“Then you know ‘safe’ is an illusion right now,” I said. “Besides, there’s another player who’s come off the bench. Not sure if they’re related. I’m sure you’ll get deets soon.”
“Look,” he said, “none of this is conclusive. We can speculate about the connection between these … victims,” he seemed loathe to say it, and almost ground the word out between his teeth like chewed cud, “but there’s no definite, final piece of evidence that says, ‘Hey, I’m targeting the known associates of’—well, you know.”
“Hey,” I heard a voice in the background say. It was Augustus. “They spotted our guy in Minneapolis. Wheels up in ten.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Shit,” Reed said at last.
I glanced at Cassidy; she had a single finger extended, then lowered it. She mouthed, “Thirty seconds,” and I nodded. “Starting to sound like that connection is firming up,” I said, ignoring that grinding metal sound of my voice being scrambled. “Who goes to Minneapolis in January if they can avoid it?”
“It’s still not definite,” he said, but dear God, was he a shit liar.
“Sounds pretty definite to me,” I said.
“Please,” Reed said, “let us handle it. I’m bringing everyone we’ve got left. This guy is going down. There’s no reason to—to expand the scenario to include undue risk to … other parties.”
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me in years,” I said, pretty dryly. “But you know that’s not how it works.” And by ‘it,’ I meant … well, me. Even with everything in a haze, I could recall that much about myself.
Bench sitter? That was not Sienna Nealon.
“I know,” he said, and there was so much tension in his voice that if he’d had a wooden spoon clenched between his butt cheeks right now, the handle would have snapped. Because meta strength, of course. Yeah, we had super-powered gluts. It was all part of the meta package.
“So … this is kinda goodbye for a while, I think.” I tried not to sound too choked up because, scrambled as my voice was, it’d probably sound like a trash compactor crushing a metal garbage can. Or a Transformer making love to a steel beam. Horrible, either way.
“Sounds like it,” he said, and man, did I feel the regret. “You know you can call me anytime. One way or another.” Subtle reference to dreamwalking. So subtle it couldn’t be used against him in court if he ever got charged with aiding and abetting me. My brother was a smart man.
“I know,” I said. “Same goes—a little differently, though.”
“Just … stand back, please.” He was begging. “Let us handle it.”
“You’ll have a little bit of time before I insert the risk into this scenario, or whatever the hell you said earlier.” I felt a lump in my throat, like I’d swallowed my own fist. “Take care of yourself, Reed. And the others, too.”
“Will do. Hopefully, after today … you can go seek out some other exotic locale and just chill for a while. Job done.” He sounded pretty confident. “And either way … I hope I see you soon. Somehow.”
“Me t—” I started to answer, but the line clicked dead. I looked back and saw Cassidy nod. She’d killed it at the buzzer.
I took the headset off and wordlessly handed it back to her. “Harry …” I said.
“Minneapolis bound, I know,” he said softly. “We’ll take I-65 north through Kentucky, then make our through western Illinois. It’s about thirteen hours from here if we drive straight through.”
“Let’s drive straight through, then,” I said, and stared at the road ahead. The sun was rising to my right, and the city of Nashville was ahead.
And somewhere, thirteen hours beyond it, was Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
Home.
I was going home.
And the thought that I wasn’t going to make it nearly in time for Reed and his battle with this metahuman who’d been attacking my friends and associates destroyed any of the joy I might have felt at the prospect of seeing home again.
22.
“Where are we?” I asked as Harry guided the car into a rest area a couple hours later. I shouldn’t have bothered asking, because as soon as I did, I saw a sign on the rest area roofline—”Welcome to Kentucky,” and it had one of those information booths visible inside the glass front of the building, just like any visitors center when you crossed a state line.
I’d completely missed our entry into the Bluegrass State, and our exit from Tennessee. It might have been nice, under other circumstances, to just enjoy a road trip like this.
But when a deadly metahuman was pursuing your friends, and they were heading into a confrontation with the bastard, it was hard to pay much attention to the natural wonders of America. My mind was on kicking ass and taking names.
Well, hopefully kicking ass and taking names. Getting your ass kicked and your name taken didn’t really bear dwelling on.
Harry slid the SUV into a parking space and shifted it into park. He blinked a few times, moving at a pretty slow clip for him but still incredibly fast compared to most humans. He rubbed his eyes a couple times, and I realized that it was getting toward noon, and he’d been driving all night.
He threw open the door just as Cassidy did the same behind him. Eilish opened hers behind me, and I got out as well. We all looked a little stiff, given that we hadn’t stopped since the ass kicking back near the Alabama line. I looked at Eilish; she was probably bruised beneath her clothes, unless her meta healing was stronger than I supposed. She walked a little more gingerly than the rest of us, though she moved quicker than Cassidy, who just freaking dragged.
Cassidy had been on her computer for most of our drive, not saying a word. That was common in the car, the silence, for which I was generally thankful. The loudest noise was the slightly labored breathing of Eilish over what I guessed was a cracked rib or two. My assumption was that by tomorrow she’d be a hundred percent, but again, I didn’t fully know her healing capabilities.
“I wish I could sleep more,” Eilish said as we entered the rest area. A couple women were behind the counter in the visitor’s booth, one smiling and facing us as we came in, another talking to a guy in a flannel shirt with a baseball hat on. She seemed to be giving him the tourist spiel, and was handing him brochures about the natural wonders of Kentucky, which I listened to with one ear while dragging myself toward the restroom, my tiredness far out of proportion with my day’s efforts.
“Sleeping just wastes the day,” I said with a healthy serving of sarcasm. Like we could waste the day any more effectively than sitting our asses in a car.
“I’m going to need to waste some of the day here when we get back in the car,” Harry said, pulling away from us to head to the men’s room, which lay to our right. “Decide among yourselves who wants to drive.”