33.
“Well, that’s just effing great,” I announced to the empty, echoing canyons of downtown Minneapolis. I didn’t bother keeping my voice down because there was no one really around to hear me. No cop cars, no obvious police engaging this guy, just a news camera a few blocks away and probably some snipers providing impotent cover fire from minimum safe distance.
He blinked at me again, his fiery skin once more causing his black orbs of eyes to disappear as he did so. “Do you … not enjoy the fight?” There was a curiosity in his tone.
“You think I enjoy fighting?” I gawked at him.
“Does it not … remind you of who you are?” His Euro accent was strong, but the passion in his voice was undeniable. “Does it not remind you … of your strength? Does it not bring you back … to yourself when you feel lost?”
I cracked my knuckles and they made a loud noise as they popped. “I dunno. I feel like there might be other ways to get in touch with my inner awesome. Ones that result in less pain for others.” I looked up at him. “So …” Now came the moment of truth. “We can both flaming suit up and cancel each other out,” I lied, “or you can come down here and fight me like a big boy without creating a rain of flaming wreckage all around. You know—recall your inner badass by going knuckle to knuckle with me instead of trying to prove your fire is stronger than my fire.”
He cocked his head at me, but drifted closer to the ground. “You … would surrender an advantage?”
I shrugged, looking around. “We could burn this place to the ground in a flaming twister, and I don’t know that it’s going to get you in closer touch with yourself or whatever it is you’re looking for. I’ve got fire, you’ve got fire—we use them against each other and it does nothing, you should know that.”
He nodded. “That is true, I suppose.”
“So are you out to cause utter devastation?” I asked. “Because there’s a town west of here where that happened.” I was playing a hunch; however much wreckage this guy had left behind—and shit, it was sizable—he hadn’t out and out annihilated Reed or Jamie or Veronika. If he’d wanted to, he could have left them a pile of smoking ashes.
But he didn’t.
“No,” he said and drifted to the earth. “I will not snuff the flame shield, though; if I do, your police will shoot me.”
Well, shit. How the hell was I supposed to beat him seven ways to Sunday with my bare fists when he was five thousand degrees?
“Fair enough,” I said instead, my mind racing. “Shall we keep this to the ground?”
He frowned, another funny spectacle when wreathed in flames. “Why?”
“I thought you were looking for a test of strength,” I said with a shrug. “Seems to me that if we’re flying and I land one good accidental hit, out go your lights and you crash to your death. Fight over, all on the basis of a lucky punch.”
He thought about it. “That … is also true.”
“You know my abilities,” I said, the lying becoming easier as I went. “And I’ve seen yours—or at least some of them. Let’s keep the destruction toned down and I will battle with you as hard as you want. You start ripping apart the whole city, I’m going to find a very unfair way to murder your ass as swiftly as possible. If you want a true contest of strength, fight me like a man, not a meta terrorist. Capische?”
“Your terms are fair,” he said and set his feet. Flames smoked off of him. “Are you ready to begin?”
Not remotely, I realized, since I had exactly zero ways to cause him damage when covered with flames. At least, nothing at hand.
“Just a sec,” I said, and strolled over to the corner of the street, where Oceanaire’s outdoor furniture was sitting stacked on the sidewalk.
“What … are you doing?” he asked.
“Well, it’s not going to do me any good to punch you when you’re covered in fire like that,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him, “and I can’t get you with a light web. We’re not flying. I mean, I could probably get in your head with Odin powers—”
“I have those myself,” he said, still watching me walk toward the sidewalk patio space in front of Oceanaire.
“Which means those are useless for me,” I raised my voice and he started to slowly follow behind me, warily, because we were about to fight and obviously I was going to bushwhack him somehow. “So what have I got left? I can’t turn into a dragon here, we just agreed to limit collateral damage and that’d just make a mess of this building,” I nodded at the tower that stretched out of Oceanaire’s facade, “so … I’m kinda out of easy options.” I stopped by the stack of furniture. “Advantage: you. We fight as is, fist to fist, and it’s either a stalemate or you beat me with your superior quantity of powers, see?”
