Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9

by Crane, Robert J.

  “The good news is,” Scott said, and I could feel the room turning back to me again, “we’ve got another succubus, and this one has absorbed a Djinn-type, a Fae-type, a Quetzalcoatl, an Odin-type and … whatever the hell Wolfe was.”

  “Cerberus is the technical name, I believe,” my mother said. “I think there were only ever the three of them, though.”

  “Their father was one as well, but he is dead,” Janus said with a light nod of acknowledgment toward my mother. “Hades had the three brothers castrated with a sword set aflame by Hephaestus before they entered his service because he did not wish to suffer a scenario in which another of their kind might be born from actions taken in the course of their … activities.”

  Reed cleared his throat. “Which is the most polite way I’ve ever heard it put that Wolfe is probably history’s most prolific serial killer and rapist. Though, for my money, if Hades had had the meat cut off with the potatoes it might have spared the world an awful lot of misery.” He glanced at me.

  I didn’t meet his gaze. I stared at the blank, white desk calendar that sat in front of me.

  “Sienna?” Ariadne spoke. I did not look up. “Are you sure you can’t …?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again, and I barely recognized my own voice. “Maybe. I think Wolfe might have used his powers through me, once.” I glanced at Kat, then Scott. “During the fight with Gavrikov and Henderschott on top of the IDS Tower. I think he … took me over and used his power to heal me. But I’ve never …” I looked to Ariadne, “… never been able to do it myself.”

  There was another pause. A silence that told me that everyone else was hesitant to push further. I kept my eyes down.

  Scott spoke. “Can I just say it?” He hesitated. “That the reason Sovereign was after Sienna—”

  “I think we’re all up to speed on that now,” my mother interrupted.

  “Maybe,” Scott said, “but—I mean, this is major. We’ve been running around this entire time wondering what motivates this guy, what weakness he might have since he hasn’t shown anything so far—”

  “We get it,” my mother said again, her voice getting darker. I could see the clouds moving in across her forehead.

  “Do you?” Scott said, turning to face her. “Do you really? Because I think it came as a little bit of a surprise to me, and it occurs to me you probably haven’t had to deal with this particular kind of scrutiny from another meta ever before—”

  “You think this is the first time an incubus has come at a succubus for this purpose?” My mother’s voice carried more than just the seeds of umbrage. I recognized her tone as one that meant Scott was heading toward dangerous territory. More than a few times I’d heard her like this just before I had a metal door slammed in my face.

  “Can we just say it?” Scott asked. “He—”

  “Don’t,” my mother said, and her voice was as cold and unyielding as the door of the box had been in all the days of my youth.

  “Someone should,” Reed said, nearly whispering. “Someone should say it out loud, just because … this is … I mean, this is huge. Heinous, but huge. Sovereign has been waiting—”

  “Stop,” my mother hissed.

  “—searching for centuries, or maybe even millennia—”

  “SHUT UP!” My mother’s voice rose to a shout. “STOP—”

  “He’s been looking for her,” Reed said, “going through candidates one by one for however long—”

  “STOP TALKING! JUST STOP—”

  I brought my hand down on my desk and slammed it hard into the wood. I didn’t crack it, but it made a thunderous noise as I slapped my palm against the surface. I looked at the faces around me, my little crew.

  Less than an hour earlier, I’d stared into the face of the man who’d been called the most dangerous metahuman in the world.

  Had stared into his face and seen…something…I hadn’t seen in a long while.

  “I know why he’s after me,” I said, looking from Li, who was focused on his shoes, to Ariadne, who stared at me with dull eyes. “I know how he’s treated me compared to others he’s clashed with.” I glanced at Kat, holding tight to Janus on the couch. They were both watching, listening. “I saw in his eyes what he wanted from me.” I let my gaze drift to Reed, who wore something approaching a look of pity, then to my mother across the door frame. “I felt his intentions in the way he talked, the way he deferred to me.”

