Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) Read online

  I was pretty sure I was developing a complex.

  Reed turning cold hadn’t helped, nor had his having a girlfriend that couldn’t stand me. Phillips taking over as boss hadn’t been of much benefit to me, either. I’d lost my job in a very public, very obvious way, one that had resulted in plenty of discussion and speculation once things had started to turn, and it had provided lots of fuel for the fires of insecurity that were already chewing their way through me.

  It made it harder for me to empathize with saints like Flora Romero, watching what had happened to me the last few months while Kat got built up into a star. Kat was flawless, she was the favorite, she was graceful, always sweet, uproariously funny, and beloved. A popular content-trawler website ran a page on her talking about “Why we love Kat Forrest more than anything,” and detailing how she’d visited sick children in the L.A. hospital cancer ward. With her TV show cameras running, of course, because she didn’t go anywhere without them.

  At this point if I walked into a cancer ward, small children would scream and try to escape, probably getting tangled up in their IV lines in the process.

  Flora Romero was a saint. And Joaquin Pollard had killed her. It was at that point that I wished someone would go ahead and make sure that Kat became a saint, too, because it required the person to die first.

  Harsh, I know. I didn’t really mean it.

  Probably.

  What stung was the betrayal of it all. How she had—

  Aw, hell. I slowed rapidly, almost missing my turn. I’d gotten so wrapped up in feeling sorry for myself that I’d overflown the intersection by a hundred feet. I turned, sweeping around, remembered I didn’t really have to follow the streets, and drifted back toward the road I was looking for. I was high enough up that I could hear the calls and cries below as I passed overhead, but not close enough to hear what they were actually saying. Which was probably good, because if anyone had said something along the lines of “Hey, there goes the Goodyear blimp!” I would have pretended I was a meteor and crashed right to earth on top of them. Which would not have improved my image.

  The sun was starting to get closer to the horizon but was still hours from setting, and I started looking for my next turn. I wasn’t far off, I knew, three streets and then a left. I slowed, letting myself drift.

  It’s okay, Sienna, Wolfe said.

  Greatness is never appreciated by the weak and pathetic masses, Bjorn added.

  Sadly, my greatest encouragement these days came from the murderers locked inside my head. If you don’t find that worrisome, I think you should get your own head examined, because hearing voices was totally normal to me and I was alarmed every time they stepped in to provide affirmation and moral support.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. We all knew I was lying, but it was always 50/50 whether they’d call me out on it. They only did it when they felt like I was strong enough to handle the criticism.

  Okay, Wolfe said, and silence followed.

  Dammit. That said nothing good about what those closest to me thought of my present state of mind.

  Saint Flora Romero. I wasn’t even really investigating her murder. I was investigating the murder of the pond scum who had killed her, in hopes of finding a link to another criminal who was killing people. That was convoluted. Still, it was Saint Flora and Sinner Sienna. Is there a demonic equivalent to saints? Devil Sienna, maybe, to hear the nice people at CNN—or my brother—tell it.

  I slowed on the last curve, leading me to a row of houses with wildly differing lawns. The houses were brick with white accent on the gables and trim. One looked like it was completely overgrown with ivy, the next was beautifully manicured and well kept. The next house was no wider than a trailer, and the next after it was set back further than the others, the lot completely unkempt and spotty brown, with a massive shade tree covering a house that looked to be falling apart.

  I surveyed the whole thing from the air, more than a little curious about the wide variety and the story it told, but I shrugged it off. I had somewhere to be, questions to ask, so I dipped toward the street and landed about three houses down. There were people out on the porches in rocking chairs, jaws dropping as I came in for my landing. It wasn’t anything dramatic, like an airplane; I just slowly inched back to the earth and set down, starting to walk again as I landed as though I’d just come down a staircase’s last step. I nodded at the folks who were gawking, and they nodded back politely through their incredulity. “Did you just see a little white girl step down out of the sky, or did the pharmacist mess up my medications again?” an older lady asked her companion. She received a shushing in return.

