Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (7 page)

“Doing well, Augustus,” she said, not really looking at me. Taneshia was short, like close to five feet. She was rail-thin, though, with the body of a runner. She was wearing her glasses, though they weren’t as obvious or thick as Jamal’s. Her skin was dark, her features petite. She was real pretty, though she seemed to try to go to some lengths to hide it. “How are you doing?” she asked. “How was your big day?”

I froze, my hands stiff by my side. “Big day?” My head raced laps, and not one of them led to the memory that I’d been photographed with a couple of my heroes just a few hours earlier. Knucklehead.

“I saw the photos of you with Cavanagh and Weldon,” she said, holding up the giant face of her phone. It was dark, but the meaning was obvious—she’d seen them online. “Thought I’d stop in and see if you’d gotten done shaking yet.”

“Ha ha!” I said, nodding my head. Cordell Weldon and Edward Cavanagh. Hard to believe a day like this could be eclipsed by something even bigger. “Can’t believe little news like my brush with greatness would make the front page.”

“Oh, it’s not the front page,” Taneshia said, shaking her head lightly. “That’s all clogged up with news about how Sienna Nealon is flying all over Vine City right now.”

I blinked. My heart—did it stop? It felt like it stopped. What does heart stoppage feel like? Because I think I had some of that. “Wh …” I felt my lips twist while my brain tried to find the ability to spit out the question that was turning it over. “What’s she doing here?” I paused, thought it over, and added something. “You aren’t just kidding, right?”

She kind of blinked back in mild surprise, like she was perplexed. “No, I’m not kidding. It’s all over the local sites. Sienna Nealon’s here, she’s been flying around this afternoon. Even if half the reported sightings are fake, she’s still in the Atlanta area and they got pictures of her flying over Lowery Boulevard.”

“Huh,” I said, my brain jumping to catch up. I always heard that metahumans were faster and stronger than normal people. I wondered if I could jump really far now. Should have tried that out, though it’d be a dead giveaway that something was going on with me, way more suspicious than playing with dirt and rocks in my room. “I wonder why she’s here.”

“Girl’s the police,” Momma said. “Probably here for one of them.” She waved her hand at the TV.

“I haven’t heard anything about a meta criminal,” I said, frowning at the TV. Katrina Forrest was in a bikini again. Again. Red this time. I dragged my eyes away forcibly, back to Taneshia to find her looking at me, slightly angled, the red bikini reflected in her lenses. That worked out well.

“Couple guys got struck by lightning last night,” Taneshia said. “Could be a meta.”

I stared at her. “Say whut? Lightning?” I thought about that for a second and my voice fell to a whisper without me even thinking about it. “They can do
that
?”

“You ever see this girl grow a plant out of a seed?” Momma said, still looking at the TV. She didn’t even need to try to eavesdrop on our conversation. Listening in was her natural state and we all accepted it. “They can do anything.”

“Hmm,” I said, nodding along. I wondered pretty quickly along a certain track that was—well, it was uniquely Augustus, I think. It went like this:
What if she’s here for me? But how could she know about me? I didn’t even know about me until today! What if they have a machine that detects metas from a distance?

And then my mind exploded with that possibility, and my eyes must have gotten really big, because Taneshia cocked her head at me like she was wondering what I could possibly be thinking.

Unfortunately, she didn’t get a chance to ask the question that followed, because the sound of gunfire popped loud and hard from somewhere behind us, and every single one of us was on the ground in about a second. I found myself nose to nose with Taneshia, her glasses askew and giving me a wonderful view of her dark brown eyes, though they were wide with fear. The reflection of the TV, still blaring next to us, was there in her pupils. Red bikini. Damn.

“Dammit!” Momma called. “Jamal!” Like he would hear her but not the shots. Actually, scratch that, it could happen. The shots sounded like they had some distance. If they’d been farther off, we might have been able to mistake them for fireworks. At a distance it was easier to hear them and just sort of freeze, listening hard. These sounded like they might only have been a couple streets away, though.

The hard pops continued, unabating. We heard gunshots sometimes, it was true, but they were usually quick.
Pop pop pop pop
and done. These went on, strung close together, like multiple automatics ripping out in the day. This was not usual.

