~
Nineteen
I sat across from Old Man Winter in his office, Ariadne standing behind him as always. There was no trace of warmth within these four walls and the day outside looked to be the gloomiest I’d seen thus far. There was a hint of light that told me where the sun had to be, hiding behind a cloud, but the bastard just didn’t want to show himself. Ariadne had led me up here after letting me read the article, the gist of which was that another five people were dead because of me.
I clutched the newspaper in my hand and tossed it on Old Man Winter’s desk. “Why did you tell me this? Wouldn’t it have been more helpful to you if you hid it from me?”
Ariadne shook her head. “You’d find out eventually.”
Old Man Winter studied me as he always did. “By telling you, we hope to gain your trust. To let you know that we aren’t hiding anything from you; that it is all out in the open.”
A roiling torrent of emotion bubbled beneath the calmest exterior I could produce…so probably not all that calm. “Why do you want my trust?”
Ariadne fixated on me. “To let us protect you from Wolfe. We need to keep you safe.”
“How can we even be sure it’s him?” I hoped it wasn’t. I hoped I was wrong, that five more bodies weren’t added to the pile of corpses I was responsible for in the week since I’d left home. The number of people dead because of me outweighed the number of people I’d met.
Old Man Winter nudged open a file folder and pulled out a glossy 8x10 photograph, sliding it across the desk to me. I picked it up and stared at it: a photo of a wall. Two bodies were visible at the bottom edge of the shot, a woman and what I thought might have been a little girl; she was almost cropped out of the frame. There were words scrawled on the wall, in a dark crimson that almost looked black: Waiting for a little doll to come out and play.
I felt sick all over again, but in a different way.
“There are more,” Old Man Winter said in his devastating, quiet timbre. “At least two other houses last night, five more victims. They were not discovered in time to make the morning paper.”
A small, plaintive cry of despair escaped my lips. “More?” I croaked. Numbness replaced the sick feeling. “How many more can there be?”
Ariadne looked at me with a pained expression. “Will you let us protect you?”
My mouth was dry. “Who’s going to protect all those people out there from Wolfe?”
“We can’t protect everybody,” Ariadne replied. “All we can do is keep you safe. Will you let us?”
I felt a twinge in my belly where Wolfe had clawed into me. “If I do, how long does this go on?”
“We’re trying to make contact with M-Squad, trying to get them back here sooner, but…” Ariadne trailed off.
“Still out of contact,” I finished for her, not really hearing my own words. “What are the odds that they can take Wolfe, anyway?”
“I would bet on them,” Ariadne said with a slight smile. “They’ll sort out Wolfe when they get back. We just need you to endure until they get here. It will get worse before we can make it better.”
I leaned back in the chair opposite Old Man Winter. “So I just sit back and let these people die, family by family, to save my own skin?”
An air of silence hung in the office, colder than the air around us. “Would you rather go and face him?” Old Man Winter said. “Would you care to taste what he has in mind for you?”
“They say I’m strong.” I spoke fast, words bubbling up from emotional depths, fear and hatred of Wolfe fueling me in equal measure. “Stronger than most metas; and Wolfe is afraid of you – between the two of us, maybe a few others, couldn’t we…maybe we could…”
For the first time since I’d known him, Old Man Winter hung his head in obvious defeat. “I cannot win a fight with Wolfe; my earlier efforts at fending him off were purest bluffery. I have not a quarter of the strength I had when last we fought, and he has grown stronger, more canny and more experienced. He would,” Old Man Winter said with resignation, “destroy me in mere moments, and you shortly thereafter, along with any other metas we brought along.” His head came up, and the cold blue eyes held an aura of sadness.
Ariadne spoke, her words coming almost as low as his. “You are the strongest meta left on the campus at present. Only one other is even close. Not enough to take Wolfe.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head again, “M-Squad has all the strength of the Directorate and it is in them that our hope lies.”
