Then it screamed.

The sound in my head redoubled, rattled, became words. The words were accompanied by mental images.

“I never had a trigger event,” Dean’s voice.

“I had to abandon you for my own health.” Jessica’s.

“I’m sorry. I was selfish. It wasn’t your fault.”

Each was a fragment, a thing that had never been said, as much as they should have. A slice of a world that would have made more sense, gone to better places. Seductive.

Floating in the air, I curled up, knees to chest.

Fuck that. I straightened, tall, eyes wide.

I used my aura. The briefest of pulses. A push, taking that ‘fuck you’ and broadcasting it for the extra emphasis.

She was there, crouching, her wings around her. The aura didn’t touch her. I couldn’t even be sure she registered it happened.

But for everyone else, it was a nudge, a slap in the face, a bit of fuck you to shake them from anything they might be thinking or feeling that was similar to what I was experiencing.

I aimed and fired in the next moment. Fragments of roof cascaded down in a stream, absorbing a good seventy percent of what I was firing. I shifted position, flying to one side, and a cape took off, flying in my way. Only reflex kept me from shooting them in the back.

Sveta lunged in, reaching for someone in range of falling rubble.

That same person slapped falling rubble aside. It struck Sveta’s reaching arm.

For what had to be fifteen seconds, the Simurgh crouched in the midst of the lobby, where our side had been regrouping. She didn’t move a wing-tip. Nobody fought on her defense or intentionally threw a forcefield up to protect her.

For those fifteen seconds, we didn’t touch her. Capes advanced, then second-guessed themselves as more debris came down. They were blinded by the dust and then someone bumped into them, disturbing their aim, and they didn’t feel confident to make the shot.

My own aim suffered, because my vision warped, distorting. Trophy Wife had moved to a place where I wasn’t in her range anymore. She granted herself mutations based off of the trophies she’d taken, and she granted lesser effects to people around her. Problem was, that involved a faint transition period, which was fucking with me at a critical moment. The see-in-the-dark mutation was dropping away from my eyes now that I wasn’t in her range.

She shifted from the crouch, rising twenty feet into the air. With her telekinesis, she pulled chunks away from the ceiling.

Each chunk flew down with terminal velocity. No lead-in, no warning, each moving in a clear straight line with no prevarication or misleading. Each chunk took a life.