“Are you okay?” Reed jumped out of the van and was making his way toward me. I shook my head, feeling as though my brain were rattling inside it.
“I think so,” I said. “Took a little bump to the noggin on that one. Glad you guys came back to join the fight.”
“Hold still,” Kat said, appearing out of my peripheral vision. I felt her touch against my skin, short contact that only lasted a few seconds, and I felt better. “I can’t do any more than that,” she said with a low gasp as she pulled her hands away. “Not without…you know. Losing my soul, or whatever, and I don’t think I’d want to spend my life in your head. I have a feeling it’s a creepy place.”
“What are you trying to say about me?” I stood with Reed’s assistance, his hand on my arm, helping me up.
Kat’s face went agape, and I saw her jaw move up and down as she started to stammer. “Nothing. No, nothing at all.”
“You could at least try and lie better,” I said, and pulled my arm from Reed. “Did anyone check on that Omega operative to make sure he’s good and down? That man hits like a frigging asteroid—”
As if to punctuate my point, a concrete block hit Reed in the face. I saw the whole thing as if it were in slow motion, the impact, the concrete shattering, blood geysering from my brother’s nose and his bone structure deforming from the impact. His body dropped to the sidewalk, his eyes invisible beneath puddles of blood already forming in the sockets. His jaw was hanging at an odd angle; he was almost unrecognizable.
“Kat!” I screamed. “Fix him!” I positioned myself between her and the next concrete block that came winging at us. I hit it with my fist, knocking it to the side, shattering the window of a nearby car. Another one came from the Omega monster as he wound up and pitched it, and I slapped it out of the way. I felt the pain in my hand and hoped I could keep up. My meta reflexes allowed me some leeway, but not much; it was all I could do to keep the bricks from hitting Kat.
The next I caught too late and it exhausted most of its force against my forearm. The face of the man from Omega was a wreck from his trip through the wall, off-axis from the impact and swollen. I knew it would heal, but for now his lips had shifted several inches to the right and blood was flowing down his shirt, which had a rip halfway down his abdomen, revealing a muscular stomach that I might have found appealing on a less violently disagreeable man.
He winged another block at me and I knocked it aside with my good hand as I closed on him. He paused and his hands went to his face, feeling it, fingers tracing the lines around his jaw and nose. I couldn’t see much reaction because I presumed his facial nerves had suffered some damage, but there was a pronounced twitch and more eye motion as he touched himself. “You…” he said, and his words were slurred by the movement of his jaw, which bounced up and down as though it were a garage door off its track. “You…did…this…”
“I didn’t,” I said, as he grabbed another block and came at me with it like a club. “But I must say, it’s quite the improvement. Before you were just an ugly son of a bitch; now, you’re ugly and you can’t speak worth a damn.” I caught his forearm with my good hand as he brought the weapon down hard enough to cleave my skull from my body with it. I slammed a heel onto the instep of his foot, and he did more than grunt this time, he let out a little yell. I dodged the retaliatory backhand and let go of him as he pulled the concrete block above his head again. I ducked out of the way as he brought it down and shattered it onto the sidewalk, sending fragments in all directions. I kicked him in the knee as I sidestepped and it buckled with the force of my attack.
I hit him behind the ear with a punch that caused him to falter, his eyes crossing slightly. He whipped another fist around but I stepped out of the way, keeping light on my feet and using my speed to outmaneuver him. “Come on, Shortbread,” I said lightly, glad that Kat had healed me, “you’re getting your ass kicked by a Thin Mint.” I hit him in the face with a roundhouse kick as he turned; I heard snapping sounds from his jaw after the impact and his face realigned. He stared at me through a droopy eye and I didn’t hesitate before kicking him squarely in the groin. He doubled over, his knees finally hitting the ground and I kicked him in the head, which ricocheted off the concrete, sending a spiderweb of cracks down the terrace wall as he fell over. “You might have to call your boss and tell him Operation Stanchion is still on, since you failed—”
He scissored out with a kick that took my legs from under me before I even realized what had happened. My back hit the sidewalk and my head bounced against the grass. I lay there for about half a second while my brain assessed what he had done. “Or not.” I rolled my weight to my shoulders and bucked, vaulting back to my feet in a martial arts move that Mother had taught me to master when I was eight. I raised my fists as the hulk got back to his feet, menace in his eyes. “Busting through the door when someone knocks? That’s taking the get-off-my-lawn attitude a step too far, old man.”
“Do you…ever…shut up?” His accent dragged the words, even through his broken jaw. I had caught a hint of it before, on the porch—Eastern Europe, I would have guessed, though I couldn’t be certain now.
I didn’t answer, instead doing a backflip onto the higher terrace as he came at me in a shoulder-down charge. I kicked him in the side of the head and backflipped again to the topmost level, landing on his two-foot stretch of “lawn.” “You should criticize; you’re pretty chatty for a guy whose face is hanging off. Maybe you want to explain this Operation Stanchion to me now, so we can get on with our lives—me to mine, you to a cell in the Directorate prison in Arizona for the rest of yours?”
He stared up at me from the sidewalk, his jaw clacking together as though he were trying to speak; I didn’t even want to think about how much pain it was causing him to talk. I wanted to inflict more of it.
From my elevated position I saw Scott on the street below next to Clary, who was sitting up. The car next to Clary was destroyed, oil leaking all over the pavement, coating him in black liquid that it took me a moment to realize wasn’t blood. Reed was bleeding next to Kat, though he was looking better than he had when last I saw him. Kat was paler than I could ever remember, her wool coat looking like black granite next to her complexion, which was drained of all color.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked him. “We could give you all the things your heart desires—three square meals a day, reconstructive surgery for that face—you know, for after it heals, and you go back to looking the way you did before?” He took a leap up the terrace in one bounding jump and I veered sideways and up, clearing the porch steps and landing back at the open hole where his front door had been. “We could give you a nice, quiet place where you’d never have to worry about some annoying strangers knocking on your front door again—you know, because that sort of thing seems to stress you out…”
With a bellow of fury he jumped up to the porch and charged again, tearing through the rail as he raged ahead. I turned and sprinted into the house and up the staircase inside the door as he crashed through the wall behind me. The foyer was sparse, old dark wood faded to a light brown, aging plaster and wallpaper that wouldn’t have looked out of place fifty years ago.
I paused at the landing as I heard his feet hit the first steps behind me. “You seem to have some anger management problems, too,” I said from above him, and launched off the stairs in another kick that hit him in the face. “Unless you think it’s healthy to act like a bull in a china shop all the time.” I heard more bones break, he let out a howl of pain, and I flipped myself by pushing off his head with my foot. I came to a landing on my feet in the middle of the square foyer. “Like a cat,” I whispered to myself. “Always landing on my feet.”