Archon's Queen (63 page)

“I was faking. Rubber suit, remember.” He tapped his crotch. “Zap away, doesn’t do a bloody thing.”

Growling, she struggled to crawl away from him, but he held her fast.

“No appreciation anymore. You Covs are all the same.” His backup pistol pressed against the side of her head, above her right ear.

She wailed as it crushed her skull against the concrete.

The sound of a gunshot almost emptied her bladder. Gordon lurched forward, falling on top of her with a loud grunt. She rolled off as he fired to the side in mid somersault, reddening the white shirt of a Timmons-Orben security guard. Two shots struck within millimeters of each other in the man’s heart. Anna sprinted a dozen car lengths before diving into a slide beneath vehicles.

Gordon snarled, scanning left and right. A small advert bot zoomed in, hovering over the dead man, displaying an offer for medical products. Agent Gordon pointed and burst into laughter, which grew more intense as the little machine got a better look at the guard, and the ads changed to solicit various funerary services.

Another security officer emerged from the main entrance, firing as soon as he had a bead on Gordon. From the unsteady gait and sudden expression of confusion, she figured Aurora tried to help and bailed out before this man died too. Anna bolted during the distraction in an effort to put as much distance as possible between herself and Gordon while the security man kept him occupied.

A stark white enclosure forty meters away offered the respite of a door. She found it locked and screamed out of sheer mindless frustration.

Bullets hit the wall, chasing her to the right and under the nearest car.

“Planning to fly off the roof, Pixie?” Gordon laughed. “You’re running
away
from the door. I suppose you are just trying to keep me busy until Doctor Mardling shows up to save his little sex doll. He is coming, is he not? I’ve got something special for him as well.”

As much as Anna wanted James to save her, being called a sex doll filtered the world red. She sprang up, sending a twenty-foot long arc of lightning into his chest, which slithered around him to the ground. This time he did not act like it did anything, offering only a laugh. Anna seethed. Her anger came in waves mirrored in flickers upon every lamp in the area.

Three cars burst into flames behind her as she raged; great crackling serpents of electricity burned holes through their hoods and coiled around her. Sizzling sparks licked up and down her entire body, channeled it into a blast that flung Gordon off his feet and sent him ass-first through the windshield of a cherry red sportscar fifteen meters away. Smoke and the scent of burned rubber filled the air. At the center of his armor, a palm-sized patch of bare skin stood out where his black suit had melted into his flesh.

“Not so cocky now, are we?” She grumbled, tamping out a small fire on her sleeve.

Near exhaustion, she stumbled over to where he had dropped his gun and came close to falling as she picked it up. She aimed at him. It chirped a ready tone as her finger hit the trigger; she froze when a voice to her right yelled.

“Drop it.”

A pair of security men pointed rifles at her over the hood of another car. Anna rotated her head to stare at them without moving anything else.

“Don’t make me shoot you, honey. Drop the fucking gun.”

She squinted, an action imperceptible to them from that distance. When she erased herself from their sight, they prairie dogged. To them, she had simply vanished. As they spun around looking for her, her arm swung the pistol in their direction and fired. Three seconds and eight shots later, the dying men caught sight of her shimmer back into existence. Anna stared at the readout showing three bullets left. Her arm shook at the realization she’d killed two men.

So easy.
She no longer even wanted to touch the pistol.
And they’re afraid of us? Any idiot with a gun…

Creaking metal made her turn, but she was too slow to avoid Gordon’s boot. It caught her in the chest, knocking her flat. The gun sailed into nowhere as his fist crossed her face before he grabbed her by the armored vest and hurled her into a car. She sprawled there, motionless, exhaustion from the massive shock and the sudden assault left her head spinning. Fingers in her hair drove her head into the fender twice, before she absorbed another punch or six to the ribs. She coughed up blood, and scrabbled at the painted metal in an attempt to stand.

When he reared back for another round of thumping, Anna shoved herself out of the way, leaving him pounding a dent into metal. She surprised him by lunging toward him, flattening her hand over the hole in his armor. Hot skin met her fingers, and she called on every ounce of her desire to live. The zap left him twitching and slumped on his knees. His left hand grabbed her forearm, breaking her contact seconds before he would have passed out. She tried to recoil away, but his grip tightened to the point where the bones in her arm creaked on the verge of splintering.

His fist smashed downward across her face, drilling her into the pavement. Beaten delirious, she lay helpless as he grabbed her hair and lifted to expose her throat. Her hand flopped at his wrist, a feeble attempt to break his hold before the blade came. At the sound of a longed-for voice, she broke into sobs.

