Power

by Robert J. Crane

  “What are you going to do, Sienna?” Scott asked. “If you’re not going to kill him?”

  “Maybe I’ll just guard him until the feds come,” I said. “Maybe we’ll have a conversation. Maybe I’ll turn him loose and run to catch up with you guys.” I felt my face harden. “Or maybe I will kill him and then come join you.”

  “I’m all in favor of killing him,” Reed said, “but I’m not a huge fan of sending you in there alone.”

  “I’m the only one that can face him,” I said.

  “No,” Scott agreed, “you shouldn’t be alone in this.”

  “Get past your egos, boys,” I said. “As much as I love you both, when it comes to a dance between me and Sovereign, you’re hostages or splatters and that’s it. This is my job, the one I signed on for, and I’m going to do it myself.” I looked at each of them in turn. “I won’t have you in the way, because if you hamper me and get yourselves killed in the process, even if I beat him, it would kill me inside.” I made them feel it, both of them, with a hard-edged look that made them each break eye contact in turn. “Do you want to put that on me?”

  “No,” Reed said first.

  “No,” Scott said a moment later.

  “Then this is where we part,” I said, and opened my arms. They both hugged me, tightly and as long as they could get away with it. When I pulled away, I could sense Scott wanting to stay a moment longer. I shook my head at him. “I’ll see you again. Or you’ll see me at least, I think.”

  “Don’t get yourself killed, Sienna,” Reed said. “If he’s willing to lay down the sword, let him do it. Just be done. You don’t have to do this anymore.”

  “I never did,” I said. “That’s what makes me … me.” I smiled, but it was totally fake and they both knew it. “Take care of yourselves.”

  Reed gave me a cursory salute and left before I could see him tearing up. Scott waited just a moment more, like he was going to say just one more thing, but I shook my head and he ducked out. I watched the two of them leave and knew that once again I was all alone.

  Chapter 53

  Once upon a time, Wolfe had held the city of Minneapolis hostage for my surrender. I’d gone out and faced him, knowing I would suffer and be tortured and die, because I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else dying in my place.

  I don’t know exactly what it was about walking down the empty corridor of the dormitory that reminded me of that moment, but the feelings came flooding back to me as I went down the hall toward my room.

  The campus was empty. I’d seen to that. I could feel it in the echoes of the footsteps I was taking toward my door. The smell of drywall dust was in the air, a smell that reminded me of new construction and new destruction at the same time. I saw the dust drifting in the sunbeams, lazily falling out of the air. It had probably been prompted by Sovereign’s exit to come to Terramara earlier, though this particular building had never really lost its new construction smell for me.

  I thought about knocking, but it was my room so I just went in. The biometrics that had once secured the door were offline, another pointless precaution to keep Sovereign from trying to mind-control someone who could access them. He was the least kept prisoner ever, I figured, and I suspected he knew it.

  “Hey,” he said, rising to greet me as I came in. His dark eyes looked worried. “Are you okay?”

  “As much as I can be,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, I picked up on some things—”

  “You sensed a great disturbance in the force, huh?” I sat down on the bed and faced toward the seat he’d been occupying only a moment before. He slowly lowered himself back into it, the remainder of the chains clanking as he did so. “Here, let’s get rid of these.” I gestured for him to come to me, and he did.

  “Why now?” he asked as I unlocked the cuffs around his ankles. They were all broken anyway, and his limbs were able to move freely.

  “What’s the point?” I asked. “You’re here of your own free will.”

  “I’m supposed to be detained by you, remember?” He smiled, and it was full of irony as per usual. “I’m your big career-making capture.”

  “I don’t have a career,” I said with a shrug. “The press has figured out about metahumans and the government is leaking like a sieve. All these years of closely holding the secret and now it’s busted loose in less time than it takes Shia La-whatshisname to unspool.”

  He stared at me, and it felt like dawning comprehension came over him all at once. “You think you’re about to take the blame for … what? The explosion up north?” I nodded. “The extinction? Century?”

  “Everything,” I said. “I figure I’ll catch everything that needs to be caught.”

  He folded his hands in his lap, and I couldn’t read his expression for a moment. “They’re going to turn on you.”

  I shrugged again. It was my expression of choice for the current state of events. “So it would seem.”

  He looked deeply contemplative for a moment. “I wish I could say I didn’t see this coming …”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “You didn’t see this coming.” I waved at him. “It’s obvious on your face.”

  He frowned. “I … I think I’ve deceived a person or two in my time.”

  “You haven’t needed to deceive anyone,” I said, dismissing him. “And why would you? Even when you were pretending to be Joshua Harding, you were practically begging for me to realize that there was more to you than I was seeing on the surface.”

  I saw a gleam in his eye. “Maybe I just wanted you to realize there was more to me. Not everybody.”

  “Still trying to impress me, huh?” I said, and it came out wary.

  “Trying,” he said. “I don’t know how well it’s working, but I’m trying. Surrendering myself, aiding you in taking down Century even though you know I believed in the idea of what a better world could bring to us—” I rolled my eyes, just a little, before I could stop myself. “All right, well, you know, maybe we should just avoid that topic of conversation for a millennium or two.”

