31.
I was being grabbed by a hundred hands, roughly, angrily, fingers digging in, and somehow I knew that when they delivered me to Rose, it didn’t necessarily guarantee I’d be conscious or in good condition. I might have pieces missing, because Rose would have told them I could heal from just about anything they did to me.
Unfortunately, this knowledge of my healing ability was not as much of a consolation to me as you might think.
There was so much blood in my eyes I could scarcely see. It ran down my face, covering my vision like a crimson cloud, finding my nose and pooling on my upper lip, a metallic scent I couldn’t gag away from. My body hurt everywhere, but the top of the skull in particular was screaming from what had happened to it.
Someone kicked me, and that set the whole ball of the mob beatdown rolling. I had just started to come back to myself when the punches began to land, and none of them were what I would call gentle. They were hardly the practiced blows of a professional boxer, but there were a lot of them, and what they lacked in quality they damned sure made up for in quantity.
I wasn’t the type to lie there and take a beating though, so I swept out an arm, blindly, but with all my strength, and heard the satisfying crack of someone’s knee joint bending in a way it shouldn’t have. I heaved out in the other direction and was rewarded with another cry as I caught another knee and turned it wrongside-right, probably sending their kneecap to the back of their leg in the process.
That lessened the assault on two sides for a second, because the two people whose knees I’d broken fell back into their mob brethren, probably surprising them or knocking them off balance. I didn’t care which, so long as they stopped for a freaking second.
Lashing out with my feet, I did a little breakdance maneuver just as someone kicked me hard in the thigh. It kinda sent a numb tingle down my leg, but I didn’t need to feel it in order to dish out harm with it. I swung my legs around in a high-speed, vicious sweep, and was rewarded with grunts as I took the legs from under three or four people. The thud they made as they landed was a satisfaction all its own, and I swirled my legs up above my own head, kicking another couple people and forcing them to step back, giving me enough room to leap, somewhat blindly, to my feet.
I wiped the blood out of my eyes and got probably sixty percent of it, if that. I got enough of it that I could see again, albeit not well. My head was woozy from the skull trauma, I was still surrounded by a mob, and I’d mostly just made them take a step back, not driven them off. Driving them off was going to be harder, especially if they were somehow mind-controlled by Rose.
Even the injured were pulling themselves back up, looking at me with loathing and fury, angry and ready to attack. They were about a quarter of a second from surging at me like a rising tide.
I threw myself into their midst and swung with everything I had. Not one to wait for the attack to come rolling in, I seized the initiative and started dishing out skull fractures of my own. Screams of pain cut the air in Waverly Station, and I was back in the beatdown business, selling but taking no returns. I popped one guy in the jaw so hard he’d be drinking through a straw for a while, caught another one in the stomach so hard he bowled over the three people behind him.
Spinning because I sensed others closing on me from the rear, I caught two eager beavers with a spinning kick, my heel just about sheering their faces off and sending them flying to the side and into a clutch of assholes swarming at me. This wasn’t a fair fight—for them—but if they kept at me in a zombie horde, I wasn’t going to be able to put off the pain that was closing in on me forever, and they’d notch a win by sheer numbers alone.
I caught a glimpse of Mr. Blonde behind a couple of these jobbers that were coming at me in waves. He was lifting his hands, and I didn’t like the look of that, so I kicked the only non-metallic weapon on the platform at him—one of his mob co-conspirators.
Mr. Blonde’s eyes got big right before this dude with a bowl cut went sailing into his face. As a succubus, I was still faster and stronger than most other metas, and I could send a bastard at him pretty quick. He didn’t quite dodge in time, and ended up catching a shoulder to the nose, which slowed his roll.
“This has been fun, guys,” I said, hearing a train squealing a couple rows over. I slapped a big guy right in the face and shoved him, hard, against a little crowd behind him, bowling them all over. “Let’s never do this again.” I hurled myself forward and back down onto the tracks, wiping blood again as I heard the cries of the mob, a kind of guttural screaming, rise behind me.
I leapt the next train, landing on the roof and sweeping a quick look over the entire station. Apparently, station personnel had been oblivious to the rumble going on in their midst, because everywhere else in the station, business looked like it was proceeding as usual. A train was pulling out, and I was a little too disoriented at first to figure out which way it was even going.
Hell, I didn’t care. I needed to be anywhere but here.
Vaulting to the next train and then down onto the platform beneath, I realized I had about fifty yards and two more trains to leap before I could get there. I didn’t know what Mr. Blonde’s recovery time was, but I had a bad feeling it wasn’t going to be forever, which would have been a nice change from the way my luck had been running these last few days.
Screams from the mob got my attention as I dismounted and hustled across the wide platform ahead of me. They got louder when they saw me, like tiny, angry ferrets when they—I dunno, saw ferret food. They came streaming after me, a little too slow, thankfully.
I jumped the last train and started to hop over to the one pulling out when something whistled behind me. I threw myself down and a glittering swarm of metal bees shot over me. That damned shrapnel cloud again. It hovered there, closing slowly down, inching toward me where I lay, flat, against the train roof.
The son of a bitch had just imprisoned me; I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t get up, and couldn’t even roll to the side without ripping myself to shreds on his immobile minefield.
Dammit.
“STOP!” a woman’s voice cracked through the station, and it had that aura of command that expected to be obeyed. It also had an accent, and I damned near had a cow right there, because I thought it was Rose.
The metal fragments came tinkling down around me, dropping in my face and on my arms, sprinkling me like a metallic rain. Gently, too, not like bullets at all.
I looked up and found the little minefield gone, the train’s rattling loud in my ears as the one next to me continued to chug its way out of the station. There were only a few cars left and then it’d be gone, leaving me behind to face the mob, as well as Rose—
I sat up and looked across the platform. Most of the mob had stopped moving, a flow of people that had congealed in a mass, now looking back toward the origin of the shout, seeking direction. I stared across the platform and saw a woman standing there, just a thin slip of a girl, strawberry blond—
Not a redhead.
Not Rose.
She was standing next to Mr. Blonde, who looked like he was about to drop to one knee and propose. Other guys from the mob were there too, standing before her as though she were Queen Guinevere and they were about to swear their swords to her.
A woman’s face, purple with fury, popped up over the edge of the train nearest me, screaming as she clawed her way up to me, and, without thinking, I punched her in the nose. Not too hard, but she plummeted off the side of the train and thumped to the concrete ground below.
I stared at the blond woman in the distance, and she stared back at me. She raised a hand, and that was all I had time for.
I leapt onto the departing train, catching the last car right before it pulled out of the station, clattering down the tracks to a destination I didn’t even know.