Kingdom of Heroes (31 page)

“Go to hell,” he replied as he started to squeeze his index finger, knowing the bullet would travel directly into her forehead. But as much as he wanted to, there was just something, he didn’t know what, keeping him from squeezing his forefinger; he simply couldn’t do it. His inability to pull the trigger was suddenly interrupted by the familiar pop and the associating smell of ozone that always accompanied a teleporter. He turned around in time to see a figure cloaked entirely in black. Before The Detective could react, the figure grabbed him by his injured shoulder and threw him into the wall on the right side of the room.

The fire had weakened the structure, and The Detective found himself crashing into the wall and then through it, landing in the fire soaked apartment next door. He landed in the floor, flat on his back, surrounded by a room full of flames.

“It‘s official,” he said to no one as he attempted to find his bearings and scoot himself into a seated position on the floor. “I’m having a bad day.”

With a pop of ozone, the black figure appeared again, teleporting ten feet in front of The Detective, blocking the view of the newly formed hole between the two apartments. The figure slowly started to move toward him.

The Detective looked around for his gun, knowing it had been in his hand before he was thrown. He found it, lying just behind his back. He picked it up, and without a word, without a snappy comeback, he aimed it at the dark figure, squeezed the trigger, and watched as the bullet traveled through the black cloak, landing in the wall on the other side of the room. The Detective sat there, a stunned look on his face and the smoking gun still held firmly in his hands.

From the dark figure’s center, a light appeared, beginning as a small candle-like strobe then, within a couple of seconds, growing larger and larger, until the blonde glowing woman appeared within the dark figure, walking out of his frame and into the room. She looked down at The Detective.

“You tried to shoot him?” she asked, her radiating light seeming so much brighter while surrounded by the darkness.

The Detective began to slowly scoot backwards, looking for the first opportunity he could find to jump to his feet. “Tried being the operative word there.”

She chuckled. “On top of being a teleporter and a human doorway, my brother can also become intangible at will. Bullets just pass right through him and into whatever is on the other side.”

“Brother?” The Detective asked, trying to find a foothold somewhere on the linoleum floor, only to realize, as his back hit the opposite wall, that he was running out of room.

“Of course, silly little dog,” she said with a smile draped across her glowing face. “Can’t you see the family resemblance?”

The Detective looked for the nearest door, even as the heat from the flames began to bear down on him. “Not really, but he does have the better personality.”

“Are you making fun of my poor mute brother?”

“Maybe a little,” The Detective replied, seeing the door to his left and trying to figure out a way to make a break for it.

“That is a naughty dog,” she said, suddenly standing directly above him. “Bad dogs get punished.” The blade of light appeared at the end of her right fist. She leaned down, the blade pointed toward his already bleeding shoulder.

Just before she could touch him, The Detective heard a sound, the sound of wood splintering and breaking. Without any other warning, the floor beneath the two of them collapsed, sending them both to the nineteenth floor below.

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The Detective landed hard on the floor, hard enough to knock what little breath he had left out of his body. He rolled to his hands and knees, his head still firmly planted on the dirty linoleum floor. He looked to his left. The blonde woman had landed directly beside him; she appeared dazed and in pain, though it was hard to exactly tell what a woman who glowed like an electric light bulb was truly feeling.

The room was filled with flames; every inch of the room overflowed with smoke and ash. Several dead bodies, at least two women and two men from what he could see, were piled into the corner opposite from the one he had landed in.

Then, just as suddenly as before, he heard the familiar sound of wood splintering, cracking, popping, breaking beneath his and the blond woman’s weight. And just like before, the floor under them gave way, and he fell another story to the eighteenth floor.

This time, though, he found himself more aware of what was happening, and he managed to brace himself before the sudden landing. The impact still hurt, and he still didn’t have an ounce of air left in his lungs; but he seemed to have survived the fall with the majority of his senses still intact.

The blonde, once again, landed beside him. As far as The Detective could tell, she was unconscious, but she appeared to be alive, somehow surviving the two sets of floor they had just fallen through. He looked up through the second hole they had just made; the entire nineteenth floor appeared to be consumed by fire. He could see several other patches of ceiling beginning to crack, ready to fall with the slightest bit of weight added. The apartment he had landed in was filled with smoke, but the majority of flames appeared to be reserved for the story above.

He pushed himself to his knees. His back popped in ways that weren’t natural, and it felt like he had several broken ribs. His left knee seemed stiff; it didn’t want to bend. But he was still alive, and at this point, being alive was the only thing that mattered. He looked around himself; the floor was littered with burnt debris that had once been the floor and ceiling from the above apartments.

On the other side of the blonde, he saw something metallic. He climbed over the top of her and found what he searched for; his gun sat there, four bullets, one in the chamber, three in the clip, just waiting for him to find it. Before he stood, he stared over at her, still managing, thanks to the now overflowing amounts of adrenaline rushing through his system, to control the desire to just stare in awe at her beauty and allow her to turn off everything he felt. It was still there, but he could fight it. Fear, pain, and desperation were the only things keeping him alive at this point. He couldn’t afford to allow those things to slip away.

She opened her eyes as he stared, her face a mere few feet from his.

“Has my favorite pet come back for another kiss?” she asked, the glow around her gaining in intensity with every word she spoke.

He stood to his feet. “Not quite,” he said in return, all the while doing his best not to look at her any harder than he had to. He returned the gun to its holster and turned toward the door that led to the hallway. He reached out for the doorknob, when she spoke again.

