Power (36 page)

“Miss Nealon—”

“Sienna—!”

“Could you—”

“How does it feel—”

“What were you thinking when—”

It all blurred together in one loud jumble of noise, and my three protectors gently pushed through for me. I followed them numbly, probably looking around into the spotlights flashing at me, stunned. We reached the curb and I realized that among the news vans and reporters’ cars, there were two black town cars waiting.

Kurt Hannegan was waiting at one of them for me, door held open. A reporter got too close and he made a menacing move that drove them back a step. “Right this way, Miss Nealon,” he said.

“Thank you, Kurt,” I said, blinking at him in surprise. I glanced back at the house, remembering when he’d last been here and remembered the feelings associated with it. I looked up at the blue sky, so different from the grey days of the past, and slid into the back seat.

“Miss Nealon!” came the voice of one of the reporters over all the others. “How does it feel to be a hero?”

Kurt slammed the door of the car before I could even answer. Reed walked around and got in the front, and Scott slid in next to me. Hannegan slipped into the driver’s seat, and I turned my head to see Janus in the car behind me, sitting next to Zollers. I nodded silent thanks to Dr. Zollers. He nodded back with a graceful smile, and I could hear his words in my head.

You’re welcome
.

“So,” Scott said, and he smiled at me from where he sat in the seat next to me. “Miss Nealon, how
does
it feel to be a hero?”

I looked up at Reed and saw a great big grin on his face as he stared straight ahead. The reporters were clearing the way, a little at a time, and Kurt was easing the car forward. I couldn’t be sure, but I caught sight of the big man’s eyes in the mirror and even he looked a little happy.

I looked at Scott and I smiled, and it felt … right. For the first time in a while. Not a faux smile, not a mean one, just a real, genuine smile born of some happiness I had springing up deep inside like the sun beams poking out from behind dark clouds.

“It feels … good,” I said and meant it, every word. I looked down, and I could still feel them all there. I spared one last look for the house where I’d been raised, the house that had sheltered me for all the years of my childhood, a place of such acute pain and loneliness that had prepared me for everything I’d just faced. “It feels good.”

And I could hear my own voice in my head as we drove away:

It feels like I’m not alone.

Epilogue

Omaha, Nebraska

They were sitting around the TV, just watching it all unfold. It was a helluva thing to see, just crazy as all get out. Flaming dragons, girls falling from the sky, and the president—the damned president!—talking about metahumans and extinctions and all manner of such that one couldn’t have imagined seeing on the TV news just a day earlier.

There was a smell of the last of dinner still simmering on the stove. It was probably long past burnt now because they were anchored to the couch, all three of them, and Momma wasn’t doing anything to get them moving. She was feeling a little too riveted to what was going on herself to make ’em move toward supper.

“What do you think?” It was the boy that asked, just taking it all in. He was a clever one, like his daddy. Always calculating some angle or another.

“He said something about her once, didn’t he?” The girl was asking now, pointing at the TV screen. The little bar with the name said, “Sienna Nealon,” and it was under a video of a dark-haired lady walking out of a house flanked by two men and a skinny little blond-haired stick of a girl.

“I b’lieve he did,” Momma weighed in at last. “Mentioned her by name.” She kept staring at the TV screen. “Seems a mite peculiar, don’t it?”

The boy pondered it, and Momma waited for him to think it through. “You think she’s the one?”

Momma gave him a nod, a vigorous one, trying to leave him without a doubt. “If she is, I reckon we better find out.”

“Then what?” This from the girl. She had them beady eyes, just staring with pools of black.

Momma gave her the look, the one that almost made her flinch back without a word. “Then we kill her.” Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

London, England

He wasn’t the sort who was usually glued to the telly, but in this case he gladly made an exception. He had his teacup close by with his window shades still open to the dark night, the sounds of London echoing in around him through the panes of glass. He scarcely paid them any notice, though, riveted as he was by what was transpiring on his screen.

They had been outed, of course. Gloriously outed, yet outed nonetheless. The grand secret, one preserved and kept since Poseidon’s decree some two thousand years earlier, was now as obvious as the Emperor’s utter lack of clothes.

His tea had gone cold long ago. This information was something quite interesting, something that could change the very shape of the world in which he lived and operated.

For the dozenth time since this drama had caught his attention, he picked up his teacup and saucer, recalled they were cold, had a passing thought about brewing another, and then set them down again untouched. For now there was a girl upon the screen.

The
girl.

He studied her pale face and rounded features as she was escorted out of a house by three bodyguards. It was an impressive spectacle, really, to see her protected by these three as though she hadn’t just turned into a flaming dragon and shredded a man in her jaws.

His hand fell to his chin and he stroked it, the natural posture of consideration for him. Yes, this had possibilities. Many, many possibilities. Now all he had to do was find the appropriate course of action to take advantage of them …

Florence, Italy

The two men sat out on the overlook, not noticing the view. It was a villa, one of the finest in Firenze—Florence to foreigners—and the entire town was lit up below them.

Instead they were utterly focused on the television in front of them, tuned to American news via the satellite dish on the side of the house.

“Capo,” the junior one said, breaking his silence. “This changes things. Their eyes are opened.”

The older one stared at the screen, thinking it over. The young man next to him was no fool, but he was young. “It means nothing,” he said after a moment, “save that they should fear us more now that they know what our kind can do.”

Edinburgh, Scotland

Alistair McKinney was dying, and he knew it, and he damned well hated it. But what could he do?

