“Sovereign?” I asked. “He woke you up?”
“I believe so, yes,” he said. “With the words, ‘Someone should tell her.’” He blinked. “Which was ironic, since I was about to tell you before Weissman so rudely interrupted me.”
“Tell me what? How to beat Sovereign?” I leaned forward, hoping to hear something I’d been looking for, something I’d been longing for.
“Perhaps,” he said, still looking dreadfully tired. “At the very least, something helpful. Some knowledge of what he represents. What he wants. What he—”
“I need to know,” I said, standing, leaning over the desk toward him. “I need to know some basics. Something to start with. To defeat him. I need to know my foe.” I squeezed my hands together, knuckles pressed against the hard surface of the desk. “I need to know what type of meta he is.”
Janus started to open his mouth, his lip quivered, and he looked down. He folded his hands in his lap and lowered his head. “Yes. Yes, you do. You need to know. Very well, then,” he said and looked up at me, face resolute, like he had committed at last to stepping over some line that he had sworn he would never cross.
“Sovereign is ... an incubus.”
Chapter 46
Sovereign
January 21, 2012
Minneapolis, Minnesota
They pulled into the grocery store parking lot following the little yellow Volkswagen beetle. Is this really it? Sovereign thought as they parked the car a few hundred feet behind the Volkswagen. They were both following another vehicle, a sedan, one that had just burned out of a Minneapolis neighborhood in a big hurry minutes earlier.
“Looks like they’re pulling off in this grocery store,” Weissman said. He didn’t look quite so oily today; he looked younger, was dressed in a coat and jeans, and his face didn’t look nearly as old as he was. “Any idea why?”
“Because she’s here,” said the man who had worked the last six hundred years to be known as Sovereign and not the name he was born with. “They placed a tracker on the bumper of the car she escaped in; her brother, he works for Alpha, and he’s inside explaining it all to her right now—all about metas, about our world.”
Weissman gave it a moment’s thought before pushing a stringy black lock out of his eyes. “Is she ... ?”
“Is she what?” Sovereign’s eyes never left the front of the store, with its massive orange-lettered display. “A scared seventeen-year-old? Definitely.”
“Is she a succubus?” Weissman asked. He kept his irritation in check, but Sovereign could feel it. It was there, always, stewing under the surface of Weissman’s mind. His black heart is just as dirty as his greasy hair.
“She doesn’t know,” Sovereign replied. “Her mother dressed her like she’d be one, though. Gloves, heavy clothing, all that. She even made rules about it.” He sifted around again, touched her mind. Even at a distance he could feel it, and it was unlike the ones he had felt before. Damaged? Wounded, he decided. Like me. “Mom wasn’t too kind to her, it doesn’t look like. Locked her up in a box whenever she was bad, tried to keep her contained.” Overbearing parent? I can relate to that. He felt a little surge of elation at the commonality. This could be it. It could be her, finally. After all this time.
“Wolfe’s just lurking over there next to the Beetle,” Weissman said, pointing a long, thin finger into the distance where the Volkswagen was parked. “Can’t believe he drives that thing.” He glanced over nervously. “He can’t see us, can he?”
“I wouldn’t worry about Wolfe,” Sovereign said, still staring at the front entrance.
“Hard to believe there are this many players after her and she’s only just left her house,” Weissman said.
“Omega knows what her mother is,” Sovereign said, thinking it over. “They’ve been after another succubus for years.”
“Why?” Weissman asked. “Do they know—”
“Of course they know,” Sovereign said. “They’re the ones who made the rules. Who put the constraints on our people, isolated us from other metas, pushed us out of the mainstream and acceptability. The minute Hades died, incubi and succubi became persona non grata in the meta world, and they were the ones driving the change.” He felt a slight smile come on.
“They feared you,” Weissman said. “What you could do if you were truly unleashed.”
“I’ve been off the leash for quite some time,” Sovereign said with some amusement. “They haven’t seen fit to do a damned thing with—or to—me.” He grew quiet, thoughtful. “I don’t know that they can anymore.”
“They’re the problem with the world,” Weissman said, looking across at him. “They run the show. They repress the people. They have all the power, but they just use it to pump up their own wallets.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sovereign said. “I’d take that populist rhetoric a lot better if you weren’t presently trying to involve me in a scheme that’s going to result in more deaths than I can easily count.”
“But to good purpose,” Weissman said.
“Says you,” Sovereign replied. He could feel the chill seeping in through the windows and probed toward the mind of the girl in the supermarket. Sienna. I should get used to calling her by her name. He smiled. It’s a nice name. She was getting angry, now; she’d seen the men in black suits from the Directorate, wanted to question them. Her brother was fighting her on it, asking her not to.
“A girl like that shouldn’t have had to live in fear for her life the last seventeen years,” Weissman said, extending his hand toward the supermarket. “She should have been able to live without being caged by her mother. Things like that happen all over. They’ll continue to happen unless we make this work.” Weissman leaned in closer to him. “Look, unless we have your support, this ... it ain’t gonna happen. I’ve got the framework in place, the basics, but the people I have need some ... motivation. Some inspiration, maybe.”
