Tormented (35 page)

Reed Treston struck in exactly that moment; while Anselmo’s attention was distracted for but a second, Treston’s hands came up and shot toward Anselmo like Treston was going to strike him with both palms from ten feet away. A rush of wind shot forth like a hurricane had been loosed in the room, and Anselmo shot back as if a mechanical donkey had kicked him in the chest. He flew into the dark, smoky hallway, and Benjamin barely dodged his flying body, throwing himself to the floor just in time.

“Cunningham,” Treston said as Benjamin pulled his head up, “I don’t have time for whatever you’ve got going on at the moment.”

“I—I—I—I—” Benjamin stammered, his arms shaking under the weight of his upper body. It wasn’t that he was heavy, it was that the moment was just so … heady. Here he was, in the belly of the beast again, but this time Anselmo wasn’t even here—

“You think your pitiful winds can stop me?” Anselmo shouted from the hallway behind him. There was an alarm echoing in Benjamin’s ears, and the hiss of water from the sprinklers was followed by the cold sensation of stinking, stagnant water rushing down on him.

“Anselmo!” Treston shouted back. “I don’t have time for your bullshit right now!”

“Oh,” Anselmo said, striding out of the sprinklers, his suit soaking and clinging to him, “does that mean you’ve discovered the dagger at the throat of your precious sister? Did you find her carcass?”

“Wait, what?” Benjamin asked, blinking, still on the ground.

“She’s still alive, Anselmo,” Treston said, glaring back at the Italian with a fire of his own. “You can’t even do a simple assassination right.”

Anselmo’s eyes smoldered as he stared at Treston. “She will die. It was promised. And it will be painful, a slow spiral into madness before her heart stops beating.”

“She’s going to blow up first,” Treston said with a smug, satisfied grin. “She’s got a bit of a bomb problem.” He waved at Benjamin. “Not quite like him. Bigger, of course.”

“Excuse me?” Benjamin asked, truly lost. “There’s … someone else … like me …?”

“There is no one as foolish or silly as you,” Anselmo snapped back at him. “Stop acting like a child in a mad scramble for your parents’ approval. Your mother does not love you because you are a spineless, pathetic, gelatinous mass of a human being. I have met teenage girls with more resolve than you possess. And they shriek less when in pain as well.”

“That’s …” Benjamin could not tell whether his eyes were blurry from tears or from the sprinklers.

“You’re such a prick, Anselmo,” Treston said.

“And now, no thanks to you,” Anselmo said, “I have one again.”

There was a moment’s pause as that sunk in. “I did not need to know that,” Treston said. “Hell, no one needed to know that. Ever.”

“Oh my,” Benjamin said, numbly coming to the realization with a low giggle that seemed desperately out of place, “that’s what you were about all along. They took away your manhood with the burns—”

Anselmo twisted his neck to look back at Benjamin, his face purple and dark. “You shut your mouth. I was more of a man without it than you are with whatever you possess.” He gestured furiously at Benjamin, who was still on the ground. “Look at you! You remain on your knees, like some pitiful slave, or a scullery maid scrubbing the floors. You are a pitiful wretch, and the only way you can ever feel any power for yourself is when you kill people.”

“Pot to kettle,” Treston said.

“I was to be a god-king,” Anselmo said, whirling back to face Treston. “And you ripped that out of my grasp, took my kingdom, tore it all away from me, you and your friends and your filthy sister. And then, after suffering imprisonment for years, I finally have you in my grip, and you take from me my very manhood.”

“You should define yourself less by your dick,” Treston said. “On the other hand, this is somehow very fitting.”

“There are no more words left to be said between us.” Anselmo spoke in a tight voice bereft of the rasp he’d had when he was scarred.

“Does this mean you’re finally going to shut up?” Treston asked, and cracked his knuckles. “Because I really want to break that newly-fixed nose of yours.”

“You will try to keep me from the ground,” Anselmo said, “and you will fail. I will overwhelm your pathetic winds and gain hold of your throat. I will squeeze the very life out of you, watch with joy as your eyes roll back in your head, and then I will kill every one of your comrades by beating them to death with my own fists. And when I get to your sister, know that she will die, suffering, with my fingers crushing her skull to a paste of the sort you would find when the vintner mashes the grapes.”

