Power (27 page)

Whose empire?
The tenor of the voice in his head changed just a little, but Marius could still hear his own within it, and it put him at ease.

Chapter 46

Sienna

Now

We hit the lobby with the crash of gunfire all around us, rifles thundering from the FBI Hostage Rescue team snipers hiding in the woods behind us covering both sides and from the mercenaries Century had hired who were returning fire and trying to get in a few shots at us from where they were being systematically chopped down by the FBI’s superior sniper ability. It was a free-for-all before we even hit the lobby, and after we burst through the doors, well—

Well, it was like a ballet of frickin’ death, that’s all.

The lobby was glass on the front and done up in a sweeping lodge style with a ton of rustic décor combined with concrete. It was a natural extension of the architectural scheme we’d seen outside, something somebody in the seventies had thought was a really good idea. LSD was big in the seventies, right?

Now it looked like the northwoods version of the Matrix lobby scene. Bullets were already flying at us as I came in the front door. There were a series of planters leading up to a three-story waterfall that cascaded down behind the registration desk in the middle of the massive lobby.

The glass panes that lined the front of the room shattered within seconds of me leading the way into the building, my team a few dozen steps behind me. I’d meant to draw the mercenaries’ fire to me, and wow, boy, did I succeed in a big way.

I rolled behind a concrete planter and heard a hundred rounds lodge in the cover I’d chosen. I’d heard about auditory exclusion, a temporary loss of hearing caused by an excess of adrenaline, but it obviously hadn’t kicked in for me. My adrenaline was in overdrive, but I could hear a hell of a lot of gunshots, and they were
loud
.

I edged my gun just slightly around the side of the planter and fired in the direction of the nearest shots. I had no hope of hitting anything, but the gunfire tapered slightly as I did so, which was my main goal. I didn’t know how many assault rifle rounds it would take to bust through two sides of a concrete planter and the three feet of dirt in the middle of it, but I was guessing a hundred rounds per second would eventually do the job.

Fortunately, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had given me an app for that.

I tossed the flashbangs that had been hanging off my belt and curled into a ball. I heard Reed in my ear as I did it. “Stacked up just outside!” he called.

“Two seconds!” I replied, and there was a blast of light as blinding as Amaterasu even behind the planter and a thunderous noise that sounded like the bass roar of grenades exploding around me.

I heard the chatter of guns firing from where I’d entered the building and saw Reed, Kat and Scott making their way into the building with their guns ablazin’. I knew Zollers, Janus and Foreman would be somewhere outside, coordinating their powers to throw a damper on the area as much as they could.

I came up shooting, pegging three guys in less than three seconds, headshots all. Tangos down and all that jazz. Yippy-ki-yay.

I saw the flare of a gun blind fired from behind the registration desk in the middle of the lobby and realized that all the holdouts had cover by this point, because anyone out in the open when those flashbangs went off had been shredded by Reed and company’s entry. Reed was lurking behind a planter a row up from mine, and Scott was next to him. Kat was behind the planter opposite mine on the right side. She was reloading, I saw, and I threaded my way forward along the side of the lobby while firing a couple shots at the front desk. I hoped there was no clerk hiding behind the desk, but there wasn’t much I could do about it at this stage if there was.

The steady chatter of an AK-47 answered me, aimed at approximately my last position. It hosed the tree above me with a good ten rounds before it ceased.

“Harper,” I said, “call it out.”

“You’ve got three, say again—zero three—tangos behind the planters in front of you. At least two are definitely still in play, and the third is either wounded or playing a real good game of possum. You have three more tangos behind the registration desk along with a possible civilian. Civilian has their head down and is curled up, left hand side. Tangos are on your right.”

“And the rest of Century?” I asked as I reloaded, sticking a fresh mag into my Sig.

“Acting cautious. They’re all clustered in the labyrinth of hallways behind the lobby, moving real slow.”

“Roger that,” I said. “First things first, the tangos behind the planters—”

“Got ’em,” Kat whispered, then I heard something truly horrific.

