The Cardinal Bird (1 of Cardinal Series)

Chapter 43

A/N: Here you go my precious lovelies.     ...you should read that in a creepy Golem voice.

"I won't hurt you," Agent Grinley taunted.

Right, because that second shot where I had been sitting was meant to make sure that, what, the almost point-blank headshot had indeed really killed his fellow agent? Not.

I wanted to curl up and cry in frustration at the unfairness of the whole thing. I had just survived one psychopath. How much bad luck did I have to fall right into the hands of another?

I jerked my hand back when liquid brushed against it. I looked down. It was the puddle of blood. It had reached me. Petya's blood. It was soaking into me, but there was nowhere I could go to escape it. And I was complaining about my luck like I had a right to?

There was a gas stove in front of me. Surely this far out of town, it had to run off of a propane tank, not a gas line. There could still be gas in there if it was a tank. If it was a gas line, the utility might've been shut off.

The hairs on my arms stood up when I realized that Grinley hadn't made a sound in a while. I had no idea where he was. He could be standing right behind me, pointing the same gun at me that had so effortlessly killed Kaz--no, not Kaz. Petya.

Focus.

Petya would probably have had a gun on him as well. I glanced over at his body. Trying to ignore it, but helpless to it as my mind mentally calculated the differences between Kaz who had been shot from the front, leaving his face mostly intact. That was not the case with Petya. Exit wounds were much, much messier, and even avoiding looking at it directly didn't stop my mind from processing the ground meat that had once been a face.

Petya's gun was out of the question. Only his upper back and above were visible and reaching for the holster at his waist would put me in direct vision of Grinley if he was still lurking in the basement doorway.

Stove it was then. I leaned forward as quickly as possible and turned the knob, smearing blood all over them from my slick grasp. Hopefully, this wasn't a myth that Ivanov's ring of personal assassins had made up. If it was a tall tale, then maybe Grinley wouldn't know for sure either. Maybe I could negotiate with him.

I glanced back over at Petya's body.

Scratch that. There would be no negotiating with him. He wasn't exactly acting rationally.

Why was he so quiet? Where was the monologuing? Was he still on the stairs? Was he right on the other side of the island? I had no way to know.

As soon as I turned all the knobs, the pungent smell of gas hissed into the air, filling the room with propane and me with relief. I turned back around, soaking my knees in the puddle of blood. I tried to open the cabinets to the island, but my hands kept slipping off the wood, the handles long since gone. I went to wipe my hands on my shirt, remembered I didn't have one, thanked whoever might be listening that I still at least had the sports bra Gabriel had given me, and wiped the blood off on my tights. The white fabric was quickly becoming soiled in red, a stark reminder of why I usually wore black.

I was finally able to get the doors opened. I was tempted to just hide inside, but it would be a death sentence. I scoured the inside for a stainless steel pot, or any surface that I could use as a mirror to try to find out where Grinley was.

But nothing.

"What's that smell?" Agent Grinley asked. He was closer, but not by much.

I continued staring at the pots and pans inside, trying to figure out how they could possibly hold up in a gunfight.

"Is that gas?" he laughed coldly. "That's rich. I'll give you credit. You're resourceful." He sounded much more relaxed. Maybe he realized that I was desperate if I was relying on the stove to save me. "You'd need a lot more time to get the right air to gas ratio to make the room go boom. And what would you do then? You're still here. Or are you just that ready to die? Why are you so guilty? You really are that hacker then? Byte-syzed?"

Now that he was monologuing, I wished he would be quiet so I could focus. Instead, the steadily growing volume of his voice as he inched closer only served to make me more frantic.

The smell of propane was suffocatingly thick now.

My eyes flew back to the stove.

Maybe I didn't need a big boom. Maybe all I needed was a small fire to make my escape. The back door was just a leap and bound away, leading out to the forest. I would have a better chance out there. I might be able to disappear. In here, I was just a fish in a barrel.

I looked back at the cabinet grabbing a cast iron skillet.

I hefted it a couple of times, testing its weight and then threw it as hard as I could around the side of the island. It clanged against the wall with a deafening sound. And then three very deadly things happened nearly simultaneously: I had jumped up and headed towards the back door, already studying and planning my route to the forest as I focused beyond the glass. Behind me, four shots rang out back to back, each one clanging with lethal precision as they hit their mark before the pan had even finished falling to the floor. And then, cutting off Grinley's curse as he realized too late that he had fallen for a ploy, the spark from the gun ignited the gas.

And, boy was it an ignition. The world flashed a brilliant orange and red throughout the room faster than the human brain could process. A heat wave blasted with crushing pressure as all of the lingering gas caught fire in a blink of an explosion. I was propelled forward through the glass door in an explosion jagged glass.

I fell to the floor in a heap landing on my side in the fetal position, praying that the worst of it was over. I couldn't hear anything past a high-pitched ringing in my ears, but I could feel it as molten-hot glass rained down on top of me. The pieces of window that had survived my burst through it the first time were knocked from their place by a smaller, secondary explosion.

I just lay there, my ears on high alert--sound gradually returning as they stopped ringing. Instead, I could focus on listening for any sign of Grinley. Moving hurt and only managed to help the glass shards beneath me to dig in deeper, so I stopped. Laying still, my body didn't feel any pain, and that terrified me. Usually the longer it took your body to process the injury, the worse it was.

I heard movement from inside, too quiet to tell if it was Grinley or debris. I didn't want to wait to find out though. I got to my feet, stumbling through the minefield of dagger-like shards and clutching my arm to myself. It felt numb and tingly...unresponsive.

Still, I staggered on. Running through my head was a mantra of just making it to the treeline, then I'd be safe.

Just 50 more yards. Then I'd be safe.

30 more yards. I'd be safe.

I stumbled to my knees, tripping over nothing, but I pushed back up. I was a survivor. I was still a survivor. Free-Sang would make it.

15 more yards.

10 more yards.

5...

Behind me, Agent Grinley had obviously recovered because the tree exploded to my left at head-level in a burst of splinters, blasting me in the shoulder.

I cried out, falling to the ground.