Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  44.

  “My God,” Rose breathed. “That’s…that’s inhuman. Surely he can’t—”

  “Of course he can,” I said, strangely calm. I turned, looking over the wreckage of the abandoned apartment. It smelled of dust from where the walls and ceiling had been ripped apart, motes of it caught in the last rays of sunset streaming in from outside. “He’s got the power to do almost anything he wants now. Killing thousands? Well within the scope of his abilities.”

  Rose looked right at me, her eyes anchoring on mine with a plea. “You can’t be serious. You can’t go out there and dance to his tune—”

  “I should just let those people die?” I asked, mentally readying myself. Of course I was going to go out there and face him.

  “Yes,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Ye can’t beat him. Why throw yourself into this when the odds are—well, they’re bloody impossible!” Her Scottish accent got thicker in the moments when she was heated.

  “I do impossible things all the time,” I said coolly. “It’s a just another Tuesday.”

  “He knows you’ll come out,” she said. “That’s why he’s doing this.” I stopped and froze. “He knows that when Wolfe held your city hostage, you came out and faced him when it was suicide. He’s pressing your buttons, playing to—to your flaws. And you’re letting him!”

  I sat there in silence for a moment. She’s right, Harmon said. He’s borrowing a page right out of the Wolfe strategy book.

  Clever, Bastian said.

  That was the annoying thing about being famous; even when you didn’t talk about these things, word about them tended to get out. I’d read one of my unauthorized bios. They got a lot wrong, but the gut-churning hours and days I spent imprisoned “for my own protection,” in the basement of the Directorate while Wolfe was ripping his way through Minneapolis to draw me out? Vividly painted, probably by any number of former agents of the Directorate who’d fed me and watched the door while I stewed within. Kurt Hannegan himself had been quoted in the pages of the one I’d read, talking about my misery at knowing what was going on outside and feeling powerless to do anything but throw my body into the gaping maw of Wolfe to make it stop.

  “Why do you have to do this?” Rose asked quietly. “Every time, you play the hero, even when it’s stupid, even when it’s against your interest, even when you’re—well you’re bloody overmatched here, Sienna. You’ve got nothing but a gun, and he’s got thousands of dead at his disposal. Why would you even…bother…when it’s this nigh impossible? When he’s already killed this many…” She gestured at the cracked door to the room where we’d found the serum and the bodies. “What are a few more when you can’t stop him?” She paced a little closer. “Why do you always have to play hero? Is it a territorial thing? Is it ego?” She shook her head, breaking away from staring at me, tears in her eyes. “Because I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.”

  “Picture someone dying in quiet desperation,” I said in a whisper. “They can feel it coming. Pain. Agony, really. They can’t see…hope.” My voice cracked a little. “The world is getting dark around them, and there’s a moment when they realize…no one is coming to save them. Death is going to take them, slow and steady and unstoppable. Impossible to avoid. They can scream and wail and cry out and beg…their last hope is this fleeting, impossible chance…that someone is going to hear them. That someone—someone who can help, who has the power to help—will come.”

  She waited in silence as I fell into one of my own. “Those people in that room…they died like that.” I nodded toward the cracked door. “Crying out. Screaming at the end, probably. Can you imagine how scared they must have been? He just…drained them. Took their lives like they were nothing, like a soda can to drink dry and then discard. They must have been…so afraid…to be dragged here, screaming, crying, knowing that an end was coming and that they were powerless to do anything about it.” I lapsed into a pensive silence. “Do you think he left them in there, in the dark?” I sniffled a little. “I think he probably did. It’s how I imagine it in these situations. Some poor soul, in the dark, alone, crying out…wishing someone would hear them…someone would come along…someone with the power to save them…” My voice broke. “Like I did every time my mom locked me in the box.”

  Rose just stood there in the desperate silence. “My God.”

