Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  “No, I don’t know,” I said, feeling a chill inside. “Tell me.”

  “You met the Omega ministers, didn’t you?” he asked, watching me. “Weissman said you helped kill them.”

  “Not intentionally,” I said tightly, “but that was how it turned out.”

  “If you’ve met them, then you know,” he said. “They were never about sharing power. They were about hoarding it for themselves while the rest of us choked to death on the noxious clouds of whatever remainder they couldn’t get their hands around.”

  I squinted at him as I tried to work through that one. “That was … uh …”

  “Yeah, I think I might have mixed a metaphor a little too hard there.” He took another step toward me and he was almost fully visible in the light now. “You should be with us. Sovereign … he wants you with us. He knows you’d be great, he’s seen what you can do.”

  “I don’t think he’s seen what I can do yet,” I whispered, looking up at Raymond.

  “It shouldn’t be like this,” Raymond said, almost pleading. “The sons and daughters of Hades and Persephone were a family. We shouldn’t be fighting. It’s not right.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s funny you say that, because,” I pointed to Kat, who was lying prostrate, gasping for breath, “she’s a Persephone, and you were choking the life out of her with the rest only a couple minutes ago.”

  Raymond’s face fell, and he looked suddenly unsure of himself. “Damn. I just … I can’t just go off the list, okay? The plan says …”

  “Your plan says wipe them all out,” I replied. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t just, and I kinda think it’s been crafted by an effing madman.”

  Raymond’s face showed just the slightest hint of amusement. “‘Effing’? Aren’t you from Minnesota?”

  “When in London, do as Londoners do.”

  He nodded, and I caught a whiff of sadness from him. “You’re not gonna budge off this, are you?”

  “Let you kill my friends?” I pointed to Reed. “My brother?” I pointed to Kat. “One of your relatives?”

  He didn’t blink. “She’s one of your relatives, too.”

  “I’m not willing to admit that yet.” I didn’t blink away from looking at him. “You say that we should band together, but you’re failing to notice that my band is going to get short shrift if I join yours. How about you join mine and we go wipe out Century together?”

  He shook his head slowly. “What they’re doing to upend Omega and the old order needs to be done—”

  “Wake up, Raymond,” I said softly. “This is all that’s left of Omega. Of your old order. I’m in charge since this morning, and I was their worst enemy up until a week ago. They’re done. The old order has been swept aside. You guys have already won. Alpha’s finished, Omega’s toast, and the Directorate was destroyed in America. There’s nothing left now but Century, and they mean to do more than wipe away the old world. They mean to kill off anyone who could fight against their vision of a new one.”

  He looked at me with those dark eyes. “I know. But it’s going to be worth it. I promise.”

  I gave him a slow, resigned nod. “Don’t make a promise you know you can’t keep. It’s unseemly.” I gave him a little smile. “It’s time.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said. “We’re family.”

  “Apparently you’ve never seen how my branch of the family treats each other.” I cracked my knuckles one by one. “I can’t let you do what they’d have you do. If you’re not going to stand aside, I’m going to stop you.”

  “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

  “Then don’t make it that way.”

  He shook his big head, slowly. “I’m sorry. I know what’s coming. You don’t. But it’s all right; you’ll see it for yourself, because I won’t kill you.”

  I let out a slow, disappointed sigh. “Well, you got one of those right.”

  I launched myself at him with a kick that caught him in his massive belly. All the air went out of him in one second and he hit his knees. I followed with a knee to the face that rolled him over and sent him five feet into the air before he came down again, hard, on the thin carpet.

  I pursued him with the viciousness of Wolfe, kicking him in the side of the face and snapping it back. The tactical detachment of Roberto Bastian told me to hit him in the head again, to impede his cognition and analysis of the fight by knocking the crap out of his brains (that last part might have been me). I punched with the white-hot anger bubbling over from years of repressed rage that waited below the surface of Aleksandr Gavrikov, and I kept myself from laughing at the joy of a fight the way Bjorn would have. I coldly determined that another kick to the face would just about put him out, so I landed one with perfect execution the way Eve Kappler would have done it—precise, on form—and Raymond hit his back, sputtering blood. He didn’t try to rise again.

  “Okay,” he gasped, blood trickling down his face. “Okay, I give up.”

  Stop.

  And listening to the better angel of my nature, I heeded Zack’s counsel and stopped, watching Raymond shudder in pain at my feet.

  “You’re tougher …” Raymond said. “Tougher than they thought you were going to be.”

  “That’s me,” I said quietly. “One of these days you’d think they’d stop underestimating me.”

  “I should tell you,” he whispered. “I should tell you why, why they’re so afraid of you—”

  “DON’T!” I shouted, but it was too late.

  A spurt of blood opened from his neck and he gagged, the geyser spraying into the air around me.

  “I, for one,” came the voice from behind me, “am not so much underestimating you as trying to maintain a realistic picture of how big of a pain in my ass you could possibly be.”

  I swiveled and Weissman was there, cradling his oversized knife again, wiping the blade on a cloth in his hands. It took me a minute to realize it was a patch of shirt, from Raymond. “The prodigal jackass returns,” I quipped. “Where’s your little sidekick?”

