7.
Reed
To her credit, Isabella didn’t ask me if I’d seen the news when I came walking in. She probably didn’t need to, because we’d been together long enough at this point that I was sure she could see the gears turning just by looking at my face. The smell of her perfume wafted lightly through the air of our small apartment in Eden Prairie, just a few short minutes from my work.
And the gears were turning. They’d been turning the whole drive home.
“How was your day?” she asked instead, her Italian accent ever present. I didn’t notice it most of the time, unless she was yelling. Then it tended to get really pronounced. She asked neutrally, without a hint of irony, or leading, like she really just wanted to know.
I pondered my answer as I plopped down on the couch next to her. My white collar was already unbuttoned, my tie loosened appropriately, as though I’d been swilling liquor behind the cafeteria at a school dance with the other guys, instead of crammed in a hot bullpen watching cable news report over and over that my sister was the subject of a manhunt in another country for more crimes that I was pretty sure she didn’t commit.
“Like someone wiped their ass on my toast,” I said, picking a random metaphor out of the air. It made her frown in contemplation, which I took as a failure, because I’d been hoping to lighten the moment. “Like crap,” I said, and the frown lessened a degree.
She nodded. She didn’t have to ask if I’d seen. “What are you going to do?” she asked instead.
“Nothing,” I said, parroting back what I’d told the boys outside the office. “Sienna’s a big girl. She can take care of herself better than any of the rest of us can, our new boosted powers notwithstanding. She did kick all of our asses, minus Jamal, last time we fought, remember.”
“It would be hard to forget,” she said dryly, probably thinking of how I had disappeared after that for a while. “But…just because she can handle the problem doesn’t mean you’re not going to agonize worrying over it. How do you feel?”
I put my head back against the soft, white leather couch. It sank back slightly, but I was still able to meet her gaze, even with my head tilted just so, my neck angled uncomfortably. “Powerless,” I said. “You and I know this thing, this hunt for her, it’s all a farce—”
“She does a fair amount of damage wherever she goes,” Isabella said, playing devil’s advocate once more. Though, honestly, if she were advocating for the devil, you’d think she’d be on Sienna’s side, at least based on the way our world’s theology was tilting. Sienna was rapidly achieving boogeyman—or boogeywoman—status. But not woman-who-boogies status, which was a shame, because seeing her dance? Hilarious.
“But that’s not why they’re after her,” I said, shoving up off the couch and taking care not to overturn it, and my paramour, with excess zeal as I did so. “They know she didn’t mini-nuke Los Angeles. The government knows she didn’t blast the crap out of Eden Prairie for the heck of it. Those criminals were after her, were going to kill her, and President Harmon—”
Isabella held up a hand to her lips, a single finger stretching across their rich, lustrous red. I’d almost let it fly with everything there, and admitting that Sienna had confronted Harmon, resulting in his death, was probably not the sort of thing it’d be wise to say here and now. We were pretty sure the FBI had us under surveillance as part of their general Sienna Nealon investigation. At first it had been really awkward, but after a while we’d simply adapted to the fact that we were probably being constantly listened in on.
On the plus side, I suspected now that Isabella had a bit of a voyeurism fetish, based on her rise in—
Never mind.
Gross.
Anyway. I changed course mid-speech. “It’s not fair that she gets blamed for what happened when those crooks came after her. Or what happened to Harmon, because—I mean, let’s face it—no one knows what happened to him.” I knew what happened to him, at least in general terms, actually, but it wouldn’t do to say aloud on an FBI recording, “Yeah, Sienna inadvertently killed his ass, and boy, did he deserve it,” however true all that might have been.
“Yes, but people have reason for their suspicions,” Isabella said, patiently. Which was funny, because, of the two of us, I was generally the patient one. “Everyone knows she’s killed people before. And not just killed them, but cold-bloodedly murdered them. Clyde Clary. Glen Parks, Eve Kappler—”
“I know their names,” I said, looking away at the TV, which was dark, thankfully. The last thing I needed at this time of night was to get sucked back into the news cycle.
“She’s done so much damage,” Isabella said. “The YouTube video of her assaulting a prisoner—”
“I know. I was there, and Eric Simmons could have used a good punching after that—”
“That reporter she slugged—”
“Geez, they blindsided her—”
“I could go on,” Isabella said quietly, but seemed to resign herself to not pressing it. I knew she was right anyway. “Everything she’s done, right or wrong…it’s all bricks in the wall they’ve used to block her in. Box her in, I guess you could say, if you were feeling…what’s the word…ironic?” She made a face that expressed her distaste. “Your sister is a scary person to those looking from the outside. However much good she’s done—and I’ll admit it’s a lot—it doesn’t erase the bad, you know.”
“I’m not so blinkered I don’t see that.” I pushed my fingers against my forehead and cheekbones and gave a solid press, battling against sinus pressure that wasn’t actually there and a headache that was. “I don’t view her as some flawless goddess, all right? But she’s saved the world a few times, and she’s put a lot of criminals away.” I pulled my fingers back from my eyes. “She’s fought against people who have no ethical line, who have—in some cases—practically no limits on their power. I mean, look at this Edinburgh thing.” I gestured to the black TV screen. “Whoever she fought there, they’ve got a power tailor-made for massive amounts of destruction.” I thought about that red beam ripping through the city on the shaky, camera-phone footage. “How are you supposed to bring someone like that down calmly, without it getting wild?”
Isabella shrugged. “How do you do it?”
I sighed. “Wildly. And sometimes it gets out of control. Recall that I ripped apart a commune outside Orlando earlier this year with a custom-made hurricane. People like us…” I bowed my head, taking a long breath. “We’re not human, but we’re subject to human laws, and sometimes it stinks, especially when you meet a person who’s hell-bent on destruction. I don’t think I have to explain to you that there are just certain people out there whose only allegiance is to wrecking everything they possibly can, to hell with who gets hurt in the process.” I tried to let out another cleansing breath, but it didn’t really cleanse me. I felt as tired, and knotted as ever. “Sienna puts herself up against those people all the time, and she doesn’t really get much credit for when things go right, only for when they go madly wrong. Sometimes I wish…” I put my head back again. “Sometimes I wish that she hadn’t been found out, that metas had never gone public. Or that she hadn’t been around when they did, that we just had a few years of this rising chaos without a Sienna Nealon around to ride herd on it. Let people see what the world would be like without her for a while, let people know what they’re missing.”
Somehow, speaking this simple truth let some of the sting of all these months of injury, something I’d not ever been able to put my fingers on exactly before, let loose a tide of feeling I could finally put a name to.
Stinging anger at the world’s ingratitude toward the person who’d saved them more times than they’d ever know.
“You should be careful what you wish for,” Isabella said, taking my hand gently, our living room quiet now, our eyes meeting over the distance between us. “You might just get what you want…and then you might find…it was not what you wanted at all.”