Mercury Read online

  “Ember, stop,” I gasped. “Please, stop. I don’t want to see—”

  I jog to keep up with Jillian, who walks down the sidewalk like she owns it. She does own it. She owns the whole city, marching through the darkest parts without so much as a backward glance to see if the group of rough-looking men on the corner are watching us.

  I trip over a curb and she catches me with a laugh, thinking that if I’d hit the ground, I’d break.

  I think she is a superhero. I think I am a liability.

  Ember fell backwards, clutching her head. “God, stop,” she moaned. “Make it stop.”

  Abby knelt next to her and put her arm around her shoulder. I held out a trembling hand to Ember, but already my vision was swimming again.

  I’m standing in the cold, barren kitchen of a cold, barren house. This whole town is cold and barren, devoid of anything but fury, hate, and grief.

  Though I can no longer hear the thoughts of my teammates, their inner turmoil is displayed for all to see in every shouted insult, every slammed door, and every bullet fired from their wretched firearms. We’re not soldiers. We’re not.

  I turn and face the man behind me. The sharp wrath in his eyes makes him unrecognizable. He is not my teammate. He is not my friend. And he is certainly not the man who loves me. I don’t know who this killer is, and I’m frightened.

  I put my head between my knees, the sheer wave of emotion in her memories too much for my stomach. My abdominal muscles clenched, and then I was on all fours and throwing up. My pounding head protested at having two psyches battling for dominance, twisting like snakes inside my skull.

  Blood pours down Jillian’s face. She is too weak to stem the flow of blood, so I hold my hand to her wounds. The blood drips between my fingers and down my wrist. Her words are faint, and I strain to hear her.

  All at once, her worries for my safety are drowned out by images of me strapped down to a metal table and screaming, my back arching as I fight against my bonds. Beau Trent’s imagination sucks me under as he fantasizes about how much he’ll enjoy torturing me. Through it all, there is the promise of untold wealth for him if he can simply make me use my powers to find the JM-104.

  Ember’s roiling, choking fear mixed with my own confusion. I collapsed onto my back, my chest heaving. Silver specks floated in my vision.

  “I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I have trouble controlling projection when I’m upset.”

  “The hell was that?” I groaned, sitting up.

  Abby was standing knock-kneed in the snow, nibbling on one of her fingers and watching us with trepidation. I couldn’t imagine how bizarre the scene had just been to her. Had she been close enough to catch some of Ember’s telepathic projections?

  “Scary,” she whimpered. “Little Reuben scary. Big Trent scary. Yellow hair man scary. Want hide, Trent.”

  Well, that answered my question. Poor Abby.

  “Nothing. That was nothing,” Ember said. She sniffed and added, “Don’t worry about it. Abby, please forget what you saw.”

  After I’d stood and brushed off my tunic and pants, I took a steadying breath. “I’ve promised Reid that after this is all over, he and I would talk. How about we have a talk, too?”

  Ember was silent for several seconds. “Fine,” she said. “I’m sorry for jumping you.”

  “I forgive you, but that’s the first thing we’re going to talk about.” Namely, just what was going on in her head? “But moving on…any luck finding, uh, people who need help?” I asked, referencing their cover story.

  “No,” Ember muttered. “For the last time, I’m trying not to scan too much. My presence is easier to detect the more times a person feels it. This whole stupid cover story depends on them believing that we don’t know they’re here.”

  A light breeze began to blow, causing the edges of Ember’s bobbed hair to flutter below the edge of her winter hat. Abby whipped around. “Sun!” She raised her nose into the air. “Sun and Little Reuben and Artemis. Artemis sleep?”

  In the distance, barely visible, two men approached in the middle of the road, leaning on a floating platform. The shorter one limped heavily. Laying on the platform was a still figure.

  Abby gasped. “Tiger!” She transformed and bounded away through the snow.

  Ember and I exchanged a sad glance and began to walk towards our friends.

