“Fifteenmillion,” Pedo-stache hisses. “For all the trouble we go through to help you.”
“Fine,” she says. “Twelve million is all I have on me right now. We’ll wire you the rest.”
“We need full paymentnow. Esther knows how I feel about indirect transfers.”
Ambrosia’s quiet, too quiet, resulting in an eerie silence as everyone holds their breath, waiting to see how this will unfold.
“I’ll radio her. She can have it sent to you in seconds.”
“You and I both know there’s no signal here.”
Then why the hell did we come out here?
The HK rattles in my grasp. I’m grateful for the suit’s gloves because my hands would be sweating up a storm by now.
“We have a problem here. How do you reckon we solve it?” Pedo-stache says.
Ambrosia disservices him by not answering. Pedo-stache takes a deliberate step forward.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she warns.
He raises his handgun.
“Was that a threat?”
“No—”
“Fucking recidivists!”
Ambrosia swipes her hands in sweeping, opposite directions. The crate of equipment in the middle remains mostly unscathed, but Pedo-stache and his men aren’t as lucky. They careen through the air, landing brutally on the cement. That’s when it starts raining hellfire from beyond the warehouse walls. Bullets clang on metal, some creating sizable dents in the structure. I fell to my knees, letting the strap of the machine gun loose, which was weighing me down. The drum of my heart is louder than the chaos that breaks out.
Our supply mission crumbles before my very eyes.
Matt’s on his feet, moving with grace as elegant as the water he masters. The water soars out of his canteen, hitting the nearest man to start getting to his feet. He molds the liquid into a bubble, the same as he did that day in Eureka. Mara flashes in my vision, her body crumbling to the ground, her venomous stare, the lightning crackling in between her fingers. All of asudden, I’m frozen. The HK hangs uselessly, draped over my torso. I blink. Lost.
“Conin, get the hell out of here!” Ambrosia bellows.
Her voice pulls me from my waking nightmare and I’m hauling myself up, machine gun in position. She tosses another of Pedo-stache’s men to the roof, followed by a booming crash. The man drops to the concrete, his bones squelching from the weight of the impact. Blood pools at his head. Meanwhile, Matt releases the water, and the person he’s trapped falls, seemingly dead.
I have the instinctive urge to vomit—my feet glued to the concrete, my mind racing a million miles a second, and I can’t formulate a thought long enough to move into action. A group of Pedo-stache’s backups files into the warehouse with guns raised. I’m a deer in headlights, a perfect offering, but my hands instinctively react like they did on the interstate, and I’m suddenly firing several rounds. Someone drops. The others are not yet aware I’m here.
“Ambrosia! Matt! Get outside!” Mafu screams.
The two Angelics dodge and weave while the men release a hailstorm. Ambrosia uses an enormous amount of strength, pushing them aside. Stray bullets gut the interior, tiny pinpricks of light illuminating their mark. I narrowly dodge the blast of hail. Ambrosia urgently motions at me. My body reacts and I’m at her side, racing out of the warehouse into the pines.
“Get back!”
We stumble to the forest floor.
Something aches in my abdomen. There’s a wetness inside my suit. It blossoms fiercely, spreading throughout my midsection. I turn on my back, reaching for the breached chink of armor, but I can’t reach, and instead watch Mafu mold the warehouse to his will—it crumbles into metallic heaps over Pedo-stache’screw. My peripheries are starting to blacken. My vision blurs. My senses numb.
“Conin!”
I close my eyes and there isn’t a world to return to.
Chapter 56
Ezra
