Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) Read online

  The hard pops continued, unabating. We heard gunshots sometimes, it was true, but they were usually quick. Pop pop pop pop and done. These went on, strung close together, like multiple automatics ripping out in the day. This was not usual.

  But then, neither was I, anymore.

  I wanted to be somebody all my life, and now I had powers. I felt my hand shake as I lay there on the floor. I looked down at the dark skin on my knuckles, saw the shake stop, steady out. Something was going on out there.

  And this was the moment I’d been waiting for.

  I jumped to my feet and ignored my momma’s calls. I listened and heard the shots coming from somewhere behind our house. I felt my balance steady and I leapt forward toward the hall, racing toward the back door. I could feel the change, the speed, the power at my fingertips. I unclicked the deadbolt and had the door open in a shake. I paused for just a second, looking out into the dying light, realizing that this was the moment—the one I’d been waiting for—and then I jumped over my fence like it was nothing more than a small hurdle as I ran off to be a hero.

  8.

  Sienna

  “Wolfe,” I whispered, my back hard on the concrete, the curb jutting into the base of my spine. It was hot, the pavement burning my arms where they touched it, warm through my black pants and on my face. I was still holding up a bloody hand, staring at the red on my fingers from where I’d been shot. Again.

  Why was I always getting shot?

  Go, Sienna, Wolfe whispered in my mind, and I felt my head snap back into wakefulness. I took a hard breath and rolled, ditching gravity as I moved, feet first, into the air, coming up about seven feet off the ground in a hover.

  “Gavrikov,” I said, looking at the scene before me. The van that had been parked on the street had spilled open, the side panels thrown wide and three men with guns staring up at me, tracking a little too slowly for their own good. At the rear of the van, the double doors were open there as well, and three more men with guns were doing their damnedest to acquire me as a target.

  I was fast. Faster than any human being and most metas. But I couldn’t outrun a bullet, and if one hit me in a place like the brain, I’d still be dead, because I wouldn’t be able to summon the mental ability to draw on Wolfe to heal me. Right now I had six gunmen drawing a bead on me, and I could only hope that if they got off a shot before I took them out, it’d be a body shot, because that I could fix.

  I twisted my fingers as I thrust both hands up. I peered down each digit like a gunsight, my right hand on the guys at the rear of the van, the left pointed at the open doors up front. To hit these guys without giant, beach ball sized blasts of flame? That was not something anyone had seen from Sienna Nealon before.

  Fortunately, it was something I was practicing every single day in preparation for a moment just like this.

  Fire, Gavrikov said, probably without any appreciation for the literal truth of his statement. Gavrikov was kind of like that.

  Long, harsh tongues of fire lanced from the first three fingers on each hand like bullets oozing contrails of flame behind them. With the power of Wolfe working through me and speeding up my reflexes, it almost seemed like they were moving in slow motion to my eyes.

  They each hit in succession, left hand shots landing first. They caught the men—all dressed in black, in tactical gear—where the hell do my enemies keep getting these guys? Mercs ’R Us? Anyway, the flames hit them right in the chest. As previously mentioned, this was something I’d been working on—superheated balls of gas that I shot like bullets of my own.

  As the flames hit the tactical vests, which were presumably armored in some way, they sailed right through like they’d gone through paper. The impact was relatively minor, because they didn’t have any real mass or knockdown force to them.

  The real secret to them was heat transference, and that took a second or two to work its magic.

  By the time the shots from my right hand had begun to land on the guys at the back of the van, the first three were starting to feel some serious consequences from my attack. I hadn’t exactly measured the temperature from the attack during practice at any point, but I had a pretty good idea from Gavrikov’s previous experience what would happen.

  The first guy’s mouth popped open and he coughed a whiff of smoke. The blood vessels on his face turned an angry red under the skin, and I counted my blessings that he keeled over onto his face right then, because I heard some serious popping under the layers of tactical clothing that indicated he probably wasn’t going to look much like a human when someone turned him over again.

  I watched the next guy wordlessly fall to his knees as the superheated gases lodged inside him. I wanted to avert my eyes but couldn’t, instead turning them to the next guy in line, then the next. My shots were dead on, not that it was super hard to hit a target aiming over your finger at fifteen feet. I hadn’t thrown the gases that hard this time; Gavrikov’s power gave me the ability to propel them with a little more gusto, but I hadn’t wanted to chance them breaking through my foes and hitting the houses behind them.

  Smoke filled the air, and so did a horrible smell of cooked meat mixed with something extra foul. I had killed these guys, there was no question in my mind as I watched the last guy in the line, keeling over as smoke poured out from under his helmet, his plastic tactical glasses fogging up as something burst violently inside them, spattering the inside of them with something wet and red.

  I had a pretty tough stomach, but this was grossing me out. I was also fully aware that in my haste to not die, I’d just killed all six of the opponents that were actively threatening me, and in a manner that was going to make identifying them … problematic.

  Oops.

  I touched back down on the curb and saw movement inside the van, in both the passenger and driver’s seats. Oh, lucky me. Survivors.

  “Hey—” I started to shout, and then I saw it.

