Tormented (14 page)

“Sienna’s going to be fine,” I said, more sure of it by the minute. “We’re talking about a woman who killed like fifty armed mercenaries and several metas when she had no powers at all. I know for a fact she has her gun with her, and she’s got all her powers, so I seriously doubt that Anselmo has done anything to her. If he had, he would have been a lot more vocal and obvious about it.” I felt my expression turn more serious. “That’s not the sort of gloat that Anselmo would pass up on.”

“I guess you’d know your arch-nemesis best,” Augustus said as Charles came by with his Diet Coke and set it in front of him.

“Anselmo’s not my …” I paused. “Huh. I guess maybe he is my arch nemesis.”

“Good to know someone’s still got an arch nemesis around here,” Augustus said, a little glumly.

“Yours got killed, right?” I asked as Charles put a cool tumbler of Jack and Coke in my waiting hand. I didn’t even turn back to the bar to look, just felt it slide right into the open hand I had waiting for it. It looked cool, like it was something that happened all the time. Which it did. Charles and I had a rhythm, we were simpatico.

“Edward Cavanagh?” Augustus asked. “Died in jail. Coroner ruled it a stroke.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

Augustus took a sip from his drink out of a straw. “Man was healthy as a horse, worked out, just got his meta powers. You’re telling me he strokes out at the age of forty-five on the day he goes down for a crime? And just leaves ten thousand questions unanswered?” He shook his head. “Smells wrong.”

“Hm,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Still. You had your nemesis, and you didn’t kill him. Points to you for that.” I took a swig. “Unlike others ’round here.”

“You keep talking that passive-aggressive crap,” Augustus said, suddenly heated. “Why don’t you just give voice to your sister issues instead of just making snippy little comments all the time?”

“Okay, fine,” I said, setting my drink on the bar. The place smelled of booze, and the scent of the musky drink combined with the sweet Coke was a wonderful tonic that oozed into my nasal passages but didn’t quite erase the smell of burned flesh that still hung on me from the airport earlier. “At least you didn’t kill your villain, unlike my sister, who has killed more people than George R.R. Martin and Joss Whedon combined.”

“You’re still aching over the death of Wash, huh?” Augustus deadpanned, taking a drink from the straw.

“Always,” I said, letting the bitterness fly. “And I’m still bitter over the fact that I’ve been supporting someone over the last few years that I thought was just trying to do the right thing. She wasn’t. She was … enjoying herself the whole time, I think. On some level, she gets off on killing people. It satisfies her soul, if you can call what she has one.” I shook my head. “And that’s not even the worst of what she’s done. Do you know what she did to her last boyfriend?”

Augustus sat his drink on the bar coolly and then turned his barstool around to physically face me, leaning one elbow on the white oak bar top, his whole manner reflecting his utter lack of energy. “How do you envision this playing out?”

“This what?” I asked, suddenly confused. “This manhunt?”

“This conversation,” he said. “You brought me here to your little hidey hole, and before that we went out to your restaurant. Did you play it out in your head beforehand? Like we’d just sit here like bros, talking about women and life and eventually get on the topic of your sister, our boss, and you’d just … what?”

My face burned. “You asked, okay? You’ve been asking all day, in one form or another. Well, here we are, and now I’m spilling. You wanted to know my problems with Sienna? Here they are, simple as can be. Heart of the matter. Now you don’t want to hear? Methinks you doth protest too much.”

“Fancy way of saying I’m calling it out that I don’t want to hear it while I lean in to catch a little more, right?” His face was set in stiff lines like a statue. “Let me help you with this: My name is not Elroy Patashnik, and my hobby is not encouraging white people. That’d be a full-time job around here, and I’ve got one of those already, plus school. You’ve got family drama problems that I don’t want any part of, something bordering on the level of Hamlet.” He gave me a knowing look. “So let’s roll with this and stick with the example you’ve pulled out in your attempt to throw Shakespeare at my unknowing and youthful ass. ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’ You remember that line?”

“Vaguely,” I said, face still burning but now for maybe different reasons related to me feeling like I’d gotten called on being a smug, superior-ish ass.