  “She’ll be along in a minute,” Weissman said, polishing the blade. “You realize, of course, that every single one of your friends here is going to die before we’re through?” He was thoroughly unamused.

  “Why?” I asked. “Because you’ve put a little distance of time between the last occasion you over-milked your powers, and your time-spinning buddy isn’t going to be aggravated if you halt the flow for a few more rounds now?”

  “No, mostly because you’ve pissed me off.” His eyes were hard, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I thought about just leaving London for last, going and clearing out North and South America first. Maybe hit those last Pacific islands we’ve skipped over.” He pointed the knife at me. “But, no. I bring our best damned resource here to London to finish the job, the last Hades-type on the planet. Do you know how long it took me to find him?” Little flecks of spittle flew out of Weissman’s mouth in rage. “Forever. Just about forever. He’s not quite the linchpin of our plan, but he was close. He made my life easier. Now,” he waved the knife in sharp gestures around me, “I have to do this annihilation the hard way. I have to take all our people into the field and kill these last metas with overwhelming force. Because somehow you talk Raymond the mass murderer into growing a conscience.” He waved the knife at Raymond’s corpse. “I mean, do you believe that? He almost told you everything.”

  I smiled sadly, looking at the body of the man who was related to me. “I’m persuasive.”

  “You’re a pain in my ass,” Weissman said, and he pulled himself off the wall he had been leaning on. “You’re a pain in my ass is what you are. And if you weren’t Sienna Nealon, I would kill you over the course of several days and spread your body parts over a five-mile radius out of pure spite.”

  “You’re not really a warm person, are you?”

  “Oh, little girl,” Weissman’s voice was low, running over gravel, “I want to make you hurt so bad. I just want to b
leed you for a while. I’d like to kill you, but I know how he’d frown on that. So I think I’m just gonna … cut all your tendons from the waist down, rip out your liver and shove it so far down your throat that you’ll never even notice it’s missing, then hang you from a meat hook and let you watch what I do to your friends.”

  I didn’t smile as I looked back at Weissman. “How do I beat you to death?”

  Weissman’s expression of fury turned to amused disdain. “You can’t. You’d be a fool to try.”

  He’s afraid to push his powers because Akiyama will kill him if he stops time for too long, Wolfe whispered. Make him move, make him keep using them, and he’ll get irate, get sloppy. He can’t freeze time for more than a few seconds at a stretch, so if the Doll forces him into a situation where he can’t save himself but by using his powers for longer, the Doll wins.

  “But you just said you were going to make me suffer,” I said, smiling at him. “That makes it seem like I don’t have anything to lose.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna make you—”

  I sprang to the side, away from him, and the blast of wind that came in my wake swept him up and slammed him into the ceiling. “I’m guessing that being flung in the air isn’t the sort of thing you can just ‘time freeze’ your way out of. Gravity and all that, am I right?”

  Weissman hit the ground firmly and squarely on his ass, and I heard the crack of something. “You …”

  “Me,” I said, still whirling in motion as another tornado started his way from Reed, who was now on his knees. I bounded toward him, changing direction mid-move, angling toward Reed. I saw Weissman disappear in the second before the tornado hit him and he reappeared just behind Reed, his knife raised.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” I said and collided with him just before he could deliver the killing strike. “Shouldn’t shortcut these things,” I said as I cranked his arm back and heard it crack, just before he disappeared again. The only thing that had saved Reed was Weissman’s desire to freeze time as little as possible. I hoped I had broken his wrist. I thought I had. It would pull some joy out of his day.

  I saw a flash of movement behind me and I realized that there was a second me, dressed exactly the same, rolling off her feet in the opposite direction I was. Weissman reappeared next to her, and I saw his left hand with the knife in it this time, and he thrust the blade into my doppelganger’s belly. It passed through as easily as if he’d swept it through air, and his face burned with scarlet rage.

  “Rakshasa,” Karthik said as he punched Weissman in the back of the head. “Did you enjoy my illusion?”

  Weissman rolled to his feet and I saw him twirl the knife in his left hand. He kept his right at an off angle, curled toward him, cradled a little. I knew if I could get hold of it I could hurt him more.

  Hurt him, Little Doll. His power requires intense concentration. Without focus, he cannot use it as easily. Give him something else to think about … make him angrier. Make it personal.

  Something flashed behind Weissman, and for a second I thought it was him, shifting in time. It took me a second to realize it was Karthik again, another illusion. Weissman sensed it, twitched, turned on pure instinct and flashed as he lashed out—

  He missed the tornado that vaulted him into the air from behind, flinging him into the high ceilings of Omega’s bullpen. He came down again with a scream as he was forced to catch himself on his right arm. I nearly winced for him. Instead, I rushed him and slammed my foot into his knee with all the momentum I’d built running toward him. I heard the snap of bone and saw the top of his shin break through skin, giving his pants a bloody stain at the knee.

  “Ouch. Pretty sure that’s gonna take time to heal,” I quipped. “So, Weissman, how much time do you have?”

  “More than you,” he grunted, and the crackle of electricity filled the air.

