Mercury Page 8

  I grumbled under my breath, calling Daisy a slew of names Jillian probably didn’t believe I knew. She thought I was ten times more of a gentleman than I actually was.

  Jillian. Just thinking about her brought down a cavalcade of worry and pain. I leaned against the brown stone wall of Gabriela’s house and sighed. I hadn’t moved forward towards rescuing my wife, just sideways. Right now, “forward” could only be defined as stopping the strike team. But I could not stop Daisy. She’d find me eventually, no doubt tracking me through the basement and out the chute.

  She would follow me. I couldn’t stop that…but I could pick the place where she found me. I stood and ran down the walkway, turning back into the alley. If she was going to follow me, I’d ambush her. One good swipe with my knife and—

  I tripped over a recycling bin that had been buried in snow, sprawling spectacularly in soft snow drifts. Cursing, I brushed myself off and glared at the offending bin. A wine bottle poked out of the snow, glinting slightly in the low light.

  For one long moment I stared at the bottle, then slowly extended my hand and plucked it out of the snow. A dark idea began to form in my mind.

  I closed my eyes and recalled a terrible night only weeks earlier, in Liberty. The Westerners had stormed the tiny settlement and destroyed most of the structures. They’d lit up the night with gunfire and…

  “Molotov cocktails,” I murmured, images of flaming accelerant and broken glass flicking up the edges of my imagination. Daisy could throw knives, but could she escape flame? I doubted it. Time and time again my team had struggled against fire, the great equalizer. Buck McClintock’s team might’ve been the camps’ answer to special ops, but they were as human as the rest of us.

  And I knew exactly where to find the ingredients.

  In a blur, I was at the entrance of the coal chute, my previous trail through the snow allowing me to run unimpeded this time. Mine were the only tracks. There was no point in worrying whether Daisy was in the basement— she either was and I’d be dead soon, or she wasn’t and I’d walk away from this. I wrenched the door open and slid into the chute, landing with finesse on the other side. Daisy wasn’t in the basement, so I hastily gathered what I needed.

  I grabbed the two largest wine bottles from the bin and tossed them up the chute into the soft snow. Motor oil, rags, alcohol, cleaning solution, and the lighter followed. Finally, I wiggled my way into the backyard for the last time with the gas can in hand, then quietly shut the chute.

  With new strength I dragged the cement birdbath in front of the door, ensuring that only someone of at least Jillian’s strength could pass through it. When I was certain that I was unobserved, I went to work.

  Gasoline was the main accelerant, naturally. Motor oil and cleaning solution would act as solvents that would help the fuel stick to whatever it landed on, like homemade napalm. I shoved the rags into the bottle of alcohol, then removed them when they were soaked. Each bottle got a rag. When I was done, I stood up with my twin creations in hand and approached the back door. If I was going to do this right, I’d have to do it fast.

  I lit one of the bombs and hurled it through the small glass window on Gabriela’s back door. Glass shattered, and then a tremendous, eerie whoosh filled my ears. Flickering yellow and red patterns eked out onto the snow through the broken window.

  A breath, a blur—two seconds later, I stood on the stoop and threw the remaining bottle with all my might through the open front door. There was only one track of small footsteps leading from across the street to the door. She was still in the house.

  The bottle exploded, casting its liquid inferno all over the pile of furniture, the hardwood floor, and Topher’s corpse. My poetic side cheered when I realized that he would get his hero’s funeral. That was very important to my new crowd.

  Without checking to see if I was being followed, I wended my way through the snow until I was across the street. When I was safely behind a snow mound that was probably a car, I turned to watch my handiwork in action.

  Thick, choking smoke poured out of the lower floor, entirely obscuring the living room. There was no way she could go through the front door. A quick survey of the windows made me sigh in relief. Anti-burglar bars covered literally every window on the house, and now that I thought about it, the large upstairs window in the back was also barred. While I looked on, a flashlight’s beam lit up an upper window, which I guessed was the small home office.

