Family (7 page)

The next hundred bullets went smoother, and I felt the kink in my shoulder dissolving. Whatever scar tissue was left from my encounter with the Omega gunman was disappearing thanks to my meta healing. I thought about Zack, still lying in the medical unit, unable to heal anywhere nearly as quickly as me.

I missed the next shot completely, didn’t even hit the target.

He was weaker than I was, no doubt. His human physiology made him more prone to injury and less likely to shake it off. I’d had occasions where I’d been beaten nearly to death and twenty-four hours later there wasn’t a sign I’d even been hit. He, on the other hand, scarred. He bled, heavily, and for longer. I wasn’t sure if I was even still thinking about his injury. Now I was thinking about the look on his face when he found out about James.

I missed two more shots in a row, and didn’t bother for a third. I set the gun on the counter in front of me and took a deep breath.

I was reeling in the target when I heard gunfire from the stall next to me. Absorbed in my own problems, I hadn’t even noticed someone else enter the range, which was sloppy on my part. For the girl who always seems to have an Omega operative chasing her, paying zero attention is the fastest way to an ugly end. I stepped back from my spot, my booth, I thought of them, even though there was just a divider between me and the next positions on either side – and looked left. Someone ran through an entire magazine, fast, fifteen shots in rapid succession. I looked downrange and saw their target; it was fresh, and holes were appearing in it, most outside the silhouette of the human body at the center. In gun terms, that’s what we like to call ‘whoops’. That might not just be in gun terms, actually.

I caught a glimpse of curly, sandy blond hair as the shooter stepped back for a minute, rolling his shoulders as though trying to work some tension out of them. I didn’t want to offer unsolicited advice, but it wasn’t going to do a thing to improve his accuracy if he didn’t slow down and stop trying to blast through all fifteen rounds in ten seconds. I might have said it, too, but I knew better in this case. Hiding behind the clear plastic glasses that were supposed to protect him from stray shell casings was the face of Scott Byerly – solemn, determined and serious.

I approached Scott slowly from behind, taking my time as he ran through another magazine, managing to land only his first couple shots inside the silhouette. The most he could have hoped for was that the proximity of his fire would cause the perpetrator to suffer from a fearful case of soiled pants, because the bullets were unlikely to stop him unless he somehow leapt in front of one of them in a panic.

When he was finished, Scott stepped back and laid his gun down on the counter in front of him, barrel pointed downrange. If he’d known much about how to use a firearm, or if he’d been paying more attention during Parks’ lessons, he probably would have treated it more gingerly. He didn’t, though, and his face was stormy as I approached. He heard me, I knew, because his shoulders slumped as I came up behind him.

“Hey,” I said, pulling my ear protection down to rest around my neck. I pulled the ear plugs out and put them in my pocket, the little pliant pieces of foam only slightly larger than the first knuckle of my pinky finger. “How are you holding up?”

He didn’t answer, but stepped back to the gun, slapped another magazine into it and ran through the whole thing in about ten seconds, one shot after another. I barely had time to get my earmuffs back on before he loosed it, and when he was done, he still gave no indication that he’d seen or heard me. Of course, I knew he had. He was tense, his posture unnatural, stiffer than the usually laid-back Scott. He never took anything seriously. Or almost anything, I thought, remembering back to the time we’d met and clashed because I’d been responsible for the deaths of friends of his, then members of his family.

I sat there as he fiddled with the gun, reloading a magazine from a box of 9mm bullets sitting next to him. I waited, wanting to see if he’d even acknowledge me, wondering if for some reason he blamed me for something I had nothing to do with. After a moment, I turned and started away, my earmuffs back around my neck, hugging the sides of it snug.

“You think she fought?” Scott asked. I turned, and saw he was still loading the magazine, pushing the bullets into the clip with fumbling fingers. One dropped and it pinged against the concrete floor. He stooped to pick it up. “You think your mom hit her? Knocked her out? Or do you think Kat just went along with her?”

