Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,31
you think—”
I grabbed him with my bare hand around his neck and heard a GURK! “You. Idiot. You almost got Reed and Scott killed—not to mention me—and you’re so damned oblivious you don’t even realize it.” I watched his piggy little eyes move back and forth and I saw the pain emerge on his face as he felt the first stirrings of my power working on him. He didn’t resist, even as he began to grunt. I threw him loose and let him fall in a pile of broken boards. “If you...ever...come on a mission with me again and fail to follow my orders when I’m in charge, do you know what I’m going to do?”
His double chins obscured his neck, but I saw the bob of his Adam’s apple. “You’ll...uh...kill me?”
I leaned down, and wondered for a beat why he didn’t turn to rock before I realized that he was afraid of me. “I won’t kill you, Clyde. I’ll drain so much of your mind that what’s left will have all the cognitive ability of a pumpkin.” I narrowed my eyes to glare at him. “Which, in your case, will be nothing but the sharpest of improvements.” I brought my hand around and patted him gently on the cheek, which he flinched from. “Clear?”
“You...” his voice wavered as he regained his capacity for speech, “you can’t talk to me like that!”
I grabbed him again around the neck and lifted him up. He was taller than me by a full head, so I tilted my back at an angle so that he was above me and his feet couldn’t touch the ground. I felt the swirling start in my head, and he shrieked, so I let him go, and he fell back into the refuse pile he had landed on a moment earlier. “I can. I will. You will listen to me while you’re alive or I’ll make you my slave after you’re dead.”
There was a moment of glare between us, and then I raised my voice. “Kat! KAT!” I kept watch on the space where the door had been when we had first come to the house, and I saw a blond head peek in from the porch, her face waxy pale, as though the life had been drained out of it. “Get Reed in the van,” I said. “We’re moving in five, just as soon as Clary and I can get our prisoner and Scott up there.” I looked down at Scott, who was still bleeding on the floor. “And I hope you saved some of your strength for your boyfriend.”
It was an operation, and I cursed Clary a dozen times over the next few minutes for cutting off our easy exit by destroying the stairs. The clouds of dust had cleared, and Clary gave me a boost up to the front of the house after I asked him only once. He was strangely silent, cowed into submission at last, no trace of guile or anger on his face; he reminded me of a shamed child, someone bullied into submission and broken in their will. I didn’t have time to feel bad about it, though, because Scott was still bleeding profusely. With Kat’s help I got him up and into the van as the sirens became audible in the far distance.
“Dammit,” I said under my breath. I looked back to the house to see a body ejected out of the basement, hitting the second of the four supporting pillars that held the roof off the porch before taking a slow arc and landing on the same Honda that the van had rammed into my opponent during the fight.
“Oh, God,” Kat said, wavering, as though she might fall at any moment. Against the backdrop of the gray skies and leaf-strewn wet street, she looked like a leaf herself, ready to wilt and fade. “Do you think anyone noticed that?”
“I think we’re pretty much out of time and luck if we want to get clear of this ridiculous turkey of a mission,” I said grimly. “And I hope like hell that the body that just flew out of there wasn’t Clary, because we have no time to subdue that other jackass again before the cops get here.”
“You don’t have your FBI ID?” Kat asked me in slight surprise.
“I don’t think an FBI ID is going to explain us out of this disaster.”
She looked for a moment like she was going to answer, then paled and promptly got sick on the