Heart of the Storm, page 22
In the distance, I could see portals opening and green-clad Chinese troops beginning to file out. In my earpiece, I heard Sierra report, without much affect: “The Chinese army has located the battle. Their reinforcements are beginning to enter the city now and are establishing a perimeter.”
“I just noticed that,” I said, watching Sienna burst through another building in an effort to ditch Fen Liu, who was close on her tail. Without any time to contemplate the Chinese forces, I prepared myself with the best option I had available, and headed for Sienna at near-supersonic speed.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
Sienna
Icould feel the heat of Fen Liu's plasma eating through the walls behind me as I burst out the other side of a building, aching from a dozen impacts. It started to collapse, another casualty of her rampage, and I began to wonder why she'd bothered dodging me this long. Seemed like she had the upper hand.
But then, when this had started, it had probably seemed like I had the upper hand. How things changed.
“Sierra?” I called, testing to see if my earwig had survived my transition into dragon mode. I doubted it; I was so much bigger now, my ear canal had probably expanded to the point where it had just dropped right out, leaving me out of contact with my forces. Which was unfortunate because I would love to have made a call to Reed and company back in the US and gotten them over here to help me crack the plasma- powered shell of Fen Liu. He'd been able to blast the plasma off people before with his winds. Or maybe David Gustafson could trap her in a shield bubble and let her burn her oxygen away. Odin could fry her brain with his extra-strength Warmind, since my basic level one didn't seem to be so much as turning her head.
Running through my list of skills as I made a strategic retreat didn't offer me any options. Nothing I could bend to work against her, nothing I could repurpose to blast plasma. At best I could produce a stream of water that might sear her slightly – if I let her get close enough to burn my flesh off.
Although...I was able to crack the gates of hell. But if I wasn't point blank with her at the time, it'd be easy to dodge that ribbon of burning red. Not exactly plan A, but if we did end up getting close, maybe I could do something to her.
A flash of purple made me turn; around the corner a block back, Wade was blasting away at her flank while she focused on me. His beam hit her right in the snake ass, and she jerked from the impact, her flying slither speeding up.
She turned, and his beam slashed into a building, cutting pieces from it before it stopped. Wade was hovering awkwardly half a block behind her as she started to turn, revealing to me her ass, where she'd been hit–
And there was zero damage. Her scales were visible, the plasma temporarily burned away, but it fluttered back into place as I watched, and came to a dawning realization–
She'd taken ALL the serums. Jacked up her own powers, but also grabbed some new ones.
And one of them was the invincibility of an Achilles.
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
Wade
My beam did nothing, and that was when I knew we were in real trouble.
Honestly, I thought getting Fen Liu alone, in a place of our choosing, would be 99% of winning this battle. Separate her from her forces, defeat her precious Skynet, put her in a place where she couldn't kill innocent people or hide behind her army (immediately), and we had her.
Turns out...I was wrong. And Sienna was wrong. And together, we couldn't have been more wrong.
I wondered if I was going to get some of the blame for this later, like you're supposed to in a marriage.
But I had a bigger, more immediate concern, and it was the dragon that turned on me. I started to go in the opposite direction, figuring speed might be my saving grace, when her eyes glinted red–
I got hit by eyebeams, and it was like being back in an elementary school pickup football game when someone's older brother from middle school joins in and tackles you full force.
It felt like getting hit with God's own baseball bat, like getting sideswiped by a jetliner, and having a building fall down on you all at once. I hit the nearest concrete facade and bounced off, a dozen injuries screaming for my attention as I fell out of the sky, all thoughts of dragons and defeating Fen Liu knocked out of my head and replaced by a faint desire to retain consciousness and maybe – just maybe – survive the landing.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
Sienna
“WADE!” I shouted, and shot into a hard dive. My husband had gotten all jacked up by Fen Liu's sudden, surprise attack with eyebeams, and I'd lost sight of him once he bounced off a building and went dropping out of sight behind another one, tumbling down a cross-street I couldn't see from here.
Fen Liu moved well, fluttering down to block my passage. She leered at me with her dragon face, and I froze in my dive, fearful of being annihilated by a full-force burst of plasma. “This was always your problem, you know – you are afraid to take power. Afraid to make sacrifices. You are afraid of war, because it requires both – and that is why you will lose.”
A tension ran through my oblong body, from snout to tail. “And you've never been afraid to sacrifice anyone or anything in pursuit of it. Because all you care about is power.”
“It's the only thing that lasts,” she said, “that's worth having. You had the White House open to you. All you had to do was sit down in the chair and tell everyone – this is mine now. A minor defense, a little effort, and you would have been dictator for life. It was right there – and you forsook it.”
“Because I don't want to rule over a nation of slaves,” I said.
Her eyes gleamed. “I do,” she said, and I barely dodged the blast of her eyebeams as they shot past my head.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Wade
Ilost consciousness and came back to it about ten feet from slamming into the concrete road. The wind was whipping past my face, slapping at my cheeks with speed that indicated I'd reached terminal velocity some time ago. The street growing large in my field of vision gave me a gut-clenching moment of panic, and I almost shouted before my instincts kicked in and I stopped myself in midair, coming to a halt about six inches from the pavement.
