had been nearly destroyed by the blast, and the legs of his jeans were shredded. Dirty, torn flesh peeked through the flaps of denim. His chest rose and fell evenly, and his eyes were open, staring blankly at the sky.
“Ethan?” I crouched next to him, mindful of the glass. “Ethan?”
He angled his head just a bit to look me in the eye. “That . . . hurt.”
The simple statement flooded me with relief. “Can you move?”
“Only if I have to.”
“I think you have to, pal, we need to get the hell out of Dodge. That sonic boom is going to make people suspicious, if they weren’t already.”
“The girl?”
Over my shoulder, Noah and King were kneeling by Deuce. Hand gestures punctuated a heated argument. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, but I had to give King credit for his ingenious solution to our standoff—even if it stopped Deuce from answering my question. Something about me bothered her, and it bothered her enough to make her order my assassination.
“Out of the game for now,” I replied. “But we have her and that’s leverage.”
“Against whom?”
“Queen, I guess. Come on, Windy, you’ve taken worse than this.”
He sat up, and with a little help, stood. I slipped one arm around his waist, taking as much of his weight as I could
manage. My bruised hip protested. He winced with each limping step forward, every muscle taut and straining. Noah met us halfway, his face pinched and pale.
“She’s unconscious,” he said. “I don’t know for how long. What do we do now?”
“We change the rules,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we have something they want now.” I pointed to Deuce. “So he, she, or it doesn’t get to make the demands anymore. We have leverage to make a few of our own.”
“What do you have in mind?” Ethan asked.
I traded off with Noah, who took my place supporting Ethan, and then I strode over to Deuce. King watched me, curious and silent. I crouched down and plucked the mike from her ear. It didn’t appear to be damaged. “I hope you’re listening, Queen,” I said, putting the right amount of snarling indignation into my voice. “Because if you are, you know we’ve got your sister. She’s alive, and if you want her to stay that way, you’ve got five minutes to call King’s phone.”
The phone rang ten seconds later. King fished it out of his pocket, checked the display, and then nodded.
Showtime. He pressed Speaker.
“How dare you—”
“Shut up,” I said, interrupting the angry female voice. “You aren’t in control anymore, Queen.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“How do you know? You’ve attacked my friends,
my
family. What makes you think I won’t hurt Deuce to get to you?
Or that I won’t kill her if you let anything happen to Jimmy or Dr. Kinsey?”
Something in my voice must have convinced her: “I guess I don’t. I know what you’re capable of, Ember, even if you don’t. That’s why you were tagged as a threat.”
Tagged? It made me sound like a prize cow.
“What do you want?” Queen demanded.
“I want Cipher out of jail right now, all charges dropped. You’ve been masquerading as Detective Forney for a while, so I know you can do it, and do it within the hour.”
Silence. I looked over my shoulder at Noah. He half-shrugged. My first real bluff worked, however, because Queen said, “Fine. And?”
“Confirmation that Dr. Kinsey has been delivered to a hospital for proper care, same time frame as Cipher’s release.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“A neutral meeting place where we can make the swap,” I said, my confidence growing. “Your sister for Jimmy and Aaron.”
“Now, that’s hardly fair. One person for two isn’t a good deal, and I’m still annoyed at Noah for lying to me about you being shot. I’m willing to trade Jimmy and Aaron for both Deuce and you, Dahlia.”
“No,” Noah said. I flashed him a withering glare, but he ignored me.
“What’s wrong, dear brother?” Queen asked, her voice singsong and full of disdain. “Still not willing to give her up to keep your family safe? I don’t know how many more times
I have to taser Aaron to make you understand that killing Dahlia Perkins was never optional.”
I shivered and a bitter taste invaded my mouth. Over the phone line, I heard footsteps shuffling. Someone whimpered, and then began to scream. Noah choked. The faintest buzzing sound filtered into the scream; they silenced together. Heavy breathing followed.
“Want me to do it again?” Queen asked.
“Bitch,” he ground out.
