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part #38 of Out of the Box Series Series
My fault.
How many people had died? I wondered. There were four million in the metro. Maybe less depending on how you defined the boundaries. More depending on how far this death sentence stretched.
Had every one of them died?
“Oh, shit,” I whispered, and scrambled for my phone, causing the dogs to flee. I scooped it off the floor, the Cassidy-made casing sparing it (mostly) from my wrath. I hurriedly unlocked it and clicked the text message button. Presented with a field of people saying, “CALL ME!” and wanting to know how I was doing, I scrolled, seeking out that last exchange I'd had twelve hours earlier.
And I found it...only a few hours back. Two texts from Ariadne that had gone unread:
Things are bad here.
Then:
Don't blame yourself.
I fell back on my haunches and launched my phone out the window. Dragging my knees close to my chest, I let out a sound that threatened to break every window in the house, if only I put a little Brance into it.
But I didn't.
“It's my fault,” I whispered to no one...but also to everyone, because surely everyone knew it was true.
How could you have known? Brianna asked, pushing herself back into the front of my mind. Think about it, Sienna. This isn't the sort of thing you had tons of warning on. No one could have predicted–
She stopped.
Because we both had the same thought at the same time.
I lifted my head, staring into the darkness, a cold rage spreading over every limb, every digit, every square inch of my body.
“That's bullshit,” I whispered.
Because someone absolutely could have predicted it – and surely had seen it coming.
I stood, wobbling on my still-drunken legs, and stormed toward the back door, barely touching the ground. I burst through it without even opening it, sending a shower of wood and glass everywhere and giving no shits about the blood it drew, only caring I had to get out of this house, had to get airborne, had to go west–
“You knew,” I muttered in pure fury, and then screamed it to the west wind as it blew angrily and cold in my face. “You sonofabitch – you knew, Harry, and you didn't tell me–”
Chapter Seventeen
Los Angeles, California
December 22nd
11:15 P.M. (Central Time)
I made it to California in just over an hour and I didn't care whose windows or houses shook as I made it happen. I probably set off early-warning alarms all over the North American continent and maybe the world. I certainly woke children over every major city I passed, was pretty certain I set a new personal record for speed–
And I cared about none of it.
I burst through the double doors of Kat Forrest's Hollywood Hills mansion, sending wood and glass exploding inward as though smashed down by a speeding garbage truck. Just yesterday I would have called the noise it made 'apocalyptic.'
But that word held new meaning now for me, and thus no longer applied.
Kat came around the corner, weary and wan, her face drawn in a tight, pissed line, though she seemed only mildly surprised. “Calm down, Sienna.”
I shot her with a burst of ice that covered her over from toes to neck, making a little Kat-sicle out of her. “In your experience does telling a woman who's righteously pissed off to calm down ever work?”
“You're drunk,” Kat said, trying to keep her teeth from chattering together.
“And you're an asshat,” I said, wandering past without bothering to give her the benefit of one ounce of my regard. “Where is he?”
Something flashed to my left, and I felt my body rocket from 0 to 100 in a quarter-second. Smashing into the far wall of a living room, I caught wood girders, drywall, and a couch before I came rolling to a stop three rooms away.
Wolfe, I summoned, and the power of healing came upon me.
I rose up as if from the dead, and through the holes in the wall and dust motes in the air, I could see who'd just laid the whammy on me.
“Don't get in my way, Olivia,” I said, staring Ms. Brackett down. She was in a sleep shirt, clearly crashing with Kat for the evening instead of spending company funds on a hotel room. She'd let her long, blond hair down and was standing right in my path, between me and Kat and the rest of the house.
I glanced around, taking note of the fact I was in a greenhouse of some sort. The plants were starting to lift and probe, and I had a feeling I knew what was coming next, so...
Lighting off a blast of frost such as Los Angeles had not seen in many a year, I floated back through the holes in the wall and found Kat-sicle still iced like her beloved plants, but a truly pained look on her face. “You've lost it, Sienna.”
