“And once that enemy was gone …” Janus said with a slight nod. “He was not a man prone to solving one massive problem by unleashing another. He was very careful to protect his interests and those of the Ministers by finding solutions that would insulate them from additional fallout.”
“Yeah, he was a real prince,” I said acidly. “Unfortunately, the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of his failure to act.” And yours, I didn’t say.
“How did you know?” Janus asked after a moment’s pause. “About Adelaide?”
“She’s left a ghost in my head,” I said, looking back at the photo of the stasis unit. “She’s the one who told me how to use my powers.” She’d told me a lot of things, actually. Showed me things. I felt a shudder and suppressed it.
Things I wasn’t ready to talk about just yet. That I couldn’t talk about.
Remember.
“How is that possible?” Scott asked, and his voice sounded a little hoarse. He cleared it, looking around the table self-consciously.
“She was the stronger succubus,” Janus said, shaking his head very lightly.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “She touched me for a long time, like … way longer than it would have taken for a succubus’s power to work.” I caught the hint of something in Janus’s gaze, a flicker, and he looked away from me. “What are you not telling me?”
Janus paused, and when he answered it was with more than a hint of irritability. “Nothing that pertains to defeating Sovereign. Let us keep the focus on the matter at hand—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Reed said, leaning forward on the table. “You don’t just get to dish out and withdraw a little bit of info like that. You’re saying there’s a way to control a succubus—and assuming that’s right, presumably an incubus’s power, too, right?” He glanced around at all of us, his look somewhere between incredulity and relief. “This could be the thing that stops Sovereign.”
“She could still use the powers of the metas she’d absorbed,” I said with the shake of my head. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t keep them—us—from being able to use what we’ve got already.”
“Nor does it keep a succubus or incubus from being able to absorb fresh souls,” Janus said with that same wary air, now flecked with the barest hint of indignation. “Should we apply this particular treatment to Sovereign, it would do precisely nothing. It is little more than a method for a succubus to voluntarily control their absorption powers.”
I swallowed as I felt a rush of hope run through me. Control my powers? Make it so I could keep from absorbing someone’s soul the moment I touched them?
Make it so I could live a normal life?
“I’d be interested in hearing about it even so,” Scott said from his place down the table. I met his gaze for half a second and looked away.
“It is not relevant to the discussion at hand,” Janus said, and the menace in his voice was unmistakable. There was a sudden, dark pall over the table, a palpable anger that made everyone lean back a little in their chairs.
“Whoa, there,” Zollers said. “Restrain yourself, Janus.”
“I apologize,” Janus said after a moment more. He stood abruptly, and his chair clattered as he did so. “I’m afraid I must withdraw from this conversation. I have nothing more to add to the discussion at this time.” He looked around the room once briefly, his eyes so low that he never met any of ours, and then he left the conference room as quickly as I’d ever seen him move.
“Wow,” J.J. said. “That was super awkward. What do you think his secret was?”
Kat had a flushed look, slightly alarmed, and her gaze was rooted on the door. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him act this way before. But if he says he’s got nothing more to contribute that would help, I believe him—”
“I don’t,” Reed said sourly. I wheeled my gaze to him. “I don’t care what he says, he’s still Omega in my view, and they’re all filled to the brimming with secrets and lies.”
No one said anything to that, but Kat flushed and left in nearly as much of a huff as Janus had. The rest of us sat there for a minute more in eerie silence, while I wondered if Reed was right.
Chapter 9
Scott lingered as the meeting broke up. So did Reed and Zollers, but they hung back. I sat in my chair, the smell of leather thick in my nose. My fingers danced over the surface of the leather covering the arms, soft, pliable material slick with the sweat on my fingertips. Just nerves, I hoped.
Nervous for the weakling? Wolfe asked.
I appreciate your assistance, I told him, but unsolicited opinions aren’t my favorite things ever.
Since the Little Doll asked so nicely, he said, and I caught a glimpse of his fearsome smile in my mind’s eye before he sauntered off to the back of my head. I could feel the press of the others in my head, too, now that I had let them out of their prisons. They seemed reticent to say anything, though, and that was just fine by me.
Reed and Zollers remained at the other end of the table, watching me with careful eyes. They didn’t bother to pretend they weren’t paying attention to everything I was doing, and I respected them for it. False discretion wasn’t going to convince me they weren’t eavesdropping; they were metas, and they’d have to at least leave the room in order to avoid hearing a conversation between Scott and me.
Scott shuffled up, hands in his pockets. He took a moment to meet my eyes, but when he did, I could see the emotion in them. “I just wanted to tell you … I’m in. All in. Whatever it takes to stop these bastards.”
“Good,” I said, a little more choked up than I would have thought I’d be. I looked up and saw Reed hide a wry smile by turning away from me. “That’s … it’s good to have you on the team.” I wanted to smack myself for the excessive formality I was lapsing into, but let’s face it, I didn’t want to have a deeper, more private conversation with my brother and my therapist in the room. That’s practically family counseling, and it was not something I was up for.
