“You can sleep,” Scott said, urging me on as he caught a glimpse of my fluttering eyelids. “I don’t mind.”
“You sure?” I could feel my eyelids fighting to close.
“It’s fine. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”
“Okay,” I yawned.
“Besides,” he said as I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the side of the car, “I’ll probably need you to drive back.”
I drifted off into a quiet calm, warmth around me, feeling safe and secure. The steady sound of the tires on the road faded away, and the hard surface of the window against my cheek turned into something else, something soft. I opened my eyes and I was lying on my side on a couch. I sat up abruptly, looking around the room.
It was a little dim, the only light cast by ugly lamps on either side of the couch. It was all very familiar, somewhere I knew I had already been. Dim awareness pressed in on me. I had been here before, many times, but the colors were blurring in the dark and everything seemed strange. There was a man seated in a chair opposite the couch, just where he’d always sat when we were in this room in the real world, not in dreams.
“Hello, Sienna,” Dr. Quinton Zollers said to me, looking up from the pad on his lap.
“What’s up, Doc?” I asked calmly, not really feeling like I was in control of this.
He gave a light shrug. “It’s your dream, I’m just visiting.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Like a dreamwalk?”
He shook his head. “No. You can control those. I’m doing the shaping work here, but I’m not really in control, either. Your subconscious is, which means you’ll probably say things that will make sense to you now but not when you wake up.” He smiled. “If you even remember this when you wake up.”
“The price of cranberries is two pounds,” I said.
He looked at me evenly. “Thank you for proving my point.”
“Why am I here?” I asked.
He smiled. “It’s just a dream, Sienna. In spite of your remarkable abilities, you dream just like everyone else.”
“Cranberries to that, I say.”
“I came to tell you something,” he said with a smile, “and I should hurry, because I don’t have much time.” The smile disappeared. “Sovereign will be coming for you. I don’t know when it will happen, but he will. And when that time comes, you won’t be able to stop him.”
“The duck-billed platypus is a mammal,” I replied, my brain doing everything in its power to not be helpful.
He inclined his head like he was searching for the right thing to say. “Indeed. I’m warning you about this because you should be aware that he’s coming.”
“But how do you know?” I asked, and once more the world made sense for just a moment.
“Because,” he said, “I—”
There was the sound of a honking horn and the sudden feeling that the world was out of control. My head hit the glass hard enough to jar me awake. I took a sharp breath and realized that we’d just swerved, that we were still driving up the interstate, that whatever had happened had wakened me at exactly the wrong moment.
“Sorry,” Scott grunted. “Who goes forty miles an hour in the left lane?”
“Grandmothers,” I replied, feeling a sudden sense of loss, like I’d left something very important behind in the dream, something I’d never be able to get back. “Illiterates who can’t read signs that say ‘Slower traffic keep right.’ Assholes.” I took a breath and smoothed my hair back. I had let it loose after the fight with my mother, and it was frizzed. “Sometimes they’re all the same person.”
I heard another chuckle from Scott. “Sorry about that. Really.” He glanced over at me and must have caught the look on my face. “You all right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I was having a dream about Zollers. Except he was really there, trying to tell me something.”
Scott’s mien changed only a little, expressing just a faint waver of concern. “What?”
I took a breath of the warm air in the car and looked out at the snowy shoulder of the road, blurring by at well above the speed limit. “He said that Sovereign was coming for me.”
Chapter 14
We arrived at the cloister just before nine p.m. We turned on an old back road into a farming area and my visions of a cloister like the quaint little village I’d seen in England were put aside. The cloister was a trailer park, a dirt road leading into it. There were about ten trailers all set out on a plot of land, trees all around it making a forested boundary. It looked much the same as other trailer communities I’d seen, with corrugated metal sides on some trailers and the fancier wood paneling on others.
I looked over at Scott and saw he wore a pained expression. I had just woken up and felt like I’d left my tact behind in the dream world. “What’s wrong with you?”
He looked over at me, almost apologetic. “Oh, uh. Nothing. Sorry.”
“Clearly it’s something,” I said. “Your face looks like that time you spilled coke all over the carpet of my dorm room and didn’t want to admit to it.”
“We’ll talk after,” he said, bringing the car to a stop outside one of the trailers. He took the keys out of the ignition and opened the door without ceremony, and I heard the crunching of the snow as he got out.
“Whatever,” I said and opened my own door. I didn’t really have time for any emotional issues he might be having, anyway. Not right now.
The chill air seeped through my coat; there was no breeze tonight for whatever reason. I followed him up to the three wooden steps that led to the door and waited down at the bottom while he gave a good, solid knock. “This is my Aunt Judy’s place,” he said, glancing back. “Like, great aunt, I think.” He gave it a moment’s thought. “Twice removed? Wait, no, that’s cousins. It’s something removed, I think.”
The door opened and a woman around my height appeared, her grey hair back in a ponytail and a yellow faded t-shirt covering her upper body. “I like to think of myself as a great aunt, with nothing removed,” she said, but she didn’t add much humor to it, completely deadpan.
