10.
Sienna
I woke up with a hangover. The night was like black tar poured outside the window where I rested my head. No moon, no lights waited outside the glass as I blinked at my own reflection staring back at me, just ink-stained night and the refracted instrument panel of the SUV behind my shadowed face in the window.
Smacking my lips together, I pulled my aching head off the glass. A cool feeling persisted against my cheek where it had rested against the flat window, and a thumping pain radiated out from within. I was getting used to hangovers—sort of. As used to them as you can get, I guess.
“Well, good morning, sunshine,” Harry Graves’s voice greeted me from the driver’s seat. I made a low moan as I turned toward him, and found the bottle he’d gifted me corked and resting in the cup holder. I stared at it; it was the perfect size, and I suspected he’d planned that when he’d bought the damned thing. Precognitive asshole, showing off.
As if in answer to my thought, he tossed me a bottle of ibuprofen that I caught, just barely. I opened it and dumped three into my hand. I swallowed them without liquid, and though I was sorely tempted to embrace the hair of the dog that bit me, I found the bottle empty when I gave it a look.
“You dump the rest out?” I asked.
“Not me,” Harry said. “Your Irish lady did.”
I turned my head to give Eilish a piece of my mind, but she was sleeping, conked out in the back, mouth open, head back. A soft, ragged snuffling was coming from her open mouth, and mercy won out. I let her sleep.
Cassidy was lit by a computer screen, tapping away without saying anything. I knew she’d noticed my awakening, so I figured she didn’t have anything to add at present, and I didn’t give enough of a damn to ask her what she was up to. Instead I faced forward, staring into the darkness ahead, where a single light about a quarter mile off aided our headlights in telling me we were on a two-lane road with nothing but green around us.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked.
“Last sign I saw said we were in Ashville, Alabama,” Harry said, and he broke into a grin that I found … well, I should have found it infuriating. I was surprisingly neutral on it at the moment, though. “We’re heading north, taking the road less traveled.”
“We were supposed to be on I-75 or I-95,” I said, massaging my scalp. It didn’t help.
“No, we’re supposed to be heading north,” Harry said, “and exactly this way. Trust me.”
“Why would I trust you?” I asked. “You took my instruction and promptly discarded it in favor of doing—I dunno, whatever the hell you wanted to do.” I blinked at him, his rugged chin. “What the hell are you doing, Harry?”
“I’m driving,” he said, still grinning. Still not infuriating. Must have been his boyish charm. “Trust me.”
“Ugh,” I said, pitching my head forward and giving my kinked neck muscles a chance to not annoy the hell out of me by screaming like my head. “You didn’t answer why I should trust you the first time I asked.”
“Because I know what I’m doing,” Harry said.
“Yes, but I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, “and two-way communication is so important to trust and also your continued survival.”
He made a production of letting out a grand sigh. “The interstate corridors back east are being fiercely watched right now. Cops, Department of Homeland Security—there’ll all be on it. And while you’ve a neat little trick to mask your face on cameras, it’s not going to help with the immense number of patrols rolling through there at the moment. I caught a probability—if we took those routes, you were going to get spotted, and all manner of hell was going to descend upon the back of our necks. Ergo …”
“You’re taking us through rural Alabama,” I muttered, still rubbing at the base of my spine. “Where the roads are twisting and the cameras are less plentiful.”
“Like I said, it’s not the cameras you have to worry about,” Harry said. “It’s the watching eyes. You may be looking not quite like yourself these days, but it’s hardly a foolproof disguise.”
“No kidding,” I said. “It certainly didn’t fool you.”
“I do like to think I’m no fool,” Harry said, with that everlasting sense of levity he seemed to bring to everything, “but of course … we all get caught with our pants down sometimes.” He looked at me slyly out of the corner of his eye. “Or … with nothing on, maybe.”
I was still slightly drunk, coming out of that bender, and damn if he didn’t get me to blush. The first time we’d crossed paths, Harry had knocked on my hotel door when I’d been wearing nothing but a towel. I’d thought he was Reed, so I’d answered, and in the course of events—I thought he was a villain at the time—I’d attacked him and my towel had gone kaput, leaving me properly naked and trying to kick his ass while he’d dodged my every attempt to lay a hand on him and watched me try with amusement.
That he was reminding me of this now was … annoying. And only mildly embarrassing.
Maybe more than mildly.
“Don’t be an ass, Harry,” I said, trying to make it sound warning.
“Well, I can’t help it, really,” he said, that smirk—gahhh, I should have wanted to club him, but he was—I was pretty sure—modulating his delivery to keep on my good side, and damn if it wasn’t working, even though I knew what he was doing. “I’m not really being an ass—I might be showing mine, a bit.” Here he grinned. “Surely you can identify with that.”
