Ruthless (27 page)

“Where is he, J.J.?” I asked. Reed and Scott were there waiting, my brother with his gun pointed at the hallway and Scott with his hands out.

“Coming out of the staircase now,” he said, with a touch of nerves. I was feeling more than a touch myself.

“Where is she?” he announced in grand style, voice booming down the empty hallway. I could hear the crowd moving behind me, scrambling, cattle fleeing from a wolf.

And he was the wolf.

Reed slid out in front of me. It was subtle, like he was taking possession of this bad guy. If I thought he had a chance in hell of dealing with him, I would have let Reed take Anselmo.

But a snowball’s chance in hell would have been generous in this case. Reed didn’t have the heart to do what it would take to put down Anselmo, even when he did have his powers. He just didn’t have it in him to get mean and vicious, to fight a dirtbag like Anselmo on his own level and win.

Me?

I was born for this.

“I’m right here, shitheel,” I said, fearless. I pushed all the fatigue back, knowing I was about to go mano-a-womano to with the meanest rattlesnake I’d seen in quite some time.

He came around the corner with a smile on his face. “And so you are,” he said with that Italian accent. He was wearing his paper outfit, which was more than I could say for the last time I’d seen anything other than his eyes. He bowed like he was Don Juan, and when he came up his smile nearly made me sick. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you.”

“Not running, little lamb?” Anselmo asked as he eased into the bullpen. To his left was the massive pile of discarded rubble that used to be our office furniture. I felt a small sense of relief that I was no longer involved in the budgetary process of replacing that crap. Enjoy it, Phillips. You tool.

Anselmo monologued on. “Do you not find yourself with a desire to run now that you’re … weak? Do your knees not tremble at the thought of what I will do to you?” He smiled. “Do you find yourself anticipating—”

“That’s about enough of that crap,” Reed said. He had his weapon pointed at Anselmo’s face.

“Where is your beautiful companion?” Anselmo asked, taking a deep sniff of the air. I imagine he thought he was erotic or something, but I thought he looked a little like a dog sniffing a crotch. Actually, scratch that—my dog didn’t look like that when he sniffed at anything. “Your … lady doctor?”

“She’s otherwise occupied,” Reed said tersely. Perugini was probably on the ground floor by now, helping the hostages with their exit. No need to tell Anselmo that, though. Reed was buying time, kinda like me. When this fight started, it was gonna get nasty quick. I doubted Scott would attack with any more killer instinct than Reed did, especially since he likely hadn’t been in a fight in three years or more.

Which meant it was going to be up to me to get so vicious with this psychopath that he would either run from the fight or lie there until he died.

As usual, I had one good idea about that, but it was going to require proper positioning.

“I have dreamed every night of wrapping my hands around your throats,” Anselmo said, looking from Reed to me. As far as dramatic revelations went, I wasn’t shocked. “I have considered so very many ways to end your lives. Knives were a favorite, for a while, for their intimacy, and the ability to carve pieces … to inflict pain … the maximum amount of pain.” He took a breath, luxuriating in the thought. “Then I had a brief flirtation with the more, shall we say, straightforward? I imagined shooting you both in the head from behind.” He rubbed his hands together as though he were cleansing them. “Quick, disdainful, a problem solved and nothing more.”

His lip turned up at the corner. “But then I thought … you have stolen precious, precious time from me. You have debased me. Stolen my home. What is the appropriate response for this insult?”

“You’re going to bore us to death with your monologue?” I asked.

“You’re going to—dammit!” Reed said, too slow, casting an irritated glare at me. You gotta be quicker than that if you want to out-smartass me, brother dear.

Anselmo’s face was consumed with dark clouds. He was not amused. “You are swine, and here I waste my time casting words before you like pearls.”

“Pearls?” I snorted. “Your words are butt plugs; go shove them up your ass.”

He came at us, and he was damned fast. Too fast, really, for us to handle. What the hell could a normal human even do against someone who moved like that? He crossed ten feet in the space of a half-second and elbowed Reed aside. I saw my brother stumble into the wall, smashing into it and leaving a solid imprint where he’d cracked the drywall with his head.

