Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (21 page)

She circled and came in for a landing. “What have you got?”

“Dudes with guns,” I called to her out of the top of my little fortress. “Still a guy with a shotgun out there, I think.”

She floated above me for a second, looking around. “Must have rabbited. No one here but dead guys.”

“D—
what
?” My shield dissolved in an instant, dropping to the ground like a sandstorm that had just lost all its fury. It all fell in a weak ridge, a small mound no more than shin-high in a circle around me.

And beyond it, I saw … dead guys.

One of them looked like he’d been run over, and I realized he’d gotten crushed under the bulldozer action I’d planned to use to knock him off his feet. Three others were bloody as hell, looked like they’d gotten blown up or something.

Except there were pebbles and dirt all mixed in with the blood and the wounds. Like they’d gotten hit with a rock shotgun.

“Holy hell,” I whispered, and I stared at the last of them. At least this one I could take no credit for, though it took me a moment to cipher that out.

“Well, well, well,” Sienna said as she landed at my side, so softly I didn’t even hear her feet crunch in the gravel that was spread everywhere from my destruction of the roadway. “This looks familiar.”

One of the gunmen was lying flat, in the middle of the zone of destruction I’d created, but he had none of the signs of being run over or plowed down or blown up in an explosion of rock and dirt.

This one had burns to his face and neck that made him almost unrecognizable, like someone had come along with a blowtorch and just cooked off half his face.

“Looks like you’ve just had a run-in with our infamous lightning man,” Sienna said, staring at the blackened body before us, which lay there like a clue we hadn’t expected. “And maybe, if we’re lucky, he’s one of the ones that didn’t survive.”

The police showed up and cordoned off the area a few minutes later. Augustus had completely torn up the road, leaving at least two potholes that would be enough to destroy an Abrams tank if it wandered into them by accident. I didn’t feel compelled to bring that up to the guy, though, because he’d taken the news that he’d killed people while trying to defend himself … poorly.

I could sympathize. I could almost, barely, remember a time before I’d killed people, when I felt pretty decidedly against the whole thing. I’d gotten a taste of it at first, found it unpalatable, and then decided to go in the opposite direction until a frost giant named Erich Winter had pushed me firmly the other way. By the time the war was over, I’d done enough killing that I only held back out of expediency.

Now that my ass seemed to be perpetually in the fire for some perceived wrong, I wasn’t feeling an overabundance of restraint when it came to all forms of violence. The Russian situation had carried with it an enormous body count, and that little factoid hadn’t been used as anything other than a cudgel to reinforce what a relentless killer I was. But I didn’t really care at this point. My soul was appropriately calloused by now, I supposed.

Augustus didn’t have that. He was sitting on a curb with his head between his hands while the cops and medics swarmed everywhere. I’d already ruled out the idea that lightning man was among the dead because they were all wearing cloth gloves and none of them showed signs of burning where electricity would have passed through, but I was holding back on telling him that, since he probably had enough on his mind.

The police lights were flashing all around us, and Calderon was making the rounds with a sour look on his face. He hadn’t talked to me yet, but I presumed that was going to be a marvelous conversation, one which would lead anyone watching to the conclusion we hated each other rather than that we had really quite enjoyed each other’s company less than twelve hours ago. Things moved quickly for me, I guess. Always in the wrong direction, but quickly.

I shuffled toward Augustus. I didn’t mind complete silence when I was alone, but it sorta drove me nuts when I was standing in the middle of a crowd. And it was getting crowded, to the point where I could actually feel the souls of the people moving around me, like they were all within arm’s reach and I could just reach out and grab them one by one.

Which was not a power I had, thankfully, but it did make me want to just start grabbing people and drinking them dry of their souls. Never a good sign.

“How are you holding up?” I asked him, almost as much to distract myself as to be nice. I was still a little tentative after our previous conversation, after all. Gun shy, I think you could call it. I doubted he wanted much from me at the moment.

“I just killed those guys,” he said, shaking his head.

“First time’s always rough,” I said, standing over him and watching the scene. Calderon didn’t even look at me.

“Oh, you remember that, do you?” He was appropriately snotty for the situation, I thought, so I didn’t hold it against him.

“Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, yeah,” I said.

He looked up at me. “What about you?” he asked, a little grudgingly. He genuinely was a nice guy, and he didn’t even have to pretend.

“I’ve had better days,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Still stinging from our argument?”

I eyed him. “It was not my favorite conversation ever, but I’ve had two I’d class as worse since then.”

He looked up at me and frowned. “What happened?” He nodded his head toward Calderon. “You and the brother over there have a tiff?”

I sighed. “It wasn’t a tiff, okay? It had nothing to do with us sleeping together.” I snorted. “Hell, if I could have told Cordell Weldon I slept with Calderon, maybe he wouldn’t have accused me of being a racist.” Nah. He still would have.

“Wait, whut?” Augustus’s eyebrows rocketed skyward. “What’d you do to Mr. Weldon?”

“I didn’t
do
anything to him—”

“That man is a community leader,” Augustus said, about half a step from bawling.

“That man is piece of human excrement,” I said. “He tried to shake me down.”

“
What?
”

“He implied,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “that if I didn’t get some agency money and time and cooperation to flow in the direction of his organization, he was going to aid the press in vilifying me even further by saying I was a racist. I can’t imagine what the next accusation to come my way will be. What’s left? Bestiality?”

“Cordell Weldon did not threaten to paint you as a racist,” Augustus snapped.

“I think he did,” I said. “And he got really defensive when I even brought up the fact that Flora Romero’s shelter was one that his organizations run, and that at least two of our skeletons were regulars at.”

Augustus just blinked. “I can’t imagine why he would be upset at that implication.”

“He didn’t get upset,” I said, “he got irate and defensive, like I’d just tried to shake
him
down. And then he proceeded to call the mayor, who called the chief of police, who then crapped from his higher perch upon Calderon, and
et voila
, here we are.”

“You are the cause of most of your own damned problems,” Augustus said. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to approach things with some subtlety?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I fail to see what was subtle about Weldon suggesting to me that the ‘race image problems’ I haven’t actually had yet could just be vanished away with some money pushed in his direction.”

“Maybe you should hire more black people,” Augustus snapped. “Just a solution off the top of my head.”

I felt my eye twitch. “You want a job?”

“With you? Hell, no.”

“Well, if you run into any more African-American metahumans, send them my way,” I said. “Personally, I haven’t had much luck locking down all three of those categories since the war, but then I’ve also seen a fairly big outflux of my white employees too.”

“Maybe it’s your managerial style,” he said. “Did you learn it from Sun-Tzu’s
The Art of War
?”

“Sun-Tzu actually had some pretty good advice in there, and no—no, I did not.”

“I see you two are picking up where he and these clowns left off,” Calderon said, stepping up to us right in the middle of our little quibble.

“We haven’t started ripping up the streets and throwing fire at each other yet,” I said, “so count your blessings.”

“Have you had a phone call from your headquarters yet?” Calderon asked me, looking daggers in my direction.

I fished it out of my pocket. Twelve missed calls. “Probably a few,” I said.

“Don’t you think you should answer them?”

“I feel like I need a vacation,” I said, smiling sweetly. “Minnesota is so cold, you know.”

“It’s June.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s like … 75 degrees there right now. Frigid.”

“You aren’t going to find anything else here but problems,” Calderon said. “Your investigation? Has turned up nothing except a lot of corpses I can’t get answers on. I would have been better off if you hadn’t showed up. This whole thing is radioactive now.”

“Good news,” I said. “Radioactive doesn’t bother me. Advanced healing takes care of it, see. Let me handle it all.”

Calderon made a grunt of frustration and stalked off. “You really do bring out the worst in people, don’t you?” Augustus asked as we watched him storm away.

“You should see me and my boss,” I said.

“I don’t think I want to,” he said. “I live a nice, drama-free life. Or I did, until—”

“I showed up?” I suggested, heading that one off before he could get it out.

“Until I developed these powers,” he said. “Without them, I’d be at work right now.” He paused, and I caught a hint of uncertainty about something from him.

“What?” I asked.

He hesitated, like he was trying to decide. “I talked to Roscoe Marion’s widow.”

