Tormented (18 page)

“And you are far too close to being a woman to deserve the one you have,” Anselmo said, surprising me by holding back from swinging at me. “The good doctor is plainly settling for a lesser stag.” The ridge where his eyebrows had been in less-burned times raised as he stumbled on a thought. “Perhaps you need a good cuckolding—”

I shot a double gust of wind at him using both hands that tore him free of the ground and sent him sailing backward six feet in a wash of spray. Anselmo rolled through the puddling water as he landed, his off-the-rack suit not quite conforming to his figure. The douche was wearing a dress shirt, which came untucked when he rose, but he showed a surprising lack of concern for the fact I’d just physically hurled him through the air. I hadn’t been able to overmatch him with that particular strength when last we’d fought, but to see his reaction, you’d think I hadn’t done anything at all.

“You are a tiresome thing,” Anselmo said as the sprinklers tapered off above us, the fire system deciding that maybe its job was done. “Full of sound and fury, sig—”

I channeled a hell of a blast right at him, and this one sent him back ten feet, right into a cubicle. He hit the wall with a crack, breaking the board and ricocheting off. He came down in a crouch and sprung upright to standing like it was nothing. He looked down at his sleeve, which was torn, plucking a splinter while wearing a look of—I assume, tough to tell with all the scarring—mild annoyance at the damage to his garment. “You fight like a little girl, slapping about at your opponent, afraid to get close, to share the look in the eyes as you attempt to best one another. I will show you what it is like to fight a man, to be beaten by a man, to have what you care about most taken by a true man—”

I shot another gust at him, but he dodged with blurry speed, ducking behind a cubicle. My gust hit it and the top wall folded, but the bottom of the structure remained snug to the floor. It was a good twenty feet from me, if not more, and my range for directed gusts fell off fast when someone was that far away. I could hear his faux-leather shoes scuffing as he bent low and circled toward me. “I can hear you crawling around like a rat, Anselmo,” I said. “I can hear y—”

The heat was the first sign I was in trouble. The second was the scorching fire that went crawling up my sleeve a moment later. I recoiled in shock, spinning around to see Benjamin Cunningham standing a few feet from me with a furious look in his eyes, like he had a fire of his own dancing within them.

“Don’t you ignore me,” he said, voice thick and husky as I batted at the flames creeping up my sleeve, burning my skin. “Don’t you—know who I am—see what I can do—kill you all—” His voice pitched and changed in the middle of what seemed like a sentence, like he was stringing thoughts together in mad sequence, performing word surgery that left gaping, obvious stitches in the middle.

Plus, he lit me on fire. I started to get the feeling Cunningham had left part of his mind behind when he came back from vacation.

I resisted my first instinct, which was to stop, drop and roll. I’d been thinking about something like this happening since I’d heard about Cunningham. During our feverish training after Sienna’s London revival, we’d practiced for any number of contingencies, including occasions when Sienna turned loose her various powers on me to ‘prepare’ me for those sort of attacks. I think she actually enjoyed it, seeing me dance around while she shot bursts of flame to either side of me, and occasionally on me, but it might also have been that she enjoyed watching me dance around like the floor was on fire and my ass was next.

Either way, it had prepared me for this moment, and to deal with it in a somewhat orderly fashion, no ass-is-on-fire-type dancing required.

Cunningham advanced on me, fury in his eyes, and when he got close enough to reach out for me, close enough for me to see the killing rage in between the lines of purest anger etched in his crow’s feet, I did the thing that Sienna’s constant flamethrowing had taught me to do, the single greatest defense to fire attacks that a keeper of the winds could possibly manage.

I took all the air in a five foot radius around me and I drove it back, creating a forced bubble free of all oxygen.

It didn’t last very long—probably three seconds—but it snuffed out the fire that Benjamin Cunningham had lit on my jacket, and it drove away all the air that he was planning to breathe and to use to burn me to death.

It also prompted his crazy, killer eyes to open wider than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s when he got sucked out onto the surface of Mars in
Total Recall
, which was kinda cool, too.

