Shades of Gray - By Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge Page 0,68
was Hornblower, peeling off a sonic blast that leveled two of the creatures. Firebug’s flaming shield had some of them flinching back, protecting their eyes. Steele took the direct approach: She pummeled any mutant that got in her path.
“Ops,” Jet shouted, “tell them to stop, that they’re civilians!”
Meteorite’s reply left Jet cold: “I already did.”
“They’re not hurting the mutants,” Iri commented. “Maybe that’s even on purpose.”
“Come on.” Jet grabbed Iri’s wrist as she summoned a Shadow floater. “Frostbite, take Taser down.”
“Plan?” Iri asked as the two of them flew over the roof’s edge.
“Help them push the creatures back,” Jet called over her shoulder. “Knock them out or otherwise restrain them. We’ll figure out the logistics after.” She dropped the floater down in a free fall.
“Brilliant!” shouted Iri, holding on to Jet’s waist for dear life. “Tell the heroes to stop beating up on the innocent, murderous, insanely dangerous sewer-mutant wannabes. I love this plan!”
Frostbite and Taser slid down an ice ramp as Jet and Iri touched down. “Don’t hurt them,” Jet shouted.
“Don’t get killed,” Iri countered before she dove into the thick of it.
Jet rushed forward, slamming the nearest mutant with a Shadow bolt that knocked it off its oversized feet. She turned to the next creature, this one a woman, and hit her just as hard as the first. The woman-thing stumbled backward and into a third, which turned its rage upon her with a vicious blow to the head.
“Herd them!” That was Steele. “Get them contained!”
“Open to suggestions,” Iridium shouted, releasing strobe after strobe. Jet caught it peripherally as she blasted the first mutant again, and a third time. It still came for her, its meaty fists promising to crush her. She stepped back, and back again, and barely spun away from the second creature’s attack.
Someone let out a cry of pain.
Do it, Jet told herself. It will be different this time. Blanket him.
But she saw Lynda Kidder’s prone body, a husk discarded by the Shadow. She couldn’t do it. Snarling, she battered the creature again, and again. All it did was hold the man-thing back for the moment.
Fire arced overhead; ice crackled below. Her ears throbbed as Hornblower released his sonic cry, leveling it like a battering ram.
Do it!
She couldn’t.
Now someone was screaming—not fear, not battlelust. Agony—so raw and brutal it turned his voice into a weapon.
Hornblower.
“Oh, Christo, his leg!” Frostbite, in panic. “Callie, oh Christo, Callie you’ve got to cauterize it—”
“On it,” she shouted. “Keep them off me!”
Jet doubled down, slamming the two mutants on her with everything she had, Shadowboxing them until they collapsed like dead trees. She pivoted and saw Iri squatting by Hornblower, clutching his right leg …
… which had been torn off above the knee.
Jet froze, staring at Tyler Taft as blood pooled beneath him and Iridium, watching him convulse with pain and shock.
Iri, stabbed by an Everyman in Third Year.
Sam, slain by an Everyman, shot in the back.
Jet screamed as she let the Shadow fly, blanketing the creatures around her. Two, three, four of the monstrosities, were swathed in Shadow, struggling to free themselves from the deathly cold. Jet squeezed, and in that moment she felt their light, their life, so sweet and thick and good, and she held her arms up, her face tilted to the moonlit sky, basking as she drank them down.
She felt them fall, one by one. And still she squeezed. When all four finally succumbed to the Shadow’s touch, she unwrapped the blanket, let them sprawl on the ground, unconscious but alive.
Energy sang in her, danced along her limbs. With a cry she hurled the Shadow over two more of the warped creatures, wrapping them tight. Squeezing them in the darkest of embraces. They, too, fell before the power of the Dark.
“Jet!”
She turned, smiling to see Taser there—Bruce Hunter, her onetime lover, who was stepping backward, his arms up in surrender. She remembered what it had been like to blanket him in Shadow, to slowly drain the light from his body … remembered how good it had felt …
“Joan,” he said, “whoa there! Good guy, remember?”
She stared at him, at the blank slate of his masked face, his eyes hidden by goggles, his sardonic smile obscured by fabric. And she thought about how easy it would be to kill him.
And then she realized what she was thinking.
Shuddering, she called the Shadow back to her, all of it. Creepers washed over her, tracing her curves in a seductive caress before they melted into her.