Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (28 page)

Taneshia let off the lightning as soon as I’d knocked him out and fell to her knees, breathing hard. “Thanks,” she said.

“You should have told me it was Jamal,” I said to her in return, with nothing but a deep and pure anger.

“I should have,” she said, nodding. “A long time ago, before it got to this point. It all just sort of spun out of—” She stopped suddenly and coughed, blood spurting from her lips and running down her green shirt, dark spatters that looked like syrup they were so dark.

Taneshia staggered to the side and looked behind her, and now I saw one of those guys standing there. He was grinning, was a bigger dude, solid and broad-shouldered, looked like he didn’t miss too many meals. His pale, bald head was freckled, his eyebrows and the goatee around his mouth were a light ginger color. “Oh, sorry,” he said, not remotely sorry. He held up a hand that was red with blood. “Did I interrupt your tender moment?”

I felt that deep rage that had been pointed at Taneshia get redirected in an instant to the ginger bald dude. I flung dirt right at him and watched his face go ghostly whiter, like it was fading, and the dirt just passed right through it.

“What the hell are you?” I asked, and he just stood there smiling at me while my stomach sank.

“You’ll find out when I yank your brains right out of your skull,” he said, starting toward me. “Right through the bone, just tug ’em out like there’s nothing but air separating them from the world.”

I blinked at him. He smiled menacingly and started walking toward me, his feet making impressions in the dirt that had been exposed by the lightning battle between Taneshia and her enemy.

I picked up a dirt clod and hurled it at the guy.

It passed right through him like he wasn’t there.

But his feet were touching the ground.

I remembered an episode of
Star Trek
where two of the crew members got bombarded with some kind of space radiation and could pass through walls. They called it ‘phasing.’ It was a cool episode, and I liked it a lot, but something always bothered me about it.

Why didn’t they go sliding through the floor just as easily as they passed through the walls?

I watched the bald dude take his next step, and I just pulled the ground out from under him. Easy, just a foot or so down, a nice tug.

And I watched him fall, like he’d just missed a step.

“Hey!” he said, a little alarmed. His eyes got big, and I knew I had a winner.

So I rearranged another foot of dirt beneath him, sending it crawling out the sides of the little pit, and he tumbled down further. His arms scrambled for hold, slapping against the sides, so I pulled the dirt out around him to widen the pit by another five feet in every direction. It happened pretty fast, and since I wasn’t lifting the dirt into the air or anything dramatic, it didn’t seem to take much of my strength.

He was in up to his chest now and starting to panic. “Hey! Hey!”

“Can’t hear you,” I said. I dug another three feet underneath him and watched him fall. Gravity still worked on him, and I just kept taking more and more of the ground beneath him. “Too busy trying to protect my brains from falling out of my skull.” I had full control of the dirt beneath him, and I was making it run up the sides of the pit like crazy, just digging him into the ground further and further. I had him down ten feet now, and he was starting to disappear as I filled in the earth behind him. He hit fifteen feet, then twenty, and I filled the pit in so that only a five-foot-in-diameter hole remained above.

“You can’t do this!” he protested, and I could barely see him as I narrowed his personal tunnel as he hit a depth I didn’t think he could get out of easily. This part of Atlanta didn’t have tunnels underground, as far as I knew, but even if it did, he’d be a long time in figuring out how to get back out of the earth again. I sealed the ground up behind him at thirty feet and didn’t care if he ever saw sunlight again.

“I think I just did,” I said, and slumped to the ground, spent. I looked over at Taneshia, who was on the ground, just bleeding. “And I think I’d do it again if I had half a chance.”

I was way late and I knew it by the time the pillars of smoke came into view behind the Atlanta skyline. I shot out of the sky with cannonball force and slammed into the ground in the wreckage of Augustus’s front yard. The sun was going down, and there was a guy with a hoodie and glasses standing there with lightning crackling out of his fingertips.

“And so we meet at last,” I said, staring him down.

“This isn’t what you think,” he said.

