I BRACE MY rifle against my shoulder. “Interlude over. As we were.”
“Finally,” says Crystalis. She flings a volley of steaming glass at Sherman, transformed from the grit canisters on either side of the road.
Sherman throws up a new shield—just. The lights go haywire. Rainbows glance off in every direction, prismatic. We stand in a massive disco ball. Shards shatter around us, peppering the cars to either side of Sherman before dissolving back into sand.
For a moment, it’s like being in the observatory again. No time to freak out, though. I got my own Super to fight.
Me and the Captain squeeze our triggers. The difference is, he had the sense to let his rifle gather power, whereas I’m blasting my gun dry. It releases a pathetic puff of light that doesn’t even reach Windwalker. The Captain’s lightning bolt, on the other hand, whizzes past his left shoulder.
Windwalker laughs. “Shame you henchmen can’t shoot!”
I charge my rifle in the meantime, sending another shot his way. Another miss. Dammit.
“That’s it,” mutters the Captain, under his breath. Does he think I’m doing this on purpose?
Perhaps he has a plan. I hope he has a plan. I sure as hell don’t.
I miss again, backing up on shaky legs. Windwalker could toss us into the walls, snap our necks, finish this quick. But for whatever reason—theatricality? Lingering regret?—he drags it out.
The Captain fires again, with marginally more accuracy. A gale bats the glowing ball at me. I duck—barely. The bolt sails overhead, static lifting the hairs from my head. It dissipates against an abandoned car, arcs zigzagging over the metal shell, leaving a black scorch mark, as if it’s been struck by lightning.
I take another potshot in the meantime. Windwalker doesn’t bother to smack mine off course—doesn’t need to. But he still turns toward it, to be sure.
It’s the distraction the Captain’s been waiting on. He squares his stance, and, with suddenly improved marksmanship, squeezes the secondary trigger beneath the rifle’s black flare of a snout. Away zooms the tiny feathered bead of a knock-out dart, swooping toward Windwalker’s neck.
It should strike him. Not the film of ice that crusts the air an inch from his pulse point.
“I’m wise to that trick,” purrs Crystalis. “Come on, Windwalker. You’re facing off against Normies! Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Windwalker’s cheeks redden beneath the edge of his mask. “All right,” he snarls, rounding on us. “Playtime’s over.”
He jabs one hand forward, toward the Captain. Then he squeezes his fist and pulls.
That’s all it takes. The Captain isn’t punched back into his car or whirled like a turbine. In fact, there’s no visible change at all. The only hint that something’s wrong is the crack as his rifle meets the floor, audible even to me.
The Captain drops, scrabbling at his throat. Crap. He can’t breathe.
Windwalker grabs another handful of air and drags it out in the same direction as the first. “I could create a vacuum inside you,” he muses. Another handful. “Rupture your lungs…”
He sounds sickly fascinated by his own words. Perhaps he’s never killed anyone before.
The Captain arches. His spine’s a flexed bow, head thrown all the way back. I know he’d be screaming, if he could.
“Captain!” calls Sherman. Crystalis hammers her with a salvo of steaming ice shards before she can run over.
The Captain’s mouth opens and shuts uselessly under his mask. He’s dying in front of me. Like Mom. Like Amelia Lopez.
This time, I refuse to watch.
The knock-out dart is my only real weapon, and I don’t trust my aim enough to waste it. I need to get closer. Windwalker targeted the Captain. Perhaps that means he can only focus an attack this intense on one person at once?
I have to try. I lower my head and charge.
Windwalker raises his other arm. I halt—or rather, I’m halted. Hurricane-force wind blasts me in the face. It’s the exact opposite of the Captain’s predicament, though it achieves much the same effect. My cheeks fill like when a dog sticks his head out a car window. Wind squashes my tongue back down my throat, my eyeballs into their sockets.
Another gust rips the gun out of my hand. It dashes it against the asphalt, the cartridge of tranquilizer shattering. Noxious green goop puddles on the road.
Panic scratches my mind. Oh God. We’re dead. We’re so absolutely, completely dead.
The Windwalker certainly seems to think so. “This,” he sneers, “is why you Normies should keep your heads down.”
Then the ignition starts.
We all peer around the fume-clogged tunnel, trying to pinpoint the source of the growl, before 2,831 pounds of Ford Fiesta slam into Windwalker from behind.
The wind drops; I crash to my knees. The car powers on, smooshing Windwalker into the road. Then it slips into park and reverses (and scoots back and forth twice more, just to make sure).