  The curtain was pulled aside, revealing my adversary for the first time.

  From what I could see, Daisy was a petite woman with her hair pulled back into a bun. She was unmasked, though her facial features weren’t clear at the distance.

  She was speaking into a cell phone, though to whom, I couldn’t guess. Her agitated, jerky movements as she tried to open the window communicated her panic, which must’ve only increased when she realized that the window wouldn’t open. She disappeared, then reappeared at the adjacent window. The bathroom, probably.

  When that window also failed to open—I blessed the unreliability of old window frames—she grabbed an item from inside the bathroom and shattered the glass. She knocked the largest shards aside and pushed on the cat-burglar bars.

  I grinned. “Push harder!” I shouted. “Put your back into it!”

  She aimed her flashlight at me.

  I waved. “What are you waiting for?” I jumped up on the car and held up my arms. “Come and get me!”

  She retreated into the interior again and didn’t reappear.

  A few neighboring doors opened and tired people in their pajamas poked their heads out. An elderly woman in a bathrobe hissed at me from the house behind me. “Boy, what the blazes are you yell—merciful God!” She disappeared into her house again and shouted for someone to call the fire department.

  My grin widened. There would be no fire department to save Daisy Guarino tonight. More than three feet of snow covered the roads, and with each passing minute the fire I’d started grew hotter, brighter, and larger. It was only a matter of time before the internal structure collapsed, leaving nothing but a burnt-out shell.

  People began to pour out of their houses around the time that smoke began to pour out of the lower windows so thickly that I couldn’t see the upper ones anymore. I had to admit that the original architect, whoever he was, had built a sturdy house. Gabriela’s century-old masterpiece had been constructed of solid wood and stone. Modern homes, with their pressboard and glue, would’ve been consumed already.

  When the crowd around me had grown to a few dozen people, I jumped off the car and melted into the mass. One boy covered his nose and wailed about the “bad smell,” unaware that he was inhaling the scent of burning flesh. Many people were watching in mute horror with their hands over their mouths. Some of them were filming the fire on their phones.

  All of them shouted in alarm when the second floor finally collapsed onto the first.

  I stepped away unnoticed from the wailing women and cursing men, walking calmly towards another walkway between two houses. When I was out of sight, I ran to the alley, then to Gabriela’s gate, which I pushed open.

  I couldn’t help a fierce whoop of joy.

  The birdbath was still in place in front of the chute. The tracks in the yard were the ones I’d left, and nothing more. Daisy was dead. I had finally moved forward.

  I let myself fall backward into the snow carpeting the alley, where I resisted the urge to make a snow angel. I wasn’t even cold anymore, not really. I was too psyched to feel something as mundane as cold. Instead, I felt only the delicious high of victory and… and…

  I sat up, my high gone. I ran a hand through my hair as I processed what had just happened.

  I’d just killed my first superhero. And it had been so easy.

  I stood up and brushed the snow off, then began to walk down the alley towards the main road. Guilt settled in my chest, but I forcefully shoved it aside. I had a job to do.

  Besides, the guilt wasn’t bad, p
er se. I’d simply killed someone who was trying to kill me. I’d killed before in similar circumstances, not even a month earlier. I hadn’t enjoyed shooting the Westerners, but their deaths did not haunt me. Very few people would argue that I hadn’t been justified in killing Daisy. The guilt was a sign that I was cognizant of the seriousness of my actions.

  I reached the mouth of the alley. I had a good idea where the others were, and now I wanted to help them. I turned left, calculating where Ember and Abby had gone.

  As I walked, an amusing thought hit me: if the strike team were technically superheroes, did that make us all technically supervillains? What did it mean to be a supervillain? And if we were supervillains, did we have the same moral and ethical limitations when we fought our adversaries?

  If they were going to hunt me like a monster, should I become one?

