Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

counted how many deaths she’d been responsible for that year because she was worried it would be twenty-three. She and Nathan would be even Steven.

Five: how many agencies cooperated in the planning of the attack on the Pennsylvania farm. Deep in a broad valley, the closest trees were acres and acres away. Thanks to the agency coordination, the Moderators were equipped as they had never been before. Some wore noise-canceling headphones. Others wore protective goggles. There were dogs with keen noses. Trucks with keen armor. A guy with a flame-thrower. A woman with a Stinger. This might be the only chance they had to corner the Potomac Zeds. It had to count.

“No hanging back like you did the other times, Carmen,” Lock said. Not cruelly, but firmly. “This is your plan. You take lead. Bring Liliana.”

Farooq-Lane swung wildly between hoping she was right and fearing she was wrong. This could be the attack that ended it all.

Four: the number of Zeds in the big stone house when the Moderators broke through the door.

There was just a second to see the scene, the Potomac Zeds arranged around a formal sofa like a portrait. Rhiannon Martin, towel in hand, face shocked. Jordan Hennessy, crouched on the sofa arm like a cat. Ronan Lynch, black liquid oozing down his face, slumped against Bryde. A second to think, it worked! Well, they were visible, which was already an improvement.

And then Farooq-Lane glimpsed a silver orb flying toward her.

Farooq-Lane wasn’t sure how she even saw it in time, but her arm was already swinging her pistol. It connected with the orb like a small baseball bat and knocked it right through the windowpane.

“Hello and fuck you,” Hennessy said, pulling out a brilliantly bright sword.

Then it was chaos.

There were bursts of gunfire. Tremendous swipes of light arced through the dim hallways. Someone screamed in a very unselfconscious way. A voice rose: “Hennessy, what are you waiting for? Now!”

They braced themselves for a dreamt horror, but no dreamt horror came. There was just a frantic race outside as the agency woman fired the Stinger directly into the house. What ensued seemed to be an ordinary foot chase, an ordinary gun battle. How astonishing that these things had become commonplace to Farooq-Lane. How astonishing that the Zeds had not yet unleashed anything worse.

Three: the number of yards Farooq-Lane discovered were between her and Jordan Hennessy. She had been trying to find a place where she wouldn’t get shot in the cross fire—she dimly suspected some of the Moderators might take pleasure in the excuse—and had been pressed against the barn, which still smelled of the turkeys that had lived and died in it. She had no idea where Liliana was. Everything was masks and riot shields and faceless agents like a war zone.

But there was Jordan Hennessy, staring up at two figures moving through the commotion: Bryde and Ronan Lynch. The first dragging the second. Ronan Lynch’s face was still streaming that black ooze, and even from here, Farooq-Lane could see his chest heaving for air. They were being rounded on by Moderators, but Bryde was keeping them at bay with a sunfire sword, one of the two weapons they’d used to get away on the banks of the Potomac.

Its mate, the starfire blade, rested securely in one of Jordan Hennessy’s hands just a few yards from Farooq-Lane, its blade dripping moonlight and malice.

Jordan Hennessy’s eyes glittered with fury as she surveyed the scene.

Farooq-Lane was surprised to feel terror. It liquefied her knees, loosened her fingers. The Zed hadn’t seen her there crouched in the shadow of the turkey house, but she would if Farooq-Lane tried to lift her gun. And Farooq-Lane knew what that sword did. She’d have less of an arm than Bellos before she could even scream.

“Hennessy!” Bryde shouted. “Now, if ever!”

Two: seconds before the nightmare appeared.

In the first second, Hennessy put a little bit of dark cloth over her eyes—oh, it was a mask, Farooq-Lane saw it was a mask now, she’d forgotten the Zeds used them at the previous attack—and slumped to the ground in instant sleep.

After the next second, as Farooq-Lane lifted her gun to shoot the sleeping Zed, there was the nightmare.

It was hell. It was shape. It was non-shape. It was form. It was non-form. It was checkered and growing, it was shriveled and grasping. Farooq-Lane didn’t want to look at it, but she wasn’t going to look away. There was not much of it, and even though it didn’t seem to have a proper body, there was a distinct feeling that it was … abbreviated. There was supposed to be more of it. It was severed. Partial.

And it hated Jordan Hennessy.

The hate was bigger than anything else about it. Farooq-Lane could hear it like a battle cry and a sob.

But Jordan Hennessy didn’t lift a finger to shield herself. She was frozen on the ground, mask slid to the side, eyes horrified and miserable. The star sword sputtered beside her in the grass, throwing moonbeams a few inches here and there.

It was clear that whatever the Zed had intended to bring from a dream, this was not it. This thing wanted to kill Jordan Hennessy.

Farooq-Lane should have let it.

But instead, she leapt forward and seized the star sword. She only had a moment to feel the warmth of its hilt, the glory of its purpose, the strangeness of its power, and then she sliced through the nightmare with the blade.

There was a silent shudder as the nightmare splintered.

Farooq-Lane slashed again, and again. This weapon drove it back so completely that it seemed to have been made to drive it back. To decimate it. She slashed and slashed, until the final tiny scrap of the nightmare somehow managed to dart through the wall into the turkey house.

Inside, the animals screamed and screamed, and then everything was silent.

“Visionary!” howled another voice. A Moderator, Ramsay.

Farooq-Lane’s gaze found Ramsay standing beside one of the armored cars. She followed his gaze. On the porch,