It’s cold, and the stars are out.
Wanda studies them, breathing on her hands to warm them. The street around her is quiet and dark, though she can sense the minds in the nearby buildings. A street over, someone laughs, and a man shouts in Sokovian. Several whoops follow, and she edges further into the shadows.
She nudges impatiently at Pietro’s mind. He’s halfway across the city, a mere heartbeat away.
Piet, it’s cold.
She feels him brush back against her mind, exasperated. Yes, yes, I’ll be back in a moment. I found a spot.
The feeling of warm air and the sound of laughter and clinking glasses flashes through her mind, and she shivers at the difference between here and there.
Hurry up.
Less than a minute later, there’s a rush of chilly air, and Pietro smacks against the brick wall next to her. She snorts at his wounded expression as he rubs his shoulder. “At least you missed me that time,” she says aloud. “You’re improving.”
“Shut up,” he mutters, trying to look dignified. “It’s not too far from here.” He offers his arm, and she takes it, curling into the excessive warmth his new metabolism provides. Her breath forms icy clouds in front of her as they walk.
The bar, when they reach it, casts a golden glow across the street. The sound of men laughing echoes out as the door swings open, a man and a woman stumbling out. Their minds brush hers as they pass.
The woman is leaning against her companion, but Wanda sees she is totally sober, calculating. She’s going to use the money she makes tonight to buy her son a toy for his birthday next week. She’s wondering if the man is drunk enough to rob when they are done. Then she can get him something he’d REALLY love.
The man, Wanda is relieved to see, has no intention of hurting the prostitute. He’s no threat, so long as she doesn’t get caught.
Wanda reaches out and gives his mind a hard tap. He staggers, the woman catching him before he can fall. They continue on, him swaying even more than before, leaning heavily against her.
He will sleep quickly and deeply tonight. Wanda hopes this will help.
She feels Pietro’s question at the back of her mind, and she flashes back the last few seconds to him. He grins in understanding.
Ready? He asks silently as they reach the doors.
She grimaces, but nods, and they step through.
The minds wash over her right along with the bright light and heat. Her fingers tingle from the sudden warmth, as images and emotions flicker through her like static. She shuts her eyes, as if that will stop the barrage.
Pietro pushes hard against their link. Hey. Focus on me.
She does. Slowly, she breathes in, concentrating on the blue spark that glows beside her.
Out again. The crowd fades, becoming background noise. She opens her eyes. Pietro watches her carefully. He squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back.
I’m okay. I’ve got it under control, I can handle this.
He squeezes her hand one more time, and they pull apart, separating along the edges of the bar.
It’s late, and by now most of the patrons are drunk. No one notices a couple of skinny street kids in the shadows, and that’s perfect.
She makes her way to the bar, brushing past people as she goes, rummaging through thoughts, searching.
She finds what she’s looking for.
“Hey handsome,” she murmurs, sliding up beside him at the bar. “What’s a fella like you doing here all alone?”
She pushes the image of the full wallet that she finds at the back of his mind towards her twin, sensing as he circles the room back towards her.
She flashes her most flirtatious smile as the man leers at her. Even she can’t see the hand that flicks out, plucking the wallet from his pocket and vanishing, but she feels his confirmation.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he slurs, and she brushes her hand against his, pushing him in the other direction. He hesitates, blinking through his drunken haze, then rolls his eyes and turns back to his drink. “Find some other sucker,” he mutters, and she slips away, hiding her smile.
She can’t go straight down the bar in a line unnoticed, so she goes back to the edges, scanning the room once more.
She picks out a man at the back of the room. He’s young, well dressed. Better dressed than anyone else in here. It’s a risk for them, she knows.
But they are fast, and they are smart.
He makes eye contact with her, smiles. She takes the risk.
She smiles back, and makes her way across the room.
She slides into the booth beside him. “Hey there,” he greets her. “Aren’t you a lovely little thing?”
