Broken (15 page)

“
Sorry, Eve,” I whispered. She had no breath with which to speak, and I felt the first strains of my power starting to work. “It wouldn’t have been a fair fight if you’d chosen to orchestrate it, so I don’t feel the need to play fair now, either.” I mashed harder against her larynx and heard it pop, and she made a choked noise. Her eyes were squinted as she struggled for breath. I knew now that she was feeling the pain from both my touch and her impending suffocation. “That’s something I learned from you, really, not to play fair. I wish I’d killed you with that stone I threw that time I tore you out of the sky.” I looked at her, not harshly, oddly enough. “I could have, that day. Just a little harder throw, I think, would have done it.” I felt the swell of the power on my skin, and it made me feel flushed, hot, even as the snow fell around us, gathering on her dark lashes. “Not that it would have changed things, if you hadn’t been there the day Old Man Winter … did what he did,” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. “But you’d be one less problem I have to deal with now.

The last surge of her came through, now, and I felt the tingle of the moment when her soul ripped free of her body. It would have bothered me, before, only a week or so ago, to feel it, to feel her torn from herself, to listen to her screaming in my head as she left hers, like the sands leaving her part of the hourglass and coming to mine. I reveled in it now, though; it was twice the rush Charlie had told me it was. My head was swimming with enjoyment; it was far better than the whiskey, and I felt a pleasant hum. “Mmmm,” I said to the air around me. “You don’t taste too bad, Eve. Kinda light. Fluffy.” I looked down in the dead eyes of the thing that used to be her and relinquished my grip on her neck. The eyes stared back at me lifelessly as I stood up and brushed off the snow. I didn’t bother to close them; I just let them stare off into the dark sky.

I eased along the side of the building, and I heard Wolfe’s voice in my head, along with the murmur of silent approval through the thick feeling of euphoria that draining Eve had given me.
So good, Little Doll
.
Three down
.

The sense of sweet lightness from what I had done held me so tight in its grip that I didn’t even care that he called me Little Doll again. Why did it matter? This was what I was supposed to be doing. My powers were there for me to use, after all, and these people I was killing all deserved it, every last one of them. I gripped my M4 tighter as I strode along the side of the building toward the open space ahead, and it was almost as though I could hear a little song playing in my head, soothing me, my skin flushed with the afterglow of what I’d done. “Two to go.”

19.

I came around the corner of the building to an open space. The area was well lit, and I could see the plane Winter would be taking as I stayed in the shadow of the building, watching everything that was happening in front of me. It was a smaller model, a Gulfstream, and as the snow fell I watched the massive orange plow with the flashing lights drive down the runway again, spreading salt out the back of it. It looked like a dump truck with a plow fastened to the front, enormous, as though it carried a ton of dirt along with it. I stayed in the shadow, took a deep breath of chill air and smelled it, the scent of cold air itself. The taste of snowflakes was on my tongue, along with a different flavor, something like the last breath of Eve’s soul.

The low hum of the plow reached my ears along with conversation. I looked to the open door of the Gulfstream, which had a ramp built into it, and saw a man, one I didn’t know, getting inside. “We’ll be ready to take off momentarily, sir,” he said, very deferentially, to Old Man Winter, who waited at the bottom in nothing but a thin dress shirt—blue, of course. He wore no jacket, only his trousers and shirt, and had his arms folded across his chest.

Winter turned to Bastian, who stood at his side; Bastian was tall and broad, wider across the chest than almost any man I’d ever seen, and it was pure muscle. I had no idea how much of an edge that would give him in a battle with me; nor did I intend to find out. “Get Eve back over here,” Winter said, and Bastian nodded. He started to turn toward me, but I was already moving, out of the shadow of the building.

I fired eight shots with rapidity, the crack of the rounds cutting through the quiet night and the bare hum of the plane’s engines starting up in the background. Every one of my bullets caught Bastian across that massive chest of his, perfectly aimed. At the last he ended up on the ground, and I fired three rounds at Winter, who staggered from the shots but did not fall.

