Power Read online

  Power

  The Girl in the Box

  Book 10

  Robert J. Crane

  Power

  The Girl in the Box

  Book 10

  Copyright © 2014 Midian Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Dedication

  This one is for the readers, who have supported me en masse and given me the power to tell the stories I wanted to tell.

  Chapter 1

  Apiolae, Roman Empire

  264 A.D.

  She didn’t know that today was going to be the day that she died, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered one bit.

  The pains of labor were coming hard and fast upon Camilla now, and she was tilted back to minimize her discomfort. The smells in the small hut were overpowering—the sweat, the stink of childbirth made her nearly want to gag. She was perspiring, her skin clammy. She could hear the sound of her own straining. In her head, it sounded like wood being pushed to the snapping point. The pain between her legs heralded the baby’s coming. That or her death, she figured.

  “Camilla,” came the voice from down there, down by the pain. She looked upon the darkened face of Aelia, the midwife. “Things are moving quickly now. I will have you push upon the next swelling of the pain.”

  “It is all pain,” Camilla said between abruptly drawn breaths. They were like fire taken into her body, each of them.

  Aelia smiled sweetly, the cow. “I see the top of a head. Do you have a name for the child?”

  Camilla drew another ragged breath, trying to keep from screaming. “Marius, if it’s a boy. Aureliana, if it’s a girl.”

  Camilla did not miss the subtle flickering of Aelia’s face as she glanced down, then back up to meet Camilla’s eyes. “Is Marius the father’s name?”

  Camilla took another impatient breath. She’d kept the father’s identity to herself. It didn’t bear talking about, in her opinion, that she’d met a strange man and fallen prey to his charms. She’d woken up groggy, disoriented, and barely able to see straight the next morning.

  She’d found out about the baby not too long after.

  And for the life of her, she could not remember his damned name. She remembered his low words, but barely, the smooth lines of his face, the near-glow of his green eyes. His caress when he brushed her arm and shoulder had felt silky at first. She remembered him speaking to tell her his name, but it was as though the words themselves had been ripped from her mind with a touch.

  A touch that had turned to fire.

  Camilla had had lovers before, had been with men in dark places and felt their touch. Rough or gentle, she’d never met a man who made her feel a searing in her skin before, all pain and no pleasure.

  And what in the skies of Jupiter was his name? It was gone. Just gone.

  “The baby is crowning,” Aelia said, her tone neutral. The cow sounded as though she were delivering nothing more important than a baby … well, cow. She had helped deliver more than a few of those, Camilla supposed. “A few more good pushes and we’ll have them out.” She glanced up and smiled. “As I said, it is moving fast. Another few minutes at most and you’ll be holding your baby.”

  “Oh, good,” Camilla said. The pain was interminable, and hearing that there was a definite end to it was a comfort in itself. She could buttress herself against the torment for a few minutes more if that was all it would take. She could feel the agony rising within her for another wave and she pushed as furiously as she could.

  Her nerves sang in pain, screamed in pain, and after a moment of resisting she added her own voice to the chorus because WHY NOT OH IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS AIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

  Camilla realized after a moment that she had started to scream along with the pain, had sung with it. The searing fire built to a crescendo and then began to subside, replaced by her own labored breathing. She sagged back on the bed, feeling the steady burning in her loins.

  “Very close now, Camilla,” Aelia said. “The head is out and I’ve very nearly got the shoulder clear.” She sounded so calm, the cow. Like she was in the midst of something ordinary, as though there wasn’t pain, pain, pain as far as the eye could see, the ear could hear, the skin could feel—

  Camilla grunted. The pain she felt now was not like the other pain. It was a burning that was continuous, a searing that seemed to be rising in her groin, independent of the labor pains. This one sizzled inside, inside her like—

  “It burns,” she moaned and felt her face contort even as the other pain—the labor pain—rose again within her.

  “It comes quickly now,” Aelia said, her voice muffled, not looking up. “This will be the time—”

  “It burns!” Camilla screamed as the crescendo of labor clashed with the screaming, burning fire against the skin of her insides where she could barely feel the baby lodged within her. Even with the pain she could tell there was something wrong, something different from the waves of agony that had come with the birthing. That was rising again, too, there was no stopping it now, but the other pain—

  Oh, gods—

  Camilla’s scream tore free from her throat as though it had been ripped from her like a goat’s skin from its meat. The pain of labor crashed in again and she found herself pushing involuntarily, against her will, mind howling about how there was something terribly wrong even as the child began to slip from her. She could feel it against her, the writhing thing, could feel it burning her as it passed—

  “Just a moment more,” Aelia said, but she sounded so very, very far away.

  Camilla’s scream faded in her own ears as the fire reached its height, its zenith, and she felt rather than heard something pop loose. Her sight fled, the smells of the room faded, her pain dropped away into black as her own screams abruptly ceased. It was all darkness and then—

  Fear.

