First of all, it was obviously dead. There was enough blood on the floor to fill three bodies, and his face was frozen in anguish. He was elevated slightly off the floor by something on his back.
Worse than him were the remains of two enormous snakes lying on the kitchen floor. I shuddered. I do not care for snakes. I kicked at one of them to make sure it was dead. It didn’t move, but that didn’t make me feel much better. While I knew logically that they weren’t slimy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I touched it, it’d be slick and disgusting. I leaned in to look at the dead man, adjusting the body to see what was causing his corpse to incline.
When I lifted him, I almost retched. I saw what was holding him up, and it looked as though the snakes had been growing out of his shoulder blades. I dropped him and stood, stifling an urge to vomit. I kept my gun in hand and stepped over him, coming around the corner of the kitchen into the dining room to find another man on the couch, this one much younger, and with no obvious signs of snakes growing out of him.
He was also quite alive, though he was limp, arm hanging off the edge of the sofa. His chest moved up and down, eyes closed. I heard the faint sound of sirens outside and walked over to him, shaking him with one hand while keeping the pistol pointed at him with the other. He didn’t stir, and after two more attempts I left him and took a quick look around the rest of the house. Two bedrooms were pretty simple and a cursory look under the beds and in the closets didn’t reveal anything. The third bedroom seemed to be set up as an office, and I grabbed the laptop computer for later analysis by someone who’d know what to do with it.
I started to leave but paused as I headed toward the front door. There had to be a basement, didn’t there? I started to set down the laptop when I heard an urgent series of honks from a car horn, just outside. I clutched the laptop tighter and with a last look at the young man unconscious on the couch, I ran out the front door.
The Directorate SUV was next to the curb, and another violent blast from the horn issued forth as I went down the front steps. I saw Charlie in the driver’s seat and Reed’s long hair through the tinted window in the backseat. I jumped in the passenger side and Charlie gunned the engine, not even waiting for me to shut the door. She slowed the car at the corner, which was fortunate, because two cop cars went shooting by, sirens blaring, and my aunt gave me a grin. She made the car take a leisurely turn to the left, and off we went.
Chapter 12
“Where to?” Charlie asked as we headed down the road. I saw a couple more sets of cop cars, lights flashing, go past.
“I don’t know.” I held the laptop tight, almost as if I were afraid to let it go, lest it vanish. “We need to lay low.”
“I thought you were with the FBI?” Reed spoke up from the backseat, his voice laced with sarcasm. “Why didn’t you just stay on scene?”
“Because while I and my colleagues might well be from the FBI, I’d have had a hell of a time explaining you two.” I looked from him to Charlie, who still wore a grin. “If I’d had to, I would have, but let’s just say I wanted to make that Plan B.”
“That coulda been a lotta fun,” Charlie said. I shot her a look of disbelief and she shrugged. “Come on, lying to the cops? Talk about a thrill.”
“So is this your aunt?” Reed asked.
Charlie looked back with a faint smile of pleasure. “You know me?”
“Charlene Nealon, A.K.A. Charlie,” Reed said. “Didn’t know you were still around, but yeah, I’ve heard of you. I particularly enjoyed reading about your exploits in Nevada.”
I saw a subtle change in Charlie’s persona then, a subtle clamping of her jaw as her smile disappeared and she turned back around to focus on the road. “That was a while ago. I barely remember Nevada.”
I watched Reed, and he smiled. “There’s some other people that could probably say the same.”
“How are they doing?” I caught Reed’s attention and nodded at Kat and Scott, both unconscious next to him. Scott was leaned up against the window like he had been the night before when he passed out, and Kat was lying gracelessly across his lap. I would have cringed for her, but, frankly, it wasn’t as though she’d never been in that position before.
“They’re out.” Reed illustrated his point by reaching over to give Scott a gentle slap across the face. Scott moaned, but did not wake. “The sweep team hit them with an amped-up version of a taser. No wires needed. I’m told they got the design from the Directorate after you guys left one behind at your house.”
“One of those things put Wolfe down on the ground,” I said. “I can’t imagine it felt very good for either of them.” I turned around to talk to him. “Who is Omega?”
He kept a cool dispassion as he stared back. “You don’t know?”
“The Directorate knows next to nothing about them.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Old Man Winter knows something, but he’s…not telling.” I frowned. “It’s above my pay grade.”
Reed shrugged. “I can’t help you, then. Sounds like something you’ll figure out when your pay grade goes up.” He gave me a maliciously self-satisfied smile. “Of course, if you want to leave the Directorate and join me, I could answer your questions instead of keeping you in the dark like they do—”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Charlie said. “They’re the gods, okay? The old ones, the ones from the myths, or what’s left of them.” She turned from driving to focus on me. “The Greek gods, the Roman ones? Persians, Norse, all else? There’s a reason there are some commonalities: it’s because they were all part of the same group. They ruled the planet for thousands of years, through their intermediaries, and vassals, and kings, and whatnot.” She turned back to the windshield as she made a turn, then glanced back at me. “You’ve gotta at least know that much, right?”