  We all met in the center of the silent road and halted. Blood poured from a wound on Marco’s chest, staining his purple tunic and khaki pants. Rips in his clothes revealed several sets of deep gouges in parallel lines, reminiscent of fingers. Reid’s left eye was swollen shut.

  Berenice was the worst of all. Her entire uniform was bloodstained and shredded, revealing her fleece winter undergarments and bulletproof vest. Her face, once beautiful, was barely recognizable—smears of blood mixed with ripped skin and shattered bones to create a horrific picture of recent violence.

  Abby laid her furry head on the platform while Ember and Reid stared at each other in sad silence. Ember slowly raised her hand to him, but lowered it after a second and turned her attention to Berenice.

  “Berenice first,” Marco gasped when I reached for his face. I obeyed, and instead laid my hand on Berenice’s ruined cheek, cradling it gently without consciously deciding to do so. Sticky blood and torn flesh between my fingers caused my skin to crawl, but I did not remove my hand immediately, as she probably would’ve wanted me to. Only when her wounds had completely faded did I repeat the gesture on Reid and Marco. They both sighed.

  Reid gestured for us to follow him into the mouth of an alleyway. When we were hidden, he directed the platform with the still-unconscious Berenice to the ground, then leaned against the brick wall of the adjacent building, his head bowed. “Well, that wasn’t easy.”

  Ember kneeled down and laid Berenice’s head in her lap. “I’m going to direct Berenice into consciousness again. I don’t think her mind knows she’s healed. Abby, lay next to her so she can feel your body heat.”

  When the women were situated, I turned to Marco and Reid. “Kyle’s dead?”

  Marco nodded, a massive shudder running through him. “I really thought the fight would be easy because there were three of us.” He laughed without humor. “I’m an idiot.”

  “How’d you lose to a guy made of rock if you had Reid with you?” I asked, my tone accidentally sounding more judgmental than I meant it to.

  Instead of lashing out, Marco slid down the wall and huddled like a small child. “Ember, can you show him?”

  Ember nodded. “Ben, get ready.”

  For the second time in thirty minutes, I became someone else.

  “This is dumb,” Berenice muttered. “What kinda imbecile would actually believe that we’re out here collecting freaking firewood at the freaking witching hour in freaking Baltimore?”

  “Lady, do us a favor and shut up,” I replied, never pausing in my constant search for Kyle.

  The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a rangy teenager with sallow skin and zits who’d chased every available skirt in camp, and quite a few skirts that weren’t available. However, if he’d worked his way onto a strike team, I’d have to rid myself of any assumptions. Kyle was a killer.

  Eh, but so was I. And there were three of us.

  Berenice started muttering inaudibly. I rolled my eyes and scanned the upper windows of an apartment building.

  The chapping wind cut through my clothes, prickling my skin uncomfortably. Yet, I wasn’t nearly as cold as Reid and Berenice, thanks to my inner battery which kept me at a toasty 109.3 when I was at full power.

  Reid had huffily refused my outer jacket a few minutes before, informing me that he was from Idaho, and they knew how to handle cold—unlike us Georgia heroes. Obviously the subfreezing temperatures had addled his brains even more than Ember’s unceremonious dumping of him had, making him forget that he’d nearly frozen to death right along with us Dixie losers in Wyoming.

  “We’re taking a break and get
ting out of the wind,” Reid said, clearly trying to keep his teeth from chattering. “Berenice, you need to warm up.”

  We stepped behind a shuttered taco truck parked in a driveway. A huge shiver ripped down his spine.

  Oh, yeah, sure, Berenice is the cold one. I inched closer to him, hoping my natural warmth would radiate off me and warm him up a bit. He wasn’t allowed to die until he’d apologized for being such a jerk for the last two weeks.

  And neither was Jill. She was going to stay alive until she’d apologized for getting married without inviting us to watch. I had very few sisters left, and like hell was she getting away with that.

  As Jill’s name passed through my mind, energy began to zero in from around the edges of my eyes. I blinked quickly, pulling it away and back into my core.