  One of my bursts of superheated gas that was directed at the first guys had burned straight through its target and was now sitting on the floor of the van like an ash that had fallen off a giant cigar. I caught a glimpse of it as the carpet flared around it, little flickers of flame around a fingertip-sized pellet of hotter-than-hell. As I stood there, it slipped through the floor of the van, presumably into the machinery below, including—I don’t much about cars, but I knew this—a gas line.

  Damn. That wasn’t good.

  It took a couple seconds, and they were seconds in which I was frantically preparing for the worst. Gavrikov, I called frantically inside my head. With his power, I could pull the heat and fire off the impending explosion, absorbing it into my body, but there was nothing I could do to keep the metal blown out of the van from becoming shrapnel that would drive into the air around me, possibly hitting innocent bystanders just sitting on their porches or huddling in nearby homes.

  I hoped for a near-empty fuel tank.

  I didn’t get it.

  The explosion lit off big, the van bursting with flame and force. I felt the shockwave start to billow outward, expanding as it blew. It was way too big for just a tank of gas; my attackers must have had some sort of explosives with them, because I watched the van’s metal deform as I sucked the fire and heat toward me in a desperate bid to rip it out of the air before it could turn the van into a giant frag grenade.

  It was like trying to hold the sun in the palms of my hands, like trying to draw the heat off a propane stove with a vacuum cleaner. The world slowed around me as the flames drove toward my fingers, coming out of the explosion just a little too late. I could see the seams ripping as the metal blew out in 1/16th time; the ripple of the flames, moved down to a gentle motion, gradually arced the fiery portion of the explosion from its path of least resistance and sucked it toward me.

  It wasn’t gonna be enough, and I knew that less than a second into the attempt.

  There was no one on the planet good enough at absorbing explosions to draw this one out of the van without it shre
dding metal and sending it flying on its way out. Worse yet, if the metal hit me and killed me, the rest of the explosion would proceed without me drawing it off, making everything so much worse for the people who lived on this street.

  Damned mercenaries. If I ever found out where these rent-a-assholes came from, I was going to personally pull a Gavrikov and nuke that place.

  Something slid above the van, something like a dark cloud that blotted out my view of the fire. It sailed over my head and then paused there, joined by another piece, from another direction. Then another, and another, clouds of darkness that formed the upper part of a sphere. I saw motion out of the corner of my eye and another piece of—was that dirt?—rolled along the ground and broke into clumps that formed a solid shield between me and the explosion.

  In another second, the van was completely covered with a cloud of dirt, and I was cut off from absorbing the heat and flame. I blinked, watching as the dirt pushed down, seemingly of its own will, tightening like it had been contracted over the explosion.

  I closed my eyes from the sound of the explosion finally hitting me, a continuous roar that filled my ears and sounded like hell itself had grabbed a lobe and yanked me close, the better to bellow right into my canal. I couldn’t help it, I averted my eyes and covered my face, like that would do anything.

  The roar subsided in seconds, and I forced myself to look back. The dirt shield that had been thrown over the explosion seemed to be … hardened. I took a few steps closer, tentative, and I could feel the heat contained within. It had held against a bomb going off within it, keeping within its heart a furious storm of propulsion and heat. I pushed against it with a touch, and still it held. My fingertips came away dusty, turned almost red. I turned my head to look and saw giant, gaping pits in the earth around me on either side of the street where the ground had risen up to offer this earth as its sacrifice, protecting me and the entire street from what would have become an uncontained disaster.

  My eyes fell on sudden motion to my right. Just off the street stood a young man with his hands in the air, mouth agape like his jaw had fallen down in total shock. His fingers were extended and he was shaking, a thick sheen of perspiration across his forehead, like he’d strained himself utterly to do what he’d done. As I watched, he fell back on his haunches on the curb, exhausted, and to my left the shield of dirt fell with him, crumbling back to red dust, the Georgia clay turned into brick by the heat and now too thin to be held together without this young man’s help.

  The van was scorched, roaring with flames, which I absorbed into an outstretched hand as I looked at this young guy who had saved my life. I took weary, faltering steps toward him, and he stared up at me as I approached, seemingly wary. Or maybe he was just about to pass out. He certainly looked the part.

  I turned and dropped right next to him, more than a little sweaty myself. I was still caked with blood and I could smell it, but the heat and the strain of the last few minutes had left me exhausted, too, and I settled back on my hands as I heard the sound of sirens in the distance. I watched the van burn and knew that the last two guys had bought it in the explosion. Alas. Someone had tried to kill me. Again. Must be Tuesday.

  “What’s up?” he asked as I looked at him sidelong, nodding in greeting. He was still shaken, sweating profusely, and not just from the heat.

  I sat there, covered in my own blood, glad I didn’t have sleeves on this blouse because they’d have been burned off by my heat absorption, and let myself rest, taking a deep breath and then letting it out. Smoke billowed out of my lips like I’d taken a big old draft off a cigarette, and once it cleared I coughed. “Not much,” I said, returning his cool observation in kind. His eyes widened and quickly returned to normal at my casualness. We were both playing, I was just better at it than he was. Years of experience with this sort of thing. He was clearly new to the game. “Earth powers, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at his fingers. They weren’t shaking now. “I guess so.”

