The flames above him got hotter, and Simmons could feel his back start to burn. The pain surged through him, giving him new life, new panic, and triggering his fighting instinct, if only for a second.
But with him … that was all it took.
Simmons lashed out with his powers, more out of panic than genuine planning, and a quake wave shot through the ground beneath him.
Except it wasn’t ground.
It was bridge; steel and concrete, thick enough to support cars, trucks—miles of it, built to hold tons and tons of weight.
But not built to survive an earthquake directed right at one of the supports.
He could hear and feel the bridge column buckle beneath him as Fire-guy burned the layer of skin off his back and reached bone. Simmons didn’t process that, just as he hadn’t processed anything else since his body and will had shut down from the beating. He didn’t care, couldn’t fully feel anything other than screaming pain lashing its way through his back, and it only spurred him on to strike out with his powers even harder.
It came out of him like a sudden blockage being forced out of a tight tube. One minute he hadn’t been using powers, the next he was giving it everything he had, like a muscle contracting from shock to his body. He hit the Chesapeake Bay Bridge with all his powers, giving it an immediate 9.5 on the Richter scale.
The concrete supports dissolved in a second, the bridge deck itself shattered a second after, and the entire thing, from the tunnel entry all the way to the next section, exploded into dust from the sheer force of Simmons’s panicked release of powers.
Simmons felt it, of course, dimly, beneath the layers of agony that Fire-man had just forced on him. But more than that, he felt his body falling, falling among the dust and steel as the bridge came down around him. He left the heat behind—thank goodness for that!—and plunged, plunged into the darkness of Chesapeake Bay below, the cold water like heaven on his burns as he drifted down into the black, the world falling in with him.
4.
Sienna
“Holy hell,” I said as we watched the chopper-eye view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge explode under the assault of Eric Simmons’s powers. He’d been getting his ass kicked by that guy on fire, not putting up much of a fight, and then suddenly—
Whoosh. The bridge imploded underneath him, and Simmons disappeared in a cloud of dust while fire-guy just hovered there for a few seconds, like a candle in the night. Except it was midday.
“Wow,” Eilish said. It was just the two of us glued to the TV, but glued we were, unable to move. I was watching something really astounding unfold before my eyes, and it was a unique situation, because …
Normally, in these types of events … I would have been there in minutes.
Instead, here I sat, in Panama City Beach, Florida …
Powerless to do a damned thing.
The dust cleared a moment later, and Fire-guy just hung there, staring down into the dark waters below. The news choppers caught him on video, just silently floating there, watching. After a few seconds, he seemed to have decided that there was nothing else to be done, because he turned skyward—
And shot off into the heavens.
“Geez,” I said, taking a breath that I hadn’t known I’d been holding. “I guess that settles Simmons’s hash.”
“That was a pretty epic fight,” Eilish said, “from one side, at least.”
“What happened?” Reed asked, emerging from the hallway, suitcase in his hand. His eyes found the TV before we could answer, and he dropped the suitcase. “My God.”
“That guy was pretty powerful,” Eilish said. “Flying and fire. That’s not a normal combo, is it?”
My lips twitched. “I’ve seen it before.” Hell, I’d been it before. Aleksandr Gavrikov had both those powers.
My stomach twisted, hard. Thinking about Gavrikov was like a dash of salt in a fresh wound.
“But I mean—they’re two separate powers, right?” Eilish asked, though I suspected she knew the answer and just wanted to talk about what we were seeing. “Flight’s one, and fire’s another. This guy has both, so … it’s unusual to have two powers, right?”
“Yeah,” Reed said, and I deferred to him, because I didn’t want to comment. “It’s unusual. Not as unusual as it used to be now that these different serums are out there, but … still unusual.”
“See, that’s what I thought,” Eilish said, with a little satisfaction.
“What’s going on now?” Augustus said, emerging from his room with his own suitcase, Taneshia a few paces behind. Augustus had—I kid you not—a suitcase twice the size of his girlfriend’s, plus a backpack and a shoulder bag.
“You pack like a girl,” I announced, making Augustus look over his luggage.
“It takes a lot of work to look this good, all right?” Augustus said, unabashed.
“You’ve been spending too much time with Kat,” I said.
“Mission parameter change, I’m guessing,” Reed said, staying focused on what was actually important and not getting lost in the details of Augustus’s girlish packing habits. He pointed at the spectacle on the TV, a helicopter shot of the fallen bridge. “Did Simmons do that?”
“Presumably,” I said, still anchored to the couch, lead in my ass keeping me from getting too excited. Or at least from showing it. Part of me wanted to get up, to go with them, but there was enough sense and enough of a feeling like I was an old dog that should stay on the porch to keep me seated. “This new guy—fire and flying powers—had him down on the bridge, and then it went kaput. Fire guy flew off, Simmons was gone, so … my guess is that he’s out of the picture, one way or another. You’ll probably have to get Scott to comb the bay to be sure.”
“He’s already on his way to the airport in Eden Prairie,” Reed said, and then answered another call. “Go for Treston. Yes, I just—yes. We’re on our way, we’ll be there in a couple hours.” And hung up, looking at Taneshia and Augustus. “Let’s go. I’ll call Greg and Olivia, have them meet us en route.”
“Sounds fun,” Eilish said, in a tone that told me she did not think it sounded fun. If possible, she sounded less energetic than even I did. “Be safe, you lot.”
“Why?” Augustus asked, giving her a sour eye. “So you can keep fleecing us at cards?”
“Yep,” Eilish said with a curt nod. “That’s exactly it.” She was a cutthroat card player. I hadn’t dared to face her, personally, but then I had other hobbies lately.
Like scotch. Scotch was a perfectly valid hobby.
“Let’s move,” Reed said, and nodded toward the door. Augustus and Taneshia went for it, while he stayed anchored in place, all serious now, the mom-combo gone—or at least transformed. No guilt; just pressure. “You going to be here when we get back?” he asked, looking right at me.
I looked up. “Where the hell else am I going to go?”
“Just wanted to make sure you didn’t get any ideas,” Reed said, a little cautiously.