“You don’t need to say it,” she yanked her hand away. “I don’t sting you, you don’t sting me.”
“Sting you?” I turned away from her. “Little scorpion,” I smacked my lips together. I wanted nothing but more scotch, even though the second glass had barely made its way down to my stomach, but it was time to quit, “stinging is your thing. I’m Sienna Nealon, okay?” I turned back to her. “I don’t sting the things that piss me off …” I breathed in heavily, “… I scourge them from the damned earth. Now …” And I started to step, figuring on packing my bag, but I tripped instead, my legs feeling a little woozy.
I hit the ground, sharp stinging pains ringing their way up my elbows. I bounced back to my feet a second later, head swimming from the quick double more-than-shot. “Okay. I’m okay.” I looked around. “Uhm … all right.” I nodded a couple times. “So …” I clapped my hands together. “… Who wants to drive?”
7.
Packing was a breeze, thankfully. I didn’t have much, and what I did have was easily shoved into my suitcase. There were no clothes waiting in the laundry, because Reed had put all of mine away for me before leaving. I perhaps should have found it awkward that my brother was laundering my unmentionables and then putting them in the drawers in my room, but honestly, I had zero interest in washing my own clothes, so it was something I’d learned to overlook in the last few months.
“We’ll head north,” I said as I opened the door and stepped out on the landing, bag slung over my shoulder. Cassidy was just behind me, and Eilish was bringing up the rear, locking the door as we left the condo. She’d been pretty quiet since I’d made the decision to leave. For someone who’d been so keen on getting out just a little while earlier, she’d changed her tune pretty fast.
Or stopped singing, I guess. Because of the quiet.
“Oh, good,” Cassidy said acidly. “Because if we headed south, we’d be in the Gulf of Mexico within minutes, and if we headed west we’d be aiming for Texas where this meta is not—as yet.”
“I notice you didn’t throw in a chance to make fun of her for not saying east,” Eilish said, pocketing the car keys with hardly any effort. She was slick, a practiced thief, and those movements carried into her everyday life, I’d noticed.
Cassidy flushed only mildly. “If you were to head east, you could catch Interstate 75 or Interstate 95, both major north-south feeder arteries on the east coast.”
“In other words, that would make sense, so she didn’t want to make fun of me for … not suggesting that?” I had lost the thread. I blame scotch. “Anyway … northward. We go north. Maybe via 90-75—whatever she said.” I waved a hand at her. “I leave the navigation to you, Cassidy.”
“Fine,” she said, falling into a hurried step behind me. If I looked skeletal, she looked like bone fragments strung together with dental floss. “Where are we going?”
I cast a look back at her. “I dunno. Where are we going?”
Now she flushed a shade darker, and her asthma acted up, very audible in her next breath, which sounded like an unintended hiss. “Well, given that we know little to nothing about this—this villain,” I thought that was a bit rich coming from a lady who’d once conspired to humiliate, destroy and kill me, all from afar and with the aid of my worst enemies, “I think our first step is to visit the scene, as best we can.” She whitened a little as she seemed to decide the course, “to, um, canvas for clues.”
“In a place where the cops and federal agents are thicker than the mosquitos on warm nights around here?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “I think we’re a lot better off getting to within a day’s drive of the scene and then waiting there until this guy shows his face again.”
Cassidy was frowning so deeply behind me I could hear it in her voice. “Your plan is just to wait for him until he shows up again?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Were you watching that thing unfold? Where he sent the bridge to the bottom of the bay?”
She caught up with me, coming alongside me and shooting a fiery look that was probably burning holes in the windows of the other condos we walked past on the way to the stairs. “Yes. Of course.”
“Then you should know,” I said, really wishing I’d brought a scotch for the road, “what happened on that bridge—”
“Was an attempted execution,” she said fiercely. “That man—that monster—he attacked my—”
“Mass murderer boyfriend,” I said, smacking Cassidy with my words rather than my fist—for now. “Let us not forget that Eric killed more people than this guy. And if he were still alive—”
Cassidy grabbed me by the hand and spun me, almost causing me to drop my bag in shock that she’d tried to manhandle me. Mousy Cassidy. She was staring at me with a blazing fire in her eyes. “He,” she said, now straining, “is not—dead.” The last word came out as kind of a hushed whisper.
Drink almost got the better of me, and I was on the verge of saying, “Suuuuuure he’s not.” But I was about to spend hours and possibly days in a confined car with Cassidy, and some little genius part of me stopped that reply at the last second. Instead, I went with the blandly neutral, “Okay.” And then followed it up with, “But it wasn’t an execution, there on the bridge.” I looked at her, trying to stay somewhat compassionate by dialing back my desire to hit her so hard she’d fly off the balcony and into the parking lot. It wasn’t as easy as you might think, with the scotch burning through my veins.
She only held off for a moment before curiosity got the better of her. “What was it, then?”
“Looked like a bloody annunciation, didn’t it?” Eilish tossed in. I gave her a nod. Mad respect. She went on. “I mean, he drops of out of the sky like a fiery avenging angel, doesn’t he? That’s not just a vigilante coming to—what does Sienna call it? ‘Lay the smack down’?”
“Pretty sure that was Dwayne Johnson, not me,” I said, maybe reddening a little. From drink, surely. “I might have quoted and possibly appropriated it as my own.”
“He doesn’t really say much, just throws down the vengeance on your boy and then leaves,” Eilish said. “Executions have announcements—I mean, I assume. We don’t really have those in the UK, see. But I’m guessing when you do them here, there’s some sort of reading off of the crimes the guilty party’s committed, et cetera. None of that, though. Ergo, it wasn’t vengeance for your ship the bloke was after, in spite of this fire man’s sandbagging attempt to fight your lad.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Either he’s a government agent that got carried away in striking down a threat, or …” I shrugged. “This was the start of something else.” We took the stairs down a few at a time to the ground floor. “And if it was the start of something else …”
“We’ll be hearing about it soon,” Cassidy said, almost numbly. That was, of course, her problem—she couldn’t figure out people. Eilish, though—she knew people. She had to. They were her marks.