Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (38 page)

“It’s Los Angeles,” Steven said with more than a little impatience of his own. He jerked the wheel to the right and rode the shoulder for three hundred yards before hitting an exit that did not say anything about the Elysium neighborhood. When Scott looked at him questioningly, the actor shrugged. “I don’t think the freeway’s going to do much moving this morning. Back streets are probably a better bet since we’re still about two miles from Elysium.”

“Okay,” Scott said, hanging onto the hand rest as Steven jerked the wheel and made an illegal right turn. Horns honked and the actor looked decidedly unimpressed. “Don’t get us killed on the way there, please.”

“I will take that under advisement,” Steven said, driving like he was in a movie. Damn, Scott thought, watching someone else do something awfully similar three lanes away in a bright red sports car, what is it with this town?

I thought about trying to light the La Brea tar pits on fire, but decided that “ecological disaster” was a step above what I was aiming here for, so instead I made a horrendous crash landing in front of Griffith Observatory, creating enough work to keep the gardening staff rolling in overtime for six months.

It hurt, ripping across the lawn, twisting my limbs as I came down, listening to bones break and reset, to nerves cry out and then stop as Wolfe’s power healed them. I’d done this much the same as I’d done the other landings, except this time I skidded for about a hundred yards. Or at least it felt like a hundred yards. Or maybe a hundred miles.

“Ouch,” I said, rolling limply around my landing sight. The camera phones were out again, but at least these people had the grace not to stick them directly in my face. Maybe they just knew how to use the zoom feature. “I am so going to kick your ass for this,” I said, plenty loud enough for them to hear me, and I looked into the sky above as I said it.

That’s right, Hollywood. You got me to act. Way to bring out the lying liar in me.

I peeled myself out of the dirt, brushed myself off, cast a scathing look at the empty sky above, and zoomed off toward the heavens. I’d made enough of a mess to get the Los Angeles press chasing its own tail in three different locales around the city. Hopefully that coupled with the tipoff I’d given to Detective Waters about what was coming would keep them busy.

I’d done absolutely everything I could to clear out the Elysium neighborhood of the kind of trouble and attention that Karl Nash was looking for.

All that was left was to go to Elysium and confront Redbeard, and make sure that attention-seeking whore regretted ever getting mine.

The cops went screaming past in a line of patrol cars just as Karl was about to pull out to start his attack. There was no mistaking what had happened.

Someone had just captured the spotlight he intended for himself.

Karl’s jaw tightened as he watched the last in the line of cars go by, its lights disappearing under a freeway overpass, the sound of the siren fading into the distance. He didn’t care for this at all. He clenched his teeth and clamped his hands on the steering wheel to keep them from shaking.

Who would dare …?

It was probably nothing. Just some punk who’d done something stupid, no big deal. Whatever had happened, the cops probably thought it was him. When they realized he wasn’t involved, they’d come rushing back, especially if he gave them a solid reason for doing so. And he had a pretty good one in mind.

Aaron Taggert had had a marvelous few days. His number one star was absent after a horrendous, sympathy-and-awe inducing incident that had resulted in widespread destruction and the death of more of his rival producers than he could count, her recently completed
Vanity Fai
r shoot had come back full of beautiful, breathtaking pictures, and better than that, he’d gotten laid last night by a nineteen year-old production assistant who had bragged about being a gymnast in high school. He hadn’t even had to try very hard on that one, no booze, no pills, nothing but a few idle promises about what he could do for her, and she’d done for him plenty enough to give him a great big capper on his week.

Yeah, it was a good life. That bodyguard he’d hired for Kitten had predictably sucked, completely inadequate to the task, but he looked good to Kitten, and that was what had mattered.

Taggert had his suspicions that Kitten was fine, of course, based on everything he’d heard from the production crew on location, but even if she turned up dead, the second season of
Beyond Human
was already in the can, and with the death of so many big wheels on the scripted side of Hollywood in the Luxuriant disaster, his star was about to rise, big time. There was a void to fill, after all, and he was just the guy to fill it.
Just like I did with that nineteen year-old last night
, he thought with a guffaw. What was her name again? Ehh, it didn’t matter.

