Family

Chapter 4

Adrenaline raced through my veins, and the sound of the chopper blades overhead was deafening. I smelled the blood, even heavier now, and I realized it was on me, on my coat, and my shirt – Andromeda’s blood. I wanted to hurt them, even as I watched their fingers tighten on their triggers; they were going so quick, there was no way I could stop them in time. And then I heard something else.

“GERONIMO!”

I was already moving before it registered that I recognized the voice. I heard and felt a rush of wind behind me and realized that two of the gunmen at my back had just been snugged to the ground by nets of light, something familiar to me from having experienced it in training. I leapt as I saw Scott shoot a jet of pressurized water out of his hands in two directions at once, sending two more of our enemies flying.

I heard the impact of a landing behind me, the sound of some dumbass – one Clyde Clary, in point of fact – shaking the earth with the weight of his bulk. I had a suspicion that ol’ Clyde had transformed himself into either movable rock or metal before he hit the ground. He’d probably landed on one or two of those guys that had been pointing guns at us, judging by the wet splattering sound I heard as I flew through the air toward the leader of the squad.

I saw his eyes widen, but his gun began to adjust aim immediately and was already firing when I was just a foot away from him. I caught two rounds, but my momentum carried me through as I felt sharp pressure in my arm and shoulder from the impact of the bullets and in my head as I rammed it into his nose, breaking it.

I landed on my feet, woozy, but maintaining my balance. The man in black was not so lucky; I heard his head hit the ground and his body bounced at least twice before coming to rest about ten feet from me. The searing pain in my arm caught up to me and I sunk to my knees. It felt like someone was stabbing into my left bicep and shoulder, then twisting around in radial circles for kicks. I sank back, letting the pain overwhelm me.

Scott appeared at my side, the trees swaying above him, framing his head like some sort of bizarre nature picture. A blue-white sky provided the backdrop. “Damn, Sienna,” he said, and his fingers came up with blood on the tips from where he touched my arm. “Not good.”

“Took that bastard out, though,” I said, trying not to make the kind of noise that would suggest I was hurt in any way. I blew my breath out through my lips and felt the tension in my guts as I bottled up the urge to scream. “Some of us don’t have a ranged attack to deliver us from harm.”

“Oh, yeah, harm,” he said, sarcasm oozing out. “I was certainly never in any of that—”

“You two are bickering like kids.” I heard a familiar voice as someone else stepped into Scott’s lovely arboreal picture. Glen Parks, my instructor, appeared to Scott’s left, his shaggy gray hair and beard such a contrast to his dark eyes. There was red in the beard around his mouth and he caught me looking. “Not mine,” he said. “Got your sniper.” We’d all been his pupils in training, Scott, Kat and I – but I always had this suspicion, based on the way he talked to me, that I was his favorite. Probably because I could fight better than either of them. Or it might just have been that our personalities meshed well – he had an edge about him, and I walked around like I was covered in barbed wire, daring anyone to get close to me.

“How’s it look?” Scott asked, and his voice betrayed the tension.

“She’s been shot,” Parks said, as if to add, you idiot. “Twice. How do you think it looks?”

“Like a gunshot wound?” He paused. “Like two gunshot wounds?”

Parks didn’t answer. I felt his fingers poke at one of my wounds and I let out the slightest moan without realizing I was the one making the sound. I saw other faces behind them – one of them was Clyde Clary’s, his round face and blondish hair looking particularly long. I hadn’t seen him for a few days, I realized, and I hadn’t missed him. At all. “Clary,” I said, acknowledging him with a little bit of a hiss in my voice.

“What’s up, girl?” he asked, looking over the shoulders of Scott and Parks. “You wearing a tank top? Where’s your gloves?” He looked at me blankly for a minute, nodding, his lips turning into a smile that I suspected was knowing – by which I mean it was knowing nothing. “Oh, I get it – you was throwing some hurt on people, giving ‘em the ol’ soul suck.”

“Could you make that sound any dirtier?” Scott said, glaring at him over his shoulder.

“Sure,” Clary said. “She was—”

“Shut up,” Parks said, as another face appeared next to Clary’s, this one looking at me from upside down. I almost didn’t recognize it, because the long blond hair that had been there when I last saw her was gone, replaced with scorched skin that hadn’t healed yet. One of her eyes was blank, sightless, but the other was still there and cold blue.

“Eve?” I asked, and the woman nodded. “What happened to you?”

“Battle scars,” she said in her Germanic accent, “from my time in Kansas.” She focused back on Parks. “The two I caught in my nets killed themselves with cyanide capsules in hollow teeth. Same with the others.” Her scarred face didn’t show much, as though her nerves had been destroyed when she’d been burned.

“You’re telling me we took them all out and have no prisoners to show for it?” Parks stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. “What about the chopper?”

“Flew off,” she replied. “Roberto said they were headed southwest, but since we can’t track them on radar…”

“They got away,” Parks finished, and turned back to me. He took a small strip of fabric out of his beltpack and I felt him wrap it around my arm. “Dr. Perugini is gonna have to pull any bullets out that might be left inside you,” he said to me. “My skills as a field surgeon are at their limit.”

“Just do it,” I said. “Get a pair of tweezers and do it. You know as well as I do that if you get them out now, I’ll heal in the next few hours and be fine as a fiddle or whatever. You wait, and take me in that helicopter, and this flight is gonna suck for me.”

Parks had a smile hidden beneath his blood-soaked beard. “Kid, this flight is gonna suck for you no matter what. But you got it.” I heard the respect in the way he said it, and it meant something. At least for the five seconds it took for the agonizing pain to start. Clary turned metal and pushed me down, forcing my legs and arms into the dirt. I saw a flash of light, and I didn’t know whether it was Eve using a net to bind me to the ground to keep me from squirming, the sun overhead going nova, or just the pain overwhelming my other senses.

I could still smell blood, mine and that of others, mingled with the dirt, the sweat, and the other smells of the world around me. The steady thrum of the chopper landing in the field next to us was muted, as were the urgent, insistent conversations being held by my comrades. I struggled when the pain got worse, trying not to. I focused on Kat first, thinking of her, of where she might be; then thought of my mother, who had kidnapped Kat for some unknown reason. Then I thought about Zack, and turned my head to see that Eve was tending to both him and Reed, who seemed to be starting to come around.

Lastly, my thoughts turned to Andromeda. I had known her for only hours, and she had already saved my life twice. I slammed my head against the forest floor, trying to resist the pain, both physical and mental, and I pushed my hair against the dirt and leaves, grinding my skull against it, into it, feeling the sharp pressure of some rocks and sticks poking at me. As the pain got worse, surging up my arm, my thoughts were reduced to a staccato burst.

Kat gone. Mom back, then gone again. Andromeda, dead. I was eighteen years old, and she wasn’t the first person I had seen die, nor was she the first to die for me. Not even close. I pushed harder against the ground, and my right hand found a rock. I pushed it into my palm, felt the smooth contours, felt it give way and break under the pressure of my grip. I screamed, unintentionally. It felt like the stabbing pain was back, a million times worse, and when my eyes snapped open, the pretty blue-white background above was blood red. It suddenly felt far away, far, far away from me, the sky above just a pinprick of light that faded the smaller it got.