  Item Nine

  Letter from Christina St. James to her mother, dated September 15, 1910

  Dear Mama,

  In your last letter you asked that I update you on the children and their school progress. Eddy has started the sixth grade, though he is behind in his arithmetic because he would rather play baseball with the neighborhood boys than study. Juliana has moved to the fourth grade…Nella remains in the third because of her reading…she mixes up her letters and detests her studies. No amount of stern lectures or strapping seems to help, and I despair of her, since her teachers say she will probably be an imbecile all her life.

  Joseph and Mark are studying at home until they can control their abilities. Amelia has not yet shown whether she has the family trait.

  I have a tricky situation with my neighbor, Mrs. Esposito. She normally puts out her odious dog, Orso, when I visit, but was too ill to do so yesterday. Orso hates all living things and bit me, but instead of puncturing the skin, he merely gnawed on me until I slapped him and called him a beast. Mrs. Esposito has a telephone and dialed an ambulance because surely my hand was mangled!

  I jested that Orso’s bark is worse than his bite, then tried to explain my “parlor trick.” Now she believes I have a fake hand because of a tragic childhood injury and has asked to meet my hand-maker so her cousin can get a decent fake leg.

  Perhaps we should move.

  Love,

  Christina

  9

  Ember and Abby weren’t hard to find. I followed the route we’d all planned out earlier until I saw a woman and a tiger in the distance, about a city block ahead of me. We were downtown, so a few businesses still had lights, no doubt hooked up to generators intended to keep refrigerators running, security systems in place, and similar. The effect was a ghostly blue light everywhere.

  I could’ve mentally hailed Ember, but I wanted to make sure she was able to use her powers in the search for Buck every second possible.

  When I was in shouting distance, I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hey! You two!”

  Ember and Abby turned to find who’d shouted. When she saw me, Ember waved. Abby transformed into a human and waved both of her skinny arms over her head.

  Benjamin! Where’s…oh.

  Don’t tell Abby. I’ll tell her myself.

  Oh, how horrible.

  I jogged through the haphazard trail they’d left behind them, not sure enough on my feet to try running at my full speed. When I caught up with them, Ember patted my shoulder. “I’m glad you made it,” she murmured.

  Abby stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck, a curious little smile on her face, as if she were watching for a delivery she was expecting. After a second, she squinted down the street. “Where Metal?”

  Ember looked away.

  I held out my hand to Abby and she accepted the invitation, a wisp of concern in her large, blue eyes. “Where Metal, Trent?”

  God, she sounded like a small child, all innocence and curiosity. No wonder her team had hated Peter so much for burning her. If she’d been my teammate, I would’ve ripped the guy’s arms off.

  I bit my lip. “Daisy tricked us into opening the door. She threw her knives and—”

  “Trent heal,” Abby interrupted in a steely voice. “Trent heal Metal.”

  “Metal was dead before he hit the floor,” I said quietly. “I can only heal someone if they’re still alive. It all happened too quickly for me to be of any use. I’m so sorry, Abby.”

  Abby shoved my hand down and backed away, trembling and shaking her head back and forth. “Metal walk talk joke,” she said in a rush. She pressed her fists to her temples and squeezed her eyes shut. “Metal live. Daisy dead.”

  “Daisy is dead,” I assured her, that lone fact providing slight warmth in my chest. “I set the house on fire and trapped her inside. She’s dead, and Topher got his pyre.”

  Abby’s response, a disgusted expression in my direction, didn’t dampen my happiness over Daisy’s death.

  Ember stepped up and reached out for Abby. “Let’s find Buck and finish this. We need your help.”

  Abby’s anger evaporated, and she seemed to deflate. She batted a tear away, then leaned on Ember’s shoulder. Ember stroked her hair as she said, “I know it hurts. I know. I know.”

  The intimate gesture made me uncomfortable, and I turned away slightly to give them privacy. My thoughts immediately turned to Buck, wherever he was. Could he also throw knives with deadly accuracy? What about the other strike team members? And why were we still here on the sidewalk when we should be moving forward? Jill wasn’t getting any freer. Ember needed to find the strike team and tell us what was going in.