But then, neither was I, anymore.

I wanted to be somebody all my life, and now I had powers. I felt my hand shake as I lay there on the floor. I looked down at the dark skin on my knuckles, saw the shake stop, steady out. Something was going on out there.

And this was the moment I’d been waiting for.

I jumped to my feet and ignored my momma’s calls. I listened and heard the shots coming from somewhere behind our house. I felt my balance steady and I leapt forward toward the hall, racing toward the back door. I could feel the change, the speed, the power at my fingertips. I unclicked the deadbolt and had the door open in a shake. I paused for just a second, looking out into the dying light, realizing that this was the moment—the one I’d been waiting for—and then I jumped over my fence like it was nothing more than a small hurdle as I ran off to be a hero.

“Wolfe,” I whispered, my back hard on the concrete, the curb jutting into the base of my spine. It was hot, the pavement burning my arms where they touched it, warm through my black pants and on my face. I was still holding up a bloody hand, staring at the red on my fingers from where I’d been shot. Again.

Why was I always getting shot?

Go, Sienna
, Wolfe whispered in my mind, and I felt my head snap back into wakefulness. I took a hard breath and rolled, ditching gravity as I moved, feet first, into the air, coming up about seven feet off the ground in a hover.

“Gavrikov,” I said, looking at the scene before me. The van that had been parked on the street had spilled open, the side panels thrown wide and three men with guns staring up at me, tracking a little too slowly for their own good. At the rear of the van, the double doors were open there as well, and three more men with guns were doing their damnedest to acquire me as a target.

I was fast. Faster than any human being and most metas. But I couldn’t outrun a bullet, and if one hit me in a place like the brain, I’d still be dead, because I wouldn’t be able to summon the mental ability to draw on Wolfe to heal me. Right now I had six gunmen drawing a bead on me, and I could only hope that if they got off a shot before I took them out, it’d be a body shot, because that I could fix.

I twisted my fingers as I thrust both hands up. I peered down each digit like a gunsight, my right hand on the guys at the rear of the van, the left pointed at the open doors up front. To hit these guys without giant, beach ball sized blasts of flame? That was not something anyone had seen from Sienna Nealon before.

Fortunately, it was something I was practicing every single day in preparation for a moment just like this.

Fire
, Gavrikov said, probably without any appreciation for the literal truth of his statement. Gavrikov was kind of like that.

Long, harsh tongues of fire lanced from the first three fingers on each hand like bullets oozing contrails of flame behind them. With the power of Wolfe working through me and speeding up my reflexes, it almost seemed like they were moving in slow motion to my eyes.

They each hit in succession, left hand shots landing first. They caught the men—all dressed in black, in tactical gear—where the hell do my enemies keep getting these guys? Mercs ’R Us? Anyway, the flames hit them right in the chest. As previously mentioned, this was something I’d been working on—superheated balls of gas that I shot like bullets of my own.

As the flames hit the tactical vests, which were presumably armored in some way, they sailed right through like they’d gone through paper. The impact was relatively minor, because they didn’t have any real mass or knockdown force to them.

The real secret to them was heat transference, and that took a second or two to work its magic.

By the time the shots from my right hand had begun to land on the guys at the back of the van, the first three were starting to feel some serious consequences from my attack. I hadn’t exactly measured the temperature from the attack during practice at any point, but I had a pretty good idea from Gavrikov’s previous experience what would happen.

The first guy’s mouth popped open and he coughed a whiff of smoke. The blood vessels on his face turned an angry red under the skin, and I counted my blessings that he keeled over onto his face right then, because I heard some serious popping under the layers of tactical clothing that indicated he probably wasn’t going to look much like a human when someone turned him over again.

I watched the next guy wordlessly fall to his knees as the superheated gases lodged inside him. I wanted to avert my eyes but couldn’t, instead turning them to the next guy in line, then the next. My shots were dead on, not that it was super hard to hit a target aiming over your finger at fifteen feet. I hadn’t thrown the gases that hard this time; Gavrikov’s power gave me the ability to propel them with a little more gusto, but I hadn’t wanted to chance them breaking through my foes and hitting the houses behind them.