He stopped short of the sidewalk. “Well …” He shifted uncomfortably. “I do not like all this talking. I thought we would fight.”
“And we will,” I said, lifting a chair out of the stack. “But you can’t expect me to walk into it with nothing to hurt you with. What’s the point of that? How are you challenged by that? What’s that do to—what was it you said? ‘Remind you of who you are’ or whatever?”
“That is a good p—” he started to say, but I winged the chair at him and he paused to try and stop it from taking his head off. He raised his hands and acted like he was going to catch it, but instead he tossed a little fire ahead of him, superheating the metal and turning it into a puddle of slag that hit him and steamed. His mouth pulled into a grimace, because he might have been able to absorb flame, but molten metal didn’t just evaporate when it made contact with his fire shield. Not that much. A bullet, sure. But a whole metal chair? Nah.
It slid past his flame shield and onto his skin, sizzling as it burned him.
I’d already heaved a table at him to follow it up, and he tried to block that but it went low, like a frisbee, right to the gut. It melted as it struck, but not before it transferred some force to him. He made an “OOF!” noise as it bounced and got him in the gut, doubling him over on the wire surface. He melted through the surface instantly but stopped as he made contact with the sturdy steel beams that held the supports together. They boiled, turning molten, and he screamed as he recoiled away from them.
“Heads up!” I shouted, throwing another chair at him. He looked up, but I’d aimed low, throwing it like a shot put at his gut, chair-back first, and it caught him in the midsection, searing and sizzling as he melted that, and then caught the seat portion right in the chest and chin.
He wobbled, leaving another pile of slag on the street as I tossed another table at him, then another. They went frisbeeing at him as he wove on unsteady legs. One cleaned his clock and dropped him to the ground while the other took his legs out from beneath him. The fire started to fade as he hit the ground, elbows buried in the slushy mess in the gutter.
I bombed him with another chair, still about twenty feet away, then grabbed another two, one for each hand, clutching one by the wire back and gripping the other beneath the seat. I was going to tame this flaming lion, tame him or kill him, and I took off at a run to cross the distance between us before he regained his wits.
There wasn’t going to be a lot of time to shellack this guy, and I was going to have to get him to drop the flame shield if I was going to even have a prayer of doing so. I rushed in on him and a little past, then whapped him squarely across the back with the chair in my right hand. It slagged, but not before the physical force sent him flying into the curb. I heard the rich crack of his collar bone as he impacted on the gutter, shoulder catching as he did a serious dive and ended up face up on the sidewalk, making little snow angels as the slush around him melted and ran off.
Brandishing my partially melted chair, I came at him like I was going to stake him with the melted remainder. I had a couple of points left of the tubing that secured the chair back in place before it had been turned to molten metal, and it came to a sharp end. Drive that through his heart and he’d be just about done, I figured, or at least he’d be in a bad enough way that I could turn his head into a pinata and shower the street with his brains before I called this thing a day.
I didn’t telegraph my move before I came in on him, driving the point at his chest. I would have leapt high to drive it in, but that would be overly dramatic and also give away my intent. Instead I just came running up and—HOO-AH!—rammed it toward his chest.
I was about to make contact when something shredded its way into my mind like a physical punch inside my brain. I’d been hit by Bjorn’s Odin power before, when he and I had fought, lo those many years ago before Old Man Winter had forced me to absorb him and he’d become a complaining part of the cadre of powers I kept in my head. His powers tended to manifest in the form of a raven—your dark thoughts given mental form—blasting their way into your mind.
That … was not what happened here.
If Bjorn’s power could be called a psychic assault, akin to someone jumping into your mind and pummeling you with your fears, this could only be described as a psychic blitzkrieg, the entire Nazi army plowing through my brain and leaving nothing but trammelled dirt and wrecked villages behind. I screamed and dropped the chairs, heard one make a satisfying sizzling as it ran over him, and I staggered back and fell off the curb.
This was worse than any hangover I’d ever felt, worse than taking a direct hit from a Thor type when they were standing in a field during a lightning storm. Scenes from my past flashed in front of my eyes, and they were like a montage of Sienna Nealon’s absolute worst hits—the murders I’d committed, the people I’d screwed over, the accusing faces of those whose lives I’d upended by my action or inaction.
