Time, page 10
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jamal
We’d only just checked into our hotel near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center when Augustus’s phone started ringing. He held it up for me to see, his brow thickly knotted in confusion. “DC area code,” he said. I peered at it as it dinged with the standard ringtone.
“Maybe the front desk,” I said, knowing he was the one who’d checked us in. I let my suitcase lid fall on my bed and was about to take my toiletry bag out and put it in the beige, faux-granite-lined bathroom. “You should probably answer it.”
He shrugged and did, saying, “Hello?” as I disappeared into the bathroom for a second. I was keeping an ear out, just in case it wasn’t the front desk, but it didn’t seem likely it’d be anything serious—yet.
“Uhhhh …” my brother said as I laid my toiletry bag on the counter. I paused, listening. “Hold on a sec,” he said, and then I heard him put his phone on speaker. “Go on.”
“Jamal, are you there?” It was a man’s voice. It wasn’t high high, but it was higher than usual for a man. He wasn’t going to be confused for an opera singer anytime soon, but he might have gotten mixed up with a little boy a time or two.
“Who is this?” I asked, stepping out of the bathroom to find my brother with a dark cloud over his features. Whoever it was, it looked they’d surprised him, too.
“Ray Spiegel with the Beltway Blog,” came the voice again. “A source told me you guys were in Washington right now. Is that true?”
“Maybe,” I said, a little too gobsmacked to refute it flat out.
“Awesome, awesome,” he said, with genuine enthusiasm. “Listen, I’ve been a longtime fan of your guys’ work. I really think you have the potential to be the next big thing in the metahuman hero space, now that, uh—well, you know who is out of the picture—”
“Tell me he means Voldemort and not Sienna,” Augustus whispered, meta-low.
“—so, anyway, I was wondering—are you guys free for a coffee and a talk? I’m downstairs in your hotel’s coffee shop.” His voice changed a little to reflect a surprising amount of glee.
“Your source told you where we were staying, too, huh?” I cracked.
“That’s the way it works, you know,” he said with that same amused enthusiasm. “So, what do you say? You up for a chat?”
Augustus looked at me and shrugged. He was clearly lost in the woods on this one. I wasn’t much better off; I was used to people coming at me with fists and powers, not reporters with questions wanting to “chat.”
“Sure,” I said tightly. “We’ll be down in a few.”
“Great, great. See you guys then.” And he hung up.
“What the hell was that?” Augustus asked.
I didn’t answer for a second, instead pulling up my phone. I checked two things—the first was a camera feed from the coffee shop downstairs. Sure enough, there was a geeky little guy sitting there at a table for four in a short-sleeved dress shirt, in front of a laptop, just putting his phone down from a call. Ray Spiegel, I guessed. Then I hacked the wi-fi in the coffee shop and discovered that his computer—which had a wickedly hard firewall, not exactly off-the-shelf software—identified itself as “Ray’s Laptop.” I considered that confirmation.
Second … I went back to the article that Arche had sent me about the Custis family. I didn’t have to look very far, because all I was searching for was the byline at the top. Suspicion confirmed, I ended my connection with the phone and sat down on the bed a little hard. “That’s what I thought,” I muttered.
“What did you think?” Augustus asked. He was fully intent on me now, wondering what the hell was going on.
“Ray Spiegel,” I said, looking up at my brother, “is the guy who wrote the article that brought us here.” I watched as Augustus’s face turned into a cloud of suspicion, which pretty much matched my own feelings. “What do you want to bet that his source—the one that led him right to us—is the Custis family? Because it seems that not only do they know we’re in town … but they’re already sending out their pet reporter to talk to us.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sienna
“Iguess I have fans everywhere, too,” I said as I stared at Prettyboy. His looks were classically good—sharply defined cheekbones; dark, mysterious eyes. He wasn’t holding himself in an offensive stance; in fact, he looked completely relaxed as he stood in front of me, back against the next table while mine was up against Kat’s.