  Finally my eyes came around to Scott, who had one hand in his tousled, sandy-blond hair. He looked back at me with pity, too, but something else. Something that had been purer in its expression only a few hours earlier, when he kissed me. Something that had been missing from my life for … months. I licked my lips, and it felt like I could taste his kiss still lingering there, as though he had just done it a moment earlier.

  And I thought of Sovereign, of how I’d touched him, stood only inches away while trying to drain the life from him. Foolishly, it turned out.

  “I know you didn’t intend for that to be meaningful,” he’d said to me, “but for me it kind of was.”

  “I know what he wants from me,” I said, and I looked at Scott. He looked back, and I could see the dread forming in his eyes. I tried to decide whether it came from what I was saying, or whether it was a reflection of what he saw from me. Either way, it didn’t matter. Not really. “He wants me … to be his. His consort.” I said it clinically. Emotionless.

  “His … companion.” I felt the bile in the back of my throat as the words rolled out of my mouth. “His … wife.” The acrid taste in my mouth grew stronger at this thought, and one final pronouncement came ringing out, making me positively nauseous from top to bottom. “His lover.”

  Chapter 3

  The night air was quiet and fresh. I took a deep breath and exhaled, taking it into my lungs. My knees rested on the ground, my jeans pushing against the hard dirt floor of the woods.

  I was in the forest that ringed the campus, my eyes closed as I knelt on the ground. The taste of that last cup of coffee was still with me. I hated the stuff, but I’d needed it in order to avoid sleep. My body had threatened to crash after the meeting had broken up in the wake of my grim pronouncement, and I wasn’t ready to sleep. Not yet.

  I had things to do.

  I took another breath and squinted my eyes closed. Crickets chirped around me in the warm summer air, and I let one of my hands touch the dirt, running my fingers over the forest floor. A dew-soaked blade of grass brushed my palm, and I felt the water run down to the tip of my index finger.

  I looked deep inside, into a swirling darkness that was blacker than the night around me. I could withdraw into myself when necessary, into a little space that I’d set aside, and it was almost like retreating from the world. There was no smell, no taste but what I brought with me.

  All that surrounded me was a circle of six metal monuments, each taller than me.

  Faint howls echoed, voices raised in a cacophony that was muted by the walls of the metal boxes that imprisoned the souls I carried with me. I took a breath as I sat in the center of the circle and rose from the kneeling position I was in.

  I turned and looked at each of the steel sarcophagi in turn. They were perfect recreations. Massive, dark-blue plates welded together at the corners, six feet tall, with a little window on the front of each. I gestured to the one behind me and it opened with a click, the lock sliding free. Hinges squealed as the door opened.

  “I’m not sorry to get out of there,” Zack said, stepping free of his prison. His blond hair was neat, and he was wearing a suit. Just like I remembered him.

  “You saw everything?” I asked. I thought I could feel shame burning my cheeks.

  “Yeah,” he said, and his teeth gritted together in a grimace. “He’s been after you this whole time so you’d be his child bride, huh?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Hmm.” Zack took another step toward me, scratching his nose. Why did he do that? I wondered. It wasn�
��t like he had an actual, physical nose that itched anymore. “You’re gonna need help from the inmates.”

  I looked in a slow circle around the metal prisons I’d built to house my mental squatters. “You think they’ll jump at the chance to give me a hand?”

  “Not likely,” Zack said with a shake of his head. “Not after you figured out how to toss us all in stir.”

  I stared at him. He really was just as handsome as he’d ever been outside of my head. “You don’t seem that bitter about it.”

  “I … was in love with you,” Zack said with a faint smile. “And I betrayed you when we first got started, if you recall, so my guilt might be weighing in your favor. It’s not like I enjoy being in there.” He gestured to the open cell behind him. “But I know how important it is for you to be able to think clearly, so I accept my punishment like … well, like the guilty party I am, I guess.”

  “It’s not a punishment,” I said quietly.

  “It’s fate, then,” he said. “And I am resigned to my fate.”

