Relentless (The Hero Agenda, #2) (15 page)

V is up the stairs before I even have a chance to react, with Draven right behind her.

I race up the stairs after them, just in time to watch seven heroes in full desert camouflage pile into the room at the same time three more come crashing through the sliding glass door on the other side of the kitchen.

“It’s a trap!” Deacon growls from beside me. “Get down, Kenna!”

He tries to shove me behind him, but yeah. Like that’s going to happen.

“Freeze,” shouts one of the heroes who came in through the window. He’s tall and blond, around my age, and looks distinctly familiar. He also looks distinctly dangerous. Which he is, I realize, as he lets loose a blast of ice straight at V and Draven.

“Bugger that!” Nitro yells, lobbing a fireball straight at the ice blast.

For the second time today his aim is right on. The ice turns to water and falls harmlessly to the floor as V and Draven turn to confront the hero.

V grabs him behind the neck and pulls his head down as she thrusts her knee straight up into his forehead. There’s a loud crack and then he hits the ground.

At the same time, Draven is focused on the other two door-crashers. With a wave of his hand, he has them on their knees, clutching their heads as blood leaks from their noses.

Deacon, Dante, and Nitro are locked in battle with four of the heroes who came in the front of the house and are doing their best to hold them off. Nitro lobs bright red and yellow fireballs at two of them, while Dante creates a mini-vortex of wind around a third and fourth. After an aborted attempt to use his water power that ended up putting out three of Nitro’s fireballs prematurely, Deacon has taken to punching whatever hero he can get his hands on.

Two other heroes are headed straight for Rebel, who is telekinetically winding a power cord around the feet of a hero Riley is holding suspended in midair. I grab the first weapon I can find—a cast-iron frying pan that is sitting on the stove with scrambled eggs still in it—and hit one of them in the face with it as hard as I can. He goes down like a rock.

The other hero sends what looks like a sandstorm at Rebel’s back. But her immunity sends it swirling around her harmlessly before falling to the ground. While that hero stares in shock at his failed attack, I bash him with the frying pan.

As he’s falling, the huge guy V knocked down grabs her around the leg and yanks her to the floor as bolts of lightning fly all around us. Jeremy ducks between a couple of the lightning bolts and launches himself at the guy’s back, and then the three of them are rolling around on the ground together.

More heroes flood in through the back door, and Rebel uses her power to lift them and throw them back out, one at a time. A few get through, and Draven turns to confront them while the other two heroes he was fighting pass out at his feet.

He can’t take on all of them though—there are too many. And their powers are too strong. One is zipping around the room so fast I can barely see her, while Dante is struggling with what I can only imagine is a hero with the power of invisibility because he seems to be fighting thin air. A hero with super stretch reaches between bodies to grab Jeremy’s ankle. One shifts into the shape of a mountain lion at the same time as another grows so huge his head hits the ceiling.

It’s a complete zoo in the not-so-spacious kitchen.

A girl with a nasty-looking weapon turns her attention on Rebel. I narrow my power into laser focus and send a flash of electromagnetic energy right at her. The weapon explodes in her face.

Lightning continues to zing around the room from one of the heroes Nitro is fighting, and between the two of them, half the kitchen is on fire. Deacon is doing his best to put the flames out, but he’s also locked in hand-to-hand combat with a hero whose power seems to be elasticity since he keeps bending and contorting himself out of Deacon’s grip. Dante’s wind is knocking things over and fanning the flames that Deacon can’t put out, and Riley is flying above the whole scene, throwing dishes, a toaster, boxes of cereal—whatever he can get his hands on—at the heroes. At least until one of the heroes jumps straight up and grabs Riley’s feet, and then the two tumble to the ground.

A hero woman in black leather slips past Draven and into the fray. I head straight for her, determined to keep her from hurting anyone. But before I reach her, she opens her mouth and lets loose a sonic scream so high-pitched that it shatters windows—and some eardrums.