  I gazed at the nearest house numbers and found the ones for my destination just across the street. The street itself was considerably narrower than the main street or even the branch I’d just followed. I guessed it had been built in the thirties or forties, maybe even earlier, part of the city’s early growth. The houses varied in size, too, maybe built during different time periods. Some of them looked gorgeous and well maintained, but I saw one down the block that was boarded up and abandoned, too.

  There was a white van just sitting on the curb in front of Flora Romero’s old house, one of a half dozen cars parked up and down the street. It really narrowed the available lane space, and I guessed people had to swing hard around it because there were barely two lanes to this road—maybe more like one and a half.

  “Is that Sienna Nealon?” I heard someone ask from somewhere behind me. I turned my head instinctively—and quickly—to look in the direction of my name being called. It stopped me for just a beat as I stepped off the curb, just like anyone else, trained to look at someone when they spoke my name.

  The person who called my name probably saved my life.

  The quiet street erupted into something else so fast that even with my meta speed, I was barely able to process it. Gunfire filled the air, the sharp crack of weapons discharge on full auto, the discordant blast of the chemical reactions pushing lead down barrels, the hard shockwaves reverberating into my heart.

  A round hit my shoulder and I went down defensively, my back hitting the sidewalk, head snapping back against the concrete. I lay there, dazed, staring at the blue sky above, puffy clouds of white drifting overhead, my ears ringing, the smell of gunpowder wafting into my nose, blood filling my mouth and pumping out of my shoulder. Warmth spread, pain radiated, and my fingers found the wound and came up crimson. I stared at the red on my fingertips, the blue sky above, blinking, stunned, and the sound of gunfire snapped ever closer around me, concrete spraying next to my head from a shot just inches away as someone pressed their advantage in ambush, moving to take me out of the fight once and for all.

  7.

  Augustus

  I had every speck of dirt in my room all up in the air, balled up tight in an area about the size of my forearm and fist, when I realized—damn, maybe Momma was right—I do need to clean this place more often. I was actually trying to shape it into a forearm and a fist, though, so it was good that it was turning out like I planned. I’d only had these powers for a few hours, after all, and the fact I could do this already was a good sign, I thought.

  I pulled my hand back and forth and the dirt fist moved with me in a gentle sway that matched my movement. I stopped, then concentrated in my head, trying to see if I could move the dirt fist without moving my own. It took a few seconds, and then it moved, slowly. I almost let out a whoop but covered my mouth with a hand at the last second before letting out a little squee while biting my knuckle to suppress the sound.

  I’d seen the hero movies. I knew what they did, always jumping right into the middle of trouble without really knowing what they could do. They were boneheads, always counting on a soft landing to break the fall when they leapt. Me, I was smarter than scripted characters. I wanted to do some practicing, see what my limits were, get really good and efficient, maybe work up a costume or something with a name—Sandman was taken, in more ways than one. Dirtman and Earthm
an had no flow to them, and I’d worked with what I had enough to know that I was basically empowered over dirt. Not regular dust; that didn’t respond. I’d tried to move a dust bunny with my mind before remembering that it was human skin or something. I’d tried moving a few other things, too, just to rule out blanket telekinesis (like one of the X-Men or something—how cool would that have been?), and I knew by the end of the experimenting that it was earth-based powers, for sure.

  I had a rock on my shelf, an old piece of amethyst I’d gotten after taking this summer program for kids at one of the local schools—I think it lasted one summer, but I liked it—for geology. When I made my moves toward it, it rattled off the shelf obligingly, spinning in the air like I’d lifted it with my own hands and was playing with it.

  I was combining the dirt fist with the amethyst when the knock came at the door. It was sudden, insistent—Momma all the way. “Taneshia’s here,” she said, and I froze, my dirt hand and amethyst completely forgotten. They both fell to the floor in a moment of shock, the amethyst cracking down and skittering sideways like it had been kicked, the hand just dispersing into a mess in a shaggy carpet in front of the bed.

