Blood spat from the stump of his shoulder. He stared, his bruised and bloody face as pale as his hair when he glanced at the arm and its tendrils of muscles laying on his sneakers. Then he screamed.
Adam fell to his knees, clutching the stump and the jagged piece of bone, but the blood wouldn’t stop gushing through his fingers and onto his shirt, onto the floor and splattering down his white shirt. I watched him shriek, watched how his voice slowly gave out into gasping dry heaves, like he was going to puke, and eventually, he did—saliva, blood, and half-digested food. It took the rest of them a heartbeat to follow suit, to look at his arm. One soldier vomited. Another swore and leveled their weapon, but I tilted my head, stared them dead in that face plate, into panicked blue eyes I saw shining with the reflection of my light. She lowered the rattling weapon. Lowered it until it slipped from her hands and clattered onto the floor. They all reeked of sweat, each and every one of them, like something had just turned up the heat in the room. Cassie simply just stared in awe.
My mom, however, gasped, grabbed Adam’s arm, then tore off her lab coat and quickly began wrapping it around the stump. It stopped me from moving forward. Froze me right in place.
Because she was whispering something, whispering, “It’ll be okay, God, I'm sorry, it’ll be okay, just focus on my voice.”
I stared at her, watched her snap her fingers at one of the soldiers, gave up, then snapped at Rett to grab a few broken emergency kits off the floor. Syringes. Bandages. Ointments. Hundreds of dollars worth of Blackwood Pharma medical-tech, wasted on some look-alike. She worked like he was the only thing that mattered in the room. Not the monsters in the cages, screaming and choking on their own blood and organs. Not the armed soldiers standing over her, the ones who hadn’t backed away or shaken themselves to nervous wrecks. Adam was her priority, and not until his healing kicked in and whatever it was that she’d given him started working, that Veronica turned to look at me, look up at me. Her glasses reflected my light, my own bright golden eyes.
And there was something in her expression, something vile in the way her mouth went thin and her brows screwed tight, creasing her forehead, like she was fucking disgusted to see me like this. She finished knotting her lab coat around his arm, and then, with an arm around him, stared at me, watched me, as if defiantly testing me to see if I’d hurt him again. Gods, where the hell were you when I’d come home bleeding and broken, huh? How many times did I pick myself up off the bathroom floor ‘cause I passed out trying not to bleed my guts out? I wanted to say something, to do something, but she hadn’t blinked or moved in minutes. Just staring at me. Just testing me. Veronica stood, facing me, her black turtleneck patched with sweat as she walked toward me.
“Don’t—” Adam gasped and tried to stand, then fell to his knees. “Veronica.”
She stopped in front of me, looking up into my eyes. More sweat bubbled across her forehead and dribbled down her neck. “Olympia,” she said softly. “It’s enough, you’ve won.”
I stared at her, silent, and when I spoke, my voice echoed. “Move.”
Veronica Addams did not move; she took a step forward. “I can tell you everything you want about the Ambrosia Project, and anything else you want to know, but you can’t continue—”
“There’s one person in this room that matters, and it’s Cassie Blackwood.”
“People will hate you,” she said quietly. “If you take her, then what stops you from taking anyone you want for any reason you want? When does it stop? Where? How much more blood?”
The corona of golden electricity pulated around me, burning the air dry. The faint sound of crinkling glass and widening cracks echoed. They all winced and shaded their eyes from me as I brightened, the heat becoming worse, almost intrusive and violent in the air. “Don’t make this about them. This is about the people in the cages and the person bankrolling it, and if the humans didn’t want blood, then they would stop squirming so much. I’m trying to help them, help this entire city, and for whatever fucking reason, nobody seems to get that—you all want peace without actually bleeding for it. I don’t give a damn what you’ve got to say right now. I’m taking her. That’s final.”
I hovered past Veronica, then she grabbed my forearm, and the stink of burning skin rushed down my throat like a burning shot of dry liquor. Mom didn’t wince or cry out. She bared down, clenching her jaw, looking at me even though her hand was flaring with angry red blisters and blackening flesh. I yanked my arm away, watched as she lowered it, the skin still smoking, the tendrils curling around her arm, and still she stared, still her brows creased and frown deepened.