Anselmo put a hand around my neck and lifted me up. He glared at me, held me in the air. I hadn’t even bothered to draw my gun. Why did they always do that, the lift and dangle thing?

Oh, right.

Power.

“I will kill you, you dirty, rotten whore—”

Reed rallied and charged into Anselmo with a shoulder. If I’d been able to speak, I would have told him not to bother. I’d already signaled Scott to back off and he was keeping his distance, cautious. I had a feeling he wanted to charge, but he saw what I was doing and knew I needed a few seconds. Reed bounced off like he’d hit a steel wall, falling at Anselmo’s feet.

Aw, hell. He needed to not be there, and damned soon.

Anselmo deigned to notice him, putting a foot on his chest like a conquering asshole, and suddenly my plan was not going to come off nearly so well as I hoped for. I estimated I had about five seconds left.

What do you do when you want to get some misogynist, testosterone-laden alpha dick’s attention?

I kicked him square in the balls.

His eyes went wide with rage, not pain. Like he couldn’t believe I had deigned to kick him in his holy of holies. He forgot all about Reed for a second and took a step forward, leaving my brother on the ground in a heap.

Yay!

Also, yikes.

He moved me toward the pile of debris that had once been office furniture, and I had a feeling a choke-slam was in the offing. His rage was kinda predictable. I hoped my plan was not nearly so.

“I will enjoy this,” he promised, lifting me higher. “I will enjoy your pain, enjoy your cries, your protestations—” His mouth was wide as he said protestations, and I shoved the grenade I’d been cooking in my hand for the last five seconds right in his gaping trap. Then I kicked him in the throat while he gawked at me in surprise, mouth wrapped around the green canister, and wriggled out of his fingers. I was already rolling away when I hit the ground, and I didn’t stop until I had a good fifteen feet of distance from him.

Anselmo pulled the grenade from his mouth, held it in his hand, and started to laugh. “You think this wil—”

He didn’t get anything else out before the Willie Pete lit off in a flare of heat, and Anselmo Serafini disappeared in a white-hot burst of flame.

I’d seen people burned to death before, but I’d never seen someone with nearly impervious skin get exposed to that level of heat before. It was sickening and amazing all at once. Anselmo let out a piercing scream, high and agonized, like the girls he hated so much. It smelled like chemical scorch, pervasive and heavy, roasted meat that flooded my nose and choked my mouth, like I could taste it. The heat fell off the white phosphorus like I’d pulled an Icarus, gotten too close to the sun, and when I got to my feet, I did so in awe of the miniature star that had been born before me.

The idiot had held it up in his hand and was staring at it when it went off, and the flames covered him now. He was a top of the scale meta in terms of power, and that meant his ability to heal from injury was presumably right up there with my boy Wolfe. Using Wolfe’s power, I could regrow a limb in ten seconds, heal a cut in less than one second, and even harden my skin against future injury of the same type. Wolfe hadn’t had the innate invulnerability to physical damage that Anselmo had; he’d picked his up through several thousand years of flesh damage of all kinds, from burns to bludgeons.

In the days of yore, against hordes of fighting men, a meta of Anselmo’s type had taken on entire armies and beaten them. They were nigh invulnerable against spears, swords, horseman and all the other weapons available to the men of the day.

But apparently, no one had ever tried burning an Achilles’ skin off with white phosphorus.

It was definitely sloughing off, and his body was fighting back to heal him—and succeeding, to some extent. I watched him writhe in the flames, curiously detached. I should have been feeling something, anything—but I didn’t. Reed had told me about him, and we’d gotten more from the Italian authorities—reluctantly—later. He was a monster, a beast of basest instinct and little restraint. The cage I’d put him in was too kind by half, in my opinion, for what he’d done to those around him.

And that was just the stuff we knew about.

His skin burned and sloughed off down to bone and then regrew muscle and sinew seconds later, turning angry red as it came back and burned clean again. It was like watching the tide battle the sand, and the tide—the Willie Pete—seemed like it was inevitably going to swallow him.

Anselmo fell to his knees in the fire, the smoke getting incredibly heavy in the room. His vocal chords quit, and I could hear a wet hissing over the steam. I didn’t know where it was coming from.

