Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 6

  Yusuf’s rustic escape had a front porch, and I was just sitting on it like an old hillbilly, rocking lightly in the chair provided, when I heard the sound of the van in the distance. Yusuf had called the plumber as promised, and I’d been waiting about two hours for him to show up. I craned my neck to look down the driveway as he rounded the thick copse of trees that sheltered the house from the road. Sure enough, my quarry had arrived.

  I could see him through the windshield of the van as it rattled up the unpaved driveway, kicking up gravel and leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. I nodded in the general direction of the van, as I imagined one does when sitting out on a porch and rocking like you’ve got nothing else to do with your day.

  The plumber brought the van to a stop, and I got a little better look at him as he paused to take a gander at a clipboard and make a couple notes. He had a bronze tone to his skin, jet black hair, and a beard that matched. Not a hint of grey anywhere. He took a minute to write something down, and then the squeak of the van door opening filled the calm Colorado day.

  “Morning,” he said to me as he got out, even though it was probably afternoon now. I’d been sitting out here for a while, so I didn’t know. “Are you … Augustus?” He tried my name experimentally, pronouncing it perfectly on the first time.

  “That’s me,” I said with a nod.

  “You’re having problems with the sink, then?” He stretched as he got out. It was a little bit of a drive from Steelwood Springs to get here. Winding roads.

  “Yeah.” I stood up, and stepped down off the porch slowly. “Water flow issue.”

  “Let me get my tools,” he said and circled around the back of the van. He wasn’t doing anything dastardly yet, so that was a good sign. So far he just seemed like a genial plumber.

  We’d see if that continued once he was back in sight and I confronted him. I had it in my mind that he was doing some contract work for someone, pushing out the occasional install for some interested party who wanted to … I don’t know, stir things up. Omar here might be the key to discovering the truth behind this rising tide of metas, and I was determined to get that truth out of him.

  I needed to make sure I didn’t screw this up, because a whole lot was riding on it. Answers to questions we’d been asking for a good long while.

  Omar rounded the van after slamming the back door, and now he had a big, grey steel toolbox in hand. He carried it lightly, well-practiced and with his head down, like he was lost in thought. He looked up when he saw me again, and smiled. “Yusuf said you are a short-term renter?”

  “Yeah, Airbnb,” I said. “Just here overnight.”

  “Bad luck to have the sink go wrong while you are here, then,” Omar said, still smiling.

  “Yusuf said you fixed his sink at another property last week,” I said as Omar approached, gravel crunching under his feet from his even stride.

  Omar just nodded, seemingly preoccupied, answering offhand. “Yes, an apartment.”

  “He was really pleased with what you did there,” I said. “Of course, he might not have been quite as pleased if he’d known you were turning two of his tenants into supervillains.”

  I was expecting a subtle reaction from Omar. Something like him freezing in tracks, his eyes going wide, maybe a guilty look spreading across his face. I could even have believed him stopping, eyes going wide like pie pans, body all frozen in a rigor mortis at being caught.

  Omar didn’t do any of those things.

  The only facial reaction was a subtle hardening of the lines. I didn’t have time to work through it until later, but that wasn’t a sign of guilt.

  It was a hint that shit was about to go off the chain.

  There was a rumble deep in the earth, and the ground gave me a two-second warning that something was happening in the well behind me before the top exploded off the old thing and a stream of water powerful enough to dissolve a boulder came shooting at me with a velocity usually reserved for rockets trying to break out of the earth’s atmosphere.

  The water stream hit the ground where I was standing a second before as I leapt, a solid platform of gravel lifting me up twenty feet straight into the air like a makeshift elevator. Dirt and rock gave way for the water pressure, and Omar’s stream carved into the ground some ten feet before it stopped, such was the power of his attack.

  Holy crap.

  That was not normal, not even for a Poseidon.

  “Someone’s been juicing!” I shouted down at Omar as he redirected another blast of water at me. It was surreal to see it pool and turn in the ten-foot-deep hole it had created when it struck the ground while trying to kill me. It writhed and moved like a living thing, like a snake composed of liquid as it coiled around to strike.

