Painkiller (22 page)

He tossed a speedy shrug and stared at me. It took me a second to realize why he wasn’t making a move. He thought he’d killed me with the throw, and my neck ached enough for me to easily believe he might have if I hadn’t used Gavrikov to stop my roll. I was probably about to plant myself in the dirt headfirst when the power of flight kept my momentum from breaking me in two.

Now he was standing off because … what? He figured I’d fly off? That was a probably a real danger, actually.

“So … a-hole,” I said, staring him down, ready to zoom skyward, “what’s your name?”

“Colin,” he said, really soft-spoken. He had a feeling of danger about him, though, that told me I wasn’t his first kill.

“So, Colin … do you know Harry Graves?” I fished. “Or who’s trying to kill me?”

He smirked. Shoulda known he wasn’t stupid enough to go for that. He was just watching me hover, and I could see his muscles tense. Could I get up in the sky faster than he could jump up and drag me down? I doubted it.

Gavrikov
, I said in my mind. The speedster twitched, and I wondered if he could read the subtle motion of my muscles as I prepared to make my move. “Let me show you something,” I said. “Nothing dangerous, I swear. Just watch, and if I make a move you don’t like, well … you know.”

He stared at me, immediately cautious. “What?”

“Kill me, of course,” I said.

He gave me a suspicious look, then nodded. Natural curiosity had overcome his caution. Stupidity is not the exclusive province of the young, of course, but Veronika never would have fallen for this one.

I reached into my pocket slowly, bringing out my cell phone. He frowned at it, looking at me a little pityingly. “That’s not going to help you,” he said with a shake of the head.

“I didn’t take it out to help me,” I said, and I glanced around us. “This is Soldier Field, right? Home of da Bears?”

He kept both eyes on me as he answered. “Yeah. I guess so. Why?”

“Because they suck, of course,” I said, keeping my phone clutched in my hand.
Wolfe
, I said, and felt him nod in my mind. He’d been up front all along. “Also, because it’s the offseason, so … no one here.” I took in the whole place with a sweep of my hand.

“What does that have to do with your phone?” Colin asked, just waiting for me to deliver the punch line.

“Not a damned thing,” I said, and I threw my phone straight up into the air as hard as I could. It flew into the night sky and disappeared. I figured I had twenty, thirty seconds before it came back down. “I just really didn’t want to have to replace another phone, and I didn’t want anyone else to die.”

He made a scoffing noise. “The only one who’s going to die here is y—”

I exploded in a blast of unrestrained fire that traveled roughly as fast as the speed of light. I saw Colin the speedster disappear behind the leading wave of flame as I went nuclear, Gavrikov-style, my flame and heat blasting the home of the Bears and turning the grass into ash and dust in less than a second. The world went white around me with the heat, with the intensity, with the sheer power of my just-below-atomic blast, and I funneled the energy out hard in every direction.

The sound was the loudest thunder I’d ever heard; the feeling of the flames exiting every pore made the air white-hot around me. My clothes burned off, unfortunately, as they always did, and I cratered the ground beneath me and turned the dirt to glass from the heat.

The explosion faded in seconds, leaving nothing but a scorched field turned to shining glass beneath me, and the stands smoking, infernos burning on the terraced stadium seating above.

My eyes swept the field. I didn’t see a smoking corpse, but then, I might not have, even if I had caught him flat-footed. I sank back down to the earth, my skin absorbing the white-hot glass’s searing warmth as my feet touched down. I stuck out a hand and my phone plopped hard into it, right on schedule.

“Smoke you, asshole,” I said, looking over the wasteland I’d created in Soldier Field. I didn’t even care anymore.

Reed was right. I didn’t know much about the NFL, but I knew the Bears could probably play just as well in the parking lot.

Suck it, Bears.

Colin had barely made it away in time, his clothes fried off, his skin badly burned. The air in his lungs had been sucked out and consumed, and he was choking hard, tasting his own blood as he staggered away. He wasn’t running but a hundred miles an hour, at best, and he was careening off of objects in the streets because he couldn’t fully see.

The bitch burned me. My eyes, my face, my body.

