Chapter Twenty-Four Darius
Chapter Twenty-Four
Darius
There’s banging on my window. My sliding glass balcony door, in fact. I had expected it, given that my phone and home alarm went off in a brilliantly loud blaze—I increased the volume after last time, expecting a repeat attack. What I don’t expect, however, is that it isn’t the Marduk.
I get up from my office chair, where I’d been researching colorful rugs, and head to my living room, where I stop dead. The Wyvern stands with his fist on my glass. His fist is streaking blood.
I rush forward, my feet carrying me without thought.
I use my powers to slide the door open before him.
He staggers into the room, and I experience another bout of shock as he falls forward, letting me catch him and bring him to my couch.
I have to carry way more of his weight than I expect to have to, and as I stare down at his pink skin, I notice scrapes and deeper cuts all over his back.
“What the fuck happened?” He looks like he’s been chewed up by a much larger beast and spit out. But his eyes are clear. They’re blazing.
“Have you heard from Monika?” His teeth are clenched. He releases a pained moan when he tries to lean back. I pull him forward to see that his whole left side is covered in short wooden darts. I start to pull them out, uncaring for how he grumbles, when his words finally catch up to me.
My fingers freeze around a dart. It’s wet and bloody beneath my fingers. “What did you just say?”
“Have you seen or heard from Monika? I was with her and COE forces. I dropped off the injured and tried to call her,” he pants, unable to catch his breath, “but she’s not picking up. Her phone just rings and rings.”
I stand up, my hands dropping away from his bloody body as all the blood in my body rushes to my feet. I’m cold. Numb. Colliding thoughts vie to take precedence, and I can’t focus on any of them. “She was with you and Vanessa at a photo shoot for your wedding.”
“No. What? She’s part of a secret mission. She was sent with us to document it,” he coughs. Blood comes out in his hand. “Fucker. That fucking acid fuck.”
“Acid?” I hiss, dazed.
He doesn’t answer, but says, “She made it out of the ports, but nobody’s heard from her since.
The COE officer with her was found dead.
The SDD forces finally arrived, but by then the Marduk and the Inconnus were already gone, their base completely destroyed.
I think they might have had Sobek involved, because the entire old port was sunk.
” He looks up at me, the kindling in his eyes ever ablaze.
“I thought she might have called you. Or come to you first.” He tries to stand. I shove him down.
My mind is on fire. I reach into my back pocket, withdraw my phone, and call the woman who ditched our date and lied to me. The phone rings and rings and rings, then goes to voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached Monika Neumann . . .” she says in the blandest tone I’ve ever heard.
Every word jacks up my pulse. I haven’t ever felt like this. This clenching in my chest. This cracking in my ribs.
I head to the window. “You need to go see the medic. And she better fix you up good, so that way I can kill you next time I fucking see you.”
My mind has yet to accept the possibility that something bad has happened to Monika, despite the way the Wyvern looks. It veers in that direction and then retreats. I keep my jaw locked and my mind focused on the next steps. The Wyvern said the old docks. That’s where I head.
The sky is bright and that pisses me off.
It has no right to be this nice a day as we creep toward November.
Not today. Not when my mood is bleak enough that every light in every building, every streetlamp, every car headlight flickers as I float overhead.
I’m not moving at my maximum speed, and that pisses me off too. I can’t afford to miss her.
My hands are clenched into fists that feel weighted like stones.
I struggle to lift them from my sides. I don’t know what to do with them.
Her phone rang and rang and rang, but the last three times I tried to call her, it went straight to voicemail.
She’s hanging up on me on purpose. Why? What’s she doing now? Where is she? Did the Marduk take her?
The thought shorts in my mind, and my hands flinch.
I reach into my back left pocket for a burner phone I rarely use.
I hesitate, debating calling him, as I round a low block of crumbling brick buildings and begin my descent.
I’m forty, twenty feet up from the sidewalk when, right in front of me—no more than half a block away—a woman steps out of a narrow alley.
“Monika!” I roar, my voice louder and harsher than I mean for it to be.
Her neck snaps up, our eyes connect, and I fall. I’ve never fallen before while flying. Never lost control. But I do now. All the concentration in my being sharpens on the cuts and abrasions all over her body. Her hair is matted in blood to the left side of her face.
I hit the sidewalk on both knees surrounded by a cloud of electricity.
Pain radiates up my thighs, but it’s fleeting.
I could have broken both kneecaps and it wouldn’t have stopped me from staggering upright toward Monika, whose expression is utterly indecipherable.
Her eyes are big and wide, like she’s surprised to see me, her lips gently parted. Blood glistens on their insides.
She’s wearing all black, a bulletproof vest covering her chest with the half-burned word PRE decorating the front of it in large, blocky white letters.