“That’s quite enough.”

James had arrived.

Gordon grunted as the knife twisted its way out of his hand. Anna struggled to look up at her savior; vision blurred from exhaustion and beating. James’s presence let her feel utterly at peace and safe. Unable to speak, her mind managed a weak telepathic whisper before she fell into unconsciousness.

I love you James…

gent Gordon turned to face James Mardling; his head covering liquefied and flowed into a metal ring on the chest plate, exposing a sweat-covered face and a glittering dark metal headband. The two men circled in a manner akin to a pair of gunslingers in the Old West. Anna lay unconscious a short distance away. Her hair and strips of torn shirt blew in the gentle breeze sweeping over the parking deck. The distant warble of alarms lent an almost inaudible backdrop to the sound of boots in orbit.

“Killing her was not part of the arrangement, old boy. In fact, what the hell are you doing here?”

Gordon spat, picking at the hole in his armor. “Neither was this. Your bitch almost killed me.”

James chuckled with a sinister smile. “Well then, she is apparently stronger than I gave her credit for. That, or whatever you said to her got her a bit cheesed off. I thought you SAS blokes had more self-control.”

“We had a deal, Mardling. Thompson’s gone unhinged. They’re calling
me
a rogue agent now.
I’m
the one that’s in hiding, not you criminals.”

Genuine amusement spread over his face. “Thompson… Lord Connor Thompson, the only psionic-tolerant moderate in the House of Lords. Do you honestly think I would allow a mundane like you to shift the mindset of Great Britain against us even more? You are deluded. What you thought of as a deal was you simply doing as you were told. I should have been rid of you after you pursued her into the Tube on a bloody motorbike. Are you daft man? She could have crashed.”

Mardling paced, folding his hands behind him as he half turned his back on Gordon.

“Your pet pissed me off in Gwynedd, Mardling. That little zap of hers snapped me out of the fog.”

“Oh, that is most unfortunate.” James sighed. “I had a feeling something was amiss when you shot her. Why did you bother legging her?”

“So she could watch me kill you.”

James laughed as if the greatest joke in the world had been told.

A second grey hover van circled in and landed. Gordon grinned as the side door slid open and five more mercenaries leapt onto the deck with rifles at the ready.

Agent Gordon’s hand crept behind him as he stopped walking. “Psionics are too dangerous; there is no way to properly police them. They could sow chaos and discord, overthrow the government.”

Doctor Mardling’s gaze fell upon Anna; his words took on an undertone of anger drizzled with contempt. “Are those men supposed to be some kind of threat? Gordon, I do believe that knife you are secreting into your left hand would look much better in your thigh.”

The psi screen went into a flurry of blinking; two seconds later, smoke formed a halo around him and the device broke into pieces. Gordon ran with sweat, his trembling arm extended. His eyes rolled up as if trying to stare at the broken headband, clueless as to how it could have failed. Gordon sank the blade three inches deep into his own leg. Terror and pain laced his scream. He staggered backwards, snarling, unable to make his arm pull it loose. Mardling’s eyes shifted in the direction of the mercenaries. He invaded their thoughts all at once and forced their perception of reality to change. Believing the building crumbled out from under them, the men panicked and fell, howling as they hallucinated plummeting to the ground from high altitude. Within seconds, they had all passed out from fear.

James frowned at the blood leaking from Anna’s nose and lifted an eyebrow at the gasping CSB agent. “Give her a twist, mate.”

Gordon’s arm obeyed, and he roared his way down to one knee. “You’re a bleedin’ monster.”

“Monsters haul small children away from their mums in the middle of the night. You are not even a mere psionic, Gordon. You are nothing, and you had the gall to strike one of The Awakened? You were quite lucky we had a bargain, you know, but you show me the folly of my charity. You did quite well convincing her it was too dangerous to stay in London, but I did not give you permission to injure her. Since you have attempted to kill her, I’m afraid, my dear boy, you are simply too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

Gordon leapt for his gun but never hit the ground. A few seconds of airborne flailing got him nowhere. He ripped the blade out of his thigh and hurled it at Mardling’s head. It stopped two inches short, hanging in midair. James turned, waving his hand in a dismissive flick. Gordon flew into the side of a parked van, across the aisle into the rear window of a car, and careened off a light post and over the edge of the roof.

Black-gloved fingers slapped onto the concrete rim, Gordon’s desperate grunt reverberated through the hollow space of the parking deck below. James walked over to Anna, scarf fluttering over his left shoulder. The hanging blade glided along until it came to a halt above the black-gloved hand and rotated point down.