I, of course, being the originator of the plan, was totally ready for the lack of oxygen. I’d exhaled everything I had to prepare for the vacuum effect. Cunningham had the wind forcibly ripped from his lips and lungs, and it left him with a shocked look. He fell to his knees as the bubble around us collapsed and the oxygen rushed back in, and I wasn’t too high-and-mighty to do a Sienna and kick him right in the gut as he went down. I’m not an über-succubus, but I can hit a dude when I want to, and in that moment, I damned sure wanted to. I wanted to hit Benjamin Cunningham hard enough to knock his punk ass out of the fight so I could deal with the Italian Stallion of Invincible Doom (I’m floating it as Anselmo’s nickname. Whaddya think? Too much? You're right, too much.) without getting sucker punched. Or sucker fired. Sucker flambéed? Whatever.

Cunningham left the ground, turned a flip in mid air, and landed gut first on a cubicle wall before bouncing inside the damned thing. I lost sight of him as he fell, but the noise of the air rushing—once again—out of his body as he took the divider in the solar plexus was unmistakable. And very satisfying.

I spun around as Anselmo came right for me, the sound of his footsteps thundering across the carpet behind me as certain as the sound of doom’s approach. I’ll admit, he scared me. Scared the hell out of me. He packed a nasty punch and was well nigh invincible when it came to taking a punch. I could throw him around all day and he’d just keep springing up after each attack, fresh as a daisy and ready to do some plucking of his own.

I poured all my fear, all my adrenaline, all my instinct and training into the burst of wind I hit him with. It came at him like a transit bus on the freeway, and I watched his face take it like a bulldog in a windstorm. His scarred jowls blew back, the hanging flesh over his eyes blew out, exposing the whites as well as tiny little pupils. I’d caught him with one foot off the ground as he was running at me, and I was coming up like a batter hitting the ball with a rising swing.

Home run.

Anselmo left the ground once more with a look of utter shock, but instead of just going five or ten feet, I watched him fly all thirty feet between us and the glass window. He shattered it as his body passed through, and the last sight I caught of him at that moment was a look of utter shock comparable to that of Wile E. Coyote as gravity took over and carried him seven floors to the ground below.

“Cunningham?” I called out, turning to look to the cubicle where he had fallen. “Augustus?” I glanced at where he’d fallen, and found my partner holding his back in pain. I hoofed it for him first.

“I’m all right,” he said, holding himself still. He started to move, then cringed. “Might have broken my back, though. Can’t feel my feet.”

“Dammit,” I said and stood. “I’ve got to—”

“Cunningham, yeah,” Augustus said. “And Anselmo’s gonna be pissed once he scrapes himself up off the concrete below.”

“Maybe he landed with a tree up his ass,” I said, “keep him busy for a while.”

“Hope he enjoys it,” Augustus said with a grimace. “Ow.”

“You’re gonna be okay,” I said, patting him on the shoulder as I rose. “This will heal, trust me.”

“Good to know,” Augustus said, “because I’m still holding out hopes for a pro football career ahead of me at some point, y’know. Probably beat the piss out of everybody in rushing yards.” His voice cracked with nerves. I’d be scared too if I’d felt paralysis setting in.

I carefully walked through the wreckage of cubicles, easing toward the one where Cunningham had landed. “Cunningham?” I called, announcing myself because I knew he could hear my footsteps anyway. “I’m not here to hurt you, but you’ve got to realize that something’s wrong by now. You’re hurting people, man. You’ve slipped the moorings of your mind. Something’s wrong. Let’s get you some help—”

I jumped out in front of the entry to the cubicle that I’d hurled Cunningham into, hoping to find a man in pain. Or, even better, passed out.

Instead, I was greeted with an empty cubicle, with nothing but the sign of his impact where his weight had cracked the top of the cubicle wall to mark his passage. I looked left, I looked right, and then I jumped up on the desk so I could see farther. No sound reached my ears save for that of Augustus’s pained grunts.

Cunningham was gone.

Benjamin descended the stairs in his sopping clothes, one shoe lost somewhere in the fracas above. He still wasn’t sure quite what he’d seen. Jessica, somehow lit aflame. Reed Treston had said … said so many things, really. Yellow light shone brightly from the bulbs on the staircase, and Benjamin simply ran. There was no other course for it, after all. Things were happening all around him, mad and terrible things, things that he wanted nothing to do with. The only logical solution was to run, to get away, to remove himself as far as possible from the situation and even the city.

