The Fire In My Eyes (38 page)

Yamamoto finally stepped in and took advantage of their focus. His eyes blazed orange and the rearmost of the Bureau agents staggered, dropped to his knees, and gagged. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. One of the other agents turned to face Yamamoto while the other kept his focus on me. The odds were even now, at least in a strictly numerical sense. If Nikki stepped in, the odds would shift to our favor, but she needed to keep an eye on the geek. We couldn’t risk losing him now.

“Kaze!” one of the agents hissed. The injured one slumped sideways to the floor. I assumed he had passed out. Yamamoto had said he wouldn't kill in our territory, but spitting up blood wasn't a sign of good health. I pushed that thought aside and concentrated on my opponent again, splitting my shield into components again. With only one attacker, maybe I could bait him. I flicked a pulse of kinetic force at him to keep his attention and to keep him from putting all his power into offense. He absorbed the hit on his own shield and thrust back. His attack was brutal, focused, and aimed at the weak points of my shield. Green sparks flashed as I shored up the weak points, but as soon as I did, he'd hit somewhere else. I had no way to overwhelm his shield before he broke mine down.

A few steps away, Yamamoto was provoking the other agent. Attacks slammed against his shield, but each one slipped off. “Deadly force? The use of firearms?” Yamamoto asked. “I was under the impression that your organization disavowed such things. I will report this to my superiors. They will be pleased to know that the rules of engagement have changed.”

“Go back to Korea, you slant-eyed bastard,” the agent retorted. “Back off, give us the kid, and we'll let you live.”

“Your promises are as empty as your soul.”

“Eat shit!”

I absorbed another attack and felt my shield crack. The agent attacking me said nothing. That wasn't a bad thing. I was too busy trying to keep my shit together to exchange witty banter. I poured more energy into my shield and tele'd a call for help to Yamamoto. “I can't take much more of this!”

“Can you distract this one?” he tele'd back.

“I'll try.”

He nodded and tele'd a quick image back to me, three white bars against a black background. I counted to three, then bled energy from my shield and rammed it toward his attacker. The agent swore incoherently as my attack saturated his shield, throwing him off-balance. He crouched low to the ground, and I could feel his shield waver. Another attack would break his shield, but I couldn’t redirect my energy again so quickly.

Yamamoto hit my previous attacker with a telekinetic blade that slashed his shield vertically, scarlet energy bleeding from the gash. The agent danced backwards, manifesting his own telekinetic blade, moving for the doorway. I slammed the door shut behind him, trying to keep him from escaping.

I didn't need to bother. The agent didn't have a chance. Yamamoto was relentless, dropping his own shield and attacking the silent agent with just his telekinetic blade. His next slash carved a gash horizontally across the scarlet shield, crossing the previous attack. The agent brought his blade up, but Yamamoto beat it aside, then drew back a step. I could sense energy charging his next attack.

“Don't let the slant get you!” the other agent shouted. He threw a ball of scarlet energy at Yamamoto, but I intercepted it with a shield and deflected it into the ceiling. The ball scorched and blackened where it struck. It would have burned right through a person.

I saw a brief smile cross Yamamoto's face, then he thrust forward with his blade. The attack pierced the shield right where the two previous attacks had crossed. If he had thrust straight through it, he would have taken the agent through the center of his chest. Instead, he angled it slightly and rammed the telekinetic blade through the agent's right shoulder.

The agent looked at his shoulder, then at Yamamoto, then closed his eyes. I felt his grip on psionic power fade as he slid backwards off the blade and collapsed on the floor. “You should know better than to meet the Kaze blade to blade,” Yamamoto said. His attention focused back on the final agent. He raised the blade in a salute and started to advance.

The agent snarled and flicked needles of red energy at both of us, spraying streaks of red wildly across the room. Most of them missed, but a few stuck to my shield and started to burrow in. I surged power to my shield, trying to burn them out. There were flickers of energy still connected to the needles. They were actual physical needles. What was he trying to do with those?

