Limitless (3 page)

Webster studied me with a practiced eye. His finger traced that rugged jawline as he seemed to consider what I said. “So working this one case with me would be like a holiday of sorts.” He smiled. His smile was boyish and damnable and
arrghhhhhh—

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes. I had a perpetual headache these days. My brother kept insisting that I go to the doctor for it, but I hated my doctor and knew what she’d say anyway—it was stress. Or the product of my abilities. Or an impending brain hemorrhage.

Part of me was rooting for the last one.

I pulled my hand back slightly and looked out at Detective Inspector Matthew Webster with one eye only. He gave me that smile and cocked his head invitingly. “Arghhhh,” I said, aloud this time. “Fine. I’ll canvas with you.” I saw his smile widen in victory. “But if we find nothing, I’m out of here so fast it’ll shatter your windows from the sonic boom. Deal?”

“Absolutely,” Webster said and stood, tugging his long tan coat free of the chair and then sliding it back under his desk. “Shall we, then?”

“We shall,” I said and followed him out. And I wondered why the hell I was doing this.

Then I saw him walk in front of me with the coat folded over his arm instead of blocking the view of his backside, and I knew exactly why I was doing it.

Chapter 5

Webster broke the silence as we rolled along the London streets. “You know, I saw you on the news.” I glanced to the side and he blushed, briefly, before expounding. “When it happened, you know.”

“You and everybody else in the world,” I said. This was all old hat to me by now.

“The whole world, eh?” Webster smiled. It was disarming.

I looked away in order to keep composed. “I went to China for a diplomatic mission last year, trying to foster cooperation because they lost pretty much all their metas at the opening of the war. This guy on the street recognized me and asked me if I could turn into a flaming dragon for him.” Technically, I could do that. I’d done it on footage that had millions of hits on YouTube. Of course, I hadn’t known I was being filmed at the time, and I hadn’t done it since.

Webster paused before answering. “I suppose it’s a rather impressive party trick.”

I just blinked, looking straight ahead out the rain-dappled windshield. “I think that’s the sort of trick that would send most people with any sense running from the party.”

“I suppose I’ve never been all that sensible,” Webster said, turning his attention back to the road. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling faintly.

“Know your limits,” I said, keeping an eye on him.

“A wise practice in general,” he replied. “Do you follow your own advice?”

“I have no limits,” I said quietly, looking back at the road as he accelerated through a green light.

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

I paused before answering, giving it some thought. “It’s not an easy thing, that’s for sure. Finding out you’ve got power—real power, the kind that has a real purpose behind it—and knowing you have to use it responsibly? It’s not quite as glamorous or glorious as you might imagine.”

“If you’ll forgive me saying so,” Webster said, nudging the car gently into a turn, “you sound like you’re a bit… worn out.”

“Probably.”

“Maybe you should seriously take that holiday. An actual one.”

“Can’t,” I said. “Every time I leave for a few days my life gets measurably worse. There’s only so much of me to go around, you know.”

“So you do have a limit,” he said, and I caught him smirking faintly.

“My patience is certainly limited.” I kept it relatively gentle, and by his expression I could tell he took it as banter. Which was good. Seriousness was my biggest drawback, and frankly, he was right. I did have limits. Except in the area of metahuman power. No one could match me there, at least no one I’d met in the last few years.

In that one area, I
was
limitless.

“So you’re… super strong, right?” Webster was eyeing me again. I was familiar with this sort of curiosity. I’d been on the receiving end of it more times than I could count when I went out in the field and had to cooperate with local law enforcement, other federal agencies, or even just people on the street.

“Yes.”

“And then there’s the whole dragon bit,” he said. “The flames are a nice touch, by the way.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But the fire is an independent thing. I just combined them when I had to kill Sovereign, that’s all.”

“You shot some sort of light at him, as well,” Webster said. “Some kind of web or something.”

“It’s a net,” I said. “Made of light. It’s pretty strong, tough to break out of.” I’d used it a lot lately. For the last couple years, actually. It was my non-lethal option for confining and restraining.

