Maybe it would bother me a lot.
Or—and this was a lot more worrisome—maybe it wouldn’t bother me at all.
It took Lee six breaths before he was able to decide to choke out, “Going to kill you.”
“Meaning, you’re
“Supposed to.” His face contorted with effort, and he bared his teeth. “Going to.”
I’d known that was a possibility, but somehow, it was very different hearing it. I glanced up at David. He was standing over us, quiet, but his expression . . . Antonelli was lucky not to be relying on his mercy. I might have developed a nasty streak, but I was the kinder choice between the two options.
“I guess I should give up on the friendship bracelets, ” I said. “Good, I suck at crafts. So, I’m guessing all this wasn’t your own brilliant idea. You haven’t had an original one since you set your cat on fire in the second grade. Who sent you? Think hard, Lee. We’re going into the final lightning round. If I don’t believe you, the next breath you take could be water. Or cyanide. I just love chemistry.”
He didn’t want to talk, but self-preservation is a damn fine motivator. No matter how badass his bosses might be, they weren’t here. I was. Like anyone else, Antonelli wanted his next breath to be sweet and life-giving, not foul and toxic. He knew better than to question whether or not I could do it.
“Sentinels,” he croaked. “Want you dead. Paying cash.”
“Hmmm. How much?” He looked at me as if I were totally crazy. I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. “I’d like to know how much it was worth, stabbing me in the back.”
“Five million.”
I sat back, surprised. “Five million
“I’d kill you for free,” Antonelli muttered. “Bitch.”
“Is that any way to talk to the person holding your oxygen tank?” I asked, and cut off the flow into his lungs. He choked and thrashed. “Oh, okay. I see your point. Five million is a lot of temptation. But I don’t think it was the money. You might like me to think it was, but I think whoever sent you scared the crap out of you.” I let him have an entire ten breaths of sweet, sweet air. He shook his head. “Come on, Lee. Please. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Just tell me who sent—”
I had no warning. Neither did Antonelli.
Some tremendous force slammed into me, throwing me facedown to the gravel path. I rolled, tossed my hair out of my face, and saw that David had also been driven back from Antonelli.
That was . . . almost impossible. Unless he’d been taken by surprise, by someone or something of nearly equal strength, it was very hard to knock a Djinn for a loop. For a fatal second, David was distracted from Antonelli by a perceived threat against me, while I was busy regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
Antonelli didn’t hit us while we were vulnerable; he wouldn’t have had either the concentration or the energy. No, someone else struck Antonelli. I’d gone up into Oversight, struggling to catch a glimpse of what was going on, and saw a huge red, spectral hand reach through the aetheric and punch claws deep into Antonelli’s chest. I felt the black wave of despair and fury like a psychic blast. In the real world, Antonelli’s eyes locked with mine.
And then the spectral hand crushed his heart like a grape.
Murder, cold and sudden and utterly merciless.
Lee Antonelli swayed on his knees, and as long as I live I’ll see his face, see that terrible, sad, confused expression and those lovely brown eyes begging me to explain why I’d let this happen. You could say that he deserved it; he’d been willing to kill me.
But you’d be wrong. Nobody deserved that.
David whirled, turning into a blur of light, and was gone. I caught Antonelli as his corpse pitched forward. Blood burst out of his mouth and nose, and I realized it hadn’t been only his heart the hand had gone after; it had been his lungs, too, and probably any other organ of note. His murderer had systematically pulped him from the inside, like a kid squashing tomatoes in a bowl.
I cursed breathlessly, well aware it was too late. David had darted off in pursuit, but I could tell there was little to no trace on the aetheric of who’d delivered the death blow. Someone horribly powerful, though. Someone not afraid to break every rule.
I’d forgotten to worry about conservation of energy, in those few seconds, and as I eased Lee to the pavement, the imbalance went critical. First, the windows on the van blew out in a shrapnel-spray of glass. One second later, the windows in my car followed. Then the diner’s plate glass windows. The concussive effect rippled out, losing strength until it was only cracking glass and denting metal, and then it faded away.
I didn’t care about that. Someone had murdered a Warden right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Some hero I was.
I heard a confused babble, and then the patrons and staff of the diner boiled out into the parking lot, yelling questions, momentarily more upset about their auto damage than anything else. Someone caught sight of me on my knees, with Lee’s body cradled in my arms, and the tenor of the babble changed and grew louder as people converged around me in a forest of heads and shadows.
“What happened?” one of them asked. “Is he okay?”
“No,” I said. I sounded calm. That was odd. “I think he had a heart attack.” Stupid thing to say; there was blood on his shirt, on me, still dripping from his gaping mouth. “Maybe a hemorrhage.”
“That’s sad; he’s so young,” someone else murmured. I heard a cell phone being dialed, and a voice asking for an ambulance. After a pause, they also asked for the police. Well, I couldn’t blame them. Big dude dead on the ground, with a burn mark in his shirt and blood all over his face.
And me, with blood on my hands.
I couldn’t explain, so I didn’t try. I just sat next to Lee’s body, and by the time I realized that I was uncontrollably trembling, it was too late to claim I was too badass to care about what had just happened.
I was crying by the time the sirens approached.
I should have realized that where the police went, the scavengers would follow. In this case, it was the local news crews, two different species by the plumage of their satellite trucks. The reporters had a certain sleek, predatory look to them that identified them clearly from the casually dressed videographers and sloppy, Earth- shoe-wearing boom guys.
I watched them approach as I was giving my story to the police, and it was like a flock of vultures circling, waiting for my last breath.
“Ma’am?”
I blinked. The police officer facing me was tall, beefy, ginger-haired, and excruciatingly polite. Despite that, he wasn’t the kind to take any crap, and I heard the warning in his oh-so-polite question.
“Sorry, sir. I was just coming out of the diner with my—my fiancé, and we saw this gentleman get out of his van. He looked like he was in some trouble. I think he might have been having some kind of seizure.”
“Seizure,” the cop said, and noted it down. “Uhhuh. Was his shirt like that when he got out?”
Oh. The burns. “I didn’t notice right away. I didn’t see him with a cigarette or anything,” I said, which was the absolute truth. “Is it important?”
“Probably not. He damn sure didn’t burn to death. So, you didn’t know him, ma’am?”
I was lucky that nobody appeared to have noticed our little confrontation in the parking lot—then again, it probably wasn’t luck so much as David, taking care of business. Everybody remembered me and David inside the diner, but nobody appeared to have been paying attention when we left and went out to the car. The glamour had held until the windows blew out.
“No, I didn’t know him,” I said. It was my first real lie, and I had to make sure he bought it. I tried not to hold myself too still or keep his gaze too long. A good Earth Warden could have exerted some mental pressure to make him overlook anything that tripped his suspicions, but I’d never been that good, and I wasn’t about to try something like that at my current level of emotional trauma. “Sorry. I think he didn’t really know what was going on. Maybe he was high . . . ?” Slandering the dead, Joanne. Good one. I felt an uncomfortable roll of guilt, but then again, Antonelli had been willing to abduct and murder me. A little slander might have been appropriate.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” the cop asked.
“Fiancé,” I automatically corrected him, and smiled nervously. “I think he went to the bathroom. It
