Power (3 page)

Searching for my prey with all my senses.

“It won’t help you,” Frederick took over, and I could tell he was somewhere behind me. “He was the least of us.”

“He disagrees,” I said, turning slowly. I had a suspicion—approved by Wolfe’s instincts—that told me that they were going to come at me from two directions at once. This was the coyote approach, feinting and darting, getting a little piece of your prey at a time until they were too wounded and hobbled to fight back.

Coincidentally, it was the exact strategy I’d been trying to employ against Century, so I was well-versed in its application.

“We aren’t going to kill you, you know,” Grihm said from off to my left.

“Killing you would be too good for you,” Frederick said from my right. I kept from wheeling about, staying steady and quiet in the center of their little circle. The attack was coming soon. Presumably after they were done boring me—
Grrrrrrr
—sorry, intimidating me. Whatever.

“We have to break you, after all,” Grihm said.

“Many have tried,” I said. “None have survived.”

“Ooh, she has spirit,” Frederick said with glee.

“She’ll make a good bride for Sovereign,” Grihm agreed.

“I wouldn’t go sending out any ‘Save the Date’ cards just yet,” I quipped. I knew where both of them were now, and they knew where I was. Since they knew I was channeling Wolfe, it told me that now that they were aware of me, aware of my ability, they were overconfident again.

It’s not many people who can get their ass squarely kicked, beaten all around a plane, and then think they’ve reestablished their dominance just because of a perceived numerical advantage. I’d been fighting longer odds than these clowns—
shut up, Wolfe, I’m not including you in this insult
—for a long damned while. This was as close to a fair fight as I got anymore.

And my power had just leveled up.

Anyone else care to join me and Wolfe in the fight of our lives?
I asked inwardly.

Whatever I can do to help, I’m there
, Zack said.

I don’t know how much help I could be
, Roberto Bastian said,
but … yeah … okay. I’m with you for this, since you’ve got your head out of your ass now.

Bjorn? Gavrikov? Eve?
I asked.

Pass
, Bjorn said.

No
, Gavrikov said.

Go f—
, Eve began.

Got it
, I said.
Well, Roberto, you weren’t too shabby on strategy and tactics. Any ideas?

There’s a moment of distraction coming
, Roberto said.
Use it.

My eyes flashed as I realized what he was talking about. I could sense Grihm and Frederick coiling to spring. It was instinctive, the hint that their muscles were flexing just so, ready to leap upon me.

And they did so just as the plane exploded on the horizon.

I threw myself into a backward roll as flames lit the night sky in a mushroom cloud of orange fire. I saw the brothers Wolfe illuminated by it, springing to the place where I’d been only a second earlier, and I smiled. They narrowly missed hitting one another and each landed roughly, their anticipated target of soft flesh—me—having evaporated from beneath their feet.

I didn’t wait for them to recover to move. Grihm had come down with his back to me and I had only a second or two to take advantage of it. I lunged, grabbing him with both hands in his long, red hair. I twisted it around my fingers, coiling it tight.

This motherfucker was about to know he was in a fight with a girl.

I yanked him off balance by ripping at his hair. I didn’t pull it as hard as I could have, because to do so that abruptly would have torn it right out of his skull, and I wasn’t ready for that quite yet. I kicked him in the gut and pulled him hard in a circle, using my strength to break his legs free of the ground—and any resistance they might offer to what I was going to do next.

Before he had a chance to stop me, I swung him around by his hair like he was an Olympic hammer. I did one orbit to build up some speed and chucked him before he had enough time to settle his inner ear enough to punch me in the face. Which would have been easy for him after all, being as he had at least three feet of height on me. I watched him arc about ten feet up before he vanished over a low line of trees. “Hasta luego, dipshit,” I called after him. I’d see him later. I was planning on it.

I could hear Frederick coming at me from the side, but I was ready for him. He charged at me like these morons always do, and rather than reacting like Wolfe—like he doubtless thought I would—and meet him head on, I reacted like Sienna Nealon with enhanced reflexes and used my years of martial arts training.