  Man, my control was pathetic these days—it was like being six again. Six, and at combatives training. I’d been bumped up into a higher class because of my natural proficiency. The older kids had tried to tease me for being roughly two feet tall, but my random bursts of literally-fiery temper had ended that on the third day. The one kid who’d persisted had had his front teeth knocked out by eight-year-old Jillian Johnson.

  I closed my eyes to stop the energy from seeping in again. She’d make fun of me if she could see how worn thin I was. I needed to hear her tease me again…just once.

  We’d rescue her, and she’d shrug off whatever the Trents had done, and she’d throw her arms around me and tell me that I should’ve been in charge of these yahoos, and that I should’ve been there to hear this really amazing comeback she had for Beau, and that I was her little brother and she’d help me get revenge for my sisters and she really wasn’t that hurt anyway and she was going to give up fighting next week and run away with Benjamin and have ten kids and live until she was ninety and I hadn’t run away after the tribunal and I hadn’t said what I said in Liberty and I hadn’t given her such a hard time about everything when she was clearly hurting…

  “Dude, what’s wrong with your eyes?” Berenice’s grating voice cut through the onslaught. “Are you practicing Morse code or something?”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “You’re not shivering as much, and Reid’s not cold, right?”

  He threw me an ugly look, but I just trudged back out into the road without waiting for their answers. My frozen boots weighed a million pounds each. I could no longer lift each foot up over the snow. Instead, I had to push through it with painful lurches, because I didn’t dare risk using even an ounce of heat lest Kyle—

  I flew into a snowbank, my back slamming against a hidden fire hydrant. I threw my hands up, barely able to block the huge stone hands that flew at my face. I ducked, but then I was hoisted by my collar and thrown several feet.

  I hadn’t had time to gasp.

  There was no fighting him. Kyle was a whirlwind of stone and pain, everywhere at once. As soon as I put up my hand to blast him, he’d moved, and fingers had raked through my clothes and into my skin. In the dark I couldn’t even make out his features, statue-like as they were.

  Reid’s strangled battle yell was cut off as he was picked up and thrown into the side of a car.

  Kyle, standing well over six feet tall, marched easily through the snow towards me. How quickly had he attacked us? Only a minute before I’d been in the alley.

  He grabbed the side of my head and made a fist. He was going to bash my brains in.

  A high, terrifying scream of fury from behind him made him pause and drop me.

  Berenice flew out of the darkness and tackled him, her face distorted with rage and effort. She straddled him and unleashed a volley of punches, tiny drops of blood spraying everywhere after each hit. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’ll…I’ll get him…” I whispered, raising a shaking hand towards the fray. If I emptied all my heat on him, I’d kill him.

  But quicker than I could blink, Kyle kicked her off and began his own beat down.

  Fury turned to terror as Berenice tried and failed to block two enormous stone fists pounding into her face and torso again and again. Her cries morphed into squeaks with each wet crunch from her ribs.

  When she was finally still in the snow, Kyle broke for breath. Over by the car, Reid stirred and looked up.

  Thousands of degrees of heat surged out of my arm and through Kyle’s, melting his appendage into lava, which dripped on the snow with loud hisses. It was a terrible shot; I’d aimed for his chest.

  He grasped his shoulder and fell backwards in silent agony. There was a low, rocky rumble, and then Kyle opened his mouth in a silent scream. He seemingly fell apart at his joints, like a huge invisible child was pulling him to pieces.

  Reid was struggling to his knees, his hand extended towards what was left of Kyle. The last of the whiteness faded from his eyes. “We…we need to go…” he said, gasping for breath. “I’ll make a stretcher for her.”

  I surfaced into my own mind and awareness with a gasp.

  Reid and Marco were huddled around Berenice, who had woken up and propped herself on her elbows. Abby was enthusiastically licking the blood off her face. Berenice let her head fall to the side so she could look at me. “Looking pale, Trent,” she drawled. “You gonna hurl?”

  “Your face was dented!” Indeed, if there were anything in my stomach, it would’ve been in danger of expulsion. Marco’s memories had been so vivid.

