In the Wind: Out of the Box, Book 2 (18 page)

He swings it around, and I try to throw wind again. A short blast ruffles his hair and that’s it. Which would be fine if I was just trying to be affectionate with the son I don’t have, but unfortunately I’m trying to knock over a guy who’s about to shoot me.

He’s four feet away, has his gun in hand, and he’s drawing a bead on me. I’m exhausted, my powers are depleted, and I have pretty much of nothing left to give.

So I kick him in the kneecap just as he fires, and I swear I can feel the wind as the bullet passes my cheek.

He looks angry, not agonized, because my clumsy kick is not enough to shatter his patella—total bummer, I know—and he’s bringing his gun around so that I can look straight down the barrel when the first piece of good news I’ve had in quite awhile comes to my attention.

The slide of his gun is back and locked. Hallelujah. He’s as empty as me after Dr. Perugini – never mind.

I am all over him like a Doberman on a fresh steak. I knock his ass over and pummel him into unconsciousness in about five seconds. If I were fully awake, I might be enjoying the sound of his skull rattling against the top of the carriage. As it is, I’m overjoyed when his eyes roll back in his head, because I don’t really want to beat a man to death on top of a speeding express train to Florence today. Or any day. Or anywhere, ever.

I stagger to my feet with a sense of rough satisfaction that I’ve spared this asshole, and then I feel my heart sink within as I see what’s standing in front of me.

Lorenzo.

Again.

And still—shit, even still—he looks mad enough to chew through the steel skin of the train with his own teeth. And I’m standing there, in front of him, completely exhausted, without anything left to give.

“Dude,” I say, “aren’t you tired of this yet?” I know he’s not by the look in his eyes. Lorenzo wants to kill me. He’s been trying since he first ran into me. This would be obvious to anyone watching, really, but I’m so exhausted I just want the fight to be over.

He doesn’t say anything, just screams in fury (technically, that’s not
saying
anything) and comes at me. I don’t know if he caught my windless act with the flunky, but he doesn’t bother to hit me with his powers. He just comes at me all raging bull and slams hard into me. I punch him twice in the head and it does nothing. He shakes it off like he’s Taylor Swift and lifts me into the air over his head. It’s a precarious position, and I get the feeling of danger as I tower above the ground—

And then he throws me over the back of the train.

I realize as I drift toward the ground that he’s seriously out of his gourd with rage. Apparently my tight relationship with Hera was more of a point of contention in Alpha than I ever knew. I throw my arms back as I fall, and kick my legs beneath me. I reach deep one last time for my power and find it, and this time it feels like a heart attack, like someone rips through my chest cavity with a buzz saw as I blast wind out of my hands and my feet, knocking my shoes clear off in the gust.

The wind kicks me back up to the back of the carriage where Lorenzo is standing, stunned. He may not be as exhausted as I am, but his mind is clearly going, since throwing an Aeolus over the back of a train is probably not the most effective means of killing one of us.

I catch him with an extremely weak kick as I land, and he staggers back with a grunt. I follow up with an uppercut to the face that staggers him. “She wasn’t even your mom,” I say as I smack him. I go low and work the gut with a couple of solid hits that have him on the ropes. You know, if a train had ropes. Something occurs to me. “She wasn’t actually your mom, was she?”

His gaze hardens and he gets even more royally pissed. I can’t decide if he’s raw because I’m kicking his ass or because she actually was his mother, but either way I hesitate for a second (stupidly), and he catches his furious second wind. He comes at me like I said something about his mother (jury’s still out on that one), and he nails me under my guard, right in the groin. It’s a cheap shot, and it’s full of meta power, and it sends me to my knees.

His anger is boiling over by this point, and maybe that’s what saves my life. Rather than engage in reasoned debate, or cold, calculated revenge, he kicks me while I’m down, right in the ribs, and sends me over the side of the train for the last time.

I’m in agony, and I’m falling. I throw out my hands and produce just a small burst of wind as I land, enough to defray some of the momentum and force of the seventy-plus mile-an-hour impact. I roll through tall, yellow grass, countless rocks that feel like boulders pounding into my legs, my ribs and everything else.