  I gave the circle of steel boxes around me another look. “Let’s see if anyone else feels the same.” I gestured my hand in a slow circle and the locks for every one of the cages clicked open.

  One of the doors opened immediately, with a thud, and I turned to see Bjorn’s muscular body sweep out of the box, shirtless, chest bulging. “Ah, the air of freedom. How can it be so stale and dank in place that does not truly exist?”

  The door next to his clanked open and a lithe, nude female form stepped out. “Haven’t you realized yet? We are in hell, and the dankness is as close to brimstone as you’ll get.” Her blond hair was still pixie-short and grew in several other places I didn’t need to see, like her armpits and … further south.

  “God, Eve, put some clothes on, will you?” I flung a hand at her and a moment later she was clad in a t-shirt and jeans. Better than the nothing she apparently preferred.

  “You seem to have come in contact with the enemy.” Roberto Bastian’s enclosure swung open with a squeak, and he gently closed it behind him once he was out. “And your plan didn’t survive.”

  “No plan does,” I said tersely as I looked at the former leader of M-Squad. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  “My sister is well, it would seem.” Aleksandr Gavrikov spoke from behind me. I felt my jaw clench at the mere mention of his sister. It wasn’t that I was even annoyed by her anymore; it was that he wouldn’t EVER shut up about her.

  “She’s fine,” I said, composing myself rather than just flinging him back into the box he’d stepped out of. I counted them off in my head, one by one. Five of them were out of their cages. One to go.

  Of course it was him.

  There was no light in the darkness, but I could still see each of their faces as though a lamp followed my gaze. I looked at each of them in turn then I swiveled to face the last box.

  The lock was undone but the door was closed. I stared, willing it to open, and it did, noiselessly. I could see his shadow within, could almost see his eyes gleaming inside the box.

  Watching me. Judging me. Sizing me up. The most heinous creature I’d ever met.

  “Wolfe …” I said, “Aren’t you going to come out and play?”

  Chapter 4

  “Maybe the Wolfe doesn’t want to come out and play anymore, Little Doll.” The voice was little more than a rasp, and lacked all the vigor and laughing cruelty that had always been present in his speech. The darkness enshrouded him, he was wrapped up in it, and even though I could feel him watching, I couldn’t see him.

  A little chill made its way over my body. “Wolfe doesn’t want to come out and play?” I took a step closer to the box, but no more of him was revealed than had been before. “You just want to … sit in there and think about what you’ve done?” I took another step closer, heard my footstep click over the silence of the others, who were watching quietly. “Are you just going to sit in there and play with yourself?”

  I heard a faint growl, but it ended within seconds. “The Wolfe grows tired of the Little Doll’s plans. The Little Doll’s prison.”

  I clenched my jaw again. He revolted me. Every moment of every day for the rest of my life, I would have been content to let him sit in the box in my head, out of my sight and as near to out of my mind as I could get him.

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  “Sovereign,” I said, saying the name almost as much to remind myself of why I had deigned to come in here and talk to these disembodied vagrants as to focus the conversation. “You know he’s an incubus.”

  Wolfe’s shadow didn’t move. “Didn’t know. Don’t care.”

  The circle of the others that surrounded me was silent. “What about the rest of you?” I asked. “Do any of you care?”

  “No,” Eve Kappler replied, tugging at the bottom of the grey t-shirt I’d forced on her like she was trying to test the fabric for flaws. “I don’t care if he makes you his whore for the rest of your days—”

  I waved a hand and Eve was propelled backward, into the box from whence she’d come. I slammed the door on her and the lock fell back into place with only a thought from me. The sound of the metal clang echoed through the darkness. “Let me make this clear … I’m not going to be anyone’s whore.” I stared at each of them in turn with a burning glare. “Not his. And certainly not yours. I need help, but I don’t need it bad enough to take shit from any you.”