“Really?” I looked around at the scene of chaos. There were no civilians in sight, and the police cruisers and fire trucks that had been parked on the lawn were in flames, along with a half dozen other cars. The neighborhood looked like a war had come through, and Augustus’s lawn was ground zero. “It’s not a battlefield?”

He paused, like he was thinking it over. “Okay, maybe it is what you think. But I’m not who you think I am—”

“You’re a lightning-wielding killer,” I said and let my hands flare into flame. I let my gaze settle on the smoking ruins of a man with an assault rifle clenched tightly in his blackened hands. It looked like he’d been hanging onto his weapon for dear life when something (lightning COUGH COUGH) hit him. “I can see the evidence for it from where I’m standing, and it’s looking pretty compelling.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and he went from uncertainty to coldness in a flash as he realized he wasn’t going to talk me out of beating his ass.

“Wolfe,” I said.
Ready
, the voice came.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.

“I’ve kinda always wanted lightning powers,” I said.

He let the first volley go and I barely dodged it. I went low to the ground and it surged past my ear and hit the ground. I could feel it run through my body and give me an instant headache as I caught the trailing edge of it. It made me want to puke, but instead I sprang up using Gavrikov’s flight and flung myself at lightning man’s jaw with a punch.

He was fast, I’ll credit him with that. I wouldn’t say he moved like lightning, but it was clear his meta reflexes were way up the scale. I altered course and slammed a forearm into his jaw, knocking him back. It was the sort of thing you could only do if you had some control over gravity, which—hey, lucky me—I do. Also lucky for me, most people don’t really take that ability into account when fighting, since it sort of violates the laws of physics.

He fell over onto his back, and I was on top of him in a second. He channeled lightning through his fingers and I grabbed his wrist with a flaming hand. He screamed as I burned him, pinning his wrist to his chest. I could smell the charred flesh as smoke wafted up. I headbutted him and heard his nose crack, knocked his glasses askew and watched his eyeballs roll from the impact. He made a faint grunt, a noise like I’d taken most of the piss out of him, and I punched him again in the face for good measure.

It felt good to finally have a face to punch.
Take that, lightning man.

I felt my powers start to work on his burned wrist, and I just held him there. I felt vaguely like I was doing something wrong. I hadn’t eaten a whole soul in years. I’d been afraid to, really, afraid to add any more crazy to the circus of nuttiness already in my head. Afraid that the meta stigma against eating souls would reflect badly on me in my newfound fame.

But you know what? Screw it. Everybody already hated me. And I had always wanted to be able to throw lightning. That was a badass power.

I stared into lightning man’s eyes as I felt the burn of my succubus power begin to work. I could hear his voice in my head as I caught the first hints of his soul, the first stirrings of him in there. He was screaming, crying out as I grasped at him. He was clawing to hold on, raging against the burn of my power on his skin, and I held him down and realized that no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried …

… they were never going to love me.

… they were always going to hate me.

… Kat was always going to win in the end.

I was never going to be like her.

I never was a hero.

I was a soul eater.

And it was time to accept that fact once and for all.

I ignored the screaming, ignored the shouted pleas and cries, and kept my hands on his skin as his agony drew to a crescendo, ready to embrace what I was once and for all.

I practically crawled over to Taneshia on my hands and knees. She had a giant, fist-sized hole in her back and I started to panic. Blood oozed out of it. I wanted to freak out but tried to hold it all together. I let out a stream of curses.

I took a breath and realized I was about ready to hyperventilate. She was bleeding hard, and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t a doctor, I wasn’t a nurse. I was a dude who was about to lose his shit because a girl he lov—errr … had known for a very long time was dying in front of him.

Then I realized … she wasn’t squirting blood out. It was a steady ooze, and the bones the dude had broken when he had pulled his hand out of her back already looked like they were—very slowly—growing back together.

And there were scorch marks all around the edges.

“Shocked … myself,” Taneshia said, speaking into the dirt. I could feel the vibrations in the soil, could barely hear her. “Tried to … cauterize … until my healing could kick in.”

“You are smart, girl,” I said. “Knew there was a reason you were the one that went to college.”

