“…pity.” The grin finished what the sentence started.
The enforcer’s hands came up, and flame roared to life along both of them, sudden and showy as a stage magician’s flourish, heat shoving outward through the room in a wall.
Two fireballs tore loose and came at Trist, dense and howling.
“A fire mutation.” Trist watched them come and delivered the honest review.
“Bit weak, though.” His face never moved.
His hand rose without hurry, closed into a fist, and then stopped being slow at all: the punch went out to meet the fire faster than sight, and the air broke.
The detonation slammed every eardrum on the floor.
Ripples tore outward from a point in empty space, the compressed blast erupting into a squall, and the squall poured forward and did not negotiate.
A sonic boom.
The fireballs went out like matchheads in a storm, and the wall of moving air went through the gathered gangsters behind them.
“AAAH…” Screams braided into the roar.
Thugs left the floor in a body, hurled backward into the glass wall, and the last few unlucky ones went through it, out into the open air above the street, and stopped being anyone’s problem.
The enforcer came out of it standing, barely.
His clothes hung in ribbons, a hundred small air-cut wounds weeping down his frame, and he coughed red and stared at Trist with the horror finally all the way through him.
“Who ARE you?
Why did you come here?!” The panic had honest foundations.
In every file the enforcer kept on the mutants of this country, nobody, nobody, turned bare strength into sonic-boom clouds.
And a monster of that grade had walked in as the gang’s enemy?
How?
Whose enemy list did Frank think he was keeping?!
“Who am I?” Trist chuckled.
“Ask Frank when you see him.” White energy streamed off his body and condensed, sphere after sphere, until a small constellation hung crackling around his shoulders, and to every gangster still conscious the crackle sounded exactly like a summons being read out.
The spheres snapped away.
One took the enforcer square in the chest and carried his whole burly frame backward off its feet; the rest dove into the remaining crowd and went off in mid-air like high-explosive shells, and the floor screamed again, briefly.
Behind the pillar, Damon’s skin crawled the full length of his spine.
In Damon’s cold professional read, the terrifying part wasn’t the power.
The kid’s face hadn’t changed once.
Trist’s eyes went to their hiding place.
The temperature of the look pulled them out from behind the pillar before either of them had voted on it.
“You’re here for Frank?” Damon asked, careful with every word.
Beside him, Mindy was failing to be careful about anything.
In Mindy’s assessment, the last ninety seconds had been the single coolest thing she’d ever witnessed, and her eyes over the mask said so at volume.
“Of course.
You know where he is?” Trist looked the pair over as he asked: skin-tight tactical gear, faces wrapped like state secrets, two people terrified of being recognized.
Interesting.
“Top floor.” Damon pointed up.
Trist walked to the elevator.
The two of them followed without a word, careful as cats.
— Up in the office, the noise had gone suddenly, comprehensively quiet.
Frank dialed the enforcer.
It rang out.
His brows locked down over a bad feeling getting worse by the second.
More than two intruders?
Why had every report simply stopped?
“Keech.
Go take a look.” The leaner man, another confidant, nodded and eased the door open a crack.
The stairwell: nothing.
Then the elevator chimed, and he watched three people walk out of it, and the one leading was a kid.
“FRAAANK!!!” Damon spotted him through the open door in half a second, and the roar came up out of him like a volcano going.
His enemy.
Right there.
Only the young man beside him kept his feet planted; anger the size of his would not survive offending that.
Keech backpedaled fast to Frank’s front, on full guard, his mind refusing to accept it.
Two intruders and one brat had walked to the top floor.
Through everything downstairs.
How.
“Who are you people?” Frank stayed behind the desk, and his voice came out heavy but level; a man in his seat did not do panic in public.
“Who sent you?” And under the desk, silent, his finger pressed a button.
Not an alarm.
Police arrived after the fact in every country on Earth, and no sane man wired a panic line to them from a gang headquarters anyway.
This button spoke to his strategic ally, and the ally moved at speeds the American police couldn’t dream of.
Hold these people for a few minutes, and rescue arrived, and after that, who killed whom went back up for auction.
“Frank.
Underworld.
Drugs.” Trist strolled in, unhurried, and let a small scoff out ahead of him.
“You sent a killer to my door at noon, and now you ask who I am.
I’m not even wearing a mask.” His eyes settled on Frank, and the cold in them flashed once.
“Seems it didn’t rate keeping in mind.
So why send the killer?” Only then, staring at the boy’s face, did the photo from the file surface in Frank’s memory.
He’d never believed it.
Sending Kane had been trying his luck, a rounding error of caution.
“So it really was you.
You killed my important subordinate, days ago.” “Days ago?” A beat, and then it landed.
The alley.
The crew he’d wiped over Gali.
“Oh.
So you’re the head of those street thugs.
What a coincidence.” “Keech.
Stop them.” Keech charged on the order, and made it three steps.
White light crossed his vision, agony crossed everything else, and then there was no more Keech.
“A superhuman.” Frank had watched it start to finish, and after his man hit the floor he spoke one word at a time, slow and deliberate.
“But I won’t die.” “Frank!
I’m going to kill you MYSELF!” Damon’s fire finally slipped its leash.
He came across the office at a hysterical sprint, and his thrown dagger cracked the pistol out of Frank’s rising hand, because this one, this one, was his to finish.
Once, Damon had been a cop.
A good one, the inconvenient kind, and he’d set himself to putting the villain Frank in prison the legal way.
Frank’s answer had been simpler: buy men inside the department, manufacture a chain of evidence, and hang the whole fabrication around Damon’s neck.
Prison took him.
His wife watched her husband turn from officer to convicted criminal inside a season, and it broke something that didn’t mend, and she took her own life.
One family, gone to pieces.
Every piece of it Frank’s doing.
Damon’s fist was one instant from Frank’s skull when metal sang.
A shuriken came in fast and black-gleaming, its edges wet with something that wasn’t light.
Damon wrenched aside, and the dodge saved him and spent his killing blow both; the fist meant for Frank’s head cut empty air.
His face went grave, because the room had changed.
A dozen figures and more stood around them where no figures had been, uniform red, masked, weapons of every description held low and ready, and the three of them stood inside the circle.