“Have you tried an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?”
He pretended to give that serious thought. “You know, I did once, but then I found out nicking wallets and jewelry on the tube is a more lucrative business than fetching coffee for eight hours a day.” He stared at me flatly. “I do have to ask you, though … I don’t run into our kind all that often. Are you with them?”
“Them who? Omega?”
He looked at me with open eyes and a smile like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Well, yeah. Who else would I be talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, I’m not with Omega.”
“Eh, I figured an American girl like you, far from home, you must be with them,” he said with a loose shrug. “Not like you run into a lot of independents ’round these parts—especially lately.”
“What about Alpha?” I asked. “Aren’t they a presence around here?”
“Alpha?” He asked, confused. “Oh, right, them. Made a big noise a few years back, tried to muscle in on Omega. I think they’re mostly in southern Europe. Can’t say I’ve heard much about them, but then, all’s I hear are rumblings.”
“From whom?” There was a slight breeze in the tunnel we stood in as I watched him.
“I tend to run with a crowd that’s in the know, if you catch my meaning, and especially about Omega—with their business activities and proclivities and whatnot.”
I heard a train in the distance and it blotted out everything else I heard. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The Irishman blushed. “I’d uh … I’d prefer not to discuss it in public. Sensitive topic and whatnot.” He looked around, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “You just never know who’s listening, after all.”
I resisted the temptation to punch him in the face until he spilled what I wanted to know like a broken piñata let loose candy. “I need to know about Omega. Where can we go that you can talk about it?”
He raised an eyebrow, and I caught a hint of something perplexed on his face, though it was hard to tell under the mustache. “I … um … you’re not propositioning me, are you? This is genuine request for information?”
“I’m a succubus,” I said quietly. “You don’t want me to proposition you.”
“Right you are,” he said with a nod, realization spreading slowly over his features. “Well, uh … look, I’ll tell you what I know, but … um … it could take a bit, depending on how much detail you’d care to get into, and whatnot—”
“I need a place to stay,” I said, causing him to take a step back.
“I thought you said you weren’t propositioning me,” he said.
“I’m not.” I ignored the looks that the crowd of passersby was giving us; his voice had risen on the last bit. “I’m just putting that out there because I’m going to need to ask eventually and I figured I’d get it out all at once. Someplace cheap, because I don’t have a ton of cash and I can’t use my ATM or credit cards right now.”
“I look the sort to know how to skirt by on the cheap, do I?” He sounded mildly offended.
“Yes,” I said flatly. “Did you not know that?”
“I … well, I never,” he said, his voice high. “Like I’m some sort of petty thief or something.”
“You are,” I reminded him.
“Oh, right,” he said, and the mischievous smile was back, the act of being offended evaporated in a second. “Yeah, I know some cheap places ’cross the river. Some flats that might be … questionable. Not really safe, as it were, not to a normal person, anyhow …”
“I’m not normal.”
“That’s what I was getting at, yeah,” he said with a nod. “I just wouldn’t want you to be surprised when someone comes at you with a knife.”
I watched him with jaded eyes. “I’m never surprised anymore when someone comes at me with a knife.”
He blew air out through his lips and made a frightened and contrite face. “Oh, my. You are a feisty one, aren’t you?” He extended a hand then yanked it back away. “Sorry. Forgot for a second what you were. Name’s Breandan. Breandan Duffy.”
I extended my hand then took it back in a smooth motion that went right to my hair, like I’d seen Zack do once when he was trying to be funny. I did it with a smile on my face until I got to my hair and found it a tangled mess that caught my fingers. I looked up and knew that whatever expression I was wearing at that point wasn’t conveying the coolness I had shot for. “Sienna,” I said at last. “Sienna Nealon.”
“’Tis nice to meet you, Sienna Nealon,” Breandan said with a gesture back toward the way I’d come. “We’ll be needing to take a train this way. Would you care to follow me?”
“Sure.” I nodded. “Lay on, McDuff-y.”
He smiled and even laughed just a little bit. “Clever, but I’m Irish, not Scottish.” We crossed the stream of people heading in the opposite direction and joined the queue heading back down to the underground platforms. “I have to ask you, though—something’s been bothering me. How’d you do it?” His face was all sincerity, with just the slightest tinge of nervousness as we got on the down escalator. The de-escalator, they should call it.
“Do what?” My hand rested on the black plasti-rubber grip that moved down along with the escalator. De-escalator. That thing.
He looked around as though he expected someone to be eavesdropping, but there was no one close to us save for a couple making out two steps above us. He watched them for a few seconds before shaking his head in disgust. “Please, save it.” He looked back at me. “You know. You made luck betray me.”
“I did huh-what?” I made my best confused face. It didn’t take much, since what he said wasn’t making any sense.
“My ability,” he said in a hushed voice. “You know, where I can spin the wheels of luck, keep her on my side.”
“I didn’t know that was your ability,” I said. “How’s it work?”
