Enemies(99)

“Apparently you’ve never seen how my branch of the family treats each other.” I cracked my knuckles one by one. “I can’t let you do what they’d have you do. If you’re not going to stand aside, I’m going to stop you.”

“It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Then don’t make it that way.”

He shook his big head, slowly. “I’m sorry. I know what’s coming. You don’t. But it’s all right; you’ll see it for yourself, because I won’t kill you.”

I let out a slow, disappointed sigh. “Well, you got one of those right.”

I launched myself at him with a kick that caught him in his massive belly. All the air went out of him in one second and he hit his knees. I followed with a knee to the face that rolled him over and sent him five feet into the air before he came down again, hard, on the thin carpet.

I pursued him with the viciousness of Wolfe, kicking him in the side of the face and snapping it back. The tactical detachment of Roberto Bastian told me to hit him in the head again, to impede his cognition and analysis of the fight by knocking the crap out of his brains (that last part might have been me). I punched with the white-hot anger bubbling over from years of repressed rage that waited below the surface of Aleksandr Gavrikov, and I kept myself from laughing at the joy of a fight the way Bjorn would have. I coldly determined that another kick to the face would just about put him out, so I landed one with perfect execution the way Eve Kappler would have done it—precise, on form—and Raymond hit his back, sputtering blood. He didn’t try to rise again.

“Okay,” he gasped, blood trickling down his face. “Okay, I give up.”

Stop.

And listening to the better angel of my nature, I heeded Zack’s counsel and stopped, watching Raymond shudder in pain at my feet.

“You’re tougher …” Raymond said. “Tougher than they thought you were going to be.”

“That’s me,” I said quietly. “One of these days you’d think they’d stop underestimating me.”

“I should tell you,” he whispered. “I should tell you why, why they’re so afraid of you—”

“DON’T!” I shouted, but it was too late.

A spurt of blood opened from his neck and he gagged, the geyser spraying into the air around me.

“I, for one,” came the voice from behind me, “am not so much underestimating you as trying to maintain a realistic picture of how big of a pain in my ass you could possibly be.”

I swiveled and Weissman was there, cradling his oversized knife again, wiping the blade on a cloth in his hands. It took me a minute to realize it was a patch of shirt, from Raymond. “The prodigal jackass returns,” I quipped. “Where’s your little sidekick?”

“She’ll be along in a minute,” Weissman said, polishing the blade. “You realize, of course, that every single one of your friends here is going to die before we’re through?” He was thoroughly unamused.

“Why?” I asked. “Because you’ve put a little distance of time between the last occasion you over-milked your powers, and your time-spinning buddy isn’t going to be aggravated if you halt the flow for a few more rounds now?”

“No, mostly because you’ve pissed me off.” His eyes were hard, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I thought about just leaving London for last, going and clearing out North and South America first. Maybe hit those last Pacific islands we’ve skipped over.” He pointed the knife at me. “But, no. I bring our best damned resource here to London to finish the job, the last Hades-type on the planet. Do you know how long it took me to find him?” Little flecks of spittle flew out of Weissman’s mouth in rage. “Forever. Just about forever. He’s not quite the linchpin of our plan, but he was close. He made my life easier. Now,” he waved the knife in sharp gestures around me, “I have to do this annihilation the hard way. I have to take all our people into the field and kill these last metas with overwhelming force. Because somehow you talk Raymond the mass murderer into growing a conscience.” He waved the knife at Raymond’s corpse. “I mean, do you believe that? He almost told you everything.”

I smiled sadly, looking at the body of the man who was related to me. “I’m persuasive.”

“You’re a pain in my ass,” Weissman said, and he pulled himself off the wall he had been leaning on. “You’re a pain in my ass is what you are. And if you weren’t Sienna Nealon, I would kill you over the course of several days and spread your body parts over a five-mile radius out of pure spite.”