“I always thought of you like Poison Ivy, that Batman villain? But you're not. Well, you're Ivy,” I said, chuckling, “but I'm Poison.”
“Sienna, don't–” Olivia started to say.
I didn't let her. I had zero time for her well-meaning shit.
With a Brance scream directed right at her I brought her to her knees; sweeping in, I hovered a hand inches from her now-bleeding ears and let loose with all the charge of Jamal's Thor powers that I had.
They weren't, much, frankly. Usually suitable for charging phones or powering TV remotes, but this one was directed into Olivia's ear canal and conducted by her own blood.
She jerked and spasmed and screamed–
And then she collapsed unconscious.
“Sienna, what are you doing!” Kat's own voice hit a register of concern that she never tended to reach these days. “Look at yourself!”
I turned my head slowly to look at her, and by the look on her face I knew that I wouldn't want to be in my way right now. “Where...is...he?”
Kat only waited a moment to answer. “Back there,” she said, lifting her head, which was about all she could do, encased as she was in ice. “But don't you dare–”
I blasted her with the hardest, least yielding faerie light webs I'd ever cast, and they shattered my Kat-sicle statue and sent her plowing into her wall with enough force to smash her head against it. Her head lolled, and she went out, still breathing but definitely now in La-La Land in more ways than one.
The obstacles cleared, I moved forward, intent on my target. The fact that he'd known, he'd EFFING KNOWN this was coming and couldn't be bothered to spare a frigging word of warning to me–
Well. I might just have to kill him for that. Because I was in that kind of mood.
Coming around the corner I saw a bedroom door waiting. He surely saw this coming, too, and maybe he had words for me. Or fists. I didn't care which. I'd killed his kind before, and nothing he'd ever said or done – not when we were lovers, not when he helped me out of the deepest jams I'd ever found myself in – were going to spare him my wrath for letting Minneapolis and St. Paul be turned into lifeless craters with the corpses of people I'd known and loved and cared about still dotting the ruin.
I kicked the door open and it blew off its hinges like a Reed-force hurricane had just blown through. “All right, Harry,” I said, sweeping right into the barely lit room, “time for us to...”
With a blink of surprise I took the scene in.
Harry was there, for sure. Lying in bed, staring straight at the ceiling, a breathing tube down his throat and a machine hissing slowly by the bedside. A startled-looking woman with a stethoscope stood by his side.
I stared at the tubes springing from his throat, and had to revise my intent, but didn't quite get the change to my mouth in time to keep myself from saying something dumb.
“...talk?”
Chapter Eighteen
“This is bullshit,” I said to Harry and his apparent nurse, trying to fit what I was seeing in with what I'd come here to do. I floated over to his bedside and gave him a ringing slap across the face. The physical force moved him, but he barely blinked. He definitely didn't make eye contact.
“Mr. Harry has not spoken in months,” the terrified nurse managed to croak out. “Not since I was hired, for sure. And Ms. Kat said not before that, either, for some time.”
“This is just a setup,” I said, grabbing his hand and letting it drop. It plopped to the bed, lifeless, though there was definitely a pulse. “He's playing pretend so I don't beat his ass for what he's done.” I lifted off, putting myself right over him so I could look him dead in the eyes. “Not funny, Harry. You're not getting off this easily.”
“He can hear you,” the nurse said, “but he will not respond.”
I stared at him for a few seconds, trying to decide what to do. My hands were shaking visibly. I'd come here for a reason, and I wasn't going to be satisfied without fulfilling that purpose.
“He'll respond to me,” I said, and thrust my hands against his cheeks.
“What are you doing?” the nurse asked with rising alarm. She grabbed my wrist, but couldn't move me.
The burning started, so sweet and sudden, and I felt myself yield to the feeling, to the sensation of my succubus powers. The slow sizzle of joy as I felt a soul stir in him, and–
I rode that feeling into Harry's mind, as time froze around us.
