I’d seen Gavrikov do something similar to bullets, at least relatively small caliber ones. Unless the police brought something bigger out there to challenge this guy, it looked like he was impervious to any threat they posed.
As if in response to being shot at, a rumble echoed through the ground, and the street beneath him started to shred as an ovoid wall rose to surround him to the waist. It paused there, crushed gravel and street sorted down to its base earthen components, this guy’s Augustus powers clearly functioning at a reasonable enough level to allow him to rip up a street that was probably more synthetic components than actual dirt and sand and whatnot. I’d seen Augustus do this kind of thing before he’d had his power boosted and it tended to take a toll.
But this guy … he was moving water, earth, air and fire, all while maintaining an easy hover. So he had flight, too, because if he’d been using wind to keep himself aloft, the strain would have to have been too much.
“Shit,” I whispered. That number of powers narrowed things down for me. He had to be an incubus who’d jacked a bunch of people. There was no other way I knew of that he could get that many powers together.
I had a brief flash of memory, back to a village in Northern Scotland where I’d faced someone else with those seemingly unstoppable abilities. The thought of Rose’s vicious grin made me shudder even now, set my heart to racing, and part of me wondered …
Was this some sort of afterstroke for her? Some reaching-from-beyond-the-grave attempt to swipe at me, one last time?
If so, it had worked. She’d taken out my whole support team, had ripped them all away from me, cast their fates into doubt. If Rose’s dead hand was still tormenting me from the other side, her aim remained unerring.
But no, I couldn’t just jump to that conclusion. Maybe I was being egocentric. Maybe this had nothing to do with me. Maybe—
“Sienna Nealon,” the man said, voice echoing through the TV speakers as I sat, alone, in that hotel room, and listened to him speak my name.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“Where … is Sienna Nealon?” he asked in a European accent, which leant a little credence to my ‘It’s Rose!’ theory, at least in my mind. “Where is she?” His face, consumed by fire, spoke like some kind of horrifying deity of flame. “Where is the protector of this city?”
And he looked right into the camera.
Right at me.
“Come out,” he said, no joy, no taunting, just a direct command. “Come out and face me. Once and for all. Our meeting is destined … it is inevitable …”
I blinked. I had gone beyond having a bad feeling about this; I was in the next county, where it looked like an impending passenger liner shipwreck combined with a three-plane crash and maybe a space station landing on the whole mess for emphasis was about to go down.
“Come out and face me, Sienna Nealon,” he said, those black, shadowed eyes hiding beneath the glow of flames, “and we will meet our inevitable fate … together.”
32.
“Sonofabitch,” I muttered as I walked out the front door of the hotel and was hit by the frigid Minnesota air. It was well below freezing and my thin windbreaker was somewhat shredded. Even if it hadn’t been, it was completely inadequate to the task at hand. It was a Florida winter coat, not a Minnesota winter coat, and I felt the difference everywhere. My nostril hairs stood up and froze, goosebumps sprinted down my back and arms, my knees felt like they were going to knock together uncontrollably—all that within two seconds after I walked out the door.
I hurried across the parking lot, shoes crunching in the hard-packed and hard-frozen snow. It looked like it’d been a while since they’d had a fresh powder here, which sorta worked in my favor and sorta didn’t. I didn’t tend to drive much, and that went double for when there was snow on the ground. I probably hadn’t driven in snow for almost two years, given that I’d been driven out of the state and gone on the run before winter had come last year.
Also, I could fly back then, a loss I was keenly feeling as I tried to nonchalantly stalk up to an older-model Ford Explorer. It looked like an early 2000’s edition, which suited me.
I tried the doors, very casually, then looked into windows of the cars next to me, just to see if the doors were unlocked. No dice. I could scour the parking lot and hope to find someone who’d been sloppy about locking theirs, but this was about as good as I was going to get, I figured.
I busted the rear window on the driver’s side and reached up, unlocking the driver’s door and slipping into the Explorer. It was cold in the car, overnight temps having dropped, the chill long seeped in. There was a partially drunk diet cola in the cup holder in the center of the vehicle, and I lifted it, just to see. It was completely frozen through, the cola a hard chunk of ice at the bottom of the can.
“Yep,” I said, leaning down to pull the wires out from under the dashboard, “welcome back to Minnesota.”
It took me a couple minutes to strip the wires I needed and hotwire the car. It would have been easier with longer nails, but meta strength and my enhanced fine motor skills got the job done eventually. The engine purred to life, and I looked back as I shifted the Explorer into reverse and eased out of the parking space. Once out, I threw it in drive and engaged the four-wheel drive which had drawn me to this vehicle.
I pulled out of the parking lot and onto Snelling, gunning it down a side road a few seconds later. In order to get downtown, I’d have to cross the Mississippi River, and most of the easy routes would be jammed with people trying to get the hell away from the scary metahuman who was tearing up Nicollet Mall.
Such a shame. They’d just finished with what felt like a fifty-year reconstruction project down there.
My easiest route would be to approach from the north, Hennepin Avenue bridge. I’d sneak into downtown that way, and if the roads were too logjammed, I’d just ditch the Explorer and head north into the city on foot. I could cover the mile or less between the bridge and the intersection where my adversary was waiting in a matter of minutes.
I took the north route to circle around; Snelling started to turn into a freeway around just before the State Fair grounds; I could see the tower in the distance, and it gave me a little thrill, being this close to home.
The Explorer skidded on the slick roads as I hit the overpass at Larpenteur and slid through the intersection as I hung a left. Larpenteur became Hennepin under the bridge, and suddenly I was racing through a faded industrial area, passing old warehouses and shipping concerns as they slipped past at fifty miles per hour. Trees with no leaves hung over the street, their branches like skeletal bones trying to wave me off from doing what I was hell bent on doing.