  I yanked the earth from around the driveway and sealed the water in, pulling the gravel and letting it pile to slow the coming attack. I jerked my hand in Omar’s direction at the same time, and he shouted in surprise as a landslide of pebbles beneath his feet stole his balance and left him right on his ass like someone had pulled a carpet from beneath his feet.

  The stones covered him in seconds as the earth heaved beneath him. I was breaking up the dirt and rock, planning to swallow him whole and let him suffocate for a few minutes, blind and struggling so I didn’t have to deal with his attacks up on the surface. That would give me time to wait him out, let the inability to breathe work him into unconsciousness. It wouldn’t kill him, not based on the level of power he was displaying, even if I left him buried for half a year, but it’d damned sure take some of the aggression out of him.

  Hopefully a lot of the aggression out of him.

  I plugged that impending water spout of doom with more and more rock, burying it as I felt it pulsate in the earth, trying to loose itself on me. I also moved about thirty feet to my left, my cloud of gravel functioning as a hovering sleigh to carry me from immediate danger. I didn’t want to go too far, because I needed to see to be able to stop him, after all.

  Omar was struggling beneath the earth, and I got an abrupt warning that something was amiss. His water spout that I’d trapped had shifted directions, and worse, he was tapping the well again. I turned my head in time to see the water overflow the well’s bounds, the aquifer deep beneath giving up its goods as a waterspout blew it out like Old Faithful going off in Yellowstone.

  The water flowed from the top of the spout’s arc, bending like it was magnetized and heading in a specific direction. “Awwwww, damn,” I said to no one in particular as I watched it spear into the earth where I’d buried Omar, meeting up with the water I’d trapped earlier just below the surface.

  This was going to be spectacular, I thought, and a second later, I was right.

  Omar burst out of the earth in a cocoon of water, arms held out in the center of a pulsating membrane of H2O the size of the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows Park in New York City. I’d seen Scott pull a similar trick before, and there was only one way to match this maneuver.

  “So that’s how it is, huh?” I shouted, and summoned the forces of earth to my disposal.

  It took me less than two seconds to build a hundred-foot earth golem out of rock and dirt. I buried myself in the head, leaving a little space so I could see out, since even with all this earth at my command, it wasn’t like dirt had eyes. I could feel what it felt, brushing against people, against water, against elements I couldn’t control, but it still left me blind if I stayed entirely in its embrace.

  Omar apparently didn’t feel the need to do one of those chats before the battle. I respected that, though the lack of smack talk left me feeling a little like I was dueling a deaf man or something. It was weird.

  He came surging at me in his ball of water, a thousand spikes jutting out and attacking my golem, water ripping through as the two of us engaged in combat like the titans of old, sounds of our battle spilling over the trees and woods and echoing down the mountainside.

  12.

  Sienna

  “Dude!” I said in my best
impersonation of a West Coaster, maybe a California transplant to Portland. I wheeled on Friday, who was standing next to me, frozen in place, eyes wide and terrified at the specter of Greg Vansen magically appearing in front of us with the biggest damned machine gun that could be carried. “You got any last words?”

  “Whut?” Friday said, blinking at me, dragged out of his fearful paralysis by my attempt at mocking conversation. My gambit worked; Greg Vansen hadn’t let loose with the Ma Deuce machine gun yet, which was fortunate for at least two of us in the room. I was keeping a close eye on his finger out of the corner of my eye, ready to start rolling with a plan of my own the second I saw his grip tighten even a hair. “I—I can’t think of anything—”

  “I have a few words, then,” I said, turning back to Vansen. Based on his lack of reaction, I didn’t think he recognized me. If he did recognize me, he was really dumb for letting me distract him this way. If he’d known Sienna Nealon was in the room, he would have been better off shooting me the second he appeared. “What’s your beef with this guy, anyway?”

  “You’ll have to speak up,” Vansen said and inclined his head slightly so I could see—he had earplugs in. Smart move, because the Ma Deuce he was holding tended to produce the sort of noise that would make the apocalypse sound like elevator music played on low.

  “What’s your problem with old Percy, here?” I shouted. “Did he sleep with your mother or something?”

  “No,” Vansen said curtly, “he did not. It’s nothing personal. I don’t even know him—”

  “Yes, you do, Greg,” Friday said with amazing self-pity. Seriously. I almost teared up for him.

  Greg Vansen just froze, looking at Friday the way a kid with a magnifying glass might look at a struggling bug he just ripped the wing off of. “Excuse me?”

  “We were on the team together, man!” Friday said, his face all bawled up like he was going to cry. “We served together. We bled together! Panama! Desert Storm! Revelen!”

  Vansen’s eyes narrowed in calculation. “Wait. Were you the idiot Hercules that always wore that mask?”

  “You don’t even remember me!” Friday shouted like a scorned teen whose parents had forgotten her sixteenth birthday. Take it with some grace, Molly Ringwald.

  “Bruce?” Vansen asked. “Bruce Springersteen?”

  I blinked at Friday. “Seriously? Did you make that one up, too? So you could sound like the Boss?”

  “I was a fan of his!” Friday said. “He rawked!”

  Greg looked at me with that same coldly scientific look, like he was diagnosing me as a disease he was about to wipe out. “Aren’t you a little young to know Springsteen? What’s your name, Bruce’s girlfriend?”

  “Oh, no, you did not just call me—” I sputtered. “We are not—I am not with him, okay? I have dignity. And standards. And a life, which is more than I can say for you in about two seconds, you gargantuan ass nugget—”

  He pulled the trigger on Ma Deuce as I lit off a blast of Gavrikov and shot it out of my palm at him while lunging sideways at Friday. I hit the big man under the armpit and tackled him down toward my couch as the sound of the machine gun cranking fifty cal bullets into the exterior walls of my apartment began in earnest. It was like the voice of God shouting extreme amount of displeasure directly into your eardrums, and as I knocked over my couch and dragged Friday behind it, I reflected that there really was no good place to hide in this entire apartment.

  I pushed Friday’s face into the faux wood floor and saw his mouth was open. He could have been bellowing at the top of his lungs and I wouldn’t have heard it because the Ma Deuce was belting out a symphony from hell; it was like every church bell on the planet had been crammed into my skull and was going off continuously. Pieces of couch stuffing were raining around me like the first snowstorm of the season in Minnesota, and with only slightly more likelihood of death (because everyone forgets how to drive).

  The compression waves from the machine gun were so powerful that I could feel my heart fluttering and my skull rattling like someone was actually tapping it with a hammer. It made me dizzy and sick all at once, but I couldn’t just lie there until the couch disintegrated under the withering machine gun fire. I kicked the sofa in Greg Vansen’s direction and scrambled on all fours toward the TV stand as it slid away, tossing a fire blast at it as it went. It lit off like a Viking funeral, the cheap stuffing going up in a blaze of glory. I’d never liked that couch anyway. It was lumpy.

  Vansen disappeared for a second as the couch passed through where he’d been standing a second earlier, flames licking their way upward. He appeared again and the intense hammering of the machine gun fire continued once he did. It had stopped for a second, and he didn’t look like he’d raised his legs, so whatever he’d done to dodge it hadn’t resulted in him becoming invisible but still solid, and it hadn’t required him to jump, which left me scratching my head because I couldn’t remember any metas who could just turn insubstantial, like smoke, at least not without any outward signs.

  He really was starting to look like magic.

  I didn’t have to ponder the problem any further, though, because he had plainly picked me out as the biggest danger to him and was stitching the fire from the Ma Deuce across the floor after me. For my part, I was lobbing flames at him, trying to throw off his aim enough to buy me a second to throw something bigger at him, like my TV and its stand. I was kinda regretting having gone for the seventy inch until now.