“Hamlet tries to draw out his uncle’s guilt,” Augustus said, “by staging a play that mirrors the death of his father. Problem is, if your sister’s like you say she is, she’s got no conscience. Somewhere in your mind, you’ve equated her with a monster. She doesn’t think, she doesn’t feel like a normal person, she just killsssssss …” He made it sound overly evil and dramatic. “Doesn’t feel bad about it, doesn’t worry that it makes her a more callous or hard person, doesn’t worry about it at all, just … murders away. That about cover your thesis?”

I let my mouth gape open while I tried to produce an answer. It took a few seconds. “Basically, yes.”

“Okay, so,” Augustus said, leaning toward me now, “here’s how I see it. Girl saved the world. We all agree on that, right? In spite of what they say on TV, and although you could maybe argue she killed some folks that could have been dealt with slower and less ‘expeditiously,’ she saved the world, right?”

“Right,” I said, tense. I got a hint of where this was going and I didn’t love it. “I’ll grant her that.”

“So she saves the world,” Augustus said, “then she gets dragged through the mud by the media, has that shit interview with Gail Roth, and people start leaving.”

“Are you approaching a point or just listing out the chronology of her life?” I asked. “Because I was there for all this. I know what happened.”

“I don’t think you do,” he said. “Because everyone left, didn’t they? Except you and Ariadne? Everyone close to her? They either left or died?”

I thought about it. Zack, Breandan and her mother died. Kat, Dr. Zollers, and even Scott left—though there was more to that story, something horrifying that I was almost eager to share. “Yeah, okay. Almost everybody left. Sienna took it all right.”

“Oh, no,” Augustus said, “you
think
she did. And maybe she did for a while. But see, then, after all that, the one person she thought was always in her corner—well, he turned on her.”

“Oh, bullshit,” I said, rolling my eyes. I grabbed my glass off the bar and took a deep drink, downing the rest of it. “My sister’s a rock, okay? She shows no signs of cracking. This violence she unleashes? That’s who she is, at the core. She’s a machine.”

“It’s like you don’t know her at all,” Augustus said. “Look, I’m not saying she hasn’t killed people—”

“Good, because you’d lose that argument in about two seconds flat—”

“—I’m just saying she
feels
,” Augustus said. “She feels it like a human being. She doesn’t enjoy it like you think she would, like a psychopath would. She’s taken this rift with you hard, harder than she lets on. She’s taking this shit with Kat and with the press hard, too. She may not be the most social creature, but—”

“She was raised a hermit,” I said, shaking my head. “This isolation is her preferred state of being.”

“She didn’t have a choice how she was raised,” he said. “You think she would have chosen that? To be cut off from everybody?”

“Maybe not,” I said with a shrug, “but she’s choosing it now. She’s comfortable with it.”

“Girl’s got the voice of multiple psychopaths and her first love stuck in her brain,” he said, turning back to the bar. “She’s never alone. And she’s not with good company when she is by herself, you see what I’m saying?” He paused, thinking. “I try not to dwell on this too much, but I thought about something a few weeks ago, when I was home for Taneshia’s birthday. When did you and Sienna fall out?”

“January,” I said, spinning back around to the bar and huddling over.

“When’s her birthday?”

“March,” I said, picking up the glass. The perspiration from the melting ice cubes fell over my fingers. “Why?”

“What’d she do for her birthday?” he asked.

“How the hell should I know?” I asked and then felt like some strongman had brought down a sledgehammer in one of those contests of strength. He landed it right on the inside of my belly, and my ill feelings shot straight up my esophagus so hard I had to swallow immediately before they overwhelmed me and choked me up on the spot. When I spoke again, I couldn’t quite eliminate the huskiness from my voice. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t know either, but I’m guessing it was … quiet.”

Those feelings that threatened to overwhelm me, this sick sense of guilt, spread over me. “You’re not arguing against her being a monster.”

“She’s twenty-three years old, man,” Augustus said quietly. “She’s got a weight like Atlas on her shoulders. She got confined and abused by her mother, she’s been pummeled for years by strangers, had to kill people even when she didn’t want to, been abandoned by friends, had everyone else she cared about ripped away one by one, and had her last living family member turn his back on her.” He blew air out the side of his mouth as he shook his head. “You try making it out of that without letting the darkness touch you all over the place.”

“Hey, guys,” Charles said, stopping back by. “Get you some refills?”

“Not right now,” I said, looking at my nearly-empty glass.

“What are you guys talking about?” Charles asked, peppy, and leaned in. “Your sister being a bitch again?”