  “I think you do,” Bjorn said, and I turned to look at him. He’d towered over me in life, a mountain of a man. “You need us. And I want to hear you … beg for help.” He grew a slow smile, and the air turned frosted around us as he let a long breath of white mist.

  I clenched my fist and felt myself swell. Bjorn was an animal, a beast so low as to be worthy only of eating off the ground and rooting through his own feces for nourishment. I knew what he’d done in life, and in my view he was as pathetic as Wolfe.

  “Let me tell you something about begging,” I said as he began to shrink before me. It wasn’t something he did voluntarily; but this was my mind, and I controlled it. I grew to twice his size and stared down at him. He was barely up to my waist at this point. I reached out and grabbed him around the neck with one hand, hauling him off his feet and into the air. I stared into his wide eyes. “If anyone’s going to beg in here, it will be you—and it will be for mercy.”

  I squeezed him and his eyes bulged. I could feel his pain but I blanketed him with quiet. His soul screamed with agony, but no one could hear him save for me. I kept a lid on it. It swelled, like a pressure cooker reaching its limits, a faint shrieking, barely audible. Finally, I let it loose and the air was rent with a horrific cry, an anguished squeal that was worse than anything I could ever recall hearing.

  I flung him back into his cell and the door slammed behind him as I returned to my normal size. I looked to Gavrikov, who stood watching me, impassive. “And you?”

  Aleksandr Gavrikov was a difficult man to read at any time. He took a step back, his face falling into shadow that pooled around his mouth and eye sockets, making his expression impossible to gauge. “You are foolish to challenge Sovereign. I will not help you. Not today. Not ever. You are a far cry from the matryoshka I knew so long ago—”

  My head whipped around as I flung Gavrikov back into his cell and slammed the door behind him. “And you, Bastian? Are you going to ignore the threat to our kind?”

  Bastian stared at me with hard eyes. Duty was everything to him. I knew that. “I don’t think I can help you,” he said after a long pause.

  I felt a swelling of anger like I was going to explode, and just as I started to reach out a hand for him he shook his head. “Let me save you the trouble.” He walked back to his box and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. I raised a hand and locked it with a slashing gesture, purely out of spite.

  I turned back to Wolfe, the last of the metas, uncaged. But he was caged, still standing in his box, his shadow staring back at me through the pooling darkness.
“What are you going to do, Wolfe? Just sit in the cage until I die, staring at the walls and reliving all your happy memories?” I stepped toward him and still could not see him in the dark.

  “Yes,” Wolfe said.

  “You’re just going to sit there?” I asked, incredulous. “Going to sit back and let the guy who pounded the shit out of you in the Forest of Dean—just let him walk away. Just let him kill … every … meta … on the planet? That’s what you’re gonna do?”

  Wolfe’s voice was quiet, and all the usual malicious joy was gone from it. “That is all the Wolfe will do … until the end comes. Until the Little Doll gets broken or killed by Sovereign. Then it will all be over.”

  “You’re a coward,” I said with quiet fury.

  I could feel him blink, could feel the hostility radiate off of him. His shadow only stirred, but I knew he was tense, ready to spring at me. It was futile, of course. I could hurt him here; he couldn’t hurt me. I was in control now.

  And he knew it.

  His shadow relaxed. “Sovereign will come for the Little Doll eventually, and she is too foolish to heed the Wolfe’s advice and run. So if she doesn’t play nice with Sovereign, she’ll get locked away or he’ll wait for another Little Doll to show up. One that will play with him. Maybe even your own Little Doll.” A chill ran through me. “If the Little Doll ever has one of her own.”

  “I will … kill him,” I said, staring into the abyss of Wolfe’s cage. “I will.”

  A paw extended out far enough to take hold of the door to Wolfe’s prison, and it began to shut. “If the Little Doll really believes that … then why is she here?”

  He shut the door and I locked it out of habit. The sound echoed, even as I turned back to Zack, who waited behind me.

  His face was pale, downcast—and said everything I already knew about my chances of success without the help of my prisoners.