him vanish. I tossed my gun into a side room and ran the other direction. A moment later I held down the button on the remote, triggering the rifle to fire in the room.
I charged through the building to a window on the other side and ducked out onto a balcony. I turned, pressing my back against the wall, and hit the remote again, firing the gun while digging Megan’s handgun out of my pocket with my other hand.
Cursing filtered out from inside the building. Obliteration must have found the gun and not me. Now, if I could just get out of here …
Suddenly he was on the balcony beside me, letting out a wave of heat.
Damn it! I aimed and shot him with Megan’s gun to make him vanish. It worked, though I was left with charred skin.
I clenched my teeth against the pain. With the healing coming more slowly, I had time to feel the pain.
I checked Megan’s gun. Two bullets left.
What I couldn’t figure out was how he was finding me. It had happened before; he seemed to be able to track us somehow. Did he have some kind of visionary power? How did he teleport away, then know exactly where to teleport back to find me?
Then it clicked.
I turned just as Obliteration appeared beside me again. He was shouting scripture and glowing with power. I didn’t shoot him.
This time, I grabbed him.
49
IT was something I could never have managed without Prof’s powers. The heat was incredible and threatened to set me ablaze. Obliteration’s surprise, however, worked to my advantage as I raised the pistol and shot him in the head.
He teleported.
I held tight, and he took me with him.
We appeared in a dark, windowless room, and Obliteration immediately turned off his heat. He did it so quickly, it had to be something he’d trained himself to do by reflex. Wherever we were, he couldn’t destroy this place. I let go but grabbed his glasses, ripping them free as I fell backward.
Obliteration cursed, his normally calm demeanor breaking down in his outrage at being tricked. I backed away, throwing myself against the wall of the dark room. I couldn’t make out much, though the pain of the burns he’d given me made it difficult to pay attention to anything else. I’d dropped the gun, but gripped the spectacles tightly with my other hand.
He pulled his sword from beneath his trench coat and looked toward me. Sparks! He could obviously see well enough without the glasses to find me.
“All you have done,” he said, walking toward me, “is box yourself in with me.”
“What nightmares do you have, Obliteration?” I asked, slumped against the wall. Prof’s healing powers were working very, very slowly now. Gradually the feeling in my hands was returning, first as a tingling, then as sharp pinpricks. I gasped and blinked against the pain.
Obliteration had stopped advancing on me. He lowered his sword, the tip touching the floor. “And how,” he said, “do you know of my nightmares?”
“All Epics have them,” I said. I was far from certain about this, but what did I have to lose? “Your fears drive you, Obliteration. And they reveal your weakness.”
“I dream of it because it will someday kill me,” he said softly.
“Or is it your weakness because you dream of it?” I asked. “Newton probably feared being good enough because of her family’s expectations. Sourcefield feared the stories of cults, and the poison her grandmother had tried to give her. Both had nightmares.”
“And the angel of God spake unto me in a dream,” Obliteration whispered. “And I said, Here am I.… So that is the answer.” He threw his head back and laughed.
The pain in my hands only seemed to be getting worse. I let out a whimper despite myself. I was basically an invalid.
Obliteration rushed to me, kneeling, taking me by the shoulders—which were now bare, and burned. Pain flared and I cried out.
“Thank you,” Obliteration whispered. “For the secret. Give my … regards to Regalia.”
He let go, bowed his head to me, and exploded into a flash of light and ceramic.
I blinked, then curled up on the floor and trembled. Sparks! Earlier the healing had happened so quickly that it had felt refreshing, like a cool breeze. Now it happened at the speed of a drop of rain rolling down a cold pane of glass.
It seemed like an eternity that I sat there suffering the pain, but it was probably only three or four minutes. Eventually the