Chapter 4

Blondie refused to speak to me and everyone else eventually got tired of me asking how Johanna was, so I sulked in one of the seats. Sulked myself to sleep, actually. I didn't even know I was tired.

I woke to blondie pushing on my shoulder.

"We will be landing in a little over an hour," she said harshly when I blinked the sleep away. "Doctor MARIA Guines has finished with Johanna. It appears she will live though the doctor claims it is a miracle. Doctor Guines seems to think Johanna should have lost enough blood to die long before we got to the airport." She made a little face. "I suppose you aren't totally useless. Thank you."

I sighed. Another person who hated me. At this rate, they were going to start a club. "I'm glad I could help her. She ... well, she saved me."

Blondie frowned and nodded, just once. "She is awake but is on pain medications. She's asking for you."

"Thanks." I stretched and got up, turning back to the plastic sheets.

Johanna was pale and her eyes were glazed over. When she spoke, though, her voice was surprisingly strong. "I'm told I owe you my life."

"You don't owe me anything, Johanna," I said quietly. "You saved me back at the complex. If anything, this just makes us even."

She closed her eyes and a small, pained expression crossed her face. "I did nothing. I just pulled you into my apartment and let you sleep. That's nothing compared to what you did for me."

"I just pulled you into a car and let you sleep," I replied. "We're even. Nothing more."

She looked up at me, blinking away the sleep. "Thank you anyway."

"You're welcome," I replied, shaking my head at her stubbornness, but she was already asleep.

"What did she say to you?" Blondie asked when I came through the plastic sheets. Her face was set in another scowl.

Yep, they're definitely going to need a club. The Reece Haters of America – RHOA. It had a certain ring to it.

"Nothing of any import," I replied dismissively. It wasn't any of her business, really, and I was getting just a little sick of her attitude.

She almost sneered at me, shaking her head. "Men," she spat under her breath.

So maybe it wasn't just me. Maybe she just hated all men. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when that's good news.

"How did you save her life?" Blondie asked me suspiciously.

"I slowed down," I shrugged.

"You slowed down?" she asked, her voice venting her disbelief. I got the feeling she was looking for a fight. I'd love to humor her but I just wasn't in the mood right then. "How does that help her?"

I sighed and shook my head.

"Don't treat me as if I was stupid, boy," she snarled, taking a step towards me.

For a moment, I felt the rage return. For a moment, I thought how satisfying it would be to take her self-righteous, arrogant little attitude and shove it down her throat. I felt myself reaching for the speed...

... and then I stopped. The moment passed. Death, destruction and mayhem – while pleasant to think about – were probably not warranted at that precise moment.

"I'm not treating you as if you were stupid," I said harshly. Hey, I'm not perfect. You don't just go from angry to nothing in .6 seconds. Well, okay, maybe I do but ... I softened my voice. "I'm just not sure how to explain it. I'm sure you know I can move fast – but I'm not, really. At least, not to me. When I move to a higher speed zone, the world just moves slower from my viewpoint." I made a face and shook my head. "Let me try that again – when I'm sped up, it doesn't affect me. I'm still moving – to me – as if everything was normal. I don't see any difference from my perspective except the world around me seems to have slowed down."

"Speeding up isn't all I can do, though," I continued. "When I was first experimenting with this, I found that I could also slow myself down – down to the point where it seemed as if the world around me had sped up. That's what I did in the car – I slowed me and Johanna down so that we were going much slower than the world around us. That meant that she didn't really have much time to bleed because for us almost no time had passed while for you ... well, I don't know how long it took for you..."

"About 47 minutes," she said, her sneer fading as she worked to understand what I was saying.

I did some quick calculations in my head. "Right. That meant that somewhere between 3 and 4 minutes passed for us."

"4 minutes?" she said in surprise. Then her eyes narrowed. "Why not just make it so no time had passed?"

"I can't," I said, shrugging my shoulders again. I was doing that a lot lately. "At least, I don't think I can. I slowed us down about as much as I could. There's ... well, it's a pain in my head when I try to go slower. Evidently, I'm good at speeding up but slowing down hurts." I remembered back to that first time, in the bathroom. "When I was first playing around with this, I got to about 120 seconds of objective time – the time that everything else is running at – to about 10 seconds for me – or my subjective time. I figure I was a little past that back there because I was scared and it was hurting pretty bad. I'm not sure I can go any slower even if I tried."

She was trying to find fault with that but evidently couldn't come up with anything. I returned to my seat when she hadn't said anything for a few minutes. I figured the cross-examination was over. Would that I could be so lucky.

"What did you do to Terrence and Serena?" she asked with yet another scowl. It wasn't so much the look on her face, though, as the way she said it. She was still looking for something to argue with me about. I wasn't biting. I just didn't have it in me right then.