I caught the look from Augustus and felt guiltier than ever. Shit. “Not right now, man,” I said to Charles. “Can you just give us a few minutes?”

“Sure thing,” he said, like it was no big deal. “I’ll check back on you in a few minutes.” He turned and went off down the bar to his next customers.

“Dude,” Augustus said, more disappointed than angry, “you talk smack about your sister to a bartender? That’s low.”

I felt my cheeks burn scarlet again. “I vented to him, okay? He’s my bartender.”

“That’s still low,” Augustus said, and leaned down to finish the last of his drink with a slurp that rattled the ice. “That’s a caterpillar with his legs cut off low.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said and slid the drink back from my fingers. I hadn’t shared a civil moment with my sister in months. She’d been isolated, alone. If she wasn’t an unfeeling monster, I’d been incredibly unfair to her, possibly driven her even deeper into her harsh shell. “Maybe I’ve been wrong about her all along.”

“Damned right,” he said and stood up as I lay cash on the bar to cover our tab. “Because I guarantee you, wherever she is, she ain’t doing that shit to you.”

“My brother is such an asshole,” I said as Brant nodded, taking it all in. “Such. An. Asshole. Let me tell you …”

The day dawned glorious blue, the sky adorned with white, fluffy clouds that rolled slowly across the cerulean backdrop at a slow, steady clip. Benjamin could see them from out of his window as he awoke in his car, sleeping on the top floor of a parking garage, just one level below the roof. He’d chosen it because it was a medical device firm that had a big enough workforce to justify a full parking structure, but not enough of one to justify a night watchman. He’d driven by this place countless times, enough to know it was dead as a doornail at night.

Benjamin took a deep breath as he opened his eyes. The world of yesterday seemed very, very far away, so far away he was sure none of it had even really happened. His life was one of steady, boring predictability, after all, of routine and sequence, of work and home, of organized, tireless patterns that made him an effective employee and son.

Benjamin took another breath, then another. The air felt different. His window was cracked, letting a little morning chill seep in. It was invigorating. His back didn’t even protest at the night spent in the car, and he felt … good. Everything that had happened had clearly been a bad dream brought on by allergies and travel exhaustion. He’d just walked out of the airport overwhelmed by pet dander, clearly. The hours and hours of tears, of sneezing, had conspired to make him sickly. Perhaps he’d even picked up a fever along the way, sending him into a delirium. That had happened once before, a fever so high he’d needed to be admitted to the emergency room. He remembered the feeling of it, that sweating, sickly sensation that reality was operating at a heightened and unreal state.

Yes, he decided, that was what had happened. He’d been lucky to make it here. And so close to work, too. His office was just down the road, after all.

Benjamin took another pleasant breath and stepped out of the car. He walked to his trunk and popped it open, finding exactly what he expected—his suitcase—waiting for him.

It was going to be a much better day, he thought as he selected the first of his alternate changes of clothes from the top of the suitcase. Everything was neatly folded and put away carefully, strapped in so that even rough handling by baggage attendants couldn’t have dislodged it easily. The TSA had made a mess of his suitcase once.

Benjamin saw a brief flash of red as he thought about that time, about finding the paper notice as he opened his suitcase to find everything shifted and pushed aside, his neatly folded clothes replete with lines and mess, the perfect creases lost to some ill-mannered lout’s fumbling fingers—

Benjamin took another gulp of fresh air and latched on to the blue sky in the distance as he nodded while serenity returned. He picked up his dress shirt, his pants, his spare pair of shoes, his belt and socks, and zippered the suitcase shut behind him. Yes, today would be a better day. The air was clear and fresh, with none of that smoky scent he’d dreamed about during the night.

He almost started to whistle as he got back into his car to change for his day.

Blinking the sleep out of my bleary eyes, I awoke to the sound of gentle tapping. I stirred under a mountain of blankets, a sense of cotton stuffed in my mouth. I flicked my tongue around and realized that there actually wasn’t any real cotton, but my mouth felt like it was dry as a dusty desert gulch, and my head felt like it had been repeatedly punched from the inside by an Atlas-type as he grew to explode from my skull. It gave me a moment’s pause, wondering if maybe there had been some sort of truth to that old myth about Zeus’s kids springing forth out of his skull. Then I remembered that he had lived to be a massive dick later on, so probably not.