He looked embarrassed. “Well, I just sorta … use it … and people don’t pay attention or notice when I nick things from their pocket, for instance. People all look a different direction at the moment when I’m perpetrating a crime. That sort of thing. You’re the first one who’s ever caught me.” He shook his head, lightly amused. “I was a little worried, you know, that my luck had run out. But it turns out you’re like me, so you musta just broke through it somehow. Thought maybe it was something your kind could do.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just have a malfunction?” I asked. “Maybe you got nervous and couldn’t pull it off without—”
“Hey hey hey!” he said, mildly outraged. “What are you trying to say? That I had some sort of performance anxiety?”
“They make a pill for that, I’ve heard.”
He frowned. “I was not nervous. It was just another day, another pocket, another bag to lift from. No big deal, nothing to get flummoxed over, and even if I were—which I wasn’t,” he said emphatically, “that has no bearing on my abilities. I can twist luck for myself however I want and twist it the opposite way for others.” We had reached the platform and waited with a crowd of people. “Here, watch this.”
He pointed his finger nonchalantly toward a man who stood a few paces away, a cup of hot coffee steaming in his hand. As if on cue, a woman walked by in high heels, each step clapping smartly against the floor of the platform. As she passed him there was a crack like a gunshot and her heel broke, sending her ankle sideways. She cried out and fell, her long blond hair swaying as she did. The man with the coffee dropped it and it spilled all down his front as he reached out and caught the woman, bracing himself to keep from being knocked over by the impact.
I looked back at Breandan and he frowned. “That was supposed to be good luck. Well, okay, it works a bit oddly for others sometimes, but not for me.”
I watched as the woman pulled herself up off him, still leaning against him and apologizing profusely. Their eyes met as she pushed her hair out of her eyes and they both stopped
speaking.
“Looks like you just set in motion the plot to a romantic comedy,” I said, not quite scowling but unmistakably irritated for no good reason. “What are you, a Cupid-type?”
“Well, it normally doesn’t work quite like that,” Breandan said with a frown of his own. He studied the woman whose heel he had contributed to breaking, and his eyes lingered just a little too long on her lengthy legs, so I snapped my fingers in front of his face and he broke off and turned back to me. “Shoulda kept that bit of luck for myself, honestly. Anyway, normally it’d do something like … someone would drop a wallet as they went by, or if I hit ’em with it as they’re buying a lottery ticket, they’d win the little prize, you know? Actually, I do that for myself sometimes,” he said without an ounce of contrition. He looked back at the blond woman, who was gently running her hand across the man’s wet shirt in a way that suggested that he was indeed going to get lucky, and frowned again. “Bugger.” He glanced back at me. “Anyway, no, I’m not a Cupid, and I doubt that’s love so much as lust.” He lowered his voice to an almost unhearable level. “I’m a … leprechaun.”
I looked up at him; he was almost six feet tall. “You’re not as short as I would have pictured you.” I gave him the once-over. “Also, you should wear more green.”
“If you make a Lucky Charms joke, I’m leaving you right here on the platform.” He laughed, and I stared at him while he did it. Not coldly, just … uncertain. The voices in my head were quiet, surprisingly, as I watched Breandan. The train came through with a screeching of the tracks, and I waited there, eyes flitting between it and him. He was someone I’d only met once, in passing, while he was stealing from me. Now I was going to go with him? I was going to trust him? My head buzzed as a riot of conversation suddenly swept through it, six voices in argument.
One I heard louder than the others, though, and for once it was Aleksandr Gavrikov, quiet, reserved, and yet at the forefront: Why not? It’s not like you have anything to lose other than your life.
“When you put it that way …” I said, out loud.
Breandan cocked his head at me, eyes squinted. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You coming along?” he asked, waiting for my reply.
“Yeah,” I said, and we stepped onto the train. I watched it pull out of the station, and wondered where it would take me. After a moment’s thought, I realized that at this stage in my life, did it really matter where it went? It’s not like I knew where I was going.
Chapter 18
When we got off the train and back above ground, it took me a few minutes to realize I was not in the best of neighborhoods. The brick on the buildings around us was crumbling from disrepair, and the streets didn’t look like they were in particularly good condition, either. Cars were banged up, older models, and seemed to match the general state of the neighborhood. Tall apartment buildings were peppered around us, and I wondered what sort of digs I had gotten myself into by asking Breandan for help.
“This way,” he said casually as he opened the door for me into a multi-story apartment block. It was a boxy looking building, with something on the order of a courtyard in the middle of it. “We can talk for a few and I’ll see what I can find in terms of empty apartments here.”
“Here?” I asked, looking around the faded walls.
“Don’t care for the area?” he asked with wry humor. “I thought you were fine with whatever you could get.”
“It’ll do,” I said, feeling the tiredness creep in again. It wasn’t even four in the afternoon, and I’d slept half the day away. But I was already ready for bed, though—if I could find one.
We rode up in a small elevator that reeked of body odor. Breandan gave me an apologetic look. “It’s cheap, though.”
“What?”
“The place is cheap,” he said, gesturing to the inside of the box. “It smells, it’s tiny, cramped rooms, but it’s cheap. You know, if you need to scrape by on the margins, unnoticed for a bit.”
