In the Wind: Out of the Box, Book 2 (4 page)

I watched Scott get distant. Watched him get irritable about the time demands. He was working a job, a nine to five that gave him plenty of opportunity to hang with his buddies and drink beer on the weekends. Even as fast-paced as his dad’s company was, it wasn’t as demanding as what Sienna and I were up to. I watched it eat at him. He tried to be supportive at first, I think, but it just dragged him down a little at a time.

At some point, I guess, after three weeks in which you haven’t seen your girlfriend, things get … awkward? Annoying? Resentment builds. What’s the point of being with someone if you’re on a catch-as-can basis? Scott was looking for someone to share his life with. Sienna didn’t have a life to share.

I sympathized. I watched it all dissolve. After Sienna’s disastrous interview with Gail Roth, it was over.

I pretty much took notes on the whole thing. Looked at it as a cautionary tale: people in our position, they don’t really get a chance at love in the traditional style. Spouse, kids, house in the ’burbs? Nah. For us, the demands are everything. I pour myself into my work, pour myself into training.

Sienna lapsed after Scott left, just drove herself into the job, and I’ve gone along for the ride.

No love.

No life.

Just work.

I can get behind that.

I guess we’re alike in that regard.

I stumble around my hotel room staring at the walls. Time passes like that fossilized amber in Jurassic Park; which is to say it doesn’t really move at all. It’s like stasis, like liquid almost gone solid, the minutes passing like hours. I connect to wifi and dull the pain by reading websites. Trolling Reddit. I’d eat, but I’m not hungry. I’d drink, but I’ve got work to do later.

The hours go like death. This is the way it is between jobs, between investigations, and I hate it. Sienna hates it. This is why I stick with her, because she and I are alike. And because there’s no one else on the planet who would put up with our crazy, all-work-no-play asses.

Hallelujah, it turns seven o’clock as my stomach lets off its first rumble of hunger. I eat a dinner in a café on the corner, Pollo alla Romana, which tastes like chicken saltimbocca to me, but whatever. It’s good. I pick at it for longer than is probably necessary, but I don’t want to have time to go back to my room before my nine o’clock—oh, heavens, Giuseppe, please be okay with me showing up at nine—meeting.

I stroll down the Via Nazionale as the sun fades in the sky. The city darkens, lights pop on. Cigarette smoke still hangs in the air, but the volume turns down a little. Stores are closing, they’re rolling up the sidewalks of Rome, Italy, like it’s a small town. It’s not tourist season, I guess, so why would they stay open late?

I mosey and meander, and I hate every minute of it. If this is stopping to smell the roses, all I’m getting is a whiff of the fertilizer. I’m bored and cranky, and the walk takes even longer because I’m dragging it out. I stop and look at architecture I’m not really interested in, and wish that I’d brought my iPad on the trip because at least if I had it, I could read through my comic collection to kill time. It’s more fun than trolling Reddit, which is kind of like fishing with dynamite in a barrel.

I skirt the edge of the Piazza Navona, which is pretty quiet compared to how I’ve seen it in the past. I dip down the alleyway toward Giuseppe’s place of business. When I used to visit him, he wasn’t living in his office. No cot, less clutter. He almost looked respectable. Times are tough, though, I suppose. I don’t exactly read economic forecasts, but I get the sense that although tourists probably still swarm this town in the summer, it’s probably not all sunshine and roses for the Italians, either. Mostly fertilizer in their case, too, I guess.

It’s easy to lose track of yourself on a city street, especially if you’re distracted. As I’m walking, I’m not so distracted, though. The alleys are tight, the quarters are close, and I’m acutely aware of every moment of it. I don’t love confined conditions, and I certainly don’t mind crowds, but on a night like this, in an alley in Rome, you’d be hard pressed to find a crowd.

I find one anyway.

They’re malingering outside Giuseppe’s shop front. I say malingering because it’s obvious that they’re not up to any good. Oh, they’re dressed casually enough. To the untrained eye, they probably look like they belong. Hell, on a summer day, when the alleys are booming and burgeoning, and people have set up those little cloths and laid out their wares so they can run from the cops in five seconds flat, these guys would maybe—just maybe—blend in.

