22.
I awoke to the gunfire of a dozen Texas cops pouring it on, huddled behind cruisers and shooting at Peter. My head was against a curb, and the sound of the gunshots was like a heralding of the apocalypse. I blinked into the bright sunlight, shining down on me with the intensity of a heat beam, or maybe one of Peter’s lasers, and something shook me, shoving my shoulder.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Angel said, smudged with sweat and some other black substance across her forehead. “You know what you were saying about a peaceful resolution…?” She looked significantly, almost theatrically at the chaos unfolding around us. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
My head was hard against the curb, the endless blasts of gunshots painful to my meta ears. I blinked a few times into the sun, trying to recall what had just happened in the dream, way more vivid and real than this battle I found myself in. The police cruiser next to me, that I was hiding behind for cover, was scorched and blacked. A few more were on fire, flames crackling quietly, unheard under the gunfire.
Peter was out there somewhere, blasts of red giving away his position behind me. I sat up, the ruined cruiser acting as cover between me and him, and I rolled to my knees, my dream now coming back to me, afresh.
My sister was afraid. Scared. On the run. In a strange, foreign land.
I had to save her.
“What the hell are you doing?” Angel asked as she stared at me. “You must have taken a harder hit to the head than I thought. You should lie back down while I take care of this.”
“Peacefully?” I asked, rolling to my knees and shaking my head. I couldn’t get the image of Sienna out of my mind. She just looked so…
Afraid.
“Like I said, I don’t think it’s going that way.” Angel was not trying hard to contain her distaste for this situation. “I’m going to try and flank him—”
“Stay right where you are,” I said, reaching out with my powers. “I’ll settle this.”
“Peacefully?” Angel said with a fair amount of mocking.
I found what I was looking for on the side of the house: an air conditioner unit, intact, and several hundred pounds of steel and internal components.
“To hell with peace,” I said, and concentrated.
Creating a vortex was a tricky thing. I did it all the time, of course, with varying levels of strength. Before I’d been super-empowered—boosted, I guess you could say—I could create a hell of a tempest when pressed: walls of wind that moved a hundred or two hundred miles an hour in a pinch, sustained over the course of a few minutes. Maybe even create the kind of tornado that could lift a car.
But since I’d gotten my power boost, that had become old news.
Now, the new hotness was creating massive tornadoes, F5, F6 and over, a thing that didn’t exist in nature, and even—once—dispelling a hurricane before it landed on Haiti. The weathermen had looked stupid that day, at least as stupid as they did most other days, since they tended to be wrong almost as much as political prognosticators. Both still kept their jobs in spite of that appalling track record, which was one of the mysteries of the universe as far as I was concerned.
I didn’t need a tornado, or a hurricane, to deal with Peter, though.
I just needed that air conditioning unit.
It wrenched free without me having to apply much power to it, a few hundred pounds of metal lifted into the air by a vortex under control of yours truly.
And then I reversed the current, redirected it a few feet, and lifted my head up to make sure I knew where it was going.
Peter was standing on the front lawn, aglow with laser light shooting out of his hands and chest. It was a stunning red beam, and he was howling, directing it any which way it pleased him. He locked his eyes on me, and I on him, and surveyed him with a cold fury worthy of…well…
Someone in my family. Not usually me.
“I gave you a chance to get out of this peacefully,” I shouted across the lawn, which was an apocalyptic wasteland of devastation. The house, fortunately, looked to be mostly intact, and I hoped the hostages were, too. “I tried to work with you, Peter, tried to help you get out of this alive.”
“Get down here!” Angel was seizing at my pants leg, tugging it, but gently, probably realizing that if she yanked it, I’d just let her rip it and keep doing what I was doing.
Peter cocked his head at me, like he was seeing me for the first time. He opened his mouth to speak, and a red glow started within it. Laser powers out of every hole in his body. Cute.
“But you didn’t want peace,” I said. “Or you were too stupid to take it.” That got his eyes glowing, and I was speaking rapidly now, furiously. “I don’t care either way, but you missed out, bub. You wanted war? Fine. This is war.
“Now reap the whirlwind, bitchnuts.”
I brought that air conditioning unit down on him like the wrath of God itself descending from the heavens, a meteor out of the sky with no fire to streak behind it to herald its arrival. A few hundred pounds of air conditioner made its landing on Peter’s head and he disappeared beneath its bulk as I slammed it into the earth and stopped it there, walls of wind arresting its forward momentum so it didn’t go bouncing into the police barricade or the houses beyond.
The only thing left to mark Peter’s passage was a splatter of blood and a couple of twitching feet.
“So long to the wicked Witch King of the South, no?” Angel was beside me, staring at the end of Peter. He did look a little like something out of The Wizard of Oz, now that she mentioned it, minus the cool footwear.
“I have to go home,” I said, turning from her and looking for my ride.
“Wait, what?” Angel was after me in a hot second. “Reed, you can’t just leave now that he’s dead. There are hostages—” As if on cue, a woman I took to be Elvira came bursting out of the shattered front door, two kids beside her and one cradled in her arms, squealing to beat the band. “And we’ve got—paperwork, and reports and—”
“Screw it all,” I said, still looking for my ride. “I have to get home. Right now.” My jaw was set, and so was my determination, and Angel must have seen it, because she didn’t argue. “All that other stuff can wait. I have to go. Now.”
“Home?” Angel asked. “Why?”
I didn’t answer her. All I could think of was that look on my sister’s face. I needed to get home, right now.
And then I needed to go to York.
To save the only family I had left.