Not subtle. I blushed deeper. It wasn’t like I hadn’t endured many bouts of public nudity in my life—I mean, I burned off entire wardrobes for the years I had fire powers, in public and elsewhere, before I discovered the secret of cloaking myself in it like clothing afterward. There were photos on the net. I knew it, and had made my peace with it.
Harry was rubbing my nose in it, and I wasn’t ready to kill him. Marks to the man who could read the future for—to my complete surprise—making me smile, ever so slightly. How the hell did he do that?
“Yeah, I can identify with that,” I said, suddenly thankful that I was sober enough to not be slurring. I let the silence hang for a moment. “So … what do you need my help with?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “It’s not time for that yet,” he said. “I’ll tell when we’re getting closer to the moment.”
“Great,” I said dryly, “I love surprises.”
“Of course you do,” he said.
“I actually don’t,” I said. “I hate surprises.”
He gave me a sidelong look, taking his eyes off the road for way, way too long. “Don’t worry,” he said smoothly. “I can read the future, remember? I could steer us all the way from here to—well, where we’re going—and never run off the road.”
“That’s still really creepy, Harry,” I said, my nerves … well, they were fine. It took me a second, and then …
Yeah. He could see the future. Of course it wasn’t a problem for him not to watch the road. If the car started to bump, he could correct because … he’d see it coming in his future probabilities.
Nifty.
“You don’t like the kind of surprises you’re regularly confronted with,” he said, looking me right in the eyes. “Villains popping up like a jack-in-the-box you never asked for. Enemies showing themselves at times you didn’t expect to see them. Governments turning on you, the press blindsiding you out of nowhere. But a normal surprise? Reed showing up when you least expect him to?” He smiled. “You like a good surprise every once in a while, Sienna Nealon. You just need to have more people in your life who give you the pleasant ones, instead of the unpleasant kind.”
“Huh,” I said, contemplating what he’d said. “Okay. Maybe.”
He just grinned and turned back to the road in time to bring the car back between the lines. “You wait and see.”
“Still,” I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye while crossing my arms and pretending to face forward, “I don’t think your need for help is going to fall into the category of ‘pleasant surprise,’ Harry.”
“Why would you think that?” he asked. He already knew the answer, the bastard.
“Because no one has ever asked me for help and it turned out to not be something horrific,” I said. “It’s never, ‘Hey, Sienna, help this little old lady cross the street.’ Or, ‘Babysit this lovely, charming kid who will give you no problems at all’—”
“I don’t think you’ve done much babysitting,” Harry said.
“I’ve watched Greg Vansen’s son Eddie on at least three occasions now,” I said. Greg and Morgan had been up to visit us twice since I’d come back from Scotland. I suspected Reed of trying to draw me out of my drinking shell. It had worked, inasmuch as I’d managed to postpone my normal five o’clock drink to after Eddie went to bed at eight. Progress, probably, by my brother’s standards. No need to mention that I hadn’t been unsupervised with Eddie during those visits. “That kid loves me.” Mostly true. I hadn’t stolen his soul, and he seemed to like to involve me in his Lego projects, even though he was much better at them than I was.
“Duly noted.”
“My point is, no one comes to Sienna Nealon for the easy stuff,” I said.
“I like how you’ve gotten to the point that referring to yourself in the third person is natural.”
“They come to me for crap no one else can solve, usually involving face punching.”
“How’s that face punching business going lately?” Harry asked.
“Poorly. I haven’t punched any faces in a while. My knuckles are getting soft.”
“Well, I come with opportunity, then,” Harry said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to get back to it!” But …
Of course I did. I missed punching people in the face. Only worthy people, people who had earned a good punch, of course.
“Don’t worry,” Harry said, prompting me to frown again. “All will be explained in time.”
And before I could respond to that bit of cryptic nonsense, Cassidy piped up. “I’ve got another hit on this attacker.”
I turned in my seat, twisting my neck and sending a shooting pain up to join the hangover headache. “Oof,” I said. “Where?”
“New York City,” Cassidy said, not looking up from the glow of the screen. It cast her in an even paler shade of white. She looked up, gaze flitting to me for just a second, watching my reaction. “Looks like he just beat the living hell out of an old friend of yours.” And she spun the computer around so I could see the headline emblazoned across the top of the screen.
I saw it … and my stomach dropped like we’d hit the world’s largest speedbump.
GRAVITY FALLS
Attack on local hero leaves her future in doubt—authorities are not saying whether Jamie Barton is even still alive.