The driver’s window rolls down. Fzzzz. A faint noise, made quieter by my malfunctioning ears, like gas escaping around the cap of a carbonated drink. Jav pokes her head out.
“What?” she calls defensively. “I stayed in the car!”
The Captain curls where he fell. He slurps huge, painful-looking gulps of air. Windwalker mirrors him—the difference being that he has a car using him as a parking space. He moans. I don’t care. I pound over to the Captain as Crystalis surveys the results of our battle with a withering sneer.
“Do I have to do everything myself around here?”
She waves her hand. The temperature plummets. Breath plumes from my nostrils. The air shimmers, and the sweat on my skin prickles, solidifying, glossing me in a hard rime shell—even as my feet heat, sinking into the melting road …
“Not her,” snarls Sherman. She hurls a shield forward, blocking Crystalis’s assault, and—
I think back to that news report (she can freeze one circle of air at a time, just one) and—
Oh hell. Crystalis grins.
“No!” I yell. “Don’t!”
Too late. I’m too late. The shield quivers between us. I can’t see through the crackled ice, but I still hear the scream.
“God,” breathes Jav.
I don’t believe in him. But as the ice crumbles away, leaving me staring at Sherman, my Sherman, speared on a spike of road tar that Crystalis melted and re-formed with a wave of her hand, I’m willing to make an exception.
Please, no, I pray. Please God, don’t let this be real.
As usual, the Big Man doesn’t listen. The tar melts, sloughing back into the road. Sherman follows it down. Limp as a rag doll, heavy as lead.
“Sherman!” I rip my sneakers out of the half-molten asphalt, dashing back toward her. Crystalis doesn’t look, just waggles her fingers in my direction. I stagger to a halt before I skewer my neck on a steaming line of ice needles.
Hot tar laps Sherman’s legs. Crystalis raises her hand, and the road swarms up and over. It devours Sherman’s feet, her ankles, her calves. She could be eaten entirely, mummified—but Crystalis stops at the knees. I doubt it’s out of mercy.
“There,” she says, clapping like a happy kid. “That’s so you can’t run away!”
Sherman doesn’t reply. Blood leaks through her hologram, slicking the road. There’s a hole in her back. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. The spike didn’t go all the way through, but there’s lots of important stuff it could’ve punctured. Spine. Kidneys. Liver, perhaps—I didn’t do well in biology.
Crystalis hunkers down beside her. “I intend to freeze the blood of your Normie friends. All I have to do is work out who to start with. Maybe you could point out your favorite?”
Sherman gurgles something.
Crystalis cups a hand to her ear. “What’s that? Didn’t quite hear.”
I take a sneaky step to the side, hoping to skulk around the ice needles. They swing with me, ten tiny daggers, ready to run me through.
Sherm makes a sound like she’s dying. Which she might be. No, don’t think about that.
“The big one it is,” says Crystalis, emerald gaze flicking toward me. There and gone again, dismissive, cruel. This isn’t about hurting me. This is all about hurting Sherman—but that doesn’t blunt the sting of her words. “Ugh. Please tell me you’re not hooking up with that pachyderm. I take it as an insult.”
Sherman tries to spit at her, but the wet string flops back on her chin. Crystalis laughs, while I do my best not to imagine what frozen blood feels like. She cups Sherman’s cheek, mock tender.
“How about a kiss, for old time’s sake? A reminder of everything you’re missing out on?”
She doesn’t give Sherman the chance to refuse. Just dives in and plants one on her. It’s long, passionate, and (in my humble opinion) unnecessarily wet. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over.
Crystalis jerks away. She sits, putting those perfectly toned buttocks to use. One hand flies to her mouth. The other remains trapped in Sherman’s grip.
“I said,” snarls Sherman, so hoarse I have to read the words off her lips. “Go. To. Hell.”
Crystalis’s eyes roll. Not in a sarcastic way. She clutches her throat. Her mouth gapes, tongue curling. Ice glistens in her throat. A tiny bubble of a shield. A kernel, a seed of death, germinating inside her.
She shakes; she struggles. Then her fox-green gaze narrows, and she points at me.
Agony. It blazes out from my fingertips, swarming up my arm. Voracious, feeding on my heat like it’s eating me alive. Cold, so cold …
“No!” shouts someone. Sherman, I think. Then there’s a splat, and the agony fades.
I blink back tears, clutching my pulsating wrist. Crystalis smiles cruelly up at me. That’s unnerving, since the rest of her slouches by Sherman, drooping to rest on the malformed road. An ice shield covers the stump of her neck. Must’ve expanded inside her. Blood drains in gentle glugs, like a tomato juice carton tipped on one side.