The trees in every one of the planters came to life simultaneously, with the sound of branches cracking and whipping through the air. I poked my head up in time to see a man jerked from the ground with a broken branch impaled through his shoulder. He screamed as the tree jerked him to his feet, and I shot him in the head out of mercy as he was ripped in two by the strength of the branch heaving through his chest.

I heard another call from across the lobby and watched a guy get hit by a stray branch like it was clubbing him. It came down on him once and he staggered. It landed on his head the second time and flat-out crushed it like a boot on a grapefruit. He dropped and didn’t move, and the slow ooze of red across the floor signaled to me that his resistance was done.

There was the heavy sound of branches whumping against something on the ground from behind the third tree, the one nearest the registration desk, and I cautiously looked out to see it flailing against the ground. There was no noise from behind the planter, and I thought about what Harper had said about the last tango being either dead or playing possum. I figured there was no doubt which it was now.

“Front desk,” I muttered. “Three on the right—”

“Got ’em,” Scott said, and there was a rumbling from the waterfall above.

I had an inkling what was coming before it happened, but that made it no less spectacular when the stone fixture three stories up burst with a sudden explosion of excess liquid. It came like a flood had just blown over the edge and when it landed, it took on a life of its own. It formed a circular ball of solid water, like an aquarium filling before our eyes, and the cascade of water joining it from above continued to fill it as it held there, without glass to hem it in, only the will of Scott Byerly to keep it in control.

I could see the three mercs trapped inside as the invisible aquarium continued to fill. It seemed to stop and then I saw the men caught within kick and thrash in a frenzy as the water kept pouring in but the space it occupied grew no larger.

It took me until the first man began to bleed into the liquid to realize that Scott was compressing the mercenaries inside the aquatic prison. He wasn’t just drowning them—he was crushing them under the weight of all that water in a confined space. It took only another moment before the water just went red, too red to even see anything in, and I started to wonder why he was keeping it in that shape.

Then Century’s first metas burst out of the hallway to the right of the registration desk, and he let it all go in that direction.

It blew out in focused pulses no bigger in diameter than my wrist, shooting in streams a foot or two feet in length. It hit the first meta and he lost his head from the force of it. The second guy caught it in the midsection and when the flush cleared, I could see the shirt of the girl behind him through the hole it had made in him as he toppled.

The water drained quickly, Scott directing it into blast after blast at our enemies, sending them scrambling for cover in the hallway. A lot of people were too slow to dodge, and the hall cleared within seconds, leaving a half dozen corpses and a few moaning survivors behind when the water finally finished rushing out.

“Let’s go,” I called and advanced behind the registration desk. “Harper, status report.”

“You’ve got a damned mess,” she said, “that’s the status.”

“Not quite what I was looking for,” I muttered as I sunk behind the desk. There was a bloody mess behind it, whatever Scott had left of the mercs he’d trapped glistening in a puddle on the floor. But there was also a woman, shuddering and breathing heavily, all curled up in a ball. “Miss?” I said, and shook her. “Get up, get out of here.”

“What?” She looked at me sideways, still in the fetal position. “What?”

“Get up, get out of here,” I repeated. “Out the front door, now!”

I must have put enough command in my voice to make her hear it, because she did move, quickly uncurling and standing, her bare legs covered with spots of blood where the skirt she wore hadn’t protected her from the mess made by Scott’s maneuver. She moved, though, moved like her life depended on it.

“Kat,” I said and nodded at her. “Get her out. Harper? The other civilians?”

“Kitchen crew is out,” Harper said. “HRT has got all but one of the maids and they’re moving now. Probably ten seconds to intercept with the last maid. The package is moving up the driveway—”

“Understood,” I said and looked back over the top of the desk at Scott and Reed, who were waiting behind the last of the planters. “Boys, be ready to move.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Reed said with a tight almost-smile.