Which is a fancy way of saying that now that I was as fast as he was. I grabbed his wrist and twisted it behind him as I let him charge past. I knocked a leg out from under him as he went, and a feeling of déjà vu—hadn’t I just done this to one of these assholes? It’s a classic for a reason, I suppose—came over me as I landed squarely on his back.

His whole body tensed, waiting for the blow to fall on his kidney. He thought he knew what was coming.

He had no idea.

“Hurt me all you want,” he said as he grunted against my wristlock, “but you’ll never stop us—”

I donkey punched him so hard in the back of the head that I could hear the vertebra snapping. I did it again for good measure, and then again. I could feel the flesh tearing against bone shards by then, his spinal column fragmented and ripping through the skin as I hammered him a fourth time.

Then I grabbed his head and twisted it back and forth at sickening angles to the left and right, up and down. I heard the popping of things that were never meant to pop, and I folded his head backward at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to the rest of his body before I twisted it three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around.

I did that three more times, ripping hard at it, a knee buried in his back, until his head popped off in my hands.

I heard movement in the brush behind me and turned. There was still a faint light of fire somewhere in the distance where the plane had come down, but I didn’t need it to see Grihm stagger out of the bushes. He was soaking wet, and I assumed he’d landed in a pond somewhere nearby.

I tossed the head to him and he caught it instinctively. He looked down at it with unblinking eyes, like it wasn’t registering what he was actually seeing.

“Question,” I said, “can you boys survive decapitation?”

He looked up at me, face twisting in fury and disbelief. “I’ll kill you,” he said in a near-whisper. I would have expected something louder, more approaching a roar, but I suspected the fear was starting to settle in on him.

“You think so? I’ve now killed two out of the three of you bastards,” I said, unconcerned. “I don’t favor your odds.”

His face changed into something feral, positively wolf-like (and Wolfe-like), and he let out a low growl like a dog that was warning someone off.

“Wow,” I said, unruffled, just waiting for him to come at me, “such doge.”

The faintest hint of confusion crept over his features. “Doje?” He sounded it out. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s an internet meme,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I’d tell you to Google it, but you’ve only got about five minutes to live and you’re going to spend every one of those fighting for your life.”

“You’re going back in that box,” Grihm snarled.

“I think we’re heading for a Grihm finish,” I said, smiling at my own pun. If I didn’t, who would?

Not me
, Zack said.
That was awful.

Pawful?
I sent back.
Because they’re like dogs—

There was a chorus of groans in my head.

“You better buckle up,” I said to Grihm. “You bastards have done everything you can to make me fear you from day one.”
Sorry, Wolfe, but it’s true.
“It’s about damned time you realized who has the power here.”

I leapt at him before he had a chance to open his stupid mouth and respond. He saw me coming high, with a punch, but missed the low kick I whipped at him at the last second. It caught him in the knee while he struck me in the face with a clawed hand. I felt my cheek split wide, a gash three inches long running all the way up to my ear. It burned and made me want to cry out with pain …

… but I didn’t.

I landed on my feet as Grihm stumbled back from my kick. I kept Wolfe front of mind the way Adelaide had taught me, and I could feel the cheek wound start to knit back together. I snarled and kept on toward Grihm, pushing forward, striking with another jumping kick and causing him to stumble back a few more steps. He was ready for my attacks, and they weren’t having as much effect now that he wasn’t off balance. He was parrying, countering, as best he could, and with thousands of years of vicious fighting experience, he was reasonably good at it.

My mother had once said to me that experience was a funny thing. I’d been slacking off in my training at the time, and she knew it. Rather than hammer at me about it, land on me with both feet and kick my ass into the box for defiance, she came about it a different way. “You can either have ten years of experience at something,” she’d said, “or you can have the same year of experience ten times. One will make you a great fighter. The other will get you killed. You choose whether you want to take this seriously or not.”