“Don’t become them,” she whispered, nearly mouthing it. “You’re better than that, Ry.”
A ball of icy lead formed in my gut, tried to rise up my throat, but I swallowed it, tasted the bitter saliva it left trailing back down to my stomach. I was held in place by her eyes, by the words that had so easily come out of her mouth, as if she’d said them before, practiced them, told them to herself so many times in case she ever had to say them to someone other than her own imagination.
I hadn’t mutilated a government sanctioned superhero, however, to stop here.
I flew past mom, leaving her just over my shoulder to sigh and lower her head. I reached the CEO, and Cassie looked up at me, her eyes shining with the light humming around me. They glittered, sparkled, shone like two tiny jade emeralds. Her smile was tense and thin, like a grimace.
“I’ve never seen you like this before,” she whispered. Cassie reached out, then swore and shook out her hand when a tendril of electricity snapped at her fingertip. “How are you doing—”
“Let’s go,” I said flatly. “The world is waiting for their answers.”
“I doubt I could do anything to refuse,” she said. “My God. There’s scripture, you know, about people with powers like this dating back millenia, and…well, you don’t care, do you? The capital in your blood alone. The potential. It almost makes me feel guilty for just being human.” The woman laughed dryly, shaking her head as she slid her hands into her pockets. “It’s been one hell of a performance, and you’ve surprised even me, but let me do you one better, superhero.”
A soft, muffled click echoed through the air, then the white fluorescents blinked red. A heartbeat later, and the blaring sound of an alarm tore through the laboratory, wailing an ear-splitting scream. I flinched, glanced at Cassie, at Rett and his soldiers, ignored Adam, and turned to look at the glass cages filled with raving Kaiju. Glass panels were hissing, sliding apart, puking out the nauseating smells that had hid behind them. Every single cage shuddered. Each looming door slid open, up and up, forcing me a little higher up, forcing me to swear, as the Kaiju paused at the exit of their cells, their tentacles licking the steel bases of each cage, slathering along the first markings on the cold concrete floor. I cursed again, even louder, as the piles of organs and flesh, hearts and muscles and tentacles gathered into one soupy mess of putrid body parts that made my overly sensitive nose recoil. I wanted to vomit looking at them. Wanted to leave right then.
We collectively stared at the creature coming together on the floor, a bubbling mass of tumors and mouths and slimy purple tentacles sucking on its own stewing mess of liquified flesh.
“What did you do?” I said. Again, louder: “What the hell did you just do?”
Cassie, hands still in her pockets, smiled. “Freed up space in the old basement. There’s always going to be more where these came from. Always. I’ll be taking my leave now. Wraith?”
A second later, and the crimson darkness enveloped Cassie, pulling her into thin air.
Wraith? I thought. The guns. That sickly sweet smell from the Kaiju, like that powder.
Was Cassie Blackwood—
Mom stumbled, banging against a table, snapping my concentration back to her, to the Kaiju now rising and rising, filling the warehouse-sized space with a stench so terrible my tongue shriveled into my throat. In the hellish red light, it looked ghastly, like it was dragging its mangled body parts out of hell and spilling them onto the floor. Its scream was louder, more strangled, a stew of voices, old and young, male and female, that was so distorted it turned my gut with sickness.
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It didn’t go for mom, or the Damage Control soldiers, or even a paling Adam.
But me instead.
A thick, grotesque tentacle shot out from the fleshy mass. I darted away, rocketing through the air to avoid the dozens more that spilled from its orifices. Quick. Faster than me. They snatched my ankle in their grip, jerking my leg painfully as it slammed me through a pillar. Concrete dust exploded into my lungs, choking my mouth dry. I rolled along the floor, dazed, used my flight to pick myself up, and narrowly avoided one, two, shit, seven tentacles snaking along the floor and through the air. Then the ceiling shuddered, the missing pillar crumbling and dragging down a bus-sized chunk of concrete down from above, like a fist of red-stained stone that punched down hard on the creature, blowing it to bits. I coughed and hacked, the dust a cloud in the air and on the ground. It wasn’t dead. I knew it wasn’t dead. It was squirming and screaming for bloody murder.
