“Quite,” Emma said. Then she took Rose’s hand again and they whisked her off.
30
Rose saw the director’s kick coming, or Spidey-sensed it. She didn’t like to spend too much time trying to figure out what was training, what was mystical properties of herself, and anyway, did it even matter? She was moving, that was the point, moving backward even as his foot connected (with her chin instead of her nose, and another half second later, she would have back-bended clean out of the way, but whatever). She was thrown back into her own flip but not as hard as she could have been thrown, and jarred by this kick — way more than she would have expected to be by this overweight, soft-chinned desk jockey — but not so jarred she couldn’t keep her wits about her enough to turn in the air and land on her feet.
“Do you like it?” he asked, holding the hand within a hand in front of his face, looking at it as if he were a little surprised, too, at how badass the glove was turning out to be. Then he flipped his wrist at her, like he was throwing an imaginary Frisbee to her, and blue bolts shot out of the fingertips.
She jumped out of the way. Just.
“It was a gift, you know. From the woman who sent you,” he said.
So he knew, she thought. Knew who’d sent her, probably knew they were coming for him, had known for how long? Days? Weeks? The whole fucking time?
Henry and Emma were going to get a fucking earful.
“Funny she didn’t warn you about it,” he said. “Maybe she forgot I had it.” A flick of his wrist, a bolt of lightning. “Maybe she forgot about me altogether. What was it? Did one of the Oracles tell her? Remind her I was here? Is that why they’ve been so quiet? They’ve known all along and she’s been waiting? Biding her time?”
She rolled herself to his desk, not sure what she would find there to help her defeat a crazed lunatic who had been waiting for her and who had a magical, all-powerful glove made out of someone else’s hand and that gave him superpowers, but it beat sitting around dodging bolts of lightning.
“The Hand of Raines,” he said as he arced more lightning bolts at her, scorching the desk and the air around her. “Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe not. Top secret, you know. When Gemini finally destroyed the warlock Harold Raines, all that was left was his right hand.” He stopped and looked at the glove and then craned his neck to see if he could see Rose hiding behind his desk. “Oyemi magicked it — who knows how — turned it into a glove.” He clenched the fist and then closed his eyes and then, for a moment, for two moments, floated inches off the floor. Then he dropped and opened his eyes and nodded his head. “I was supposed to test it out with her, you know. The two of us, together. Oyemi and me. Like always.”
Rose crouched and tested the weight of the desk and then sprung up, lifting the desk up (use your legs, not your back) and flipping it log-roll style right at the director’s head. He karate-chopped it, the way you karate-chop something in a cartoon, the way that would never really work in real life, but that gloved hand just sizzled through wood, solid oak or cherry, she didn’t know, but a heavy fucker of a desk, she knew that much. The desk sliced into two pieces, fell harmlessly to the floor on either side of the director, and now she didn’t have any good cover.
Fuck.
“But, you know how it goes,” he said. “Or maybe you don’t.” He took a step toward her and then another. Unhurried. Unconcerned.
“She got so busy and then she had her Oracles and then they all moved out of the city, her and her Oracles and a few others she brought with her to her compound in the Catskills.” He stopped and shook his head and sighed. Then he looked right at Rose, looked at her as if they were at a Starbucks, catching up over a latte, looked in her eye and gave her half a smile and said, “I didn’t even know where it was for the first six months she was out there.”
None of this made any sense to Rose but she didn’t care all that much, either. All she could figure was that maybe he thought someone else had sent her, which, fine, what did she care. All that mattered was getting herself out of this, and if he wanted to go on and on about the woman who gave him this glove instead of using the glove and then writing a long, emotional blog post about it, fine with her.
For every step he took forward, she took one back, thinking that this would buy her a little time, that he wouldn’t really notice anyway. He was standing between her and the door, but if worse came to worst, she could make her own door, get out of the immediate vicinity of this loon, and open the fight up, give herself breathing room, space to work, to improvise. This office was just too cramped.
Step, step. Step, step.
“So, fine, I understand, we were both busy,” he said. “We were running the Regional Office, I get that, but”—he shook his head—“there was something else, too, I don’t know, some distance between us. You know? Not that there wasn’t. Not that we didn’t.” He paused. He sighed. “We’ve both changed, haven’t we? But this, this seemed more than just normal growing apart.” He had been walking toward her but not looking at her, had been looking at his hands or his feet, had been distracted by his own story, his own memories, but then he looked at her and noticed where he was, what he was supposed to be doing, what she had been doing. “No, no, no. Stop. Stop, just. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t think I’m an idiot.”
“A distance,” she said. “I’ve had that, like, with my best friends from school,” she said.
“Don’t patronize me,” he said, and then he charged at her.
She kicked him, aiming for his nuts because, well, desperate times, etc., but he grabbed her foot, with the blue-crackling magical fire-hand, grabbed her foot and threw her up and over and God that burned, more than she could have imagined a burning sensation burning, and she flipped ass over head, and she thought, briefly, everything now flitting through her mind so damn briefly, about kids she remembered from when she was a kid. Kids with their dads at the beach or at the one pool in her shitty hometown, whose fathers would throw them high into the air, make them do these spectacular flips and falls off knees or shoulders or chests, and how jealous she had been watching those kids fly into the air and land graceless in the water, splashing and giggling and asking for more, for again, and how she wished she had some water right below her to land gracelessly into, instead of the cold, marble floor of the director’s office, or worse yet, his waiting arms — how the hell did he move under her so damn quick? She made an adjustment, which she knew was going to hurt, was going to hurt more than just a little, but less than if she let him catch her however he wanted. She wrenched control of herself midair and aimed herself at the director’s head, her fist outstretched, one leg stretched back, the other leg knee up, her other fist cocked and at the ready at her hip, like she was Supergirl, flying off to save the day, but aimed right at the director’s head knowing full well that he would grab that fist, what else could he do, grab it with the Hand of Pains or whatever he’d called his glove, and he did and it burned — fuck it burned — but he could only grab one arm at a time, right?
No matter what else the glove could do, it couldn’t grab more than one part of her at a time.
So while he had her by her wrist, burning the shit out of it, and while the burning pain leapt up her wrist and her arm, like it was shimmying up through her veins, heading, she was sure of it, toward her head and her heart, she punched him good on the bridge of his nose with her other fist, punched him as hard as she could punch, which was pretty fucking hard, she knew, having once punched an old VW Beetle onto its side after a particularly unfun afternoon of Assassin Training Camp. A VW Beetle she had assumed was Windsor’s — because of course Windsor would drive a fucking canary-yellow classic Bug — except it wasn’t hers, it wasn’t any of the girls’ at camp, but regardless: Her punch was a mighty fucking punch.