06 - Vengeful Read online

  I pulled back enough to get the stink of cat out of my nostrils and so I could see his monitor. “What the hell is this?”

  “These are email accounts tied to IP addresses of your much-vaunted ‘Brain’ villain,” J.J. said, apparently deciding to wisely forgo any additional unamusing witticisms in favor of extending his life expectancy. “I caught them last episode, while we were dealing with Anselmo and Bryant Cunningham. They’ve been waging a PR war against you, tipping off reporters to all sorts of stuff that’s … well—”

  “They’ve been messing with my public image,” I said, adding that fuel to the fire that was burning not-so-deep inside of me. “She’s been upping the speed on the treadmill as I try to outrun these media shitstorms.”

  “Bad analogy,” he said, shaking his head, “there’s not a treadmill out there that you couldn’t outrun ’til it smoked—” He caught the look on my face and stopped. “Yes. Right. So … these are the Brain’s emails … and this is what went out early this morning, while I was sleeping.”

  He punched a key and brought up a wall of text, six emails in a chain with replies and everything. I blinked as I scanned, and my blood grew colder and colder. “Who the hell is the recipient?”

  J.J. smacked his lips together. “Local assassin, near as I can tell. He doesn’t have a file with Homeland Security or the FBI, which means—”

  “He’s good,” I said, feeling that chill settle over my bones as I kept reading. “How do I find him?”

  “His name’s Michael Shafer, and he communicates over a VPN that’s technically untraceable—” J.J. froze mid-sentence, looking at me like I was going to smack him. “You know what? I don’t want to waste your time with the technicals—”

  “Good call.”

  “Anyway, I already found him.” He tapped the keyboard a few times and an address popped up along with a Google map. “Sending to your phone.”

  I heard a chirrup and pulled out my phone to find the map already there. I stared at it for only a second, the thought I had not really a thought, just a generalized urge to head straight for my enemy. “Okay,” I said and waited for him to say something—a wiseass comment, a word of caution, anything. He didn’t, he just sat there looking down, like his lap was the most interesting thing in the world. So … like any other man, really.

  With nothing and no one to stop me, I turned and flew back to the stairwell, erupting out of the roof door and into the night.

  7.

  I went cannonballing into a house right on the shores of Lake Minnetonka without worrying about how much I was probably lowering the property values just by being there. I burst through a full plate-glass window, not for the first time that night, using Wolfe to heal the massive lacerations I suffered before I bled all over the place. Shards of glass landed all over the floor and I startled the shit out of the guy who had been walking across the far side of the luxuriously appointed living room with a big ol’ snifter of brandy in his hand, a spotted maroon bathrobe knotted around his waist.

  Everything about this guy screamed EXPENSIVE, including the diamond-crusted ring on his index finger, his carefully sculpted grey-tinged hair, parted on the side and sweeping back, and his fuzzy slippers. Wool or something, I think. They looked comfy.

  “Hi,” I said, not in a friendly way, hovering rather ominously over his lushly appointed cream-colored couch. He didn’t even have a TV in this room, just a bar cabinet, tons of wood shelving with books, and furniture that looked like it didn’t come cheap. All that and a full view of Lake Minnetonka by moonlight. I glanced down and saw a Persian rug that probably cost more than I made in a year.

  “Good God,” he said, ducking his head and raising his hands, apparently a little surprised that I’d just burst into his living room while he was having his nightcap.

  “Not quite,” I said. His eyes were fixed on mine, and his mouth was only slightly agape. “God forgives, I’m told. Me? Not so much.” I stole another glance around the room, feeling like I needed slightly more from him before I commenced to pounding him into sausage meat. Probably very luxurious sausage meat, but still. “So … crime pays, huh?”

  “Very well, actually,” he said, his brain apparently not getting the memo that when you’re in over your head, you should shut your mouth. Instead, he took a couple steps toward his liquor cabinet and opened a bottle on the top, taking his time, pouring another for himself. I suspected he needed it after the start I’d just given him. He pointed to a second snifter and shrugged when he caught the look on my face. “How about government service? Is it as bad as everything I’ve heard?”