I come to a rest staring into a blue sky overhead. It’s pretty, I reflect, but it seems so very distant. I stare into it, and the clouds seem particularly white. They glow, they brighten, they fill the sky. I feel my eyes dragged shut by gravity, but the brightness lingers. I let it take over the world around me, dissolving everything into it, and I slip away into blissful unconsciousness.

The woman is still quiet and contemplative when Lorenzo re-enters the car. He looks a bit scuffed up, with blood running from an open wound on his eyebrow, and his suit torn in several places. He looks like a man, though, a blood bubble in one nostril. Anselmo can tell by his bearing that he has faced his problems and has triumphed, and that counts for much.

“Done,” Lorenzo says, pouring himself into the seat behind the woman. Anselmo tilts himself to look at the boy, who looks as though he is about to pass out.

“He is dead, then?” Anselmo asks.

“He is off the train,” Lorenzo pronounces. “He was lying unmoving in the grass after landing.”

Anselmo ponders this for a moment, and finds he is not even angry. “Call the house. Have them send two cars with men. Tell them approximately where he landed, and have them search.” He points a finger at Lorenzo. “Tell them to shoot first. Bring rifles.”

Lorenzo nods, and pulls out his phone, making a call as quickly as his fingers can dial.

Anselmo turns to look at the woman, and she appears … stricken. “It is okay, my dear,” he says, soothing her. “It will be over swiftly. He is likely suffering, and should be put out of his misery.”

Like a dog,
Anselmo does not add, purely out of sensitivity.

Pharell’s “Happy” fills the air around me, but it’s tinny and feels like it’s playing at a distance. My eyes are nearly impossible to pry open, and I wish the song would just carry me away on the notes.

It fades and quiets, then starts again, and it feels like it’s dragging me physically somewhere.

I open my eyes to find that the sky is still blue. My body aches, a thousand pains registering their outrage through screaming nerve endings.

I move a hand gingerly, trying to localize the sound of the song as it fills the air for a third time. I realize it’s coming from my pants pocket and I dip my fingers in, rustling until I finally come up with my phone.

It’s J.J. calling. I press the damned green button and let my arm fall to hold the phone against my ear. “What?” I ask, and I sound bad even to myself.

“Dude, you’ve been unmoving next to the train tracks for like twenty minutes,” J.J. says, skipping his usual cheerful greeting. “Are you okay?”

I sit up, slowly, taking inventory of all my miseries. There are so many. “Not really.”

“Gotta get going, pal,” J.J. says. “You need to walk about five minutes north. I’ve got a cab on the way for you.”

“I just wanna lie here and die,” I say and mean it.

“High likelihood that’ll happen for real if you don’t get going,” J.J. says. “I’ve got two cars moving out of Serafini’s compound. Thermal shows they’re loaded with guys—with guns—and they’re heading your way.”

“Awwwghhh,” I moan, leaning forward.

“They’ve got Dr. Perugini, man,” J.J. says, and I suddenly remember why I was on that train to begin with. “You gotta make like a cow and mooooove, man.”

“Sounds more like I’ve had a laxative if I’m doing that much moving,” I mutter in protest as I manage to get myself into a squat. Standing up is going to be a slow process.

“Haha, like diarrhea,” J.J. says, the master of subtlety. “Seriously, though, you need to go. Cab’s gonna be there in like five minutes.”

“I’m going,” I say, getting to my feet and shuffling along the tracks. A really dismal thought occurs to me. “What the hell am I gonna do now?”

“What heroes do,” J.J. says, like it’s obvious. “Rescue the girl, pee in the bad guy’s cornflakes. You got this, you’re a natural white hat, dude.”

If I had been wearing any hat at all, it would have been crushed in the last fall from the train. I hold up a palm as I walk and try to stir the wind. It’s faint, but a little comes, along with a whole lotta pain. “Owwww.” I cringe and keep walking. “Man, I don’t know if I have anything left. I assume Anselmo has guards at his compound, and even if not, he’s still got himself and his iron skin plus Lorenzo, the guy who just threw me from a moving train.”

