I squinted at the menu. “Persephones can grow plants?”
“Oh, yes,” Janus said, “quite well. A Persephone can cultivate a field of thriving plants in the middle of a snowstorm.” He frowned and turned to me. “Have you not seen Klementina do that before?”
“You mean Kat,” I said, almost grinding my teeth. “I’ve seen plants respond to her touch, but I didn’t know she was growing them.”
“Indeed,” he said. “A Persephone has a bond with life, influences it with the touch, can augment it, make it grow, guide it in the directions she so desires. I suppose if the Kat … personality, as it were,” he said, almost sheepishly, “did not have much experience with the power, it would probably be somewhat limited. A Persephone with full command of her abilities,” he clucked his tongue and shook his head slowly, “well, it is different from what you’ve seen, I suppose.”
“Marvelous,” I said, uncaring. “Are you going to eat?”
“Ah, yes,” Janus said, “just one minute more.” We waited, and I looked at him until the door opened to his right and a girl a little taller than myself stepped out. She looked just a hint younger too, dressed in black shirt and pants, with an apron tied across her waist. She wore a broad, feigned smile as she stepped out to greet us.
Her hands were neatly clasped in front of her. “Good morning,” she said with an accent. “Can I help you?”
“We were considering breakfast, my dear,” Janus said with a condescending sort of sweetness.
“We have the best Greek breakfast in town,” she said, her accent only faintly noticeable; she showed no sign of knowing Janus, and I wondered what his game was.
“Of that I have little doubt,” Janus said, pouring it on thick with his own brand of sweetness. It reminded me of seeing an old man flirt with a waitress. I thought about Kat and Janus and realized that I might in fact be witnessing just that. I started to feel nauseous again and wondered if I was about to be involved in a thousand-year-old man making an effort at picking up a teenager.
“Why don’t we go inside and take a seat?” he said to me, jarring me out of my reverie. Personally, at that moment I wanted to be about a thousand miles away or, barring that, at least in a different restaurant with the man, preferably someplace with guys as waiters. That might be more palatable.
“Come right in,” the girl said and held the door open for us. Janus made a great show of stepping inside, gesturing for me to follow. I passed the waitress with a little reluctance; part of me wanted to tell her to get out while she could. “My name is Athena,” she said, and that part came out sharply accented, “and I’ll be your server.”
“Excellent,” Janus said as she led us to the table. “Do you know where your name comes from, Athena?” I realized somewhat belatedly that Athena was in fact, Greek, and working at a Greek restaurant. Coincidence? Doubtful.
“I was named after the Greek goddess,” Athena said, a little off balance, “of wisdom, inspiration, law, justice, strength—”
“Let us call her what she truly was,” Janus said somewhat broadly, “a woman who encompassed the ability to speak to the betterangels of our nature, to borrow a fitting phrase.”
Athena cocked her head at him. “Ah … all right. What can I get you to drink?” she stepped aside at the table she had led us to while Janus and I took our seats. We were near the front window, and behind us was a long counter. To either side of us were unoccupied tables set up with seats for twos and fours but no larger groups. They were all unoccupied, and I wondered what time of day it actually was. I was guessing I had missed traditional breakfast hours and we were about to shift to lunchtime.
“I will take a glass of wine, whatever the house white is,” Janus said with a wave. He glanced at me. “My friend will take water.”
I blinked at him in confusion. “I will?”
“It might be best for your stomach,” he said. “And you, Athena?” he asked, turning his head to look at her. “What would you like?”
Athena blinked at him in confusion. “I … uh …” She seemed to strain the very boundaries of her English, looking for what to say. “I’ll get you your drinks—”
“Why don’t you sit with us for a few minutes?” Janus asked, and he said it gently. It was strange, but the way he did it compelled even me. I wanted her to sit even though a moment earlier I didn’t care what she did.
“All right,” Athena said hesitantly and pulled up a chair from a nearby table to sit between the two of us. I stared at her, and she stared at me from behind her thick-framed glasses. On a man, they would have been hipster glasses. Hers were older, I guessed, and probably all she could afford.
“Athena,” Janus said, “I want to tell you something. Something you already know, really. You are not a human being.” She blinked back at him and started to speak. “Now, now, let us not play games. You were raised in a cloister, I would guess, around other metas, yes?” He tilted his head to look at her with a piercing gaze, and I saw her burn beneath it like an ant under a magnifying glass. “You need not answer. I can tell that it is so. You ran away, yes? From home? To the big city of London?”
She nodded, hesitant. “I found … passage … a job … from a man in a nearby town, to work in his brother’s restaurant here in London.”
“Ah, so you came from Greece itself,” Janus said with a smile that was cool, a little distant, something beneath the surface. “And your family? They remained in the cloister?”
It was her turn to be cool; her eyes shifted downward. “Yes.”
There was a moment of quiet, and Janus seemed to take stock of the situation before speaking again. When he did, it was lower, wearier, and infused with candor. “You know, don’t you?” She looked up at him, and he looked back. “That something is coming?”
She gave a slow shake of her head. “I heard rumors. Before I left.” Her raven hair hung loose around her shoulders, straight and perfect, in a way that I only wished mine would. “That something was coming. Something bad. Cloisters were disappearing, ones where the village elders had known each other for hundreds or even thousands of years, just going quiet in eastern Asia, Turkey, eastern Europe.”
“Ah,” Janus said, and there was no mirth or light in his expression, only a sad understanding. “Yes, something is coming.”
“Death,” Athena whispered then seemed to catch herself. She looked for a moment as though she wanted to stuff her hands over her mouth, as though she could crowd the thought back into her, as if she’d never spoken.
Janus cocked his head. “It certainly brings death. But what do you know of what is coming? Have you seen—”
Athena began to shake and placed her palms flat on the table. After a minute of silence she removed them, and there were wet spots of moisture in the shape of handprints left on the table where she had rested them. Her eyes came up, and I realized they were a dark brown, the irises shadowed in the low light of the restaurant. “The village elders talk of a darkness that spreads from the lands of old, of enemies coming back from a bygone time.” She leaned forward and whispered. “They talk of whole villages being wiped out, villages of metas strong and powerful being erased from the land.” She looked left and right, as though someone might hear her. “I left so they wouldn’t find me.”
Janus leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs and adopting a thoughtful posture. “Have you heard more than rumors?”
She was quiet then, looking down. “My father was an elder. He traveled to Cappadocia, to a cloister there, one that had been there for thousands of years. The elder there was powerful, had been a local deity in his youth in the days of the Romans.” It took me only a moment to realize that she was speaking of the days of the Roman Empire. “The village was dead.”
Janus stirred, only a little. “Dead?”
Athena nodded, meek as a mouse. “As though he had come upon them himself.”
“He?” I interjected, looking to Janus, who shook his head subtly, as though trying to warn me off.
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“Athena,” Janus said, causing her to look back to him before she could answer me. “What was the state of the village? What did your father say he saw?”
“Bodies,” Athena said quietly. “Bodies everywhere, in their homes, in their places, lying on the floors and in beds, as though he had come for them.”
Janus held out a hand to stay my questions, putting it up as though he could ward me off by a simple wave of his hand. “Athena, dear,” Janus said, “it is not him. It may, perhaps, be someone with powers like his, but I assure you that it is not him destroying villages. Indeed, I can assure you that it is not even the same meta every time—”
“No, it is him,” she said, swallowing, her throat making an unnatural motion. “My father was there for the last time he spread his fingers across the lands, and he said it was exactly the same, the same thing happening, the same darkness.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You can tell me a thousand times I am wrong, but a thousand times I will tell you I am right, that he has returned to cover the land in his darkness again.”
No hand was going to stop me this time. “Who?” I asked, and I said it loudly enough, insistently enough, that she broke out of her focus on him and looked to me, her dark eyes shining. “Who are you talking about?”
She looked at me with a hint of confusion, then let her gaze stray back to Janus, who seemed to shake his head in resignation. With that little permission given, Athena turned back to me. “Death, of course. Him. The one who would destroy the world and claim all the souls for his own.”
My mouth was dry, and the air had gone still in the restaurant. The sun shining in from outside felt like it had been captured behind a cloud, and I was left to stare at her, probably open-mouthed at the words she had used.
“You know,” she said to me, waiting for a reply that I couldn’t give. “Him. Death.
She gave a small shudder, and the name came out in a fearful whisper.
“Hades.”
Chapter 8
“Hades?” I asked Janus after we were done in the Greek restaurant. “She thinks death is coming for us all, the literal one, the guy himself.”
“I assure you he is not,” Janus said stiffly as we walked down the sidewalk, not in the direction of my hotel but the opposite way. He kept himself upright, not deigning to look back, and I was left to follow along.
“Is he still alive?” I asked, trying to match his speedier pace.
“No,” Janus said simply as I came alongside him, our reflections catching my eye as we passed by glass shop fronts. “He is long dead.”
“Was he an incubus?” I watched for his reaction, and he semi-cringed.
“No,” Janus said finally. “He was not.”
“But there’s more to the story than that?”
“There always is,” Janus said, eyeing me with something approaching annoyance. “The important thing is that we have convinced Athena to come in from the cold, to get her under Omega’s protection.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, “I didn’t convince her of anything. I’m still not sure that being under Omega protection is any better than being left to die under the gentle auspices of Century.”
He gave me a wary eye. “You think death is preferable?”
“Death is preferable to a great many fates I can think of,” I said with only a hint of bitterness.
He didn’t speak for a moment, but his pace slowed. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, then placed his wrinkled hands in the pockets of his suit coat as the wind whipped between us. “I suppose I would see that way as well, if I had experienced what you have of late.”
“Yeah, well,” I said feelingly, “you haven’t, so—”
“You think I have not experienced great tragedy in my life?” He gave me an almost amused look, one eyebrow raised. “You think I have not been horribly betrayed before?”
I narrowed my gaze and looked at him. “I doubt you’ve ever had the people you trust most force you to kill the person you love.”
He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “I watched my parents killed before my very eyes by Zeus himself, in a fit of pique. I was ten. You see, Artemis, my mother, dared to resist his charms, his advances,” he took a step closer to me, “and when my father, Apollo, intervened to save her, he too was killed by Zeus’s rage. I watched him, powerless to do anything to stop it, until there was nothing left but ashes when the fire from the electricity subsided. I have lived in the presence of monsters my entire life and tried to never become one myself. Years later, I got to see a human mob kill a god. Of course, they did not know she was a god. She was only six, after all.” His expression grew darker. “Still, they killed her—witchcraft, devilry, something of that sort—before I could intervene. This was after I left Zeus’s court and tried to live among the humans to avoid the games of power and politics. The girl was my daughter, and to see them kill her with a sword before I could cross the hundred feet between us …” The air went out of him. “Well. It was the last regret they ever had, their hasty action, because I was not hasty in my revenge at all. Thorough, but not hasty.
“There are monsters everywhere, and that was my lesson that day. Human, meta-human, it matters little. The entire race is compromised, shot through with weakness of emotion, of the heart. To glorify people in spite of their flaws is the trick I had to learn.” He looked jaded. “Most of the time it works. So, yes, I have seen people I trust, admire and respect butcher those whom I loved, and I have also seen it done by total strangers. Neither one feels much worse than the other.” He turned back down the street, looking, as though he could see a destination in the far distance. “But I suspect you know that. All the rest is merely something that you are clinging to in time of great sorrow.”
I followed his gaze but didn’t see anything in particular he could be looking at. “Some days … lately … I don’t feel like I know anything at all.”
A wan smile spread across Janus’s face as he looked back at me. “I think that also is a uniquely human—both meta and standard—feeling.”
“So Hades is dead?” I asked, staring at Janus.
“He is,” came the reply. “He died before the Roman Empire even fell from the height of its glory. And he was no incubus, as I said.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this story than you’re telling me?”
“Because,” he said, and he sounded weary, “there always is.” He gave me a look. “Do you know why we want you—you, specifically? Why we’ve been after you since day one?”
“Not really,” I said, quiet. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I can’t tell you everything,” he said, and his words were shot through with a deep-seated tiredness that I felt in my bones as well. He gave a smile that reflected it. “So much of what you are as a succubus—and one of only three whom we know of that currently live—is … clouded.” He seemed to give a moment of consideration. “Succubi and incubi have lived on the margins of the meta-human world for ages. As a type of meta, yours is the most feared, most hated. Cloisters do not accept incubi and succubi among their number, fearing—perhaps rightly—that your powers lend themselves toward a casual application. If you’ve ever met one of your own kind who has embraced their power fully, you know why.”
“Fries,” I said with a whisper. “Charlie.”
“Yes,” Janus said with a solemn nod. “To fully use all the ability at your fingertips—literally—in many cases results in a sort of addiction to using said powers. Much like your aunt, the incubus or succubus becomes obsessed with drawing souls, feeding this ever-increasing emptiness within. It is very much like drug addiction, save that people become a disposable commodity, something to be drunk like wine.” He cocked an eyebrow. “And much like wine, it can become required rather than occasional, a constant need, a desperate desire to be fueled in every possible instance.” He cast a look across the street, where a tour group of students lingered next to a bus stop, backpacks on their backs. They didn’t look mu
ch younger than I was. “A succubus on the prowl looks at a city street and sees nothing but targets, souls to be absorbed, a rush to be felt.”
I looked at them, so young, and I didn’t feel that—maybe a hint of it, a desire to walk through the middle of them and brush against them with ungloved hands. But not the desire to wade in, to drag the screams from them as I had with Wolfe or Kappler. “My mother wasn’t like that.”
“Indeed not,” Janus said. “Your mother is probably the most disciplined of all of your kind. She can take a single memory from a person’s mind with the skill of someone opening a filing cabinet, sliding out a single piece of paper and leaving the rest untouched. That takes a great deal of practice and considerably more than just raw ability, I assure you. She is the most powerful of your kind presently walking the planet.” He held up a hand to forestall my response. “Not in terms of raw power. I understand that you have her outmatched in that way, but she has decades of practice that have refined her abilities into something unmatched in the world.”
“She is strong,” I conceded. “I’ve seen her take a person’s memories. I think I leave a little more of a mess when I do it, though I have done it.”
“Ah, yes, I read about that last night,” he said with a subtle nod. “Ariadne, was it?”
I gave him a wary look. “I let her live.”
“I heard,” Janus said. “Turned her loose in the parking lot of a mall with no shoes.”
“I gave her a coat.”
He let out a small sound of amusement. “Well, then, that must absolve you of any responsibility for her well-being. I’m certain it was of great consolation to her when she lost those toes to frostbite.”
My jaw fell open. “She lost toes?”
Janus let out a small laugh. “I kid. But it is nice to know that you still care, at least a little.”
My face straightened. “Your group employed Wolfe. I doubt that it matters to you how much I care.”
Janus gave a slight shrug. “To them, perhaps not. To me, it is all the difference in the world. This is why you are here now, and were not on any of the occasions they previously tried to capture you. I told them, when I took over, that they were going about it all wrong. They are used to dealing with monsters like Wolfe, like … others,” he said carefully. “I told them you are dealing with a girl—woman—who has a heart, who has a soul, but you try to entrap her as if she were an animal or perhaps a beast that needs to be caged.” He made a tsking sound. “They would use you to help save the world of metas from destruction and the world of humans from slavery. A noble cause, I think, which is why I have remained with Omega through … some ups and downs, let us say. As a decent person, I think this would be an aim that you would agree with. Yet they went about it by trying to capture you by force, to make you come with them.” He shook his head. “Foolish, I said. Directed at the wrong audience.” He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets. “I think after dealing with monsters for so long—including some who are very much within our own organization,” his face tightened, “you become accustomed to approaching all situations by immediately leaping to the same conclusions, and theirs usually involve applying force.”
Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven Page 5