I could hear the smile in her voice when she said, “Do I make my point? Dahlia and Deuce for your family, Ace. You can’t have both.”
“Why?” he asked. “What the hell does Bates or Forney have against her that you’re so adamant about this? What?”
She laughed. Honest to God, amused laughter. “You have no idea what this is about. Rest assured, Alan Bates would have made a good scapegoat, if you’d just stuck to the plan. This whole exercise has been amusing to me, but it’s time to end it. Deuce and I have a life to return to.”
“Don’t count on it,” I said.
More laughter. “Enjoy the next two hours, Dahlia, because this is all going to be done over your dead body. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I’ll call you with a meeting place when my tasks are done.”
The line went dead.
Two hours was plenty of time to . . . do . . . stuff. Figuring a way out of offering myself as a human sacrifice was high on the list. We also had to ensure that Queen and Deuce didn’t disappear once they were back together and the brothers
were safe. With the hell we’d gone through these last few days, we could not risk their escape.
Footsteps shuffled across the grass. A hand reached down and squeezed my shoulder. I looked up, expecting Noah, but found Ethan. Pain and grief swirled in his eyes.
“Did she really kill Marco?” he asked.
Slowly I stood up and clasped both of Ethan’s hands in mine. I wanted to say no, that he was tied up in a closet somewhere and we’d find him soon, alive, maybe unconscious. That he wouldn’t end up a pile of discarded skin once Deuce came to and dispelled him.
My chest ached. Comforting words fled, chased away by grief. “I think so, Ethan.” I hated myself for voicing it, and for making it seem so real. “I think he’s gone.”
He choked. “Just like that?”
I threw my arms around his neck, ignoring the slick heat of blood. He returned the embrace, pressing his cut face into my shoulder. Marco Mendoza was our friend. Teammate. Brother. For a little while, a stranger had walked among us, secure in his body and knowledge, and used him to betray his allies.
“They’ll pay,” I said. For Teresa. For Marco.
For all of us.
T
hree phone calls later, King tossed the trussed-up, still-unconscious Deuce over his shoulder, and we sneaked off the old HQ grounds. Between his burden and Ethan’s pronounced limp—he denied any sort of ankle sprain or break, but his left foot was already swelling—our progress was slow. We managed to cross the street and make it down a block to the somewhat protected courtyard of an abandoned office building. Twelve stories tall with its own underground parking garage, the building had a huge For Rent banner strung across the decorative courtyard gates.
Gates that King opened without breaking a sweat.
I helped Ethan sit down on a cracked stone bench, beneath the welcome shade of a half-alive juniper tree. Perspiration rolled down the sides of his face. Pain etched lines around his eyes and mouth. If he ground his teeth any harder, they would snap.
King dumped his package next to a putrid fountain that hadn’t run in years. The stone was stained with algae. A few centimeters of rainwater clung to the bottom of the last tier.
In the distance, sirens wailed. Good. Phone call number one had been a success: the ambulance for Renee would be along shortly.
Call two was a message left on Gage’s voice mail, giving him the number of King’s phone and asking him to call the moment he got it. I wanted him with us during this final fight. Encounter. Whatever it turned into. I needed his advice.
Noah hovered by the gates, watching the street intently. I approached in a wide arch, giving him advanced warning of my presence. We were all on edge. Needless startling should be studiously avoided. His hands were tucked beneath his armpits. Small shivers still racked his body, raising goose bumps up and down his arms, even in the oppressive heat.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
Without tearing his eyes away from the street, he asked, “About what?”
“Stealing your heat. The cold chill. Not realizing one of my dearest friends wasn’t who I thought he was. Pick one.”
He turned his head, skin so pale. Almost fragile. “It’s not your fault. I’m beginning to think none of this could have turned out okay, no matter what we did or didn’t know.” He leaned against the gate, facing me full-on. “You heard what Queen said. It was never about Forney or Bates. Or maybe it was at first, but when Queen and Deuce got hold of them, they turned it into something else. Something twisted.”