Limitless (17 page)

“Shall we go?” Antonio called. He had moved over to the parked BMW that was waiting for them here. The smell of drifting smoke from the wreckage around the gallery was heavy, though not as heavy as it had been in the immediate area around the destruction.

“Just a moment,” Philip said. His mind ran through the probabilities. She was wounded but not critically; left on the street she’d be found in a matter of minutes. Too soon. “Move her to the bin,” he said, pointing at a rubbish bin against a dull grey wall.

Liliana did it with glee, stabbing the girl under the armpits, burying her knives between the ribs as she dragged her along. It left a clear trail of blood that caused Philip to sigh in sheer annoyance. He said nothing, though; there was no point.

Liliana tossed the girl into the bin as if she weighed nothing at all. Philip held the top for her, barely, his thumb and forefinger tingling at the thought of all the bacteria surely covering the thing. He kept from making a grimacing face, but only just. “Antonio?” he called, and the bomb maker came round the BMW to give him a look of curiosity. “Give her a little something extra for her trouble.”

Antonio smiled, his dark goatee pushed back around the edges to make room for the fearsome expression. Keeping the painting cylinder tight under one arm, he pulled something off his belt, slipped a pin out of it and tossed it, perfectly, into the open bin.

Philip let the lid slam shut and he started toward the car. He didn’t bother to count out loud, and he’d lost track by the time he slipped into the back seat of the BMW and removed his mask.

They had reached the turn outside the alley when it went off, a faint pop that sounded like a gunshot in the distance. He did not turn around to look as they made the left onto the crowded road, quite secure in the knowledge that everything was in perfect placement. When she woke—if she woke up—even she could not stop him now.

Chapter 41

I drifted along like I was riding a tide. I floated, suspended on a calm ocean, the sound of the waves crashing in my ears and a salty, metallic taste on my tongue that wasn’t at all like water. It was so bright, the day shining down on me, and my breaths came slowly, one after another, my body utterly relaxed.

I blinked at the bright sunshine, and realized I wasn’t actually on a beach. It felt like a beach, water and all, but it wasn’t.

It was all in my head.

The sand was there, gritty, sticking to my shoulders. I didn’t feel like I was wearing much, probably just enough to be considered beach legal. It was peaceful, though, even though I knew it wasn’t real, and I was quite content to just sit there and feel the heat radiating down on my skin.

At least, until a voice with a thick German accent interrupted my bliss. “We need to talk.”

I opened an eye to find Eve Kappler standing over me. Bitch was stealing my sunshine. I could see her face, knotted into an unpleasant expression. Her arms were folded, and she was wearing a black tactical vest, black pants, and high boots. She was the picture of a soldier, the picture of her I saw in my head every time I thought about her.

Of course, she also looked very much alive, which she wasn’t and hadn’t been for a couple years.

“Not now, Eve,” I said, waving her off. “I’m enjoying my imaginary day in the sun.”

“Nothing wrong with taking a break every now and again,” came the voice of Roberto Bastian, causing me to crack my eye open. He was dressed almost exactly like Eve except he was taller, and instead of short blond hair, his was dark and cut close to the scalp, military-style. “But this is not a great time for it.”

I sighed and tried to roll over. I failed, and the two of them continued to block my sun. “I disagree. It feels like a great time for it.”

“Your life hangs in the balance,” came a heavier voice, deeper. I recognized Bjorn, one of Odin’s—yes, that Odin—sons. He was a big son of a bitch in life, and I could tell just by peeking out at him for a split second that this hadn’t changed in death. He was still big. And stealing my sunshine, too.

“You are at risk,” came the cool yet strained voice of Aleksandr Gavrikov. He still sounded Russian in my head. Of course, he—and the others—actually
were
in my head, their full personalities. However happy I’d been for their recent silence, they were destroying all that goodwill here in one fell swoop.

“I’ll deal with it later,” I said, brushing them off.

“Sienna,” Wolfe’s husky voice said, causing my eyes to pop open. He used to call me Little Doll with alarming regularity, but hadn’t done that in a couple years. I was starting to feel surrounded, the sun blotted out by their shadows. “Do you know where you are?”