  “I thought I was going to die, hopeless, helpless and alone,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “Every time. It didn’t matter that she let me out every time but the last…I still imagined I was going to die in there, trapped, afraid. No one ever came to save me.” I squeezed my fist in the memory. “But I got powerful enough to save myself. So, yes, people have died. Frankie’s done a really organized job of killing here. Thousands are dead, and they’ve died…probably exactly that way.” I cast a long look over my shoulder at the cracked door, at the shadow of the bodies I could still see within. “But I can’t stand back and let it happen…again.”

  “I’ll…I’ll go with ye,” Rose said, wiping her own eyes. “I don’t know what help I’ll be, but—”

  “No,” I said softly. “Rose…you can’t. You should go home. Back to your home, I mean. Out of here. I’ll drop you off at the edge of town before I leave and you—you should just get out of here. Go back to your family.”

  “I dinnae have a family anymore, Sienna,” she said quietly. “My grandparents are dead. And my ma…she passed on, too. That’s why I left my home. There was nothing left for me there.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  “So I’ll come with ye,” she said, taking a step forward. “And one way or another, we’ll make an end of this Frankie bastard.”

  “You can’t come with me, Rose,” I said. “This is something you won’t understand—” No one could understand it until they’d been pursued halfway around the world and found that…no matter where they go, they’ll never really be safe. “You need to go live your life.”

  “I dinnae have one,” she said. “Did you not hear me? I have no family left. I want to fight. With you—”

  “You’ll be a hostage for him,” I said, taking a step back.

  “Then—then kill me,” she said, sputtering up to righteous indignation. “Absorb me like one of yuir souls, and use me that way, if you think I’ll get killed on the field of battle.” She thrust out a hand—

  I dodged back. “Rose…you won’t get this now…but hopefully you’ll understand someday—”

  “Wait,” she said, lunging forward again as I dodged back, heading for the hole in the building, “don’t—”

  I flew out without her, and heard her shout my name into the wind as I dodged around the building and out of sight, flying toward Calton Heights…and hopefully my final rendezvous with Frankie.

  45.

  Wolfe

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  1986

  He knew it was her when he saw her get out of the car. She walked slowly around it, the steady walk of a warrior who had left her battlefields confidently behind, who had nothing to fear here, on this street in the middle of civilization. Her hair was dark, her skin was not, and she stayed focused on looking sideways for motion on the street even as she gathered her groceries from the trunk.

  Wolfe crossed the ground to the open garage door slowly, announcing his presence by not cushioning his footsteps, by not muffling his breath. The subtle way her posture changed when she heard him coming told him that she was alerted to his presence, but she moved coolly to turn around, not the quick spin of a woman who had been the first Valkyrie, coming around to face an opponent.

  Her blue eyes did not betray a hint of surprise at his approach. Her hands were free, groceries left in the trunk behind her, available to fight in case he was a foe. She kept her fists unclenched, the better to thrust a stray finger or two into the weakest points of his body, an impromptu knife if she needed it. Her instincts were still intact, then, which did not surprise him. Perha
ps it would have surprised his employer, but then…Omega didn’t know Lethe the way that Wolfe did.

  “I must confess my surprise at seeing you here,” she said in the language of her birth, then switched to modern, accented Scottish English without missing a beat. “It’s been a long time, Wolfe.”

  “You’ve been hiding,” Wolfe said, stopping on the driveway, the full, waving yew trees above swishing gently in the summer breeze.

  “I haven’t been hiding that hard,” she said, gazing at him smokily, watching him for sudden movement. “Ye killed my husband, Simon.”

  Wolfe bristled. “I had nothing to do with that. It was a rookie agent that did it. One of your kin.”

  She didn’t stop gazing at him with suspicion. “I’m sure ye had no influence over it at all. I bet yuir boss, that shite-for-brains Alastor, he passed the death sentence all on his own. Maybe ye want to blame it on that lad Janus? Try and convince me that he had some hand in it?”

  “Believe what you want,” Wolfe said, a little sulkily. He bared his teeth slightly. He hadn’t expected her to know.

