22.
“No,” I moaned, trying to get to my feet. I was bleeding, sick to my stomach, the trauma of what my body had just been through coming out in the physical reactions of shock. I was blinking, hyper-fast, trying to stimulate my body back into motion when it didn’t want to do anything but lie down and die right there … or at least try to be still and heal so I wouldn’t die.
I pulled a long shard of bloody glass out of my shoulder and hurled it at Prettyboy’s fading back. It shattered across his left shoulder like one of those beer bottles that you see in the movies, smashing to tiny pieces. I had enough strength to do that, even wounded and weak, and Prettyboy turned around to look at me as I pushed to my knees.
“Don’t … even … think about walking away from … me …” I said, barely able to remain upright even on my knees. I pulled another shard out of my left trapezius, this one larger than my hand, and beckoned to him with the bloody glass. “Come on, asswipe. You wanna die? I’m working up to granting your fondest wish.”
His lips split into a feral smile, and he looked at me just a second longer than he really should have. Harry blindsided him with a chunk of concrete, and while it shattered over his head into dust, it also staggered him for a second, letting Harry slip past and give him a forceful shove that launched him back, head over heels.
Harry slipped in between us, interposing his own body between Prettyboy and myself. I tried to get to my feet and failed, but Harry motioned to me with a hand behind his back, urging me to stay down. “Hey,” he said, and added some unintelligible Japanese that felt like it held the aura of an insult, “… your fly is down.”
Prettyboy stared at him for just a second, and then bent over to look at the front of his pants. I couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that, but then, Harry did presumably know before he tried it that it’d work. Or maybe not, since he couldn’t read his own future.
It didn’t last long. A second later, Prettyboy was looking up again, a tired smile draped across his lips. “You think this will stop me?” He threw his head back and gave the appearance of a deep laugh. “This will not make quit my pursuit of—”
Squealing tires heralded the arrival of something else, and a small Japanese car slammed into Prettyboy, destroying the front end but also launching him into the air. It arrested its own momentum in a heartbeat, bouncing off him and going back about ten feet, coming to rest just outside the shop door as Prettyboy was ejected from my field of view with all the violence of a football being punted.
“Come on,” Harry said, grabbing me by the elbow. “We don’t have much time.”
“Wha …?” I managed to get out before he jerked me along, practically carrying me out of the wreckage. Kat was just extracting herself from the ruined car, a little blood running down her forehead as she joined up with us. She scooped up her suitcase as well as my bag and Harry’s as he pulled me over the fallen yakuza, some of whom didn’t seem like they’d be waking up anytime soon.
Kat ran ahead and flagged down a taxi extremely-mini-van, yelling at them in excited Japanese and then opening the side door as Harry tossed me in and followed. Our bags landed in the seat behind me, thrown by Kat, and she yelled at Harry to get in the front seat while she slipped in next to me. Harry was already moving, though, and they were in the car seconds later. Kat shouted something else at the driver and he floored it, taking the corner at high speed as we left the station forecourt behind. We were on the main road a second later, and suddenly my world started to clear up.
“Just chill,” Kat said from beside me, hand on mine. She had a waxy look on her face already, and the blood was still seeping from the injury on her forehead. She was looking pretty drawn by the time she withdrew her hand from mine, and my skin was tingling at her touch in the most pleasant way. I’d heard a faint voice in my head, reminiscent of the souls I’d so recently—and dreadfully—lost, but this one was higher, more pleasant.
I could hear Kat in my head. Faintly, like she was whispering outside a room I was in, but still … it was a pleasant, if somewhat painful, reminder of what I’d lost.
“Thank you,” I croaked, dragging myself upright again.
Kat plucked another shard of glass out of my arm and opened the window, tossing it out. “You’re welcome,” she said, looking white as a glass of milk. She pulled a few more shards out, whatever hadn’t fallen out on their own as Harry had pulled me through the promenade. I removed one on my left side myself, and handed it to her for disposal. Points to skinny, pale, delicate-looking Kat—she didn’t blanch at all as she tossed the blood-soaked glass shard out the window.
The cab driver was stiff, eyes pointed straight ahead, not daring to look back at us and shaking in his seat. Kat said something to him quietly, and he nodded, shoulders quivering as he moved.
Harry looked back at us, tense. “He’s going straight to the cops as soon as we’re out,” he whispered, meta-low. “We’re going to need to change vehicles and get to the docks at uber-speed.”
“I can’t imagine why he’d be terrified to the point of wanting to run to the lawful authorities,” I murmured, low enough he couldn’t hear it. “I mean, his cab was only just hijacked by three people fleeing a metahuman brawl at the train station, one of whom is bleeding liters all over the back of his livelihood.”
“There’s no path to dissuading him, either,” Harry murmured. “Unless either of you is in favor of taking stronger measures?”
“I’d be okay with knocking him out,” I said, “or I could steal his memories. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.”
Harry concentrated for a moment, staring into empty air. “That’d be enough. Take his memories, it buys us a lot of time. Hours, actually. Just wait until we get out.”
“Okay,” I said, settling back in my seat and closing my eyes.