He found an alley and shot down it, slamming into the brick next to a dumpster. He caromed off the wall and landed on his ass, a dirty, disgusting water puddle that stank of refuse soaking through his clothes.

Colin didn’t care. He barely noticed. Sienna Nealon had just hurt him more than anyone in his entire life had hurt him, even before he’d gotten his powers. He huddled into a ball and hoped, gagging his lungs out and coughing crimson liquid, hoping that his ability to heal would spare him. And he sat quivering, hiding, worried for the first time that it wouldn’t.

Veronika showed up a few minutes later, naturally, before the cops could get to the scene. I was fully expecting her, just chilling in the middle of the crater of glass where the force of the explosion I’d made had pushed the dirt down before changing its molecular state. Veronika came into the stadium at a run, at metaspeed but not as quick as Colin the speedster, and she grinned with pleasure when she saw me waiting for her.

“Don’t get up,” she said, slowing as she approached. She was smiling, probably thinking I’d cleared some of the competition for her. “I take it you wiped Colin’s smug face off the earth at the speed of light?”

“Presumably,” I said, sitting on my naked ass, watching her. The stadium was still burning on the upper decks, filling the sky with dark, drifting clouds of smoke. I guess I’d torched everything on the lower decks with my blast, because nothing was burning there. “Either that or he ran off, I don’t really care which at the moment.”

“Yeah, it’s not really going to matter soon, is it?” she asked with a big ol’ smile. “You didn’t even bother to run, which means—” Her shoulders fell. “Ohhh. Nealon. Tell me it’s that you’ve given up. Tell me it’s not that you think you can beat me.”

“I haven’t given up,” I said, drumming a bare foot against the bottom of the glassy crater. This would make a real nice hot tub the next time it rained. Maybe the local synchronized swimming team could practice here. It’d certainly be more elegant than letting da Bears keep using it.

Veronika made a tsk-ing noise. “Let’s just … run through this. You use fire, I snuff it. You don’t have a gun. You try and net me, I burn through. You warmind, I shrug it off. You try and punch me, kick me, whatever, I do the same thing, but with hands that will burn through you.” She got an annoyed look. “And if you try and fly off again, I will lead you with my eyebeams and smoke you that way. Don’t expect a repeat of the police station. I won’t trail you again.”

“I’m not going to do any of those things, Veronika,” I said coolly as she shuffled toward me, cautiously.

“Oh no?” She stopped about ten feet away. “What’s your big plan to defeat me?”

“Well, I like to play to my strengths,” I said, and slid my phone across the glassy field. It clicked as it came to rest where the team benches had probably once been. I stood up and brought my makeshift weapons with me. “So I think I’m just going to beat the living shit out of you.”

Veronika’s eyes widened in unmistakable horror as she saw what I’d done with the time between when I’d torched Colin and when she’d come rolling into the stadium. I came at her like she’d come at me before and she barely had a chance to put up a glowing blue hand before I crashed into her with a giant block of glass the size of a tall dresser. I’d personally pounded it out of the ground near the fifty-yard line, and another just like it for my other hand. It gave me a nice, six-foot reach, was probably not going to dissolve easily, even under attack by plasma, and allowed me to punch right past Veronika’s hands and ram it into her face like a truck bumper to the jaw.

The best part? It didn’t even shatter when I hit her. Veronika’s jaw did, though.

I’d had about enough of this assassin bullshit. I wanted these monkeys off my back. I was sick of them sitting there cackling, throwing feces, and generally dragging me down. I punched Veronika in the face again with a giant block of glass, and her plasma hands didn’t do squat to stop it.

Ahh, punching people in the face. I was very much in my idiom here.

Little shards of glass broke off my massive, comically large boxing glove stand-ins. Veronika took another hit, then started to stumble back, trying to avoid my long, powerful shots. It wasn’t easy on her; she couldn’t fly, she could only move so fast, and I was coming after her with a vengeance, flying, pounding my glass meta-beaters like pistons. I broke her arm, aimed a little lower going for her leg, and watched her try and throw up a fist to go knuckle-to-knuckle with me again.

This time, it didn’t end as well.