“Aunt Judy,” Scott said weakly and leaned down to give her a hug.
“Come in,” Judy said briskly, without any further explanation or warning. “It’s too damned cold to stand outside jabbering all night.” Scott gestured for me to enter first, so I did, and he followed behind and shut the door.
The trailer was immaculate, the brown and white spotted carpet looking as if it had been vacuumed every day since it had been put in. The white linoleum flooring at the far side of the room in the kitchen area was spotless, my meta-enhanched eyesight could already see from here. The walls were covered in faint, blue-striped wallpaper, which blended well. A few pictures of perfectly hung natural scenes were on each wall, evenly spaced. A television was going quietly to my right.
The trailer was warm, pleasantly so after the bitter reminder I’d had from the car to the door that it was in fact winter in Minnesota. Judy was ahead of us, her face looking tired. She gestured to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair. “Will this suffice for our talk?”
“Sure,” I said, taking off my coat and hanging it on the back of the chair she gestured to.
She was eyeing Scott now, her old, faded jeans and yellow t-shirt quite the contrast to his khakis and dress shirt. I knew he’d gone home last night and changed, and it made a world of difference. Scott always tended to dress up, preppy boy that he was. I was just surprised he wasn’t wearing a tie. Meanwhile, my natural tendencies made me want to dress like Judy (except for the yellow; it was not in my color wheel), but unfortunately my current job being blackmailed by the United States Government required me to look a little more professional. Or so Senator Foreman had told me. I felt in my coat pocket and found the FBI ID that rested within for reassurance. I didn’t think I’d need it—or the guns that came with it—but I carried them all just the same. Always.
“The kids from your Directorate are staying with a few of
the bigger families around here,” Judy said, a little primly.
I looked around at her trailer, which seemed roughly the same size as all the others, but it was quiet and there was nary a sign that anyone inhabited it with her. “Any of them staying with you?”
“Heavens, no,” Judy said. “I’m a terrible person to live with, especially for a child. My sense of rules and order is very clearly defined and much too strict for most people, which is why I have chosen not to inflict it upon anyone else.”
I blinked at her. “I’ve ... uh ... never heard anyone be quite so critical of their own personality quirks before.”
She shrugged. “I don’t see it as a flaw, but others certainly do, and since I have no desire to annoy, I find it better to live on my own.” She thumped a hand lightly on the table. “Now then. You’ve come about the children, but Scott mentioned on the phone that there were other circumstances propelling you up here. What are they?”
I cleared my throat as Scott took off his coat and sat next to me. “Have you heard the rumors out of Europe?”
She inclined her head slightly as if to say, “Meh.” She was of a generation that probably wouldn’t know what that meant, but the sentiment was definitely there. “I have a few friends in the old world who have stopped returning any phone calls or emails. The responses I do get are from their local constabularies, looking for clues to their deaths or murders.”
I thought about that for a second. “But they’re all murders.”
“The local police in several countries do not share your rather obvious conclusion, I’m afraid,” Judy said, a little primly. “Of course there are some ways in which a meta can die that, by their nature, look like natural causes. Incubi and succubi, naturally—” Scott cleared his throat rather abruptly and Judy looked at him, annoyed, before speaking again. “In any case, the truths are percolating their way out to even us, here at the edge of the wilderness. Something is destroying our kind.”
“But you’re not concerned?” I asked.
“Of course I’m concerned. What kind of a foolish question is that?” Judy’s lips were pressed together tightly, stealing all the color from them.
I realized suddenly that I hadn’t had much to drink in the last few hours. “But you’re not doing anything about it.”
She watched me with a clear sense of annoyance. “Oh, be assured, we’ll do something about it. It’s just that we’re still deciding on what that something will be.”
“There is a man called Sovereign,” I said, just launching into it, “and he’s leading a group called Century that is planning to wipe out all of us to the last meta.”
Judy’s face was already ruddy compared to her yellow shirt. “That son of a bitch,” she said under her breath.
Scott’s eyes widened. “Umm ... Great Aunt Judy? You know him?”
She looked him over like he was an idiot. “Of course I know him. Anyone who’s been around these parts for a few hundred years knows him. He’s been through before, that ass. Used to take pride in breaking metas who’d run local protection rackets, which was a pretty common thing even a hundred years ago. You had these metas who would watch out for a town or county in exchange for money. Sometimes they’d even take the sheriff’s job. Some were honorable about it,” her expression tightened, “some weren’t. Anyhow, Sovereign passed through a few times, and it seemed like every other time he’d break some damned fool who tried to shake him down. The man didn’t say shit to anyone when he’d come through, he’d just walk along, buy food or eat in a restaurant without saying more than a required word to anyone, and be on about his way when he was done.”
“So he was like a good guy, back then?” Scott asked. “Breaking up protection rackets?”
Judy snorted. “Hardly. Sometimes it was warranted, sometimes I think he was just spoiling for a chance to bust someone up. Didn’t kill ’em most of the time, though, and that’s to his credit because he certainly could have. Just warned them off, told them to find an honest job. A lot of them learned to steer out of his way when he came to town. They’d give him a wide berth and he’d given them no trouble.”