“Way to come off the bench at the buzzer, Arthur Curry,” Reed said, and he turned back for just a second to smirk.
“Who the hell is Arthur Curry?” Scott asked, confusion stitching a downward line across his brow.
“Aquaman,” I said with faint amusement. He looked at me and his forehead puckered further. “Arthur Curry is Aquaman.”
“What the hell, Reed?” Scott gave him an insulted look, to which my brother just shrugged. He turned back to me. “And, uh … I’m sorry about your mom.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll, uh … deal with it later,” I said and meant it. “No time for mourning at the moment.”
“Can you and I talk later?” he asked. The annoyance on his face at Reed’s jibe had faded, replaced with something else, something closer to concern.
I took a breath before answering. “Yeah. Though we might want to do what we’d talked about before everything hit the fan and just … wait until things settle out with Sovereign.”
“Sure,” he said, and I watched him swallow heavily. “Sure, we can do that. Wait until everything is, uh … over … before …”
“Thanks.” I smiled faintly. Part of me didn’t want to put it off. Part of me wanted to dig into it right now and get it out of the way. This wasn’t the sort of thing I really wanted to leave open, like a wound, while I was heading into battle, but I wasn’t sure it was the sort of thing that could be fixed with a couple stitches, like … a smaller wound, I suppose.
The truth was I didn’t have any idea what to say. My feelings regarding Scott were immensely complicated, and I was still feeling exhausted from all the garbage that had been dumped on us in the last few days.
“Well, okay, then,” Scott said, and he swung toward the door almost as though he were on a string, being pulled toward it. His movements were mechanical, shuffling, and reminded me a little of how he’d acted after Kat had lost all memory of him. He disappeared through the door without another word.
“You know that keeping him at a dista
nce is going to come back to bite you in the ass sometime between now and the final battle, right?” Reed asked, and I turned my head to find him standing there, leaning on the back of one of the chairs, watching me.
“Everything comes back to bite me eventually,” I said. “Leave my house, get drawn into a war. Kill Wolfe, piss off his brothers. Fail to kill Weissman when I had a chance, he comes back and kills my mom.” I said it grimly, but I didn’t feel sorry for myself about it. I didn’t know many people who’d been left with the shitty choices I’d been given in the last year and a half. Any people, actually. All I had were shitty choices. And I didn’t feel sorry for myself about it, not anymore. This was just reality. “I’ll deal with Scott when I figure out how to deal with Scott,” I said. To me, it had the ring of bracing honesty. I didn’t know how my brother or Dr. Zollers took it, but their facial reactions didn’t indicate they took it well. I looked to Reed. “Are we still in lockdown?”
“We’re always in lockdown,” he said, breaking a smile. “We live in a perpetual state of lockdown around here. It’s all we do anymore.”
“Good,” I said. “We may not have much left, but better safe than—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving me off as he started toward the door. “You should know that I’m ‘all in,’ too.” He paused at the doorway. “In case you didn’t already know.”
“I knew,” I said and felt the hint of a smile grace my lips. That took some doing at the moment, piercing through the shroud of numbness that felt like it had settled on my bones. “But I appreciate you saying it anyway, Hal Jordan.”
Reed’s eyes narrowed and his lips puckered in deepest betrayal. “Green Lantern? You consider me a Green Lantern?”
“You can kinda fly, but you’re no Superman,” I said with a shrug. “Just a touch of arrogance—”
“Ohhh, I am retracting my all-in,” he said and slapped the doorframe with mock irritation. He smiled, rolled his eyes and started to sweep out. “We’ll talk later, right?” His look turned to hesitancy, and I knew what he wanted to talk about—Mom.
“Yeah,” I said and glanced at Zollers. “But I have a feeling I might be all talked out on the subject pretty soon.”
“Maybe I won’t be,” he said quietly.
“Okay,” I said and gave him a nod. He left without another word.
“So …” Dr. Zollers said, completely unreadable.
“So,” I said. “Therapy session, huh?”
“Not necessarily,” he said, edging toward me quietly. His hands were folded in front of him, and he looked solemn. “Seems like everyone wants to talk to you now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Gotta console the grieving, I suppose.”
“Are you?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Grieving, I mean?”
I felt that faint smile broaden. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you? Psychiatrist to the last.”
“Reminds me of a joke I heard,” he said with a faint smile. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a hint of impatience.
“Only one. But it has to really want to change.”
I felt an absurd little laugh escape my lips at that. “That’s … terrible.”
“It truly is,” he said, and the familiar light that had always been in his eyes twinkled. “Do you know why so many of them want to have a conversation with you like I am right now?”
“They’re worried about me,” I said. “Worried I’ll … I don’t know, go charging off the edge of a cliff or something. Worried I might drop the ball on running this war.”
“They’re worried about you,” he agreed. “Not the war. I mean, Li is worried about the war. But Scott, Ariadne, Reed—none of them are worried about the war in relation to you. They’re worried about you because … it’s you.”
“And what’s Janus worried about?” I asked.