Okay, so even at her most delicate, she wasn’t exactly cashmere soft. This is my mother we’re talking about, not Molly Weasley.

The brothers Wolfe were some of the most feared predators in the world. They were stronger, they were faster, and they were more vicious, wicked and nasty than almost anyone else walking the world.

And as I’d discovered just a few months back in a museum in the heart of London—to my great surprise—thinking you’re at the top of the food chain is a really good way for complacency to set in.

Grihm countered me, but he was slow. I kicked him again and he batted my kick away, but just barely, and he failed to exploit the opening I gave him. He felt slow. Strong, but slow. I could taste all the years of complacency settled around him. All the years of being invincible to the mooks he’d preyed upon. He’d been the alpha predator and hadn’t gone up against anyone that was nearly a match for him—or his brother—in centuries.

All in all, it was a really good way to stay alive.

Until you met someone who was more of a predator than you were.

I feinted for the first time and he tried to block it. I’d gone high, leaving his leg exposed to a kick that made his knee go in the wrong direction. Grihm let out a sharp cry and fell to his good knee. I knew without doubt that he’d have it back to fixed in seconds and be right back to being on me.

Unfortunately for him, I was a predator who was constantly fighting bigger and badder nasties. I was at the top of my game.

Seconds were for pansies. Seconds were more than I needed.

I braced and hit him with a reverse side kick in less than a second. It’s a spinning kick that gives you more chance to build momentum and force than a simple standing kick. It’s the next best thing to a running, jumping one, or one in which I could have taken a few strides toward him. We were close, though, and this was what I could do with the space I had and the time I had.

More strength would have been better, but really, all the strength in the world was useless if you didn’t aim it properly.

I hit that bastard right in the neck and listened to the sweet, popping sound of his throat crushed under explosive force.

His eyes went wide, fearful, and I heard him make a choking, gasping noise. His hands snapped up from his knee, which was still disjointed, and clawed at his throat.

While he did, I hit him with a reverse side kick again. Right in the face, as hard as I could.

His neck snapped like it was on a rubber band, back and then forward, whipping like he’d been jerked by the hand of a god. Goddess, I guess, technically.

Grihm’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his body wavered there for another second, ready to tip and fall.

I hit him one last time for good measure, and his body just rolled end over end, limp. A silver light suddenly shone down on him, and I looked up to see a full moon shining down on me from where it had just come out from behind a cloud.

In the distance, I could see the metal structure of a bridge, a few hundred yards away, its dark outline over a river that was lit by the thousand sparkles of the shining moon. I listened and could faintly hear traffic on it, a car here and there. I sighed. I’d need to catch a ride back to the Agency. Rally the team.

I had a war to fight, and I’d just been handed a shiny new weapon. And a warning, something that I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to share with the others. Not yet.

I looked back down at Grihm’s unmoving figure and sighed again. First things first, though—this bastard wasn’t going to rip off his own head, and it wasn’t like I could leave him without making sure he was dead …

Chapter 4

There had been a really wide, swampy river channel between me and the road, and although I’d jumped with my newly found Wolfe strength, I hadn’t quite cleared it. I’d say this was not my night, but frankly, this was the least bad thing that had happened to me this evening.

There were still worse things—much worse—that I didn’t want to deal with yet.

My shoes were still sloshing as I walked through the doors to the lobby of headquarters. I could sense that I was being watched, but when I looked up I was greeted by an assload (technical term) of assault rifles and submachine guns pointed at me from all directions on the ground floor and the second floor balcony.

Reed, Scott, Zollers, Janus and Kat were standing just in front of the security checkpoint’s metal detectors, and only Zollers and Janus looked relaxed. I figured they’d gotten the telepathic and empathic read on me while everyone else was still assuming the worst. I had blazed past the front gate guard without offering more than a cursory explanation, after all. Plus I had an unconscious body—the driver of the car who stopped to pick me up—in the passenger seat. I had suspected the guard would whistle for help as soon as I was through, which is what I would have told him to do if I’d been training him.