  “Oh, hell,” I said, leaping off the bed to scramble for the amethyst. It was kind of stupid in retrospect since I now had the power to control it with my thoughts, but hey, c’mon. I lived nineteen years thinking I had to pick stuff up to move it physically. Give me a break on not remembering that after six hours.

  Momma opened the door, and I caught her peering down at me. There were no locks in Momma’s house, which had been very, very awkward as a teenager. She stared at me on my hands and knees on the floor, amethyst in my grasping and extended fingers as I looked up at her, probably looking more guilty than if she’d caught me naked as a jaybird on my bed.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, in a tone that told me she wanted to add, “fool boy,” to that last part but lacked a justifiable reason to do so.

  “You surprised me and I dropped my amethyst,” I said, getting to my feet and holding it out. “I was, uh … tossing it around.”

  She cocked that eyebrow at me like I was lying to her. Which I wasn’t, really! I had been tossing around the amethyst. With my mind, but still. “I said Taneshia’s here.”

  I looked straight at her. Taneshia showing up was not an unusual thing. My momma collected other kids in the neighborhood like some people collected—I don’t know, cigarette packs, or old cars. She saw something in everybody, and she tried to be encouraging, be like a momma to them, too. That got tougher as time went by and a lot of us got older and crept off the kind of paths Momma approved of. I remember one of my friends from when I was young took to dealing when he was … I don’t know, twelve, maybe? He said hi the next time they passed, and she gave him a look that sent him about running. Never gave him the time of day again after that. Momma could write you off quick if she was of a mind to.

  Taneshia was definitely one of my momma’s collection. She still came over a couple times a week, even though she had long days at Georgia Tech. It wasn’t far or anything, like twenty minutes or less to walk.

  “She’s here for you, though, right?” I asked, staring at her, a little baffled.

  Her head dropped a little so she could look at me while appearing to roll her eyes up. “Get out here, boy.” She closed the door with a thump.

  I straightened myself up quickly, gave myself a once-over in the mirror. I tried to affect the look of a man at leisure. I didn’t change clothes or anything for her, because that would have been too … uh … contrived? Needy? Desperate?

  Augustus Coleman is not a desperate man, all right? I’m careful. I’m selective.

  And I’m single because I live with my momma and she would kill me if I brought a woman home. Full on kill me. I had my first time at eighteen in my girlfriend-at-the-time’s backyard because I was scared witless that someone would see us go into her house. Instead we did it on a picnic table out back while I was watching the top of the fence around me with paranoid intensity, sure someone was going to see me and tell Momma. “What was that?” I asked, jerking my head around. Damned squirrel. To no one’s shock, not even mine, that girl broke up with me the next week.

  So was Momma pushing me to one of her favorites? Because if so, this was somewhat new. As demonstrated by my gawking at her little blond television star earlier, Momma preferred not to allow me to think of sinful thoughts related to women. I suspect she thought it corrupted me in some way, took me off the important focus of my ambitions. Which, hey, that’s a reasonable criticism. Maybe taken a little to the extreme by her attitudes, but … everybody has their hobbies. Hers was wrecking my love life.

  I walked out into the living room to see Taneshia sitting there next to momma. Beyond Human—that’s the new hotness, the metahuman reality TV show featuring flavor of the month Katrina Forrest (I’m guessing her flavor was Very Very Very White Non-Mocha with extra sugar) was still playing on the TV. Must have been a marathon.

  Taneshia wouldn’t have come back to my room even if Momma hadn’t been here. That girl had pride or morals or something. She stood up when she saw me and took a couple tentative steps forward for an awkward hug that I returned, all very gentle and proper. Momma wasn’t even looking at us. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Doing well, Augustus,” she said, not really looking at me. Taneshia was short, like close to five feet. She was rail-thin, though, with the body of a runner. She was wearing her glasses, though they weren’t as obvious or thick as Jamal’s. Her skin was dark, her features petite. She was real pretty, though she seemed to try to go to some lengths to hide it. “How are you doing?” she asked. “How was your big day?”