I had to think about it. What we’d seen of the car my mom had been driving gave some clues. The interior was bloody, and there was a bullet hole in the car’s upholstery. The fact that she’d used her hands to drain the memories of our agents that had been riding with Kat was a sign that she had probably done the same with Scott’s girlfriend. “I think my mom took her,” I said, stating an opinion I could only back up through conjecture, “because she realized she was a Persephone-type, and that…tends to be useful.”

“Yeah, I get that,” he said, almost snarling, and jammed another bullet into the magazine with savagery, pushing hard against the spring as if he could throttle it into giving Kat back to him. “What I’m asking you is if Kat just went along or if she fought your mom.”

“I think she fought,” I said, answering without thinking about it. I knew what he wanted to hear, and I sensed that anything else I said could be dangerous. Not for me, because I had all the confidence in the world that I could flatten him before he could so much as raise the gun at me (not that he would), but for him and his fragile state of mind. “Kat’s not the sort of girl that would let a stranger abduct her without putting up a fight.” After a second of reflection, I realized that this was probably true; no lie needed, even though I apparently was prepared to deliver one without thinking about it. Kat was a fighter; not, perhaps, as much as I would have considered myself to be one, but she was no weakling. She may have been blessed with the power to heal, but I’d seen her put a hurting on a few people since we’d begun working together.

“Yeah, I think so too.” Scott’s shoulders slumped again, and the next bullet he tried to put into the magazine went easier. “Where do you think she took her? Your mom, I mean—”

“I don’t know. I mean, we’re talking about a woman who locked me in a box one day and disappeared, not to return for six months.” I felt a tightness in my chest, a burning near my eyes, and I hated myself for it. “She’s not exactly predictable, you know? I mean, I kinda thought she was dead until she showed up and kicked my Aunt Charlie’s ass.”

“You thought she was dead?” He turned away again. “And that didn’t bother you?” His head tilted sideways to look at me.

I felt irritation rising, but was detached enough to realize it had little to do with Scott. “See above, re: locking me in a box and disappearing without warning or a trace. Not exactly behavior designed to build a warm and fluffy relationship with your offspring. She left me, Scott. To die, or to manifest and break out; either way, she left me to be picked off by Wolfe, and lucky for me the Directorate came along or who knows what Omega would be doing to me right now—”

“Huh.” He picked up another silhouette target and hung it, his fingers exercising more care with the clips that held it in place than they had with loading the bullets. “If she just…left you to Wolfe and you’re her daughter, what do you think she’s doing to Kat right now?” He held the switch and the motor buzzed, sending the hangar zipping downrange, the target fluttering along with it. “Kat doesn’t have anybody else,” he said, and his eyes came up, and I caught the hint of violence within, the stir beneath the surface, threatening to boil out. “No one else to care if she were to disappear. Or die.”

He turned, pointing the gun downrange, and I slapped my muffs back on as he began to fire. I heard every shot, each one a declaration of intent, the target a silent, black and white standin for my mother, each blast of primer and powder a small explosion of his rage blooming forth from the barrel of the gun. I turned my face away, as though I couldn’t handle the spectacle of him shooting at the target that was my mother by proxy.

I could hear the click after the last of the bullets was spent, and I looked up at the target, still whole, not a single perforation in the silhouette. He stood there, unblinking, a sort of disbelief visible behind the clear plastic of his protective eyewear. He stared, his mouth slightly open for a moment before I saw the physical reaction break down his cold resolve. “Son of a…” he said, and I had to stifle the deep desire to laugh. “Dammit,” he said, the timbre of his voice rising, and he threw the gun downrange where it clipped the bottom of the target, ripping it on the corner with the force of the throw. The gun continued, his meta strength carrying it all the way to the wall.

His hand came up again, and he extended a single finger. The air rippled around him, and a blast of water came out, focused, small, the size of a roll of pennies, and shot downrange. It impacted in the center of the target’s blank-white face, ripping a hole through the middle of it as though one of his bullets had hit the target. The splash of the water against the concrete wall in the distance was audible. His other hand came up and a broader blast of water followed, one that tore the target from the hangar and left it a sopping mess on the floor.

