06 - Vengeful Read Online Free Page A

complicit.
    “I don’t blame you,” she said finally.
    “Why the hell not?” I smacked dry lips together after forcing the question out of my mouth.
    “You want to feel bad,” she said, nodding without looking at me. “Wronged. I don’t have it in me to do this thing for you, and he wouldn’t want me to anyway.” Now she looked at me and quivered. “I’m not angry at you. I don’t blame you … I’m too busy being scared for him.”
    I staggered back, taking it harder than if she’d struck me, than if she’d grabbed the IV tree and impaled me on the end. I felt so weak, so tired, so out of sorts that the world around me was starting to feel surreal in its wrongness. She watched me stumble back with something akin to concern, maybe the closest to it I’d ever seen from her when aimed at me. “Are you—?”
    I didn’t even give her time to finish the question. I took a last look at my brother, burned almost beyond recognition, breathing with the aid of a machine, and I ran from the room. I ignored the agents who asked me if I was all right, paid no attention to security, and stumbled straight to the window at the end of the hall, breaking through the glass and leaping out into the night with my hospital gown flapping behind me, possibly more wounded than if Isabella Perugini had attacked me with everything she had.

6.

    By the time I got back to the agency, I was calm enough to stop off at my quarters to change into some clothes, to dump some kibble in a dish for the dog, then fly to the roof of HQ, calm enough not to Kool-Aid-Man my way through the fourth-floor windows. I descended the stairs like a human being, resolving to hold together even though I really didn’t want to adult right now. I wanted to scream like a toddler who just lost a juice box, wanted to go to sleep and wake up a year from now. Or a year before now.
    I had many powers, but those weren’t in my set, unfortunately, so instead I went to go see a man about people I could vent my rage on.
    The fourth-floor lights were on in a few places, but I could tell pretty much no one was home. It was somewhere near five in the morning, I reckoned, and the entire agency had been in manhunt mode the last few days. Since the manhunt had been resolved hours ago, that meant everyone was crashed out at their homes, probably.
    Probably.
    I checked his cubicle first, and when I didn’t find him there but saw the computer was still running a compiling program, I knew he was nearby. I floated into the air and did a three-sixty of the entire floor until I found a conference room with its door shut. I shot across the massive open space, blasting about ten thousand pieces of paper into a storm behind me and putting the lie to Director Andrew Phillips’s ‘paperless office’ policy.
    I similarly managed not to burst through the door of the conference room, or the wall, but only by using some of that vanishingly small amount of restraint I carried with me almost nowhere. I opened the door without concern for its occupant, and I was standing over him before he had a chance to realize there was a presence in the room and that it was a human being inches from his nose. He’d set his thick-framed glasses on the table. I snatched them up and jammed them onto his face so I wouldn’t have to wait through that step.
    His eyelids fluttered, slightly exaggerated by the thickness of his lenses, the fluorescent lights from outside spilling into the conference room. His dark hair was flattened in the back from leaning against the chair he was sleeping in. When J.J. did finally open his eyes—and keep them open this time—it didn’t take more than a couple flutters for him to realize that shit just got real.
    “Oh, f—” he said as he tried to sit up abruptly. It was a doomed maneuver, and he started to topple back in his chair. I, however, was prepared for this and lifted him by his lapels into the air with me as the chair came crashing down on the conference