Oh no. Hell no. I can’t see this. I can’t deal with it right now.
I stare at my hand instead. It’s twice the usual size, puffy and discolored. Bruises spread beneath my skin like inkblots on paper. It hurts. It hurts so damn much. But it’ll heal. I think. Then it’ll be as if Crystalis never touched me.
“Uh,” wheezes the Captain, pushing up on his elbows and pointing at the decapitated head. “You never told me you could do that.”
Sherman looks as shocked as the rest of us. “I didn’t know I could do that.” At least, I think that’s what she says. Her voice is so frail I can no longer tell.
The pain in my hand is nothing in comparison. I stagger over, hurdling the majority of Crystalis. I wipe her blood off Sherman’s cheek on my sleeve—have to stop myself before I keep scrubbing. I want the stain of her gone, forgotten. Out of our lives.
“You saved me,” I whisper. “Again.”
Sherman grins—a proper one, not her usual half smile. There’s more blood on her teeth, I don’t know whose. “I’m … just that good…”
“Shut up. Don’t talk, okay? Just lie here a bit. Think you can handle that?”
She flops her head on my lap in answer. The Captain heaves himself upright, using the nearest bumper. He trudges to his car, hissing at the new dents.
“Shit. My insurance don’t cover running heroes over.”
“You’re welcome,” says Jav, hooking her arm through the window. “I thought it was damn good parking.”
Spoke too soon. Windwalker surges back to life. He rears up, taking the Fiesta with him, heaving it high above his head like a circus muscleman. Typhoons swirl around his fists.
The Captain flies backward. He slams into a dented hood, bowls over it, and flumps gracelessly down the other side. Jav sways on the driver’s seat, screeching.
Windwalker bares his teeth. “You Normies dare—”
That’s as far as he gets. His knees sag in. His brows beetle beneath his torn mask: a final look of perplexed rage. Then he keels, the car smashing back down on top of him with a satisfying crunch.
Two darts bristle from his neck.
“Cavalry’s arrived,” growls Birnbaum. He and Turner stand at the mouth of the tunnel, in Hench uniforms, pistols raised. “Nice shot, kid.”
“Fluke,” says Turner. “I was aiming for his chest—bigger target.”
How many points would a twofer fight win him on Superspotter? I don’t care, and he doesn’t seem to, either. He came to help us. They both did. If I weren’t supporting Sherman’s head right now, I’d run over and give them the biggest tackle hug known outside of football. Even if it threw Birnbaum’s back.
“You’re late,” grumbles the Captain. He peels himself up—again—and limps to his car for the second time. Jav clings to the steering wheel, glass-eyed and shaking. The Captain ignores her, retrieving a crowbar from the trunk and tossing his rifle back in. He makes his wincing way back to us, whereupon he plonks down and starts levering the road off Sherman’s legs.
“Can I help?” I ask, running fingers through her curls, combing out the snags. I’m still breathing too fast and too shallow. Every inhale tastes of blood and tar.
The Captain shakes his head. “You’re helping plenty.”
Sure enough, Sherman appreciates my pillow services. At least, that’s what I assume she’s conveying, through her vise grip on my bruised hand. Birnbaum approaches, splashing through Crystalis’s leakage with no aversion. Behind him, Turner gags.
“Oh, that’s a headless body. She’s dead. Very, very dead…” He stumbles away, ashy pale. Lyssa takes his place, inching around the abandoned vehicles in the tunnel’s mouth, eyes huge. And—crap. That’s a whole-ass corpse my baby sister’s staring at.
“Lyss, look away!”
For once, she does what I tell her. She doesn’t want to see.
“Took us a while to figure out where you were,” Birnbaum explains, creaking into a crouch beside Sherman. Captain must’ve called for backup before we set off. “Young ’un here figured you were either underground or dead if none of our emails got through.”
“Texts,” Turner manages from where he’s bent over, undulating around a dry retch.
“Yes, those. Thought you might need a medical assist, so an ambulance is on its way.” Birnbaum assesses Sherman, wrinkly mouth tight. “Let’s see what I can do in the meantime. Patched up plenty of our boys, back in Nam.”
The Captain budges aside, giving him space to work. He wiggles the crowbar into Sherman’s new asphalt leg warmers. “Fuck, that’s hot. Doesn’t it hurt?”
Sherman nuzzles my thigh. She says nothing at all. Her nails dig into my defrosting, bruise-puffed knuckles. It stings, but whatever. I’d take that pain any day over the moment her grip limpens.
The red pool under her spreads and spreads. Soaking through my pants, sticking to my skin.