  “I don’t really care, you understand,” Lethe said. She folded her arms in front of her, but not so tightly they couldn’t be unwound for a fight in less than a second. “Simon and I, we were closer to enemies than friends these last years. I told him not to go work for yuir fair-haired friends, but did he listen to me? No.”

  “He had other lovers,” Wolfe said, vomiting out this bit of information unintentionally. He’d meant to keep it in reserve, save it for when he needed it, not throw it out meaninglessly in hopes she’d sink her teeth in it, but he’d done it nonetheless.

  Her reaction was cool. “Well, of course he did. I’m a succubus and we’ve lived apart for years, you daft prick. I’ve had other lovers, too. Don’t reckon there’s as much evidence of mine as there is of his.” She looked at her feet, but only briefly. “Babies and whatnot.” She shifted again, then glanced at the door to her house. “Reckon I might as well invite ye in.”

  “Most don’t,” Wolfe said.

  She flicked her cool gaze over him. “Most don’t know you as I do. If you mean to try and kill me, you’ll do it out here just as easily as inside, and I’d like to get my groceries in the refrigerator.” She leaned down and picked them up lightly. “Come on then,” she said, “be a dear and get the trunk as ye pass, will ye?” And she went inside.

  Wolfe stood on the driveway a moment, then slowly made his way over to the trunk and shut it, then walked over to the door and went in after her.

  She was already bustling in the kitchen, the refrigerator door thumping closed as he let the one to the garage swing shut behind him. “Would you like something to drink?” she called to him through the pass over a counter into the kitchen. He was standing in an open living room, furnished with shag carpeting in colors that resembled vomit.

  “No,” he said, and glanced at the wood-paneled wall. Pictures hung of two girls, their progression from babies to adulthood. The eldest had a lean, hungry look in her eyes, serious in her teenage pictures. The younger wore a smile that grew more malicious as she aged, culminating in a smug shot that looked as though she might spit in the eye of the photographer—after first sleeping with him.

  “You admiring the pictures of my children?” Lethe worked her way over to the counter and leaned down, looking through the pass-through at him. “My girls?”

  “No,” Wolfe said, averting his eyes. He felt nothing but revulsion looking at them, a flash of anger that someone had managed to give her children and survive the process. “I doubt they’re worthy of note. I saw you on battlefields, blood running down your naked body. You can’t tell me either of your coddled girls would be able to do anything of that sort.”

  “Charlie, no,” Lethe said, turning her head down toward the drink she had in hand. “Sierra, though…she might surprise ye.”

  Wolfe snorted. “I’ve seen your other children. Do any of them yet live? I would be shocked if they did. Sovereign killed the last of that tribe with some gusto.”

  “One’s still alive,” Lethe said, steely reserve flashing in her eyes.

  Wolfe almost growled. “Which daughter was this?”

  Lethe watched him carefully. “If you don’t know, I decline to tell Omega. Let’s just call her Juliett, and say she’s out there.”

  “The last of the valkyries,” Wolfe murmured. “Does she carry your blade? The one forged by the same man who made Mjolnir?”

  Again Lethe grew quiet. “No. That was meant for me.”

  “That was meant for a warrior,” Wolfe said, bleeding his disgust over the overstuffed furniture, his eyes sweeping over all he beheld and finding a revolting end for a woman who had slaughtered legions—thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—in her time.

  She favored him with a very calm look, eyebrow raised just a tick. “You don’t think I’m a warrior?”

  “Does this look like the domain of a warrior to you?” Wolfe raised his hands, taking it all in with a sweeping motion. “I followed the daughter of death, the chooser of death, the first of the—”

  “Ye followed me, ye daft idiot. From Greece to China to southeast Asia and across the Middle East to Norway.” Her eyes burned. “Whatever you’re seeing here is what you’re expecting to see.”