On a near-winter night, when everything’s closing early and it’s almost nine o’clock? Not so much.

I become aware that a couple have fallen in behind me. They’re all cautious, not giving much of anything away. It’s their body language that tips me almost as much as the sudden crowd. Ten guys all bunched in an alley is suspicious. When they’re all holding themselves stiff and straight, heads swiveling to look in every direction, even the most head-up-his-ass tourist is gonna notice something’s afoot.

I consider glancing back to confirm what my ears are telling me—that there are two of them easing along behind me, cutting off my retreat. Giuseppe’s shop is closed, no doubt, even though the storefront is very open and the lights are on. The guy who was behind the counter earlier is missing as surely as good taste from a Nickelback listener. In his place are a couple of these mooks, standing in the aisle between the tables and the counter, blocking the path. The message is clear:
move along.

Getting into a ten-against-one fight in an alley in Rome is the kind of stupid that I pride myself on not being. I keep it casual, drifting along, pretending to ignore these guys. I can see their skepticism, every one of their studious eyeballs on me. They’re thinking about it, trying to figure out who I am.

I try to make it easier on them. “Hey, how’s it going?” I ask, putting casual emphasis on my English as I nod at one of the guys and keep moving. I like a good fight, but I’m not exactly a heavyweight like my sis. My mind is racing, and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way I can help Giuseppe without getting myself killed. These guys look like they could be armed, and I’m very definitely not. I’m not the hugest fan of guns (also unlike my sis), but right now I’m wishing the Italians would have let me come into the country with a gun. Instead I’m pretty well down to a pen and my powers. It’s not nothing, but these guys have coats on that suggest they’re concealing.

The lead one acknowledges me with a nod, and I can see him put at ease by speaking English. I’m a tourist, clearly, here in the off-season. I keep walking, threading through their little crowd like it’s no big deal, I’m just wandering through. They’re relaxed now, put off their guard by what they’ve seen of me.

Then a heavy shout of something in Italian that I don’t understand cracks from somewhere in Giuseppe’s storefront, and I can feel the mood change in an instant. Burly Italian men at instant attention, ramrods driven down into their slouching spines, hands fumbling in their coats as they go for their weapons.

Panic seizes me as I stand there, in the middle of a pack of enemies who are reaching for their guns, tight in a Roman alleyway, and oh shit, do I feel really damned far from the safety of home; just a lonely man in the middle of danger in a foreign land, without a friend to call my own.

I see guns emerge from coats like they’re drawing in slow motion, a John Woo-style vision of gunplay granted me by my meta abilities. It’s not that slow, though, and I don’t have a ton of time to respond, so I let my panic give me a little strength, and I twist as I thrust my arms out in both directions, forward and back.

A gust of wind tears loose from each hand, creating a short-duration wind tunnel effect. I catch four guys in the sweep, and for a moment it’s a scene out of a Weather Channel wet-dream hurricane report; full-grown men are ripped from the ground and tossed in the air. I feel it down my arms, the power draining from me. It’s a quick exertion, a sudden, high-weight, low-rep workout for my abilities. I throw everything into it, send those guys tumbling, and I feel my head rush as I let off the power.

I don’t even have time to assess what happens to those four, though, because I’ve got others whose weapons have nearly cleared their holster. A quick assessment tells me that I’m very lucky; only half of the six remaining actually have guns. Whoopee.

I throw a hand behind me, pointing at a wall of the alley, and trigger a gust. It launches me forward, straight into two of my quickdraw opponents. I’m still panicking a little, the sheer weight of the numbers daunting me. I’m solo, after all, no one to watch my back, and this is not what I was expecting when I hopped the plane. I launch into the two gunmen with a shoulder check. They’re grouped tight enough that I bowl them over like ten pins, hitting one in the sensitive belly so hard he goes, “OOOOF!” Another commonality shared by all mankind. Knock the wind out of us, do we not make the same noises?

I barely have time to punch the other in the face before he raises his gun to shoot me. Fortunately, my punches are somewhat harder than a normal human’s, and his head rockets into the cobblestone street, knocking him stupid. I fumble for his gun, figuring this might be the moment to put all that practice sis has forced me to do, to work, and I roll, coming up ready to shoot.

But the last gunman? He’s got a damned arrow sticking out of his head.