  I gave him a slow nod as I stared straight ahead. People were coming out of their houses now. A crowd was bound to assemble soon; they always did. I saw people pointing to us, saw them mouth my name. Heard a whisper from someone as they pointed to him. “That’s Augustus Coleman,” they said.

  “Augustus?” I asked. He turned his head very slightly to me and nodded. “Nice to meet you. I’m—”

  “Pfft,” he said, and waved me off. “Like there’s anyone who doesn’t know who you are. You—you’re somebody.” And he said it with a certain reverence that—frankly—I hadn’t heard associated with my name in a long time.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly, and he looked at me like he was surprised, or like he didn’t know what I was thanking him for. “For the help back there.”

  “Got to do what heroes do if you want to be a hero,” he said with a shrug. There was a long pause. “And you’re welcome.”

  We both settled back and sat there in silence as the sirens drew closer, discordant music to my ears as I waited, and felt the warm heat of the sun on my skin.

  9.

  “It’s not going to be quite what you expect,” I said to him as the first police cars were pulling onto the street. Augustus and I were both there with our hands in the air as one does when the cops pull up to the scene of an explosion. I had my badge in hand and was prepared to identify myself. When they pulled up, though, they totally bypassed us at first, the first two cop cars on scene screaming up to the wreckage of the van and ignoring us completely.

  “What’s that?” Augustus asked, like he couldn’t quite hear me.

  “This,” I said, trying to clarify. “This whole … this being a meta thing. Trying to help. It doesn’t … it’s never a smooth thing, without consequence or …” I just shook my head. “You know what? Never mind. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  He gave me a sidelong look. “Well, that makes two of us, because I don’t have any idea what you’re saying, either.”

  The first patrol officer came over to us then. I waved my badge at him and he nodded. His nameplate said Delaurio, and he was a big boy. “You see what happened—” He caught sight of the blood on my shoulder. “Jesus!”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Sienna Nealon. The men in this van attacked me, and in the process of repelling their attack, I accidentally set off some explosives they were carrying.”

  “I gotta … call this in,” Delaurio said, taking a few steps back. I could tell he wasn’t sure quite how to handle the situation. He eyed me again. “You need, like … an ambulance or something?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, letting my badge flop to the curb at my side. I looked at Augustus. “You need anything?”

  “No,” he looked at me strangely. He looked at Delaurio. “I’m fine, too.”

  Delaurio nodded toward Augustus. “This your sidekick?”

  “I am not a sidekick,” Augustus said, suddenly outraged.

  “Concerned citizen,” I said. “Hero, really. He just saved a lot of lives by helping me contain the blast.”

  Delaurio nodded. “Well, if you wouldn’t mind waiting right there …”

  “I got nowhere else to go,” I said, shrugging. Augustus’s lips pushed tight together. “What?” I asked him as Delaurio edged away, making a call on his shoulder-clipped radio in hushed tones. I could hear every word. “You got somewhere else to be?”

  “I’d like to go home,” Augustus said, and he shivered. It had zero to do with the weather.

  “Crimes scenes make me nervous, too,” I said. “Especially after a fight like this. You always wonder which direction the local authorities are gonna go.”

  He froze in place like I’d hit him with an ice beam. As a side note, I would like an ice beam. Should have absorbed Winter when I had the chance, I guess. “Could we … I mean … we were the heroes in this. We’re not going to get arrested, are we?” he asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “And if we are, it’ll get sorted out quickly.”

 
This only seemed to increase his agitation. “I can’t get arrested.”

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  He looked at me like I’d gone nuts. “Because I’ve never been arrested before, and it’s a streak I’d love to keep going all the days of my life.”

  I snorted. “I broke that streak a long time ago. It’s NBD, as my brother would say. Don’t sweat it, it’ll all turn out all right, especially for you. You didn’t even engage in the fight, all you did was shield the locals from a potentially hazardous outcome.”

  That didn’t seem to settle him down much. “Maybe now I’m starting to get an idea of what you were talking about before, with things not going quite like I expected them to.”

  “The problem with being a hero,” I said, staring straight ahead at Officer Delaurio, who was still speaking into his radio, “is that the system doesn’t really know what to do with them when they’re outside the traditional structure.”

  He gave me a look that asked for further elaboration, but an unmarked car pulled up and squealed to a stop before I could. Marcus Calderon popped out of the passenger side like a jack-in-the-box, leaning on the door and staring at me, shaking his head. “Your rep is clearly well earned.”

  “My rep?” I asked, more playful than I felt. “I haven’t even done any reps today. Still got a workout in, though.”

  Calderon nodded at the van. “How many were in it?”

  “Eight,” I said. “Mercenaries or some type of soldier of fortune.”

  “Eight?” Calderon’s jaw was a little slow to close. “That’s hardcore, even for the Bluff. You get a look at them?”

  “Not close,” I said. “They were wearing tactical masks like a SWAT team. Carried HK submachine guns. Caucasian-ish, though, at least the ones I saw.”