Treston just lashed out again with a windburst, this one tearing Anselmo from the ground and sending him backflipping out of the room.

“Just shut up,” Treston said and turned his attention to Benjamin. “Cunningham, I could use your help.”

“She’s flaring again!” the lady doctor called in her thick, accented English.

“W … what?” Benjamin asked, feeling foolish and cold and soaked and quite out of place. The world was blue all around him, blue from the water washing down around him in a flood, and he tried to find his composure. “I … with what?” he asked rather lamely, not sure if he should resist or run or simply take orders and hope for the best.

“Are you out of your mind?” Phillips asked, seizing Treston’s forearm in his grip.

“I’m out of my league,” Treston said, jerking his hand free. “I’m overmatched here. Anselmo’s probably already up, and we’re about to lose this place unless we can contain Sienna’s fire.” He looked right at Benjamin, and Benjamin felt his heart wither inside. “Without your help, we are all going to die.”

Benjamin felt that withered heart seem to catch a drip of water, a drip of hope. “M … my help?”

“You can draw away the fire,” Treston said, offering a hand. “Your power, it’s not just about destruction. It’s about control.”

“I … I …” Benjamin blinked, “I have … no control. Never have.”

“Did you burn his skin off?” Treston said, and pointed toward Anselmo, who was stalking out of the hallway again, pure fury contorting his features.

“Yes,” Benjamin said, “but—”

“That’s control,” Treston said, and offered him a hand. “Please. We need your help.”

Benjamin blinked and took the hand, unthinking. “Uh … all right.” Treston’s strong grip yanked him to his feet. “But I—”

“You are all of you fools!” Anselmo screamed, and leapt right at them. “And I will kill you, you little—”

Treston leapt forth and connected with a solid punch to Anselmo’s jaw that knocked the Italian back a step. “Go!” Reed shouted. “Help them!” He didn’t wave toward the gradually growing frenzy in the corner.

He didn’t have to.

For once, Benjamin Cunningham knew exactly what he had to do.

All his nervousness melted away in the heat of the moment’s intensity, and he dashed toward the corner, toward the girl whose skin was already turning into flames, and prepared to do the thing that he felt he’d been born to do.

The icy wind rolled in around us, and my father’s embrace was not enough to protect me from the rising cold. I shivered in his arms and pulled away to see his face, still kind, but laced with concern. “They’re coming,” he said, “coming for you. For us.”

“I know,” I said, “I can feel it.”

“They want you to suffer, Sienna,” he said, “to feel agony beyond measuring, to despair into nothingness. And they won’t stop. They’ll keep coming.”

“I got that feeling, yeah,” I said. “But they’re not real?”

“They’re real enough,” he said. “They’re all your guilt, your fears, your doubts, poured into the form of people you feel you think you failed.” His face hardened. “Or in that frost giant’s case, your self-loathing given form, I think.”

“Figures,” I said, “because I did loathe him.” I stared at my father, trying to memorize his features, seeing him for the first time as he would have looked in life. He still seemed strangely like a photograph to me, even though he was lively enough. “What about you?”

He smiled. “You’re a fighter, Sienna. There’s always going to be a part of you that fights, even when things are as dark as they’ve ever looked.”

“And that’s you?” I asked as the icy wind whipped around me.

“Somewhere between the realm of ultimate wish fulfillment and protective father figure, that’s where I come from,” he said, turning away to survey the darkness that surrounded us.

“You’re awfully self-aware,” I said. “And kinda ironic.”

“Gee, I wonder where that comes from.”

Any response I might have made to that was cut short by a blast of arctic wind that ripped through me like a blade, driving me back toward the darkness behind me. I felt encircled, trapped, like if I were pushed into the dark, I’d be done.

“That’s a good instinct,” my father said, “trust it.” He extended his hand and shot a vortex of air in the direction of the wind that was pushing me, canceling it out and returning it to its unseen sender.

“Do not go into the darkness,” I said. “Got it. Any other rules? Like—”

“Don’t eat yellow snow?” I couldn’t see his face, but I heard the smile in his voice. “I could probably come up with a few pieces of fatherly advice, if pressed.”

“Lay it on me, Pops,” I said, cracking my knuckles as I placed my back against my father’s. I could hear the movement in the darkness and knew that these fears—these doubts—these … whatever they were—they were circling closer, like carrion birds to the kill. “Because who knows … this might just be our last chance.”