He was lying flat on his back, feeling the life running out of him in the last. It came and went in bits and bytes, like he was copying a file, except his bits and bytes were his life, and they were running out.

There was someone with him who seemed to be having a much grander time of it than Alistair was. He could hear the voice, faintly, as he lay there, just lay there, unable to move, unable to think. There was a fly buzzing around him, like it could tell he was nearly dead and unable to fend it off.

“… the American president announced …”

Alistair’s ears heard a little of that as he tried to move. The TV was on, wasn’t it? God, it seemed so far away.

“… named Sienna Nealon managed the agency response to the crisis …”

He felt the abrupt pain again, this time so searing he knew it was the end, but he couldnae find it in himself to scream. Instead, he heard something that sounded to his ears like a cross between a whistle and a choke, and it stayed with him until the pain faded and left him with almost nothing.

Except a view of the figure who had killed him, watching, unable to look away from the TV, even as Alistair died.

Location Unknown

The flare of the television in the dark fell on the face of the watcher. He stared at it in the blackness, watched it flicker as it told its story in silence. He needed no sound, no words, to know what it said. He saw the girl—the woman—with her dark hair and pale skin, and he knew her face. All too well, he knew her face.

The watcher had waited in the dark for some time and would wait here for a while longer. He was tasked with a duty to keep his charge, and to make sure they were kept safe. His eyes slid to the corner of the room, to that which he watched over, and he felt the assurance of a job done.

His eyes fell back to the television, to the flickering, to the girl. Sienna Nealon. He knew her.

He knew her all too well.

She was the reason he was here, in the dark.

And when the day came that he left it for the last time, she would die just as surely as the sun lit the sky.

Sienna Nealon will return in

LIMITLESS

Out of the Box

Book One

Coming November 4th, 2014!

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A Final Note From the Author

(‘Final’ for like five minutes, anyway, until Out of the Box starts.)

First off, if you want to know when future books become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by
CLICKING HERE
. Don’t let the caps lock scare you; I don’t sell your information and I only send out emails when I have a new book out. The reason you should sign up for this is because while I have actually set a release date for Out of the Box #1, it is not something I usually do, and even if you’re following me on Facebook (
robertJcrane (Author)
) or Twitter (
@robertJcrane
), it’s easy to miss my book announcements because…well, because social media is an imprecise thing.

Now that the PSA is out of the way…

Well, that was a hell of a thing.

Alone: The Girl in the Box, Book 1 was released on April 11, 2012 and here we are, approximately two years and four months later, and it’s done. Ten books in less than two and a half years. (Plus I released another six books in other series during that time, and some of them were REALLY long…hey, what’s that tooting sound? My own horn? Oh. I’ll stop, then.) Girl in the Box was always meant to be an origin story, the tale of a girl who’s stunted emotionally by the things her mother has done to her in the name of protecting her, about her journey out into the world to become an isolated and yet self-sacrificing protector of society. I wanted to show her grow up, suffer betrayals and grow stronger than she would ever have imagined possible.

Also, I wanted cool fight scenes. Because really, cool fight scenes make the world go ’round.

Sienna has become part of my world, and I have had an absolute blast telling her origin story. I’ve laughed with her, cried with her, and I hope you have, too. I dedicated this book to the fans because without you showing your support by buying the books, this series would have died uncompleted, like so many other authors’ series’ have.

So, thank you. I appreciate you more than you know. Especially if you’ve stuck with Sienna from the beginning until now.

That said, this is an
origin
story. That means it’s just the beginning. The problem with having as much fun as I have with Sienna is that ideas just keep coming to me…I’m now up to twenty five books plotted for Out of the Box. (If that sounds intimidating to you, imagine how intimidating it is for me! I have to write all those damned things…) Out of the Box will follow a much less rigorous story structure than Girl in the Box, with story arcs lasting only about three books at a time at most. Well…mostly. Of course there’s a larger, overarching story I’ll get to, but it’s much subtler than this time around. Still, it’s there, and I can almost guarantee Sienna fans will find plenty of things to enjoy about the new series.

So here’s my promise to you – as long as I’m having fun with this world and these characters, I’ll keep writing them. It’s probably a good sign that I honestly had the most fun I’ve ever had with a Sienna book while I was writing book 10, isn’t it?

Come join the Girl in the Box discussion on my website:
http://www.robertjcrane.com
!

Cheers,

Robert J. Crane

Acknowledgments

Once upon a time, I was deep in the telling of a fantasy story about a warrior and a paladin. It was a very different sort of story than the one you’ve just read, and although I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of it, I was worried that it would not have the broad-based appeal to allow me to make a living as an author.

In a really long conversation with my friend Kari Phillips, I told her my idea for another series I’d tentatively sketched out about a girl confined to her home, mysteriously trapped by her mother until the day mom doesn’t come home and she wakes up to find two men in her house. “You should write that,” she told me. “I think that would do well.”

And so it has.

Thanks to Kari for helping Sienna get out of the box.

There were others, of course, almost too many to count. Robin McDermott, Julia Corrigan, Erin Kane, Damarra Atkins, Calvin Sams, Paul Madsen, Kea Grace – all these people reviewed preliminary manuscripts at some point in the series and provided guidance to either help me feel like I didn’t suck or helped me fix genuine errors in the books. They were fixers and reassurers, people who helped keep the car on the road, and I appreciate every one of them for it.

Thanks especially to Jo Evans, Jessica Kelishes and Nicolette Solomita, who each worked on this particular book to help it be the best it could be.