I shrugged. “I should probably just go home. I don’t think there’s much reason to stay here. Maybe wait a few days until the heat is off, buy a ticket out of Gatwick or Heathrow, and clear the hell out.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said. “One place is as good as another, so long as it’s temporary.”
“It’s all temporary,” I replied as the doors opened and we stepped out into a long, narrow, windowless hallway. Besides, it’s not like it could ever be worse than the box.
We went about twenty doors down and he opened a lock on an old, dark brown door that looked as if it had stood the test of time. For centuries. I tried not to sneer as he opened it and led me into his humble abode. It took me about three seconds to realize that when he’d said, “scraping by on the margins,” he meant it.
There was a couch in front of a TV, but it was brown and beige, and looked like it had been made in the seventies or eighties and had never been reupholstered. The TV was one of the older, standard-def models, and it sat atop a battered old table. There was something of a kitchenette just behind the main living room but it was small and cramped, and I could see dishes piled high in the sink from where I stood. A door led off into what I presumed was a bedroom, but the floor in front of it was covered in dirty laundry.
I wrinkled my nose at the smell; it was plain no one had been cooking, but something had been smoked in the room, and recently. Breandan shot me an embarrassed look. “Me mates and I have a tendency to light one up every now and again.” I gave him a nod and turned my attention back to the couch. “So … you want to know about Omega first, or do you want to go about the business of finding a flat of your own to let?”
“To let?” I asked, as my head started to spin. I was so weary, it took me a minute to realize that let meant rent. British English was confusing. “Never mind. Honestly, I am so tired right now.”
—should ask about Omega first, Zack said.
—don’t need to worry about Omega. We should head back to the States now, Bastian chipped in.
—none of it matters anyway. I’m dead, why do I care? Eve asked.
—need to go back to Omega, Bjorn said. They’ll help—
—can’t be trusted, Gavrikov said. Janus is the only one—
Kill him, Wolfe whispered.
“I need to go to bed,” I said, clenching my hands tight and keeping them at my side. “How long will it take for you to get me a … flat?”
Breandan looked at me slightly wide-eyed, one wider than the other, his eyebrow at an odd angle. “Uhh, hours, in all likelihood. I have to talk to a friend who won’t even be awake for a bit yet.”
“Night owl?” I asked.
“Drug dealer,” Breandan said. “But tends to have the run of the building. She’ll know which units are vacant, which ones can be moved into on short notice, if you catch my meaning.”
“What a charming crowd you must run with,” I said, not really feeling judgmental but probably sounding like it. “I need to sleep now.” The world was tilting around me, the voices in my head a cacophony of argument.
—trust Omega—
—don’t trust Omega—
—don’t trust anyone—
—who cares—
—kill them all—
There was a throbbing in my temples that blotted out all else. I clenched my eyes shut and stuck my index fingers against the sides of my head and rubbed, hard.
“Uh, you look like you’re about to collapse,” Breandan’s voice cut through all the others.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“You can use my room,” he said. “Uh … it has a lock. I’ll sleep on the couch tonight.”
“A perfect gentleman,” I said with a smile, my eyes still shut. “Thank you kindly.”
“Oh, yeah, no problem.” I opened my eyes and he stood there, watching me uncomfortably, as though I were about to explode all over his floor. Which was a possibility.
I made my way past him and through the open door, kickin
g his laundry as I went. I shut the door and had only a moment’s thought of my own to spare for what he must be thinking about me right then before the chorus in my head grew so loud I couldn’t contain it any longer, and the last thing I saw was the bed rising up to greet me before I fell into blackness.
Chapter 19
“You made a terrible mess.” Janus’s voice rang with extra emphasis, and I knew it was him before the scene came into focus. It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t talking to me, that he was talking to someone else, someone just as reluctant to be sitting in front of him as I would have been were I actually there.
Adelaide was sitting across the desk from the man himself. Janus’s grey hair and impeccable suit were only slightly different than the one I’d seen him in that very morning. It looked older somehow, less modern and fashionable, and I remembered again that Adelaide, for some reason, was living in the 1980s, and that I, for some other reason, far beyond my ability to adequately explain, was along for the ride with her.
“I did what I had to,” Adelaide said, but her manner was surly and snappish. “I couldn’t very well let this Aeolus go wandering about when I’d been handed a kill order, could I?”
“That’s not correct,” Janus said. “But let us leave that aside for a moment. You splattered the man’s brains all over the compartment of a passenger train, in full view of countless people. We are not talking about some minor, trifling problem. You have exposed yourself to considerable trouble. They will make posters with your face on them—”
“They will have posters with my mohawk on them, you mean,” she said, her legs crossed and her black leather jeans squeaking when she moved. “Lucky for us I can change up my look with ease.”
“That is not the point,” Janus said. “The point is that you made a mess, and you failed to clean it up. There were other ways to go about it, other ways to limit the damage, and you failed to employ even one of them.” Janus turned and stood with his back to her, facing the window that afforded him a view of London. “What we have to ask is whether at this point you will be a good operative for Omega or not. And it is an open concern at the moment.”
Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven Page 12