“I am a great admirer of your work,” he said, and now he giggled, his voice hitting a higher pitch.
“And who could blame you,” I said. “What’s your favorite thing I’ve done? Shredded Sovereign with my teeth? Beat a handcuffed Eric Simmons like a red-headed stepchild when he sexually harassed that waitress? Annihilated that insubstantial mass killer with fire in LA? I could go on, but go ahead—tell me your fave.”
“I like it when you kill anyone,” he said, and it was chilling how casual he was about it. Also, how little tension there was in his body as he admitted—with a smile—that he liked to watch me murder fellow human beings. I’d done the freaking deeds, and I wasn’t that cavalier about it.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, pushing my voice toward menace. This dude was giving off a bad, bad vibe, and people were picking up on it. Folks were already starting to head for the exits, which I thought was sensible; I wished I could follow them. But no, I was stuck here engaging with some shitbrick who thought killing people was “cool.” “You want to see me kill someone up close and personal? Is that your angle? You a voyeur?”
“Yes,” he said, and there was waaaaaaay too much unrequited lust in how he said it. “I want to see death. Very close.”
“You’re certainly heading that way, bucko,” I said, trying to buy time for the dining room to clear. Some stubborn holdouts were still watching things unfold, and I cursed both them and the fact that my days as a redhead were now over. I was running out of shades to dye my hair, and at this rate I’d be going fluorescent with my next dye job.
“Good,” he said with unmistakably demented joy. “I want it. I want to see it. Feel it. Show me … death. Give it to me.”
“That sounds a little closer to what I figured you’d asked her,” I chucked a thumb over my shoulder at Kat. “This death thing kind of a fetish for you? Am I going to have to turn you Fifty Shades of Purple?”
He still smiled, and OH MY HEAVENS was there something terribly wrong with it. “Yes. Please.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “To be clear … are you asking me to—”
He stood, smiling, and his breath came out in a way that reminded me of—nothing I terribly wanted to be reminded of. It was way too sensual, way too close to intimate, and in a public place, no less. “Yes. I want you, Sienna Nealon … to kill me.”
I just stared at him. “Huh,” I said.
For the first time, he evinced a flicker of uncertainty. “… What?”
I blinked. “Well … usually that’s the subtext when someone picks a fight with me nowadays, but kudos to you for having the honesty to say out loud that you’ve got a death wish. ‘I’m going to pick a fight with Sienna Nealon because I want her to kill me.’ That’s bold. And it’s also what always seems to happen when someone starts shit with me, but I mean … just, bravo on having that self-awareness. It’s so refreshing.” I cast a look around the dining room. There were still about twenty or so people scattered around the room and a bunch more clogging the exits as they tried to flee. This was as good as it was going to get unless I got a little more active about it. “Well, what the hell are you idiots just staring for?” I asked, raising my voice to a thunderous volume, “Get the hell out of here so I can kill this idiot like Sean Bean in everything he’s ever been in!”
I can’t imagine most of the people there actually understood what I was saying, but my tone was enough to get the stragglers moving, bringing the gawkers back to life and making them head for the exits. Within a few moments, the room was clear except for one table at the back with five other guys dressed exactly like my dance partner here. Black suits, white shirts, black ties …
Oh, and a few of them were missing all or part of fingers on their left hands, starting with their pinkies. When they caught me looking, they rose, unfolding themselves from the booth, and I rolled my eyes and looked back at Prettyboy. “Yakuza? Really?”
He grinned and inclined his head in a subtle of bows. “I am who I am.”
“Explains why you haven’t lost any fingers,” I muttered, figuring it was time to go for the gusto. He wasn’t nearly far enough away, his stance was pathetic for defense, wide open and poorly positioned to defend, so I decided to gauge how much trouble this bastard was about to give me. Surging forward, I hit him with a short punch to the throat that would have crushed a human’s—or even most metahumans—trachea.
Unfortunately … the only thing that got crushed were my hopes for a brief fight. My hand bounced off his neck like I’d punched a wall, and Prettyboy didn’t even look surprised when I struck him.