Smoke filled the air, and so did a horrible smell of cooked meat mixed with something extra foul. I had killed these guys, there was no question in my mind as I watched the last guy in the line, keeling over as smoke poured out from under his helmet, his plastic tactical glasses fogging up as something burst violently inside them, spattering the inside of them with something wet and red.

I had a pretty tough stomach, but this was grossing me out. I was also fully aware that in my haste to not die, I’d just killed all six of the opponents that were actively threatening me, and in a manner that was going to make identifying them … problematic.

Oops.

I touched back down on the curb and saw movement inside the van, in both the passenger and driver’s seats. Oh, lucky me. Survivors.

“Hey—” I started to shout, and then I saw it.

One of my bursts of superheated gas that was directed at the first guys had burned straight through its target and was now sitting on the floor of the van like an ash that had fallen off a giant cigar. I caught a glimpse of it as the carpet flared around it, little flickers of flame around a fingertip-sized pellet of hotter-than-hell. As I stood there, it slipped through the floor of the van, presumably into the machinery below, including—I don’t much about cars, but I knew this—a gas line.

Damn. That wasn’t good.

It took a couple seconds, and they were seconds in which I was frantically preparing for the worst.
Gavrikov
, I called frantically inside my head. With his power, I could pull the heat and fire off the impending explosion, absorbing it into my body, but there was nothing I could do to keep the metal blown out of the van from becoming shrapnel that would drive into the air around me, possibly hitting innocent bystanders just sitting on their porches or huddling in nearby homes.

I hoped for a near-empty fuel tank.

I didn’t get it.

The explosion lit off big, the van bursting with flame and force. I felt the shockwave start to billow outward, expanding as it blew. It was way too big for just a tank of gas; my attackers must have had some sort of explosives with them, because I watched the van’s metal deform as I sucked the fire and heat toward me in a desperate bid to rip it out of the air before it could turn the van into a giant frag grenade.

It was like trying to hold the sun in the palms of my hands, like trying to draw the heat off a propane stove with a vacuum cleaner. The world slowed around me as the flames drove toward my fingers, coming out of the explosion just a little too late. I could see the seams ripping as the metal blew out in 1/16
^th
time; the ripple of the flames, moved down to a gentle motion, gradually arced the fiery portion of the explosion from its path of least resistance and sucked it toward me.

It wasn’t gonna be enough, and I knew that less than a second into the attempt.

There was no one on the planet good enough at absorbing explosions to draw this one out of the van without it shredding metal and sending it flying on its way out. Worse yet, if the metal hit me and killed me, the rest of the explosion would proceed without me drawing it off, making everything so much worse for the people who lived on this street.

Damned mercenaries. If I ever found out where these rent-a-assholes came from, I was going to personally pull a Gavrikov and nuke that place.

Something slid above the van, something like a dark cloud that blotted out my view of the fire. It sailed over my head and then paused there, joined by another piece, from another direction. Then another, and another, clouds of darkness that formed the upper part of a sphere. I saw motion out of the corner of my eye and another piece of—was that dirt?—rolled along the ground and broke into clumps that formed a solid shield between me and the explosion.

In another second, the van was completely covered with a cloud of dirt, and I was cut off from absorbing the heat and flame. I blinked, watching as the dirt pushed down, seemingly of its own will, tightening like it had been contracted over the explosion.

I closed my eyes from the sound of the explosion finally hitting me, a continuous roar that filled my ears and sounded like hell itself had grabbed a lobe and yanked me close, the better to bellow right into my canal. I couldn’t help it, I averted my eyes and covered my face, like that would do anything.

The roar subsided in seconds, and I forced myself to look back. The dirt shield that had been thrown over the explosion seemed to be … hardened. I took a few steps closer, tentative, and I could feel the heat contained within. It had held against a bomb going off within it, keeping within its heart a furious storm of propulsion and heat. I pushed against it with a touch, and still it held. My fingertips came away dusty, turned almost red. I turned my head to look and saw giant, gaping pits in the earth around me on either side of the street where the ground had risen up to offer this earth as its sacrifice, protecting me and the entire street from what would have become an uncontained disaster.