He did, barely showing his head around the frame, and I peppered him with a three-shot burst that would have made Parks proud. It was flawless, impossible save for the fact that I was in close proximity and possessed of a steely calm brought about by hundreds of hours of training. A puffed cloud of red turned the air a subtly different color for a brief second before the body pitched forward. I would have let out a sigh but I had no idea how many more of them there would be.
I heard movement behind the doorframe and I saw a flash of black shadow against the bright of the kitchen lights. There was a burst of gunfire and I felt heavy impacts to the body that was lying atop me. Six bullets hit his tactical vest, thumping his corpse into me, hard, like miniature earthquakes jerking his body and bruising me with each hit. I lost my breath from the impacts, but I could tell from the force of them that none of them had penetrated through to me.
I flung the corpse toward the door, not really aiming so much as trying to buy a moment’s time; if the shooter had any more uninterrupted seconds to take aim, he’d surely be able to hit me in the head, and I was beginning to think I might have more than just myself to be worrying about. The corpse flew forward, reminding me of a time when I’d done something similar to a table in my living room on the day I first left my house. I heard the wet smack of it hitting the doorframe and collapsing as I ripped off two quick three-shot bursts. I rocked my body sideways and rolled to a crouch, waiting just inside the door to see what came my way. I edged closer to the frame on the chance he’d reach a barrel inside. It would only take another moment and I’d be close enough to grab a gun if it came through the door.
Unfortunately, I was still a step away when it happened. I saw the barrel poke in, and I looked up it as it pointed down on a perfect arc toward my head. My meta-enhanced eyes allowed me to see the subtle rifling at the closest end of the barrel, and even though I jerked my weapon up, I knew I wouldn’t make it before a burst of gunfire put my lights out for good. The smell of blood, of bile, of my own recently re-experienced vomit hung in my nose along with the heavy odor of the gunpowder discharge. That sharp, familiar aroma of a hundred days on the range was unmistakable, and more pungent than my recent digestive explosions. I looked down the dark barrel and waited for the flash that would end it, everything—and I felt a moment’s pity for the fact that I had left so damned much undone.
There was a sound of a soft click, then another, as the hand that held the gun pulled the trigger again and again to no effect.
“Well, now,” came an Irish voice from outside the door, “looks like you’re having a spot of bad luck.” The sound of something hard hitting flesh, and then a body hitting the wall was followed by the submachine gun that had been pointed at my face falling to the ground in front of me with a clatter. “You in there?” Breandan’s voice came around the corner.
“Yeah,” I said, my every muscle tense as I leaned against the wall, still clutching the gun to my chest, the stock hard against my shoulder. “You all right?”
“Me?” Breandan’s voice came back. “I’m quite fine. Made it to the floor before they destroyed my kitchen with a flurry of bullets. I’m not really sure I need that tea anymore, though, as I’m now quite awake.” He peeked his head through the door and looked at me. “You know, if you hadn’t distracted them and started tearing them up one by one, I’m quite sure they were planning to murder me.”
I sighed, ragged breaths coming more quickly than I would have liked. “Same here. That last one, the weapon jamming—”
“Bad luck,” Breandan said with a smile. “Doubt I could have pulled that off with all of them, but when it was down to one, it seemed easy enough to change his odds.” He extended a hand toward me. “Do you think there are more outside?”
I looked at the bloody mess on the floor of his bedroom, extending out into the main room as I took his hand and let him help me up. I tore it away from him after a moment and saw the surprised look in his eyes. “Sorry,” I said, “bad touch, remember?” I looked at the bodies piled around me. “You think these are Omega thugs?”
He looked them over. “Omega? Maybe. I’ve heard they have something called ‘sweep teams’ for their dirty work. Why?” He eyed me. “You piss ’em off?”
“Yeah, I took the mickey out of them,” I said, leaning over the nearest dead body, one of the ones who had caught a few bullets to the head. I pulled the mask off of him and looked into a destroyed face. “I ran into an Omega sweep team once; they had tattoos on their chests.”