And so was my mom, a sound so terrible I could only stare at the chunk of rubble sitting on her right foot. I was there in a blink, empty, panicked, grabbing the rock, but something snatched my ankle, snapping me away from mom and throwing me against the floor, the ceiling, a wall and through a pillar in one violent smashing move. My head rang. My body ached. The burning light around my body flickered as I gathered myself, shouldered off debris the size of small cars, and raced back to my mom, to the Damage Control soldiers running toward her, trying to avoid falling stones larger than a human’s skull. Then another tentacle latched onto my arm, not wrapping around it, but almost melting into my suit, gooey and pasty and burning my skin when it touched.
I screamed when it raced around my throat, tightening like a sudden noose, dragging me further away from mom and the soldiers struggling to get her up. Fuck. Fuck! More rubble. More stones rained from above as it all shuddered and shook with vibrating chaos. The glass cages shattered, spitting glass spindles through the air, slicing at mom’s cheek and drawing a line of blood across the floor. I struggled, kicked. The tentacles blending onto my skin didn’t let up. They burned, ached, and when I pulled at them, dug my fingers into their meat to tear them off me, it hurt to even touch them. Up into the air. Down into the concrete. Agony tearing through my mind and body, the wind getting knocked clear out of my lungs. Mom’s screaming, that’s all I could hear. I dragged myself onto my hands and knees, dug my fingers into the concrete and pulled and tore and fought my way forward, no matter how much it felt like my skin was getting torn right off my arms, my neck, my legs—something deep down told me not to care, not to bother; to focus on the thing trying to pull strips of flesh off my skeleton, but….I still crawled, still screamed, maybe her name, maybe in pain, fuck, maybe even mom by accident, and didn’t stop no matter the agony.
A tentacle snapped onto my cheek. I flinched, whipped my head around—it came free with my skin. Blood spat onto the floor, onto the tentacles that raged into a frenzy at the taste of it.
From the darkness, one darted into my mouth, down my throat, choking my, gagging me—I tore away at it, ripping it apart, my body pulsating with the same energy that had killed that damned snake back on 12th Avenue to no avail. Mom still ahead of me. Two more soldiers crushed by falling debris. I lurched forward. Stumbled and ran, flew upward and smashed into a falling boulder before it could slam down onto Rett, mom, three others and even Adam. It blew apart into smaller rocks, showering them, but the creature wasn’t done. It swung me through another pillar, against the ceiling, gathering itself out from the rubble and rising above it, one large eye gathering in the darkness to stare at the bleeding light it had in its tentacle. It had my arms, my legs, my throat in its organ-layered tentacles. Then it began to pull. To dig its shards of bone into my flesh, through my costume, and I screamed. Screamed loud enough for the ceiling to collapse, for it to all come down.
----------------------------------------
Adam watched the ceiling fall, and the superhero bleed golden blood. His mind had been wracked with pain, so much pain he couldn’t focus on anything going on around him. He lay on the ground, trapped underneath rubble. Screaming. Lots of screaming. Veronica’s the sharpest. Olympia’s the loudest. Her light was stark in the blood-red darkness, so bright it cast long sweeping shadows through the entire room. Tonight was a favor, a task he wasn’t meant to do. The Olympiad didn’t know he was here, didn’t know he was being crushed again and again by the weight of debris smashing onto the stones laying flat on his back. But they didn’t need to know. He didn’t care.
She was screaming for help, not even for herself, but for Olympia.
His body couldn’t lift itself off the floor, let alone the boulders above him, but he had no choice, no option—couldn’t stay on the floor, couldn’t just lie there bleeding and helpless.
He had been promised power, a future. Only way to get that was to live to see it.
Adam’s fist splintered the stone underneath him, smashing it apart as he rose, rose, goddammit, stand up, square your feet, shoulder the rubble, the debris, tensing his jaw to much it ached with pain. Then he shot outward, straight toward Veronica, the soldiers, and stopped a piece of debris from crashing into them. One arm above him, The stone on his back. He collapsed onto one leg, the warm blood pouring down his side making his head woozy as he struggled, fighting to keep the boulder from coming down any closer. He roared, using his lone arm to lift higher, higher, then throw it aside. He went for the stone sitting on Veronica’s ankle, didn’t even look at the mangled mess it had become. What was the bastard’s name, Rett, right—he snapped for him to get a hold of him, hold tight, as well as the rest of his soldiers. Veronica in his arms, the debris raining from above, the entire laboratory caving in, and he shot toward the exit tunnel. Through the choking dust and blinding concrete shrapnel that spat into his eyes and flicked away from him.