“You want to put the fear of the gods in them,” Sovereign said, crossing his arms over his chest. It was getting cold, the Minnesota winter seeping into the car.
“How better to put the fear of the gods into the old gods than by finding someone who’s more powerful than they are?” Weissman’s grin was dirty, just like the rest of him, and Sovereign only managed to nod politely.
There she is. She caught his eye, even from across the parking lot, striding across the wet, snow-covered surface with a purpose, her brother in tow. She’s ... beautiful. He stared out the window at her. She was shorter than he would have thought and pale as the snows that covered the land. Her dark hair whipped with the stirring of the wind, and when he caught a glimpse of her eyes he thought of the still waters he had seen when last he was in the Carribbean—deep and blue.
“There goes Wolfe,” Weissman said, and the beast leapt out from behind a car to grab Sienna’s brother by his neck. He held the man aloft until the girl herself turned around and saw. Words were exchanged, and she hauled off and punched him, solidly in the belly, to no reaction. “This could get messy,” he said, a look of unmistakable joy on his face, as if he were watching high quality entertainment.
“I’m going to help her,” Sovereign said. He was already on his way out of the car, feet crunching in the thin layer of slush in the parking lot.
“Wait, what?” Weissman was behind him in an instant, doubtless hiccuping time in order to keep up.
“Follow my lead,” Sovereign said, feeling the urge to crush Wolfe, to break his bones. The day in the Forest of Dean came back to him in an instant, and he pondered it, thought of making a show of it in front of her, to impress her. I could do it, too. Make up for the decision to let that miserable creature live, end his reign of slaughter once and for all.
He looked past the fury of Wolfe to the girl gripped within his hand, and caught a glimpse of her eyes, wide with fear. It would be foolish. She’s lived in a cage for years; gods and mighty forces sweeping down on her will do nothing but inspire her fear and suspicion. A sting of regret, a remembrance
of past failures burned his cheeks as the moment on the Edmund Fitzgerald came back to him. Then the night at the Agency came back him, when he’d let his haste for revenge cloud his judgment and led him to kill the father of the very girl he was looking at now. No. I won’t make the same mistakes this time. He turned to Weissman and whispered a command. “Whatever you do, don’t expose yourself or your powers.”
“What?” There was disbelief in Weissman’s reply. “What are you playing at?”
“HEY!” Sovereign shouted, and felt the anger boil in him. “You can’t treat a girl that way! Drop her!” He held himself back, though, restraining himself to keep from attacking hard, from cutting Wolfe to pieces. He slapped Weissman gently on the arm, a Let’s Go kind of motion that prompted Weissman to run forward.
They both took it slow, human speed, and Wolfe tossed aside the brother—Reed, his name was—slamming him into a parked car. Weissman came at Wolfe slowly enough to warrant a hard hit. Sovereign saw a glimmer of time displacement before the impact, enough that he knew Weissman had prepared himself, had paused time for a second to move himself just a hair farther away to lessen the power of the blow. He still flew across the parking lot, landing in the snow.
Sovereign went on, charging at Wolfe. Play it slow, play it dumb. Grab me, you silly bastard. Wolfe obliged, planting thick, terrible fingers around his neck, flesh to flesh, skin to skin. Now just hold on for a bit. Wolfe’s fingers dug in, and Sovereign held his breath, tried to widen his eyes. Let him think he’s winning ... just hold on ... hold on ... He could feel the first sense of the fire kindling in his flesh, the first burning of his powers stirring to work where Wolfe’s fingers met his skin. He watched the girl hammer at Wolfe’s hands, trying desperately to break them loose from around her throat. Finally, she reached down and pulled out a gun, firing it into Wolfe’s face as Sovereign fell, released from Wolfe’s grasp at last. I bet you feel that, you son of a bitch.
A dart poked out of his eyebrow, hanging on by the bushy hair. Wolfe staggered, and she fell from his grip then shot him again in the leg. He smacked the weapon out of her hand and it slid across the slushy ground.
“Little Doll,” Wolfe breathed. “That’s not a fair toy for playtime.” His eyes unfocused, widening, his steps uncertain. “What have you done to the Wolfe?”
Sovereign could feel it, the shadow, the little bit of Wolfe’s soul that he’d taken. Let them think it’s a dart. Like there’s a dart out there that could penetrate Wolfe’s skin.
“Back away from her,” came another voice.
“New playmates are not part of our game,” Wolfe breathed quietly into Sienna’s ear. Sovereign watched, laying still, willing the beast to run. If he makes one more move on her, I’ll just finish him myself ...
Wolfe took one last look at the two agents and ran, sprinting across the parking lot, bare feet slapping on the melting snow. The agents dropped down next to her talking, both at once, focused on her. Sovereign could sense their distress, their fear—We failed an assignment, oh no. Old Man Winter will be so angry. He smiled. Winter, angry. He was certain it was a pitiful sight.
“Hey, you!” the younger agent shouted. Sovereign looked up in time to see the brother stagger to his feet and run off through the rows of parked cars, bouncing off them until he reached his own. A moment later, the sound of an ignition turning over roared to life.