“Not as lovely as you,” she whispers, trailing her fingers along his arm.
A flash of blood and steel and shrieks of pain drives itself into her skull like a spike, and she rips her hand away from him.
His hand shoots out, coiling around her wrist, and she freezes, suddenly too frightened to even breathe.
“Why don’t we get out of here? We’ll go back to my place,” he murmurs. “You’ll like it there.”
Heat rips through her skin, and he yanks his hand back with a grunt of pain. She throws herself out of the booth, and Pietro is suddenly right by her side to catch her.
She can’t even focus enough to send him a coherent thought, only red and alarm and danger and get out. He wraps his arms around her, murmuring words she doesn’t pay attention to as he guides her out of the building and back into the cold. She stares back at the booth, at the dark shark’s eyes that watch her coldly until she’s out of sight, until finally she can breath again.
“What happened? What did you see?” her brother asks, his thoughts and voice overlapping in anxious question.
She knots her fist in his shirt, shuddering, sucking in the icy air. The man’s memory coats her mind like oil, like the feeling of slippery blood on her hands as she pins them down. “He killed them,” she gasps out. “He killed them.”
“Who?” Pietro demands, scared.
“Girls,” she breathes out, faces flashing through her mind, all of them terrified. “A lot of them.”
She looks up at her twin, sees his eyes harden, feels the fierce anger in him, mirrored in herself. His eyes reflect the red glow in her own back at her. “He’ll do it again if we let him,” she intones, her voice steady now.
“Then we don’t let him,” he replies, and she thinks that really, they don’t have a choice.
…
They fold themselves into the alley beside the bar, curling up on the cold ground. Wanda is exhausted, but she tells Pietro to get some sleep while they wait. She can keep watch, and she knows how quickly he burns through energy these days. He’ll need to be quick and careful, and he knows it, which is the only reason he lets her push him quickly into sleep, leaving her alone in consciousness.
The screams of girls she’s never met ring in her mind, and she feels bile rise in her throat.
Focus, she tells herself. She strokes a hand through her brother’s hair. His mind is at peace right now, and she draws on that, uses it to ground herself. She needs to be able to think.
And so, her eyes fixed on the door, waiting, she comes up with a plan.
…
It’s another hour before he leaves, and he’s got another of the working girls along with him. Wanda tenses, wariness and determination both increasing tenfold. She taps Pietro, mentally and physically, and he awakens with a jolt. She puts a finger to her lips, tipping her head at the two walking away from the bar.
Separated from the mass of people inside, it’s much easier to get into his head from a distance. She finds his route home, and pushes it to her twin.
Go, she thinks, and he does. There’s a whisper of a breeze, and she’s alone in the alley. She follows the pair from the shadows, eyes glinting scarlet.
It’s only a minute before Pietro arrives at the house. He breaks in through the back easily, and she is in two places at once, following the man, watching through her twin’s eyes as he walks through the house. Together, they memorize everything, preparing.
She’s gotten good at staying unseen. No one spots her, the whole way to the rundown house they finally arrive at.
There’s no one on the rest of the street except for a couple homeless men she feels sleeping four houses down. Half the houses here are bombed out and broken. This isolation may be by his design, but she knows it will work in their favor tonight.
There’s a flash of blue in the upstairs window as they approach, too fast for the man and woman to notice, but Wanda is reassured.
She watches, keeping her eyes fixed on the woman, as they pass through the door. She waits until Pietro can see them, from where he crouches in the darkness on the rickety second floor, before she slinks around the back of the house to the window Pietro broke through.
She watches through Pietro’s eyes as they come through the hallway, and the man immediately goes to lead the woman towards the basement. Wanda feels her cautiousness.
“This is where you live?” she asks suspiciously.
He laughs. “I’m renovating.”
She hesitates, and he tightens his grip, forcing her onwards.
Wanda swings up and through the window while they’re distracted, landing lightly and slipping into a crouch.