  “Oh?” I turned as Eleanor Madigan lashed out at me with a bolt of lightning that hit me in the midsection and sent me into the wall. Other flashes lit the room and I heard others flung as well; Reed landed beside me.

  “Shit,” he whispered, grunting in pain. “We forgot about the one that craps thunder.”

  “I didn’t forget her,” I said, “I just had to delay dealing with her. I thought the guy who could move faster than lightning was more important than the lady who threw it, at least at the time.”

  Eleanor Madigan’s eyes were lit with the glow of electricity running through her hands in the dark room. She stood before us, and I wondered if any of the other metas who were on the floor had any ability to hit her at range with anything. Almost as though she could sense my impending order, I saw her hand rise at me, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get a chance to shout for them to do something.

  The blast of gunfire next to her head caught me by surprise. Not as much as it caught her by surprise, since it sent her brains out the side of her head, but it was still a little stunning. The muzzle flash lit the face of Breandan Duffy, a pistol in his hands at point blank range next to her head. Silence filled the air in the room as Madigan’s body slumped, lifeless, to the ground.

  “Shouldn’t you have said something like, ‘Your luck’s just run out’?” I asked Breandan as I struggled back to my feet, muscles burning in pain.

  He shrugged. “I’m a bit new to this whole fighting thing. I was too busy burning all the luck I had to keep her from noticing me. Didn’t have time or thought to make a quip.” He held up the pistol and then blanched at it and aimed the barrel back down. “But … I did learn to shoot someone in the head the other day, so I figured if I could do it once by accident, I could probably pull it off a second time on purpose.”

  “Good call,” I said, striding over to him. I held my hand out and he gave me the pistol a little reluctantly. I forced a smile. “You did good. Really good. Saved our bacon. And I don’t mean your crappy English quasi-ham bacon, either. I mean the really tasty American kind.”

  He flushed and feigned irritation. “You’re just lucky you took the gun away before leveling that insult.”

  “Or you’d shoot me in the head?” I asked, amused.

  “Actually, in the Irish tradition, I probably would have just done you the courtesy of a kneecapping.”

  “A kneecapping, huh?” I hefted the gun and snapped it around so fast it made Breandan step back in fear. I fired off two rounds before anyone in the room had a chance to react.

  A soft moan filled the air in the shocked silence after, and Reed was the first to speak over it. “Uh, Sienna … you missed.”

  “I didn’t miss,” I said, looking down at Weissman. He had bloody spots on his belly now, and he was holding them in with his hands, clutching at his stomach. “I hit him just where I wanted to.” I looked down at him. “How does it feel being gutted, Weissman?”

  “Screw … you …” he said, breathing agony.

  “You wish,” I said coolly. “I don’t think you’re going to be screwing much of anything for the near future. Though I bet you’d be the world’s fastest man, wouldn’t you?”

  He ignored my goad and took a long, seething breath. “You can’t kill me—”

  “I can’t?”

  “No,” he said, grunting. “You win for now, though. But what do you think you really bought here? Time?” Little flecks of bloody spittle washed down his chin. “This is temporary. This is a poke to the eye. It’s annoying. It slows us down, that’s all. We’re in the Americas now, and it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re done there—”

  “A matter of a longer period of time, if I’m not mistaken,” I said. “Since your mass killer is no longer available to make it easy and painless for you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, gritting his teeth. “We have other ways. We’ll bring overwhelming force to every encounter. We’ll crush them, break them to pieces, leave them for the crows. And eventually, we’ll be back here for the rest of you.”

  “Listen,” I said, and stood over him, almost exactly as I had James Fr
ies only a week—and a lifetime—ago. “I don’t think you understand where we’re at now, so let me explain something to you.” I leveled the gun at him and he watched me over the barrel. “You are my enemy now. I know who I am because I know who you are, and what you stand for is everything I will oppose to my last breath.”

  He licked the blood from his lips. “I’ll give you credit. You’re tougher than I thought. After everything you’ve been through, you shouldn’t even be standing right now.”

  “The only reason I’m still standing,” I said, glaring down at him over the sights, “is so I can keep myself between you and the people you want to kill. My people.” I kept the gun barrel fixed on him.

  “Between us and them is a dangerous place to be,” Weissman said, and I saw his hand twitch as he tried to hold his guts in.

  I grinned. “What are you going to do, Weissman? Kill me? Like I said, you’re my enemy now. Maybe you can scamper away before I pull the trigger again, maybe not. But next time I see you, I will kill you.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Weissman said, and he tried to drag himself upright and failed. He looked back at me. “I’m done with you. He’ll be coming for you next, you know.”

  “Who?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. “Sovereign?” He nodded slowly. “If you see him before I do, tell him I’ll be waiting,” I said, and I gave Reed a sidelong glance. “In Minneapolis.”

  Weissman looked back at me, eyes filled with fury as his face split into a smile. “I don’t need to tell him. He already knows. And he’ll find you—when he’s ready.”

  “Oh,” I said, and raised the pistol at his face. “In that case—”

  I fired three times in rapid succession then stopped. I waited until the muzzle flash cleared from my eyes to confirm what I already knew when the third shot went off.