  I put a hand over my face. “Won’t that be around the time you reach the end of your lifespan?”

  “Could be,” he said. “Time starts to lose meaning for you after a while. We live a long time, our kind. Incubi and succubi have that going for them. Of course the downside is that even our own people hate us for our powers. I mean, metahuman vampirism isn’t as sexy as the movies make it look—”

  “You’re rambling,” I said, and pulled the hand down from my eyes.

  “I’m rambling,” he agreed, and I watched him rest both hands on his knees. “So … the campus is feeling pretty empty.”

  “It should be totally empty.”

  His eyes shifted left then up. “It is. You sent them all away.”

  “Yep.”

  “Alone at last.” He stared at me. “So … are you planning to shoot me?”

  I stared back at him. “Not right now.”

  He cracked a smile. “It’s a start. I’ll take it.”

  I shrugged. “Would you even hold still if I told you I was going to shoot you?”

  I could see the tension on his face in the form of his jaw halting partway open. He met my eyes and I could see the surrender. “Well, since you just told me I’m a horrible liar—”

  “You proved it a second ago, incidentally, when you started to answer and froze up.”

  “—no, I wouldn’t hold still and let you kill me.” He gave me a light shrug of his own. “I’ll submit to punishment for what I’ve done, but I’m not likely to sit still for the death penalty.”

  “Well, then there we are,” I said. “I couldn’t shoot you if I wanted to. And I think we’ve already established it wouldn’t do any good anyway.” I glanced down. I was down to one pistol now anyhow, thanks to having to grab something in a hurry from the armory to replace the weapons I’d lost in the explosion.

  “So why are you here?” he asked. “Now that everyone else is gone?”


  “Because I have to deal with you,” I said.

  “Even your friends left?”

  “I sent them away,” I said. “And let’s get back to talking about you.”

  “You want to talk about me?” He stared at me. “Why?”

  “Because I’m secretly in love with you.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Really?”

  “No, not really,” I said and gave him a frown. “It’s because you’ve been a huge pain in my ass and the focal point for all my problems for the last year and a half, even when I didn’t know it. Wolfe and all the other Omega stooges came at me because they needed a succubus to try and bribe you with. Century came at me because you had Weissman steering them toward me. Winter turned on me because he was petrified you were going to kill him.”

  “Which I did.”

  “No points from me,” I said. “Indirectly, you’re the reason I had to leave my house for the first time a year and a half ago.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “How?” I asked. “Did you read someone’s mind?”

  “No, I was there,” he said, never looking away from my eyes. If you’ve ever seen creepy stalker eyes, that was the vibe I was getting right then. “I was there in the parking lot of the supermarket when Wolfe grabbed you. Weissman and I jumped out to help. He touched my skin—”

  “And you partially drained him,” I said and felt my stomach turn in disgust that I hoped was well hidden. “I should have known that a dart wouldn’t do squat to him.” I pictured the first time I’d seen Sovereign as Joshua Harding. “No wonder you looked so familiar.”

  “I’ve been watching out for you since the beginning,” he said, leaning toward me. The stalker eyes were just a little self-aware, just a little more cunning than I would have hoped for. “I’ve done everything I could to try and organize things right, but I’ve made serious mistakes even so. Siding with Weissman was disastrous. Going with his plan was horrible. Reprehensible. I wanted the world to be a better, brighter place, somewhere that someone like you didn’t get abused by the people who were supposed to protect you.” He paused. “See, I know how it feels when a parent torments you. How it is when the person who is supposed to love and care for you turns on you, the harm it can do—”

  “Yeah, I heard about your mom in your head,” I said, cutting him off. I was keeping myself as cold and aloof as I could manage. And I could manage a lot.

  “She couldn’t hurt me physically,” he said, never looking away from me, “but she did everything she could to break me mentally.”

  I looked at him without looking him in the eyes. It’s not like I was afraid I’d fall into him or something, metaphorically speaking. I just didn’t want to look him in the eye. “I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

  “Probably like having Wolfe in your head,” he said with some humor. “Maybe a touch less horrific.” He paused. “Except in the teenage years. That was awkward.”

  I couldn’t help but give him the disgusted look for the overshare. I tried to rein it in, but there are limits to how much yuck I could take. “Ugh,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and dropped from the chair to his knees in front of me. I looked up at him and must have had another WTF look on my face, because he held out both hands. “Relax, I’m not about to propose marriage or anything.”

  “Good, because the answer would be ‘no’ followed by a punch to the face for you.” That came out reflexively.

  “I know you don’t know me,” he said. “And … if I’m right … you probably still don’t want to know me. But I’m also guessing you see the weight of what’s chasing you right now and you’re more than a little afraid.

  I stared back at him, not saying anything.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’d be scared, too. You poured your life into stopping me, into stopping all the bad guys that crossed your path, and you’ve done a damned fine job of it. I mean, you killed the top one hundred strongest metas still alive. That’s … that’s pretty big. And you did it in service of a government that’s … uh … well, they’re turning on you. No easy way to say it.”