I squinted at her. “You mean…like Zeus and Poseidon and Thor and Odin and all that jazz?”
“Well,” she said, “Zeus and Poseidon are good and dead; so’s Odin. Not sure about Thor…but anyway…yeah, those guys. What’s left of the originals, and quite a few of their descendants. It’s kind of a cabal.”
I let out a snicker, more from disbelief than anything. “And they’re…what? Out to take over the world?”
Charlie shrugged, and I turned to Reed, who rolled his eyes. “Probably not in a literal sense,” he said. “Not anymore, at least. But yeah, like she said, they’re a cabal, and they have a ruling council and a pretty strong organization. At this point they’re collecting metas, building their strength, and…given their history, probably up to no good.”
“No, seriously.” I let out a short laugh. “What are they up to? What’s their objective?”
Reed sighed. “I don’t know. No one does. We just know they’re making power moves, collecting metas…kinda like the Directorate, but even more shadowy, if that’s possible.”
“I don’t love the sound of that,” I said.
“You’re telling me.” Charlie spoke up, bringing the car to a squealing stop at a red light. “I’ve tangled with their sweep teams before – they’re the ones they send out to bring in metas they want to talk to.” She laughed. “They’re a fun bunch, but they oughta stick to catching newbies; kids that have just manifested and don’t know what they’re doing.”
I stared at the laptop cradled in my hands. “Why does Omega have a safehouse in Eau Claire?”
“Because the Twin Cities is too hot for them.” Reed’s answer came with a cringe in his voice. “Minneapolis or St. Paul would be too close to the Directorate. Eau Claire’s only an hour away, and a few hours from Chicago, where they have a lot bigger presence.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why have a presence up here at all? What are they hoping to accomplish?”
“Tracking metas,” Charlie said. “Just like you guys. Track ‘em and collar ‘em, recruit the ones that seem promising. It’s all anybody does nowadays, keep snatching up every unattached meta out there.”
“What’d you find in the safehouse?�
�� Reed leaned forward and I felt his hand on the back of my seat.
“A guy with a couple snakes lying on the kitchen floor, dead.”
Reed frowned. “The guy or the snakes?”
“All of them,” I said. “Looks like the snakes grew from his shoulder blades. Kinda creepy.”
“Sounds like a Zahhak,” Reed said, exchanging a look with Charlie, who nodded.
“What’s a Zahhak?” I wrinkled my forehead.
“Look it up on Wikipedia sometime; it’s a pretty scary meta to go up against.” He entered a pensive state, his fingers resting over his mouth. “They’re pretty rare, but I heard Omega has one – or had one, I suppose.”
“Why have they been after me?” I turned to question Reed on this one, and when I looked at him, his expression was suddenly pained, a twisted grimace. “You know, don’t you?” He nodded, slow, not looking away. “Why are they after me?”
“They’re not after you, specifically.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve never been the end to them, always the means. They’re after your mom.”
I exchanged a look with Charlie, who seemed surprised. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I think she knows something…something from when she was with the Agency – you know, the government group that was destroyed before the Directorate came onto the scene?” I nodded. I knew Mom had been at the Agency with Old Man Winter before I was born. “Anyway, something happened that has a lot of people scouring for her.”
I turned back to Charlie. “Do you know what it is?”
She let out a long cackle. “Your mom and I aren’t on what you’d call ‘speaking terms’. I haven’t talked to her since way before you were born.”
“What happened?” I asked.
She turned the steering wheel to bring us into the parking lot of a hotel that was shaped like a giant, round cylinder. “She didn’t like the way I did things and I didn’t care for the way she told me to run my life.” She pulled the car into a parking spot just outside the lobby and gave me another lazy shrug. “So I told her what she could do with her opinions and we didn’t really need to talk after that, cuz it’d all been said.”
“Can’t imagine what she might have taken issue with,” Reed said under his breath.
Charlie shot him a searing look and jerked her head toward the lobby. “We should get rooms here for the night, unless you want your friends to continue sleeping in the back of the car.” She turned around and saw Kat’s head in Scott’s lap. “Although she seems comfortable there.”
I checked us in to four rooms, using the Directorate credit card for two of them and my personal card for the other two. As I swiped it through their reader, I was reminded that I needed to call Ariadne and make a report, since Scott and Kat were unlikely to do so in the next few hours. Once I was done, I hurried back to the car and Charlie drove us to the outside entrance nearest to the rooms. She and I each grabbed one of the unconscious members of my team and dragged them into the building while Reed walked ahead to make sure we didn’t run into anyone. Fortunately, the hotel seemed quiet.
We made it to our rooms without incident, and after depositing Kat and Scott onto the king-sized bed in their room, Charlie grabbed the key for her room and left. Reed lingered, watching the door to the room until it shut. After it did, he remained silent for almost a minute, listening. When I started to say something to him, he held up a finger to his lips and then opened the door, looking up and down the hall. He shut it and walked back to me, stopping only inches from my face. “How well do you know your aunt?” he asked in a low whisper.
“Not well.” I looked into his concerned eyes and felt a tremor within. “I met her about six months ago when she tracked me down, and we’ve been in contact on and off ever since, meeting whenever she’s been in town.”