  Quick on his feet, back to getting a drink and having a casual conversation about the financial benefits of criminality seconds after the world’s premiere superheroine burst through his window.

  Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.

  I swooped down to get a grip on him so I could take him on a quick night flight/interrogation high up in the air before dropping him like Sokovia on an unsuspecting world. To my surprise, he threw the brandy in my face and dodged left fast enough that I actually had to pause to counter.

  And that brandy? It must have been expensive, because it burned. All the way down.

  It wasn’t a little burn, either, it was the kind that made you blind, made your skin smoke. The smell of alcohol was absent, a strong chemical smell heavy in my nose instead. “I wish you hadn’t come here,” he said, sounding regretful.

  I turned on the Gavrikov and Wolfe all at once, felt the burning on my skin halt even as I burst into flames. “You’re saying this now, before I even have a chance to really wreck your leather-bound books and eliminate the smell of rich mahogany from your life. Let’s see how you feel after I burn this motha to the—”

  Whatever he threw on me ignited with a lot more gusto than I’d expected, propelling me backward through a wall and causing me to flip from the force of the explosion. Harsh chemical flame and dust poured into my nasal passages as I crashed through drywall and wood, my body pinwheeling as I spun through the air, inadvertently lighting flame to everything I touched until I came down, hard, and the world went dark around me.

  8.

  I forced my eyes back open, reflecting not for the first time that in spite of being in something of an induced coma only hours before and an unconscious state not long after, I kinda wanted a nap. Again. Getting my ass kicked really takes it out of me.

  I shook my head as I came up, trying to get rid of the bell-ringing effects of that caustic-plus-explosive mix I’d just had thrown into my face, but smoke was streaming into my eyes, nose and mouth, causing me to cough and sputter. I realized I had a hell of a headache, maybe worse than when the car had exploded, and I wondered how long I’d been out, because the bed was already fully engulfed and flames were already creeping up the walls.

  Normally, I would have noticed someone pouring an explosive chemical mixture into a brandy snifter from across the room. Something about the smell tended to trip metahuman senses under normal conditions. I could only assume my emotional state was affecting my mad skills. “Well, shit,” I said as the smoke started to grow thick around the ceiling. This was not exactly going to plan.

  Perhaps caution? Wolfe advised, so out of character I thought it was Roberto Bastian speaking at first.

  “Perhaps you should go screw yourself with something sharp,” I replied, rising off the fiery mattress and looked to my left. “Give me a few minutes to wrap this up and I’ll imagine into your existence something suitably pointy for you to get the job done with.” Fire was crawling up the fancy curtains and the smoke they were giving off was messing with my view of the lake, which was starting to show signs of the impending sunrise somewhere off to the east.

  He’s only trying to help, Eve Kappler said a little resentfully.

  “I’m in a burning house and I just got attacked by someone smart enough—or stupid enough—to keep a booze bottle full of flammable liquid in their liquor cabinet in case company like me comes cal
ling,” I snapped. “Captain Obvious’s advice is not so helpful right now.”

  Without waiting to hear a reply from my mental spectator gallery, I burst through the wall into the living room, which was not quite in flames yet. It was, however, still covered in broken glass, and empty of Michael Shafer, whom I presently wanted to expose to broken glass, flames, and my fist, not necessarily in that order. Rather than say something to announce myself in case he was lying in wait, I drifted through the air, careful not to make any noise.

  Then the smoke alarms started wailing in the room I’d set on fire and put that plan right out the window. I heard the klaxon taken up by every other smoke detector in the house, and that pretty well ruined my ability to hear, like a month full of Rammstein concerts piped directly into my eardrums.

  I considered just getting the hell out of the house and letting it burn, swooping into the air and looking down, watching the exits until someone came out, but that didn’t really fit my furious and raging emotional state. No, I wasn’t the type to sit quietly in wait for someone who’d just ambushed me, because that would be entirely too smart.

