Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (41 page)

I bolted for the door.

“Trance?” Grayson asked.

“I need to get closer to the gate to let them—”

“Trance!”

“What?” I turned, annoyance turning to shock as a bullet struck Grayson in the center of his forehead. The sound of the shot followed, an echo my brain was too slow to catalogue. Blood, matter and bone sprayed on the wall. Grayson fell to the floor next to Gage, who was still slowly bleeding to death.

Fear rooted me. I didn’t dare look. My legs tingled. I had made a deadly tactical error.

“I truly hated that man. No need pretending anymore, Trance. Turn around.”

I did so, slowly. Insides twisting. Desperate for my eyes to find fault with what my ears heard. Dr. Angus Seward stood halfway across the room, a still-bound McNally at his feet, a revolver raised and pointed. Plain brown eyes gazed at me with keen interest from beneath bushy white eyebrows. As
I watched him, his eyes began to glow yellow-orange. The glow lasted only a moment, before fading back to brown. A chill clawed its way from the top of my neck to the tips of my toes.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Seward said. “Happy now? We both have the blood of others on our hands.”

The hard edge in his voice cut like an invisible blade. Warmth and compassion—two things I had always associated with Angus Seward—were gone. Erased. Replaced by cold calculation and tinged with anguish.

Fury continued to boil just beneath the surface, fueled by betrayal and loss. And foolishness. How had we been so blind? Not seen it? We were the perfect fools, about to die senseless, avoidable deaths. He had the upper hand now, just has he’d had it all week. Playing us like a guitar, knowing every chord to strum and sweet spot to pick.

“I knew it,” I said, even though I knew nothing.

He cocked his head. “Knew what, my dear?”

“That whoever was playing as Specter had a dick the size of a walnut.”

His warning shot hit the wall inches from my fractured right hand. I didn’t jump. Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. It seemed to impress him.

“You know, Trance, I briefly considered trying to make a deal with you.”

“Oh?” My gaze flickered toward Gage. Time was not on my side here.

“You and I are unlike any other Metas, Trance. We received powers we were not born with, something never
before seen in Meta history. Your transformation fascinated the scientist in me, as did my own. I shouldn’t have delayed your deaths, but I had to know more. I had to understand why.”

Little things started clicking into place. I felt sick. And used—well and truly used. Bastard. “You set the fire. You destroyed the Warden and released our powers.”

“Yes.”

“Why? The fail-safe?”

“Yes.”

“You did all this just to ensure the Banes were wiped out.”

“We’ve already discussed this.”

“No, we haven’t. Why do you hate them so much that you’d sacrifice so many lives just to see the Banes dead?”

His hand trembled, altering the aim of the gun. Several times his mouth opened and closed as thoughts started and never finished. He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“Of what would happen when the Warden failed and the powers came back. Fear of how twelve angry, mismatched young adults would handle six times their numbers in vengeful enemies. Fear that those lines of division the MHC created between Rangers and Banes would once again consume the world.”

While his fears weren’t unfounded, the logic wasn’t there. “How did you find out about the Warden?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Summarize it.”

He was stuck in that strange place between not wanting to justify his horrible actions, and wanting to finally tell someone and ease a hefty burden. I wasn’t there to absolve him of his sins, but I wanted to know why, dammit.

“You were wrong, Trance,” he finally said. “I was a Meta before all of this.”

I couldn’t have heard that right and stared at him, too stunned to say a word.

“Weren’t expecting that, I see.” His shoulders sagged a bit. “I had no idea. Not until we all lost our powers. Whatever mine were, they were so weak I never knew I had them until they were ripped away. The experience was exactly as you children described it.”

“How could no one know?” I managed to ask.

“I don’t honestly know the answer to that, and it’s possible there are more like me, who never knew they were Metas. It’s not as though being Meta is detectable in a blood test.”

Good point. But still!

“My mother’s family had no history of Meta powers, and I’d never known my own father. So I spent the next few years obsessed with finding him. With the country in so much turmoil, it was difficult to get the records I needed. My marriage suffered tremendously.

“I’d spent twenty years in service to the Rangers and MHC, and just when I thought I could retire and spend the rest of my life with my wife and our girls, I drew further away. And I was too scared to tell her why.”