A car engine hummed to a stop with squealing brakes about twenty feet from me as something exploded across the building behind me. I started to fly back, but a glance at the car told me it was Lethe, Hades, and that Chinese guy they'd been using as a chauffeur. Hell if I could remember his name.
“How's it going out there?” Lethe asked, sticking her head out the window and parking her butt on it like a coed riding in her boyfriend's car to a tailgate party.
“Worse than we anticipated,” I called back. “She's taken the serums, and her powers are the stuff of legends.” I pointed at Hades, sitting in the back seat. “Any chance you want to take a stab at ripping her soul out?”
Hades was out of the car in an instant, jogging toward the intersection where dust was billowing from battle debris falling ten stories to the ground. I paced along behind him at a float, both of us stopping when we reached the corner.
“Hmm,” Hades said, peeking his head out. He squinted, seeming to concentrate. “That's a big soul.” He grunted a little. “I think she's going to be – ahh, Babaī!”
A wave of debris hit the corner, a section of concrete knocking Hades back and bowling me over, too. The wall beside us collapsed and I reacted with my enhanced reflexes, but still barely got us out of the way of a cascading mess of debris. The building beside us issued an ominous creak, and it was all I could do to snatch up Hades, who had gone limp, and bolt back for the car.
“Move, move!” I shouted, on the fly, and the driver did, throwing it into reverse as the building began to collapse behind us.
I flew for it, the wind blowing hard against my face. I made it out from under the debris field, and so did Lethe and the car, just before the building fell down right where they'd been parked and I'd been standing with Hades just moments before. As the debris began to settle, the rush of dust having already poured over us, I was left with an insensate Hades in my arms.
Out of the cloud, Lethe appeared. “How is he?”
“Not dead,” I said, having touched his jugular to confirm his heart was still beating. “But I don't think he's waking up anytime soon, either.”
“He probably would have struggled to take someone like her, anyway,” Lethe said, her eyes tracking to the sounds of battle still ongoing somewhere behind us. “He's not as strong as he used to be. It'd give her time to react, to track him, to kill him while he was trying to lock in the soul drain.” She tensed, then looked at me. “Sienna can't take her, can she?”
How to answer that? “It's not looking so good,” I said. “Fen Liu is at a sick level of power. Dragon, plasma, Achilles, eyebeams...if I could pick my powers, there's only a couple I'd add to that.”
“Most people don't get to choose their powers,” Lethe said, then glanced at me. “And obviously some of us have had less fortune in that department for...reasons.”
“That's true,” I said, and looked over at the car, where their chauffeur was still waiting behind the wheel. My backpack was in there, with all of Cassidy's little goodies. So was Sienna's. In the distance, I could hear a dragon roar in pain, and it came in the voice of Sienna.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
Sienna
“You could run at any time, you know,” Fen Liu said, with great glee, as she belched a gout of plasma at me. It made it past my head, missing me by a few dozen feet, and floated down to the street below, melting the pavement into a slurry of molten asphalt.
“I'm not done killing you yet,” I said, and belted another round of Brance voice at her. I followed it by cracking the gates of hell, and she took that blast – which could level cities – like it was a gentle tap on the face, barely deigning to notice it. Where the plasma had faded for but a moment, I saw a black scar like carbon scoring on a piece of stainless steel. As I watched, it disappeared like it had never been there–
“You have Wolfe healing in addition to Achilles nigh invulnerability?” I dodged another belch of plasma.
She laughed. The bitch. “I have many skills. But I prefer to use the more elegant tools of our time to achieve my ends. Actually, I should thank you – before our encounter in the prison in Shenzhen, I hesitated to use the serums for fear of side effects. Modern pharmacology does not come without costs, after all. But being there, at your mercy, I realized I needed to use every tool at my disposal to destroy you.” She billowed another wash of plasma that I barely dodged, then tried to push me into it with a blast of eyebeams. I took that hit, though, rather than be forced into her trap, and felt a series of ribs break along my side. “And I have used every tool, now.”
“Including yourself, because you're the biggest tool of all–” I said, then took another blast of eyebeams as I tried to protect my wounded side by spiraling into a coil. It didn't work, though, because she busted my ribs along that side instead, and while I was running my Wolfe healing all-out, she could deal me damage faster than I could recover from it. I started to flutter lower.
I had lost my breath from the two vicious blasts; it was like getting your ribs kicked in on one side, then the other, in rapid succession. I felt like I couldn't breathe, and my brain started to go into panic mode.
In the distance, I could see soldiers in Chinese Army uniforms slowly closing in, marching their way up the avenue, about six blocks out. Fen Liu chuckled, then shot another round of eyebeams at me that clipped one of my wings – to no effect except to tack on a little more pain. I dove a little lower, trying to decide what the hell to do next, because my options were rapidly narrowing, and victory looked like it might not be among them.
