The Flight of the Silvers (55 page)

Her expression turned frigid. “And my warning.”

The elevator closed on her pointed last words, which struck Amanda like arrows. She envisioned a large tempic spike bursting through Zack’s chest, throwing him to the floor in a bloody heap.

Hannah held Amanda close as she continued to keep the weight off her broken ankle.

“It’ll be okay,” she insisted. “The others are all right. You heard her.”

The words did little to comfort Amanda. She stared ahead in a morbid daze, too distracted to notice the fifth-floor button lighting up on its own.

“What did she mean by ‘kin’?” Hannah asked her.

Amanda fixed her dark green stare on the doors.

“Nothing. She’s insane.”

—

The Gothams knew of Esis Pelletier. A week after Rebel’s ill-fated mission in Terra Vista, the clan’s best ghosters had traveled to Sterling Quint’s lobby and watched her slaughter four kinsmen in retrospect. Her tempic savagery was described in harrowing detail at the next elder council, enough to give nightmares to half the tribe.

Mercy Lee had missed that meeting. She’d been off sharing opiates and oral favors with a long-haired delinquent from Nyack.

Now she was all caught up on the matter of Esis.

Mercy hid behind a planter, struggling to hold back her screams as she listened to Nick McNoel’s gurgling last breaths. Esis had found the broken boy on the stairwell and wasted no time finishing him with a tempic sword through the neck. Three of Mercy’s teammates were dead now. Her comm-link was dead. Her solic charge was still drained from her attack on the Givens.
I’m next. I’m dead. Oh God.

She parted the hydrangeas with trembling fingers, peeking down at the lobby through leaves and iron rods. No one was there.
Maybe . . . maybe she . . . maybe she just . . .

A cold hand grabbed her ankle from behind. Mercy shrieked as she dangled upside down from a long white arm. The lip of her T-shirt tumbled down to her chin. Esis curiously studied her small breasts and flat olive stomach. A flowery vine tattoo spiraled around Mercy’s navel.

“Look at you. As lovely and filthy as an outdoor cat. Tell me, cat, why do you stain yourself with so many inks and oils?”

Thick black tears dribbled down Mercy’s temples. “Please! Please don’t kill me!”

“You slaughter my Golds and threaten my Silvers, and now you ask for mercy, Mercy?”

“Please! I’m sorry! I never wanted to hurt anyone! I just got scared! My brother—”

“Your brother lives,” Esis informed her. “He resides in our care, as healthy and pampered as an indoor cat. Does this news quell your bloodlust? Or must I find a stronger remedy?”

“No! No! Please!”

Esis threw a baffled gaze at the highest railing, beneath the artificial sky. Through the metal bars, she saw Hannah and Amanda hobble out of the elevator. She’d sent them to the twelfth floor, not the fifth. Her dark eyes narrowed in suspicion.
No. Not him. The fool wouldn’t dare.

“Please!” Mercy shrieked. “I’ll do whatever you want!”

Esis turned back to her captive. She had no intention of killing Mercy Lee. The child came from an optimal gene line, and her future intersected heavily with Zack Trillinger’s. The two funny artists were practically born to entwine.

“You seem sincere, child. Perhaps I will spare you. But know that if you raise your claws against my little ones again, there will be no mercy, Mercy. Do you understand?”

Through her upside-down perspective, Mercy saw a large figure creep up the stairwell. She looked away for fear of alerting Esis. “Yes! I won’t! I promise!”

Rebel aimed his revolver through two metal posts. He reeled with doubt as he watched his speculative gunshot pierce the back of Esis’s skull.
That can’t be right. It can’t be that easy.

Indeed, the moment he pulled the trigger, a small white portal appeared ten feet in front of him and swallowed the bullet whole.

Esis dropped Mercy and moved toward Rebel in a windy blur. He barely had a chance to react before she tackled him down the stairs. He crashed to the floor, his gun sliding thirty feet across the marble.

The mother Pelletier straddled his stomach, pinning him to the floor in a tempic web.

“Imbecilic ape. Did you think you were the only augur here? You see nothing compared to me. You’re a blind and stubborn fool and we are out of patience with you.”

Five stories above, Amanda took a wincing perch on a cushioned bench by the railing. She’d sent Hannah to the restroom to soak her scalded hand. Now she had a lone view of the conflict below, clear enough to recognize the man beneath Esis.