  The world came back in a rush of crying. Screaming and crying. It was short, sharp cries, cries born of need and ignorance and pain.

  The cries of a child.

  Camilla could hear them, had expected them at the outset of the labor. But they sounded … different … than ones she’d heard before, at other births she’d been at. They sounded—

  Like she was hearing them from within her own head.

  She saw nothing, just a faint light through unfocused eyes. “There, there,” came Aelia’s soothing voice. “It is a boy, Camilla. What was the name again?” There was a pause. “Marius?”

  Yes, she tried to say, but her throat would not cooperate.

  Her throat …

  … was already crying …

  … the cries of a baby.

  There was something else with her, raw fear pushing against her. She could feel it, something squirming and afraid, something longing for warmth and darkness. Something scared of every raw, cutting sound, every rough touch of Aelia’s hands. It pushed against her thoughts, and she pushed back roughly.

  What … is … this …?

  Camilla tried to give voice to the words, tri
ed to push them past the screaming of her lips, but failed. The fear of the other was overcoming everything.

  “Camilla?” Aelia’s voice permeated her consciousness, broke through the screaming of the child using her voice. “Camilla?” She could hear Aelia’s voice get higher. “Marcellina!” Aelia called, the panic obvious as she screamed out for the assistant she had left outside.

  There was a surge of light—the door opening, Camilla dimly realized over the screaming and the fear from the other—and the sound of harsh footsteps on her floor. She could feel the rough sensation of a blanket being draped over her skin, wrapping completely around her, of a sense of warmth.

  The other felt it, too, and a little of the fear subsided. Just a little, though.

  “Take the child,” Aelia said, and Camilla felt the world shift roughly, the balance tilt. A dim hint from that came to her, and she dismissed it as madness—

  “Is she …?” Marcellina’s voice came from above her, and a subtle rocking began, the bare motion of left to right.

  “Dead,” Aelia said. There was a pause. “She must have died during the last moments of the labor.”

  What …?

  “And the child?” Marcellina asked. She was barely a girl herself, a thin, reedy little thing. There had been a reason she’d been waiting outside. Gossipmonger.

  “We will take him with us, for now,” Aelia said. “Camilla had no family left. The boy—Marius, she wanted him to be named—we will have to find him a home.”

  A silence filled the air. The cries had subsided, and only the faintest hint of light made it into Camilla’s vision. But she could feel the blanket around her, strong arms beneath her. She could smell, could hear. It is not possible, she wanted to tell herself. And yet—

  Somehow it was.

  She pressed her thoughts against the other thing that was with her, the other … mind? She felt it press back only gently, a deep weariness already falling over it. It was incomprehensible, nearly, especially for a woman who tried to think of herself as reasonable, tried not to indulge in fits of fancy—

  It is like a story of the gods, a tale of punishment and madness and woe for those who go against them. What did I do to deserve this …?

  The other mind in her body slept, and she felt it drift away while she stayed awake, fighting the urge to sleep that came with it. She stayed, numb in her shock, the faint light still flooding through her eyes as she was rocked, back and forth, like the baby she now was.

  Chapter 2

  Sienna Nealon

  Now

  The door burst off the steel box with the fury of a succubus unleashed. It felt as if I’d been speaking to Adelaide in my head for hours, but I knew when I’d come back to myself that only minutes had passed. Minutes that I’d spent in that cramped metal box, the smell of blood and fear still trapped in the dark with me. The steady thrum of the aircraft’s engines buzzed in the background, and I smiled as a slightly oily scent flooded into the open box along with the light of the cargo plane’s hold.

  “What’s up, bros?” I snarled as I stood there, feeling the cool air run over my skin.

  Two massive specimens stood in muted shock in front of me peering in, one to each side, a divide between them where I’d sent the door to the box that had been imprisoning me skittering across the metal grating of the deck. The guy on the left side had long, curly red hair and a red beard while the other had short dark hair and a clean-shaven face.

  They both looked at me blankly. I could tell that their brains hadn’t gotten the tray tables up and the seatbacks locked just yet. There was a boiling anger in me that wasn’t entirely my own, something closer to the surface than usual that wanted to tear off their faces, shred the skin from their bodies in large chunks, expose their entrails to the sweet light of day—

  Settle down, Wolfe.

  But it will be so sweet, Little Doll, to taste their blood on the tip of the tongue, to—

  “That’s about enough of that,” I said, letting my thoughts form out loud.

  “Wh–what?” The red-haired one asked, and I could see the genuine surprise on his face. What was his name again? Grihm, that was it. Grihm was the redhead. Which made the clean-shaven one Frederick. I glanced at him; he looked just as stunned as his brother.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” I surged out of the metal enclosure with a speed greater than I’d ever had. I had tapped directly into the power of Wolfe, and of the many things he’d been—murderer, psychopath, serial killer—

  Hey, the voice of Wolfe protested from within me.