He left his production office with a song in his heart. The sky was the limit, no possibility too far-fetched after last night. He was gonna make so much scratch he might as well have his own mint. But there was nothing else to do today except “participate” in the mourning by being seen at all the right funerals and wakes. Hands would be shaken, ideas would be batted back and forth in whispers, because the scraps needed to be collected. This town didn’t stop for anyone, after all.

He thought about taking the SUV, especially since Kitten wouldn’t be needing it or the driver, but this was a day where he actually felt like driving, so Taggert headed down to the garage in his production office, keys in hand, ready to take his prize for a spin. Hell, it was older than the women he’d bedded for the last few years, he thought with a laugh. Prettier and less needy, too.

He looked around at the spot where his 1961 Ferrari Spyder had been parked. It was empty.

“What the hell?” Aaron Taggert muttered to himself.

When Scott had said that we were going to give Redbeard what he wanted, I’d assumed he meant feeding Kat to him as some sort of bait. Now, I wasn’t merciless enough to think we’d, y’know, stand idly by while he skinned her alive or anything …

Probably. We probably wouldn’t do that.

Anyway, I’d started listening to his plan with the preconceived notion that he was counting on ol’ Karl to want to kill Kat so badly he’d suspend all reason to do so. He had, after all, seemed to fixate on her above all else.

But Scott—wisely, annoyingly—had pointed out that really, Kat was likely the first-string target all this time because Brock had wanted to draw me out here to LA and thought—annoyingly, rightly—that Kat plus Scott would get that job done. And here I was in Tinseltown, so I guess I was the stupid one for stumbling ass over teakettle right into that trap. Me and my dumb nobility and stuff, making me all predictable.

So anyway, Scott then pointed out that, really, Kat coming back after the Luxuriant would really just throw up a giant red flag for anyone with half a brain. And we had to assume that in spite of whatever neurological damage ol’ Redbeard had suffered, he still at least
had
a brain. Therefore, putting her front and center as bait would probably raise Karl’s worry level when we needed the bastard lulled.

Oh, I wanted to kill Scott. So badly. Because of course, he’d gone and used reason, and suggested that the only person that Redbeard would REALLY, REALLY want to kill that would actually come after him would be—

—naturally—

me.

And so I found myself flying low and slow a few hundred feet above the Elysium neighborhood, working a steady course toward Redbeard’s bolt-hole, which, if Detective Waters had done her job by now, would be empty, along with every house for a block in every direction (because of the bombs he’d planted in his own house, duh).

It was by no means a perfect plan, seeing as the rest of the neighborhood, still occupied, was probably still laced with massive amounts of explosives, but it had all the crazy elements needed—bait, in the form of me, a trap, in the form of the others, and prey, in the form of Redbeard.

Now all I had to do was hope it came together in the least deadly way possible for the people left in the neighborhood.

She was just flying overhead like an invitation offered right to him, and he drove after her as quickly as he could.

He could see where she was going, of course—right to his old hidey-hole, probably looking for a clue as to his whereabouts. She was so dumb, she was practically fumbling about in the dark without a clue where the light switch was. He watched her descend over the house, coming down to the earth slowly, wafting, gravity causing her to drift downward. He watched her go, driving after her, slow enough not to attract attention.

The neighborhood was quiet, only a few people walking around here and there. Karl had a grin that stretched across his face and hurt the corners of his mouth. He parked a half block away from the house, and she just stood there in the middle of the street for a minute, staring at the house like it was going to blow up on her.

He wouldn’t do that, though. No, she needed to suffer more. An explosion would end it entirely too quickly, and he didn’t intend to let her off that lightly. Not since Kat Forrest—that bitch—had gotten away.

She started toward the house, and he got out of the car, leaving the door open as he stalked down the block. He watched Sienna Nealon disappear down the side of the house behind the wall that separated his yard from the neighbor’s.