Harry's mind was a different beast. A sort of version of the dreamwalk, soul-draining a person felt much more...personal. I was in control, utterly, in a way that I wasn't in a dreamwalk. As Odin and others had shown over the years by shifting that world to their liking.
But here...I found myself in a dark place, the sky lit by fractures that resembled shards of a broken mirror. There were shadows around me, hints of Harry Graves scattered all around. I walked closer to one and saw it was him, cast in darkness like a silhouette, sitting on the ground, mumbling to himself.
“Harry,” I said, and my voice echoed through this illusion of his mind.
The dark shade of Harrison Graves looked up at me, and his eyes were black pools. “Knew you'd come,” he said dully. Unsurprised.
“Then you knew I'd be mad,” I said.
“Knew you'd want to kill me,” Harry said, turning away. “Me dead is better than you dead.” Then he cackled madly. “But you die anyway, so...” He shrugged wildly, then yelled at the sky. “...we all die!”
I stared at him, and it started to dawn on me that maybe – just maybe – his silence wasn't an act. That it wasn't a thing I could just circumvent by hijacking his memories with a soul-drain. “Fine. How do I die, Harry?”
He turned his head back and stared at me as though I were the thickest dullard on earth. “Which time? So many times.” He lowered his voice to a hushed whisper. “So many ways.”
I grabbed the shadowed Harry and lifted him up. “Now hear this, you cryptic pile–”
But he vanished as though made of shadow, dripping between my fingers and slipping away.
“Dammit,” I said, glancing around. There were more Harry shadows about; one over there, playing pool. Another sitting alone at what looked like a card table. All of them were deep within the penumbras of this place, barely visible. “What kind of game is this?”
“Poker,” the one at the table announced, and laid down a hand.
“Pool,” the one with the cue in his hand said, making an aggressive break that sent balls all over the table.
I strolled past the one at the pool table; he'd drilled one of the balls into the corner pocket and I slid it out. It was the black 8.
Shadow Harry looked right at me. “Game over, see?”
I went past him, to the poker-playing Harry. His cards were laid out on the dark green felt, and I could barely see them.
A Queen of hearts, a 10 of Clubs, 7 and 3 of Spades, and a 5 of Diamonds.
“All I have is the Queen of Hearts,” he said, looking at me with those soulless eyes. “It's not enough.”
I looked around the table; other players had appeared, cast in shadow. Their hands were on the felt, though – two pair, Aces over 7's, a full house with jacks over tens, and the last...
The Royal Flush of Spades.
“We lose,” Shadow Harry said. “All of them will beat us.” And he bowed his head.
I seized him by his shadowy face and lifted him out of the chair. He didn't react in pain; he didn't react at all. Just stared back at me with black eyes. “Tell me what I want to know,” I said.
He didn't react. “What do you want to know?”
I let loose of him, and he stumbled back a step, barely remaining upright, as though a stiff breeze might plow him down. “Why didn't you tell me, Harry?”
His mouth slightly open, he concentrated on me. “About what?”
“About wh – about Minneapolis, Harry!” I exploded.
“Oh,” he said, and turned away. He shuffled along a few steps. “Oh.”
“You left me,” I called after him, not sure any of this was even getting through. “You bailed on me when things got rough. Ran to your mommy. And now – what? You couldn't even spare me a mention of the fact my city was going to get leveled?” I followed him, gave him a shove that almost sent him tumbling. “Why? So you could fall apart?”
“But I am apart,” he said, turning slowly to me. “Been apart since I left.” Then he laughed maniacally. “Get it? Apart? A part. A...heart? Apart.” He mimed with his hands as though his heart were split in two.
My patience for metaphor being low, I almost hit him with my eyebeams. “What the hell are you on about?” I just kept myself from shoving him again, being as this was a vision that I'd thrust into his mind as I absorbed parts of it into my own. “I just want to know – why didn't you tell me that Minneapolis and St. Paul were going to be destroyed?”
He stared at me like a cipher he couldn't quite break. “Because Minneapolis and St. Paul were going to be destroyed.”