His arm. He’d forgotten his arm. The stub ached, thudded with so much anguish he wanted to pass out, to puke and shudder and stop existing long enough to not have to feel it anymore.
Not an excuse. Not for Zeus. Keep fucking going.
Keep. Going.
Through the falling stone, through the dust, the soldier’s fingers deep in his skin, their screaming and praying and cries for their loved ones loud in his ears, and Veronica calling for her.
That superhero being torn into by that fucking Kaiju.
Adam burst through the tunnel exit, collapsing into a heap as he rolled along the floor, his body finally giving out, his strength sapped and nullified. He held Veronica tight against his body as he rolled, ass over heels again and again until he slammed into a parked armored van. He gasped, winded, breathing harder and harder the longer he lay in the crumpled mess of the truck. Veronica lay beside him, moaning, her foot a mess of skin and bone and muscle. Soldiers lay scattered all over the ground and, thankfully, all still alive. Rett was already crawling around, stumbling to check on each of them, trying to shout for help from other guard posts along the tunnel. Adam gave in, sighing with exhaustion as he splayed out in the dent he had made. Shit, those old bastards are gonna be on my ass about leaving the compound. That was his first thought. Not his arm or the blood pooling through his shirt, but Poseidon and Ares and what they would say.
A good superhero would have stopped that damned criminal and taken her into custody.
But…hell, a gust of dust rushed down the tunnel and into the loading dock, and he figured that fate had taken her into its own kind of custody. The silence lingered, lasted, laid thick and fat in the air, only interrupted by the sounds of their breathing and shuffling and incoherent mumblings.
“Oh God,” he heard Veronica whisper. On one elbow, her head tilted to stare at the tunnel exit, at the rubble tumbling from it. “Oh God. Where is she? Did you—Did you see her get out?”
Adam shook his head slowly, lest he passed out right now. “Last I saw, that thing had her.”
Probably ripped her in two, he thought. Or into bloody birthday ribbons.
Confetti, he felt, was a better word. A little surprise for the city.
“No,” was the word she said that cut through his thoughts. The word, like a shard of ice, that shocked him awake. Veronica crawled, dragging her foot behind her, a long snaking trail of blood on this dusty floor. “No, God no. Fuck. Please. Please no.” She clawed at the rubble, throwing stones behind her, cutting up her hand and tearing her fingernails. “Not again. Not—”
“Veronica?” Adam said. She didn’t stop muttering, didn’t stop throwing stones.
But she turned her head, and he saw her eyes, saw their redness and the tears that balanced on their rims and those that had already smeared her cheeks with grit. “Adam, please. Save her.”
“Save Olympia?” he asked, groaning as he sat upright. “I can’t raise the dead, Veronica.”
“Adam!” she cried out, so sharp he flinched. Then, softly: “There’s people who need her.”
“The city will be just fine without that blue and red train wreck.”
She stopped flinging the stones behind her, going woozy for a second when she moved too quickly and smacked her ankle against some rubble. “Adam,” she whispered. “Superheroes save people, save anyone.” Veronica panted hard, almost gasped for air. “Superheroes don’t give up on people, alright? I don’t know what they teach you in that fucking organization, I don’t care what Poseidon or even King has to say about doing the logical thing; you do the right fucking thing until you can’t anymore, because all I’m asking from you after all these years is just this: save Olympia.”
Adam sat on the edge of the dent, looking across the docking yard. Help was coming.
He could hear their boots and trucks racing down the tunnel, blaring their call.
I’d hate to break your heart, Veronica, he thought. But there’s no heartbeat in there.
Buried with the rest of the monsters, not killed on a hill like her father. Typical.
Zeus was right about her. His daughter was destined to be a disappointment to the very end.
That's why I was brought into this world, wasn't it? To wear her cape when she fails.