Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (24 page)

Cary sneered. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Something about the way he said it, about the way he’d been acting throughout our whole conversation just set me off. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him over to the wall of the alley and slammed his sorry ass up against the brick. His eyes went wide again, mouth fell open into an O as he realized for the first time that maybe he should have answered that differently.

“Whoa!” Sienna called from behind me.

“I can see that you
would
like to know,” Cary said, humbled, “and I am willing to tell you in exchange for you not breaking my … anything.”

“Start talking,” I said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Well, the truth is that I don’t know,” he said, and I believed him because he was looking straight into my eyes and seemed like he might need to change his pants. “I didn’t want to ask. I told her I doubted I could get it, but that I’d ask, and that was the end of that conversation.”

“Starting to get an idea of why she hesitated to give me your name and how to get ahold of you,” I said.

“She gave me up?” Cary asked, suddenly outraged. “Oh, I ain’t selling to her no more!”

“Let him go,” Sienna said gently from behind me. “This doesn’t really change anything.”

“You don’t think so?” I asked, turning to look at her. “There aren’t that many metas around here. Either she was looking to suppress me, or she knows someone else she’d like to take out of the equation.”

“Lightning man,” she whispered.

“I’m thinking maybe lightning
woman
, now,” I said. “No one ever saw it was a him. Only witness was a kid, and we got zero description of a face, just a hood. Could be anyone under that.”

“Man, if Taneshia is shooting lightning and killing people, I really need to leave town now,” Cary said. “She’s going to know I gave her up.”

“Anything else?” Sienna asked, coming up behind me. She waited a moment, and Cary tried to shrug in my grasp. It didn’t go so well, but the point was made. “Let him go.”

I dropped him and he slumped to the ground, catching his feet and trying to adjust himself in a faint effort to salvage his dignity from being manhandled by me. “I don’t even think I want to know this, but … what are you fools planning to do?”

I looked at her. She looked at me. “Find evidence on Cordell Weldon,” she said. “Drag him out into the light of day.”

Cary shook his head, like he was just giving up on us and life. “A man like Cordell Weldon does not leave evidence. He’s too smart for that. Fat cat like that will always land on his feet. Little cat like me? I got to stay low, keep to falls I can survive. Man. Such a waste. You got all this power in the world and nowhere to point it.”

“I can point it at him,” Sienna said, menacing.

Cary laughed, totally fake. “No, you can’t, and that’s the point. Even you can’t stand with the whole world against you. And, girl, they are turning that way. This is a whole new level of heat, one you are not ready for. Try and imagine them gassing you with that stuff and dragging your ass off to some prison. Or worse, digging a ditch somewhere and just letting you disappear—”

“Never gonna happen,” she said.

“Pfffft,” Cary said. “You’re going to die a villain. They’re going to make it happen, you just wait and see. They’re setting up for it. And Cordell Weldon is going to dance on your grave.”

“He’s going to have a bitch of a time dancing once I break his legs,” she said and grabbed me around the chest. We shot off into the sky, straight up. The wind buffeted us as we climbed into the warm midday air.

“Where we going?” I asked.

“I’m going to drop you off and you’re going to try and find Taneshia,” she said, loud enough to be heard over the howl of the air, “and then I’m going to make a slight … detour.”

“Detour? Now?” I asked.

“No time like the present,” she said.

I waited to see if she was going to say anything else. When she didn’t, I just asked. “What is so damned important that you’re going to take off in the middle of the investigation?”

“I need to talk to an old friend,” she said, pensive in a way I wasn’t used to seeing from her. “Someone who might be able to shed some light on how we go about ripping people of power out into the light of day.”

“What makes you think that this person can help?” I asked as she arced us across the sky toward the black cloud that I now knew was my house. My home. A smoking wreck.

“Because,” she said, as we started to come in for a landing, “if we’re lucky, he’ll be the next president of the United States.” And she dropped me off and flew into the sky, vanishing from sight with a sonic boom that shook the world around me, leaving the spectators still standing on my lawn with their mouths agape.