  Ember’s wispy telepathic voice chided me. Let her grieve now, for a minute, and then she’ll be able to fight.

  Fiery, poisonous fury exploded. I spun around, my hands turned into white-knuckled fists. “We don’t have a minute,” I hissed. I could feel the blood in my ear tips.

  Ember patted Abby and gently pushed her away. She crossed her arms. “I’m getting tired of your mood swings, Ben.”

  I nearly choked. “My mood swings? You’re the one who can’t decide whether she’s psychotically angry at her ex-boyfriend or just fine, thank you very much,” I said through gritted teeth, making sure to sound as mocking as possible.

  Ember turned pink. “I admit that I haven’t been the most mature, but I’m already sick of you hopping from happy to furious to nearly catatonic with worry. And—and—yeah, maybe I’ve got issues, too,” she said loudly, stumbling over her words a little. Abby backed up from us, confused. “Every single person in this little drama of ours has problems. We’re trying as best we can to work through them, but…” She trailed off, breathing hard and gesturing all around. “Did you forget that Marco’s sisters were murdered less than two weeks ago? Or that the rest of us are still trying to come to terms with the whole Westerner…slavery…thing?”

  I swallowed, uncomfortable with the veracity of what she was saying. It was true that I didn’t think Reid and Ember’s relationship problems were the most important items to discuss, but even I couldn’t ignore that Marco was in unimaginable pain. I didn’t know how to address the “Westerner slavery thing,” since I’d never liked the elders, and finding out that they’d been involved with something as nefarious as human trafficking hadn’t exactly shocked me.

  Ember’s face was slowly turning from red to white. “And you know what?” she continued, still louder. “Good for you for not being surprised that our elders were selling our brothers and sisters! Wow, Ben! You’re so special! What would we do without you on our team?”

  “Ember,” I said as I held up my hands in surrender. “This can wait. Right now I need you to find the strike team. We’re getting off track.”

  Her faced morphed into an inhuman mask of fury. “For the last time, I can’t look for the strike team without them knowing I’m there!” Her scream made my ears hurt.

  “Well, they know you’re there now!” I shouted back. “Just look into their minds and see what you can get, because the whole freaking Baltimore metro area knows you’re there!”

  “T
hat’ll put me in more danger!”

  “Who cares? We’re all in danger!”

  Ember tackled me, sending me flying backwards into the snow with an icy thud. Her small, delicate fists didn’t seem so small and delicate now that she was straddling my chest and pummeling my face and neck. Snow collapsed around my face, blinding me to her attack and cutting off most of my air. Her shrieks came through loud and clear, though.

  “—betrayed by the people we trusted most, and now we’re being hunted like animals for daring to tell people about it! Superheroism is crashing down around us and I don’t know if my best friend is alive!”

  “Ember—!”

  “—your mother and your brother are going to break into my camp and kill my parents and my brother—”

  “Please, stop—”

  “—of course you didn’t! It’s just you, you, you!”

  I kept trying to shove her off, but without being able to see or easily breathe, I couldn’t coordinate my hands enough to get her off me. Ember, please, stop, please, we can talk...

  Ember’s presence, and her disgust, overwhelmed my mind as she grabbed my neck and pulled my head out of the snow. My vision cascaded into being, but I was no longer on a frozen Baltimore sidewalk.

  I was no longer me.

  Rough hands shove me to the hard floor, and Patrick’s face hovers above mine. His hatred and loathing of Jillian, me, and life itself flow into my body. “Where is she?” he demands, his nails digging into my skin through my blouse.

  If I answer, Jillian will die. This maniac will kill her without hesitation.

  “No,” I whimper. “I’m not telling you.”

  His fingers tighten around my collar and his intention overwhelms my mind. I have to betray my friend or I’ll die. I will not survive his sick attack. Reid will come home and find my destroyed corpse on the floor.