“Are you just going to leave me here, hurt, wounded, in pain, possibly dying?” Every word she spoke oozed with her power, the intensity of it seeming to hang in the air between them. “Has my dog abandoned its owner?”

It took everything he had to look at her without abandoning himself to the desire she created. “I should kill you.”

Still on her back, she smiled as a small trickle of red blood rolled down her glowing lips. “I wouldn’t leave you alive. I would kill you.”

He reached out for the doorknob again, grasped it in his hand, and turned it. “And that’s why I continue to maintain the moral high ground in this whole sordid mess.” He pushed the door open and walked out of the apartment.

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It took everything she had, every ounce of strength, every bit of willpower, but she had finally broken through. Emily had forced her way into the mind of the woman who apparently referred to herself as Light; Emily could see everything they had done over the past day, all of the killing, all of the slaughtering, The Agent’s lawyer, all of the doctors and guards at The Hole, the paramedics and cops who had seen The Detective at the Barren Building, the hundreds of innocent people who had lived in Adam’s building, all of them dead just because of what they may have known, no matter how little or how trivial; The Agent couldn’t take a chance on anyone having seen The Detective walk freely alongside The Ice Queen; The Agent couldn’t take the chance that someone might know The Detective may have been there on his orders.

Emily was inside, but she knew she wasn’t deep enough. She was in the outer levels, where the memories and the senses lived, but she needed to be in the inner portions of Light’s mind, the area where control resided. If Emily could get there, even for the briefest of moments, she knew she might just be able to help The Detective survive this.

She pushed as hard as she could, doing everything in her power to move through the defenses. Inside of her own body, she felt a wet sensation down the front of her face, only to realize that her own nose was pouring blood. It didn’t matter. She had to continue pushing; she had to push harder than she had ever pushed before, harder than she believed herself capable of.

She heard the sounds of screams, the sound of a woman crying out in pain. It wasn’t coming from inside of the memories she had invaded, and despite how much it grew in intensity, she couldn’t find the source; it was just the sound of misery, the sound of a pathetic soul screaming for their life. It took another moment or two, but it finally dawned on her that the sounds were coming from her; it was the sound of her body breaking down even as her mind struggled to push through another’s defenses.

It’s going to be okay; it’s going to be okay; it’s going to be okay. She repeated the phrase over and over even as the crying and screams from her body grew ever louder. The harder she pushed, the louder they became, but she did everything she could to block them out, forcing them aside just as she pushed Light’s defenses out of her way. Neither was easy.

Suddenly, she was there, the inner workings, the great center of activity, the part of the mind where control was enacted, where one could take someone over from their thoughts, where, if she was lucky, she could help The Detective without even being anywhere near him. The screaming grew; the pain from the outside was starting to seep into her mind, but she forced them both out. She would be damned if she had come this far just to quit, not after all of this, not after everything she had already accomplished.

She braced herself and prepared for one last push. She really hoped his cute ass knew all of the trouble she was going through just to keep him alive.

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“Why the fuck did I just do that?” he said aloud to himself as he walked slowly down the hallway. He had her there; all he would have had to do was pull the gun out and place a bullet in her head. It would have been clean, easy, and it wouldn’t have been the first time he had ever returned the favor to someone who wanted him dead. Man, woman, it had never mattered. Survival had always come first, so why, for the second time, couldn’t he do what he was supposed to do here. He had no answers.

The hallway he had walked into was dark and filled with smoke; the ceiling above him appeared ready to crumble at any moment. He knew he needed to move as fast as he could, but speed was no longer an option. With his left leg dragging behind him, unable to bend, barely able to put weight on it, he felt lucky to be walking, let alone actually moving any quicker than he currently was. And then he heard it from behind him, the popping sound made when the blonde’s brother teleported into the vicinity.

The Detective turned his head around, and the dark figure appeared, his cloak seeming to pull what little light there was in the room within him, making the whole area much darker than it had been before. The Detective moved faster, much faster than his body seemed to want to move; the stairs were at the end of the hallway, and he made it his singular focus in life to reach that door, no matter how much his body refused to cooperate, no matter what he knew was coming up from behind him.

He could feel the dark figure near him; the closer it got, the darker everything around The Detective seemed to become. But despite it all, the door was right there, just within his reach. He reached out for it and grabbed the shiny metallic knob in his hand; he turned it and opened the door. Instead of finding an empty stairwell, he found the dark figure, who had teleported in front of him. The dark figure’s arm reached out from beneath the cloak, gripped The Detective’s shoulder in a vise-like grip, and pulled him down the stairs.

He rolled down one flight, then two, bouncing off of the wall between the two sets, then rolling down a third. He could feel more ribs breaking beneath his skin, the steps coming hard and fast, hitting him like concrete fists against his now bruised and battered flesh. He rolled, despite his bests efforts to stop himself, until he plowed into the guard rail that separated the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, the back of his head slamming hard against the metal barrier.

For a moment, he just sat there, his head resting against the rail, his bottom planted firmly on the concrete floor. There was no pain, just numbness, just the sense that if this was death, then it came as a relief, a reprieve from the coming onslaught of agony he was sure he was about to feel. The adrenaline was probably blocking most of the pain, but it was bound to arrive as impending doom always does, without mercy, without remorse; it just arrives and takes what it wants.

He suddenly had the overwhelming feeling that this was it. All of the fighting, all of the torture, and it ended right here and now, in a deserted stairwell of a burning building, murdered by The Agent’s hit squad. Not exactly how he had envisioned his final moments, but he guessed it could have been worse. He could have died on the toilet. Nothing worse than dying while in the middle of your most private business. At least there was some kind of a bright side.