Chapter 408: What the Hell Is That.

Max looked sideways at me, a fraction, and faced forward again.

"Is he your brother?"

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to lose focus in front of a man who could end me between one blink and the next.

"Didn’t he tell you?" Vince had heard it from thirty metres. "He’s my brother. We have things between us that you don’t need to involve yourself in, young man."

"You tried to kill my sister." Max’s voice didn’t move at all. Flat. Final. "Anybody who tries that dies. That alone is going to cost you whatever’s left of your miserable life."

Vince started laughing.

The sound went up the street and came back off the buildings. He wiped his mouth again with the back of his hand and looked at the blood as if it belonged to someone else.

"I’m killing you after we’ve put this thing down." Max dropped his voice so only I caught it. "Understood?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now let’s kill it."

Vince was already coming.

He went through everything Max threw into his path — a length of railing torn off a frontage, a sheet of corrugated metal peeling off a shop face, a parked bike lifting and spinning end over end — metal coming off both sides of that street and him passing between all of it without slowing.

The black smoke flickered at his heels and vanished. He was flesh for the crossing and smoke for the gaps, and the gaps were wherever Max’s force wasn’t.

I put charge into the force as it crossed him.

White light finding the sheet of metal mid-flight, the two of them meeting in the space Vince occupied. He met the sheet going the other way and it took him off his feet and sent him back further than he’d come.

"He’s not going to last," Max said, eyes forward. "What’s yours called?"

"It doesn’t have a name."

"Everything has a name."

"Not this."

"Then we’re not waiting for whatever’s coming." He flexed both hands. The air in front of his palms tightened — a pressure visible only in the way the dust on the road shifted outward. "We go at him."

"Agreed."

Vince came up off the road.

And he roared.

It went up the whole street and into the buildings on both sides and every infected standing within reach of it came back on at once. Heads lifting. Weight shifting. Eyes finding direction. All of them waking up in the same second along that road, the quiet that had held breaking like glass.

"By the way." Max started walking, then running. "I know exactly why people choose you over me."

"What?"

"I’ll tell you after."

We were already going, the two of us at full speed, and Vince stood in the middle of that road with his head tipped back and his eyes at the sky, shouting at something above all of us.

The infected closed from both sidewalks — staggering, then running, the wrong patience gone, hunger back in the limbs.

Charge in both hands. I put down everything that wandered into my line. White light. Bodies folding. The smell of ozone and the wet wrong of things that had already died once.

Max swept the rest of them the way wind takes leaves off a path, both arms going, the whole street clearing outward from him — bodies lifting, tumbling, hitting shop fronts and car doors and each other — until there was nothing standing anywhere near Vincent Vale and he was alone out there like a single tree in open ground, still roaring, still tipped back toward whatever he was calling.

I threw charge ahead of us.

All of it, into him, and it lit him from the inside — white crawling under the skin of Mute’s borrowed face, along the throat, across the chest — and he kept shouting straight through it, the sound unbroken, the eyes still on the sky.

"He’s heavy." Max had his hand up, trying to take him off the ground, and the strain was in his voice for the first time all night. The air between his palm and Vince’s body tightened and failed and tightened again. "I can’t lift him."

[ God Hand punch initiated. ]

[ Force tripled for impact. ]

I was on him, Max half a step behind.

I threw it with everything I had.

The fist left my shoulder with the system’s full weight behind it — the triple force a physical fact in the air, a compression that pulled at my own balance as it went.

His eyes caught it coming and his head moved, fast, and the punch went past his cheek by less than an inch and the shouting stopped.

He’d gone all the way over. A vampire, charge still crawling across him in dying threads of white, the face barely holding its shape — Mute’s features sliding toward something older and less human, the jaw too long, the eyes too wide, the borrowed boy from Hogsby struggling to contain what was wearing him.

His hand came round to hit me.

Max lifted him an inch off the road without touching him.

The fist went over the top of my head — a blur of knuckles, the wind of it in my hair — and the inch of air Max had bought was the only reason it missed.

And mine went into his stomach.

God Hand, tripled. I felt it go in through flesh and find the organs underneath — the give of muscle, the deeper resistance of things that were never meant to take that force, the wet shift of structure failing under the system’s multiplied weight.

It didn’t move him.

His feet found the ground again like Max wasn’t there at all — the inch of lift collapsing, the telekinetic hold breaking as if it had been string — and his fist came back and caught me across the cheek and the street went sideways.

Bone. The bright detonation of impact on the side of my face. My vision strobed. I went back hard, feet leaving the asphalt, the lamps and the buildings and the quiet infected on the far sidewalk tumbling through my field of view in a single continuous roll.

Max passed over me while I was still in the air.

Both hands up, committing to the space I had just been thrown out of. I came down on my back — asphalt driving the air out of me, the restored hip taking the secondary hit — and my eyes lost him for less than a second.

Less than a second.

When they found him again Vince had him up off the ground with his mouth at his throat, and Max was fighting, both arms working, legs going.

Then he tore him in half.

That was all of it. Two, three seconds from start to finish.

Max Donman came apart over that road and the pieces hit the asphalt, and there was no blood.

None anywhere. Not on the ground, not on Vince, not in the air.

He’d taken all of it on the way through.

What the hell is that.