Everyone on my team freezes—everyone but blissfully immune Rebel—their hands clapping over their ears to block out the sound. The heroes must be wearing earplugs, because they keep fighting. It takes only seconds for them to subdue my friends, some of whom have blood leaking out of their ears, but the woman continues to scream.

I fall to my knees, sharp agony shooting through my head. Through my whole body. I try to fight the pain, but that only makes it worse. At least until I see Draven on the ground, a hero on his back, handcuffing him, while another beats the hell out of him.

Anger wells in me, a fury that’s more than fury, a hate that’s more than hate, a hollowness that starts in my core and overwhelms my entire being. What I’m thinking. What I’m feeling. What I’m seeing and what I’m hearing. It overtakes me, until nothing exists for me but it.

I stagger to my feet and stumble across the room toward the screaming woman. I can feel the heroes staring at me. They start toward me as freeze blasts and lightning bolts and sandstorms fly at me.

I hold my hands out as if to block them, and as I do, something strange happens.

Everything stops.

Not stops as in freezes, but stops as in disappears.

The lightning bolts poof into thin air.

The freeze blasts disintegrate.

The screaming woman warbles and chokes, her deadly shriek completely silenced.

It’s just for a few moments, five seconds max, but that is all the time my team needs. Draven jumps to his feet with a roar, the handcuffs dangling from one wrist as he throws his arms out and sends biomanipulation waves straight at every hero in his sight line.

The kitchen faucets spring to life, water flooding out of them so fast the hardware breaks and water starts spurting straight into the air. Deacon gathers all the water and sends it crashing toward the heroes near the glass door in a giant wave that propels them through the broken glass. Then he maintains the wave, making it impossible for them to fight their way back in through the barricade of water.

Riley flies through the door after them—above the wall of water—and V and Jeremy leap out one of the kitchen windows to join the battle outside.

Rebel sends out a telekinetic blast so powerful that it lifts four heroes right off their feet and pins them against the wall, while Dante and Nitro create a fiery vortex that cages all the remaining heroes inside of it.

Well, all except sonic scream lady, who I take care of with another well-placed slam of my frying pan. She falls face-first to the kitchen floor, hitting her head on the corner of the granite countertop as she goes down.

I don’t know if she’s dead, and for the first time since this nightmare began, I can’t bring myself to care. The heroes have done so much damage, have hurt and killed so many people. I would never deliberately kill anyone, but if she hit her head on the counter hard enough to crack her skull, I’m not exactly going to be crying for her. I have too many other, better people to cry for.

Draven finishes with the heroes he’s fighting inside, then beelines for the clash outside. Once that happens, it’s only a matter of a couple minutes before the hero force is laid out on the ground in front of us. Most of them are passed out, and the ones who aren’t are in bad enough shape that they won’t retaliate, which is all that matters—at least to me. V is another matter altogether though, as she and Draven go through and knock out everyone.

“What are we going to do with them?” I ask as Jeremy runs down to the lab to find something to tie them up with.

“I’ve got some ideas,” Nitro says. There’s a look on his face I’ve never seen before. One that’s filled with rage and hate and so much fury it’s a miracle he doesn’t spontaneously combust where he stands.

I don’t blame him. The scientists who were used to bait us were my mother’s friends. Each of them was kind to me in his or her own way, and each of them feels like family. That they died because the heroes wanted a way to bring us down—to bring
me
down—hurts immensely.

But then again, that’s kind of the point of their whole futile exercise, isn’t it?

Jeremy comes back with a couple rolls of duct tape, and we all go to work binding hands and wrists. We use a lot, doing our best to ensure that they won’t get free. Then Jeremy goes from hero to hero, taking whatever electronics they have on them and piling them high on the kitchen table.

Only then does he nod to Rebel, who uses her power to pick the heroes up, one by one, and carry them down the stairs and into the environmental chamber in the lab. I follow behind to close the door and lock them in. If there was a key, I would throw it away. And just like that, the threat is neutralized and we’re safe. At least for now.

“What are you doing?” Rebel asks as I walk around the lab, gathering ingredients and equipment.

“Making more immunity serum.”