“Damned right,” she muttered. Her wound looked clear, but … did metas have to worry about infections? That was something I’d need to ask S—

I looked up into the sky as a sonic boom shook the world around me. Sienna came jetting down in front of my house, and I saw her disappear behind the roofline, smoke hanging in the air above the street. “You going to be okay?” I asked Taneshia.

“Go if you need to,” she said. “I’m a little … sleepy …”

“I’ll be back,” I said, staggering to my feet. I limped along, not because my legs were injured, but because I was just so completely wiped out from my exertions that I was having trouble putting one foot in front of another. “Just hang out here.”

It took what felt like ten minutes to get to the corner of the house, and then I slid around it. The whole street was heavy with smoke now. Looked like the fire engines had caught on fire, along with the cop cars in front of the house. Looked like Mr. Cavanagh and Mr. Weldon—if they were the ones behind this—had done a real number on the neighborhood. Dammit, this was my home.

I wanted to drag both those bastards out into the light of day.

Instead I dragged my feet along, slow and steady, moving toward my house. I’d seen Sienna head that way, and Jamal had gone that way a while earlier. I’d almost forgotten about my murdering brother. I had no idea what to do about him. I could hear sirens in the distance as Atlanta’s finest finally got around to organizing their response to this calamity. I couldn’t blame them; this was disastrous. It wasn’t like our whole area broke out into a literal war every day.

I crossed the second lawn, watching out for the holes I’d left. I looked to my right as I saw water bubbling up out of the ground where I’d buried the dude that shot the jets of water at me. I guessed he was still working his way through it. I used my hand to shift some mud down in that hole, block the bubbling. I didn’t have the strength to fight anyone else right now.

My legs were hurting now, and I started to get the feeling maybe I’d skinned my knees at some point. My rib was killing me, my whole side on fire. I wanted to stop. To fall down. To just give up and let myself rest.

But I couldn’t.

Sienna and Jamal were still in the smoke, somewhere, fighting the good fight against these guys. I couldn’t let them soldier on alone.

I pulled myself over another lawn, and I knew now I was only two houses away.

The smoke got thicker, hung in my throat. I couldn’t hardly breathe, and that bitter taste was just caught on my tongue. My eyes were tearing up, but I kept putting one foot in front of another.

And then the smoke started to clear, and what I saw nearly took what was left of my breath away.

Sienna Nealon was atop Jamal, hand clutching hold of his wrist. Jamal’s mouth was open, locked in a silent scream, and he was writhing under her grip.

Her grip.

“Sienna!” I shouted. “No!”

When I thought about it later, I don’t know what I was expecting. Her to ignore me, maybe. To shout back some argument. To double down and grasp him even tighter.

I didn’t expect what happened.

I didn’t expect her to fly into the air ten feet in an instant, dropping her hand from him so fast it looked like he’d flung her into the air. Her head whipped around and her body hung there, and I knew she’d done it herself, not because of anything Jamal had done to her. He was too busy clutching his arm tight to his body, sporting a sickening burn on his forearm that was blistered and charred.

“What?” Sienna asked, standing there, staring at me through the dusky smoke. “What is it?”

“I … didn’t expect you to stop just because I said so.” I said it because I was a little stunned.

Her answer came out kind of cross. “Well, I did. So … what’s the deal?”

I nodded to Jamal. “He’s my brother. You can’t … do whatever you were going to do to him.”

She kept her cool, but I saw a hint that she might have been rattled. “Oh. You know he’s the lightning man, right?”

“Yeah, but he’s not in league with Cavanagh,” I said, stumbling closer to Jamal. “Are you?”

“No,” Jamal said, shaking his head through gritted teeth. “I hate that man … now that I know it was him.”

“Know it was him that … what?” Sienna asked. She floated closer to the ground.

“Killed Flora,” Jamal said, still clutching his burn gingerly. “He killed Flora.”

“Who was Flora to you?” I asked, offering him a hand. Smoke swirled around us, the wind picking up and driving it west as it billowed off the nearby fire engine.