Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan Page B

standing across the street in her blue-and-silver uniform with the silly-ass cape, hands on her hips, a smug smile on her ice-princess face.
    He could take care of that in a hurry. He rolled a hand open and sent a nice hot spike of plasma her way. She dodged, and the striped awning of a tobacco shop that had somehow survived the current depression puffed into flame.
    The wind went away. Without standing up he shot a blast between the two Greek narcs who were standing with their guns and jaws hanging slack, right at where he figured the subcompact’s gas tank to be. It blew up and sent the Greeks running.
    A sound like firecrackers right over his head. Dust stung his scalp as a burst of 7.65mm gouged the front of the building. There was Agent Saxon, soloing on Scorpion again. He really seemed to love that thing.
    J. J. pointed a finger at him. “You,” he said, “go away.” A line of fire leaped out. Saxon pirouetted like a bullfighter. He’s been putting in his time in the gym, anyway. J. J. thought, gotta give him that.
    Saxon had not pissed J. J. Flash off enough to burn a hole right through him. Yet. The relatively cool jet caught a corner of the dodging agent’s off-white sport jacket. The polyester blazed up nicely. That gave Saxon something to think about other than endangering the public, which was all J. J. had in mind.
    Wind hit J. J. like a fist, cracking his head back against the storefront. It struck again and again with a sound like a snapping spinnaker, jackhammering his ribs and face.
    “I handled Fireball, J. J.,” Mistral called to him. “I can handle you.”
    Rage blazed white inside him. Fireball was a serial killer Mistral had apprehended in Cincinnati, live on global TV thanks to Daddy’s infallible headline-hunting instincts. He had been thrown in J. J. Flash’s face once already this incarnation: in court in New York, when Kimberly Anne’s attorney St. John Latham had flashed pictures of one of the psychopath’s victims, an adolescent girl, horribly charred. The implication was that J. J. Flash, as one of Mark’s friends — no one but Dr. Tachyon knew, then, that the relationship was rather more intimate — might inflict such a fate on Mark’s daughter, accidentally or otherwise. The suggestion that he might harm Sprout in any way had burned like a cancer for all the months of J. J.’s captivity in the back of Mark’s mind.
    Inadvertently Mistral had punched a very bad button. “Where are you, bitch?” J. J. gasped. He battled upright. The wind came back at him, pummeled him against the wall. He looked around desperately. She had to be somewhere she could see him; like most ace powers, hers were strictly line-of-sight. That meant he could see her…
    There. Up the block, crouched behind a low stone wall. He gathered up the rage into a big ball of fire and just bowled it at her.
    Mistral ducked. The wind stopped. The fireball hit the wall, flash-heating stones, shattering them. The wall blew up, knocking Mistral backward, stunned and bruised.
    More gunfire, again badly aimed. J. J. jumped into the air. Agent Hamilton had his partner on the cobblestones rolled up in his coat; Saxon was only smoldering a little, though he was bitching loud enough that you’d think he had third-degree burns over half his body. More Greeks with guns had appeared on the scene, or at least revealed themselves. One of them was just nerving himself enough to spray the sky with bullets.
    “Everywhere I go, people shoot at me,” J. J. complained to the air. “I could get a complex.”
    Instead he split, streaking off up the flank of the big hill. At the top he swung low, scattering Nips with Nikons, and then fancied he could hear the shutters clicking like a cicada chorus behind him. He gave a rebel yell for the benefit of those with camcorders.
    He’d always wanted to fly slalom through the pillars of the Parthenon. At least it felt as if he’d always wanted to, like a lot of his whims. Instead a big