“And you can fly?”

“It’s how I got here so fast,” I said.

“You flew over without a plane?” Webster looked slightly astonished. “I mean, I knew they picked you up outside the city. When you said you’d flown into an empty field, I assumed—”

“It’s a nine-hour flight from Minneapolis,” I said. “Only leaves during normal airport operating hours. I wouldn’t have been here until tomorrow if I’d gone commercial.” I ran a hand back through my long, dark hair, which still felt a little frizzed even though I’d tried to contain it in a ponytail while I rode into London in the Foreign Office car.

“That means you must be able to fly at ridiculous speeds,” he said, not taking his eyes off of me. I gestured toward the road. He looked back with a hint of contrition but kept stealing glances at me.

“Supersonic, yeah,” I said. “At least until I hit the coast of Ireland, then I had to turn it down a little bit.”

“My God,” Webster said, shaking his head. “Why not just fly right into the middle of the city?”

“Your government,” I said with a slight tug of a smile at the corner of my mouth. “They didn’t want me flying where I can be seen. Apparently they want to sleep with me, they just don’t want to be seen with me the next morning.”

“Ah, yes, well,” he said, clearing his throat—out of embarrassment, I suspected. I thought his next question was going to be some variation of “What else can you do?” but he kept it in check. After a moment’s silence, he followed up with a question I did not expect. “So, with all that power at your fingertips, why did you decide to run yourself ragged working for your government?”

I opened my mouth and it hung like that for a moment.
That
was not a question I was used to getting. I had an answer anyway. “Because if I didn’t,” I said, “who would?”

He looked over, met my eyes, and nodded once. I would have sworn I saw a hint of sadness or something within them, but I wrote it off as me not knowing him very well. We lapsed into a comfortable silence, lulled by the quiet tapping of the rain at the windshield and the gentle thrum of the car’s engine as we drove onward.

Chapter 6

Philip had to take a good long scrub after finishing with the old man. He wasn’t dead, the crotchety old bastard, but Philip suspected he wanted to be. No one could lose that much skin and be sanguine about it. Except in the other sense of the word sanguine, of course—the bloody one.

“This is it?” he asked, taking a good long look out the window of the car. It was raining of course, as the London sky was prone to do, grey clouds hanging in a low ceiling over the scene. But he could still see the small house across the street. He had to look across the driver to see it, a worn-down brick house far on the outskirts. They’d been driving for a while to get here.

“This is it,” Liliana Negrescu said to him, her low, harsh voice tinged with a Romanian accent. She’d been living in London for years, he knew, but showed little sign of ever fully adapting. She was a sharp-faced girl—and she still looked like a girl, except in the darkness, where she looked like a scary, hard-edged witch he wouldn’t care to trifle with. Her dark hair was pulled back tight, and her black eyes flitted to look at the house.

“All right,” Philip said, buttoning his tweed jacket before he opened the side door to get out. “Quick and quiet is the name of the game, then. You take back door, I’ll take front.”

She acknowledged him with a slight hiss that was almost a signature for her. Liliana didn’t speak all that much, and when she did, it was straight to it. He liked that about her, but it was hardly her biggest selling point.

The knives: those were her biggest selling point.

They were both out of the car in a moment, moving quickly but casually. They kept to human speed, but when they reached the door just off the short drive, Philip knocked while Liliana disappeared along the side of the house without a sound. She wore street clothes. In them, she looked surprisingly normal, as long as one did not stop to ponder the vast darkness of her eyes.

Philip took a sniff of the wet air, a few drops of rain coming down on him as he stood outside the screen door, waiting for someone to answer it. He forced a smile onto his face. He was small of frame, and his glasses made him look even less intimidating, he thought.

If only they knew, no one would ever open the door for him.

The white door clicked open just a crack, inward. Philip kept the smile perched on his lips and angled his head to look in. There was a face there, that of a young man. Angus Waterman was his name. He was slightly paunchy and had a mane of red-brown hair. His eyes were small. He reminded Philip of a rat hiding in a hole and staring out at a threat.