He shrugged as he nudged at the open collar of one of the bodies. “Don’t see an obvious one on this bloke. You could ask the last one who he’s with.” He pointed to the fellow whose gun had jammed on him when he tried to shoot me. I could see him, lying against the wall just outside the bedroom door, his black tactical gear a stark contrast against the dirty white walls of the flat. “I think I left him in a hurting way, but still lively.”
I walked through the door into the main room to find the door to the outside hall broken open, hanging off the hinges. I glanced back at Breandan, who shrugged. “Common sight in this building, I’m afraid. Neighbors won’t give it a second look.”
I turned back to the man lying unmoving against the wall, his head slumped over. I pulled his mask off and found his eyes closed, face slack. He’d had a pistol on his belt, but I could see Breandan had removed it when he’d knocked the man unconscious, and I pulled the tactical vest from him and slipped it over my own chest. Couldn’t be too careful when people were shooting at you, after all. I slapped him lightly in the face (lightly for me—it still rocked his head back) and his eyes flew open with a shock. “Hi,” I said in a sweet voice tempered by irritation. I was still holding the submachine gun that I’d pulled from the first man I’d killed, and with the tactical vest I’d taken from this one I had several fresh magazines. I kept the weapon handy, unafraid that he’d be able to wrest it away from me before I pulled the trigger on him. “Who are you with?”
His hair was dark and his face was pale, with a set of scars that looked as though someone had taken shards of glass and mashed them into his forehead above his right eye. “Who are you?” he asked me, staring back, awfully unconcerned for a man with a gun in his face.
I smiled and used the barrel of the gun to whip him hard in the scars. I broke the skin and a thin trickle of red made its way down his face as he looked back at me more in anger than shock or fear. “Let’s try this again,” I said calmly. “I ask the questions, you answer the questions. Very simple ground rules for our time together, and if you follow them, I won’t shoot you in the leg and then play around by sticking my finger in the bullet hole.”
There was a subtle hint of fear at that across those inscrutable features. “I can see you’ve been shot before,” I said. “Hurts, doesn’t it? Try to imagine me twisting your nerves, ripping at your wound, causing you so much pain …” I let my voice drip with sincerity. “Now … are you ready to talk?”
He sneered at me, chin jutting defiantly out, face like flint. “I’m not saying a word.”
I looked back to Breandan, who shrugged as though indifferent, and then I sighed. “Okay.” I tossed my gun backward at Breandan, who caught it, then I thrust my palms flat against the man’s cheeks. “Hold still. I wouldn’t want to have to hurt you as I’m ripping the memories out of your head.”
His eyes went wide and he started to struggle, but I ended that with a solid punch to the nose that broke it. He tried to slap at me with a hand, but I broke that too, at the wrist, and he cried out, but I ignored him. There was a building sense of pressure in my body as he began to jerk in my grasp. There was a sweet burning feeling at the tips of my fingers, like I’d stuck them in something that was making them tingle in all the right ways. I felt the man try to stand, but I leaned in and put my weight on him, straddling him, to keep him down. He screamed and I hammered him with an elbow to the midsection that knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping for air. All the while I kept m
y fingers on his face, locked on, my short nails digging into his skin as he tried to get a ragged breath in.
I could see the flash of memories, of things coming from his mind, facts and thoughts. I knew his name was Roger McClaren, that he was an American, a mercenary, hired by a group who he didn’t even know. I saw him in a room with the others that had come. There was a man giving him orders, a man who seemed vaguely familiar to me even though I couldn’t place him. He was tall, with a mop of hair that was out of control, and he stood before the mercenaries.
“He’s an Irishman,” the man told the mercs in a flat accent, his head distorting in the memory as I watched it. “Name is Breandan Duffy. Should be a soft target. Sweep him up and we’ll have another for you to hit by the time you get back. I want London ops wrapped up by this time tomorrow so we can start heading north to deal with a few strays before we clean out that cloister in Scotland.” His eyes flashed. “There’s work to do between now and then, so get done with this one quick.”