“We’re going to the basement,” the man is saying. He sounds almost cheerful, like he’s trying to persuade a whining child to come along, even as his hand is locked so tightly around the woman’s arm Wanda can feel the bruises forming.
“Let me go,” she hisses, as Wanda slips into the shadows at the end of the hallway. She sees his hand slip under his coat, and she steps forward, red crackling in her hands.
“Do as she says,” she commands lowly.
The man’s grip loosens in shock, and the woman takes the opportunity to pull free, but she doesn’t run, just staggers backward a step, staring at Wanda in horror.
Wanda’s eyes flick over to her, struggling to keep her magic focused in her hands.
“You need to run,” she tells her. “It’s not safe.”
The woman looks her in the eye, studies her, and Wanda sees herself, sees her own scarlet eyes staring out of the gloom, and for a moment she does not feel human.
And behind the portrait in her eyes, she feels...gratitude, and something approaching awe.
The woman doesn’t voice it. She steps backwards towards the door, nearly tripping in her hurry, her eyes still on Wanda. She looks away for only a beat, to shoot a look of absolute hatred at the man, and then she’s gone, out the door, and Wanda never sees her again.
Wanda looks back at the would-be-again killer, her head cocking as she locks on to him.
“Go on. Pull it out,” she says softly, and he does as she tells him. Slowly, his hand slips into his coat, and withdraws with a hunting knife clasped in his fingers. “Drop it,” she orders, and he does.
It lands in Pietro’s hand, and in the next moment he has it pressed to the man’s throat. “Now, what were you planning to do with this, I wonder?” Pietro muses in disgust, twitching the blade just enough to cut into the skin of his throat. A bead of blood wells up, and slides down the skin of his neck. “Awfully sharp. You should be more careful. You could really hurt someone with this.” He taps the knife delicately against the artery, not quite hard enough to break the skin.
Sweat shines on the other man’s forehead, but he still grins at Wanda. It’s not the same smile he shot her at the bar. This one is too sharp, too feral.
“Hello pretty one,” he croons, ignoring the way the blade presses harder against his throat. “I remember you. And what sort of creature are you, pet?”
“I am not your pet,” she says, in a voice like steel. “But for the rest of your life, you can be mine.” Scarlet coils out of her fingertips, drifting into his skull like smoke. She shudders as her magic makes contact, resisting the urge to shy away from his oily, bloody mind. “Walk to the basement.”
Let him go, she tells her twin. It was his decisions that led him here. Let him walk to his own fate.
Pietro reluctantly pulls the knife away, and the other man steps jerkily forward, on limbs that dangle like a puppet’s, down the dark and grimy hallway. They follow him.
The door at the end of the steps is already open a crack, the frame splintered from where Pietro kicked it in. He steps through the doorway ahead of them, and Wanda’s pace falters as she sees through his eyes the ghosts that overlay the room like cobwebs.
Pietro’s hand brushes against hers questioningly, and she jolts, nodding briskly to him before continuing forward.
The basement is shallow, and the ceiling is barely higher than their heads. Pietro is forced to stoop slightly to avoid bumping his.
In the center of the room stands a thick wooden post, and at its base lies a pile of chains.
Something dark splatters the wood and the concrete floor like rust, a lot of it, and it is darkly satisfying for her to raise the chains and let them snake around their captive, weighing him down but not crushing, not yet.
“This was a place of power for you once,” she tells him, and the chains push against his shoulders, forcing him to his knees. “How does it feel to be in your victims’ position now?”
He grins up at her, baring his teeth. “How does it feel to be in mine? Good, isn’t it? Makes you feel…” he laughs. “Strong.”
Anger curdles in her stomach like sour milk, and for a moment the desire to simply snap his neck and be rid of him is strong, until she realizes the anger is not all her own.
If you cannot get a hold of yourself, you need to leave the room. I cannot manage both our tempers, not right now, she snaps silently.
