Power(53)

“Hi,” I said with a little wave and smiled enough to bare my teeth, channeling my best Wolfe impression. “Let’s play.”





Chapter 30


There were two women and two men remaining, all dressed reasonably well, all of them standing in utter shock at my entrance. I had to say, it was one of the more dramatic ones I’d pulled.

Their shock lasted about another second after my quip, and then the one who had been throwing fireballs tossed a big one at me.

I started to dodge but a voice in my head told me to stop. Gavrikov shouldered his way to the front of my mind. You may not be able to control the fires within without practice, but this one thing I can teach you to do easily.

I held out my hand and absorbed the fireball into my skin like a vacuum sucking up a loose plastic bag. Just WHUUUMP! and it was gone like it had never even been there. I turned my palm toward me and there was no sign of burns or blackness, not even a hint of smoke to indicate the passage of the flame from existence. “Well,” I said, “how ’bout that.”

There was another moment of collective silence and then things erupted. The same woman who’d cast flame at me seconds earlier chucked another ball of it, bigger this time, while a big guy who’d been lingering to my left seemed to grow a couple feet in height. I started toward him, pegging him for a Hercules-type, but Wolfe spoke: Atlas-type. Similar, Little Doll, but not exactly the same.

“How bad?” I asked as the big guy headed for me. There was another guy lingering back, who looked like he might have been from India, watching me kind of cagily. There was also an Asian woman, probably the one with the commanding voice who’d somehow picked up on the laser.

Bad, Wolfe said. The bigger they get, the stronger they get.

Like a Hercules, then.

No, Wolfe said. Much worse.

“How does it get worse?” I asked, below my breath.

Ask and ye shall receive.

The Atlas kept growing, his muscles staying in proportion to his body, the way it had been when he’d begun. His clothing started to rip when he reached eight feet of height, and I could see that although he was muscular, he wasn’t like a Hercules where it grew to ridiculous, beyond-steroid proportions. He looked like a well-built guy, just … well … taller.

And then he grew past ten feet, and I started to worry maybe a little.

I saw something long and black that reminded me of an arrow shooting by, but it sounded like a swarm of bees as it passed. I caught a glimpse of it and had a sense of plague as I watched it, a sense that I realized was coming from Wolfe.

Rudra-type, he said, like that was supposed to mean something to me. Fires arrows of disease.

“Lovely,” I said, and turned my gaze toward him, letting it drift over the last of the four metas arrayed against me, the Asian woman. “And her?”

While I was watching her, her skin began to glow subtly. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before; when Gavrikov had started to glow, he just caught on fire. In her case it was as though her skin was the sun, and after a second I was forced to look away from the harsh gleam.

Amaterasu, Bjorn supplied. Japanese Sun Goddess. The real one, I think.

“Century must have run out of flunkies,” I muttered under my breath.

The woman throwing fire, Gavrikov said, drawing my attention to her. She was cold and pale, had a Norwegian look about her. She is the last of my kind.

Friend of yours? I asked.

No, he said rather definitely. Most certainly not.

The Atlas came at me hard. He was nearly fifteen feet tall now, a giant the likes of which I hadn’t faced before. He was reasonably fast, too, operating at a speed which—for most metas—would have been impressive.

I wasn’t most metas.

I shot toward his knee with my power of flight, turning myself into position for a side kick as I went. I hit his knee with the force of a speeding Maserati, just at the point between the bones on the side of the kneecap. My foot tore into his flesh and and ripped through, his femur and tibia bowing apart as I blew through.

I landed on the other side and rolled back to my feet, still moving. There was a mighty thump as the Atlas hit the ground, but I was already coming around in a dead run toward my next target, Ms. Gavrikov. I felt a harrumph of annoyance from Aleksandr as I called her that.

“What the hell is going on down there?” I heard Harper mutter over the comm link.

“Something magical,” I said as Ms. Gavrikov sent another burst of flame my way. I saw the look in her eyes and it was pure panic. I sensed she’d never had someone go all fire-eater on her before. She’d probably never met anyone she couldn’t at least slow down with a timely bit of flame, and it was freaking her out. I saw the whites of her eyes as she froze, deer-like, in my path while I bore down on her. She’d seen what I’d just done to Atlas, after all …