“Shit!” I said as I pulled my hand back, shaking it in the universal sign of, “Damn, that hurt.” I had a sudden burst of empathy for Harry that I’d maybe been lacking after the hand-breaking thing at Narita. I stared at Prettyboy, he stared at me. “Achilles?”
He just grinned. “We call it …” And he said something unpronounceable in Japanese.
Then the bastard hit me.
Unfortunately, I did not share his invincible skin. Mine was as pliable as a normal human’s, and so I took it pretty hard. I managed to mitigate the blow somewhat by twisting away at the last second, but still, there’s only so much you can do when a human wrecking ball winds up and tries to level you when you’re inches away from them. It was my own fault, getting caught up in the pain in my hand instead of moving to the next attack in my tactical toolbox—which would probably involve trying to rip this asshole’s soul right out of his body like I was a crazed, red-headed Scot and he was some sort of sexy, brilliant American succubus who was clearly the most misunderstood person on the planet.
Except I wouldn’t have played around; I would have finished the job on his sorry ass.
I flew through the air but only a couple feet, smashing into the wall above Kat as she let out a shriek beneath me. She caught me as I fell, praise be to Little Miss Persephone's meta-reflexes, and I felt her bare hands on my wrists. There had been a curious shattering sound in my skull as I’d hit the wall and failed to crash through, a sound that told me that a) it was concrete and b) my skull was softer than concrete and my momentum not great enough to overcome the challenges of smashing through.
“Hold still a sec,” Kat muttered, still gripping me skin to skin. I could barely understand her because I’d just experienced skull trauma of the sort usually reserved for people who have just been hit with a falling piano. From the top of the Empire State Building. Or something of the sort.
The black blurring around the edges of my vision faded, and I broke contact with Kat with a subtle, “Thanks,” as I sprang back up five seconds after landing, shaking off the feeling of getting battered and nearly one-shotted by this douchecanoe.
“Don’t mention it,” Kat said, sounding woozy herself, “and don’t expect a second round anytime soon unless you want a new passenger.”
“I like you as a close friend, but not that close, if you know what I mean,” I said. “Also, if you think Harry is creepy now, it would be so much worse if you were in my head when we—”
“Okay, thank you, go fight now,” Kat said, sounding caught between exhausted and repulsed.
Speaking of Harry, I caught a glimpse of him lingering in the doorway, eyes on the five yakuza standing across the room. They were leering at me, but they weren’t moving yet. And Prettyboy was just standing there, doing a little leering of his own as I came up off the mat from my near-first-round knockout.
“I thought you wanted me to kill you,” I said, putting my dukes up and watching my foot work. I was going to need to get in close with this guy, and frankly—and this bothered me at least a little because of the consequences—absorb his soul, since otherwise beating an Achilles with their impenetrable skin and near invulnerability required weapons and powers I no longer had.
“I do,” he said, still smiling. “But do not think I will simply surrender, lie down, and die. You must defeat me.”
“Oh, I’ma defeat you, all right,” I muttered, keeping both eyes on him. “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t asked for that by the time this is done. I’ve killed harder Achilles types than you in my sleep.” Technically true, though Reed had been heavily involved in that, beating the living tar out of Anselmo Serafini and tossing him onto my insensate body, which had been wreathed in superhot flames at the time.
“Tell me more,” he said, just standing there, waiting for me to come at him. “Or better still—show me.”
It was pretty obvious to me he wasn’t just going to stand still and let me absorb him. And he was bound to know about that, because everyone on the freaking planet who had even a nodding acquaintance with the name “Sienna Nealon”—and this guy was way past nodding and into Annie Wilkes territory—knew I absorbed souls through skin-to-skin contact. Whatever his death wish was, it didn’t look like he was down to just be drained, or at least he wasn’t going to simply surrender to it.
Which only left me a few options, none of them great.