It wasn’t a long flight to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. It was somewhere around four hundred miles, and I did it in less than half an hour, hauling ass until I saw the skyline. It didn’t take much effort on J.J.’s part to get me a copy of Senator Foreman’s itinerary and to find his hotel. It was a big one, after all, a giant tower that overlooked downtown.

I approached carefully, dropping in from the clouds at highest speed and stopping in seconds before I splattered on the roof. It wasn’t a comfortable landing by any means, but it kept me from being seen by any but the most observant, and even then they’d pretty much just see a blur falling out of the sky. The sound was somewhat obvious, but I couldn’t do much about that. Breaking the sound barrier rattles windows, and that’s just the way it is.

I entered the hotel from the roof stairs and immediately encountered the U.S. Secret Service. I raised my hands, badge in my left and looked the surprised guards in the eye. “Federal agent. I’m here to see Foreman,” I said and let them scramble.

I stood in the stairwell with a steadily increasing number of black-suited agents while waiting. I figured they’d eventually reach critical mass and run out of places to stand, but somehow they all managed to continue giving me a wide berth while piling in. I took utmost care to avoid any threatening gestures while they kept their hands on their weapons. I was actually fortunate they hadn’t drawn down on me. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly protocol to let a super-powerful metahuman close to a presidential candidate, especially one who was likely having the word “rogue” thrown about in relation to her name. They kept it cool and cordial, though, and I did the same, extending them the professional courtesy of keeping my hands up and where they could see them, which allowed them the illusion of thinking me innocuous. The fact I could smoke everyone in the stairwell—literally, thanks to fire powers—in seconds was probably lost on them. It was a brave new world, and bodyguard training hadn’t quite caught up to it.

I realized after a moment that the chill, calm atmosphere of everyone in the stairwell was probably not entirely natural, and shook my head, letting out a little sigh. I was definitely feeling calmer than I had been upon approach. Even identifying that as an unnatural feeling in my head gave it a little less power but didn’t eliminate it. I didn’t really want to be irate, so I just went with it in any case.

“This way, ma’am,” one of the agents finally said, after a burst of staticky voice in his earpiece gave him his marching orders. He was a tall, light-blond-haired guy with freckles. They made way for me, though I don’t know how. There had to be twenty agents in the stairwell by that point, and it wasn’t exactly wide.

We descended three floors and entered a room that was completely controlled by the Secret Service. I’d heard they took over entire hotel floors during presidential and candidate visits, but it lent the whole place an ominous aura. Most hotels have a quiet hum to them, even when unoccupied. This one had four visible suited guardians standing sentry at various points in the hall. It cast a little bit of a pall over the place with them standing there like statues. Statues whose heads turned as I came in with my escort.

“Do I need to search you?” my escort asked.

“I’m carrying a Sig Sauer P227 in the small of my back,” I said. “If you want it, you can have it, but it’s the least lethal weapon in my arsenal.”

He made his displeasure obvious with both a disapproving grunt and a reddening of his fair complexion. “I’m not leaving you alone with the senator, then.”

“Dude,” I said, “skip the interagency rivalry. If I wanted to kill him, I would have blown up the hotel and flown away before you even saw me coming. I’m here to talk, that’s all. I’ve known the senator for years, Agent …?” I waited to see if he was going to give me his name or play dick.

“Faraday,” he said, conceding. “You understand my job here?”

“Protect the candidate,” I said. “At all costs.”

He paused at the entry to a door and stared right in my eyes. “Are you going to make my job more difficult in some way?”

“Nope,” I said. “Just here to talk about items of mutual interest.”

“You sure?” he asked. “Because I’ve heard things.”

“Things?” I asked. “Like … rules of grammar? Laws of the universe? Rumors? That sound a tire makes as it’s deflating?”

He gazed at me suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I said and sighed. “I’m trying not to be an ass and it’s really difficult. I could have made a really kick setup line there about ‘the sound your balls make as they explode from the impact of my foot’ against them. I’m just so used to pushing back against people who give me any hint of resistance on anything.”

