Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,98

the chips, hoping I could snag one from her, but she was very quick, almost Fangborn quick, and I knew she’d taken the Order’s best speed and strength synthetics. She snarled at me and lashed out, but I jumped away.

“The Makers!” I shouted. “They’re talking only with me! They don’t like . . . disorder.”

“But I don’t talk to lackeys,” she said.

I aimed a blast at her, but she dodged that, mostly. There was a whoosh of exhaled air as she leaned forward clutching herself, sparks flying and blood flowing. I’d already used up a lot of that energy on Zimmer, but no mind. I followed up with a two-fisted hammer blow to the back of her neck and then ran to the wall. I pulled out the fire hose and spun the crank, blasting her full strength with it, trying to wash her off the platform.

A train was coming.

Somehow she managed to withstand the stream and force her way toward me. The hose suddenly turned on me, like a living thing, and the force hit me full, though I kept my balance. I don’t know how, but the fire hose twined around my ankles. Carolina appeared behind me and shoved me toward the train tracks.

I flailed, grabbed her hand, and pulled her into the ditch with me.

I could feel the train bearing down, the rumbling devastating; I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think. I had to find a way to stop her long enough to get away.

I could see the lights of the train behind Carolina. I could see my fear reflected in her cracked glasses. She was going to keep me busy, long enough to shove me into it, and scram out of there before she was hit.

Her strength was scary and unexpected. It was clear that she had as many of the enhancements as Porter and Buell did. It was too much like fighting Porter—ahhh.

She had enjoyed the fruits of his research but lacked one thing he had.

Bingo.

Porter’s gold signet ring.

I had the ring, and now I knew what it was for. Porter had created something to keep only for himself, an object that could remove the synthetic powers he’d given to his colleagues if he decided to.

The ring was Porter’s version of Fangborn shedding.

I pulled it out of thin air and slipped it on my finger. It was laughably too big, but it made a dandy knuckle-duster. I ate a couple of punches, which hurt like hell, but I needed my hands free. I grabbed Carolina by her expensive haircut with my left hand and slammed my fist, and the ring, into her forehead.

“We’re done here,” I said.

Time froze, literally, for the both of us. I didn’t feel anything but the sweat on her forehead stinging my cracked knuckles. When I tried to pull my hand away, to try and get away or drag her up to the platform, I couldn’t. And then shit got glowy.

I realized that the rising fog before my eyes wasn’t because I was about to pass out, but that there was a reddish mist accumulating around the pair of us. I closed my eyes, just a second, to make sure; then, when I opened them again, I could see that the mist was coalescing into tendrils.

Tentacles, really. They were moving, waving individually now, about a dozen of them, moving from my hand and the ring—which presumably was creating them—and hovering around Carolina’s head. They hovered a second longer, before all twelve—or was it twenty?—drove themselves into her forehead. More extended, and began to curl around the chips in her arm, plucking them out delicately.

Carolina screamed. In this weird communion, I screamed, too, a chorus of pain to hers. It felt as though something in me was digging through her bone, brain, and psyche; it reminded me of trying to grab something valuable before it got lost in a trash can filled with glass fragments and metal industrial waste.

The world around me blurred, which I assumed meant that she was getting weaker, or at least her hold on the reality she’d created was getting weaker. I didn’t like betting, so with a great deal of concentration, I jumped? Teleported? Moved us to the platform again. At least we’d be out of the way of the train.

I felt good, felt like I was getting the upper hand, at long last, but I couldn’t seem to keep my balance. Carolina weighed virtually nothing, but she dragged on me like a laundry bag full of anvils. But