No, scratch that. I didn’t want to know where it was coming from.

“Sienna,” Scott said, and I could hear the horror and awe in his voice. “Sienna,” he said again, and I woke from my trance of watching this psychotic beast burn and burn again. “The prison break?”

“Right,” I said, shaking myself out of it. We still had Vitalik and Natasya to go. And Simmons.

“They’re on the move,” J.J. said, his voice a hushed whisper. I guess he was watching on the security cameras. “Heading to the roof. The police on the perimeter just reported a chopper flyover. They’re moving to extract.”

“Dammit,” I said, “let’s get them,” and started toward the stairs. I just ignored the flaming pile of Anselmo, somewhere in the white-hot fire. I could still hear him moving around in there, but it wasn’t like there was a lot I could do for him either way. I mean, I could have Scott put the fire out, maybe, but assuming Anselmo was still alive, that wouldn’t exactly do me a lot of good.

So I left him burning and headed for the stairs.

“NOOOOOOO!” J.J. cried out into my ear, loud enough that I almost yanked the microphone out.

“What the hell, man?” Scott asked for me. I looked back to seem him cringing from it. His hearing was meta, so it was better than Reed or mine’s, at least at the moment. His expression was pained.

“Sienna,” J.J. said, his tone verging on panic, “problem.”

“No more problems,” I said, halting, looking back at the white phosphorus fire, still doing … what it did. “Solutions, please.”

“Problem, man,” he said. “I was watching you guys during the Anselmo thing and I—aw, dammit! Aw, damn!”

“J.J.,” Reed said. “What is the dilly-yo?” I blinked at him; he shrugged.

Weirdo
, my look said.

You should talk
, his said in reply. Point taken.

“The brain, man,” J.J. said, “the brain was still breaking through our—they were using our network access, and I’d been blocking them, but I lost focus and—they’re in! They’re totally in.” He just deflated, from sixty to zero like he had the best brakes in the world. “We’re compromised.”

I just stood there, waiting for translation. “And this matters why …? Their people are running like scared squirrels.” This time, Reed gave me the look. My return look said,
Don’t judge
.

“Because—oh, God, I can see what they’re doing,” he said, low and scared. “Because the brain—whoever they are—they’re watching through the cameras, first of all, but second—and so much worse …”

“Spit it out, dude,” I said, making for the stairs again. “I have zero time.”

“They’re working on opening the doors of every prisoner in the Cube,” J.J. said. “In about two minutes, every prisoner we’ve got is … they’re all … they’re all about to get a real early release.”

I was so hot I felt like I was going to burst into flames like Anselmo, but from the inside. The brain opened my prison. Seriously. I was the warden of that place—still, I think? Damn Phillips. Whatever the case, I felt a sense of responsibility for it all, since I’d put those clowns there. I couldn’t remember off the top of my head how many of them were left, but almost every one of them was a seriously bad dude, villains with first-rate ambitions and last-rate executions. Not high on the power scale, but right at the top of the vicious scale.

How did they get there? Power unchecked. I’d done some reading on their backgrounds in the course of the investigations that led me to them. Every one of them, without exception, started small and grew into a killer. They thought they could get away with it, and they did, their schemes and contempt for order growing larger and larger.

Until I showed up.

This was how the old gods were made, I knew. That hubris, that feeling that no one could stop them? It came from the fact that no one could. When the cops showed up to bring you in and you took down all of them, it was a rush. A sense of youthful imperviousness is common, in greater or lesser form, in most people under the age of twenty. A sense of lawlessness and a total lack of need for impulse control common to the criminal class. Want, take, have, I’ve heard it expressed. Because when you’re a person with power, who’s gonna stop you?

No one had stood up to these cowards. Every time someone had tried, they’d come out on top. They thought they were invincible, like Anselmo, although they didn’t have a tenth of his power. They could put a hell of a show on for the local PD, though, that was for sure. Put a dozen cops in the hospital with their schtick.

But you put me up against any one of them on my worst day, and they’re a smear on the pavement when I get irritable.

I was heading down when I should have been heading up, and I was getting angrier by the minute. This brain was a pain in my ass, and I was resolved to find him, her, or it at my earliest convenience.