“I will be happy regardless,” he said, pausing in place.
And somehow … in spite of the conditions, in spite of the war we’d just been through on the ground …
I knew he was telling the truth.
This … freak … was happy just to be here. Fighting me.
“What the hell are you?” I whispered, preparing my last attack. I reached down, lifting a fragment of the Gulfstream’s burning wing and raising it into the air even as I assailed him with unceasing winds, buffeting him around, trying to trap him in place for my coup de grace. It wasn’t going to be pretty, slamming tons of metal into him over and over in a controlled windstorm. I figured it’d be like an improvised blender, and I expected him to come out the other side like he’d been through a real one.
And I was fine with that. Grinding up my opponent like chum, only in this case, I was the shark.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, shouting in the maelstrom of wind I had created. The plane’s burning wing was rising to us now, zipping toward its rendezvous point with his back as I trapped him in place. His command of wind was like mine before I’d been enhanced by Harmon’s serum. No match for me now.
He met my gaze across the distance, flames blowing in the wind. “Do you not feel it?” he asked, electric look in his eyes, as though Jamal and Taneshia’s blast had run through him.
“Feel what?” I asked. Just a few more seconds. Let him connect emotionally with me until my sneak attack connected with him and made a smear of him.
“The call,” he said, staring right at me, almost through me, his eyes were so alive. “Do you not feel it? The need to …?” He let off there, waiting.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I threw that question into the tornado of furious wind between us. “Do I feel what?”
“It,” he said, as though that explained it all. He stared into my eyes, and—
A flash of a raven in my sight caused me to lose concentration—just for a moment, as my senses were scrambled. I’d been hit by this before, this feeling. Sienna had possessed it until Scotland, the power of an Odin-type, and she called it the Warmind.
She’d hit me with it dozens of times, maybe hundreds, but this time …
Something about it was … different. Stronger.
It caught me like a visceral slap to the face, a slap to the consciousness, and my muscles locked as the raven cawed like a scream, louder than my mind could process. It was a hideous noise, one that seeped into my arms and legs and paralyzed them, locking me into place in the middle of my tornado.
A thousand unnamed fears crashed in on me in that raven’s caw, like needles of death stabbing into me. I felt paralysis, a heart attack, screaming panic infusing my every muscle group as I shuddered in the air.
The wind stopped around me, and I was becalmed, my footing disappearing like melting ice beneath my feet.
I dropped, the ground roaring up to greet me, clear now that all the clouds were blown away. I saw it rushing up, the tarmac screaming toward me, my heart thundering faster than it had ever run before. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, and it was coming so fast—
Something stopped me a second before impact, a harsh grab at my ankle that kept me from splattering on the concrete below. The whiplash sent all the blood to my head, though, and all I was left with was fear as I snapped into the darkness.
26.
Sienna
We passed through Kentucky quickly, and on into southern Illinois about an hour later. I was at the wheel and not hating it, surprisingly. I’d never been a huge fan of driving, preferring to let others just chauffeur me around like I was a big shot. It wasn’t as though I weren’t capable of driving. I was reasonably smart, possessed the dexterity of a superpowered person, and had reflexes that would have rivaled an AI-guided machine.
But there was just something about driving I didn’t care for. Maybe, as a total control freak, it was one of the few opportunities I got to just yield control and trust the person next to me to not get me killed. Which was a big ask in some cases. Admittedly, it was pretty funny that I, being such a deeply in-control person, would want to surrender control in such a way, but—
I blinked as I thought about that. Had I known that about myself before Rose had ripped out those memories? Maybe. I couldn’t recall actively thinking about my control freakery before. And certainly not as it pertained to driving. It was a strange thing, trusting people so little in other ways and yet immediately trusting them to take control in the instance of basically the number one cause of unnatural death in the country.
“Hm,” I muttered to myself, enjoying the quiet for once. Eilish was staring out the window, a look of barely veiled awe on her face as we drove through endless, flat fields. Cassidy was still tapping away at the keyboard, having not said anything for a long while, and Harry …
Harry was in the passenger seat. He shifted, trying to put his head against the window in a way that was comfortable (I assumed, having gone through the same thing only hours earlier) and failing.
“Trouble sleeping?” I asked as he shifted again and made another sound of displeasure.
“Now that you mention it … yes,” he said, arms folded tightly in front of him.
“Guilty conscience?” I asked with a little bit of a prickly, taunting air.
“My conscience is perfectly fine, thanks for asking,” he said. “I think it has more to do with this uncomfortable car.”
“Yeah, I guess windows weren’t made to be great pillows,” I said. “I just figured you had something on your mind that you’d yet to hit me with. Some super insight from the future or about my past that you were just waiting to—y’know, knock the pegs out from under me with in a little while. Keep me off balance.”
“I think you’re plenty unbalanced as it is.” He was smirking again. The bastard.
“Haha,” I said, with no actual humor. “You have to admit, if you were being honest, that you don’t exactly seem like you’re making a great effort not to knock me flat in this whole business.”
“Lots of people make a lot more effort than I do to actually knock you over,” he said. “And whether you want to believe it or not, Sienna … I’m on your side in this. And I am trying to help you.”
I burned a little within. “Fine. Okay.” I let it go, because … well, annoyingly, I actually did sort of believe he was trying to help me. Frustrating as I found him.
“The future is in flux right now,” Harry said, trying to stretch his neck. “The near future, I mean. And, actually, the far future, too. Consequences are coming, with the chance to ripple through … well … with a chance for a long rippling effect.” He rubbed his forehead. “The problem is, there’s so much going on it’s like sensory overload. So many things are happening. It’s overwhelming.”
“Does that happen often?” I asked.