“Do you trust her?” He didn’t break eye contact.
“Only a little,” I said. “I don’t exactly know her well.”
“She didn’t come on the mission with you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “She said she tracked my cell phone GPS.”
“Uh huh.” He licked his lips, thinking. “Sounds a little funny.”
“Why so suspicious? You think she has something to do with Omega?” He stared back at me, as though waiting for something. “What? What am I missing?”
He turned a slight smile, and looked at me with expectation. “Come on,” he said. “You know.”
“Come on, what?” By this point I was just annoyed. Kat and Scott were passed out on the bed behind me and who knew when they’d be coming back to consciousness. I had to report to Ariadne that we’d gotten in a violent clash with Omega forces, ending with two people not associated with the Directorate getting involved to save our bacon, in an incident that would certainly have drawn more than a little attention.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m gonna go…recover for a bit. Let me know if anything major happens.”
I shook my head, feeling my annoyance fade at the remembrance that he’d wrecked his car to save me from the Omega sweep team. “Reed…” He looked back over his shoulder, almost out the door. “Thanks.”
He nodded, a little smile breaking on his face, and left.
Chapter 13
I tried to reach Ariadne, but her cell phone went straight to voicemail. I tried her office, but her assistant told me she was out and unable to be reached for several hours. When I asked her to connect me to the Director, she informed me that he, too, was unavailable. I sighed, told her to have them call me urgently, that I had run afoul of Omega, and left it at that.
I stayed in Kat and Scott’s room, watching the light fade outside the beige curtains as the day ended. I looked at a clock when the last rays of sunlight were still visible, and it was just after 9 P.M. Neither of them had moved, but their pulse was regular, they reacted to prodding and other stimuli; they just…didn’t seem to want to wake up.
There was a knock on my door and when I looked through the peephole, Charlie grinned back at me, her smile overlarge and distorted by the glass as though I were looking at her in a funhouse mirror. Her cutoffs and tank top were gone, replaced by a red dress not unlike the one I had seen her wear when we first met, something with very little length and quite a bit of cleavage exposure. I tried to smile, but inwardly grimaced as I opened the door. “Hey.”
“Hay is all around us; this whole damned place is a farm town.” She made a slight gyration, as though she were dancing to music only she could hear. “What do you say we go find a couple cowboys to while away the dull hours with between now and morning?”
“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Because we don’t have enough carnage on our hands already without killing a couple of poor locals that are just out for a good time.”
“It’s not about killing,” she said in a soothing voice, “it’s about having some fun. Unwinding.” Her smile was oddly infectious. “You’ve been watching these vegetables all day. You need to get out and let loose. Have the other guy watch them for a while.” She strolled over to Scott and brushed his cheek with her hand, letting it linger a moment longer than I would have, and a slight shudder ran through her body. “Ooh. Is he a Poseidon type? Tastes like the ocean to me.”
“Tastes?” I’m pretty sure my face was locked into disbelief. “You touched him.”
“Yeah, it’s a sense you start to develop with maturity.” I felt a rough swell of annoyance as she walked to the other side of the bed and let her hand drift onto to exposed cheek of Kat. “Mmmm. Persephone type? If you ever get a chance – you know, maybe tangling with one that’s a ‘bad guy’,” she used air quotes, driving my eyebrows up almost to my bangs, “you need to take a drink of a Persephone. They are double yum.”
I closed my eyes and felt a throbbing in my temple. “I know you did not just suggest that I drain—”
“A bad one,” she said, her voice suddenly higher. “I’m saying that if you run across a bad one cuz I know how focused you are o
n that sort of thing, catching ‘bad guys’ – you should definitely drain them dry, because they are all kinds of tasty, let me tell you.” She did a pirouette and came around the bed, then brushed my hair out of my eyes, careful not to touch my face. “Come on, get the other guy and get ready. We need to go out, niece.”
I sighed. “Go out where?”
She leaned her head in close to me and gave me a mischievous smile. “The bar, here in the hotel.”
“I went to a bar last night. It didn’t end well. I almost killed some guy.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Was he cute?”
I felt a pang as I remembered, not for the first time in the last few hours, that I had broken up with Zack only this morning. And had kissed James last night. “Yes. He very much was.”
“Sounds worth it to me.” She looked me up and down. “You change and get ready, I’ll go knock on the other guy’s door and get him to watch the kids.” She turned and headed for the door.
“His name is Reed, you know.”
She waved a hand carelessly behind her as she walked out. “I’ve already forgotten it again.”
I stood there in the middle of the floor for about ten seconds, pondering my options. I could sit in my room, avoiding the horror that was drunkenness, the searing pain of a hangover and the loss of judgment that resulted from it, or stay here and stare at the walls. I had almost convinced myself that that was the wisest course, the soundest of ideas, when Zack wandered across my mind again, and I realized he’d be doing that for the rest of the night – just like he had been all day – and I’d have only the unconscious bodies of my two colleagues to keep me company.
There was a knock at the door, and when I looked through the peephole, it was Reed, looking a little cross.
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