I came at him in an obvious jab, something straight out of a boxing match, and he slapped my hand aside. None of my punches were going to do squat to him. If I landed a true, brutal, grand slam haymaker, it might annoy him slightly, and come at the cost of my knuckles getting broken. Achilles were truly, nearly invulnerable, possessing a bone structure that was hard as diamonds and skin that was resistant to blunt force trauma like it had been hardened into steel. Fire worked on it, but unfortunately I didn’t have a blow torch secreted away in my bag. Guns did nothing against these guys. Eyeballs were kind of a weakness, but not much of one; they were slightly more susceptible to a good strike, but I couldn’t really pop them like with any other, normal(ish) meta.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t vulnerable in other ways.
Glancing at the nearest table out of the corner of my eye, I took a mental inventory of the discarded dishes that the patrons had left behind. Rice, ramen, rice, tempura, rice—yakisoba—
Yakisoba noodles in thick brown sauce. Perfect.
I made a feint at Prettyboy and then swept my hand around, grabbing the plate of yakisoba off the table and hurling it into his face from less than two feet away. He must have been expecting to intercept my hand midair, because he slapped at me and knocked it aside—
But not until after I’d loosed the yakisoba right in his face.
There was nothing chemically bad about the dish as far as I knew. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him, it didn’t possess peppers that would irritate his tear ducts. It was just noodles in a nice, thick sauce that’d make him blink for a second and maybe obscure his vision.
That was all I needed, really.
Another flaw of the Achilles was that they were just as susceptible to laws of physics as anyone else. Once Prettyboy had his hands on his face, trying to clear the yakisoba, he was blind as an old beggar, and nicely distracted. I slipped a couple feet to my left, circling around him and avoiding the chairs in my path with a quick jump that placed me just over his right shoulder. He was grasping at his eyes, trying to restore his sight, even though he probably could have just opened his eyes at any time and stared through the blur of sauce without having any problems at all.
The human instinct to protect the eyes is a powerful thing. Even in a being whose eyes couldn’t actually take damage from getting something like yakisoba in them.
I jacked Prettyboy in the back of the head with a haymaker, slamming my fist into the soft-ish tissue at the base of his spine. I got a little hit on the bone, too, which stung me, but also caused him to lurch forward from the force of my donkey punch, and—I suspected, at least—sent his brain hard against his invulnerable skull.
I’d recently proven that an Achilles’s brain was not invulnerable, mostly by turning Rose’s into pudding with a bullet trapped inside her own invincible skull. That gave me a tactical direction to move in, which was to say that my current plan B (since plan A, drain his soul, was being blocked at present) was to use his own invulnerability of skin and bone to turn his head into a makeshift brain blender. I also had a few suspicions that his spinal cord, while more durable than most, was probably not as invincible as the bones protecting it. That was Plan C, though, because I didn’t know if striking him hard in the vertebrae was going to be something I’d get enough time to test, at least not right now. I’d just done it, after all, as hard as I could, and since he wasn’t dead or paralyzed, it suggested I’d need to bring a lot more force to bear on his spine in order to dislodge a vertebra and break the cord.
Right now, though, I was focused on Plan B, turning his brain to slurry. Next: take his legs from underneath him. I couldn’t just bust out his knee joints, either, which was always the quickest way to take a person to the ground, because his knee joints weren’t exactly breakable.
I came around him, circling to behind his left shoulder as he lashed out blindly toward where I’d thrown the punch only a second before. I didn’t bother trying to do what I normally would have, peppering his kidneys with painful blows, because he wouldn’t have felt the pain anyway. Instead, I kept circling and shot my right hand out over his shoulder like I was going to tap him, but kept going until it hovered over his left collarbone. Then I swept my right foot forward at the back of his knees until I just barely touched them. It wasn’t a kick, and it wasn’t a traditional sweep, the kind where you try and deprive your opponent of footing and do them a little damage at the same time. Doing damage to him with a kick was the kind of fruitless stupidity I tried to avoid in my life.