  Instead, I burst through the wall across from me, smashing into where I assumed the master bedroom would be. I drew hard on Wolfe’s healing abilities the whole time, and it turned out I needed them, and badly, because I came crashing through the master bathroom instead and absolutely racked my knee on a marble countertop.

  While I was filling the air with anger, flames and swearing (all related), I saw movement through the door to the master bedroom ahead. Reflecting again that perhaps I was going about this thing all wrong (but with more colorful language), I shot ahead like a fiery rocket, watching my orange-colored reflection in the shiny, ivory-colored floor tiles and the mirrors that surrounded the two separate vanities and the enormous glass shower parked in the corner of the room that would have been big enough to clean off a small elephant.

  As I flew into the bedroom, someone swung a wooden chair right into my face. It hurt, of course, all the more so because I didn’t have Wolfe front of mind at the moment. I felt my cheekbones shatter like a glass dropped off a ten story building, my skin bursting open at the hundred mile an hour impact. My vision cut out and my lower body flipped under the artificial clothesline and rammed into the bed, shattering the baseboard and my back in the process.

  This was not anywhere close to my finest hour.

  I lay there, stunned, bleeding in a pile, blind save for a very tiny amount of vision in one eye. Blood spurted out of my mouth in a very wet, very nasty cough. The sound of fire alarms wailing around me was nothing compared to the insensate feeling in my own head, my neck at a terrible angle to the rest of my body. Every breath I took was choked with my own bloody spittle, and I must have sounded pathetic as I fought even to get a glimpse of the room around me.

  As per usual, it was way nicer than anything of mine.

  “What do we do?” I heard Michael Shafer ask. I could tell it was him over the harsh ringing in my ears and the sirens going off. Dimly, I realized that it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be more than one person in the house.

  The answer came from a different voice, this one female, and possessed of none of the maternal kindness that people sometimes associate with women. This one was cold, uncaring, and more than a little pissed off. We could have been friends, I like to think, if not for her answer. “We kill her,” she said, and the next sound I heard was the click of a trigger being pulled.

  9.

  A shotgun blast went off right in the back of my head just as I managed to get Wolfe in my mind, ramming my face into the oaken floorboards from the force of the explosive blast of pellets that swarmed my skull. It was like getting stung by a thousand angry gnats at once, like Hellraiser-type pins stabbed into my scalp as the force smashed my face into the floor, all while my body was already broken in about two dozen places and trying to heal.

  Best. Night. Ever.

  Right about the time my body started to resume its normal shape, I caught a whiff of the panic that was congealing in the air around me. I heard Shafer curse under his breath, probably after his lady friend tried to blow my head off with a shotgun and realized I was impervious. Should have used a handgun, folks. I’d been blasting myself with buckshot of increasingly powerful levels for months all over my body, trying to coarsen my skin when I was in Wolfe mode. Thousands of years of doing similar things to himself had made Wolfe damned near impervious to physical harm before I met him. I hadn’t been gutsy enough to progress to shooting myself with full-metal-jacketed bullets yet, but it was on my list of things to do for next year.

  I swept a foot out hard in the direction that I suspected my female assailant stood and was rewarded by a sharp cry of pain as I swept her legs. I thrust both palms against the ground as if doing a push up, but used Gavrikov’s powers of flight to switch off gravity as I did so. I leapt into the air and flipped, catching Michael Shafer with a stylistically badass kick as I did so. It wasn’t my strongest, but it knocked him back a few steps, leaving a dent in the drywall where he hit.

  It should have put him through it, which, when coupled with his fast reaction in throwing the snifter at me earlier, told me something about Michael Shafer.

  This sonofagun was a metahuman.

  I didn’t even need to vow that there’d be no more Ms. Nice Lady, I just flew at him with everything I had and smashed him through the wall. He took the hit and rolled as he landed on his nicely manicured lawn below, and I did a quick Yeager loop and drilled him into the earth with a crash-landing punch that would have been a lot sweeter if he hadn’t dodged out of some of the impact at the last second.