“Sienna,” Kat said, suddenly an ominous and hovering presence right next to me, “what the hell happened back there?”
“Ugh,” I moaned, still keeping it low, like the others. “Time snapped into superspeed for me. Prettyboy pummeled me while I was basically standing still, unable to do a damned thing about it. Hence my sudden flight into the glass.” I plucked a small shard out of my left forearm and presented it to Kat, who palmed it and tossed it out the window without comment.
“How does that even happen?” Harry asked.
“I dunno, Harry,” I said. “How does time stop for everyone else but remain constant for me? It’s all kind of a mystery until we can talk to Akiyama and get the straight dope from the horse’s mouth … or whatever, in an unmixed metaphor way. The truth, I guess.” I felt exhausted, probably more from travel and blood loss than the brawl I’d just been in on its own. Nothing felt broken anymore, thanks to Kat, but I definitely had bruises aplenty to show for our most recent squabble with Prettyboy. “All I know is this—if time does that again during a clash with Prettyboy, my goose is probably well and truly cooked, because I was barely holding my own, and I don’t think he was even using all his strength.”
“I don’t envision any more clashes with him soon,” Harry said, eyes darting. “Things are … well, fragile in terms of probabilities, but that one’s relatively clear, at least for the next few hours.” His lips settled into a thin line.
“And are we still on track for the end of time in the next couple days?” I asked.
With a grudging, almost pained nod, Harry grunted. “Yeah.”
“Awesome,” Kat said, slumping back in her seat. “I hope I don’t feel this crappy at the end of time, because it’d suck to feel this way into perpetuity.” She seemed to give that a thought. “How does that even work? Like a permanent time stop?”
“Looks that way to me,” Harry said as we took a turn onto a side road. Like in Britain, everyone was driving on the wrong side of the road, but I didn’t have the mental energy to give as much of a damn about it as usual. Or maybe Scotland had simply drained all the relative dread out of it for me. “It’s like all probabilities, branching paths, everything that happens normally with my power—it just stops. Everything ends beyond that moment.”
“What fun—” Kat started to say, but her words stopped as a flash of light blasted through the cab and I felt like someone had jerked me out of my seat.
I opened my eyes into bright light, blinding almost, and then it faded as a blurry world seemed to coalesce around me.
The back of the cab was gone, the Nagasaki streets were gone, everything I’d experienced a moment ago was gone. In its place was a sterile white room, with a single bed in the hospital style, white sheets covering it. They were clumped and wrinkled, wrapped around a petite figure who lay in the middle of it, a lump on her chest.
Kat. Her blond hair was tangled and matted, and there was a thin veil of relief shining through the weariness on her face, a glow that shone, almost lighting up the small room.
A Japanese nurse stood off to one side, her delicate features showing a faint smile, her hands on the bundle that rested on Kat’s chest. “Do you have a name?”
I stared at the lump in Kat’s arms, the little bundle wrapped in a blanket, the object of all her attention and—more than I’d ever seen from Kat in all the years I’d known her—her happiness.
“Yes,” she said, not taking her eyes off the baby in her arms.
Someone stepped out of the blurring at the edge of my field of vision. Dark hair, taller than me, he stepped over to the bed and leaned over, kissing the baby on the cheek. His back was to me, but his figure oh so familiar.
Harry.
He was looking down at the baby in Kat’s arms. I could see over his shoulder, but just the start of his profile, because of the way he was facing. “What should we name him?”
Light flashed again, and the scene in the hospital was gone, the cab returning and the chaotic Nagasaki streets appearing again, Harry in the seat in front of me and Kat to my side. Her face lacked the peace it had held in my vision, and instead her eyes were wide, saucer-wide, moon-wide, and her mouth was slightly open. “What … the hell was that ?” she asked, and I had a suspicion—maybe more than a suspicion—that I hadn’t been the only one to see the hospital room and what happened there.
“It kinda looked like you and Harry having a baby together,” I said, jealousy marring every syllable of my trademark sarcasm. “But that couldn’t happen, because of course you were two were never together before, especially in that way, amirite, Kat?”
“Dude,” she said, “I told you, if I don’t remember it, it didn’t happen to me.” And at this, she crossed her arms in front of her. Behind that facade, though, her eyes moved around a little more than usual, making me think that maybe—just maybe—this vision had rattled her a little.
“Harry?” I asked, turning my attention to him and probably lashing at him with a tone that demanded explanation.
But Harry had his fingers massaging his forehead with both hands. “What?” he asked, eyes closed.
“Would you care to explain this?” I asked, trying to keep from sounding like the crazy, jealous girlfriend I was heading toward being.
“I don’t really have much to say.” He kneaded his fingers into his forehead. “I have a headache.”
“Isn’t that convenient,” I grumbled, looking at Kat, who just shrugged at me. I could almost feel her mentally disengaging from what we’d just seen, as though backing away from thinking about it would make it not have happened.
