The Girl in the Box Series, Books 1-3: Alone, Untouched and Soulless

by Robert J. Crane

  Chapter 20

  I pulled the IV out my arm and slapped some gauze on it, along with some medical tape. I didn’t see Dr. Perugini, but the blinds in her office moved a few times. She was watching, I knew it. I stormed out in my outfit, burnt and haggard once more. I didn’t even want to know how much of a mess my hair was, but I saw it anyway in my reflection on the metal wall.

  I rode the elevator to the top floor and found the offices abandoned. I could see out the windows that darkness had fallen. A clock nearby told me it was the middle of the night. Old Man Winter and Ariadne were not in their offices, which were both were locked.

  I walked out the door to the Headquarters building and found myself in the middle of a light snowstorm. Again. I kicked a trash can savagely, sending it hurtling across a snowfield. I started back toward the dormitory building at a brisk walk, as though I could exorcise the demons of Perugini’s words by walking them off.

  I was already in the building and almost to my door when I remembered that Gavrikov had burned my room. I stopped outside the door, which had caution tape across it and gave it a gentle push. It swung open and I found the space covered from the outside by several tarps. The broken glass was gone from the floor, as were the carpets, leaving bare concrete.

  The room was frigid and the furniture was all gone—desk, bed, everything. The walls had already been replaced, the scorch marks gone, vanished with the addition of fresh drywall. It hadn’t been painted yet, giving the place the smell of a construction site.

  I walked into the closet and found the clothes were missing. I smiled as I wondered if the Directorate had finally run out of jeans and turtlenecks in my size. My smile vanished when I realized that would bode ill for me; my current outfit was scorched, stunk of acrid smoke and was missing a sleeve.

  I heard the scrape of a footstep on the concrete and all my amusement vanished as I sprung to attention. I stood in the darkness of the closet and heard someone walk to the door, opening it wide to let light from the hallways outside my room filter in. “You were supposed to come see me.” Dr. Zollers stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame in the way of a man who’d been awakened from a deep slumber and might return to it while standing there.

  “Dr. Perugini called you?” I took a step toward him and he nodded. “I thought maybe it could wait until tomorrow.”

  “Well, that was dumb,” he said and turned, then gestured for me to follow him. “Let’s go.”

  I went with him, out of the dormitory building, back to his office. He didn’t talk the whole way there and I started to wonder why, but when we got to his office, he poured a cup of coffee and gestured for me to sit. He yawned, took a big swig of his mug and cracked a smile. “Much better.” He pointed to his cup. “Want some?”

  “No, I had a bad experience with coffee.” He looked at me quizzically. “I tried to drink it with meatloaf. It was my first time with both of those things, so...” I shrugged.

  “All right, so let’s talk.” He put his mug down and picked up his notebook, all business. “You’ve got a maniac in your head.”

  “Plus Wolfe,” I said with a smile.

  “Clever. How’s it feel?”

  “Being clever? Damned good. It’s my only vice.” I grinned, then turned more serious when he didn’t smile back. “He mostly just talked, until recently. Smarted off and whatnot. Told me a couple things—like where his lair was, who the man behind the armor was.”

  “When did you figure out that he could hijack your body?” He was already writing feverishly, but paused to look up when he asked the question.

  I looked away, uncomfortable. “Um...probably when the Science Building exploded and I woke up in the snow with no idea how I got there.” I hesitated. “But I had a suspicion before that. Ariadne said they had footage of me breaking into the cafeteria and I didn’t remember doing it.”

  “Sleepwalking is not usually a good sign, even if it’s just to get something to eat.” He put down the pen and looked up to me. “We have no scientific idea how you drain a soul. Sessions is mystified.” Zollers stopped to smile. “He’s always a little confused, but this one started him on all the possibilities of other mythological powers that might hold some truth. For example, the ability of a succubus to influence dreams?” He waited, eyebrow raised, as though he were expecting an answer.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “I can contact people in my dreams. It’s a kind of weird, two-way communication dream. Like a video conference, but entirely in my head.” I frowned. “Like a hallucinatory video conference.”

  “Anything else you haven’t been telling us?” he asked with a cocked eyebrow and a half smile. It could have come off as an accusation, if anyone else had done it. Zollers pulled it off like a pro. I think I smiled when I shook my head. “All right. So...how are we going to get the Wolfe under control?”

  I shrugged expansively. “I dunno. You’re the doc.”

  “Yeah, and you’re the patient and the one that has to live with him in your head.” He leaned forward in his seat. “Which means you stand to lose a lot more than I do if we can’t. The good news is, Old Man Winter assures me that succubi have been living with this particular quirk for thousands of years, so I assume it’s manageable somehow.” His face squeezed into a look of concentration. “Obviously it’d be easier if we had some firsthand experience from someone who’d been through it, but...”

  “Since I’m the only succubus currently available to talk to...” I shrugged. “On my own again. Big shock.”

  “Is that a note of self-pity I hear? Cuz’ that’s not an attractive quality.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Because being attractive is my biggest concern.” I tugged on the shredded turtleneck and stared down at it. “Actually, even if it was, it’d be near impossible given the crap I’ve gone through lately.”