If I don’t keep busy, I’m going to keep thinking about everything that’s happened in the last couple of days. And if I do that, I’m going to start crying—and I don’t want to start crying. I can’t give in to the despair. Not now, when there’s still so much to do. Still so much to take care of.

Everyone else can search for clues. Only I can do this.

“The last batch I made got left at the cabin,” I explain.

“Do we have time for that?” Deacon asks, peering over my shoulder.

“We’re making time,” I answer. “This is the only way we know to break Rex’s mind control. Don’t you think it’s a good idea to have some of it around? Maybe that craziness upstairs would never have happened if we’d been able to immunize them.”

What we really need is one of my mom’s injection guns, so we could dose mind-controlled heroes from a distance. Too bad Rex cleared out her secret stash when he took her from our house.

“Wait a second,” V says, her eyes narrow and her face all scrunched up as she watches me pour the first ingredient into a glass beaker. “You think the heroes we just fought were under mind control?”

I shrug. “I can’t know for sure.”

“But it’s a possibility?” Rebel asks.

“A
strong
possibility.”

V demands, “How do you know?”

I start measuring out the compounds required for the first stage of the serum recipe. When I look up, my whole team is staring at me. Waiting for me to explain the inexplicable.

“It’s only a theory,” I say. “But that hero with the braids and the nose ring who came in the back door? I know him.”

“You know him?” Draven asks. “How?”

“His dad was a friend of my mom’s. I wasn’t sure at first, during the fighting, especially with how he was acting. But after, when we were tying them up…” I pour the first-stage ingredients into an Erlenmeyer flask. “It was Will.”

“Just because you knew the guy doesn’t mean he wouldn’t follow Rex’s orders to bring you in,” Dante says.

“Wait, that was Will?” Jeremy says, making a kissy face. “
Your
Will?”

Draven’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline. “
Your
Will?”

“We were…kinda friends for a while. I mean, it’s been a few years, but I know him.”

“You mean you
knew
him,” Draven says. “Kenna, people can change a lot in a few years.”

“Not like this. Will is not the kind of guy to use his power to hurt anyone,” I say as I stir the mixture until it turns a cloudy blue. “Let alone to hurt me.”

“Let alone you?” Draven repeats. His eyes are turning stormy again.

“You might want to close your mouth,” V tells him, tapping his cheek. “It’s not a good look for you, D3.”

I turn away from the workstation, where the initial reactions are already beginning.

“He was my first kiss,” I tell them. “And I was his. At science camp a long time ago. He and his dad used to have dinner at our house every week before they moved to New Mexico. We still chat online—or at least we did, before all this started. I
know
him. He wouldn’t do something like this, any more than Rebel would deliberately try to kill one of us.”

“But you can’t know for certain,” V says.

I flash back to the memory of a younger, scrawny Will with a ponytail and a tendency to hiccup when he’s nervous. “He isn’t a soldier—he’s an artist. There’s no way Will should even be here, no way he
would
be here trying to kill me unless Rex did something to his brain.”

“That’s just wishful thinking,” V argues. “Nothing more than a guess.”

Her attitude is starting to get on my nerves. “It’s an
educated
guess.”

V is like a dog with a bone. “I’m not betting your lives on a guess.”

“Then let’s test the theory,” Nitro suggests. “Let Kenna cook up the immunity serum, and then we shoot him with it and see what happens. If Will snaps out of it like Rebel did, he was mind-controlled. If he doesn’t, then he wasn’t. Sounds pretty simple to me.”

Riley gives him a thumbs-up.

“We can’t sit around for a couple hours waiting for the serum to process,” Dante says. “We’ll be sitting ducks for the next wave of attacks.”

“We’ll be sitting ducks if armies of mind-controlled heroes keep coming after us,” Nitro replies.

“The serum is the only weapon we have,” I tell them.

Draven nods. “It’s our only chance.”

“Besides,” Riley says, “what else are we supposed to do?”