I blasted Anselmo down the hall and away from the medical unit. His fingers stretched out and left scratch marks in the side of the hall as he flew, straining to halt his runaway momentum. I kept catching him unprepared, because his being a self-righteous windbag meant he kept wasting his breath trying to explain how much I sucked, how unworthy we all were, how we had wronged the amazing him, blah blah blah.

I needed to get him away from Sienna, away from Cunningham, away from the medical unit, so they had time to contain the situation. For the first time in a while, I was actually glad I hadn’t caved and shot Cunningham in the face. Not that it had ever been my first instinct, but if Sienna had been in charge, it would have happened right off, probably.

Maybe.

Aw, hell, maybe not. I got it now; it wasn’t like she looked for reasons to kill people. The countless prisoners under HQ were obvious proof that she didn’t. If she’d just murdered anyone who resisted, that place would be empty, because almost without exception, they fought her tooth and nail—and a little more tooth in the case of Bronson McCartney, an animalist shape-changer. It’s a shame there was no vid of that on YouTube, because Sienna wrestling a massive Kodiak bear? Just as epic as it sounds.

Anselmo landed on his feet, coming back up as I prepped my next wind blast. I shot and he dodged down the hall toward the exit, narrowly avoiding my attack as he disappeared from sight. “You can run but you can’t hide, Anselmo,” I said, then thought it over.

“All evidence to the contrary,” he called from around the corner. “I have run and hidden from you on multiple occasions thus far.”

“Men don’t run,” I said, goading him.

That drew a sharp response. “What would you know about being a man?”

“More than you, considering I’m blowing you all around this hallway and you haven’t so much as laid a finger on me so far,” I said with undisguised glee. “How was that fall out of the office building?”

“Bracing,” he said. “A true rush. It made me feel alive—”

“The wind against your skin,” I said and slid out into the hall. He was almost at the end of it, by the exit doors. “The feel of fresh air ripping you from your feet and sending you over the edge?”

“If all you have is the ability to blow people around like a flag on a windy day,” Anselmo said, looking slightly trapped, “I suppose it must make you feel less impotent than you actually are.”

I blew him through the doors with a focused wind tunnel. They hit the maximum extension of the hinges and then slammed shut behind him. “It may be all I’ve got, but it’s not so bad,” I said to the empty hallway. I charged forward and shoulder-checked my way through the doors to find Anselmo gone.

Well, hell—

His punch decked me, sending me sideways with a hell of a pain in my jaw. I landed on my side on the pavement, then rolled, once, before I went tumbling off the edge and down—

Uh oh.

I fell into the pit made by Augustus’s incessant harvesting of the soil just outside the door. Unfortunately for me, he’d dug a pretty big hole by this point, big enough to swallow a tractor or a backhoe. Maybe two of them.

I hit on my shoulder and neck, snapping my head to the side as I landed like a thrown spear. My legs followed on with the landing a moment later, and rocks or a root poked me in the spine. I lay there, trying to gather my wits about me, staring into the navy blue sky above, faint lights in the distance shedding enough illumination for me to see the shadow as it appeared above me.

Anselmo leapt into the hole, landing catlike at my side. His hand found my throat before I could react, and he pulled me into the air, my throat closing as he made to crush my windpipe. My head swirled, and he slammed me into the earthen wall of the pit, dislodging dirt that fell down my collar and tickled my back.

“And here we are,” Anselmo said, and the darkness of the pit swallowed everything but the faint gleam of light on his teeth, leaving him as shrouded as if he were still scarred, “face to face for the last time.” He squeezed my throat so hard that I couldn’t take a breath, the life fleeing my head as I began to wonder if he would make it explode right off my neck. “At the end at last, Mr. Treston … any final words before we come to our close?”

Benjamin was at a loss, drawing the heat from Sienna Nealon as quickly as he could pull it away from her. The woman’s skin was on fire, the bed’s exposed metal frame warping under the intensity of the conflagration. Whatever bedding had been on it when she’d started to burn, it was long since consumed. She swelled with a burst, and he drew it out, and then she waned, almost looking like she was going to snuff out, to return to skin, but that was just a tease. She began to burn brightly again.