"Who are Terrence and Serena?" I sighed, rolling my eyes.

"You know who they are!" She growled at me. If looks could kill there'd be nothing left of me for anyone to clean up. Of course, I'd been there before. "You killed them!"

I put two and two together and looked away sadly. I wasn't proud of that; killing someone should never make you proud. How I killed them, though, made me shudder. "I didn't know their names," I replied quietly, still not looking at Blondie. "He told me to call him Mr. Judas. She never actually spoke to me; she never gave me her name."

"So, just like every other man, you go out and take your aggression out on whomever you like," she spit at me. "I guess I should just get down on my knees that you don't kill us all, huh?"

It was too much. She'd gone too far. She crossed a line that had the rage surging through me. "The day is young," I snarled, my speed field bursting into existence. Power surged through me; I sped up and wrapped my hand around her throat then walked her slow, tiny, weak body to the wall of the plane and held her against it.

It would be so easy. All I needed to do is twist my hand the right way and it would end her. There would certainly be no love lost. She hated me and I was learning to hate her right back. So easy ... a twist and ... no more man-hating bitch.

I couldn't though. I just ... couldn't. Reason broke through the anger, quelled it. I would not become any greater monster than I already was. The Brauns would not win.

I tied her to the netting that was wrapped around nearly every inch of the inside wall of the plane, careful not to exert too much pressure. Then I stepped back and slowed back down. I waited in silence while she struggled until she finally gave up.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," I snarled, my voice icy. "You want to know what I did to Mr. Judas and Resurrection Barbie? You want to know what happened to them? I sped up time for them. I wrapped them in my field and sped up time. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? A few minutes and ... poof ... they're ash."

I chuckled and I certainly didn't recognize my voice. It sounded evil and dangerous. "You have no fucking clue. They lived every.fucking.moment of the 50 or 60 years they lasted. Remember, time doesn't speed up for me. I experience it all. So did they. In that little bubble, they lived for 50 or 60 years, unable to move, until they finally died."

I moved closer, almost nose to nose with the bitch. "It is the cruelest thing I could think to do to them ... and they deserved every fucking moment of it. They killed me over and over and over and kept on bringing me back so they could hurt me some more." Her eyes grew wide and the sneer on her face fell when what she finally processed what I was saying. I stepped back and looked at her, my expression remaining firm. "You didn't know that part of it, did you? You didn't know what they did ... just that I'd turned them to ash. Well, now you know." I calmed myself, let my voice go quiet again. "So, yeah. I killed them. I did it without remorse or regret; I can live with the guilt of it. I'll do it again, if I have to."

We landed in New York City long enough to refuel and then headed to DFW. Either Blondie got loose or someone released her when I wasn't looking. It didn't matter; she stayed away from me and I was more than fine with it. She's got no business judging me until she's walked a mile in my shoes.

Johanna had not awoken by the time we debarked from the plane. They had an ambulance standing by to take her wherever gunshot victims go and Blondie insisted on going with her. The doctor and nurse weren't overly happy with that but they eventually gave in. Instead, they rode in the back of yet another black SUV with me.

"I am told that you were the miracle worker that saved her," Doctor Maria Guines said after we'd been driving a few minutes.

I just sighed. I'd been staring out the window in order to avoid conversation but it looks like my luck was holding – all bad. "I just got her to you, doctor," I said without looking away from the window. I wasn't actually looking at anything. "You're the one who saved her."

"My skill as a Medicus would not have been sufficient had you not somehow got her to the plane with so little time passing," she continued, her brow knit. "How did you do that?"

I closed my eyes and hung my head. I was so tired of this. Why couldn't people just leave well enough alone?

I told her, though. I'm not sure she understood any better than Blondie but I told her anyway. The nurse had a faraway look as he contemplated it, so maybe he got it.

We pulled up outside my house, the limo parking at the curb. The house looked strange for it being so familiar. It looked ... different. I couldn't place it – the walls were still brick, the windows were still the same and the trim and garage door was still painted in that hideous tan-almost-yellow that my dad had picked out years ago.

The lawn looked a little greener, maybe. The trees might have been a little leafier. Maybe it was that the bushes were squared instead of rounded or that my mom looked to have bought a little fountain of a little girl pouring water from a small pitcher. All of those didn't seem to cause the effect in me, though.

It took me a few minutes to reason it out and my eyes filled with tears when I did. This didn't feel like home. I didn't feel safe here like I used to. My parent's betrayal weighed more heavily on me than I could have imagined ... and that also decided my next steps for me.

I turned to the doctor and nurse. "I'll be right back," I said firmly. "I won't be gone long."

"But your mother and father, they are waiting," the doctor said to me, her surprise written on her face.