He’s right. It’s not like we have any better plans. After Mom died, I had four missions: fix Rebel, find Dr. Harwood, find my dad, and stop Rex. We’ve done the first and, I guess technically, the second. I have zero clue where to even start looking for my dad, and as for Rex… Well, if anyone has any thoughts on how to stop his quest for world domination, I’m all ears.

The silence in the room says it all.

V throws her hands in the air. “Fine. I give up. Let me know when you know what the hell you’re doing.” She turns and storms up the stairs. “I’ll be outside—”

“Guarding our bodies?” Riley finishes helpfully.

She doesn’t even bother to flip him off.

“So we make the serum,” Draven says. He nods at the chamber full of heroes. “Find out if lover boy is a Rex robot. And then what?”

“I’m working to find the code for their frequency, so we can see if Rex is trying to communicate with them.” Jeremy says from the back of the lab where he’s fiddling with the electronics we took from the heroes. He’s got Dr. Harwood’s laptop connected to one of the handhelds and is working on both simultaneously. “If we’re lucky, we’ll find out what else is coming our way.”

“And if we’re not?” Nitro asks.

No one has an answer for him. I guess we just have to be lucky.

I turn back to the workstation, even though there is nothing for me to do but watch until the contents of the flask turn orange. I pull out my phone and start making notes about the scientific process. Recording the time line of the reactions and my observations along the way might not tell me anything I don’t already know, but it gives me something to do.

And right now I need something to do.

While everyone else gets lost in their thoughts, Draven moves to my side.

“We need to talk,” he says, his voice so low I can barely hear.

I sigh. I should have expected this.

“Will and I are just friends now,” I tell him. “Actually, we were never really more than friends.”

“Not about that,” Draven says with a cocky smile, “but that’s good to know.” He leans forward and drops a quick kiss on my lips.

I surprise him by wrapping my arms around his waist and pulling him closer. He comes willingly, his hands coming up to frame my face as he gives me another deeper kiss.

He feels good. This feels good. Normal in the very best way, even in the middle of all this chaos and destruction. I’m not sure how we got here so quickly, how I fell for him this deeply. But I did, and though I know I could do this without him if I had to, I’m so, so glad that he’s here and I don’t have to.

Eventually, he starts to move away, but I’m not ready to let him go yet. I slide my hands up to tangle in his hair and hold him in place as I kiss him until we’re both breathless and shaking.

When we finally come up for air, he keeps me close. “You doing all right?” he asks.

I nod against his chest. “How about you? Are
you
okay?”

We haven’t really talked about what happened while he was Rex’s prisoner. Partly because there’s been no time, but I’m guessing also partly because he doesn’t want to talk about it. I can hardly blame him.

He hesitates, takes a couple deep breaths. “I’m good.”

There’s something in his voice that says otherwise. “Yeah?”

He sighs. “I can’t stand the idea that there’s anything of him inside of me. Even if it’s just DNA.”

I hold him tighter, try to get him to look at me. But he’s very determinedly staring over my head.

“Nothing about you is like Rex Malone,” I insist.

“How do you know?” His voice is quiet, like he wants to make sure no one else can overhear. “How do you know I won’t lose it one day and abuse them the way he abuses what he’s got? Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Because I know you.” It’s my turn to cup his cheeks, to force him to look at me. “You could be super egotistical and power hungry with what you’ve got right now. But you’ve never been like that. That’s not who you are. It’s insane to think that one day you’ll just wake up and a switch will be flipped.”

“How do you know that didn’t happen to Rex? How do you know—”

“That man has been an asshole his whole life. No switch got flipped. He’s been like this for at least as long as I’ve known him. My mom knew him even longer, and she never liked him. You’re. Not. Like. Him.”

He searches my eyes like he’s looking for something. Whatever it is, he must find it, because his shoulders relax and he finally smiles. It’s a small smile, but it’s there.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

“For what? All I did was tell the truth.” I pull his head down, press his forehead against mine in a gesture meant to comfort both of us. “You’re a good guy, Draven. One of the best. Never let Rex make you doubt that.”

He nods, then glances over his shoulder to make sure no one is paying attention to us. “We still need to talk.”

“Sure. About what?”