Karl came around the corner of the wall that stretched along the front of the neighbor’s house and peeked after her. She was just walking down the side of the house, stalking near-silently along the overgrown lawn, peeking in a window.

This was going to be beautiful.

Karl snuck along the other side of the wall, heavy with dried-out foliage shadowing the ground beneath him, his head out of phase and stuck through so he could watch her. He went quickly, trusting that his footsteps would be hidden enough by the wall separating them to throw off her suspicion. The wall between the yards was about six feet high, a concrete, cinder block creation that had been painted white once upon a time but now was cracked and fading. Karl stalked along quickly, gaining ground on her, his head leaning through the wall just enough to keep an eye on her.

She paused and he froze, her back tensing through her crumpled suit as she looked around to either side. Karl dodged through the wall and minded his footsteps, careful to stick to the loosest patches of grass. He listened for her, trying to tell if she was moving, turning around, trying to see if someone was stalking her.

If she thought she was about to surprise him, she had another thing coming.

Karl braced himself just on the other side of the wall from where he’d seen her. She hadn’t taken a single step, hadn’t moved at all, based on sound. She was just standing there on the other side of the wall, though she probably wouldn’t be for much longer. Now was the time to act, now was the time to—

Karl lunged through the wall, turning himself insubstantial as he passed through, the bottoms of his feet going solid again as soon as he was through. He sprang out into daylight—

And caught Sienna Nealon with her back turned.

Karl smiled uncontrollably and plunged his hand into her back, turning it solid as he reached her heart. This was the end of her, he thought as his fingers turned solid and he ripped open the muscle that let her live.

This was the end, at last.

Steven took them through the Elysium neighborhood, flying around corners at high speed, rushing for the rendezvous. “Make it. Make it in time,” Steven was muttering under his breath.

Scott was trying to decide if that was something he was rooting for, too, his fingers pressed into the leather padding on the car’s door. He still wasn’t sure.

When someone sticks their damned fingers into your heart, it hurts. A lot. In fact, it’s usually a fatal sort of injury, so maybe you could just imagine how much it hurts, since most people wouldn’t live enough to tell that it hurts. It does. Lots and lots.

Fortunately, I was not a normal person, and more than just being abnormal on my own, I also carried with me the power to summon a crazy serial killer who could heal more wounds than time alone.

See
, Wolfe said,
for that insult I should just let you die
.

My old response would have been something along the lines of,
Fine, we’ll all die together, then, crazy
, because Wolfe was really kind of chickenshit about “dying” again. He wasn’t exactly living it up in my head, but apparently going into the great beyond was a little much for him to contemplate.

But I’m trying to be the new me, Sienna 2.0, kinder and gentler, so instead, what I said was,
Pretty please, Wolfe? With sugar on top? Heal me?

And grudgingly, he said, with a growl that hinted he was a little taken off guard,
All right
…

The torn and shredded, painful muscle that was my heart closed up around Redbeard’s fingers, and my ribcage started to heal around his arm. He grunted in surprise, and I knew I had him, though probably not for long.

Gavrikov
, I said to myself and was rewarded with an angry curse in Russian, apparently directed at Redbeard, but which he would not hear, or even understand if he had.
Yob’ tvoyu mat!
Gavrikov yelled in my skull, apparently not happy with ol’ Red targeting his sister. I surged into the sky, dragging Redbeard with me, his fingers still in my heart muscle, his arm buried in my back up to the wrist.

“Wheeeee!” I yelled as I surged into the sky, Redbeard stuck with me as I zoomed two hundred feet into the air. I twisted my head around to look at him. He looked appropriately scared shitless. “Bet you weren’t counting on that when you went to kill me. That’s called the tables turning, you m—”

Redbeard went insubtantial and the holes he was holding open in my heart and back were suddenly vacant, causing me pain again, as well as a sudden desire to black out. It also caused him to drop, a very frightened look in his eyes. I would have enjoyed it, but I was busy bleeding out.