Rebel bucked and thrashed in her web. “I’ll kill you, bitch.”

“Your foresight fails you again, Richard. Shall I tell you the future? That crude piece of lead you fired at me will return one day when you least desire it. It’ll travel through the skull of your pretty wife. Or perhaps the tiny eye of your child.”

He bucked madly. “NO!”

“You’ve inconvenienced us greatly, Richard. Did you think we would tolerate it? You should have listened to Pendergen. You accomplish nothing by killing these children of ours.”

“The breaches—”

“The damage to this world is already done. It cannot be undone, any more than your hand can be unrifted. Cease your foolish crusade and perhaps we’ll let you and your family live to see its natural end.”

“I swear to God I’ll—”

“Kill me. Yes.” Esis sighed. “A stubborn fool to the last. So be it. Soon you’ll know—”

She threw her head back and gasped in cold shock. Even the most powerful augur couldn’t foresee every circumstance. When Esis dropped Mercy Lee to the carpet, she never anticipated for a moment that the terrified girl would rediscover her nerve. And her solis.

With a feral scream, Mercy drowned both Esis and Rebel in an invisible field of energy, dissolving the tempic web between them and flipping the cruel advantage. Esis was a 130-pound woman with slender arms and a delicate beauty. Rebel was not.

Amanda gaped, thunderstruck, as Rebel’s first punch drew blood from Esis’s nose and sent her flying onto her back. He leapt on top of her, pummeling her with fists both flesh and synthetic.

“You threaten my wife? You threaten my
child
?”

Four blocks away, the screens of the command center flickered back to life. Gemma did a double take at the action on the center monitor. This was not the future she’d seen. Not at all.

“Oh my God. He’s alive.”

Ivy raised her teary face from her hands. “What?”

“He’s alive! Rebel! He . . . Holy shit, he’s beating her!”

Olga looked up from her table. She’d just finished tying a tourniquet around Bruce’s leg and was now lowering his body temperature in preparation for reversal. Her ice pack dropped to the floor when she saw the two slaughtered kinsmen in the elevator bank.
Dear Lord. No.

Ivy kept her rapt attention on the middle screen. “Oh God. Richard. Get the gun. Kill her.”

“Kill her!” Gemma screamed.

Kill her,
Amanda cried in her broken thoughts.
Kill each other.

Rebel continued his furious assault, reducing Esis to a raw and battered wreck. The woman had been raised in a more civilized era, where only the poorest suffered the indignity of pain. Even a surgeon like her could live her whole life without seeing a drop of blood.

Now as this ancestor ape thrashed her with his brutal fists, a shrill cry escaped her bloody lips.

“SEMERJEAN!”

A nine-foot portal opened on the second floor balcony. A speeding figure burst through the surface and knocked Mercy unconscious. It continued down the stairs in a blurry streak, yanking Rebel off Esis and slamming him against a wall. Two heavy-framed paintings crashed to the ground.

Now Amanda could see this new man clearly. He stood as large and bald as Rebel, with powerful arms and a broadly muscled back. His entire body was glossy white, like a marble statue of a naked Greek god. It took two squinting glances for Amanda to see that he was covered in tempis.

Ivy stared at the screen in slack horror. “Oh Jesus, Richard. Come on. Break free.”

Rebel may as well have been crucified for all the force that pinned him. When he tried to kick his aggressor, the man grew a second pair of arms from his hips. They held Rebel’s thighs to the wall.

Gemma shook her trembling head. “God. What is that? Is it even human?”

Only Rebel was in a position to glimpse the man behind the tempis. Through the small round eyeholes, he could see pale skin and sandy brown eyebrows. His fierce blue eyes brimmed with savage fury, like a panther in mid-roar.

Rebel hocked a spiteful gob at his attacker. “Fuck you, coward. A real man shows his face when he kills someone.”

Semerjean’s eyes laughed with a shrewd and vicious mockery that Rebel found even more frightening than his rage. Clearly this creature wasn’t just a thug on the family payroll. He was a Pelletier through and through.

Ivy cried out when the tempic man grew a third pair of arms from his rib cage. They struck at Rebel with relentless fury, cracking his jaw, breaking his teeth. Once Rebel’s face matched the bloody wretchedness of Esis, Semerjean melted away his extra limbs. He leaned in toward Rebel and hissed a gritty whisper.

“You’ll know when I’m killing you, boy. You’ll see my true face then.”