The heartbreak in his words dug deep. I had to fight against their impact, to keep my anger up. I couldn’t feel sorry
for him. It was a betrayal to my friends, both alive and dead. “Was your father a Meta?”

“Not just a Meta,” he said. “He was a Bane.”

“Holy shit.”

“Indeed. His name was Shade. I’d already worked five years for the MHC when he was killed, and in researching Shade I made a connection no one ever had before—officially, at least. I discovered Shade had a son. I had a half brother.”

Only one answer, horrifying as it was, made any kind of sense. “Specter.”

“Tragically, yes.” Even now, years after discovering the fact, he looked pissed. “My inevitable inquiries at the prison came to the attention of Agent Garth Anders.”

“McNally’s partner?”

“Correct. Anders knew almost since the end of the War that Marcus Spence wasn’t on the Island. The MHC found out too late and didn’t want a public panic, or to admit to missing a Bane. Anders was assigned to seek him out—off the record. When he found him, Spence had already had one stroke. Anders never considered a feeble, wheelchair-bound man to be a risk, so he didn’t tell anyone he found Spence.”

“Why did he tell you?”

“Well, at this point in the story, Anders had just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. We’d worked together years before. He may have been clearing his conscience.”

“Anders told you about the Warden?”

“Yes. He knew the Warden was a temporary fix. The technology would break down, or one of the Metas powering
it would die. If that happened, then the fail-safe collars were the only thing that would protect us. I was inclined to agree. Our country was barely surviving the destruction of one Meta War. We’d never survive another.

“After Anders passed, I went to see Spence. I needed to look my half brother in the eye and see the monster who’d murdered so many. But he wasn’t Specter anymore. He was a wasted shell of a man, and part of me understood why Anders couldn’t turn him in.”

Just as I’d felt sorry for the broken old man I’d found at the Blue Tower. None of us was immune to pity, it seemed. “But why destroy the Warden?” I asked. “Why kill
us
?”

“Destroying the Warden was simply to help along the inevitable. I looked up you twelve, you know. You were all unsettled, disillusioned, unsuccessful in so many ways, and I believed you would never step up and be heroes. But killing you before you repowered would look suspicious and could be traced back to me.”

The clinical way he spoke about our intended murders compounded my hatred of the man I’d once considered a friend. “So you … what? Asked Spence to do it remotely after he got his Specter powers back?”

“I did. He agreed.”

“But he didn’t get them back.”

“No. The night of the Fairview fire, Spence suffered a third stroke. It left him catatonic, and I received his powers instead. I didn’t understand why until McNally postulated her family connection theory.”

Disgust bubbled up. It had all been some big improvisation
from a man caught between personal vengeance and doing what he thought was best for the world. “So you left your brother to rot in his own filth, while you stuck to your plan to slaughter us?”

“Spence was a murderer a hundred times over.”

“Maybe, but no one deserves to die like that. You’re just one big, fat fucking fraud, aren’t you?”

He wilted just a little. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“Would Annabelle have wanted this?” I asked, my voice quaking. “Would your wife and daughters still love you, knowing what you’ve done?” His daughters, who were potentially Meta, too—damn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Annabelle divorced me four years ago and took the girls to Europe. It’s all for the best. I’m sorry, child.”

He took aim at my head and squeezed the trigger.

I
threw up a shield, caught the backlash as the bullet ricocheted, and stumbled backward into the window’s frame. Broken glass cut my lower back and I cried out. The shield dropped. He fired again. I waited for the inevitable pain—for the bullet to tear through flesh and muscle and bone.

Nothing.

The fired bullet hovered in front of my eyes, six inches from striking distance. Just spun there like a freeze frame. I stared. Seward stared. A shadow moved by the door. I looked first.

Caleb stretched his little arm out and up, palm forward, like a child raising his hand in class. Wherever he’d been left, he had obviously gotten out. Dust and grime coated his face and clothes. His lips were puckered into a tiny hole, almond eyes wide and angry. I had never seen such intense fury on the face of a child.

