Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  Janus looked wary again. “I don’t have the power to forget things the way a Persephone-type would—”

  “I meant from old age,” I said, twisting the knife and noticing the flash of irritation in Janus’s eyes, “but if you’d like to forget her sooner, I have some expertise in that area—”

  “This is all so cute,” the Primus said in a high voice, his accent unmistakably American. “I may not even need to watch TV tonight. Not like the BBC has anything interesting on it anyway,” he said, an ugly tone undercutting the lightness in his voice. “All the sniping, backbiting, the repartee. It’s like a reality TV show airing right here in my office. You know, minus the reality part of it.”

  “You’re not from England,” I said, tracing a look back to the Primus.

  He gave a slight shrug of the shoulders to go with his grin. “Born and raised in Los Angeles. What can I say? I’m of the new world, not the old.” He waved his hand around the room, indicating all the construction. “That’s why all this stuff, these remnants … they gotta go. This is the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. I’m here to bring Omega into the next age, not keep it cowering in the last one.”

  I looked at him carefully, putting things together. “You’re new.”

  “I’ve been around for a while,” he came back at me.

  “I meant as Primus,” I said. I looked back at Janus and he gave me a subtle nod. Rick, Wolfe’s voice came to me. Son of the last one. “Your name is Rick.”

  Rick brought his hands together and clapped them twice in approval. “Very good. Who told you? Wolfe?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Could have been Bjorn or Gavrikov.”

  “Wow,” Rick said. “You got both of them, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t it in my file?” I shot him a mean-spirited look.

  “Your file’s pretty incomplete, especially regarding our own agents and how they died.” Rick turned his gaze to Kat. “After all, we haven’t really had someone who’s gotten close to you until recently.”

  “What about Mormont?” I asked.

  Rick shrugged. “What about him? He went mercenary, tried to make a big play to bring you in and failed. I read about that op and felt sad for the idiots who backed it.” Rick looked pointedly past my shoulder to where Bast was sitting. “Why would you trust some sad-sack human who’s banking for a big payout to deliver the most powerful succubus of our time? Dumb. Just dumb. Typical of the kind of backwards, non-visionary thinking that used to fill this office.” He looked around, and I realized he was waiting for someone to speak up and defend his father. I felt bristling behind me, but whether it was from Madigan, Janus or Bast, I didn’t know. I just knew it was present and contained. Barely. “We’re working on remedying that, though,” he said with a smug grin.

  “Oh, yes,” I said with some smugness of my own. “Visionary thinking. That’s what you’ve been lacking around here. I’m sure that’ll fix everything.”

  “It’ll help,” Rick said without any trace of humility or worry. “But enough of that. Let’s hear about this village.” He shifted his attention to Janus. “What’s the word?”

  “All dead,” Janus said. “But I suspect you already know that.”

  “I’d heard,” Rick confirmed then shifted in his chair to put his other foot up on the desk. “Did you see how?”

  Janus shook his head. “The bodies appeared unmarked to me, though I didn’t get particularly close.”

  Rick smiled. “Feeling a little squeamish at the sight of the dead, J?”

  Janus didn’t bite at the goad that was tossed his way. “I have seen my fair share, and that of several hundred others. No, I’m afraid that my problem was more oriented to a lack of experience with forensic pathology. We saw no signs of physical violence, but that doesn’t rule out poison, cardiac arrest—”

  “Removal of souls,” Rick said with a pointed smile toward me. “So, you don’t want to speculate? Afraid to bet your ass that you might get it wrong and I’ll be pissed? Fair enough.” He slid a page off the desk and toward him. “Toxicology reports aren’t the fastest thing in the world, but the preliminaries for one of the victims came back pretty quick.” He looked around between all of us. “Anyone wanna guess?”

  “Ooh, ooh,” I said, raising my hand, “I’m guessing they were bored to death, and that it originated from London, probably right here in this office, in your chair.” I looked around and caught Janus’s face fall. “Did I win a prize?”

  “Nice,” Rick said, the smug not even dented. “Nope, you do not win.” He thought for a moment. “Although, technically, I guess, they could have been bored to death.” He threw the paper down. “The point is, it doesn’t look like poison, at least not from the preliminaries. It looks like they just up and died, keeled over while clinging to each other.”

  “Are there actually poison-spewing metas that could do something like this?” I asked as a quiet settled over the office.

  “Not that I know of, no,” Janus said, his hand covering his face, as though he could use it to wipe the expression off. He was distracted, unfocused, lost in his own head.

  “What is it, then?” I asked. “What killed them?”

  “In some of the previous cases, it has been bullets,” Bast said from behind us. “Or obvious meta powers, like a massive fire burning them to death.”

  “But he’s saying there’s no obvious cause of death,” I said, pointing to Rick. “Who could just kill a room full of people like that, and not leave a sign of any sort that they’ve been murdered?”

  “I don’t know,” Rick said casually, and the way he said it made me suck in a deep breath of air, the stale scent of old cigar smoke hanging in it and coloring my taste buds. He dropped his feet off the desk and leaned forward toward me, seeming to savor the very air I wanted to choke on. “No marks, no poisons, no signs of beating or bullets.” He smiled. “It’s almost like someone just touched them,” he said pointedly, with that wicked smile, “and they died.”