“Question, sir,” came the voice of one of the men outside McClaren’s field of vision. “What type is this one? Should we expect much resistance?”
“Our telepath says he’s a luck-changer,” the man at the front of the room said, his dark eyes never moving off the man he was speaking to. “That jibes with the intel we got on him from an interrogation. Swarm him, hit him fast, you’ll not have any problems. He’s unpredictable in his habits, though, as he’s some sort of petty thief, so waiting for him to come out of his flat at a certain time is out. His offensive capabilities are minimal, and the telepath puts his disposition as more of a risk of flight than fight. He’s on the seventeenth floor so you should have him trapped.” He shook his head, his dark hair flopping about his face. “Minimal resistance risk. Take him down, report back. We’ll have three more down by sunset and the day after tomorrow we can get up to York.”
Another question came from behind McClaren. “This can’t be all of their kind in London. I thought there were more of them.”
The man at the front of the room smiled. “There are. And we’ll be back, with some help. We’ve got some resources in country that have already wiped out one cloister. They’re on their way to do the job to a couple in Ireland before they meet us back here after we finish in Scotland. We’ve got a lot of work yet in London, but we’ll need more than just guns to do it.”
I sensed the mood shift in the room, as though someone else was about to ask a question, but McClaren stood up and sketched out a rough salute to the man in the front of the room. So McClaren was the squad leader. “Yes sir, Mr. Weissman. We’ll get this Duffy stitched up and be back in a couple hours.”
Weissman smiled coldly, his thin face not capable of much warmth or sincerity. “I have no doubt.”
The world faded around me and I came back to a screaming in my head, a searing at my fingertips, and I pulled them off McClaren’s face with great reluctance as he slumped to the ground, unconscious. I looked down at him and shook my head. “Quit whining. Any other succubus on the planet would have eaten your soul just now just for the cheap thrills, and frankly, knowing them, that would have been worse for you than you can imagine.” I turned to look back at Breandan, and I realized that I’d only been in the memory for a second or two, even though it had shown me minutes worth of time in Mr. McClaren’s life. “They were here for you.”
“Well, yeah,” Duffy said, unsurprised. “They did break down the door to my flat, after all.” He frowned. “Wait, did you think they were here for you?”
I watched him, in near disbelief. “There are people after you, trying to kill you?”
His face etched surprise. “There are people trying to kill you, too?”
I gave him a look of pure annoyance. “You could have mentioned that people were trying to kill you before you let me sleep in your apartment!”
He gave me a wide, unexpressive shrug. “And when were you planning to mention that someone was gunning for you?”
I scowled. “After I slept.”
“Look,” Duffy said with a slight grin, “clearly, we’re both in some sort of peril here. It could have been either one of us that caused this spot of bother to descend on my flat—”
“No,” I said, looking back down at the unconscious McClaren, “they didn’t know I’d be here.”
“Yet I’m quite thankful that you were,” Duffy said, “as if you hadn’t been, I’d be dead.” He seemed to think about it for a moment before his face turned serious. “I guess having you catch me pickpocket you was a lucky thing for me after all?”
I stared back at him and pursed my lips. “Don’t get all sappy on me now. I get the sense that this sweep team is only one piece of what this organization has available in the U.K.” I reached down and ripped McClaren’s belt off, then stepped back into the bedroom to start gathering magazines from the other fallen mercenaries.
“You ‘get the feeling’?” Duffy looked back at me with alarm. “I’m not too up on what succubuses are capable of—”
“It’s succubi. If a bunch of us got on London double deckers, that’d be succubuses.”
“Ah ha ha!” He laughed weakly and sounded fake. “The point is, did you just rip the soul out of the man?”
“No,” I said as I stooped to pick up three narrow magazines and a pistol, which I tucked into my belt. “I pulled his memory from the briefing he got before he came here.”
“And saw what?” Breandan asked, watching me wide-eyed.
