Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

“What I meant to say was”-and here I yelled, muscles straining as I rose against my bindings-“he attacked the only friends who stuck by me after I lost everything!”

My voice was scratchy from the strangling, but louder than I’d raised it in weeks. And it felt good, using the only power left to me. It also surprised the so-called superheroes surrounding me. Even I had no idea this much raw anger simmered so close to the surface. Sure, I was resentful that every fresh morning brought with it a wave of renewed rejection, but this was the kind of fury that had once had my eyes burning black in my skull, my breath coming from me in waves of noxious hate.

It was my father’s anger, and that, at least, I harbored still.

Felix’s face was taut and drawn into the middle, as were Micah’s mottled, sooty features. Tekla’s remained unreadable, though she too had fallen superstill. Riddick’s powerful hands briefly fell to his sides, and Jewell had begun crying, though she wiped away the tears before Warren whirled to see. Vanessa didn’t bother. Though Warren gave her a warning under his breath, she defiantly continued to stare at me. I stared back as relentlessly, but didn’t soften anything. Sense my pain and your betrayal as I did. Scent it like a chalk outline stamping the air. Feel its abrasion erupting behind your eyelids at night.

“Enough!”

I sucked in a deep breath, the air cool against my heated anger, and turned that hard stare back on Warren. “I don’t take orders from you, old man.”

He damned near hissed. “All mortals are subject to my whim.”

I raised my brows so high they probably disappeared into my hairline. “So we owe you fealty, is that it? For your protection?”

He sniffed, regaining his composure. “Something like that.”

“Then where the fuck were you tonight?”

His lips pinched reflexively and I knew he wanted to punch something.

My arms were still bound, but by now my legs were finally freed, so I decided to take my one-woman guilt trip on the road, slipping off the countertop, but staggering as pins and needles crawled up my limbs. I leaned against the glass case, refusing to fall in front of them as I hissed, “Where the fuck have any of you been?”

“We’re not going to risk-”

“Shut up!” I fired back, because I’d heard the official statement, and wasn’t buying it. “It was rhetorical. Riddick, are you fucking done yet?”

He mumbled what could have been an apology as the last of my bindings fell loose. I pushed from the counter to stand, and realized that my dizziness wasn’t due to the change in positions. I was flush with the power of someone in full control of another’s guilt. In this case, many others. And not just people. Superheroes.

Clinging to the power like a barnacle on a hull, I limped forward. “If you’re done here, I’m going to find a clinic and get cleaned up.”

Micah, ever the physician, stepped forward, sad eyes tucked into the smoky skin, voice strained with pain. “I can-”

“No!” Warren and I yelled in unison.

To ward him off, to keep anyone else from touching me, I swallowed back the lump in my throat and tried on a sneer I only partly felt. “It looks like you can’t even help yourself.”

Jewell gasped, as did Felix, but Micah just stepped back-which I took as a symbolic return to his betrayal of me-and Warren and I again locked gazes. I knew I’d hurt the big softhearted man, but I worked better with anger than pity, which was what I needed to get through this.

Warren made a growling noise in his throat. “Tripp did that to him, and if you know where he is, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t expect to meet up with Harlan Tripp again.” A white almost-lie.

“But you might. And just in case…” He fished in his pocket, then held a cell phone out to me. “Use this if you see him, or hear of any other rogues hiding in my city. It’s an untraceable number, you won’t talk to a person, but you can leave a brief message. We’ll only contact you if we must.”

I fondled the phone, a one-way channel into my past. Why was everything with Warren always so one-way?

“Believe me,” he said, mistaking my silence for acquiescence as I placed the phone on the counter beside me.

“You don’t want rogues leaking from Midheaven. They’ll all be worse for their time there, even the Light.”

Yes, he’d already told me. A twisted place that twists people in return.

“Even Hunter?” I asked coldly.

If I was a sore spot with the troop, Hunter was an open wound. Pain bloomed on every face, and Riddick even staggered. No one in the troop had experienced Midheaven the way Tripp and I had, but no doubt they’d each done their research into the world since discovering it really existed, a fact Warren had only recently and reluctantly clued them in on. I didn’t know if they’d researched it with his now-blessing or furtively, on their own and behind his back-probably both-but from the collective look on the faces around me, they were actively imagining the horror their former troop mate and ally was enduring in a world meant to separate a man from his soul. Good .

Not that their imaginations could ever do the place justice.

An unreasonable pang struck me at their reaction-they should feel more for their lifelong troop mate than a woman they’d only known a year-but it was blunted by how clear it was that no one had forgotten. Not my sacrifice, not Hunter’s banishment, not the way Warren had locked his Aries of Light in a world where men were used as batteries. They remembered all, no matter how much Warren willed it otherwise.

Meanwhile, Warren had closed his eyes, falling immobile. I fought not to step back, but after another moment he only strode to the room’s center, gait powerful despite a pronounced limp. “The point is, it would unbalance everything. It wouldn’t be good for you or us.”

He just couldn’t resist differentiating me, disparaging me, in front of them.

“I’m curious, Warren,” I said, mimicking his indifference, right down to the placement of my hands on my hips.

“Did you feel this sort of disdain for my mother too? After all, she was an agent who also became mortal by giving up her powers.”

In a way, I’d simply expanded on the premise. She’d only done it for one person-me. Warren’s gaze darkened, a look that said my mother’s sacrifice hadn’t been worth it. “Your mother never attempted to re-engage in our world after leaving it.”

“I didn’t re-engage! I was kidnapped!”

“By a rogue, right?”

His single-mindedness made me want to scream. “Don’t ask me shit when you already know the answer! Harlan Tripp did this, and you’d better watch your ass because he’s after you next!”

I said it for Harlan’s benefit, to let him know that though I wasn’t handing him over to Warren, I wasn’t anywhere near on his side. If he thought I’d align myself with him against the agents of Light-that I was going to “re-engage” with this world at all-I’d disabuse him of that now. Getting a dig in at Warren’s expense was just a bonus. “All the rogues in Midheaven would be after you if they knew what you’d done.”

Warren lifted his chin, pulling the skin along his jaw tight. “Then don’t open the gateway to Midheaven again.”

“I didn’t do it this time. Mortals can’t. It hurts too much.” Warren’s gaze sharpened and I clarified, in case they’d forgotten: “The child I gave my life for in those fetid tunnels learned that the hard way!”

“Okay.” It was a grudging murmur, but sympathy was on my side, so there wasn’t much more he could say. And so as abruptly as he arrived, he turned back to the door, motioning to the others.