  Chapter 15

  “So it was succubus?” I asked. “Or an incubus?”

  Rick shrugged, still wearing a maddening smile. “I don’t know. Could you have done that?”

  “Drain an entire room of metas without having any of them fight back or leave any sign?” I gave a quick look around the room. “I dunno. Want to try it right now?”

  Bast stood suddenly behind me, and I could feel Karthik tense where he stood near the wall. “I think she’s kidding,” Rick said to both of them, with a slight wave of his hand. “Unless you can devour souls from a distance now.”

  “That escapes me at present,” I said. “But there’s that old saying about looks being able to kill? Maybe I’ll work on it.”

  “Perhaps something associated with fear,” Janus said. “They might have died of heart attacks or something of the kind—”

  “So we’re back to theories and conjecture,” Rick said, flattening his hand and laying it along the top of the desk. “I prefer to work with hard facts.” He looked us all over. “Go figure it out, then let me know what you come up with.”

  “How many meta cloisters are there in the United Kingdom?” I asked. “There can’t be that many.”

  “There are not,” Janus said. “There is another in the north of Scotland and two in Ireland.”

  “We don’t have the manpower to stage some kind of bodyguard force around every cloister in the isles,” Rick said. “I want our people protecting our own, here at headquarters. If you want to send out an envoy to convince these cloisters to huddle up with us, that’s fine, but we’re not gonna go running out to northern Scotland for anything other than a burial detail to see what’s up with those people.”

  “What about the non-cloistered metas?” I asked, looking to Janus, who watched me with a flat stare. “Like that Athena we talked to this morning? Why aren’t more metas running like her, if this kind of calamity is falling on the cloisters?”

  “Oh, but they are,” Bast said from behind me.
“We’re finding them as well, in ones and twos.” She let out a cruel smile. “Well, we’re finding pieces of them, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, wait,” I said as I tried to process that thought. “You’re saying that they’re being killed, too?”

  “Quite violently, in fact,” Janus added. “Very much at odds with what we have just seen. Whoever Century has set out to track these spares, they are not doing it nearly as quietly as they have been with the cloisters that have been falling. Those metas have been dying after being torn to pieces or shot to death.” He shuddered, so subtly it was almost unnoticeable. “It is not a pleasant way to go. I think I would prefer to go out quietly, in a church basement.”

  “So, multiple metas, multiple teams,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rick said, and I caught the first hint of annoyance from him. “Like I said, enough speculation here. Go brainstorm if you have to, and bring me back some hard facts and solutions to our problems. Keep in mind our priority is still protecting our own, not people who haven’t signed on with us.”

  “You’re a real wellspring of humanity,” I said.

  His look darkened. “I’m in charge of Omega, not the whole damned world and all its puppies and kitties, too.”

  “You’re not in charge of the kitties?” I said, mockingly. “That’s odd, because you seem like a p—”

  “That’s quite enough,” Janus said quietly. “We need to focus on the problem at hand. There are indeed people who need our help, and we should reach out to them as quickly as possible, to all the additional cloisters in the isles. After that, we can look to gathering up some more of the strays before the tracker teams—or whoever is killing them singly—manage to make it to London.”

  “You have your orders,” Rick said to Janus, forcing a wide smile after spending a good long while leering at me. “The rest of you can get out; I need to talk to Sienna for a minute.”

  “Ooh,” I said, “looks like I have to stay after class. Bet I’m in wicked trouble now.”

  I watched the others file out one by one, Janus the last, holding the door and hesitating before leaving and closing it behind him.

  I turned back to Rick and stared at him over the desk. “Aren’t you worried?”

  Rick gave a slight bob of his shoulder. “About what? I’ll weather this extinction just fine, and so will Omega.”

  I cocked my head at him. “I actually meant about being left alone in your office with a woman who’s probably killed more of your operatives than anyone else on the planet, but thanks for the helpful insight into your megalomaniacal personality. I haven’t heard any rampant ego for the better part of a day, so it’s nice to get in a dose now and again to remind me of what it sounds like.”

  He made a slow sound of, “Pfffffft,” as he blew air out the side of his lips. “No, I’m not worried about being in an office alone with you.” He didn’t deign to look at me. “Do you know why that is?”

  “I hope for your sake it’s because you’re the most uber-powerful meta this side of that Sovereign guy,” I said with only barely concealed amusement.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said, dripping sarcasm and looking at me sideways as he leaned his chair back and I saw him in profile. The guy was such a prick, he didn’t even bother to look at me head-on. “It’s because you’re not stupid. You know where the power rests here. I’m the Primus of Omega, and that makes me the most powerful man on the planet.”

  “What is he, Wolfe?” I whispered in the back of my throat. “Bjorn? Gavrikov?”

  His power was as closely guarded a secret as any I’ve ever seen in Omega, Bjorn said, and I could feel Gavrikov agreeing with him. His father kept him far from our operations, far from London, for almost his entire life.

  I have only met him once, Gavrikov said, and it was when he was still a child. He is young, only a little older than you.