“Having an excruciating headache is not really that convenient, no,” Harry said, head still in hand, and his voice sounded ragged enough that I believed it. “I think all this shifting around of events is physically hurting me now. The probabilities change so dramatically after most of these stoppages—thanks mostly to you—but this … vision thing just now … man, it really put a mule in my brain and let it double-kick me.”
I wanted to be sympathetic, so I bit my tongue and let us ride in silence until Harry waved for the cab driver to pull over. He did so, shaking all the while, and Harry looked at me, eyes still squinting in pain. “It’s time,” he said.
“Hilarious pun,” Kat said, throwing her door open. We’d pulled off in an alley, and the cab driver was muttering low under his breath in what sounded an awful lot like a prayer.
“Hey,” I said, trying to be soothing, and putting my hands on the back of his neck. “It’s all right. We’re not going to hurt you. We were just trying to get away from some yakuza.” All true. He didn’t exactly loosen up under my grip, though, just kept saying the same things, under his breath.
“I don’t think he believes you for some reason,” Kat said, a half smile twisting her lips, which lacked their usual red glow and looked faded.
“Which is weird, because I’m such a sincere and warm person,” I said, letting my fingers hang on the back of his neck gently. He felt the first strains of my power and tried to jerk away, and here I had to be a little firmer with him. “Just for the record—absorbing peoples’ memories sucks and is not nice.”
“Kinda like you,” Kat said lightly as she pulled my bag and her suitcase out of the back. I found it amusing my 10,000 megawatt reality TV star friend had quietly become my pack mule instead of vice versa. “Because of the soul draining, y’know, and your constant talk about being the Queen of Mean or whatever.”
“I think that was Leona Helmsley,” I said, neatly dragging the memories of the cab driver’s last half hour of absolute terror out of his mind. Not for the first time, I regretted being unable to plant something more pleasant in their place, because if you’re going to jack the memories of a person anyway, it doesn’t feel like it’d be any worse—and maybe even, ethically, a little better—if you could put some peace back in for them.
Alas, the limitations of being a soul-stealer.
“Well, she’s dead, so the crown is probably up for grabs if you want to claim it,” Kat said with a shrug, my bag over her shoulder and the telescoping suitcase handle in her hand. “I don’t know anyone who’s going to fight you for it.”
“Remember June Randall, that toxin-cloud spreading meta who shot me in the head in Florida last year? She could have made a run at it before she surrendered,” I said, taking the last of the cabbie’s memories of us and sliding across the bench and out the door. Harry was already out, leaning against the alley wall behind Kat, bag on his back, studiously ignoring the blond bombshell next to him who’d he’d apparently sired a child with. They might have made a cute couple if not for Kat’s pallor, her look reminiscent of someone who’d had recent run-in with a vampire—which she sorta had, of the White Court, soul-stealing variety—and Harry holding his head gingerly, looking like a strong breeze might topple him. We probably looked like a beat-down combo platter from hell.
Stepping out into the alley, I didn’t feel so hot, either. A little weak, actually, from all the blood loss. Kat’s healing powers were amazing, but they were no panacea, and it wasn’t like they could do anything to heal the emotional venom that seemed to be running through my soul right now. I looked to Harry, but he wouldn’t look at me, and a part of me questioned whether he really had a headache or whether he just wanted to avoid answering questions.
“Where to?” Kat asked, leading us behind the cab and away from the cabbie, who was starting to come out of the soul-burned stun that my touch tended to leave people in. She was laboring a little under the weight of our bags, and thrust mine out at me.
I took it up on a bloodied shoulder. “I think I need to change before we do anything else.” I ran a hand down my front. My shirt was shredded, my pants were shredded, and I was drenched in scarlet as surely as if some anti-fur demonstrators had taken umbrage at my attire. “You know—so we don’t attract more attention of the troublesome variety to ourselves.”
“Good point,” Kat said. With an impish smile she added, “I’m so used to seeing you covered in blood that I don’t really notice anymore.”
“Ow,” I said. “That’s harsh. True. But still … harsh.”
She was still smiling, but looked at me sidelong. “Here, this’ll make you feel better—red really is your color. Shame about the hair having to change now.”
“I know, right?” I nodded. “I may have to make the leap into bright blue or something, cuz my blond disguise got totally yanked when I appeared on national television in Minneapolis to face off with the Predator.”
“I’d say auburn, but it’s probably too much of a middle ground between your current shade and your natural one,” Kat said. “Which is a shame, because it’d totally look great on you. Maybe after this is all over—”
“Ladies?” Harry asked from behind us, and I turned to find him nearly bent double, his eyes hardly open. The cab driver was driving off now, making the turn out onto a main road ahead, whereas we were descending deeper into the alley. There was a slight curve ahead, and I thought it might be a nice place to duck in and change, a few darkly lit doors providing some shelter for a quick clean up. I hoped.
“What’s the matter, Harry?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said, sounding a little strained. “Just—”
And his eyes rolled up, and he keeled over right in the alley, thumping down heavily onto the concrete, where he lay, passed out.
“Damn,” Kat said, sounding mildly vexed, “I thought he was faking that headache thing.”
“Me too,” I said, a little more concerned now. “And also … damn.”