I saw Ariadne, and somehow she remembered me, and all the crap I’d brought down on her.
Then there was Reed, looking pathetic in a hospital bed, tubes threading out of him, the guilt-inducing sound of a life support machine beeping in the background.
And finally … there were my souls, surrounding me in silent judgment.
Wolfe. Gavrikov. Bjorn. Zack. Kappler. Bastian. Harmon.
Their forces were distorted, but their expressions were unmistakable.
I’d failed them.
And they were letting me know.
“No!” I shouted, coming back to myself as I landed in the slush in the middle of the street. Cold water soaked through my clothing, and it was like a shock that brought me back to myself. I wanted a drink of scotch more than I’d wanted anything in my life to this point. I wanted it now, I wanted it quick, I wanted to cut my wrist wide and shove the bottle right into my veins so this sick, uneasy feeling I’d been running from for months, this sense that I’d—I’d lost something, that I sucked, that I was the worst person in the entirety of the world, that I was weak and pathetic and horrible—I wanted it gone, I wanted to be in blissful stupor, and—
My face lay against the rough pavement of 6th Avenue, my fingers cold in the melted ice that this bastard, this … this fight seeking, this danger hunting … this Predator had left behind. The chill was seeping in, Minnesota winter come back to get me. I’d been warmed by his flames, distracted by the horror of what he’d done in my mind.
I remembered Veronika, when we’d first met, saying that she’d conditioned herself with an ex to resist the power of the Odin mental attack. How I wished I’d been able to do that now.
“Why do you just lie there?” the Predator slurred. I turned and saw him floating, his shoulder at a funny angle. “Why do you not shrug off my Odin attack?”
“Because no one’s ever hit me with it like that before,” I said, rising to my feet. “Either that power has been enhanced or you’ve been living a thousand years and working with it.”
He looked frozen in place, caught in headlights, me about to run him down. Unlikely, since the mind assault had frozen my entire body, and I was just shaking out of the paralysis. “I have not lived a thousand years,” he said stiffly, answering that question.
“Then why are you so good with fire?” I asked. I was starting to get a feeling this guy was no incubus.
He flared for a second, and then rushed at me, streaming flame. I was forced to dodge back, to go low, and he shot inches over my head. His black eyes passed me, and even covered in the fire, I could see the curiosity.
My bluff was about to be called. If I’d still had my Gavrikov powers, I would have taken his charge head on, and we would have gone flame to flame.
Instead … I’d dodged out of his way. And I’d already faltered under a mental assault that an Odin type should have theoretically been prepared for, at least in general if maybe not in scope.
I rolled back to my feet, a little slowly because of the stiffness, and he paused as he came around. He threw a burst of flame at me, one I should have been able to absorb, then another, then another.
I dodged them. Because there was nothing else I could do.
The shiny lens of the news camera caught it all, blocks away, over his shoulder, and I knew that now … the world was drawing its own conclusions.
Now … the whole world knew.
They knew I was powerless.
Weak.
“What are you doing?” Predator leaned toward me, throwing more fire. I dodged, rolled, sidestepped, and he upped the tempo. I moved, ducked, flipped, and spun out of the way of successive shots, no time to grab something and hurl it toward him for a counterattack. “What is wrong with you?”
“I could ask the same of you, really,” I said, my breaths becoming ragged from all the rapid movement. “I mean, really, who goes looking for fights? What are you, Tyler Durden? Are you a figment of my imagination?”
“This cannot be.” He stopped throwing flames. “You … are not her?”
I paused, ready. “Oh, I’m her. Or as her as you’re going to get these days.”
He just stared at me, almost crestfallen, like he was another person I’d hit with crushing disappointment. “You have none of her powers.”
“You think so?” I stared him down. “Drop the flames, come over here and hold my hand for a bit. See if I’m missing that power.”
“You are … weak.” It was a sick sounding declaration, like a gunshot in the street.