“He seems to have changed his mode of operation,” Scott said.
“Yes,” Judy said pensively, a frown on her face. “He didn’t truck with anyone else that I knew of. Damned sure not anyone with as dumb a name as ‘Century.’” She looked over at Scott. “What does it mean?”
Scott almost gulped. “Like, a hundred years—”
“I know that, you dunce,” Judy said, and I almost thought she was going to reach across the table to take a swipe at him. “Why did he name his group Century?”
Scott looked at me, I looked back at him. “We don’t know,” I answered.
She frowned at me. “Might be something you ought to look into.”
“I’ll add it to the list of things to discuss when I meet him,” I said, trying not to let my voice carry too much sarcasm.
“So why are you here?” Judy asked, looking at me now. “Really. Because you didn’t know I knew Sovereign from before, did you?” She leaned in closer. “You know why he calls himself that? Sovereign, I mean?”
“Because he’s a man unto himself,” I said. “Like an island all on his own. Says he doesn’t need anything, or anybody.”
She gave me a curt, perfunctory and satisfied nod. “That’s what he always said.”
I watched her carefully. “You don’t believe him?”
She shrugged again. “Everybody needs something.”
I looked at her, she looked back. “Do you know what he wants? Or what he needs?”
She breathed in and out, thinking about it. “He needs food and water, I know that. Needs to sleep from time to time, because they say he’d find shelter in an inn for the night sometimes, and woe betide anyone who was dumb enough to wake him in the night for any reason. Just like the rest of us in that regard. But other than that ... no, I don’t suppose I know of anything else he needed or wanted. He never really talked to anyone, never visited a whorehouse while around here or showed any interest in any of the women in the area.” She got a glint of amusement in her eyes. “And I recall one even threw herself at him, stupid trollop.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“Not a damned thing,” Judy said. “Just walked right around her like she was nothing more than a stone in the road he was stepping out of the way to keep from tripping on.”
I filed that away for later. If he wasn’t interested in women, maybe men were more his cup of tea. I was desperate for a vulnerability. After all, what could make a man as long-lived as that apparently not interested in anything or anyone? “You asked us why we’re here,” I said.
Judy didn’t blink, just gave me the flint-hard look back. “Yes?”
“We’re here to check up on the kids that fled the Directorate, for one,” I said. “But the other reason we’re here is because I’m trying to organize a fight against Sovereign. Against Century.”
Judy leaned back in her chair. “Well, that’ll be an interesting sort of slaughter, I suppose.”
I hesitated. “You don’t think there’s a way to beat him?”
She laughed but it sounded more like a cackle, completely bereft of any amusement. “Sweetie,” she said, but there was nothing sweet about her pronunciation of the word, “if he’s got a hundred metas at his disposal and they’ve already rolled through the cloisters of Europe, he will not have any trouble making you and anyone dumb enough to line up with you into a flat smear on the pavement wherever you’re standing when you meet him.” She turned to Scott. “You too, numbnuts. Might want to think this one through with your head, for once, instead of your crotch.”
Scott bristled. “You think I’m going into this fight because I’m running on testosterone? Like I’ve got some need to prove the size of my manhood?”
Judy didn’t back down, but now she was amused. “Oh, no, I’m sure that’s still as insubstantial as it was when you were a kid taking baths with you
r cousins.” She waved a hand in my direction. “No, I mean that you’re going into a battle that’s going to get you killed to impress your girlfriend here.”
“Oh, me?” I said after a moment’s pause allowed that to sink in. “I’m not his girlfriend. His girlfriend—well, ex, now—she’s ...” I looked down at myself. “She’s blond and leggy, and I’m ... so not.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “No, really,” I said. “We’re not! I can’t even—” I halted myself and saw a flicker on her face. “Well, anyway, we’re not, in spite of whatever you might think. I mean, we couldn’t, even, because ... well, anyway.” I stopped myself short of explaining how my last boyfriend had died only a couple weeks earlier.
She had an even more suspicious look now and glanced down at my hands, my leather gloves tight around them. “It’s kinda warm in here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said absently.
“Why do you still have your gloves on?” Judy asked, and she cocked her head at me with her eyes narrowed.
“It’s for—”
“She just forgot to take them off,” Scott interrupted me.
“—your protection,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Scott like he was a moron for answering for me.
I turned back to see Judy glaring at me, then she turned back to Scott, all hostility now. “Did you bring a soul eater into my house?”
Scott shook his head swifty. “Nooooo …” He stretched out the word to make it even more obvious he was lying.
“You’re as bad a liar now as you were as a kid,” Judy said, stating the obvious. Her face was flushed a bright red and I started to get an inkling that this was not the place to be. The image of a raven flashed in my mind and there was a stir in the back of my consciousness, a screaming from the place where I was keeping my hitchiking souls.
She is an Odin-type, Bjorn shouted once I let him out. Her ire is raised.
Tell me something I don’t know, I shot back at him.
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