Omega(33)
“I didn’t,” I said, as he grabbed another block and came at me with it like a club. “But I must say, it’s quite the improvement. Before you were just an ugly son of a bitch; now, you’re ugly and you can’t speak worth a damn.” I caught his forearm with my good hand as he brought the weapon down hard enough to cleave my skull from my body with it. I slammed a heel onto the instep of his foot, and he did more than grunt this time, he let out a little yell. I dodged the retaliatory backhand and let go of him as he pulled the concrete block above his head again. I ducked out of the way as he brought it down and shattered it onto the sidewalk, sending fragments in all directions. I kicked him in the knee as I sidestepped and it buckled with the force of my attack.
I hit him behind the ear with a punch that caused him to falter, his eyes crossing slightly. He whipped another fist around but I stepped out of the way, keeping light on my feet and using my speed to outmaneuver him. “Come on, Shortbread,” I said lightly, glad that Kat had healed me, “you’re getting your ass kicked by a Thin Mint.” I hit him in the face with a roundhouse kick as he turned; I heard snapping sounds from his jaw after the impact and his face realigned. He stared at me through a droopy eye and I didn’t hesitate before kicking him squarely in the groin. He doubled over, his knees finally hitting the ground and I kicked him in the head, which ricocheted off the concrete, sending a spiderweb of cracks down the terrace wall as he fell over. “You might have to call your boss and tell him Operation Stanchion is still on, since you failed—”
He scissored out with a kick that took my legs from under me before I even realized what had happened. My back hit the sidewalk and my head bounced against the grass. I lay there for about half a second while my brain assessed what he had done. “Or not.” I rolled my weight to my shoulders and bucked, vaulting back to my feet in a martial arts move that Mother had taught me to master when I was eight. I raised my fists as the hulk got back to his feet, menace in his eyes. “Busting through the door when someone knocks? That’s taking the get-off-my-lawn attitude a step too far, old man.”
“Do you...ever...shut up?” His accent dragged the words, even through his broken jaw. I had caught a hint of it before, on the porch—Eastern Europe, I would have guessed, though I couldn’t be certain now.
I didn’t answer, instead doing a backflip onto the higher terrace as he came at me in a shoulder-down charge. I kicked him in the side of the head and backflipped again to the topmost level, landing on his two-foot stretch of “lawn.” “You should criticize; you’re pretty chatty for a guy whose face is hanging off. Maybe you want to explain this Operation Stanchion to me now, so we can get on with our lives—me to mine, you to a cell in the Directorate prison in Arizona for the rest of yours?”
He stared up at me from the sidewalk, his jaw clacking together as though he were trying to speak; I didn’t even want to think about how much pain it was causing him to talk. I wanted to inflict more of it.
From my elevated position I saw Scott on the street below next to Clary, who was sitting up. The car next to Clary was destroyed, oil leaking all over the pavement, coating him in black liquid that it took me a moment to realize wasn’t blood. Reed was bleeding next to Kat, though he was looking better than he had when last I saw him. Kat was paler than I could ever remember, her wool coat looking like black granite next to her complexion, which was drained of all color.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked him. “We could give you all the things your heart desires—three square meals a day, reconstructive surgery for that face—you know, for after it heals, and you go back to looking the way you did before?” He took a leap up the terrace in one bounding jump and I veered sideways and up, clearing the porch steps and landing back at the open hole where his front door had been. “We could give you a nice, quiet place where you’d never have to worry about some annoying strangers knocking on your front door again—you know, because that sort of thing seems to stress you out...”