“
I’m afraid Eve will not be able to join you,” I said, crossing the distance between us with slow, taunting steps. I fired twice more into Winter’s chest, and he slumped to one knee, looking up at me with those cold blue eyes. “On account of the fact that she’s dead, in case you missed the inference.”

“
It was not lost on me,” Winter said in a low, gasping voice, looking up at me from the distance between us. There was no blood on his shirt, not where I’d shot him. There was, however, a crust of ice hanging out of the holes where the bullets had ripped the fabric, and it seemed to be steadily growing.

“
Sir,” I heard in a rasping voice, and looked over to see Bastian still moving, “go.”

I tipped the barrel of my gun toward Bastian but stopped short of firing at him; he had been on all fours in the snow, but something was changing as I watched. His chest was jerking, swelling underneath his coat. I fired at him twice and saw the rounds ricochet. I turned them instead toward Winter, who was still slumped, and ripped off the rest of the magazine at him, but his body was encased in a thick coating of ice now, frozen to the bones. All my shots did was chip away at it.

Winter limped away, toward the ramp to the Gulfstream, and I watched Bastian start to return to his feet now, but twice as big as he had been before, his body distorting horribly. His shirt ripped open to reveal wings, and his head and neck grew longer and larger. His legs seemed to fatten out, and a tail extended. He continued to swell, his skin disappearing as it turned to scales, and he grew larger and larger. He reached the size of a four-story building, his skin scaled like a snake, but with feathers around his head, his body elongated like a serpent’s, but with wings. He looked like a cross between a bird, a snake and a Chinese dragon, some mythical combination that made me drop the M4 without even bothering to reload.

He stared down at me from far above, bigger than the plane that was supposed to carry him away from me—me, the danger that they had feared, something so miniscule in comparison to what Bastian had become that I wondered why they had worried at all. With a roar of exhaled breath, he knocked me off my feet. I looked up at him, towering above me, and tried to find any reason to hope that I could possibly win against something so grotesque, so large. I wondered why I had ever thought I had a chance; a scared little girl in a world that was so much bigger than I had ever imagined.

20.

I quivered below the creature that Bastian had become, not quite shuddering, but my fingers buried in the snow as he towered over me, head atop the tall, snake-like body, wings extended wider than the wings of the Gulfstream. They were feathered, and with a single flap he rose above me, a creature out of a movie that was larger than any life I could imagine.

Get up, Little Doll
, I heard Wolfe shout in my ears over the flapping of Bastian’s wings.

“
I can’t!” I cried out, sitting there on my ass, looking up at the thing above me. “I can’t beat that!”

Go, Little Doll
.

Move
, Bjorn said.

You can destroy it
, Gavrikov told me.

Go
, Zack whispered.

I got haltingly to my feet, my legs unsteady, and Bastian hovered above me, each beat of his wings threatening to throw me back to the ground. “How do I beat something like that?”

Look for weaknesses
, Bjorn suggested.

“
It’s a friggin’ flying dragon!” I shouted. “Where the hell am I gonna find a weakness?”

“
Don’t kill her!” I heard Old Man Winter shout from behind Bastian. He was atop the ramp of the jet, and I wondered if Old Man Winter was a weakness for Bastian. It really didn’t matter if he was, because the likelihood I’d be able to reach him with Bastian between us was somewhere between nil and zilch.

“
Not being able to kill me is a weakness, I suppose,” I whispered.

Bastian swept his tail in a wide arc toward me, as though it were a sock filled with a paperweight that dangled off the end of his body, and I tried to jump it but didn’t quite succeed. The tail hit me squarely in the legs and caused me to flip. I landed on my front, my hands catching me. My wrists felt the impact, as did my face, which snapped down and hit the snowy ground. I didn’t feel the snow when I hit, though; to me it seemed like I’d been slammed into the asphalt beneath it. My nose started to bleed, and I came to rest with my face in the powder. I wanted to lie there, but as I looked up I saw Old Man Winter still standing atop the ramp, watching me.