She’s got a camera in her hand and is walking down the street like everything is normal.
Like she’s just out and about taking photos on a casual autumn stroll, never mind the fact that the knees of both of her pant legs are torn open, revealing bloodied legs.
“Hey,” she says to me.
Hey. The fact that she remains alive after such a glib response is a testament to my control.
Perhaps my lack thereof. If I could have controlled the schism between my heart and my powers, she’d certainly be dead by now, electrocuted in one swift surge to the heart.
Because the alternative is too much to bear.
Just take her out of my misery. I can’t .
. . be . . . on this planet . . . if she’s .
. . also on this planet and capable of being injured .
. . like this. And as my entire universe comes crashing down, everything I’ve ever known boiled down to a single bloody beating heart—her bloody beating heart—she has the audacity to say that to me now?
Hey.
I want to strike her, thrash her, bend her over my knee .
. . but when I close the distance between us and reach out to touch her, I don’t do any of those things.
My claws start at her widow’s peak and, so gently as not to touch her, I push her hair off her forehead.
It’s wet with the blood that drips from the curling tips.
The skin on her forehead and nose has been rubbed raw, like she had her face pressed against a massive cheese grater.
There’s a cut on her left cheek, and when I cup the back of her head with one hand while the other continues its sweep down her neck, I feel that the back of her hair is crispy and hard, as if burned.
I open my mouth and words sit bunched all along the length of my tongue, clogging the back of my throat. They congeal into a solid mass, and when they erupt, they erupt as one. “Hey,” I clip. The word is hard and angry.
She doesn’t flinch. Instead, she blinks at me and holds up her camera. “I didn’t get much usable footage.”
“What?” I whisper much more softly, but in just as harsh a tone. Is she insane? She’s talking to me about her fucking photos?
“I d-didn’t . . . I think some of the pictures might be .
. . The one . . .” She’s touching her chest now, feeling around her neck for something.
“My other camera . . . It’s gone. I should go back and look for it.
” She physically starts to turn from me, and as she does, I see that she’s got a fucking stake three inches long sticking out of the back of her right shoulder.
Against the Wyvern’s skin, the darts looked small, like beestings.
Against her size, they look like fucking javelins.
I catch her wrist and pull her back around to face me.
My gaze narrows as I focus more intensely on her eyes.
Fuck. Her pupils are fully blown. My fingers circling her wrist suddenly become aware of the frenetic nature of her pulse.
Even though the temperature hasn’t dropped below sixty, her skin is clammy and as cold as ice.
“Monika, I’m taking you—”
“Aaaahhh!” A sudden burst of human wailing jolts my attention to the alley.
I stand up straight and wrench Monika behind me, but the men charging me are older, wearing baggy clothing over their thin frames and unshaved.
All three are white and over fifty. One of them has a chain in his hand, and the other two hold planks of wood.
I give them each a zap, a light jolt of electricity, which causes them to buckle and drop their weapons.
Monika makes an odd sound. “W-wait . . . they helped me!”
The man who was leading the charge looks up at me, and then at Monika past me. “You passed out. We left to make sure the coast was clear, but when we came back you were gone. Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I lost my camera but . . .”
My brain lights on fire. She’s so far from fine. I’m wasting my time here with this. “She’s going to be fine,” I say in a rasped hiss. I’ve never felt more violent, and yet, if what Monika says is true, I owe these men her life. “You helped her?”
They nod.
“What happened?”
“Champions—” one starts.
“Villains,” another corrects.
The one who spoke first nods. “They were attacking these military folks. We ran off to hide, but she showed up alone, so we took her in. One of the villains came and smashed up our spot pretty good, but we didn’t let him find her or us.”
“She passed out,” another says, this one with a long, white beard. His jaw clenches again and again, and his pupils are enlarged. He has track marks between his fingers. “We were worried, so we went out to try to find help. She gave us her phone, wanting us to call D—”
“I called her a dozen times. Why didn’t you answer if you had her phone?”
“We didn’t know what kinda trouble she was in.”
The third man says, “The only name she gave us to call was Darius. But no Darius called. Just superhero names—Taranis, the Wyvern, and folks from the COE. We got spooked that those mighta been some of the supers fighting, and turned her phone off.”
My body hardens; my heart is harder. I swallow stones and struggle to speak through them. “I will find you again,” I tell them, looking each of the three of them in the eye, “and repay you for what you did for her.” I wrap Monika up in my arms as carefully as I can and start moving up into the sky.
One of the men shouts after me, “Didn’t do it for pay, but we’d like to know she’s okay. She don’t look so good! Got some shit on the back of her legs that looks bad!”
That’s the last thing I hear from the three men before the wind gobbles up their words and I’m left to the nightmare-inducing sound of Monika’s shallow breaths and frantic heart.