Yamamoto's shield flared into a complete sphere of protection, but it was too late for me. All across the room, whatever the needles had stuck into jumped into the air and flew toward us. Circuit boards, soda bottles, a computer monitor that sparked and screeched as it was yanked free from its power cord, objects across the room slammed into us. I had been focused on blocking energy, not physical objects. The monitor clipped my head and dropped me to my knees, ears ringing. I touched my head where it had hit and my hand came away red. My vision blurred and I felt the room spin. Yamamoto seemed to be in better shape, but his shield was surging with power and I knew he couldn't do anything until he stabilized it.

The agent pointed at me and I could see red energy building up at his fingertips. The gesture was oddly similar to the agent in Washington. “You're fucked,” he said.

Nikki blindsided him before he could hit me. Energy flashed from her fingertips, quick green blasts that didn't have enough power to break his shield, but coming from an unexpected direction, they were enough to surprise him. The energy building for his attack vanished as he reinforced his shield and spun to counter her. I stood up and grabbed the monitor that had clipped me with telekinesis, then heaved it toward him. It bounced off his shield, but distracted him again for just a moment. That was all Nikki needed. She sprayed him with another salvo of weak bursts, but this time, she followed it up with a strong focused attack that bored through the flickering shield, right into his forehead. I didn't know what sort of attack it was, but his eyes rolled back and he flopped over without another word.

I wiped my bloody hand on my pants. “Yamamoto? You all right?”

“I am uninjured. You are hurt, though.” His orange shield faded out. I could see red scratches on his face where something had brushed him, but he wasn't bleeding like me.

Nikki jumped up and rushed over to me. “Kevin! You're all bloody!”

“He clipped me,” I admitted. “But you got him. Don't worry about it now, we need to get out of here. Did the copies finish?”

The researcher's head popped up behind the desk. Nikki must have forced him down to take cover. That steel desk looked heavy enough to stop bullets. “Did I hear gunshots?”

I looked down. At least two dozen flattened out bullets peppered the floor where I had been standing. I picked one up and flipped it over to him. “You could say that. Get all your research copied?”

He peered at the flattened bullet, then up at me. “Three copies done, fourth just finishing. You're going to distribute this? Make sure it gets into the right hands?”

Nikki walked over to him and took the trio of flash drives that had finished, then placed a hand on his head. “Don't worry. They'll get to the right hands,” she murmured. The researcher's eyes fluttered closed as her eyes glowed green. “He'll sleep, and he won't remember any of this, or his project,” she said.

“Good, that makes my job easier.” The door opened and I turned to face it. My muscles froze in place
. A fourth Bureau agent walked in, his eyes glowing scarlet. He brushed imaginary dust from his sleeves and smiled at all three of us. “Thank you for doing the hard work for me,” he said, walking over to the identically frozen Nikki and taking the flash drives, then plucking the fourth drive from the computer. He slipped all four drives into his suit jacket's inner pocket.

There had been a fourth agent. I should have known. There had been the one attacking Nikki earlier, and then after I had disabled him, there had been three others looking for us. The fight had been intense enough that I hadn't even noticed the mental assault.

“Your actions. Regrettable,” Yamamoto said. I tried to look toward him, but couldn't turn my head enough. If he could talk, maybe he could fight. I tried to say something, or telepathically communicate, but the agent's grip on my mind was firm. My heart and lungs were laboring just to keep me alive. Scarlet energy was pulsing in time with my heartbeat. The agent's presence was all around me and I could feel him slowly eroding the last barriers in my mind. If this kept up, none of us would walk out of here.

“Regrettable?” I heard a crash from behind me. The grip slackened just enough for me to turn my head. Yamamoto was on his back now, blood dripping from his nose. The agent stood over him and planted a foot on his stomach. “You shouldn't have interfered with our business.”

“Not your business,” Yamamoto replied. “Establishment territory. Not yours.”

The agent pressed down with his shoe. I heard Yamamoto grunt. The grip on my mind slackened more and I took a full breath for the first time since the agent had walked in. If he let go any more, I'd be able to seize control back. Was that what Yamamoto was trying to do? I saw him looking at me and shook my head slightly. If that was what he was trying, it wasn't enough. “The Establishment couldn't find their own ass if you gave them directions. They're so busy screwing up in the city, they could only spare a pair of trainees to deal with this. You'd take advantage of weakness, wouldn't you, Kaze? ”

“We respect and honor our adversaries,” Yamamoto said. The grip must have relaxed for him as well. “You? You are nothing but thugs, the lowest filth, with no respect for your enemies or yourselves. The concept of honor is foreign to you,
gaijin
.”