  I kept looking at him, waiting to see if he’d get to the point.

  “I don’t think you want to suffer for your crimes,” he said flatly. “Do you?”

  “What I want doesn’t matter,” I said. My voice sounded weak to my ears, filled with the tiredness that had settled in on me in the last hour or so. Maybe it even went back further than that, to the explosion. I felt it, though, and a kind of weariness that reminded me of what I’d heard about runners in mile twenty of a marathon—the mile where most of them quit because all the hope was gone.

  “You don’t want to suffer for this,” he said, voice tinged with sorrow. “Your friends are leaving, getting away because you wanted them to. You wanted them to be safe, to not suffer like this. Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “Because,” I said, almost whispering, “I have to deal with you.”

  There was a flicker of emotion behind his eyes. “Fair enough. You have to deal with me.” He spread his arms. “Here I am. I am your prisoner. But do you really think they’ll let you watch over me if you’re in jail?”

  I shook my head slowly. The logic was obvious in that one.

  “Sienna,” he said quietly. “They wouldn’t be able to stop me. Only you can stop me. I won’t stand still for them. I will for you, because I care about you, because I want to be able to spend the time with you that it takes for you to see who I am. I won’t do that for anybody else, and if they take you away, I will not be a prisoner anymore.” Each word came flatly, and there was a menace hanging with them. “I will not submit myself to any man or government. That’s not who I am. I surrendered to you because I trust you.”

  “I can’t let you hurt anyone else,” I said and lowered my head into my hands.

  “Then I have a perfect solution for you,” he said, and his voice was strong, commanding. “Your friends have already left. Why don’t you come away with me? We can go somewhere safe, somewhere like they did—and you can keep an eye on me for the rest of my life if you want, as my jailer—and you’ll never have to worry about me hurting anyone else again.”

  Chapter 54

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  January 21, 2012

  The car rattled along, tires slipping on the turns as they drove away from the supermarket. Marius—though he hadn’t been called that in so many years he barely thought of himself in that way—could still feel the ice sliding down the collar of his shirt from where Wolfe had manhandled him.

  “Urk,” Weissman said in some sort of complaint from the driver’s seat, “I haven’t been hit like that since grade school.”

  Marius cocked an eyebrow at him. “Someone as strong as Wolfe beat the holy hell out of you in grade school?”

  Weissman flushed, his skin going nearly purple under his greasy bangs. “No, I just meant that I hadn’t gotten my ass kicked like that in a long time.”

  Marius stared Weissman, who had turned back to focus on the road ahead. It was coated intermittently with ice, heavy snow piled high on the median and both sides. A thick layer of grey clouds lay overhead, something he knew was not unusual here in the Midwest. I bet she’s never seen the sun, he thought to himself.

  SHE IS A CHILD, came the voice from within, a flexing, moving thing in his head. It had so many voices now, and he could barely hear his own among them any longer.

  But Mother’s was still in there.

  He looked over at Weissman once more and called forth the power of the telepath he’d absorbed so long ago. He tunneled into Weissman’s mind without effort, tasting the fresh stock of pain and horror there. He found a memory with little effort, a juicy one, of a child in grade school taking painful hits to the face, the chest. Blood ran down his face and coated the inside of his mouth, and the screaming that filled his ears was his own. One word stood out from it all, one word repeated over and over—

  Dadd
y.

  Marius shook the horror from his mind, wanting to spit it out as though it were something foul he’d taken a bite of. “That explains a lot,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?” Weissman asked.

  “Nothing,” Marius said, and looked back out the window. “The girl—”

  “I’ve got a guy already in at the Directorate,” Weissman said. “He was one of the first I put in place. Him and a few others with the big powers. Eyes on the big meta farms in China and India—they need to be our first targets. Anyway, this guy can keep an eye on the girl for you.” Weissman spoke in a staccato rhythm, his excitement inflecting his tone.

  “All right.” Marius frowned. “Her mother was stubborn. We may need to play some games with her if we’re going to pull this off.”

  “What kind of games?” Weissman asked.

  “Manipulation,” Marius said casually. “I can’t be the bad guy to her. She’s young, probably prone to fits of idealism. I don’t want to be the villain. I have to be the natural choice, the solution to her problems and not the scary guy who’s destroying the whole world.” He paused “Unless she’s so cut up inside she’s into that, in which case I’ll swoop in as soon as possible.”

  Weissman shrugged. “Women want power. You get enough of it, she’ll come around.”

  “Maybe,” Marius said. “But in any case, for our purposes, in this endeavor, you’ll be the stick and I’ll be the carrot. If I have to deal with someone, they need to die.”

  “I have no problems being the enforcer,” Weissman said, and took his hands off the steering wheel to crack his knuckles. He smiled. “It’s gonna work.”

  Marius shook his head. “This plan of yours …”

  “I’m telling you, it’s brilliant,” Weissman said. “And its success is its simplicity. We just have to eliminate the threats, right? The metas, the armies? Once we break their will, we’re in charge, and with your powers, we just … hold back the tide. Make it obvious that certain things are not acceptable, that this plague of people being complete and total shits to each other is going to end.”