“We gotta get her out of here,” the older agent said. “Get her to Dr. Perugini.”
“Yeah,” the younger one said, and swept her up in his arms, carrying her. “She’s bleeding everywhere.” He carried her off, cursing, running across the wet, cold parking lot to the black Directorate sedan that waited. Sovereign heard the engine turn over almost immediately, and they skidded out moments later, splashing mush into the air as they did so.
“I hope that was worth it,” Weissman said, appearing at Sovereign’s side. He rolled his neck from right to left, making an exaggerated motion with it. “That big bastard doesn’t pull punches. Even with the time skip I pulled to cushion the blow it still hurt like hell.
“It was worth it,” Sovereign said, picking himself up off the ground. There was blood underneath him, all over the place where he’d fallen. That hadn’t happened in a long time. He watched the car running down the street outside the parking lot as it skidded toward the freeway. “I’m in.”
“In?” Weissman was rubbing his neck with one hand. “You’re ... you’re in? Like in?”
“I’m in,” Sovereign said. “You’re right. Let’s make the world a better place.”
“You don’t even know if she’s a succubus yet,” Weissman said cautiously.
“I’m sure she is, but it doesn’t matter,” Sovereign said. “I read her mind. I saw her story. I know what Omega wants her for, I know what Winter would want from her, and it’s not fair. No, I can wait.” He let a smile break across his face in the cold, icy wind. “Besides, girls are into older guys nowadays, right?”
“Yeah, immortal vampires are pretty popular with the teenage girl set,” Weissman said, nodding. “Should we go get her then? Go on out to the Directorate campus and ... ?”
“No,” Sovereign said, watching the last turn where the Directorate car had disappeared. “The last few times I screwed up because I came at them head on. There are ... so precious few succubi. Even fewer that you would actually want to spend a year with, let alone five thousand.” He watched the freeway ramp, contemplating. “I don’t want to screw it up again. I blew it with her mother and her grandmother.”
“I heard the mother has a sister?” Weissman asked.
“Charlie? Ugh, no,” Sovereign said. “No, it’s her. Sienna’s the one. But we’ll just leave her where she is for now. Sooner or later, Winter will screw things up, Omega will come at her as head on and hamfisted as ever, and she’ll be right where we want her. That’ll be the time.”
“Uh huh,” Weissman said, and Sovereign could see the skepticism. “So you just want to wait?”
“I do,” Sovereign said. “Because this one ... Sienna Nealon ... I think she’s the one I’ve been waiting for.”
Sienna Nealon will return in
DESTINY
THE GIRL IN THE BOX
BOOK NINE
Coming in 2014
Author's Note
Well, that was epic and I hope you enjoyed it. It was probably the hardest Girl in the Box novel I've written yet because of the sheer number of flashbacks while trying to be as realistic as possible about the environments and locations mentioned therein. Also, managing the reveals on some things I've kept back but have hinted at for so long was just a little taxing. One of my beta readers wondered how I'll be able to keep the series going for the next two books now that so many cards are on the table. Well, you'll just have to tune in and see, I guess...
If you want to know as soon as the next volumes are released (because I don't do release dates - there's a good reason, I swear), CLICK HERE to sign up for my New Release Email Alerts. I promise I won’t spam you (I only send an email when I have a new book released) and I’ll never sell your info. You can also unsubscribe at any time. You might want to sign up, because in case you haven't noticed, these books keep showing up unexpectedly early. You just never know when the next will get here...
Thanks for your support and thanks for reading!
Robert J. Crane
Acknowledgments
1. The Editorial Department - Heather Rodefer, Carien Keevey, and Paul Madsen all gave this book a thorough readthrough before I handed it off to the illustrious Sarah Barbour (http://aeroplanemedia.wordpress.com/) for final review. Every one helped make the manuscript stronger by their actions, and infinitely more readable.
2. The Cover - Karri Klawiter (ArtbyKarri.com) seems to have done her best work yet, producing something that is absolutely amazing. Kudos to her.
3. The Formatting - Nicholas Ambrose has once more handled the formatting duties, taking my rambling words and putting them onto an actual pag
e.
4. The Narration - Though she hasn't done the audiobook for this one yet, I wanted to take a moment and give a shout-out to Annie Sullivan, who has diligently been working to turn Sienna's adventures into audiobooks over the months since Enemies came out. She truly has captured the spirit of our heroine.
5. The Home Front - To my parents, my in-laws, my wife and kids - my thanks for all you do to keep me writing.
About the Author
Robert J. Crane was born and raised on Florida’s Space Coast before moving to the upper midwest in search of cooler climates and more palatable beer. He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a degree in English Creative Writing. He worked for a year as a substitute teacher and worked in the financial services field for seven years while writing in his spare time. He makes his home in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.
He can be contacted in several ways:
Via email at [email protected]
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Other Works by Robert J. Crane
The Sanctuary Series
Epic Fantasy
Defender: The Sanctuary Series, Volume One
Avenger: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Two
Champion: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Three
Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four
Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 Page 28