  “ … power rests with me,” Rick said, “because when the day came that my old man died, the Ministers of Omega—some of the most powerful metas in the world—knew who the natural successor was. I’m the Primus because I’m the most powerful man on the planet; I’m not the most powerful man on the planet because I’m the Primus. You see how that works?” He finally looked over at me. “Of course you do. You know how it works because when you were at the Directorate, you were never the one with the power. It was always Winter, and he jerked you around like a dog on a chain.”

  I felt myself bristle in sheer rage. “Wolfe?” I whispered in the back of my throat, my mouth closed. “Do you know what he is?”

  I heard Rick let out a little giggle. “You know what I’m saying is true, don’t you? That it’s always been about power, and you’ve never been in the driver’s seat. It’s always been about who’s yanking your strings, whether it’s through a paycheck, through threats and coercion, fear and intimidation—these are the things that drive people. See, what you have to decide is who’s going to have power over you. Because it’s going to be someone. You’re a pawn, after all, and there’s no practical way for you to exert agency over your own dealings. You tried the Directorate for a little while, saw what they’re all about. But now you’re with the big boys. And as long as you know your place, we’re not going to have a problem. All right?”

  I felt the streak of fury run through me right to my core. “You think you … what? Own me?”

  He laughed, a long, cackling one that pissed me off even more. “I don’t own you. I don’t have to own you. I have power over you. That means you’ll sell yourself out anytime I need you to, just like everyone else—to survive, to get what you want, whatever that might be.”

  “You think so?” I stared at him coldly.

  “If you’re smart,” Rick said, and he pursed his lips in an infuriating smile, “you’ve already figured out who has the power here. If it takes a while to accept it, that’s fine. But you will accept it. Once you do, you’ll find that being a loyal servant of Omega doesn’t go unrewarded. A hell of a lot more rewarded than you were at the Directorate, I can promise you that, anyway. But the converse of that is punishment—”

  “Wolfe,” I whispered again, “what is he?”

  Don’t know, came the rasp finally, but let’s find out. I blinked at the response, trying to figure out what he meant until the follow-up came a moment later.

  Kill him.

  I was out of my seat a second later, already flying over the desk. I don’t know if you could say I was proud that he didn’t have a chance to register surprise, but he didn’t even respond facially before my fist connected with his cheek and sent him flipping out of his chair. I followed right after him, landing on his belly with my knee. I heard all the air rush out of him as I did so, and I didn’t waste a moment of time in punching him twice more. I heard the shattering of his face as I smashed his jaw and broke the bones around his eye.

  “Who has the power now?” I shouted as I slammed his head to the marble floor, cracking the tiles and his skull. I heard the door open behind me and I stood suddenly, grabbing the chair that he’d been sitting on from where it had fallen when I had knocked him out of it. I stood and held it above my head, the rollers above me and the leather back in my hands. It weighed a hundred pounds, easy, and it felt light in my grasp as I let it hang there.

  I saw the others rushing back in now—Bast, Janus, Karthik—he was already going for his gun, but he’d never make it in time—Madigan, and Kat. Madigan was the only one I had to worry about, and she was the last coming into the room. Everything was in slow motion, and I saw Janus reaching out a hand to me, shouting at me to stop, to not do it, and I suspected he’d be toying with my mind any second.

  I brought the chair down with all my meta strength and it dashed Rick’s—I never did catch his last name, did I?—brains out all over his pretty marble floors, a spray of red and grey matter splattering as the frame of the chair shattered from the impact.

  There was a collective gasp around me as I took a step back from wh
at I’d done and surveyed the room. They’d assembled in a little half-circle centered on me and I could tell they were all about a second from action. Karthik was raising his pistol and Madigan’s hands were already up. I had held onto the arms of the chair as a weapon, and I flung them at Eleanor and Karthik, catching each of them in the torso and sending them flying back, impaled. I wanted to feel bad about it, but I wasn’t going to do it now.

  There was movement outside the office; probably security details coming as I could hear the sound of feet on the floors, of people speaking outside in the cubicle farm. Bast was limp, slumped, staring over the desk at me in sharp disbelief. Janus’s eyes were closed, and Kat was openmouthed as she knelt next to Karthik, preparing to heal him with her touch. “You’ve changed, Sienna,” she said into the rushing void that was the office, the desperate quiet.

  “No shit,” I shot back. “In case you haven’t noticed, even without your new necrophiliac habit, you’re pretty different yourself.” I reached down and grabbed the remains of the back of the leather chair and threw it, hard, out the window behind me, shattering it.

  “Where will you go?” Janus asked, watching me as I eased closer to the window. “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, letting my foot rest on the sill of the window. I looked down below into a busy street, and saw traffic passing by on the road. It was a long way down; I was on the fourth floor. “Guess I’ll find Winter myself.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Janus said quietly.

  I laughed. “I just killed your leader.” I gestured to the splattered remains of Rick. “I kinda doubt his meta healing or even Kat’s touch is going to put him back together again.”

  “Probably not,” Bastet said with quiet rage, “since he was human.”

  I looked at Rick’s head; there wasn’t much left. “Excuse me?”