Scott turned back to me, his face twisted, breathing heavy, as though he had exerted everything. Without saying anything else, he walked to the stairs and left. I looked back to the range, where a thin trail of water stretched from the counter to the where the destroyed target lay and threaded off into the distance behind it.

Chapter 8

I left the range shortly thereafter, leaving Parks with nothing but a friendly nod and a wave. I crossed the hall to the training room, an open space with a wall holding every imaginable kind of weapon, from the eskrima sticks that had brought me so much joy over the years, to sickles, scythes, bo staffs, and a full range of swords. There were a half-dozen excellent katanas, and I chose one that I had practiced with before, and began a kata – a series of regimented martial arts moves rendered in sequence – that utilized the sword.

I was graceful, I was elegant, I was lethal. I watched myself in the long wall of mirrors opposite the door and the glass windows that allowed people walking down the hallway to look in and see what I was doing. I suppose I would have cared if the building got more traffic. M-Squad would pop in and out infrequently, maybe once a week, doing their own thing, but most of the time they stuck to their own floor in the dorms, which was on the other side of the campus. Except Parks. He was here constantly. A way of life.

Otherwise, it was Scott, Kat and myself. Sometimes agents or other Directorate employees would come to the gun range to practice their firearms skills. I think the agents had to do a certain amount of practice per week as a part of their jobs, because I always tended to see them on the range on Monday morning. After that, it was pretty quiet.

Though after the last week, and the slaughter of so many of those agents by Omega, I guessed it was going to be quiet around here for a while, until they restaffed. If they restaffed.

I went through a kata I had done about a million and a half times before. Mom taught me dozens of them, in the basement, and most of them were interchangeable in terms of the weapon you could use – or no weapon at all. The katana was light and well-balanced enough for me to use it one-handed. I still struck with my other hand as a fist, practicing as if to pretend my primary hand, the one without the sword, were striking to stun, to distract, and then the blade followed up. You didn’t use a blade unless you were ready to kill. Although you could wound with one, it was uncertain, and better not to take a chance with anything you didn’t want dead. Mom taught me that. A blade raised in anger is for killing, nothing else.

I moved gracefully through the kata to the end and stopped, the blade poised. I stood there, sword at full extension, holding my position, and looked to the mirror to check my technique, which was flawless. It should be. I’d practiced it twenty times a week since I was twelve, with and without weapons. Even now, outside of my mother’s influence, I found it to be the habit I couldn’t break, the remnant of the past that kept coming back, even though she had disappeared. It stayed with me, and after Scott, Kat and Parks had all called it a day, I kept coming back here, to this place, and practicing, as though it were something that was so ingrained that it was in my core and couldn’t be shed, like a second skin hiding beneath my first.

“Very nice,” came the voice from the door. I hadn’t heard it open, which was unusual, but then the man standing there with his arms folded was the disarming sort anyway, the type that I wouldn’t have felt threatened by even if I’d seen him coming. He’d earned enough of my trust that I wouldn’t have jumped like a scared cat; anyone else catching me in the middle of a form unexpectedly might have (would have) gotten a much different reaction.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” I said, and wiped my forehead, my long sleeve catching the sweat that had begun to bead there. The practice room was actually quite comfortable, but my practice was exerting – every strike, block and attack was practiced at full tilt, nothing held back, but with all discipline and control. When I strung several katas together in sequence it became very good exercise, if I didn’t take a break in between. I looked at the clock hanging over the door and realized I had been practicing for over an hour. “And it’s not that easy to sneak up on me, so my congratulations.”

“I don’t think I can claim much credit for that,” Dr. Zollers said, the irony bleeding through into his words. “The building could have been burning down around you and I doubt you would have noticed.”

“Those are the things I tend to perceive,” I said, finding my way back to the far wall and replacing the katana on the pegs that waited for it. The curved blade fitted perfectly into the scabbard and I hung it back where it belonged after wiping the sweat off the handle. “You know, black smoke billowing around the ceiling, heat spiking to uncomfortable levels, flames all around.” I turned to find him unmoved, still standing by the door, relaxed. “Unthreatening psychiatrists in sweater vests don’t tend to set off my smoke detectors.”