  Well, you were. Are. Still would be if you could be.

  —he was also a lot stronger and faster than I’d ever been. I couldn’t have hoped to break open the door to the box that his asshole brothers had trapped me in, but for Wolfe it was all, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto ye.”

  I was hoping his brothers’ skulls operated under the same principle.

  I slammed into Grihm with a punch to the midsection that he was just beginning to prepare for when I hit him. These two jerkoffs had done a number on me recently, busted open some of my internal organs, laid a hurting on me like I hadn’t felt in a while.

  All signs of it were gone now. Healed by the power of Wolfe, that creepy and sadistic and magnificent bastard. One of the souls that lingered in my head, and now my new BFF.

  That probably should have been cause for concern.

  Hey, he said again with a little bit of umbrage.

  Sorry.

  The blow to the midsection caught Grihm flat-footed. If he’d been surprised I’d broken down the door, he was almost completely unprepared for the world-ending blow to his gut that I struck him with. He grimaced in pain.

  And flew into the ribbed steel hull of the plane twenty feet away.

  The whole world shifted with the sudden impact of his body against the bulkhead, a tilt in gravity as though something heavy had just impacted the plane from the outside. I felt like I was on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise during a space battle, and the world turned sideways while I lost my footing. I watched Frederick go tumbling with me as I scrambled to grab hold of the grating on the deck. My fingers caught hold while I watched that dark-haired bastard fall a few more feet before he managed to get a grip as well.

  It took a moment for the plane to stabilize, and I returned to my feet before either of the other two, which was good. They still both had that look like they were shaking off surprise. Which was even better.

  Because it made them prey.

  Prey are unprepared, Wolfe said, lecturing me. They wait, they react, they try to fight back after the hunter has made his move.

  Yes, thank you, I said. Really helpful. And kind of scary.

  He was right about one thing, though, I reflected as stooped into a low crouch and readied myself to spring.

  They were prey.

  My prey.

  I launched myself at Frederick in a low run, my center of gravity closer to the deck than his. I was average height for a woman, after all, five foot four, and he was a mountainous, towering beast who looked like he should have been hitched to a wagon in the old west, lashes falling across his back as he pulled his burden along a dusty road.

  I actually giggled at that image as I slammed iron knuckles into his back and heard him release his breath. I’d hit him in the kidney, just the place where he’d hit me not ten minutes earlier. It had hurt. A lot. And I carried a grudge.

  I hit him again as he struggled with his balance. He threw back an elbow to try and knock my head off my neck, but I was short enough to duck it. It caused him to lose his balance, and I was nimble enough to let his momentum carry him to the ground. With a little help, maybe.

  I knocked one of his legs out from beneath him at the most vulnerable moment. “Timber!” I cried gleefully. When I’d fought these two only a half hour before, they moved like lightning and hit like … well, also like lightning, I suppose. I’m fast, but I’m not that fast.

  Or at lea
st I hadn’t been. Things had changed.

  I landed on Frederick’s back as his face hit the deck. I heard his roar of rage on impact and knew that it hadn’t hurt him one bit. I planted another painful blow to his kidney and this time he howled. These creatures were on such a level of strength, their skins so resistant to damage, that they could shrug off bullets like they were BBs and brush aside punches from powerful metahumans like they were wet cardboard being slapped against them.

  I drove another fist into Frederick’s kidney and listened to the roar mingled with pain—real pain—and grinned. I was going to turn him into wet cardboard by the time I was done—

  I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and it set my predator’s instincts into motion. Grihm was charging at me, and he looked like a rhino loping its way across the plains. Huge. Powerful.

  Well, if the plains were a confined cargo plane’s hold, and the rhino was a subhuman beast barely a step above a wild dog on the evolutionary chart—

  HEY.

  Oh, hush up, Wolfe, we’re busy here.

  Grihm was coming at me without thought, without logic. He was all out on his run, uncaring about what he hit behind me, so long as he turned me into a greasy smear on the deck in the process.

  Big and dumb, that’s what these boys were. Just like—

  HEY—

  SHUT UP, WOLFE.

  I propelled myself low, taking advantage of Grihm’s absurd height advantage. He may have been charging at me, but his center of mass was still several feet off the ground. I greeted his left knee with a booted foot. His joint didn’t give out—he was still obscenely tough, after all—but it didn’t have to.

  I knocked his damned leg right out from underneath him.

  Grihm collapsed, coming down in an absurd triangle, with his ass making up the apex, his feet being one point, head being the other, and the deck making up the bottom of the shape. Well, sort of. I was beneath him, after all, so technically, I guess I was the bottom of the triangle. And since having one of these obtuse, moronic mules landing on me wasn’t in my plans for the day—Shut up, Wolfe, stop taking my insults to them so personally, you wuss—I kicked up and landed a foot in Grihm’s crotch and changed his downward trajectory back to up.