“No idea,” Zollers said with a shake of his head. “I can’t read him, not even a little. His empath powers blot mine out without him even having to try. I can’t even read the others when he’s around, he’s so strong.”
“To answer your question … I’m fine,” I said without enthusiasm.
“I don’t have to be a telepath to know that’s not true.”
“In relation to what happened with my mom, I’m fine,” I corrected. “For now. It’s not like I feel nothing, I just …” I sighed. “I hate to go all Scarlett O’Hara on this, but I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
He frowned, his lips compressing in a tight line. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so … now that I can read you, mentally, you do not feel fine.” He paused, as if he were stopping to take the temperature of the air, his eyes drifting into open space. “It’s not about your mother, the distress I’m detecting. It’s—”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding, not meeting his eyes. “It’s something else entirely.”
I felt his eyes on me. “What aren’t you telling us?”
I chewed my lower lip. “Things. You’re a mind reader. Why not just take a look?”
“I could do that,” he said, stopping a step away from me, “but …” He squatted down, bringing his eyes level with mine. I avoided his gaze no longer, looking into his deep, mocha-colored eyes. “… I really don’t care to invade your privacy if you don’t want to share it.”
“I’m sure it’ll come out at some point,” I said, and felt a tightness in my throat. “But not yet.”
“All right,” he said soothingly. As always. “Do you want to talk about your mom?”
I felt my throat tighten further. “I don’t know what else to say. She never even saw it coming.”
“Oh, she did,” Zollers said with a nod, drawing my attention back to him. “She knew it was coming. My mind was with her, blocking Claire’s ability to read her as she hitchhiked on the back bumper of Weissman’s car with you. She was at peace, knowing that her end was coming. Most people don’t have the level of serenity—”
“Oh, bullshit,” I said, feeling impatience bubble out of me. “My mother was many things, but serene was not one of them.”
“In this case, she was as close as one could get,” Zollers said quietly. “Don’t get me wrong, there was rage and anger and fear—for you, I might add—but she was as peaceful at the end as I have ever felt her. You were right, Akiyama was there. He allowed her to get the drop on Weissman, and the words they exchanged gave her a sense of peace before the end came.” He shook his head. “Having been present for my share of deaths, I can tell you that it’s more than most get.”
I pushed my lips together hard and let them stay that way for a moment before speaking again. “We said a lot to each other just before she died. But … it doesn’t feel like enough.”
“It would never be enough,” he said quietly. “She has power over you and always will. Parents are like that. You’ll always want her approval.” His eyes glistened faintly. “Her love.”
“She said she was sorry.” I felt the lump in my throat. “For what she’d done. For how she’d failed. Like she knew ahead of time she was going to die.”
“The life expectancy of people engaged in this particular endeavor is not very high,” Zollers said, and he stood. I could hear his joints popping as he did so. “This is war, after all.”
“And my mother is one of its casualties.” Adelaide’s voice came back to me again, soft and warning. Remember. “And not the last, either, if Sovereign has anything to say about it.”
Zollers’s eyes narrowed, just slightly, as if he caught my deeper meaning. It made me wonder if it was something he was reading from my thoughts or something from his own experience with Sovereign that made him react that way. “No. No, it won’t be.” He paused and took a breath. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
I pulled my eyes from Zollers and rested them on the photograph of the Omega stasis chamber, still sitting face up on the table, the glare of the overhead lights blotting out a portion of the picture. Just li
ke my sense of Sovereign’s plans, it looked utterly incomplete this way, unfinished, so much of it out of view. But I could still see a lot of it.
I took a breath, pulled my gaze from the photograph, looked Dr. Zollers in the eyes, and told him what I needed from him.
Chapter 10
I found Janus on the roof, which was the last place I would have looked. There was a helipad up there but it wasn’t in regular use. We used the one on the grounds out of habit, I supposed. Those old habits, they’re a real bitch to get rid of.
Suspicion was an old habit for me, though, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
“Janus,” I said quietly as I stepped out into the gentle breeze blowing across the rooftop. It was an overcast day, late summer, and not nearly as hot as it could have been. Part of me had trouble keeping track of the days. Why did it matter, after all? When the world is roaring to an end around you, who cares whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday? It’s not like I had any days off, after all.
“Sienna,” he said, loud enough to be heard. “Dr. Zollers told you where to find me?”
“He pointed me in the direction of the giant black hole in his mind’s coverage of the campus, yes,” I said. Janus was standing a couple feet from the edge of the roof, staring off. We hadn’t exactly followed safety regulations and installed railings or anything yet. There was nothing but a gaping, open space in front of him leading to the south lawn, and he stared across it as though he had a better view than a four-story building could provide. “You got pretty defensive in there.”
“Yes,” Janus said simply. He did not turn to look at me as I sidled up next to him.
“And then you run up here to … what? Think about your problems?” I stared out onto the lawn. I could still see each individual blade of grass from up here. That was meta eyesight for you.
“Think about how to handle my problem,” Janus said, not stirring. The wind came through and rustled his tweed jacket. I wondered if Kat had packed that for him when she brought him over from England.
“I prefer head-on, personally,” I said.
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