Rebel moaned in pain as Semerjean traced a finger along each cheek, rifting the skin just enough to scar him. He let his victim collapse to the floor, then gently scooped his wife into his arms.

Amanda watched in bleary-eyed anguish as Semerjean carried Esis through a new portal. The gateway shrank to a close behind them.

All was once again quiet in the lobby as the living fell as still as the dead. In the remote command room, three Gotham women stared numbly at the monitors. Gemma shuddered in her seat while she received new intel from the future.

“It’s safe to get Rebel and Mercy,” she told Ivy. “But you have to do it fast.”

“Why? Are those monsters coming back?”

“No.”

Gemma adjusted the camera displays to show a view of the street. A trio of ash-gray vans came to a halt in front of the building, with several more approaching.

The Deps had arrived in full force.

—

Howard Hairston parked his rental coupe at Bowling Green Park, a block away from the action. The freckly young redhead was the only member of Melissa’s team to follow her here. Everyone else had been called back to Los Angeles by the regional director, who sought to sever his office from this quagmire of a case. Until Integrity seized the reins, as everyone assumed they would, the six otherworldly fugitives were officially New York’s problem.

The moment Howard reached the siege site, he saw that New York was ready for them.

Seventeen government vehicles flanked the building—armored trucks, reviver vans, mobile thermal scanners. A trio of NYPD aerocruisers circled the roof like buzzards.

Howard scanned the crowd for Melissa, to no avail. He moved in on Rosie Herrera, a small and sturdy woman whose masculine features were only slightly countered by her salmon-pink ensemble. She paced the barricaded entry, commanding her men like Napoleon at Austerlitz.

“I want all exits covered before that tempis comes down. Every door. Every window. Every vent.”

“Excuse me . . .”

She held up a finger to Howard, then fumed at the young agent working the gate controls. “Why am I still looking at this barrier, Jules?”

“None of the overrides are working. Someone jammed it good.”

“Well, fix it already. We got thirty guys standing here with their twigs out.” She turned to Howard. “Who the hell are you?”

He raised his badge. She leaned in to study it. “Huh. Another one from Sunland. You must be Melissa’s boy.”

“Yes, ma’am. Has she arrived yet?”

“She’s here. She’s changing.”

“Changing?”

“You faced these perps before. How bad are they?”

“Bad.” Howard sighed. “One of them broke my teammate’s back. Another punched the gate off a Tug-a-Lug truck. They’ve got an Australian kid who’s an ice-cold gangster and a Filipino who probably already knows your middle name. If they slip out this time—”

“They won’t.”

“—it’ll be because of Maranan. That guy just knows things.”

Rosie snorted. “Unless he knows how to turn into sunbeams, he’s not getting out of there.”

The back doors of a truck swung open with a heavy
thud
. Eight imposing agents marched down the ramp. They wore the same padded black armor, with thick-soled boots and gray metal cables that ran between their gloves and their backpack shifters.

The lone female of the group broke away from the procession and approached Howard. He smiled at the dreadlock tips that dangled from the base of her mirrored black helmet.

Melissa raised her visor and flashed him a humble grin. “Hello, Howard.”

“Hi, boss. Damn. I guess I don’t need to ask if you’re ready.”

Melissa now had the power to move at twenty times her normal speed. Her armor carried four gas bombs, three flash grenades, two sonic screamers, and a stun chaser. She kept a snub-nosed pistol in her side pouch in case Zack rusted her primary weapon. Most crucial of all were the two reviver vans parked right outside the building. In lieu of winning over her quarry’s hearts and minds, she now had the freedom to shoot them everywhere else. This was Melissa’s final chance to capture the fugitives alive. She wouldn’t waste it on words.

She blew a hot breath, then looked to the barrier. “Let’s get this thing down, shall we?”

—

Hannah eyed her dreary reflection in the restroom mirror. Her vision was coming back in dribs and drabs, enough to let her see the magnitude of her sister’s injury. Amanda was in mortal agony and yet somehow she found the strength to fuss over Hannah’s trifling burn.
You need to soak that hand,
she’d told her.
Put it in cool water, not cold.

After forty seconds, Hannah yanked her fingers from the sink in restless anguish. There had to be something she could do for Amanda. Maybe she could make her a splint out of something, or find some painkillers. For once it was time for the dizzy actress to take care of the nurse.