“On a beach,” I sighed. “A beautiful place with mild temperatures and pleasant winds and an ocean that will feel wonderful on my skin when I go to take a dip in a few minutes.”

“You’re in a back alley in London,” came the voice of Zack Davis, causing my eyes to snap open, “your throat has been cut, your internal organs have been shredded by a bomb, and you’re less than a minute from dying.”

I caught a flash of something beyond the beach. There was a faint tapping of something like rain on metal, sirens echoing in the distance, and I saw a dark that was only penetrated by light seeping in from half a hundred holes in a wall of blackness. There was pain everywhere, everything that I could feel was agony, and I let it go—

And I was back on the beach, back in the sand, legs pulled close to me, the heat on my skin feeling oh-so-good. I could feel the lapping of the tide at my toes, and it felt like it might be time to go up the beach a little further or maybe just let the water wash over me—

“Sienna,” Zack said again, and I saw him there next to me, a snow falling down around his pale cheeks, all the life gone out of his face. “I don’t want you to end up like this.” His mouth moved unnaturally for the voice that spoke, stiff and dead, his jaw creaking open and closed barely in time with the speech.

I felt a swell of sickness in my stomach. “Zack, I’m not… I’m not…”

“You’re getting closer,” he said, all the color washed out of his features. His blond hair, usually a handsome contrast to his tanned face, looked dark and dull against his white skin. “You need to go back to the world. You need to fight.”

“Yes,” Eve Kappler said, her pixie haircut flashing in front of my eyes as I glimpsed her dead body on a snowy tarmac at night, lights shining down on her in the darkness, “you need to start putting up a fight again.”

I felt the heat of resentment burn through me. “I don’t know if you’ve just been on vacation yourselves, but I’ve been fighting for a couple years now.”

“No,” Roberto Bastian said, dead eyes staring at me in judgment, “you’ve been going through the motions for a couple of years.”

“Or at least one year,” Bjorn said with a darkness in his face. I saw him as he had looked when he died, body lit by the flames of burning buildings all around him..

“I’ve done what was required of me,” I said.

“And nothing more,” Gavrikov spoke, and I saw him on the top of a building—the IDS Tower in Minneapolis—home—the sun rising behind him, his skin glowing like it was about to burst into flames.

“That’s not living, Sienna,” Wolfe said, and the darkness surrounded us completely. I looked around, trying to peer into the infinite black, and saw a single light in the dark. An incandescent bulb pitched a soft glow from above me, lighting a concrete floor beneath my feet. I could smell sweat, fear, and other things. Wolfe’s face peered at me from out of the dark where he lay on my basement floor. “That is little more than surviving.”

“What is this?” I asked, turning about in the darkness. “An intervention? Because the six of you are the last people in the world who should be lecturing me about—”

“We’re not in the world, are we?” Zack said, stepping out of the dark. He looked alive again, healthy, that confidence he’d always carried with him evident in the smile on his face. He was wearing a suit, and he looked good in it. His cheeks had a dash of rose.

Like they had before I’d killed him.

“No,” I said, staring at him, my voice low and near to cracking. “No, you’re not.”

“You’ve always been a girl who did what she had to do,” Zack said, and the bulb swayed gently above him, casting a spotlight on his handsome features.

“You’ve been someone who fought the long odds.” I turned to see Bastian staring at me, his skin flush with life again as well.

“Who fought the hard fights that no one else would take,” Eve said, stepping into her own little lit circle to my left.

“No matter what… you fought,” Bjorn said, his massive, tattooed chest on display as he stepped into his place.

“You beat one hundred of the strongest people on the planet,” Gavrikov said, his skin wreathed in flame.

“Mercy was a concept for lesser mortals,” Wolfe said, his dark hair looking like menacing fur on his body.

“Whatever it took,” Zack said.

“No matter what,” Gavrikov said.

“No mercy,” Eve said.

“No fear,” Bastian said.

“No stopping,” Bjorn said.

“Until the job was done,” Wolfe said.

I stood quietly at the center of the circle, not even bothering to turn to face my accusers, because the world spun so I didn’t have to. As each of them spoke, the circle rotated to bring them right in front of my face, edging ever closer the longer this wore on. At the present rate of acceleration, I realized I’d be tasting Wolfe’s most recent dinner in a couple more minutes. He was a cannibal, so that prospect held little appeal for me. “What do you want?” I asked.