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
Fen Liu
Why had she been avoiding this? This had been easy. Easier than all the things she'd done in the olden days, the imperial days, the days when the Communist party was on the rise, and so was she.
A power she'd never known before flowed through her veins, gifting her with strength beyond that of nearly anyone that had ever walked the planet. It gave her hope for the future, for the things she would be facing in the days ahead. For although Sienna Nealon had turned the tables on her, wrested control of her digital microphone away from her, she would grasp it back once the Baizuo whore was dead, and put to an end all resistance.
It was a holy trinity, the power at her command – uncontested personal strength, indomitable military control through the largest, most powerful army the world had ever seen, and an electronic stranglehold on information of a kind the most rapacious dictators of the past would have drooled in envy of.
Power, overwhelming, indeed.
Her armies closed from all directions, moving steadily up the streets toward them. General Guoqiang had found her, as she'd intended, but she hadn't really needed the help, as it turned out. But this was good. They were going to watch their premier crush the so-called most powerful woman in the world. Some were filming it; she could see the glint of phone cameras lenses in the sun. She'd let that escape the blanket of electronic control. It would do the nation good to know who was at the helm of their ship of state. Give them pride. Offer a vision for deterrence, too.
She ripped through a building with a blaze of scarlet light shot from her eyes, driving Nealon in her dragon form closer to the ground. Her dragon form was even inferior; a cool blue shade versus her angry red. More like a snake with wings, and a tapered, pointed head like a triangle rather than the classical, fiery look of a Chinese dragon. She was a serpent, though she lacked the feathers her type might suggest.
Driving her closer to the ground was all part of the plan. She was losing room to run with every foot she dropped; the armies closing in formed a perimeter, and enough of them had energy projection capabilities to knock her out of the sky should she try to flee. The distant buzz of drones suggested they were in play as well, coming to create a net she couldn't fly past.
So Fen Liu bided her time, alternating between the eyebeams and breathing plasma to push Nealon closer to the ground, deeper into her web – from whence, this time, she would not escape.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
Sienna
There are times, in a fight, when it becomes blisteringly obvious that you're in the deepest of shit.
The first time I fought Rose was probably the clearest example of one of those. She'd approached me in a cemetery in Edinburgh when I was already down, and then proceeded to drain the souls out of my body. Subsequently, she'd kicked my ass halfway across the country, in a series of encounters that I'd survived only by the grace of her desire to torture the hell out of me. It was glaringly obvious upon reflection – and I'd had months for that, after – but at the moment I'd been just trying to run, to survive, to make the next canny move that would keep me out of her jaws.
This...felt a lot like that. Fen Liu clearly had the upper hand, and she was not letting up. She was driving me deeper into her trap, which was anchored by incoming drones, by her onrushing armies, and by herself, which was obviously the most formidable and immediate threat of the three.
I didn't know how to beat her. I didn't even have the first clue where to start. Nothing I could throw at her was making so much as a dent that she couldn't heal; charging at her would just get me dissolved into particulate matter, turning me into a threat only to the lungs of whatever future inhabitants were going to eventually move into this city.
For the first time in a long while, I'd come across a meta I couldn't so much as ding.
And God, did that stick in my oversized craw.
“A wise person never overestimates their own efficacy, but always takes care not to exceed their potential,” Fen Liu said, spitting fortune cookie wisdom at me as she belched plasma in a wave followed by a crimson blast that forced me to dodge ever lower, buildings coming apart around me from the damage she was inflicting.
“My potential has generally been considered limitless,” I said, feeling the heat as a wave of plasma burst past me and blanketed the edifice of the building, dissolving the concrete like a sandcastle under the tides.
“If only you'd seized more power,” she tsked at me. “Your husband understood. That's why he picked up so many when I threw my army at him. I always admired a man who sought power.”
“Yeah, you've ridden a carousel of dicks on your climb up,” I said, dodging another eye beam that clipped the side of my head, rocking my entire world. “Too bad none of them realized how willing you were to kill them to climb. Zhen Xiang. Jun Gong. Wei Zhang. Though I bet it stretches further back than that.”
She paused, surprise raising her dragon eyebrows. “How did you know about them?”
I snorted through my dragon nose. “Did you really think it was a secret that you sacrificed lovers on your climb up the greased-up pole of the Chinese Communist party? And I don't mean Mao, though I'm sure you climbed his greased-up pole, too.”
Her eyes widened in shock, then narrowed in fury. I was almost against the ground, and my room to dodge was down to just about zero. “I won't miss you. No one will, for long, because I'm going to make it my mission to kill every single person you've ever associated with. Your name will be digitally stricken from the world internet as more countries fall under my control. In a hundred years, no one will remember your name.” She breathed plasma out her nostrils, illuminating her dragon face with an eerie blue light. “That's real power. True and total control.”
“And here I thought it was having people who actually give enough of a shit about you to help you out when you're in a pinch,” I said. And tried to keep a straight face.