  We were both a half a foot into the ground when we started to come out of the second’s worth of stun that followed my landing on him, and I locked eyes with his. He had a pained look on his face, but not as pained as he ought to have looked after I drilled him like I did. I punched him with a sharp jab, the kind that I use to break bulletproof glass, and his head rocked back. When he bobble-headed his way back, it was with none of the blank look or wooziness that he should have had.

  Instead the bastard headbutted me right in the nose, and I heard my cartilage break. Warm blood dripped down my upper lip, giving me a red Hitler mustache and pissing me off even more. “So that’s how it’s going to be?” I hit him again, and again, and again, and again, and—

  Well, it went on for a while.

  I pounded him right in the kisser, my knuckles bleeding after the second punch from exceeding the force limits a human body is supposed to take. The big secret of metas, of course, is that while we heal faster and are stronger than humans, we’re not invulnerable to them, per se. I mean, with Wolfe’s power I’m a lot closer, but a normal person could conceivably knock me out with a properly aimed sucker punch. It’d be a frosty day in hell before I’d let anyone close enough to do that, and I’d have to not have Wolfe pulled up in my mind, but it could happen.

  As a consequence, my knuckles were splitting open and healing after each punch, the skin not quite accustomed to hammering against something this hard, this repetitively. Blood ran down my wrist, tickling and annoying me, but not as much as the douche canoe I was battering. Most people gave up the damned ghost after a couple punches, but Michael Shafer was still looking at me with not-so-veiled-murder in his eyes after however many punches. He got his mouth open and I saw the glint of his teeth in the light as I went to punch him again. He bit down with perfect timing, right on my already-bloody knuckles, and suddenly I knew just what kind of meta this bastard was.

  I forget the official title, but Japanese called them “Iron Tooth.” As he ripped my middle and ring fingers off my right hand, my textbook knowledge of this type of meta went beyond the theoretical and well into the range of “Soon To Be a Trophy Head Hanging on My Wall.” The way things were going, I’d probably get my own outrage Facebook post to be shared the world over for it. I didn’t care; I’d even make sure to shine up his teeth every f
ew days so they didn’t lose their luster or get dusty.

  Who bites in a fistfight? Honestly.

  I didn’t stare in horror at my missing fingers like he probably expected me to, because this wasn’t my first rodeo of missing body parts. Instead, I pulled clear of him, getting to my feet and beginning to do what I do best.

  I kicked him like his belly was a piñata and I was a spoiled, hangry (a portmanteau of hungry-angry, before you try and correct my spelling, you unsophisticates) four year-old with the sweet tooth from hell. If his teeth were iron, I was hoping his belly was a soft pouch, and I stomped and stomped until I felt like even a tortoise with a titanium shell couldn’t have survived in his intestines. I hoped he felt like he’d eaten eighty-seven bean burritos and had nary a hope of Gas-X ever, and judging by the way his eyes were bulging out of his head when I got done, I wasn’t far off.

  Blood was streaming down his lips by the light of the house on fire behind us, and he was cradling his tender underbelly, which was distended inward like he was about two inches from being cut in half. “Smile, you prick,” I said, and wound up for the kick, which was going right to his stupid face.

  I got dragged down from behind right as my balance was at its worst point, and my shoulders hit dirt, as did my ass. It didn’t really hurt, but Shafer used the opportunity to roll over and bite me in the leg. That hurt.

  And was also the last straw.

  I saw his woman coming at me from above with a kick, and I grabbed her by the ankle. She didn’t move nearly as fast as him, thankfully, and when I caught her I could feel that she wasn’t as strong, either. I yanked her into the air, dragging him along by his teeth, buried so unhelpfully in my upper thigh. I could tell he was going for the artery, so once we got aloft I sparked off Gavrikov, setting fire to my leg. He yelped, and I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck as he cut loose and started to drop, carrying him along into the night.