Anton Strout - Deader Still

The electricity in the air dissipated and the two women both slumped to the floor. Shaking from my jolt, I caught Jane just before her head hit the ground. Her eyes were open, but they stared ahead, blank and unmoving.

“Jane?” I said, worried. “Come on back to me. We’ve still got a lot of arguing to get on with in our lives and I can’t have it be all one-sided. C’mon now . . .”

I hugged her to me and felt her gasp in a deep breath. She started to sob.

“Where were ya just now?” I said, laughing a little with relief. “You were looking a little Voldemort around the gills there for a minute. We should probably talk about that.”

“I’m sorry,” Jane said, repeating it over and over, rocking back and forth in my arms as we sat there on the floor. “I couldn’t stop myself. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t kill her, did I?”

I turned to check on Mina, but was surprised to see she wasn’t lying there anymore. And once again The Scream was gone also.

“I think she’s going to be just fine,” I said.

The sun was just starting to set as the two of us, shaken, exited through the back-alley door that had led to the underground section of the Guggenheim. I was having trouble just walking. With so much raw electricity in that last blast, I was kitten-weak and had to rely on Jane to help me walk, making this quite possibly the slowest escape ever.

“I think we need to call downtown and let the Department in on what happened here today,” I said. “Connor’s going to go ballistic, but at least I can report that I wasn’t wholly wrong about there being vampires, or rather a vampire, in New York City. That should ease a little of the tension between the two of us.”

I reached for my cell phone in the inside pocket of my jacket, but when I pulled it out, it was melted, the same as the last one.

“Fuck,” I said, dropping it. The now-hardened plastic blob of my ex-phone shattered as it hit the sidewalk.

“Use mine,” Jane said. She reached into her pocket, but hers had also melted. “Looks like we’ll have to tell the Department in person.”

“Just let me catch my breath for a second,” I said. “Okay?”

Jane nodded and led me to safety across Fifth Avenue, headed for one of the entrances to Central Park. I thought about Connor’s warning about the park at dark, recalling the odd lights I had seen while running through the trees. It took all of my remaining strength to plant my feet firmly on the ground to stop Jane from walking me into the park.

“Simon?” she said, still looking a little evil around the gills. “What the hell?”

“I’m not going in there,” I said. “There’s just too many paranormal thingies in there, stuff that I don’t want to encounter in this state, thank you very much. Strange lights in the forest, bronze attack crabs, ghost scientists . . .”

“Suit yourself,” Jane said. Her voice was short, and with little gentility she dropped me onto a bench along the exterior wall of the park. “You’ll have to tell me all about those sometime.”

I hissed in a breath of air from the impact of my body on the bench. Jane started walking off.

“Jane,” I shouted. “Where are you going?”

She stopped, but didn’t turn around.

“I have to go,” she said, her voice cracking and uneven.

“You’re just going to leave me here?” I said, incredulous.

Jane spun around, a conflicted look on her face.

“Do you want to end up dead?” she said. “Did you not see me in there? Then let me go. I almost killed you. I almost killed both of you.”

I waved her over and patted the empty spot on the bench next to me. With some reluctance, Jane came over and sat down.

“You were trying to save me and yourself. You were fighting for your life.”

“I’m so not used to that sort of thing from my days working for the Sectarian Defense League,” Jane said. “We had minions to do our fighting for us.”

“Yeah, well, doing good means that you have to get your hands a little dirtier and not put other people in harm’s way as much.”

Jane shook her head. “I don’t think that was good I was doing,” she said, very somber. “I was out of control. I tried something like that before when I barely even knew what technomancy was, and all it caused was little more than an electric spark.”

“Well, that one was a lot more than a spark, Jane,” I said, holding up my wrists. The Mummy Fingers that had been wrapped around them were crisped up from the last blast of her power. When I flexed my hands, what remained of the bandages crackled apart and fell to the sidewalk in a shower of burnt flakes.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve just been feeling strange lately.”

“How?”

“All this misguided jealousy of yours and the fights we’ve been having . . . When I’ve been working in the Black Stacks in the bookstore, it feels like somehow the books have been talking to me, whispering about all my fears. Then when I showed up and saw Mina there with you, something snapped inside me. It’s like all of it just fed into that spell I cast. I was electrocuting her and I couldn’t stop myself. The horrible part is that I didn’t want to.”

“You have been acting a little season-six Willow on me lately,” I said, hoping to lessen the gravity of her words.

Jane’s mood didn’t lighten.

“I almost killed her,” she said, “and you.”

“But you didn’t ,” I said. “That’s the difference.”

“What’s wrong with me?” she said. She balled her fists up and started pounding them on her knees. “Is this what I left Kansas for? To become this?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said, taking her hands in mine. “Nothing that can’t be handled with a little time off from the Black Stacks, anyway. There’s a lot we don’t know about them, and from what you just said, I don’t think they play fair when they have access to someone nice like you. If there’s anything wrong, it’s with us, our relationship, but I want to fix that.”

Jane nodded, unable to speak. I pulled her to me and hugged her while people passed us by, staring. I didn’t care.

When Jane finally pulled away, she spoke. “Simon, I hate that I even have to say this so bluntly, but it should be pretty obvious by now. I’m not interested in Thaddeus Wesker. He’s my boss. That’s it.”

I stiffened a little at the change in conversation.

“But the night you met Mina, she said you acted like you had something of your own to hide. She had me convinced that maybe something was going on.”

“She was playing you , Simon,” Jane said, putting her hand on my forehead in the universal symbol of duh. “The reason I didn’t start acting all jealous was because I’m not clingy like that and I trust you . God knows why, given all this . . .”

I welcomed the coolness of Jane’s hand against my forehead. Just her touch was enough to calm me. After several seconds that I wished could have lasted forever, Jane pulled her hand off my head and stood, then paced away before turning back to me. Her face was too calm.

“I don’t know what you want me to make of all this, Simon,” Jane said, her voice a whisper. “I really don’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“You get all jealous because I’m around Director Wesker, you know, just doing my job, when I’m the one who has every right to be jealous.”

“Of what?”

Jane looked at me, tears finally forming at the corners of her eyes and she shook her head at me.

“Of Mina, you idiot,” she said, her voice cracking. Tears started flowing down her face. “Are you really that dense? Your little hot redheaded friend shows up in town and suddenly you start acting funny: sneaking around, picking fights with me, and just the other night you actually hung up on me when I clearly heard her in the background. How do you think all that makes a girl feel?”