“And?”

“I used to work with him,” he said, “on the line at Cavanagh Tech—the factory.”

I waited. “Uh huh …”

“She said he was still working at Cavanagh,” Augustus said, “but he’d gotten promoted. Trouble is, he didn’t get promoted the traditional way, to, like, line lead or super. She said he got promoted to work in an off-site lab working with biological research.”

I shrugged. “Still not seeing it.”

“Cavanagh Tech doesn’t do bioresearch. They’re a mechanical and software tech company.” He raised his hands in an expansive shrug. “It’s not listed on the website, and Edward Cavanagh himself said to me this morning that they weren’t in the biotech arena.”

It was my turn to frown. “You called him and asked him this?”

“No,” he said. “He came over to my line and offered me help, gave me time off, complimented me and—I don’t remember how it came up, but he said something like, ‘I wish we were in the biotech business so we could’—partner on something, maybe. I don’t know.”

I felt a rising tide of surprise. “That’s really interesting, because apparently the Atlanta press is speculating I want to meet Edward Cavanagh and beat his ass at the moment—”

“Is there anyone whose ass you don’t want to beat?” he asked in exasperation.

“Yours, until just now,” I quipped. “But listen—the reason why they think I want to beat his ass is because apparently Cavanagh Tech developed that chemical weapon that suppresses meta powers.”

“That thing they used at your headquarters?” he said. “That thing the Russians stole?”

“Exactly,” I said. “So tell me how your mechanical engineering company developed a bioweapon if they don’t work in that realm? Because I doubt it was a printer toner experiment gone wrong.”

Augustus held a hand up over his mouth, face locked in serious thought. “Damn,” he said quietly.

“Damn, indeed,” I said and noticed for the first time a thin puff of black smoke in the distance, to the west. It was a little pillar, stretching up into the hot midday sky. The sun was beating down on me, making me sweat, and that black smoke just seemed … out of place somehow. I took a sniff and it came home for me at once—something was on fire.

“Hey,” I called out to the nearest cop, “what’s up with the fire?” I pointed to the column of smoke in the distance.

“House fire south of 278,” he said nodding his head. “Four alarm.”

Augustus’s head came up at that, and he launched off the curb like his ass was spring-loaded. “Where is it? Exactly?”

The cop just shrugged. “Not sure. Somewhere near Pelham, I think.”

I saw Augustus’s pleading eyes turn toward me, and he whispered only one word, one that told me immediately what he was thinking: “Momma.”

I scooped him up with one arm and launched us both into the air, centering on that column of black smoke and racing toward it, hoping that what we found wouldn’t make things even worse for him than they already were.

The wind rushed past my face, and I didn’t even care that I was being carried along by a girl that was, like, five foot nothing. I could see the billowing smoke ahead as we shot across the sky, and the closer we got, the surer I was, until we finally came down for a gentle landing on the street in front of my house.

The place was engulfed, fire raging out of every window, black smoke clouding the air and making its way up in thick, continuous bursts. I started toward the front door, which was practically gushing flame, and felt a strong hand on my shoulder that threw me backward in something less than a courteous manner.

“Hold on,” Sienna said, and she rose into the air as I watched, biting back a stream of curses and a desire to shove her in reprisal. She floated toward the fire and her hands came out. “Gavrikov,” she whispered, so low it was barely audible over the howl of sirens and cries of the crowd.

The fire crackled and burned, a wave of heat coming off my home like I’d stepped too close to an open oven. Sienna hovered there for a moment, and then I saw what she was doing as her powers started to work.

The fire was sucked toward her like she’d grabbed all the oxygen in the area and fed it along a pre-assigned path. It shot toward her hands, blazingly fast, curling like fiery tornadoes as it made its way toward her, swirling into her palms and dissipating into smoke as it made contact with her flesh. Her hands burned like they were aflame as she drew it all in, every bit of it, and I watched a tongue of flame the size of a concrete pillar fork off from the rest and head toward her face. She breathed it in like a reverse dragon, drawing it to her and out of my home. It came from every window, from the roof, and she pulled every bit of it into her body as she hovered there.