“Oh, and Reed?” I said, catching his attention. “Let ’em reap the whirlwind.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said again, this time with a grin. He stepped from behind the planter and aimed down the hallway with his hands, thrusting them out from his chest like he was throwing a snake from his upper body. It made a roar as the air around us was sucked into a vortex that rushed down the hallway to the right of the desk. It was loud and looked like a tornado, a wall of grey winds rushing through the confined space. I saw bodies and limbs poke out of the wall of air at various points, and even heard a scream or two over the sound.

“Harper?” I asked.

“Last maid is on the move,” she said. “Kitchen staff is clear, HRT is disengaged, moving back to the treeline for rendezvous and extraction. Black Hawks will be landing in zero-three minutes on the south lawn.”

“Roger that,” I said. “Move out!”

I flung a hand at Reed and Scott and saw them motor, running through the lobby. Just outside I could see a van rolling across the parking lot. I stayed in cover by the registration desk, watching the right-hand hallway as I waited. Scott and Reed dodged out through the broken glass at the front of the lobby as I heard the engine of the van roar just outside.

It crashed through the metal framework that had held the doors just as the last of Reed’s tornado was dying down in the hallway. I could see movement down there, motion as I covered with my pistol. I grabbed one of the bullpup rifles from the floor and held it up, looking through broken optics. I frowned and ripped the sights loose and tossed them aside. I was a meta; I didn’t need fancy sights.

I glanced back to see the agent shaking his head in the van, which was now parked squarely in the middle of the lobby. “Go!” I shouted to him and saw him nod. He opened the van door and bailed, tearing off out the hole he’d just created in the lobby.

I heard movement behind me and raised the rifle in time to splash a lady who came around a corner. I pegged her right in the brain and she dropped in her tracks. I fired again for good measure, just to discourage anyone from coming from that direction. I didn’t need much more time, just enough for the agent to get far enough away that the others could cover him and I could—

I heard the footsteps only a millisecond before I got leveled. The hit to the back of the head was catastrophic, all but scrambling my brain. I brought Wolfe to the front of my consciousness but the next hit was so devastating, landing against the side of my skull, that I forgot everything—that there was a plan, that I was supposed to be doing something, what my name was—everything.

I came to on the floor, staring up at a face that I didn’t recognize, but one that was filled with purest fury and a seething rage. Then I saw another, and another, and another. Men, women, creatures I barely recognized as human. My head was swimming, I was dazed beyond belief—but even still, I recognized the danger.

All metas.

The moment of peace lasted only another second, and then they fell upon me in a frenzy of kicks and punches that drove me gladly into the realm of unconsciousness.

Chapter 47

I opened my eyes to find myself facing a room full of people, and I sighed through bruised and battered ribs. “Ugh,” I managed to get out. “
You
people.” At least I thought it sounded like that.
Wolfe
, I said in my mind, and felt him stir to come forth.

“Us people,” Claire said with mild amusement. She was right there, front and center, and I remembered without having to work very hard that I truly despised her. “Us people, who have categorically devastated you.”

I felt my swollen lips subside a bit and the pain began to disappear. I pulled Wolfe back from healing me. I needed to be functional, but having them see me go from wounded and beaten to flawless in seconds would probably tip them off that some things were seriously amiss. Then I remembered that Claire had seen me fly, and I realized she probably had at least an inkling of what I was capable of at this point. Clearly not a full understanding, or I’d already be dead.

I could work with that.

“I wouldn’t go so far as ‘devastated,’” I said, a little cocky, putting a slur into it. “But you certainly did just outnumber me and deliver a beating. Oh, yes, you’re all very impressive at a hundred-to-one.”

“We don’t have a hundred anymore,” Claire said, and she sounded snippy. There were a lot of angry faces behind her. “You saw to that.”

“Mmmhmmm,” I said. I walked back the cockiness a little bit on this one. I could have said so much worse; admire my restraint.

A guy came down into the room, which was a sort of big conference room, like something you’d see in the United Nations if they held UN meetings in a seventies-era resort in the Midwest. He had a couple people following him and wore a battered suit that looked like it had been through at least twelve ringers. He paused just in front of Claire, and she looked at him.