“You hurt my daddy,” Caleb said. His voice was heartbreaking, even as the vengeful glint in his eyes froze my blood. He ignored me, even when I pulled away from the
window and screeched in pain. He only had eyes for Seward.

Seward’s eyebrows furrowed, then flattened. He looked at his hand—at the gun he held and could no longer manipulate. Confusion twisted his mouth into a grimace. Every muscle in his face went slack. A power struggle played out in the fifteen feet separating the two.

“Caleb,” I said, taking a step forward, my torn and bleeding back on fire.

“He hurt you, too,” the boy said. The gun in Seward’s hand began to turn, twisting back on the man holding it. My heart pounded in my ears. I couldn’t let the little boy kill. Seward wasn’t allowed off that easily, and no way did a child deserve to carry such an awful thing around for the rest of his life.

“Caleb, make him drop the gun. Please.”

Seward’s hand stopped moving. Caleb looked at me. Tactical error. With Caleb’s attention diverted, Seward gained the upper hand. His eyes sparked. Caleb winced, whimpered. He closed his eyes, his child’s mind caught up in a nightmare of Specter’s making. A silent war waged between the two telepaths, one with fifty years of life experience and one with five. A child versus a man, and I had no doubt Caleb would lose.

I just didn’t expect him to lose so fast. The air in the room became crisp, keen, like lightning about to strike. Twin sets of yellow-orange eyes glared at me, one child-size and one adult. I lobbed an orb at Seward—how could I bring myself to fire on a child?—and Caleb blocked it. He sent the orb pinging into the wall near McNally’s supine form. The orb struck and blasted a hole the size of a soccer ball through concrete and plaster.

Specter-Caleb spread his palm in my direction and then clenched his fingers. An invisible hand closed around my throat and squeezed tight. My lungs seized, desperate to draw in air. Black spots danced across my vision.

Was this how I died? Choked to death by a possessed five-year-old?

I was on my knees, but didn’t remember falling. I tried to concentrate on summoning an orb. Purple sparked, unable to coalesce. Gage’s voice was in my head, telling me over and over that he cared for me. That it was okay. I tried to say it back and couldn’t. I was dying. If life after death existed, I hoped he would know me there.

Roaring filled my ears. A tiny pin of lavender pricked the periphery of my mind. I latched on with all I had left, balled it up, and pushed. Power surged forward, along with the last of my strength.

The roar in my ears became a man’s scream. The pressure on my throat ceased. Air rushed into my starving lungs, and I collapsed on the floor. A few seconds passed before I mustered enough energy to push up with my left arm. I gasped, every joint aching. Caleb was huddled in the corner of the room nearest the mirror wall, arms around his knees, weeping. A big, black shape hulked over Seward’s body. It took a moment to process the sight: Marco’s panther form had Seward by the throat.

Time ticked by, each moment filled with my attempts to breathe and the quiet sound of Caleb’s sobs, and then the cat released his prey. Blood dripped from his long teeth, matting the fur around his mouth. He looked at me, feline eyes
reflecting the utter sorrow no real animal could ever hope to understand. He stood on three legs, limped sideways, and finally collapsed.

By the time I crawled to him, he had transformed back to Marco, lying on his side, broken fingers swollen to the size of D batteries, blood coating his mouth. He had a black eye, bruised jaw, and half a dozen minor scrapes. But he was alive and staring at me.

“Almost did not make it,” he panted. “
Lo siento
. So sorry.”

I wanted to laugh. It turned into a choked sob. Tears filled my eyes, burning my sore and damaged throat. “You made it in perfect time, pal, now don’t move.”

I crawled onward. Seward blinked at the ceiling. A burn the size of a half-dollar smoked just above his heart. Blood oozed from four wide puncture wounds in his neck. He made no attempts to stop the bleeding, and neither did I. More blood dripped from the corner of his mouth, joining the puddle on the floor beneath his head. I didn’t want to cry for him; the tears came anyway. Hot and sharp, they stung the corners of my eyes.

I touched his cheek. I had no words. There was nothing left to say.

Seward blinked once, and then the light faded from his eyes. His chest rose once more and stilled. No exhalation, no choking gasp. Angus Seward died quietly and unforgiven for so many sins.