It looks a little like one of those comic props, where you wear it like a headband, but there’s blood dripping down on his coat, and the angle is off, like it came in above his ear and is sticking out of his lower jaw. His eyes are registering shock, but his brain hasn’t quite figured out what happened yet.

Judging from the wound, it never will.

There are still three guys in play by my count, and they’re wielding clubs and blunt instruments. I want to know how an arrow came to be sticking out of that guy’s head, but I want to live through the next five seconds a lot more, so I focus on the matters at hand.

I know a thing or two about fighting. When you’ve got strength beyond that of a normal human’s, it makes a street fight kind of a trivial thing. There was a time when Sienna would have killed these clowns, probably, and without much thought. She didn’t used to be that way, but she got to a point where she realized that some people are just bad. People who want to kill others are generally not easily redeemed. Those with super powers that want to kill others are usually not easy to contain, either.

But these are garden-variety human idiots, so I just beat the living hell out of them in three moves and leave them drooling blood on the cobblestones.

I’m not Sienna. I still have some mercy left in me.

I’m just about to look up to see where that arrow came from when I hear a slow, clapping sound coming from the storefront. It’s really dramatic, and I get the feeling I’m about the meet the leader of this little expedition. Why are they always dramatic? Why can’t there just be a low-key villain, for once, someone who’s clearly read the Evil Overlord List and is just going quietly about their malicious business?

On second thought, that would probably be really bad. Scratch that.

“Reed Treston,” the man says, and I realize he’s wearing a frigging ski mask. It’s not quite cold enough to justify this, and none of his thugs are wearing one, which gives me pause. His voice is accented, Italian, and I am suddenly sure he’s the one who shouted the warning to the men in the alley that set this whole shitstorm to flying.

“Overly dramatic villain,” I say, acknowledging him for what he is. I catch a flicker of confusion in the eyes as he steps into the alley to face me. A hunch occurs to me. “Or should I call you … ‘Axis’?”

I make two assumptions here that could go badly wrong—one, this guy could very well not be related to my inquiries of Giuseppe at all. Two, even if he is related to them, he might not be either one of them. Also, it’s fifty-fifty whether he’s Axis or Wrench. Though my money would be on Axis, because Wrench is a dumb nickname, bereft of drama, and this guy plainly has the drama thing in spades.

His eyes flare, and I’m feeling pretty good about my conclusion jumping for about a second. Then he flips three throwing knives out of his pockets and they come rocketing at me in a gust of wind, and suddenly I’m not so enthused about my intelligence because I’m an idiot for provoking this guy.

I barely throw up a wind blast of defense in time. He’s strong, plainly an Aeolus, like me, and the knives come driving at me hard enough to bury themselves in a telephone pole up to the handle. I turn sideways to shrink my profile, and one of them cuts a line in my jacket as it passes. I can still see the rage in his eyes and I just know he’s coming back with another handful of blades when he throws a hand up to ward off something I haven’t even seen.

It’s an arrow. Another one. And it misses him by about a foot because he throws a gust hard and broad enough that I almost fall down. The arrow plunks into a cooler to his left, spearing its way through a bottle of water. The sound of trickling liquid fills the air as the wind dies down.

My back is against the wall of the alley and I catch his eyes again. There’s enough uncertainty behind the rage that I know if he wants to make a fight of it, I’m gonna be in serious trouble. The arrow is affecting his calculations, though, and the flicker gives me enough time to regain my footing and put on my game face. It’s all bluster, though, and I hope he doesn’t know it.

He doesn’t. He throws another broad-based gust as an arrow streaks at him, and this time it’s blown off course in the other direction, shattering a glass deli display and lodging itself in a panini.

Dramatic villain guy decides to live to fight another day, and my head is spinning a little too hard to want to pursue. He dodges into the dark of Giuseppe’s storefront, and I see him crash through a back door and disappear into the night.

I stand there, hand out, thinking about the threat that just ran off in front of me when I hear the sound of feet landing lightly on the cobblestones next to me. I’m about to turn and thank Oliver Queen for his help when I get a glimpse of the bow pointed straight at me, the sharp head of a hunter’s arrow about six inches from my cheek, and I hold my thanks.