“About what happened upstairs. When every power in the room stopped.”

“Oh, right.” In all the craziness that followed, I’d put that bizarre moment out of my mind. It had been a turning point in the battle. We’d been on the verge of total defeat, and then…we weren’t. I can’t explain it—don’t even know where to start.

One look at Draven’s face tells me he thinks he has an explanation. A shiver goes down my spine, and suddenly I’m not so sure I want to hear what he has to say.

“And before that,” he continues, “when you were trying to save Dr. Harwood.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You put your hands over his chest and tried to heal him. I saw you.”

“That’s…ridiculous.” I shake my head. “That’s your power, not mine.”

“It is,” he agrees. But then he holds his arm out to me. It’s got a nasty cut below the elbow that has to hurt. “Try to heal me.”

I draw back. “I can’t.”

“Just try.”

I want to argue, but seeing him injured like that makes my chest tighten. Before I can think, I lift my hand and let my fingers hover right above his wound. It looks so painful.

I wish I
could
heal him.

And then, something shifts. I feel that strange vibration in my fingers again. Just like when I was kneeling over Dr. Harwood’s body. Only this time, the vibrations leave through my fingertips.

Draven’s wound heals before my eyes.

“What the—?”

“Shhh.” He shakes his head.

My gaze darts from his unmarred skin to his icy blue eyes. “You did that!”

“No,” he says, leaning close to whisper in my ear. “You did.”

“How is that—?” It doesn’t make sense. My power is electricity, not biomanipulation. “I don’t understand.”

His breath tickles my ear. “A second power, Kenna.”

I gasp, shaking my head, ready to deny the suggestion. But then my mother’s voice is in my head, reminding me to be logical. Be scientific.

Sure, it’s rare for supers to have two powers, but it happens. Look at Draven. He’s got two incredible powers. I’ve never stopped to wonder why, but maybe it really is genetic. He has one parent who’s a villain and another who’s a hero.

Just like I do.

Maybe that’s the key.

“I have biomanipulation?” I say, my voice full of awe.

My mind fills with all of the possibilities. All of the people I can help, the people I can
save
. Could I have saved my mom?

“I don’t think so,” Draven tells me.

“Then what?”

“Absorption,” he answers. “I think you can absorb the powers of other supers.”

“I—what?”

I’ve never heard of that power. Is it even possible? Does it even exist?

“Remember in the courtroom, when Rex was trying to grab you?”

Of course I do. That’s not a moment a girl forgets.

“At the end, when I was on the verge of upping his blood pressure to do more than just disable him, my power slipped.” He tucks a lock of hair behind my left ear. “You put your hand on my arm, and I lost my hold on him.”

“I remember,” I tell him. “I wanted to stop you from killing him, from revealing your second power to everyone in that courtroom.”

“At the time, I thought I was just weak. But now, after seeing—and feeling—what happened upstairs…”

I nod. Other pieces of the puzzle fall into place. The fireball that took out the guard who plasma blasted my mom, and Nitro later saying his power sparked out in the courtroom. Seeing that weird mental map of our surroundings, one that could have been a product of V’s echolocation, when we were escaping in Fort Collins. The vibrations I felt over Dr. Harwood’s body and over Draven’s arm.

Had I really being using other people’s powers?

This is almost as hard to process as finding out I had a power in the first place. In the space of a couple weeks, I’ve gone from being completely powerless to having
two
powers? It’s seems too impossible to believe.

“Should I…?” I nod toward the others, who are mostly gathered on a couch in the corner of the room.

He shakes his head. “Don’t tell anyone. At least for now. They don’t need to be freaking out about losing their powers if yours kicks in. Let’s wait until you have more control.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. The last thing we need in a fight is everyone worrying that I’m going to zap away their powers.

No, that’s the second-to-last thing. The last thing is me accidentally doing it. It has taken me hours and hours of focused practice to get even a semblance of control over my electromagnetic power. I don’t know anything about this power. How does it work? How do I take the power? How long do I keep it? Do I have to give it back or does it return naturally? I have so many questions, and no time to answer them.