  She touched her cheeks, which were still being licked. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it,” she said faintly. “I suppose it was upsetting to see.” She frowned a little bit, the familiar wrinkle appearing between her eyes. “Thank you for healing me.”

  “No problem.” I couldn’t say “you’re welcome”—her gratitude freaked me out, though I couldn’t say why.

  Ember helped Berenice to her feet. When she was stable, she looked down at her ruined uniform and let out a long breath. She reached through a large rip and snapped the waistband of her long underwear. “Well, I guess Baltimore is getting a show tonight.”

  “They already did,” I said quietly. “Daisy attacked Gabriela’s house not long after you left. I burned it down and killed her.”

  “Wow,” Marco said. “I wish I could’ve seen that. I bet…hey, where’s Topher?”

  Instead of answering him, I met Berenice’s gaze and shook my head. “I’m sorry. It was the knives. I couldn’t save him in time.”

  Berenice’s eyes widened and filled with tears, but she quickly shook her head. “Was he…did he suffer? No, I don’t want to know. She’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

  “It was instantaneous. And she’s dead, unless she can survive a burning building falling on her. Two down, two to go.” I turned to Reid. “What’s your call?”

  I was eager to move the conversation along, to move forward towards Jillian and away from talk of Topher, lest Berenice dwell too long and decide to blame me for her friend’s death.

  Reid turned to Ember. “Do you have any idea where Buck is?”

  “No,” she said with a little sigh. “I’ll scan again.” She closed her eyes, then jerked them open. “He’s really close, just two streets over, but he’s not thinking about us. He’s heading back to Gabriela’s. Daisy was on the phone with him when the house collapsed.” She frowned. “Ouch. He’s a little messed up about it.”

  “Let’s jump him,” Marco growled. “We’ll converge from all sides. He’ll never know what’s coming. It sounds like he’s emotionally compromised right now, so he might be easier to kill than Kyle.”

  “I agree,” Reid said. “That’s what we’ll do. I’ll fly us there, making sure to avoid his line of sight, and we’ll situate ourselves around the street, covering all points of entry. When we’ve got eyes-on, we’ll attack. Then we’ll go find Rube and Lark.”

  “And then we’ll go to Annapolis,” I said, barely believing what I was saying. Could it be so simple?

  Were we really so close to defeating the team that couldn’t be defeated?

  Item Ten


  Translation of coded letter sent by anonymous Mexican spy to revolutionary forces of the Mexican Revolution, January 28, 1911.

  To the boss:

  I am returning to Sonora following my failure to recruit the Navajo man to our cause. Francisco did not exaggerate his abilities, but contrary to his report, the man, Bidziil, is not sympathetic to the revolution. He would not agree to fight with us, nor even leave the reservation to speak to the other men. When I tried to argue with him, his eyes glowed as the moon does glow and I was chased out of the land by a storm cloud that nearly drowned me twice.

  10

  The throng of people in front of Gabriela’s destroyed home had only grown in the hour since it had collapsed. Two firetrucks had pushed through the snow and parked in front of the smoldering building, which thankfully hadn’t spread its flames to the neighbors. Firemen sprayed their long fountains of water through the windows, causing steam to rise up with loud hisses.

  Now that I wasn’t in fight-or-flight mode, I took a moment to appreciate the enormity of my actions tonight: I’d destroyed Gabriela’s home. She was an orphan; likely everything she had to remind her of her parents had gone up in smoke. I’d gotten the impression from Jillian’s report of her life that she was a responsible, circumspect businesswoman who would certainly have insurance, but still…I owed her. I’d make it up to Gabriela somehow. Someday. She would not endure penury because of me.

  We were all on a rooftop across the street, watching the tragedy unfold from behind the roof access. Nobody on the street would be able to see us from their angle. As it was, the crowd was too interested in the fire to look up and behind them. More helpfully, the emergency flood lights for the firemen between us and them washed us out while illuminating the scene below. If anyone were to look back, all they’d see would be blinding light bulbs.

  “Where’s Buck?” Reid asked. “There’s gotta be a hundred people down there.”