“That's not an answer!”
“It is,” he said, and started to melt, his legs becoming one with the black, oily, rippling floor.
I seized him by the face and hauled him up, but still he dissolved to the knees while I held him, and it began a slow creep upward. “Why wouldn't you tell me?”
“Because I love you,” he said, his eyes flashing for but a moment from that black and empty pool. Then he was gone, melted away, and I heard laughter behind me.
“It's a funny thing about love,” the Harry at the poker table said, staring at the cards in front of him. “It makes you weak. In the knees, in the head.” He looked right at me. “Blurs your sense of reason. Makes you do stupid things.”
I clenched my fists. “I am about to do stupidly painful things to you if you don't start making sense soon.”
His whole face twitched. “Hurt me all you want.” He chuckled. “You can't do any worse than I already have.” And he laughed, but it was mirthless, pained, and painful to hear. “Besides...I don't have the words.”
Something occurred to me, something that kept me from grabbing up this shadow Harry and wringing whatever life there was out of him. “No words?”
He shook his head. “No words.”
“Then...show me,” I said, easing closer. “Show me, Harry. We're in your mind right now. No words needed. Just...show me.” And I tried to smile, but it hurt, so I stopped.
He thought about it for a second, and then, a shrug. “Okay.”
And he was gone.
“Oh...okay?” I looked around.
All the shadow Harrys were now gone.
“Okay...what?” I asked, trying to figure out where he'd gone.
“OKAY.” The word rumbled and the world shook.
And suddenly...
...I saw.
Chapter Nineteen
I died, and it hurt.
It happened in so many ways, so many times, that my screams began to lose meaning, my heart felt as though it were giving out, and my throat was rubbed raw from the anguished howls coming out of me.
“You were going to die, Sienna,” Harry said, and the tumbling cascade of painful visions that culminated in my own death, over and over, stopped. His voice was everywhere and nowhere at once. Anchored in the recesses of his mind – his unhinged mind – I could hear him everywhere, including in my own.
I saw a flash of conflicting kills, moments in which I died, plainly and obviously and in agony. Someone hit me with a light pole so hard my brains were dashed from my head, the sound of my skull splitting like a ripe cantaloupe. Another time I was impaled through the face with something sharp and terrible; the next I was smashed by a van being dropped upon me, and the one after I seemed to be crushed to paste beneath a giant foot.
Knives were slung into my eye sockets and through to my brain, vehicles smashed into me, bright blue plasma boiled my skin and dissolved the tissue beneath into particulate matter...
...And I died.
Over and over and over. Painfully and repeatedly.
“Harry!”
I screamed the word, and the cracks in the black mirror edges around me sparkled, kicking me out of the vision of my repeated death. I was breathing heavily.
Harry walked, his soft footsteps tapping out a steady cadence. Now he wore a suit, a dress shirt, and his shoes made crisp noises with every step. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed perfectly composed in a way that none of his other personalities had been. “Hello, Sienna.”
“You seem...normal...ish,” I said, trying to catch my breath from watching myself get slaughtered over and over.
“I'm a simple recording from an earlier point in my life,” he said, smiling tensely. “Before the wheels started to come off. Because I saw this coming. Saw you coming here, months ago...”
“Great, so you're a not-crazy Harry?” I asked. “Because I could use an explanation that makes some sense.”
“So you said, and so I heard,” he said, keeping his hands in his pockets, “all those months ago. So...” And he extended a hand to indicate a light on the horizon, “...you want an explanation? Here you go.”
The world changed around me, and I found myself watching the moment of our breakup in Ariadne's basement six months ago.
“This was the moment I saved your life,” Harry said, and then the scene flashed forward. I saw my house in Tennessee, saw me cuddled on the couch with him, warm against his side. “Because you were going to have to leave Minnesota regardless. And I could have cushioned your landing.” He made a drinking motion. “Kept you from the hard knocks you took. The hard choices you made that you regretted.”