Pietro flinches, and turns to look at her, apology and frustration written across his face.
That’s when the other man slams one of the chains as hard as he can into the back of Pietro’s knees.
He’s down before she can catch him, and the man who’s already killed so many is raising the chains up, about to bring the heavy, solid metal down against her brother’s skull, and she doesn’t think to hesitate before she acts.
Down the hall, the knife rises off the dusty floor, sails smoothly through the hall and the open door, and plunges itself into his chest with so much force she feels his ribs crunch around the hilt.
He doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t make a sound, except for a single, wheezy gasp, staring at her with bright and startled eyes, before he tips over, crashing to the ground with a final dull thud.
For the next few seconds, all is still and silent.
Pietro is the first to move, shoving himself up off the ground and away from the pool of blood slowly spreading across the concrete.
He raises his arms, and Wanda doesn’t hesitate to wrap her own tightly around him. She realizes she’s shivering slightly, and he rubs a hand gently across her back. She realizes he’s shaking too.
“I’m not sorry. I thought I might be, but I’m not,” she says into his shoulder. “I’m glad I did it.”
“I’m glad too,” he says. “I’m only sorry he didn’t suffer for long.” He viciously kicks at the body with the side of his shoe, making a noise of disgust. “You went right for the heart. I’m amazed he even had one to destroy.”
She steps back, keeping their hands interlinked, and looks down at the body, her brow furrowed. “It seems like all the ones who destroy do. Maybe it’s what makes them do it.”
Pietro grips his sister’s hand tightly.
“What do we do with the body?” he asks her quietly.
“He left his victims in dumpsters when he was done with them. He deserves no grave of his own,” she says with venom. “We’ll leave him here to rot. There’s enough evidence to show what he’s done, and the police have enough on their plate that they won’t even look for a serial killer, let alone someone who’s killed one.”
They stand in silence for a few seconds more, before Pietro tugs gently on her hand. “C’mon, it’s time to get out of this place.”
He leads them out of the crumbling house. They step out onto the empty street to find it’s nearly dawn. The sky above them is a soft pink, gold and orange streaks spreading across it.
Pietro is quiet, but she doesn’t read his mind. She knows when he needs to put his thoughts into words.
“What are you thinking?” she asks gently.
He bites his lip, letting out a breath through his nose. “I think we haven’t been thinking big enough,” Pietro says softly, and she can feel his mind working, potential futures unfolding and branching so quickly she can’t see more than flashes. “Wanda, we’ve been treating these powers like they’re parlor tricks, and they’re not. There’s so much pain and suffering and...and we can do something about it.” He looks down at her, and even despite the bags under his eyes and the gauntness that’s come from never having enough to eat, there’s a glow to his face that nearly matches the spark she can feel within him. “We could do so much more to help.”
She thinks of the crunch of ribs and the smell of fresh blood. She thinks of how it was her mind that wrapped those chains about him, and she wonders what she would have done to him if he hadn’t tried to kill her twin, if they had taken their time.
Then, she thinks of the woman who ran out of the house, who’s going to see her family again today when she goes home, who’s life didn’t end in a basement and who, with luck, will not have a dumpster for a grave, and she thinks maybe she would have made the same choice one way or another.
“Then we do this correctly.” His eyes widen, and he starts to smile. “No more following strangers home like tonight,” she says firmly, and he nods quickly in agreement. “And…” she says carefully, “we should take advantage of the fact that we can do more than most. We go after the ones who hurt the most. The ones no one else is going to stop.”
Pietro looks down at her with shining eyes, and he leans down, pressing their foreheads together. She shuts her eyes, and she almost doesn’t feel their combined exhaustion beneath his hope and her determination.
“We’re going to do this,” he breathes. “We’re going to be something good.”
She feels the first rays of the morning sun against her skin, and the warmth of her brother’s soul against hers, and she thinks:
God, let us be right.