“Fuck you,” I said and turned, reaching the corner in a second. I grabbed hold of the light pole in front of Oceanaire and ripped it out of the ground as he stood there, stunned. I tugged it carefully, working to not tear the electrical wiring as I pulled it free of the street. Then I put it on my shoulder, holding the pole like a massive baseball bat. “Come here and say that to my face, you son of a bitch.”
He raised a hand to shoot flame, but I brought my improvised bat down on him like he was a Whack-a-mole. It hit, hammering him, melting as it did so. He let out a little cry of pain as the molten metal dripped through the fire shield, and I dragged it forward, taking care to keep the structural integrity of the wires that had powered it connected—at least for now.
I smashed him over the head with the melting pole a few more times before he got irate enough to do something about it. And the something he did about it was a billowing cloud of fire that forced me to go sideways and ripped my electrical wires out, severing the power pole from the ground.
There went one plan, unfortunately. And it was a good one, too. Zap zap.
“You are not what I thought you were,” he said, steely and pissed now that he’d managed to blunt my constant bonking and burning attack. He was still holding his shoulder at a funny angle, though, and his head looked like it bore a wound, judging by the way the flames danced over his forehead, casting a consistent shadow over his brow like a scar. I’d hurt him and he couldn’t heal it, at least not immediately.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry I haven’t updated my dating profile yet,” I said, taking advantage of the newfound freedom of the pole in my hand and bringing it overhead like a log, hurling it at his midsection. He started to go up and then changed his mind at the last second and went sideways, a nearly terminal hesitation and a pretty rookie mistake. He caught a glancing blow on the side as he tried to get out of range and the crack of his ribs echoed down the street. “But honestly, you lose a little weight, you ditch a few psychological demons, stop hearing voices—most guys would consider that an improvement.”
He fell to the ground, clutching his side, fire starting to subside from his feet and hands. He was wearing clothes beneath, a trick I’d never managed to master with my flame shield, but one that Aleksandr Gavrikov had at his disposal. It suggested a high level of control of his fire, something I’d already suspected just from watching this guy work. Still, the ability to control it millimeters at a time? Enough to run a shield just over the surface of your skin and not consume your clothing? Way beyond anything I’d ever been able to do.
I darted in and kicked him in the knee, wrenching it by making it go in a direction it was not supposed to go. He let out a little cry, and I did not let up, especially as the fire receded from him. I kicked him in those already-wounded ribs, sending him flying through the air and into the facade of the building across the street. He crashed into it, leaving a cracking impression in the concrete, and I was all over him as he flapjacked down onto the sidewalk, not giving him an inch of space to recover.
“I didn’t ask for this fight,” I said, stooping and punching the shit out of him. His face was bleeding after one hit, nose shattered after two, cheekbones out of place after three. “I didn’t ask for any of this.” Blood spattered my clothing as I gave him the business, the Sienna Nealon special, which was face punching with no a la mode. His skull made a cracking noise—or my knuckle did, hard to tell with the adrenaline pumping—and I worked him like a punching bag as he lay there.
“I didn’t ask for any of this!” I shouted, raining blows down on him. Fury pulsed through my hands, ravaging him as he tried to raise his hands to shield his face.
I didn’t ask to be made a fugitive for shit I didn’t do.
I didn’t ask for every meta asshole on the planet to see me as their number one rival.
I didn’t ask for some crazy Scottish bitch who lost her family in the war to latch onto me as the avatar of every wrong that had ever been done to her.
I didn’t ask for the president of the United States to decide I was a threat to everything he was trying to accomplish, I didn’t ask for Cassidy and the Clary family to come after me for revenge, I didn’t ask for freaking Sovereign to decide that I was his one and only chosen bride, or for my mother to die, or for her to imprison me, or—
My adversary exploded in a burst of fire that flashed over me so quickly I barely had time to react. I moved on instinct, hurling myself away from him, seeking cold, seeking ice, and I landed in the nearby snowbank at the edge of the road and rolled, rolled furiously and without thought, even as the ice melted and steamed and sizzled around me.