“So we just sit back, hide, and watch as he kills three or four families a night until M-Squad comes back?” My voice was raw. I thought back to my encounters with Wolfe and wondered again if there was any way I could beat him myself. I thought about the pen in his ear and wondered at any other weak points he might have; eyes, mouth…his bones felt unbreakable, but with enough force they could surely be destroyed. The only question would be what could deliver enough force. “There has to be a way to beat him.”
“Would you suggest shooting him?” Ariadne asked.
“No,” I said with a shake of the head. “Guns don’t even break the skin. The tranquilizer darts, though. Maybe if we loaded him up with those darts…”
“Based on what we’ve seen, one of his powers seems to be to adapt to attacks – the shock cannon that Kurt hit him with was less effective each successive time it was used, to the point where he shrugged it off when he attacked us here.” She cast a sidelong glance at Old Man Winter. “We suspect his resistance to bullets is something that has developed over time; it’s doubtful that the darts or the toxin would be as effective this time around.”
“He has always been uncannily adaptable to changing situations,” Old Man Winter said, “and has lived through battles that have killed lesser metas by the hundreds. There is a reason that Wolfe and his brothers have lived for thousands of years.”
“There has to be a way to beat him,” I said with urgency. “Something. Some weapon in your arsenal that you haven’t tried yet, like that shock cannon…something that can just buy us a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said, voice gentle. “There’s nothing. We’ve bluffed him well enough that he seems to be steering well clear of the Directorate, but until M-Squad returns, it is only a bluff. We need to keep you here, protect you, until we can work out this situation. It’s the only course we have available.”
My voice cracked. “Unless I give myself up.”
“Ridiculous,” Ariadne replied. “You know what he would do to you. Do you really want to go through that?”
“No,” I answered. “But neither do I want to keep sacrificing others, watching bodies pile up and families get destroyed because I’m too scared to face Wolfe.”
“Give us a little more time,” Ariadne said in a pleading tone. “Let us get M-Squad back. Once they’re here, we can take care of Wolfe.”
I put my hands in front of my face and started doing the mental arithmetic. Two dead in the parking lot outside the grocery store. Eight at my house when I wanted to face Wolfe the first time. Eight more when he attacked the Directorate campus. Ten last night, none of whom I’d even met. Almost thirty dead at the hands of Wolfe, every single one of them because they stood between me and that maniac. How many would it take? What if I left town? Like Zack said, he might eventually find me, but how many people would he kill in the interim? Hundreds? Thousands? Would he eventually just burn the city to the ground?
The fear choked me again. I wasn’t as afraid of dying as I was of what Wolfe was going to do to me first. I had caught a sample of his idea of play and the thought of uninterrupted time with him doing what he liked was enough to make me sick again. He would violate me in ways that I couldn’t imagine, based on my limited experience in the world and with men. In a way, my naïveté probably spared me from being even more fearful. Or maybe the fear of the unknown made it worse.
I looked back to Ariadne and Old Man Winter, who were looking at me, waiting for
a response. I wanted to be brave. Part of me wanted to fight him again, to knock him down, to make him fear me the way I feared him.
But my hands felt weak. They shook. I couldn’t beat him, I knew that. I didn’t want him to touch me, didn’t want to smell his disgusting, rotten breath or feel his claws caressing my skin and drawing blood, didn’t want to feel him rubbing and pushing against me again. I choked on my cowardice and justified it in my head – I didn’t want to be near him again. Ever.
All I wanted was to go home, back to the simple world of Mom, and when I was bad, the box. Nobody but me got hurt there. Nobody died.
But Mom was gone. My house was forfeit; it was Wolfe’s domain now, he owned it, and every thought I had of it from now on would be tainted by the memory of how he beat me, broke me in that basement in a way my mother and the box never had. I had nothing left but the Directorate, and no one to trust but these two people that I didn’t even know.
I looked from Old Man Winter to Ariadne, each in turn. Winter was brooding and quiet while Ariadne was waiting with patient expectation. I choked on my words, but finally they came out, filling my ears with the sound of my cowardice, drawing a nod from Winter and a smile from Ariadne.
“You win.”
Alone: The Girl in the Box, Book 1 Page 20