“Yes?” Angus Waterman asked. Philip had the feeling he was looking at him as one would stare at a door-to-door salesman. He was going to be ever so disappointed.

“Mr. Waterman?” Philip asked and waited patiently for the answer. He already knew, of course, but this was the game to be played.

“Yes,” Waterman replied, still looking cagey. “Can I help you?”

“I doubt it,” Philip said smoothly, his smile broadening. “You can’t even help yourself, after all.”

Waterman took a moment to register the surprise before he attempted to slam the door. Philip managed to brace a hand in and stop him. Waterman was a weak meta, his physical strength so low on the scale that a strong human might have been able to overmatch him with a little effort.

And Philip was no human.

The door flew back open, Philip’s hand pressing an imprint into the wood as if it were wet clay. Waterman ran. Philip already knew exactly how that was going to play out. He stepped inside and closed the door gently behind him. No need to make a scene, after all. He wiped his feet on the mat, listening without much interest. It was all so terribly predictable, unfortunately. Took some of the fun out of it.

The scream was exactly as he’d known it would be when it came, the sound of Angus Waterman catching a punch to the throat. It cut off when Liliana landed a blow to the side of his head that knocked Waterman’s infantile brain into unconsciousness.

Philip, meanwhile, stepped into the kitchen. The kettle was boiling, just as he’d known it would be. He took a moment and poured a cup, taking his time as he heard Liliana in the back of the house. Philip knew what Waterman’s future entailed, and it involved a stint wrapped up in a rug. “Hit him again,” Philip called as he stirred a lump into his tea. “Otherwise he’ll wake up in the trunk and make a frightful ruckus.”

There was a short, sharp grunt of acknowledgment from the other room, followed by a dull thump. Philip felt a tingling sense of satisfaction and took his first sip of the tea. He made a face. It was quite cheap.

There was the sound of a car outside, and Philip froze. He reached out to his surroundings and felt a sense of urgency as the realization hit him, something he hadn’t predicted yet.

The police would be here in seconds.

And they had help.

Her
help.

“Liliana,” Philip called, icing the sense of discomfort he felt, “the police are arriving and shall be knocking momentarily. Be a dear and ready poor Angus for his journey.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the item Antonio had given him for just such an occasion. He could sense that it was going to make one hell of a bloody mess, but then, by day’s end, Angus Waterman wouldn’t be much in need of a house anymore. “I’ll need a moment to prepare for them before we set off…”

Chapter 7

I still wasn’t used to riding on the wrong side of the car or the wrong side of the road. We were in a town called Hounslow, on a street of brick homes that were called townhomes in America, sharing common walls with the residences immediately next to each house. There were breaks in between every other dwelling that allowed for tight alleyways. The space next to the house we were going to—domicile of one Angus Waterman, whom I didn’t remember at all—had been planted with a bank of trees. They didn’t have much space to work with, but it was a nice break between houses.

“You remember Angus?” Webster asked as we crossed the street. There were cars parked evenly down both sides, only a few scattered spaces available.

“Not really,” I said. “I’m not that good with… uh… people,” I added, just being honest.

Webster must have thought it amusing, because he let out a low chuckle. “Think he’ll remember you?”

“Probably,” I said. “I do tend to make an impression.” I froze before the white door and noticed it was just a hint ajar, with a palm print pushed into the wood. I stared at it for only a second before I pulled my gun.

“What the hell!” Webster started and took a step back. He looked murderously angry, and suddenly I was glad the pistol was in my hands, not his. “What is that?”

“A Sig Sauer P227,” I said, keeping my weapon at low rest as I sidled up to the door.

“You can’t have that here!” He muted his outrage to a respectable level in terms of loudness. The fury oozed with every word, though, unmistakable. “Handguns are illegal.”

“Yeah, well, his door is open, and my mental alarm is going off because someone has clearly forced entry,” I nodded to the indentation in the door. “That’s something it would take meta-strength to do. Now, are you coming in, or am I entering on my own?”