  Flames were spreading up the wall from where I’d lit the couch on fire, and I just let them go for a few seconds more, burning their way into the drywall and wood. I had a plan for them, but it wasn’t mature just yet, and it was going to require the distraction of a thrown TV, at least. I also had two barbells in relatively easy reach after that, and was already scheming how best to lodge those in his skull.

  Fragments of my faux wood floor sprayed my legs as I reached the base of my TV stand and toppled it over. The TV caught two fifty cal bullets and sparked accordingly, pieces of glass and plastic peppering my abdomen and face. He damned near had me, so I shouted, “BJORN!” out loud.

  Warmind! Bjorn yelled, and the machine gun fire was suddenly, almost magically, redirected upward, ripping apart my ceiling and showering me with bits and pieces of the warehouse-industrial ceiling that was probably a huge sell for the hipsters who usually rented these kind of studio apartments.

  I kicked the TV right at Vansen and it soared like a soccer ball toward the goal that was his head. He was squinting hard, trying to get the Norseman’s psychic attack out of his brain, and he got them open just in time to see the TV coming when it was inches away.

  He disappeared but the TV actually struck him this time—or caught him for a second before he disappeared, at least, because it smacked into a physical obstacle at the position where he’d been and jerked around like it had encountered a wall, flipping and breaking in half as it hit the ground, shattered.

  Vansen reappeared a second later, dazed and woozy, the Ma Deuce pointed at the floor. I took advantage of the opportunity to do two things before he recovered.

  One, I hurled a ball of flame with dead-on accuracy at the blocky firing mechanism of the machine gun. It hit just above the ejection port, five thousand degrees of heat landing perfectly on the machinery that launched death in every direction it was pointed. The fireball seared through metal and diffused its heat into the gun, causing the barrel to glow like it was straight out of a blacksmith’s forge and a few of the closest rounds to light off in random directions.

  It also made Greg Vansen scream a little and drop the Ma Deuce, which was now slagged and inoperable, as he clutched his burnt left hand to his chest. As one does when one has been burned.

  The second thing I did was yank all the fire that had been crawling its way up the walls, consuming the stuffing of my sofa and was now working on the wooden studs hidden in the wall, drawing it toward me in a wall of flame that converged on one central point that lay between me and
its source.

  That point of convergence? Why, it was Greg Vansen, that dick.

  I covered him in flames and wrapped them tight around him like a cloak of fire. He screamed again, but this time he could just pull himself away from them. I expected him to go invisible again, maybe appear a few steps to the right, but he didn’t. He just writhed in the depths of the fire for about a second, and then—

  He shrugged off the inferno, and it just disappeared.

  Poof. A wisp of smoke, and all my fire was just … gone.

  I was left sitting there, on my haunches, Greg Vansen staring at me—half burned, furious, short as shit, brow tilted down like a hard triangle over his face, and a layer of black over him like he’d stuck his face in a coal bin.

  “Huh,” I said, and crafted a new plan right there.

  I grabbed Friday and flew out the window, shattering the glass on my exit and hoping like hell this freaking magical, seemingly invincible assassin couldn’t follow.

  13.

  Augustus

  Impossibly hard jets of water were carving their way through the rock I was using as my shield, the ones holding up my golem as I strode into battle against Omar the Poseidon. It knocked me back, threatening to send my giant rock construct onto his back where Omar could just rip me apart at will, but I leaned the golem over, balancing him forward, and thrust a rocky hand into the defensive bubble of water Omar had set up to shield himself.

  That didn’t go so well.

  Gravel sprayed everywhere as he sliced pieces of golem and I pulled them back to me, trying to compact them into a new layer of armor to replace the ones he was peeling away.

  I was really missing the battle banter right now. I could’ve use some witty repartee to lighten up the fact I was getting creamed by this dude and making no progress. I pulled my golem hand back and found it washed away and smooth, like it had gone through a rock polisher.

  Omar stabbed out again, hitting me with an attack across the vulnerable midsection of my golem. He struck a joint where a couple rocks had been balancing together through force of my will holding them tight and hit them with a plane of water no thicker than a half inch, like a guillotine blade right through me.