  “There it is again!” He pointed the end of the pen at me. “That little quavering of self-pity in your voice.”

  “Oh, who cares?” I threw my hands up in the air. “So I feel a little sorry for myself sometimes. So what?”

  “Because it doesn’t do a damned thing to make you feel better.” His dark eyes were locked on mine. “Yeah, you had some stuff go wrong in your life. Real wrong, in fact. I feel bad for you. But wallowing in it won’t make you feel better.”

  “This conversation is getting repetitive.” I drummed my hand on the arm of the chair to emphasize my point. “Perugini gave me the same line. Couldn’t quite figure out her angle, though. She doesn’t like me, after all.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. That’s important to realize.”

  “Why is that important?” I was close to beyond caring. “Whether she loves me, hates me, or wants to kill me, the message is the same. You guys think I’m being self-indulgent, I think I’m justified—at least a little bit. It’s not like I’m whining to anybody but you about how much my life sucks.”

  “Got a question for you.” He looked me in the eyes. “If you’re thinking about yourself and how bad things are for you, how much time and thought are you devoting to other people?”

  I glared at him but didn’t argue his point. “Go on.”

  He shrugged. “Seems to me if you’re that worried about being alone—enough that you’ve mentioned it both times we’ve talked, you’d look at what you could be doing that’s causing that situation. Self-involved people don’t tend to make the best friends because they’re too busy thinking of their problems. Ones that are bitter and hurting tend to be the ones that push others away, sometimes with their actions, sometimes with their barbed tongues.

  “So congrats.” He clapped twice for me. “You had a bad past. You’ve got stuff going on right now that I wouldn’t want to have happen to me. But everything you’re doing that’s alienating people around you is because you’re so busy worrying about who to trust that you’re missing how trust gets built. You’re missing how to connect with people on a basic level and get to know them—and you’re giving up the possibility
of a future because you’re stuck in your past. Your mom, the abuse—yeah, she abused you, get it straight in your head.”

  “How can I have a future? How can I connect with anyone?” My words came out in a rage, but I felt the burning of curiosity at what he might say. “I can’t touch anyone—ever! Without causing them pain or death. And there are a ton of people no longer walking this earth because of me, because of what I didn’t do, because I hid while Wolfe was on the rampage, trying to draw me out.”

  “Yeah, that happened,” he said. “But you went into the basement to face him knowing you were going to die, didn’t you?” I nodded. “That was your penance, kid.” I didn’t take umbrage at him calling me kid, surprisingly. “Yeah, a lot of people died at the hands of that maniac, but you didn’t wrap your fingers around any of their throats, didn’t kill a single soul up to that point and hey—news flash, you haven’t killed anyone since! You are not a killer, Sienna. You went in there to die, knowing he was going to eat you alive and do God-knows-what to you. You knew and you went anyway. You faced the fire and you walked out the other side. Yeah, it’s not all spun out yet, and there’s the little complication of him mind-jacking you, but past examples say that that can be settled. So my question is—are you gonna blame yourself forever for stuff you didn’t even do?”

  “I...” My voice was ash. “I don’t know. They’re all dead, and I’m alive.”

  “Mm-hm. Got a way to fix that?” I shook my head. “Did you do it? Really do it? Go out there and kill a swath of people?” I shook my head again, this time tears welling up. “Forgive yourself. Explain it however will get you through the day—that you couldn’t have stopped Wolfe then anyway, that it wouldn’t have made a difference, he would have killed just as many people over the next hundred and thousand years he lived—whatever it takes to reconcile in your head that it was not your fault. Anyone who calls you weak for not wanting to die is an idiot. If that includes you, then stop being an idiot.”

  “I could have gone sooner.” My voice was even hollower now. “I don’t have a future.” I looked up at him and the lump in my throat was big, enough that it was choking me, enough that a little sob escaped and I wanted to hit myself in the chest for letting it out. “I lost my future in the moment I killed Wolfe—when I found out what I was. Even if I got past all the rest, I still have no future, not a normal one anyway. I can’t touch anyone. Ever.”

  “Can’t touch anyone? Your mother was a succubus, yes?” He waited for me to nod. “You’re familiar with human biology, how we breed? Explain your existence, please.”

  “I don’t know. She could have,” I faltered, “artificially, you know. I never asked her the finer details because I didn’t know what she was at the time. There are ways it could have happened without touch, real touch—but none of that changes anything. I can’t lead a normal life. I can’t have a normal relationship. I’m a smoking crater with nothing around for miles.” I bowed my head. “I am death.”

  “Wolfe was death,” Zollers said, stern, “and you’re nothing like him. You’re like...like a fragile package. ‘Handle with care’.” He stood up and grabbed a blanket from the back of his couch. He threw it around me and hauled me up, wrapping his arms around me in a hug. I started to struggle but something stopped me.

  “I just...” I choked out, “I just...want to be normal.”

  I could hear the Cheshire Cat-like smile in his voice. “You’re seventeen years old and you feel like the world is ending around you.” He pulled me tighter, and the gentle pressure was reassuring in a way that I had never known. “Sienna...this is normal.”