Her hand glowed blue and it refracted through the glass, making a searing noise and filling the air with a smell of something burning that wasn’t quite like anything I’d ever caught the scent of before. The closest I can think of is the smell of water evaporating off of pavement on a hot day. The glass sizzled as I slammed it against her hand. She cried out and her fist sank into the six-foot glass buffer between us, all the way the way up to her elbow.

Naturally, I was merciless. I pounded her in the face twice before she got her other hand up to sink it into my second weapon. This immobilized both of them, but by now her face and body were bleeding from a good dozen wounds created by both my punches and shards of the glass chipping off as I slammed them into her at high speed.

She grinned faintly now that she had my weapons trapped. I could tell by the sizzle that she was burning through, gradually, her arms going hot all the way up to the shoulders, firing her way through the edges of the glass.

Fortunately, I had anticipated this, and I hit her with the big surprise.

Okay, it wasn’t so much a surprise as it was me using Gavrikov’s flight power to slam her forward into the glassy ground faster than she could push back or burn through the glass barriers between us.

She hit the ground hard, glass shattering for ten feet in every direction. The glass weapons I was using broke from the impact, too, Veronika’s glowing hands bursting through and falling to the side, the light beginning to fade in her stunned state. Her eyes were dulled and I was determined not to waste this opportunity.

Because I knew, if our positions were reversed, she damned sure wouldn’t.

I snatched one of the biggest shards out of the air in front of me as the glass burst and fell, and I lifted it up high for less than a second, getting momentum behind it.

Then I drove it right through the middle of her.

She moved at the last second, damn her, and I perforated her right through the middle. She screamed in pain and lashed out at me with a freshly glowing hand. It hit me across the face, and OH MY SHIT THE PAIN.

I flew backward twenty feet, all thoughts of flight and fight and anything else pretty much shooting out of my mind as if they’d been blown out with my brains. It hurt so bad I couldn’t even assess the damage at first, all I knew was that it felt like she’d ripped off my entire lower face. No, worse than that, actually, because I’m pretty sure my lower face had been ripped off before and it hadn’t hurt this bad.

I was moaning on the ground, and when I came back to myself I raised my head to find her doing exactly the same about twenty feet away from me.
Wolfe
, I begged, and he obliged, coming to the fore and starting the healing process. I tried to speak but nothing came out, and the smell of char was everywhere, as omnipresent as the pain in my face.

About ten seconds later, I sat up. “Owwwwww,” I moaned through newly forming skin and lips.

“Unnnnghhh …” Veronika said from where she lay, closer to the edge of the stadium. “I’m not sure this is worth the contract money.”

“Youuu shud acks fir a rayseeee,” I said, not able to fully form words. Had she burned my tongue out?

“That’s a good note,” she agreed, letting out a little moan of pain. “I’m adding that … to my … to do list.”

“Yu realiiiise, ob course … that dis means warrr.”

She sat up just in time to see me flying at her, and she raised a hand just in time to turn me aside with a burst of flaming blue plasma. I dodged back as it burst forward in a blinding flash, so bright I couldn’t even see. When my rods and cones returned to normal, the flare of plasma she’d released was gradually falling to the earth, way slower than gravity would have brought normal objects down. It fluttered, slowly, like a curtain dropped but catching a stiff updraft to slow its descent. It wasn’t a small burst, either—it was like a blanket she’d thrown at me, three dimensional and tilting wildly toward me on three sides. I flew back ten feet as it fell to the glass and sizzled, burning the already crisped molecules as it ate its way into the ground.

I looked up and found Veronika running, looking over her shoulder as she jumped into the stands. It took me a minute to realize why she hadn’t run toward one of the major exits. Then I heard the sirens.

Reed came pounding up behind me, his pistol drawn. Maclean and some other cops were behind him a good hundred yards or more, huffing their way over.

“Reed,” I said, drooling as my lips finished healing, “shoot her.”

Reed stared at me, horrorstruck. “I can’t do that! She’s running away.”

“Yes,” I agreed, wiping the drool off my chin, afraid to pursue for fear she’d toss up another lethal barrage of plasma, “but she’ll be back to kill me. Again. And she might succeed next time, so do your sister a solid and shoot her already!”

“But …” I could see he was desperately torn, the barrel of his gun not even aimed at her. “That’s so … that’s just so …”