“Clary, our mission is to recon first,” I said. “Ringing the doorbell isn’t exactly a subtle way to find out who’s inside.”
“What, you wanna sneak around the back and peer in the windows or something? Screw that.” I heard his seatbelt unsnap and he was already moving toward the back doors, even though we were still moving. “Let’s get this party started!” The back door swung open and he was out.
“What the hell is he doing?” Scott said, and he slammed the brakes. “Is he seriously going to go knock on the door? What is he thinking?”
“Clary doesn’t think, does he?” Reed asked.
“Dear God, I hope he gets the right house,” I said, already unfastening my seatbelt. I ran the ten feet to the back door and jumped down to the pavement, racing to catch up with Clary, who was already up on the sidewalk. The air held a dampness, and the sky was hazy, a light fog still lingering thanks to the cloud cover.
“Clary!” I said, trying to keep my voice down, knowing he could hear me. “Clary!” I said again, now only a few feet behind him. He had reached the steps at the bottom of the house and was starting to ascend the first when I caught him. “Clyde,” I said with a hiss as I laid a hand on his shoulder. He brushed it off.
“Girl, ain’t no one calls me Clyde,” he said as he continued up the steps.
“What are you doing? I am in command of this mission—Ariadne is going to have your ass if you don’t get back in the damn van.”
“I’m gonna get this show on the road,” he said as he reached the front porch. A squeak of an old floorboard caused me to cringe, as though it were attached to a wire that would report directly to Omega HQ that we were, in fact, here. I felt as though they were watching us through a pinhole camera and could see stupid Clary in his Ugg boots and me trying to get him to listen to reason. “Why tiptoe around these clowns when we can just push ‘em right out into view and start kicking ass?”
“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, “and not the mission.” The paint on the siding was peeling, leaving cracks of dark, old wood peeking out from behind the dirtied white paint, the chips still laying scattered with leaves all around the porch. “We’re supposed to investigate first—”
“Well, we gonna investigate right now.” He smiled at me with that gap-toothed idiot look of his and slapped his hand against the screen door, hard, rattling it on its flimsy hinges. He swung it open, then smacked his palm against the interior door five times, loud enough that I was sure that they could hear it at Omega HQ, wherever it was, even if they didn’t have any microphones anywhere in the state. “Hey!” Clary shouted. “Open up, Omega! It’s the Directorate. We’ve come to kick y’all’s asses, so get on out here.”
I closed my eyes and placed a gloved hand over them, as though I could blot out the horror of what was happening as easily as I could cut out the light around me. “Did you really just tell them we’re from the Directorate?”
“What’s wrong?” his voice came around my hand, though I wished it didn’t. I wished I had an invisible wall or a happy place I could flee to that was as far from Clyde Clary as Pluto was from the sun. “Fine, I’ll be subtle. Girl Scout cookies! No, wait, I got it. Avon calling!” He raised the pitch of his voice on the last one, turning his normally deep timbre into something horrific.
“Oh, dear God, kill me now,” I whispered. “Please let Chris Hemsworth answer the door, and then let him smite me with lightning and abs.”
“I think it’s working,” he said as I took my hand away from my eyes. “Someone’s moving around in there, I think they’re coming to the door.”
Before I could brace myself (or call him an idiot, because I was going to do both) the front door blasted off its hinges and Clary vanished behind it. They flew through the air, off the steps, and down the ten or so feet to the street below, where he came to land on an old-model Ford that flipped when he hit it. He fell behind it and was obscured from my view.
I turned back to the doorframe, which had become a cloud of dust and fragments, and looked within. A man stood at the aperture, taller than me by a head, hair brown and short, flecked with white from the demolition he had just perpetrated. He was big, big enough to make Clary look small by comparison. I took an involuntary step back, placing myself into a more moveable stance. The man looked at me with eyes that were so light blue that they almost seemed white. A few scars dotted his face as he emerged from the gaping hole in the front of the house.
“Umm, hi,” I said. “Sorry about my associate. He’s an idiot.” I glanced back to where Clary had landed, and saw not even a sign of movement. I wanted to curse and scream, but since I had darted out of the van so quickly I hadn’t put in my earpiece, no one but Omega would hear it. “Umm…we were just wondering if you’d like…” He stared at me, angling his head as though he were pondering me, “…some Girl Scout cookies?” I heard the lameness of my words and wished I could just flip a switch that would shut me up.
I heard him let out a breath all at once, deep and throaty. “I’m about to pulverize you, Thin Mint.”
I blinked at him. “Thin Mint? You really think so?” I felt myself perk up a little. “You know, I have been working out—” He charged at me, shoulder first, and I threw myself through the porch rail backwards as he stormed through the space where I had been standing only a moment earlier as though he were a rhinoceros coming across the African plains. I hit the terraced step below and caught myself as I saw him burst through the support beam for the porch and fly over me to land on his feet on the sidewalk. The earth itself shook, I swear it, as I rolled to my feet. The narrow strip on which I stood allowed me to look at the back of his head as he came to a landing, and I knew if we were going to fight, which we were, there was no better opening than the one I had right now.
I jumped, leading with a front kick, my leg extending as I caught him perfectly in the back of the skull. He staggered and caught himself on a rusty Honda, knocking the car out of its parking place at a ninety-degree angle. I landed on the sidewalk and felt the impact run through my legs; I had hit him at a height of nearly seven feet off the ground and the drop was not small after that. I landed and regained my balance, wobbling only slightly.
The gargantuan beast in front of me turned, placing his hand on the car that he had knocked out of the way. I grimaced. “Hi. Still thinking over which cookies you’d like?” I kicked him in the knee as hard as I could, causing him to grunt and me to bounce back a step. “May I recommend some Samoas?” It wasn’t exactly like kicking a rock as I could see I was causing him pain, but there was no doubt he was tough. I followed up with another hard kick to the thigh, hoping I could at least give him a dead leg to stagger him.
“How about a Thanks-A-Lot?” he grunted and swung at me in a backhanded slap that connected and caused a ringing in my ears as it lifted me off the ground and hurled me into the concrete terrace. I heard the retaining wall crack, possibly along with my skull, as I tried to blink the dots and colors out of my eyes.
When my eyes refocused, I saw him take a limping step forward, dragging the other leg behind him. He was still in the street, at a perfect right angle to the Honda he had hit. “I know you,” he said in a gruff, scratchy voice. “Sienna Nealon. I’ll make you my prize, take you back to the boss; Operation Stanchion will be over even before it starts—”
He stopped speaking when a squeal of tires came from his left. The van slammed into the parked Honda next to him, spinning its front end around. The front of the car hit him from behind, catapulting him into the air. He flew to my right and struck the terrace wall about ten feet from where I lay, shattering the block and causing the first level to collapse on him. His legs stuck out onto the sidewalk, his dark gray trousers and beat-up tennis shoes the only thing remaining that weren’t covered by concrete and dirt. The broken blocks had buried him to the waist.