“No, not griping,” she said, almost as if she were agreeing. “Moping. Sulking. Stewing, I think they call it also? You are a girl, about to be a woman, yet you act like a child.”
“Act like a child?” I almost choked on it. “I’ve had all these things—”
“Happen to you, yes, such miseries, I already acknowledged.” She folded her arms. “So sad, no one in the history of the world has ever been through any worse.”
“Been through?” I almost choked on my own words. “How about ‘still going through’. They’re still after me, the people who sent Wolfe—I still have him hanging around in my brain—”
“You are not the first to go through that, either.” She shrugged, as though it was a matter of little consequence. “You’re hardly the first succubus. They made it through somehow, so will you muddle through—if you ever decide to stop moping.”
“You know, I think after all I’ve been through, I’m entitled to a little— ”
“No, you’re not.” She cut me off. “You’re not entitled to a damned thing. This is where Ariadne and Old Man Winter make their mistake with you. Yes, you have had a hard life up to when you left your house, being locked in, boxed up, crated, whatever you want to call it. You leave your house, all hell breaks loose and worse. All this is true. You have had very bad things happen to you, no denying. But you take responsibility for the things you shouldn’t and take no responsibility for the things you should.” She threw her arms up in the air. “You will be a bitter, pathetic shell of a person if you continue down this path.”
“Well, awesome.” My words were acid. “Because I’ve always aspired to be like you.”
A self-satisfied smile made its way across her face. “I hurt your little fragile ego, so you lash out. Very mature.”
“Yeah.” I tasted bile in the back of my mouth. “Well, I’d call you old school but you’re really just old. Die already.”
Her hand came down and slammed the bed and I jerked back, reacting to the idea that she might actually hit me. “At some point you have to accept some responsibility for your actions. Not Wolfe’s. He killed all those people, not you. If you blame yourself for those, you are stupid. But now you want to blame Wolfe for some things you control. It’s not always him that lands you in trouble. Bad things happen to all of us. You cannot control bad things that happen to you any more than you can control the weather. It’s less about the things that happen and more about how you react to them.”
She turned away and stalked back to her office. “Or you can sit here in your little pity party and let whatever life you could have pass you by—be a vegetable of sorriness, feeling bad for yourself, curl up in a little ball and waste away, waiting for momma to come find you and hoping those people you didn’t even see die will somehow vanish from your conscience.”
“Why do you care?” I snapped it at her, trying to find some way past her infuriating facade. “I’m just another patient, another pound of flesh for you to minister to. Why does it matter?”
She stopped at the door to her office, put her hand on the frame and rested on it for a split second before turning back to me. There was emotion peeking through from behind a wall, some reservoir of feeling that I couldn’t see the depth of. “Me? I don’t care what you do, whether it’s waste away in a little ball of sadness or become a useful, productive, happy member of society. Neither one matters to me.” She pointed at me. “But if you’re going to do the former, at least leave so I don’t have to watch you throw your life away?” She smiled all too sweetly. “Okay? You can go now.” She turned and I heard her office door shut softly and her blinds closed a minute later.
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.”
Chapter 21
“Gavrikov wants Kat Forrest.” I stared across the desk at Old Man Winter, a few hours later. I felt better after talking to Zollers, more determined. I had some clarity. Old Man Winter watched me the same as always, but next to him, Ariadne seemed to study me with more suspicion, more wariness. “But you probably knew that, because you know her name’s not Kat, not originally.”
Ariadne’s facade of wariness broke and she looked at Old Man Winter, then back to me. “What do you mean? What’s her name?”
“Klementina Gavrikov,” I said, forcing myself not to smile. It wasn’t funny that Old Man Winter hadn’t told his top lieutenant, who I liked to snark at, something of vital importance. Or at least that’s what I told myself as
I mashed my toe into my shoe and against the floor. Nope, didn’t smile.
“She’s his…” Ariadne blinked three times, then looked to Old Man Winter for confirmation.
“Clone,” I said, “or at least that’s what he thinks.”
“He is incorrect,” Old Man Winter said, his hands steepled in front of his face.
“Don’t tell him that,” I said. “I don’t want to see what happens when a human bomb gets told he’s wrong.”
“She is his sister,” Old Man Winter said, as though I had not interrupted. “Not a clone.”
“Oh?” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Gavrikov…Aleksandr,” I said, softening my tone, “seemed to think she had died in 1908.”
“She did not.” He stared back coolly. He did everything coolly, dammit…I wished I had his glacial reserve. Half the time I was trembling beneath my badass exterior, just a scared kid. “She is as long-lived as any other powerful meta and as adaptable at healing. Whatever happened to her, she recovered.” He hesitated. “Though there is a…cost to her power.”
“There’s a cost to any power, it seems.” I breezed it out, way more than I really felt. “After all, if I used my power constantly, I’d end up with the mental equivalent of a clown car.”
Ariadne didn’t seem to find that amusing. “Her power, when used to excess, triggers almost the opposite.”
“Personalities leave her?” I shrugged. “Explains a lot.”
Old Man Winter spoke. “She loses her memory. If a Persephone-type reaches the end of their strength and continues to heal or grow a life, it is at the cost of their own faculties. They become a blank slate, new, fresh. Young again, as well, but at the cost of all they remember.”
“Tabula rasa,” I said with a breath.
“Indeed.” Ariadne took her usual place by the window. “If Gavrikov is after her, it would be best if we hid her for a while.”
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