I SCREAM LIKE a panicked housewife, no thought to my own dignity or even safety as I abandon the stalemate with Titan to warn Bellwether out of the crossfire.

The girl frowns, twisting about and going into a defensive pose like we drilled as Arsenal clarifies out of the shadows, a nightmare of sparkling appliances and coiled menace. There is a serpentine quality to the burly intruder far beyond what one might expect from a disgruntled man aged about sixty. As he moves, I realise there’s some manner of distortion rippling the air around him, aiding and abetting his advancement, throwing my barometric extra sensory perception into a buzzing alarm.

Titan clearly neither knows nor cares what the interloper’s arrival means. He dives for the big cannon, meaning idiot me has to leave his back exposed in order to rocket across the crumbling courtyard and collect Bellwether in a tackle that would make even the hardiest wide receiver’s eyes water, a little feminine grunt of displacement shooting out of the girl as we narrowly miss Arsenal’s signature invisible incendiary attack. A patch of concrete floor erupts in flames amid a high frequency squeal and I am still too busy skidding and trying to protect mine and Bellwether’s faces to do aught but watch as Arsenal and Titan both round their weapons on our wake.

“Fuck,” I growl, splaying out a hand as we come to rest, trying to scramble in a most ungentlemanly way on top of Belle to protect her as the hairs on the back of my neck prickle at our crucifixion in those gun sights, but Belle – whether she misunderstands my clumsy efforts to shield her or thinks she has a better way to deal with the impending threat – evades my best efforts, starting to rise with one hand to her temple in that time-honoured tradition of telepaths everywhere.

But too late.

Arsenal’s wrist beam squeals again, the invisible beam punching right through her. For that awful time-slowed moment, the incandescence bursts forth from her mouth and eyes as they fly open, nothing she can say, the fire lit within and me unable to say anything either as Titan’s coruscating death ray strafes me, blasting me backwards into a concrete shelf that shields stairwells to the cellar level below.

Before the darkness momentarily claims me, I’m a horrified witness to Belle twisting back at me as she ignites from within, going up like a tree in a forest fire as the scream she at first could not unleash now breaks free along with her life force.

I push free of the wreckage half-covering me, fighting off the pain of Titan’s attack, hurling a girder aside as I leap like an avenging angel from the ruins, the whole superstructure groaning above me as I sling out an electrical attack that knocks Titan back so I can get clear enough to race to Belle’s side, the disorienting agony of the this-isn’t-a-dream realisation that accompanies each tragic life’s upheaval threatening to choke me, testosterone and adrenaline momentarily not at war with each other, but allies as they saturate my bloodstream and let me act, furious, beyond furious gaze scanning for Arsenal who is set to disappear, job done, whether he eliminates me or not clearly not part of his remit or concern.

My lightning bolt hits Titan’s weapon, which flares in a blinding white snap flash that disappears him as completely and effectively as some cosmic etch-a-sketch. The wall behind where he was standing comes down, then the whole structure behind me follows suit so that I am flying across the chipped and stained and ruined concrete as the building slumps chaotically to the ground in my wake and I break free into sunlight, the news chopper’s shadow crossing the sun and throwing the shadow of its hurtling rotors over the tragedy lending a stomach-rending strobe effect I could really do without.

Belle collapses into my arms. The fire burns within her still, yet life clings to her skeleton like her very soul’s fingers are clawing to avoid that final release. I’m again overwhelmed to think this calamity, for all my powers, appears so unavoidable, and that another woman close to me has to die.

“No.”

A wretched sob’s my one concession to the moment. Bellwether’s face is gone, burnt out from within, perhaps just her psychic presence the only thing leaving a trace of life within her, the stub of her incinerated tongue making an awful dry clucking noise I yearn to still. My hands clutch her, fingers sinking awfully into the flaking meat of her arms as her already slim body arches in its final misery and she starts to yield to the great Nothing.

Across from me, Arsenal flicks his helmeted gaze my way, fussing with a device on his opposite wrist.

Torn, I refocus my attention on Belle. Gently shake her.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, honey,” I say, words a half-moan decipherable to probably no one. “We were linked before. You can do it again. The Preacherman did it. So can you. Come across to me, Bella. Tessa. Please. Take me. Don’t hold on. Leave your body behind. Do it now.”

Frantic, I look between the still collapsing epic monstrosity of the naval graveyard and the bleeping from Arsenal’s wrist. The villain gives a satisfied smirk, but in one of those rare transmorphic moments, I feel his grin slide from his face to mine as there’s a spark of light within my forehead, inner eye ablaze as I feel Belle’s triumphant psychic yell as she slips free of her mortal corpse and rappels along the psychic lasso into the warm sanctuary of my head space. Somehow Arsenal knows this moment of victory isn’t entirely his, and whatever taking stock he’s started, he quickly abandons as he sees me drop Bellwether’s corpse like so many rags and hurtle towards him.

“You’re dead,” I bawl as I land on him, swinging a left he ducks as he activates the old-fashioned chronometer on his left wrist.

“Whatever I do, you’re mine, Arsenal,” I growl and grab his arm, fingers raking down over his arm-guard and tearing the device from his arm.

Seagal’s shocked look, lower half of his face, stubbled chin and biker’s moustache visible beneath the helmet’s guard, is of a pyrrhic victory.

I cock my right arm back to deliver the killing blow.

And disappear instead.

Zephyr 15.9 “Out Of The Shadows” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose