We pulled into a parking space and when the car stopped, I got out. The smell of oil and metal was heavy, along with the pervasive feeling that this place had been here for a long time, decades at least. Janus gave me a reassuring smile and started toward a heavy steel door at the far side of the lot. I followed, my quiet footsteps lost in the sound of his shoes clicking against the pavement. He thumbed a button on his key fob and I heard a lock click behind the painted steel door, which he held it open for me, like a gentleman.
I stepped inside a short hallway, and there was a security guard behind a plastic window to my right. I stared at him and he continued to read the paper his face was buried behind. “Sir,” he said with a thick British accent as Janus went by, not looking up from the newspaper.
“Shane,” Janus said in acknowledgment, looking at the man. “How is the family?”
“All well, sir,” Shane said, looking up and giving Janus a smile with his nod. “Thank you.” His accent was so thick it took my brain a moment to realize what he’d said.
“This way, my dear,” Janus said, holding out his arm to indicate heavy elevator doors at the end of the passage. When we arrived, the elevator dinged as though it had been summoned just for us. When the doors opened, there was a thin black woman waiting inside. I knew who she was before she said anything, from a memory I had seen. Even if I hadn’t already been familiar with her, I would have realized she was graceful just by the way she was standing. She wore a tan skirt, white blouse and a jacket that matched the skirt. Her necklace was a series of beads with a claw hanging down at the center of it, and her smile could only be described as catlike. It was directed at me, and I tried to decide if she was attempting to be disconcerting.
“Bastet,” I said, stepping onto the elevator before she could acknowledge me. Her knowing smile evaporated, but I could feel one of my own straining to break loose on seeing this presumably imperturbable woman caught off balance within three seconds of our first meeting. “How goes it?”
“Sienna Nealon,” she said, recovering quickly. “Of course you would know me because others in your service have known me.”
“If by ‘in my service,’ you mean rattling around in my head,” I said with a sharp smile, “then yes, that’s right.”
“Bast,” Janus said, stepping onto the elevator. He wore a smile of his own, but it was pure, deep amusement that wrinkled his brow. “You seem to have been taken a bit off your guard.”
Bast gave a smile, but it was shallow and insincere. “I’m used to knowing strangers but not being known.”
“Kind of a funny attitude for a goddess to have,” I said. “Weren’t you the object of worship once upon a time?”
Her nostrils flared in subtle irritation. “That was long ago. I prefer to work behind the scenes nowadays.”
“Sure,” I said with a nod. “It’s probably something you just get over after a while, being worshipped by thousands of people. It’s all, ‘We love you,’ ‘We adore you,’ ‘You’re beautiful’—” I pretended to look her up and down. “Well, you know, at least, you probably were once upon a time. After a couple thousand years, it’s understandable—”
“You really are quite adept at getting under a person’s skin, aren’t you?” Bastet said, looking at me sideways.
“I believe you’re a fan of doing the same,” I said coolly.
“So, how do you know me?” she asked, arms folded. “From Bjorn?” Her smile grew nasty. “Or that passing introduction I had to your boyfriend before—”
“Bast,” Janus said quietly, “Sienna is our guest here. It would be nice if you were to treat her as such.”
Bast seemed to consider this a moment, never taking her eyes off of me. “She has claws, Janus.”
“And you don’t?” he asked with more good humor than I would have had if it had been me with a potential recruit I was trying to impress.
She gave a catlike smile. “My claws are reserved for when I really need them.”
I smiled back at her. “So, they put a scratching post in your office, huh?” Her smile faded. “Litter box?”
“She’s not funny,” Bast said. “I thought she would be funnier.”
“I save my best quips for when I’m punching someone in the face.”
The elevator dinged and opened on an office floor, rows of cubicles with workers manning them, quietly tapping away at keyboards or having quiet conversations. The whole place was unremarkable, just like the fourth floor of the Directorate, really, with offices around the perimeter behind glass, sunlight shining in from behind. As the elevator doors opened, no one from the cubicles seemed to take any notice of us.
A face appeared at the edge of the elevator door, sliding around. Curled blond hair followed it, falling around the thin shoulders of a small-framed girl I knew all too well. Her hair shone in the sunlight that flooded the room, and she wore a sweet, mischievous smile that she shot at Janus. “Hey, sweetie,” she said to him, making my stomach turn. She looked to Bast, and her smile dimmed. “Bast,” she said, then turned her head to look at me, and her face went vaguely malicious. “Sienn—”
I took pride in the fact that she didn’t see my punch coming, that it shot out in a flash, that it crumpled her nose as if I had smashed a paper cup filled with liquid. I was even prouder and oddly emotionally gratified when blood squirted out and she fell back onto her flat ass, stunned, like she was a kid on a playground who had just been knocked down unexpectedly and was about to let out one hell of a cry. Her face was crumpled in pain, and it brought a malicious smile of my own to the fore. “Kat.” I shot a look at Bast. “Declawed.”
Bast shrugged indifferently. “Still not funny.”
Chapter 10
“Are you quite able to control yourself?” Janus asked, standing in his office with me in one chair and Kat in the other. It was a smallish room, about ten feet by ten feet, with glass windows surrounding us and giving us a view into the offices next door. It reminded me a little of a newspaper office in an old movie. The blinds were open, affording us a view of the bullpen of cubicles outside, which had been even quieter as Janus had helped Kat into the office, his disappointed gaze bidding me to follow.
“I controlled myself just fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I saw her, I punched her in the face, and I kept myself from beating her to death afterward.” I shrugged. “I could have done a lot worse.”
Janus let out a loud sigh that I was fairly certain wasn’t exaggerated at all. “You could have restrained yourself entirely.”
Kat was sitting next to me, looking resentful as she held a tissue against her face. “Sweetie, she broke my nose.”
“Call him that around me again and your jaw is next.” I smiled bitterly and Kat’s visage turned horrified, then looked to Janus as if expecting him to referee our tête-à-tête.
“Is this really necessary?” Janus asked.
I started to answer. “She betrayed—”
“Your organization,” Janus interrupted. “An organization which betrayed you less than half an hour after you found out she had done so. Was it really so terrible, what she did to them—to them, not you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, cracking my knuckles, “why don’t you have her lean a little closer and we’ll see how I feel about it?”
Janus made a noise of despair and waved for Kat to leave, which she did, a sullen look on her cheerleader face. “Is this how it is going to be?”
“You work with monsters,” I said, “a little face-punching shouldn’t be that hard to cope with.”
“I expect it from monsters,” Janus said. “Not from you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I do, actually.” He calmly came around his desk and sat down, easing into the brown, leather padded chair. It squeaked as his frame hit it. “I can sense your emotion, you know, on a minute-by-minute basis—”
“Which didn’t seem to help you stop me from obliterating your girlfriend’s nose.”
“
Because it was too fast,” he said with a shrug. “You spun from enjoying a subtle needling of Bastet to rather extreme violence at the sight of Klementina within a second, second and a half perhaps.” He watched me as he raised a leg and rested it on the edge of his desk, leaning back in his chair to match my uncaring posture. “She betrayed the Directorate. Are you truly that upset about it?”
I stared back at him with some sullen of my own. “She betrayed me,” I said, but I felt a dash of unease. In the moment, I had felt like she’d betrayed me, but some things that happened after that pissed me off even worse. The thought of her touching Janus, calling him “Sweetie” made me ill. As I watched him, I knew he was sifting my emotions at the same time I was. A face popped into my head as I saw her in my mind’s eye on the night of the Directorate explosion, of how she touched Janus and my vision turned red—
“Oh,” I said quietly.
“Oh, indeed,” he replied with a quiet all his own. “It would appear that you are truly not that upset with Klementina on the basis of her betrayal of the Directorate.”
“It annoys me,” I said. “That’s plenty enough for me to punch her in the face.”
“Perhaps,” Janus replied. “But I think we both know that is not why you did it. Feeling … angry and avenging for another’s sake are somewhat noble emotions—”
“Don’t get too far up on that high horse,” I said, standing abruptly and causing my wooden chair to squeal as I pushed the legs against the floor. “You’re not Dr. Zollers and I don’t need a therapist, anyhow.”
He watched me from where he sat at his desk, judging carefully. “Perhaps not. But I think … a friend … might not go amiss right now.”
I laughed. “Let’s keep it professional, Janus. I know who my friends are.”
“Do you?” There was genuine curiosity in his voice, as though he were studying something particularly peculiar.
“It’s easy enough to keep track of,” I said, stepping behind my chair, as if interposing it between the two of us was enough to protect me from him, from anything he said. “There are so few left. Enemies, on the other hand, those I seem to have plenty of.”
“Probably not as many as you think,” Janus said, pushing back and standing up himself. “But then again, how would you know?”
“If it’s less than I think,” I said, watching him, “it’s only because they’re dying at a vastly accelerated rate, so quickly I can’t keep track of all of them kicking off.”
He shrugged. “If that’s the way you feel—”
“It is.”
“All right, then,” he said, wary again. “I do ask you to try and refrain from making more enemies while you are here. I don’t think Klementina bears you any ill will—”
“Even after I punched her in the face?” I asked, amused. “Are you sure you can read emotions?”
“But I do ask that you try and keep yourself from doing any more damage to your image,” he said with another sigh. “Is it not enough that you already have to combat the negative reputation that being a succubus gives you in the meta-human world? Need you add more difficulty on top of that?”
I reached for the door, realizing that if I waited, I would be continuing to let him dictate to me where I went and when, just as I had been since I got here. I opened it, then wheeled around. “Well, you know, when you’re surrounded by enemies—or monsters, if you prefer,” he gave a slight roll of his eyes as his expression sank, “it’s probably not a bad thing if they end up hating and fearing you.”
“Yes, well,” Janus said as I closed the door behind me, “you seem very adept at finding out, no matter where you go.”
Kat was waiting just outside the glass door, and looked at me warily over the red-stained tissue she held over her nose. “That hurt, you know.”
“I know.”
“Did he talk you through it?” she asked, eyeing me as she dabbed at the blood on her upper lip. “Are you over it now?”
“He walked me through it,” I said coolly. “Turns out, when I punched you before, it wasn’t because I was upset about you betraying the Directorate, and by extension, me. It was because I was super pissed that you betrayed Scott by sleeping with Janus.” I gave her a broad, faux smile, and she gave me an uneasy one of her own. Lulled. Perfect.
I punched her in the nose again, and once more, she didn’t see it coming. This punch wasn’t as hard, but it didn’t have to be since her nose was already broken. She let out a pained gasp, landed flat on her ass once more, her eyes already shut and welling with tears. “That one was for me,” I said, strolling back toward the elevator. “The good news is, I think we can call it done; I’ll let you off the hook for betraying the Directorate seeing how things turned out later.”
“Thank you,” I heard her mumble before she slumped to the ground, holding the already-stained tissue to her nose and letting out a pitiful sob as I walked away.
Chapter 11
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I made it back to the elevator. It seemed like the direction to head, since I didn’t really feel a compelling need to walk around the bullpen to tour the Omega operation. The sound of paper being shuffled produced a feeling of boredom in me, and as the sun made its way across the floors from the windows, I realized that if I were a cat—like Bast, maybe—I would probably curl up in one of the shafts of sunlight and nap the day away. Something about the knowledge that it would be months yet before I got my shot at Winter was producing a complete lack of urgency or desire in me to do much of anything.
Also, I was genuinely tired. More tired than I could recall being at noon on a weekday, ever. Especially since I’d slept for something like fifteen hours. Being a meta usually meant I was over-the-top filled with energy. The two punches I had just delivered to Kat notwithstanding, right now I felt like a kitten could win a wrestling match with me. Before I had a chance to ponder that energy drain, there was a stir behind me. I turned and heard the whispers from the cube-dwellers. I’d heard them before, just after I punched Kat, but this was different, something else, a reckless energy running through the room. I stopped to listen, but the urgent whispers were buried under the ambient noise to a degree that made it impossible for me to tell what was being said, just that it was important.
I stretched to my tiptoes to look back at Janus’s office. He was there, the door pulled to, with Bast inside with him. I was surprised it wasn’t Kat, since I had just given her another drubbing in full sight of him, but she was nowhere to be seen, presumably still on the floor in a heap, and he was totally focused on whatever Bast was telling him. He glanced away from her to look across the room and caught me watching. He didn’t offer a gesture to the effect, but I knew he was bidding me to stay where I was. Something was happening.
I felt anchored to the spot, and I wondered if it was his doing. The two of them finished their conversation and then he was out the door with so much urgency that I feared he would break the glass. He cut a path through the middle of the cubicles, as dour and serious as I had seen him. “Come with me,” he said when he reached me but didn’t stop, heading instead for the elevator that I had been going for only a minute earlier.
“Why?” I asked as I fell in behind him. “Was two punches too much?”
“One punch was too much,” he said as the elevator dinged and we stepped inside. “Two was excessive.”
“Ooh,” I said, not entirely feigning a frightened reaction but burying it under my bravado. “Is three going to be the end of me?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Doubtful. Even if I were personally upset by your behavior, it is hardly my decision to cut you loose.” He stared at me for a moment. “Not literally but from this operation.”
“Why not? Seems like you’ve done more to bring me here than anyone else has been able to.”
“True enough,” he said tensely as the elevator made its way up—to my surprise. “But now that you are here, I doubt they would blink if you were to slit Klementina’s throat in the middle of t
he office during lunch hour, in full view of everyone.” He turned to glare at me. “I don’t think this needs to be said, but I would take a very dim view of such an activity, and outside my capacity as your contact with Omega, I can assure you that you would regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Did you just threaten me?” I looked at him with more than a little amusement. “If I’m as important as you people seem to think I am, couldn’t I just negotiate with your boss and have him throw in Kat’s death as a sweetener to the deal I’ve already worked out with you?”
“Undoubtedly,” Janus said, and his voice was hard as iron. “And if that is the type of person you truly are, a murderer, then please, make that request and do it swiftly.” He averted his eyes from me, turning them toward the elevator bank. “Let me know who I’m dealing with. I would prefer to see you for what you are from the outset.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people, Janus,” I said, staring him down even as he didn’t look at me. “I was merciless about it, wiping M-Squad off the map. When we talked on the night you destroyed the Directorate, you seemed so sure I wouldn’t kill any of you. You even explained away how I killed Wolfe and Gavrikov. You justified them for me.”
“They were eminently reasonable killings.” He stood facing the elevator panel, as though it was something fascinating he could read, like a literary classic.
“Then please,” I said, and I realized I was actually pleading, “explain away how I killed Glen Parks.” Janus shot me a sidelong glance filled with a little alarm in his blue eyes. “I shot him in the face, you know. Or Clary? I drowned him after pinning him under a ton of machinery in a swimming pool, did you know that?” I saw the subtle nod. “Eve and Bastian, well, I would have shot them both to death, but it got a little dicey and I ended up draining them both dry.” I held a bare hand up in front of my face as I spoke just above a whisper. “I think with the last two, I finally got a taste for it. My power, I mean. You know, like you talked about with the others. I felt it, and it felt good.” He turned to face me, but he was calm, unconcerned save for just a hint of unease in his eyes. “I would have done the same to Erich Winter, and I came to you so you could help me find him so I could kill him. So let me ask you: what’s the justification for what I’ve done? Hm? How do you explain these away, Janus? How do you presume to tell me I’m not a monster now? I have left a trail of bodies behind me.” I waved around, as though indicating the direction I’d come from. “How do you spin that as reasonable? How do you think of those as anything but the acts of a monster?”
Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven Page 7