  I froze, my hands stiff by my side. “Big day?” My head raced laps, and not one of them led to the memory that I’d been photographed with a couple of my heroes just a few hours earlier. Knucklehead.

  “I saw the photos of you with Cavanagh and Weldon,” she said, holding up the giant face of her phone. It was dark, but the meaning was obvious—she’d seen them online. “Thought I’d stop in and see if you’d gotten done shaking yet.”

  “Ha ha!” I said, nodding my head. Cordell Weldon and Edward Cavanagh. Hard to believe a day like this could be eclipsed by something even bigger. “Can’t believe little news like my brush with greatness would make the front page.”

  “Oh, it’s not the front page,” Taneshia said, shaking her head lightly. “That’s all clogged up with news about how Sienna Nealon is flying all over Vine City right now.”

  I blinked. My heart—did it stop? It felt like it stopped. What does heart stoppage feel like? Because I think I had some of that. “Wh …” I felt my lips twist while my brain tried to find the ability to spit out the question that was turning it over. “What’s she doing here?” I paused, thought it over, and added something. “You aren’t just kidding, right?”

  She kind of blinked back in mild surprise, like she was perplexed. “No, I’m not kidding. It’s all over the local sites. Sienna Nealon’s here, she’s been flying around this afternoon. Even if half the reported sightings are fake, she’s still in the Atlanta area and they got pictures of her flying over Lowery Boulevard.”

  “Huh,” I said, my brain jumping to catch up. I always heard that metahumans were faster and stronger than normal people. I wondered if I could jump really far now. Should have tried that out, though it’d be a dead giveaway that something was going on with me, way more suspicious than playing with dirt and rocks in my room. “I wonder why she’s here.”

  “Girl’s the police,” Momma said. “Probably here for one of them.” She waved her hand at the TV.

  “I haven’t heard anything about a meta criminal,” I said, frowning at the TV. Katrina Forrest was in a bikini again. Again. Red this time. I dragged my eyes away forcibly, back to Taneshia to find her looking at me, slightly angled, the red bikini reflected in her lenses. That worked out well.

  “Couple guys got struck by lightni
ng last night,” Taneshia said. “Could be a meta.”

  I stared at her. “Say whut? Lightning?” I thought about that for a second and my voice fell to a whisper without me even thinking about it. “They can do that?”

  “You ever see this girl grow a plant out of a seed?” Momma said, still looking at the TV. She didn’t even need to try to eavesdrop on our conversation. Listening in was her natural state and we all accepted it. “They can do anything.”

  “Hmm,” I said, nodding along. I wondered pretty quickly along a certain track that was—well, it was uniquely Augustus, I think. It went like this: What if she’s here for me? But how could she know about me? I didn’t even know about me until today! What if they have a machine that detects metas from a distance?

  And then my mind exploded with that possibility, and my eyes must have gotten really big, because Taneshia cocked her head at me like she was wondering what I could possibly be thinking.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t get a chance to ask the question that followed, because the sound of gunfire popped loud and hard from somewhere behind us, and every single one of us was on the ground in about a second. I found myself nose to nose with Taneshia, her glasses askew and giving me a wonderful view of her dark brown eyes, though they were wide with fear. The reflection of the TV, still blaring next to us, was there in her pupils. Red bikini. Damn.

  “Dammit!” Momma called. “Jamal!” Like he would hear her but not the shots. Actually, scratch that, it could happen. The shots sounded like they had some distance. If they’d been farther off, we might have been able to mistake them for fireworks. At a distance it was easier to hear them and just sort of freeze, listening hard. These sounded like they might only have been a couple streets away, though.