I couldn't see the agent's face, but I did see him rear back and kick Yamamoto in the ribs. A solid thump echoed through the room and Yamamoto gasped. The grip on my mind loosened as the agent kicked again. I heard a crack, probably one of Yamamoto's ribs popping. I had heard that sound from my own chest often enough, thanks to Shade. I let fury push my power beyond my stable limit and burned the agent's grip on my mind clean. For a brief moment, I had a mental image of him stumbling away, fingers on fire, slapping them against his suit in an attempt to put them out.

He spun to face me, eyes blazing, but I gave him no chance to defend himself. I stepped into him and slammed a fist into his stomach, accelerated just a bit. He bent forward with a gasp and I pulled him off balance, then shoved him toward the sole window in the room. He stumbled over a power cable and I gave him a telekinetic boot in the ass, aiming him toward the window.

I expected him to grab onto something, re-orient himself in mid-air, or simply bounce off the window. I only meant to give him a moment of panic, to distract him. Instead, he crashed through the window, spraying a storm of glass shards that caught the glow from his eyes and shone red in the early evening. He didn't scream. He only fell.

Somebody touched my shoulder. “Kevin?” I jumped. Nikki. His grip was broken now. It had to be. “Are you all right?”

“I guess?” I said. I hadn't heard him hit the ground, no thump, no crash. Had he hit the ground? Would I even hear it if he did? Was he dead? “I didn't mean to do that. I didn't.”

“Calm down,” she said. “Did you get the flash drives?”

I slapped my forehead. “No. Shit!” I didn't want to go down there. If he had hit the ground, I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to think about it. I hadn't meant to kill him, only force him to do something unexpected, to give me a moment to act, to force him to let go of Nikki and Yamamoto, not to kill him. “I didn't mean it!”

She grabbed shoulder and squeezed hard enough to hurt. “We've got to get the drives and get out of here before we're caught.”

“But I killed him!” I shouted at her. She took a step back. “I killed him! What the fuck was I doing? What was I thinking?”

“You were defending yourself,” she snapped back. “Get a grip! It was an accident!”

“He's not dead,” Yamamoto mumbled.

“What?”

The few pieces of glass left in the window rattled, then glowed red. The agent leaped in from some point below the window, face contorted with rage. He didn't even bother to land on the floor before lunging toward me. “You son of a bitch!” he screamed.

My power was unstable and he was enraged. Neither of us could manifest anything remotely complex. “I didn't mean it!” I shouted. Irrational, sure, but I felt a compulsion to apologize to the man. “I'm sorry!”

“Fuck off!” He kicked straight for my crotch. I deflected it and dodged sideways. He followed me and kept on kicking. “You fucking little shit, I'm going to mount your head on the fucking flagpole in Washington! Fuck you and your Establishment!”

I jumped backwards across the room, posted off the wall, and dropkicked him in the chest. He tumbled across the room and came up spitting. I hadn't expected the kick to actually land, but his rage was making his power as unstable as mine. Nikki added to the fight by flinging another salvo of weak bursts, but he deflected them, pounced toward her, and threw a sloppy roundhouse punch.

No one had ever punched her, as far as I knew. Shade never had. I certainly never had. She was completely unprepared and didn't even lift her hands to block. His punch snapped into her jaw and spun her to the floor. “Fuck off, bitch!” he screamed at her, then reared back for a kick.

I grabbed his leg as he swept it backwards, and pulled as hard as I could. His hip popped and I spun, flinging him in a sideways cartwheel toward the far wall, away from where the researcher was peacefully sleeping behind the desk. He pushed off the wall with one hand and landed on the floor, right leg dragging at an odd angle. “Don't touch her,” I warned him. “Or I damn well will kill you.”

He looked at me, then looked at her. “So she means that much to you?” Before I could respond, he jumped off his good leg, dropping right for her face or throat. She was still dazed from his punch, no way to manifest defenses, completely vulnerable.