  “I didn’t expect to see the greatest warrior I’ve ever known turned into a meek Scottish housewife,” Wolfe spat.

  She put her hands on her hips. “And I didn’t expect to see the fiercest third of the Cerberus brothers turned into an Omega housepet, but here we are. Ye let Janus into your head all those years ago, and off ye went yuir way while I went mine.”

  “I kept doing what I was best at—”

  “Oh, I’ve heard tell.”

  “—and you,” he seethed, spitting, “you settled yourself, resigned yourself, pissed away your legacy—”

  “Ye have no idea what I’ve done, boyo.”

  “—no sword in your hand, no weapon in easy reach—”

  “I am a weapon—my best weapon—or have ye forgot it?”

  “I think you are the one who has forgotten,” Wolfe said, dripping his anger. It was like ten lifetimes of fury had built up and was pouring out now. “Forgotten who you were.”

  “I may be a couple thousand years old,” Lethe said dryly, “but I remember who I was just as clearly now as ever I did. I serve no master, and control my own destiny, which is more than I can say for ye—”

  Wolfe crossed the distance between them and slapped the glass she’d left on the pass-through counter, sending it shattering against the wall. Lethe watched it sail coolly, unmoving, as Wolfe hissed, sticking his face into hers.

  “Ye want to give me a kiss now, Wolfe?” she asked, whispering. “Ye always did; ye were always just too much of a gelding to make the move.”

  He opened his mouth and breathed hot, stinking breath right at her. “I should eat your face in tribute to him, to mitigate the insult to his memory of what you’ve become. I have become more death than you have, and whatever pathetic shadows you’ve spawned in the years since we parted are nothing but lesser branches of a dying tree. I have never been more glad than I am today that Hades died at the height of his power. For to see this as the result of all his efforts would disgrace him beyond measure. Some cosseted housefrau sitting on a seat of cloth comfort, with pictures of runty children on the walls and her pathetic husband dead and unavenged. Death would not have let this or any such insult pass, but you are not death, you are not Lethe—”

  “I go by Lisa now, thanks,” she said, even as ever.

  “—and you are not even a thin shadow of the woman I knew,” he said, ripping himself away from her by only the thinnest measure of control. “You have become as pathetic and soft as everyone else.”

  “Think whatever you like, Wolfe,” she said as he stood, refusing to look at her. “You don’t know me, and you haven’t for a long time.”

  Wolfe just stood, seething. “True words.” He t
urned his head, slowly, to look at her. “Alastor and Janus are curious about you. About your offspring. Thus far I’ve said nothing.”

  “Because you know nothing,” Lethe said. “You didn’t even know about—”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Our old loyalties are dissolved as of today. The bond I swore to your master, to you—it is broken. If Omega sends me after your pitiful children or their spawn, I will no longer honor any of our prior history. If they come in my path—I will kill them.”

  “You will try,” Lethe said.

  “I—will—kill them,” he said. “I will wear their skins like I would any other.”

  “You may end up regretting that,” she said. “Do you forget what I am?”

  “You forget what you are,” he hissed. “And I know—I know—that whatever your daughters are, they are not kin to death, do not carry even your thread of his power, because if they did, they wouldn’t be sick, tired, weak prey like you. They’d be hunters.” He pounded his chest. “Like me. Not weak.” He stalked to the door. “Not cowering, hiding in the tall grass of opulent society as though it were some sort of genuine cover from predators.” He looked back and found her standing there, small behind the counter, nothing like the woman he had known, the warrior of days past. She truly was…prey. “Go and live your life as one of them but know that someday, someone stronger and with less compunction than me will appear on your street. You will not know them. You will not be ready, for you are no longer a person who is ready—and they will take you that day, as you took so many back when you were a warrior. They will take you for death, a thing you no longer even know—and I wonder if you ever did.” And he left, tearing the door from the hinges in his fury, knocking the car aside in his flight to escape this woman that he no longer even recognized.

  46.

  Sienna