I stopped and stared back at him before I answered. “A guy at the front of the room giving the order to kill you. His name’s Weissman. I think he’s a meta and almost certainly a member of Century.”
“Sorry, who?” Duffy gave me the look of a man who’d missed a step. “What’s Century?”
I tried to find a way to say it that didn’t sound absurd. “They’re a group of metas that are planning to kill every other meta on the planet … except for them.” Nope, that wasn’t it.
Breandan’s face got comically screwed up again. “Right. And this Weissman, he’s the James Bond villain sitting atop their little organization? Stroking a fluffy white cat as well, I trust?”
“Didn’t see a cat,” I replied and pulled three more magazines out of the belt of a dead commando, “just him, by himself, right now, in a warehouse not terribly far from here.”
“And you are picking up all these bullets because …?” he waited expectantly, though I could tell from the tone he knew what was coming.
“I’m going to go have a chat with this Weissman,” I said, taking a deep breath in through my nose as I stood to look at Breandan. “You see, he and his little henchman’s club, they killed someone a while back that I cared about, and I haven’t been able to properly repay them for it.”
Breandan looked down on me with his superior height, but I could see the skepticism in his face. “Oh, yeah? Who was that? Your mother?”
“Oh, God no,” I said, almost laughing. “I said someone I cared about.” I looked around soberly, trying to decide if I’d pulled everything of value from the bodies on the floor. “No. Her name was Andromeda.”
“Andromeda?” he asked, and I could hear the little noise from him that told me he was beginning to wonder not if I was crazy, but just how crazy I was. “That was her given name?”
“Hell if I know,” I said. “I only knew her for a few hours.” I watched his expression change, and I knew that telling the truth wasn’t doing my cause any favors in his eyes. “Listen …” I said softly, “maybe you should stay behind. What’s going to happen with this Weissman could get messy.”
“Oh, messy?” Breandan gave a wave to indicate all the dead bodies around him on the floor. “Well, all right then, I should definitely keep clear of it if it’s going to get messy. Because it certainly isn’t at all messy here, no, bodies on my floor is a perfectly normal effing day!” His eyes got wilder, and I saw a tick in the light crows feet around his eyes as he waved a hand around. “Are you serious? There a
re dead people on the floor of my flat, ones who came here to kill me!”
“Yeah,” I said with a little cringe, “see, this is why you should stay behind. I don’t know if you can handle what could happen with Weissman—”
Breandan extended the pistol in his hand to aim at McClaren’s head and fired it once, then jumped like he’d been the one shot. “Jesus!” It sounded like he said “Jay-sus!” Blood had splattered on the wall, and McClaren’s corpse was now lifeless on the floor, dropped by the momentum of the shot.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I asked, looking from the body to him in quick order.
“Well, I didn’t mean to!” he said, looking from McClaren’s corpse to me with panic in his eyes. “I was going to point it at him to show you how serious I was,” he waved the pistol toward me and I slapped a hand on his, twisting the gun out of his grip while keeping the barrel pointed away from me. “And it just went off!”
I stared at the pistol in my hand as I took a step back from him. “They do not just … go off. You have to pull the trigger for them to go off.”
He waved at it, clearly agitated. “Well, it … don’t they have a safety or something to keep that from happening?”
I held up the weapon. “It’s a Glock 17. No, it does not have a traditional safety. First rule of guns—do not point one at anything you do not want dead.”
Breandan looked back to McClaren’s corpse. “And is he … is he …?” He kept trying to form the question, but it was clear his emotions were getting in the way.
“Dead?” I finished for him. “His brains are all over the wall and floor, so yes, I think we can safely say he’s dead.” It occurred to me I’d seen entirely too much of that recently, as though somehow in the moment I killed Glen Parks I’d opened a floodgate on an orgy of violence that had come dropping into my life.
“Dear God,” Breandan breathed. “I didn’t mean to.” He looked tense enough to crush an apple between his buttcheeks. “You’re awfully calm about this!”
Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven Page 14