Agent Faraday stared at me, like he was trying to decide if I was bullshitting him. I was not. “That sounds like a personality disorder.”

“Great, so we’ve got that in common. Can I see the senator now?”

He made a grumbling noise and opened the door. “I’ll be right outside,” he said, loud enough that anyone in the room could hear him, too. He closed the door behind me.

I stood in a hotel suite that was ridiculously lavish. The curtains were drawn, though, giving it a half-lit effect, with only a little of the late afternoon light making its way through the sheers, casting things in shadow. My eyes adjusted quickly and fell on a shape in the corner, sitting in a chair almost against the wall, head tilted to look out the white lace curtains.

“Hello, Sienna,” Senator Robb Foreman said in a low, ponderous voice. “It’s been a while.”

As soon as Sienna dropped me off, I was stalking down the street, my phone in hand. I wanted to have a conversation, and I didn’t want to do it in public or anywhere Sienna could hear me. I watched her fly off into the sky, and once I was sure she was far enough away, I dialed Taneshia and listened to it ring.

And heard Alicia Keys’s “This Girl is On Fire” blare out somewhere in the crowd behind me.

I turned as I felt my skin crawl like it wanted to shed me, chills running up and down even as the sun beat on me. I caught a glimpse of Taneshia, a flash of jet-black hair as she shoved her way through the crowd assembled outside my house. I didn’t have to wonder too hard about why she was hiding, why she wasn’t sitting on the back of the ambulance with Momma.

I went after her. Not too fast, not too slow. I didn’t knock people over, linebacker my way through them. I pushed gently, said sorry, excused myself. People parted for me after a minute, realizing I was making my way through. I heard the words they said, the hushed gossip. It was all kind, too, not like I heard them say about Sienna. They knew me here, I was of the neighborhood, and I didn’t have months of bad press dogging me like the grim reaper to drag my name down.

I made it out of the crowd and caught sight of Taneshia making her way determinedly to the end of the street. Shorty was hauling, too, so I hurried to catch up, breaking into a run. She scooted around the corner and I hustled after her, watching her cut across a lawn and disappear behind a brick house.

I came around it in a hurry and almost ran right into her. She was just standing there, waiting, hands in her pockets and eyes down. One look at her and I knew she knew, that she’d realized why I was calling, why I was following. I stood there looking at her, she stood there looking down at the brown and scraggly lawn we were standing on, and finally I spoke. “Why?” I asked.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” she said, still not looking up.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

She hesitated, like she was wrestling with something. “More specific still.”

I frowned. “How much are you keeping from me? Just tell me all of it.”

She let out a sigh. “I can’t do that, Augustus. Some of the secrets I’m keeping aren’t mine to give away.”

“Are you a meta?” I asked, staring her straight down.

I saw her bottom lip quiver. “Yes,” she said.

“You can throw lightning,” I said.

She held up a hand, and I watched electricity flow through it. “Yes.”

I took a step back and felt myself clutch onto the ground in my head. I didn’t know if I could throw up a shield that could protect me from lightning, and certainly not if I could do it fast enough to protect myself from her, but I wasn’t going to die blindsided, even by a girl I’d known as long as I’d known Taneshia. “Why did you kill Roscoe Marion?”

She looked like she wanted to cry but there was not a tear in sight in her eyes. That girl was hard of heart, like she had a stone in her chest. “I didn’t.”

“Man, don’t give me that!” I said, shaking my head. “Someone killed Roscoe with lightning, all right? And just a little bit ago, someone saved me with some lightning, too—”

“
That
was me,” she said. “I knew you were going to stick your nose in this and get yourself in trouble, and I came to help you.” She put up a hand and covered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to—that guy … I didn’t intend for him to … but I did …” She pulled her hand away. “He was the first person I ever killed, I swear.”

“Then who killed the others?” I asked, and took a step closer to her.

“I … I can’t tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “I just … I can’t. It’s not my place to tell.”