“At least he didn’t throw your momma from a train,” J.J. says with some amusement. This is just what he’s like, all the time. He waits for me to get the joke, and when I don’t respond, he says, “You know, like the movie, ‘
Throw Momma
—’”

“I got it,” I assure him, stumbling along. There’s a road ahead, and it’s not too far off, running almost parallel to the tracks. Exhaustion rolls over me in waves. “But as you like to say, ‘Seriously, dude—’” I feel so much frustration welling inside, I don’t quite know where to go with it all. “I have no idea what to do. I can’t fight them both like this.” My feet are dragging as I walk. “I can’t fight anything right now.”

“Just get in the cab and rest up, bro,” he says, and I see movement on the horizon. Sure enough, it’s a cab, and it’s rolling toward me. “We’ll figure something out on the way.”

I make it the last hundred yards to the cab like a car rolling along the shoulder on fumes. I lean my head back against the soft interior as the cabby spews out an address at me. “
Si, si
,” I say, assuming J.J. gave it to him. He starts the meter and turns the car around.

I watch the horizon for about a minute before I feel my phone slip out of my grasp. I find myself staring at the car’s ceiling, the upholstery hanging off in little bubbles here and there, gravity gradually pulling it down. I feel gravity working on me, too, and I pass out in the back of the cab as we rumble along a back road somewhere in central Italy. I have no clue what I’m going to do next but I’m pretty positive I’m screwed in every quantifiable way except the one I wanted to be—the one which would involve a certain doctor whom I have no idea how to save.

He is off the train almost before it has come to a halt, Lorenzo in front of him and the woman at his side, his iron grip on her elbow. “I will show you my palace, darling,” he promises her as he steers her through the station.

One of his men is waiting in a car just outside and they pile in. The car is moving almost before Lorenzo is in.

“Have you been to Firenze before?” he asks the woman. He stares at her, starting low and surveying up, again. It is flattering to her, surely, that he should pay such attention to her curves. They are magnificent, perfect in all the right ways.

“
Si
,” she says, but her voice has faded. She is put off by the thought of her friend’s death, clearly. Anselmo knows that this is a phase that is certain to pass as her soft heart comes to the realization that she has traded up in the world. Still, it is natural that she should feel a moment’s conflict. Now he realizes it is down to him to make her aware of how greatly she will benefit from this change.

“Tomorrow I will take you onto the Ponte Vecchio and buy you something gold,” he says. “Have you ever been shopping upon the bridge before?”

She blinks at him. “Once. Many years ago.”

“There are charms and rings,” he says, “so lovely and so many. None could add to your beauty, of course, but perhaps they could assuage that sense of grief you feel.” He smiles. “Have you ever wanted something lovely and expensive, my dear? Because now it could be within your reach. A hundred thousand euros?” He snaps his finger. “Is nothing. You could be drenched with gold tomorrow, diamonds studding the beauteous jewelry draping your … lovely body.”

“Do not forget your meeting tomorrow,
Capo
,” Lorenzo says, a warning.

“It would be hard to forget,” Anselmo says, all breezy charm. He would not miss it for the world, not even for this lovely piece. “We will be back in plenty of time.”

She falls into silence and he lets her, staring out on the street as they cross the river on the way to his villa. It is an easy silence, and he fills it with the occasional study of her form. He does so over and over, in a repeating pattern, to flatter her as they ride. She seems not to notice, and this is fine for now.

The pull through the gate and under the portico, and he is quickly out of the car and offering her a hand. She takes it without word, and they enter his abode.

She observes it all in with a practiced eye. The air is scented with a lovely pasta. The chef is clearly at work, informed of the master of the house’s return. He steers her, hand gripping her elbow, through the house and onto the back patio.

It is a lovely pool deck, though the pool itself is covered over for the winter with the plastic bubble covering that keeps the leaves and dirt and melting snow from making it filthy. But it is surrounded by trees that give it shade in summer, and the view is magnificent. He takes a breath, a peaceful breath, feels the relaxation flow into him, and snaps his fingers.

The servant girl comes over hesitantly, like a dog that has been whipped. “
Si
?”

“Brandy for two,” Anselmo says. “A cigar.” He glances at the woman. “Would you like something to eat, my dear?”

“No, thank you,” she says, the epitome of class. Her dark, straight hair sways over her shoulders as she takes it all in.