Before she could react, taunt him back or make a wickedly sarcastic remark, he pulled out a pistol and put a bullet in the back of lab rat’s head. Before Goon B could respond to that shocker, he also received a bullet. In the forehead. Right between the eyes.

Holy shit!

Oh God, oh God. Okay the little fucker had completely stolen her thunder and had temporarily scrambled her brains, and now she was at a loss as to what the hell to do next.

Play it cool, Ari. Never mind you’ve never been a cool kind of girl. You freak at the slightest fright. You’ve always been frightened by your own shadow. Get over it. You’re not that girl anymore.

“Well, thanks,” she said cheerfully, her mind racing as she ran through the possibilities. For once, her photographic memory came through in spades. Yes, it was helpful in her profession as a teacher, not that she’d likely ever have that job again. But now it was going to save her ass because her mind was processing each scenario at the speed of a computer, discarding ones with the least likelihood of succeeding, latching on to the ones with more merit.

His eyes narrowed at her quirky response.

“What?” she asked. “You not used to being thanked? My mama did teach me manners. You just took out two of the guys on my hit list. Now if you’d be so kind as to shoot yourself then I could move on down the list and call it a day.”

She was doing a miserable job of covering her panic and hysteria and the bastard realized it. He actually smiled at her. It was a perfectly evil smile, worthy of any movie villain. But then they could be the lead roles in a sci-fi movie. Hell, they were living a damn movie because who would ever believe this shit?

Her mom was so going to wash her mouth out with soap. Apparently being around Beau and his co-workers had lowered her verbal acuity by more than a few points. She’d never cursed so much in her life, despite her father’s own propensity for F-bombs.

“What I think is that you’re scared shitless, Arial,” he said in a mocking tone. “Not so brave now that you have blood on your hands. Were you playing pretend? Or were you really going to kill us all in cold blood?”

“Damn straight,” she said, anger injecting a bite to her words. “And I’ll suffer not one iota of remorse when I send you straight back to hell, where you crawled from. This time I hope you stay there and rot for eternity.”

He clapped, the sound jarring, startling her, his eyes laughing, mocking her at every turn.

“Watch and learn a lesson,” she hissed. “Never piss off a woman who has the power to take your balls and feed them to you on a plate.”

She caught his look of surprise just as he lifted straight up into the air and hurtled backward, slamming into the wall several feet away. The force with which she sent him flying through the room made the sound of his impact loud and forceful. Satisfaction gripped her and it was her turn to openly mock him.

“Amazing how much of a pussy men become when you threaten their wee little manhood,” she drawled. “Bet you don’t have that much to work with anyway, so I don’t imagine it’ll take much effort on my part to separate you from your smaller head.”

She donned a thoughtful expression and cocked her head to the side just before she sent him straight upward, crashing into the ceiling. She held him suspended, pinned against the ceiling as though he were caught in a spider’s web.

“Although there are limits to my powers,” she said in amusement. “I have to be able to imagine it in order to manipulate it and if there’s not much to work with . . . Well, you understand my problem.”

His eyes glittered with fury and then, strangely, triumph. A chill went up her spine just as the overwhelming urge to duck and react defensively overtook all else. She dropped like a rock and then performed a powerful leg sweep, rotating blindly behind her.

She connected with something hard and solid, pain shooting up her leg at the contact. Judging by the muffled oath, her assailant hurt worse than she did, though. Splitting her concentration between two objects, or rather people, was more difficult than she’d imagined it would be.

Goon A, still suspended from the ceiling, dropped about a foot before she shot him upward again, but the lapse in concentration cost her dearly. A fist connected with her chin, sending her reeling back several feet. The damn man had bricks for hands.

She grasped her jaw, massaging as she focused on keeping the man who scared her the most where he could cause her no harm while planning her offense against her newest assailant.

Her gaze lighted on the pistol the goon trapped on the ceiling had shot the lab rat and Goon B with. Evidently, he’d dropped it when she slammed him into the wall. Remembering what Beau had told her about Glocks she whispered a prayer that this was a Glock as well and she didn’t have to figure out how to mentally turn a safety off. But then surely the goon wouldn’t have engaged the safety after killing two men.

Now that she was effectively splitting her mental energy between three things, she found it a lot harder to summon the pistol from across the room. It went skittering erratically over the floor, bumping and knocking. She winced hoping to hell it didn’t arbitrarily go off because if she had to ward off a speeding bullet, she could kiss all her other focus goodbye.

Finally the gun lifted into the air and floated toward her, unseen by her newest assailant. The damn goon shouted a warning though, and the man turned just in time to see the gun dangling in front of his face.

Shit!

He reached for it and her instincts, or self-preservation, kicked in. She pictured the gun leveling itself, aiming for the man’s shoulder, because damn it, she just couldn’t bring herself to be the cold-blooded killer she’d almost convinced herself that she could be.