“
Oh, no you don’t, you son of a bitch,” I whispered as I spit blood out of my mouth. Bastian remained just above the ground, the gentle flap of his wings keeping him aloft about five feet overhead but little more than that. His tail was at rest now, extended back behind him. Proportionally, he wasn’t nearly as long as a snake of his size would be, but he was long enough to look a little like one. I reached under my coat and pulled out a pistol, a bigger-bodied one. I had no idea what I was going to shoot with it, but I suspected the eyes were the only weak point. Assuming I could hit them; they small targets, far away, and in constant motion.

The tail swooped toward me again, but this time I was ready, and I nailed the timing. I jumped and cleared it, catching myself as I landed on my feet in the snow. He threw the tail at me again, like a whip this time, and I dodged right. I fired three shots at his face, but he made no reaction but to hiss and dart toward me with his head.

I lunged to the side, throwing myself into a shoulder roll that spared me from his wrath as he tore into the metal side of the building behind me. He ripped through it easily with the force of his blow, and his head remained there for a moment, the rest of his body still floating a few feet off the ground.

The Gulfstream had started to move now, rolling toward the runway, cutting a path through the snow that lay on this unplowed section of tarmac. I dodged under the flailing Bastian as he ripped his head out the side of the building with a screech of metal being shredded. I pumped my legs as I ran for the Gulfstream Jet. The ramp was already starting to lift, the hydraulics pulling it shut. I cursed and hurried on, trying to catch up with it.

“
GET BACK HERE!” The shout was world-ending, as if a lion had roared it but crossed with the subtle hiss of a snake. I looked back in time to see Bastian dive at me jaws first and I leapt aside, just not quite fast enough. He snagged my arm in his mouth as he went, and I felt it. He didn’t bury but one or two teeth in my right forearm, but it was enough to make me scream. I felt something flood through me and the pain subsided; I hoped it was adrenaline but I had no idea. Bastian was speeding up now and my arm was trapped in his jaws, dragging the rest of me along for the ride. I had the presence of mind with the pain blotted out to try something, though, and I grabbed hold of one of the long feathers that stuck out of the sides of his head where the gills would be on a fish, and I ripped hard on it. I wasn’t trying to pluck it, however, I was trying to use it to pull myself up.

It worked, and I propelled my body up onto the top of his head. I tried to grab hold there, but there was no obvious place to grasp, so I contented myself with pushing my fingers into a neat cleft in his skin where I presumed scales met. I tightened my grip and tried to wrench loose of the biting hold he had my other arm in, but I couldn’t really feel it all that well presently. This was not a huge, surprise, though, considering he had a six-inch long tooth squarely through the middle of my arm.

I held on as he took me a little higher. He lifted us about twenty feet into the air, above the Gulfstream, which was taxiing down a snow-covered runway away from where it had been parked. I could see, far in the distance, where the runway they were on turned onto the one that the snowplow had been diligently working to clear. Dimly, I knew that if I didn’t somehow reach Winter’s plane by the time they made the turn, I would have failed because they’d take off as soon as they hit the clear tarmac, and I’d lose him, possibly forever.

I gripped Bastian tighter as he started to take a turn to my left. He really did remind me of a Chinese dragon. His body fluttered lazily through the air in a way that defied the laws of physics, like no bird I had ever seen was capable of. He curled upright, straightening as though he were turning to spiral up, but I felt his wings falter with the next flap. The Gulfstream was ahead of us, and he had seemed to be going for it, but the next flap was weaker still, and I heard Bastian exhale in pain.

I realized, just barely, that I felt a surge of something through my hand where I gripped his skull. It was my power at work, again, and I felt the tingle through me, the sweet surge of something like endorphins as I felt my fingers start to draw him out. “Looks like you’re not as thick-skinned as Clary, Roberto,” I breathed as Bastian began to sink back toward the ground, each subsequent flap of his wings doing less and less to hold him aloft. The sound of the wind was mingled with the howling noise of his consciousness being absorbed into mine. He didn’t scream, at least not at first, but when he did, it was a fearsome bellow that shook the world around me.