Up north. Yes. That was the place to go.

There was a cabin he’d rented before, two hours north near the Pequot Lakes chain. It had been his very first vacation that he’d paid for after getting his job. A full week spent in a cabin, by himself, reading and looking at the lake he’d been encamped on by sunrise, day, and sunset in turn. It had been marvelous, serene, blue skies reflected on shimmering, glassy waters.

None of this present madness of airport lines exploding, or people suddenly bursting into flames. No, this was the pressure of the city, surely. This sort of thing didn’t happen up north, where the crazed pace of city life gave way to the ease of country living on the lakeshore. Benjamin’s heart thundered in his ears, his head throbbed in pain behind his eyes. No, he couldn’t stay here. There was a monster on the loose, he’d seen it twice now, though he’d wanted to believe it neither time. He had to escape, had to—

Benjamin hit the emergency exit door and knocked it off its hinges in his panic to escape. He stared at it blankly, not sure how that had happened. Probably damaged when everyone else had fled, and his passage had been the last straw, as it were. He stared at the blue door for a moment then shook it out of his mind and charted his path against the background of the green planters and trees that dotted the parking lot. He had to get out of here.

People were huddled in clusters around the building, milling, questioning, talking among themselves. Benjamin ignored them all, dodged around their little conversational circles and close-knit groups. His car was over there, and all he needed to do was get to it—

As he passed a bush, strong hands grabbed him and dragged him inside. Branches and twigs tore at his sleeves, but the arms that held him were strong. He started to protest, to let out a little squeal, but a lumpy hand made its way into his mouth, wet and tasting slightly burnt with the scent of a hard-blown wind over it. Benjamin tried to make a noise, but the arms anchored him in place, putting him in a hold as secure as any wrestler could have managed. Hot breath fell on his ear, whispering.

“I won’t hurt you,” the voice said, raspy but spoken with an unmistakable European accent. Benjamin was eminently familiar with those by now. “Don’t scream.” The man ripped his fist free of Benjamin’s mouth.

Benjamin let out a whimper, his hands still tightly bound. “Wh-what do you want?”

“To help you,” the voice said, soothing.

“You can’t help me,” Benjamin said, “I have to get out of here. There’s a monster—”

“Yes, of course there is,” the voice said, reassuring, straight into his ear with a warmth that Benjamin found oddly … comfortable. “There is a monster.”

“I need to get away from it,” Benjamin said, never more sure of anything in his life. “I have to—”

“No, no, no,” the voice said, tsk-ing him. “A man does not run from his problems.”

“But—”

“No buts,” the voice said. “Benjamin?”

“Y-yes?” Benjamin asked, surprised to hear his own name.

“My name is Anselmo Serafini,” the man said, breathing so lightly on his neck that it almost tickled. “And I can teach you all about dealing with monsters. About being a man. Do you want to learn?”

His words sounded so warm and inviting, even though being stuck in a hedge row, encircled by strong arms was such a … well, it was odd.

“I …” Benjamin licked his lips as Anselmo’s grip on him loosened. Benjamin almost wished it hadn’t; he felt strangely uncomfortable being loose, like the next good jarring he received would send him crashing to the floor like a saucer off a table, shattered. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to be afraid.”

“I will teach you,” Anselmo said softly into his ear. “Do you wish to learn?”

“Yes,” Benjamin said, feeling a sudden relief from the fear that had clutched him tight in its hand. Anselmo was here, and whoever he was, Benjamin believed that touch, believed that voice, believed … him. “Yes. Teach me, please. Don’t let me be afraid … anymore.”

I stormed my way through the growing snowfall, kicking it out of the way in fits of pique as I wrapped my arms tightly around me. This was a hell of a vacation so far, experiencing the symptoms of a haunting while someone played mind games with me. The chill seeped in through my fall jacket, which was wholly inadequate to the task of protecting me from freezing winds and medium snowfall, which this was turning into. I had resolved to beat the Minneapolis weather man with a blunt instrument of some kind when I got back to town, because he had not even mentioned this as a possibility when I had tuned in to learn how to pack for my trip. AccuWeather, my flight-capable ass.