When I stopped, I was face up and looking into a cloudy sky. I raised a hand and saw scorched skin, blisters already appearing between the angry red. “You … ass,” I said, to no one in particular. Or at least no one I could see.
He floated through the air toward me, head at a funny angle, creases in his flame shield in a few places where I’d worked his frigging smug, fight-seeking face. His nose was out of joint—literally—and his jaw hung a little to the side.
“You … are not what I was looking for,” he said, muffled through the broken jaw. It was probably causing him a lot of pain.
“You weren’t looking for an ass kicking?” I asked, unable to get my body to move. I was, after all, flash-fried, and that wasn’t a condition that leant itself well to anything but rolling around on the ground wishing for the burning pain to stop. I was feeling the first traces of it, but I suspected his earlier mind assault might have been occluding some of the pain because my nervous system was still not fully back to operational. “Because if you called me out, you should have known I wasn’t just going to send you away with a little chiding.”
“Look at you,” he said, almost sneering down at me. “You talked your way through my advantages, lied your way through part of the fight, counting on me to be too dumb to realize you were … weak.” Here he sneered and spat a little, still talking like he had a mouth full of cotton. Which, he probably would, later, because I was pretty sure I’d knocked out some of that son of a bitch’s teeth.
“Yeah, well … it didn’t seem likely you’d fight me fair, fist to fist, you loser,” I threw back. I was trying to move, to do something—hell, grab another snowball and throw it at him in defiance, maybe turn it yellow first if I had any pee left—but my body was just … not working. I glanced around, seeking some sort of impromptu weapon, anything would do.
All I saw was empty sidewalk and snow. Nothing to my advantage at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, if he melted the snow that enshrouded me. He could drown me right here and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
I twitched, my fingers moving slightly, and I gathered a small amount of snow in my palm. With jerky movements, I lifted my hand, and tossed it at him.
The small snowball hit his chest, sizzled, and evaporated.
“You are pathetic,” he said, disgust just dripping from him. “What happened to you?”
“I ran across someone badder than me,” I said, looking him right in the eye. “But I still killed her ass. And I’ll do the same for you.”
“You are like an old dog that still barks even though he can barely move.” He just loomed, sneering down at me.
“This old dog bit you harder than anyone who’s bitten you yet, dickweed.”
“No,” he said, and his voice went hushed. “No … you are not even close. This?” He motioned to himself. “This is a pleasant sleep compared to what I have been through.”
“That so?” I stared up at him. “Well, next time I’ll make sure to turn it into a nightmare you’ll never wake from.”
“There will be no next time,” he said, shaking his head at me as he raised his hand. I could feel distant thunder, like the earth was moving beneath me. It was a strange, faint hammering sound that seemed to grow louder the longer I lay there.
I stared at him as he raised his hand to strike—
And the ground beneath me gave way, the sidewalk crashing in as I fell beneath the street.
Something snatched me out of midair, and I was moving, moving like someone had me on their back. I didn’t even feel like I’d lost consciousness, just that somehow the sidewalk and snow had dropped from beneath me, and then I was being hoofed through tunnels. An explosion went off where the light had been streaming through into the darkness of this sewer, and the pressure felt like a hard shove.
The person who carried me did not even stumble, sure-footed as he rounded a corner and kept moving at a hard run. “So,” came the voice of Harry Graves in the darkness, “that could have gone better, but not much. You did well.”
“Harry? I … just got my ass kicked,” I said to him, feeling oddly reassured that he had kept his word.
He’d found me, like he said. Just when I needed him most he’d … uh … jackhammered through the concrete beneath me, pulled me out as it fell, and then dynamited the tunnel entrance behind us to cut off my adversary’s ability to follow us.
Damn.
“Damn,” I said, because it just came out.
“I know, I know, I’m amazing,” Harry said, huffing lightly as he rounded another corner. “I’ll have you out of here in five.”
That was exactly what I’d been thinking. Safe on the back of Harry Graves, I felt myself lulled by his movement, my body traumatized beyond the ability to function. I let my neck loll, swayed as he ran, and just gave myself over to the darkness I’d been fighting since the man on fire had burned me, and off I went, into waiting sleep, my fight now finished.