“For you to be you,” Zack said, hands buried in his pants pockets. He shrugged and did it with a boyish smile. “For you to go back to being you, the you that fought for the whole world. For you to turn back the clock a couple years, shake off the weariness, dig deep, and get after this man in the ski mask like you’re out for his blood.”

“I can’t do it like that anymore,” I said, looking away. “Guys, there are rules. Perfectly reasonable rules. We have a society here that doesn’t respond well to the level of destruction that—”

There was a chorus of crosstalk that felt like it burned my ears. I recoiled away, and the world spun around me.

“Don’t be a fool—”

“—can’t keep doing this—”

“—better as you were—”

“—world burning around you—”

“—going to die—”

“STOP!” I said, and they did. The world slowed, the spin reduced, and I stared at each of them in turn as they stood in the quiet darkness, the light bulbs above each of their heads shining down on them. “I’m not the same person I was back then. I have a job and a responsibility. I’m not some rogue agent flying under the radar who can just do whatever she wants without fear of the consequences. I blew up a resort, in case you forgot. I haven’t forgotten because it landed me in about a hundred and fifty hours of disciplinary hearings that never got aired on C-Span. I have a job to do. I’m very good at it. No one else can do it. And in order to keep doing it, I have rules to play by—”

“Rules will get you killed,” Wolfe said.

“Rules limit your freedom of action,” Bjorn said.

“Freedom comes with responsibility,” I said. “This is a civilized society—”

“So called,” Gavrikov said with a dismissive snort.

“—and you don’t just roll around killing people,” I said. “This isn’t me, being outmatched, outgunned, and in danger of losing everything and getting everyone killed. This isn’t war any longer.”

Bastian chucked a thumb over his shoulder. “I don’t know if you just weren’t paying attention when that guy in the mask blew up those buildings, but that looked like a declaration of war to me.”

“Not the same,” I said. “He’s got like, three people.”

“How many do you have?” Eve asked, a little snottily.

“I’ve got me, and that’s always been enough,” I said.

“You’re dying, Sienna,” Zack said.

“I’ll fix that in a minute,” I said. “One thing at a time, because right now I’m arguing with the people in my head, apparently.”

“What are you willing to do to stop this man?” Wolfe asked, and the world grew still around me. His black eyes stared at me and I stared back.

“What I have to do,” I said.

“Whatever it takes?” Wolfe asked, staring back at me, hard.

“Within limits,” I said, folding my arms and staring right back.

“Those limits will be his best weapon,” Zack said. “And once he figures out where you won’t go, that’s where he’ll stay.”

“You don’t even know who this is,” I said.

“But we know what he just did,” Bastian said. “He killed a lot of people for a painting.”

“To prove a point,” Gavrikov said.

“Oh, yeah?” I wheeled on him. “And what was the point? Chaos for the sake of chaos?”

“To show anyone watching that this is a man who has no limits to what he’ll do in order to get what he wants,” Wolfe said.

I stared at the big, hairy bastard. “You’d know a little something about that, I suppose.”

His eyes were blacker than the darkness around him. “Wolfe knows everything about it.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said, and waved them off. “I could use a little help pulling my guts back in, if you’re done with the sermon.”

“Sienna—” Their voices were in a chorus, concern and fear and a ripple of anger all together.

“I will take care of it,” I said, and my tone was all ice, all the way down, a whole shelf of it. “Thank you for your opinions.”

With that, I stepped through the sunlight blue into the darkness and re-entered that world of pain, of agony that encompassed my whole body, and of sirens in the distance under the bleak and stormy sky.

Chapter 42

I pulled myself out of the dumpster a few minutes later, my skin bloody, my clothing tattered and shredded. I was wearier than I could ever recall having been. Drawing the power of Wolfe to heal my body nearly drained whatever stamina I had left. He’d been right when he’d said I was close to dying. There had been a heavy layer of blood in the dumpster from more lacerations than I could rightly count, and even as I pushed the lid up and hooked my upper body over the edge to come tumbling out to the pavement below, I was still so weak that I couldn’t immediately stand.