Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  But worry of a kind she didn’t remember seeing from him before.

  “Miriam,” Hamilton said softly, hovering over Graham and looking down at him, “be a dear and go roust Caitir, will you? I think we’re going to need her Persephone abilities for this. Ease the boy’s spirit a bit.” He turned to favor Rose with a weather eye, and she could see discomfort there, as well.

  “What…what happened to him?” Rose asked, still sitting in the dirt where she’d moved away from Graham.

  No one spoke for a long moment, and the only sound—other than Graham’s ragged breathing—was Miriam’s hard footfalls as she ran back to the village. They lessened in time, receding into the distance.

  “You happened to him,” Rose’s mam finally said, and there was so much quiet judgment in her words. Even more in her eyes when she turned to look at Rose, hints of betrayal speckled in with the worry.

  “Now, now,” her granddad started, “you dinnae—”

  “I do,” her mam said, a whisper filled with fury. “I was afraid of this. That you’d take after…him.” She said the last word replete with such disgust that Rose wanted to scamper back farther to escape any possible venom that might have spewed from her mam’s mouth.

  “You always knew that was a possibility,” her granddad said with his usual air of quiet patience.

  “I never thought she would, though,” her mam said, and there was that streak of betrayal crawling through her words like snakes writhing in hay.

  “No harm was done,” her granddad said. “Nothing done here that can’t be undone.”

  “Your granddaughter is a succubus,” Tamhas said in a whisper so low that Rose barely heard it. Had the adults around her been talking like this all along? She knew in her heart they had, she’d seen it happen for years, heard the bare hiss, but never realized that they were having full conversations so low that she and Graham had never heard them. “I don’t think that can be undone.”

  “Tamhas,” Hamilton said warningly, and he was looking straight at her. They all were.

  Rose felt like she’d been cracked hard over the head with a thick bough.

  A succubus?

  A damned soul eater?

  Her?

  Her skin tingled with cold, crawling over the warm feeling that had favored her moments earlier, when she’d been touching Graham. The world had seemed so pleasant then, so pleasurable—

  Now it seemed like winter was going to set in any second, and a blizzard would bury her right here.

  Her mam was staring at her with fury, and Rose stared right back. When she found her words, Rose said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Her mam said nothing. Just looked away.

  She looked at her granddad. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”

  He seemed to take a breath in, though just barely, movement so subtle he was almost a statue. “Your mam asked me not to.”

  “And when you have ye ever listened to her before when she’s asked that?” Rose was on her feet now, steadier than she thought she could have been. Her skin was hot again, and she wanted to touch someone else.

  They all seemed to recoil from her, and that made Rose hold back. She looked at Tamhas. “You didn’t say anything. Just now.” She stared at him, and he looked away. “You knew? You must have; you ran and got me mam and granddad right off when you realized I could hear you talking low, so…you must have known.” She looked from Tamhas to Hamilton. “Didn’t you?” The quiet accusation felt harsher to her than if she’d yelled.

  Hamilton nodded, his face contorted with a strange regret. “Of course we knew. But…we all hoped you wouldn’t end up as…well…you know…”

  “As a bloody soul eater,” her mam said, harsh anger bleeding out into the quiet air.

  A thick drop peppered Rose’s cheek, followed by another that landed on her shoulder.

  The quickening pace of the rain seemed to reawaken the others. “We should get him inside,” Tamhas said. “There’s nothing to be done just waiting here. Moving him won’t hurt him.”

  “Aye,” her granddad said, and positioned himself at Graham’s legs. “Let’s be about it.”

  The clouds had given way now, crashed on each other, no Scottish sunshine left to see. It was all grey gloom above as her granddad lifted Graham by the legs, Hamilton got him under the arms, and they started back toward the village, Tamhas supporting him with an arm under the lower back. They didn’t struggle at all under his weight.

  They hurried, picking up the pace as the shower increased, fat drops raining down around them. They were out of sight in thirty seconds, disappearing up over the rise back to the village and leaving Rose alone with her mam.

  That didn’t last long, though. Her mam wouldn’t look at her, and soon enough, she turned to leave as well, giving Rose the sight of her back.

  Rose’s eyes burned, but she stayed where she stood. “Mam!” she called out, when she could bear the quiet of her mam under the fury of the coming storm no longer.

  Her mam stopped, but only for a second. “You’re such a disappointment,” she said, and that was it.

  And soon enough, she, too, disappeared over the hill.

  Quietly, six strangers watched it all happen. Among them stood a man with sandy blond hair, and the stir of familiar feeling came through him at the sight of the exchange, a peculiar similarity that verged on deja vu.

  *

  “This all seems…familiar,” Zack David said, running a hand through his hair, ruffling it. His hair wasn’t actually here, but then, neither was he; the events they’d just watched play out must have happened years ago. They were most certainly not of the now, though he couldn’t put his finger on an exact year, at least. The village looked almost timeless in its way, and by that token seemed frozen in time. He stared at the red-haired succubus in the storm, rain pouring down around her. She stood there alone, the girl who’d just lost everything she’d ever had, and…

  He almost felt sorry for her.

  Almost.

  “I imagine you’ve seen this story play out somewhere before,” Aleksandr Gavrikov said stiffly. He wasn’t wearing his habitual skin of fire, but he hadn’t worn it habitually for quite a while. When Zack had made his acquaintance—briefly—in life, he had scarcely gone without it. Now, as he stared at the Russian, whose eyes betrayed nothing but sadness most of the time, he felt a hint of pity for him, too. Gavrikov’s gaze met his own, and the Russian smiled, faintly, as if to acknowledge their shared plight.

  Trapped in the head of an unfamiliar succubus. Prisoners.

  “It does have some incredible parallels,” Zack said. The red-haired girl was just standing in the rain now, soaked to the bone as they all watched her. “There was more snow in Sienna’s tale. And the first time she touched my hand, I didn’t pass out, just felt lightheaded.” He spoke somberly, because damn if he didn’t feel somber. Dead for seven years, and now he’d been passed off from his familiar respite of Sienna’s mind into someone else’s.

  And she…this Rose…did not seem friendly.

  “So far I’m not enjoying the dime tour,” Gerry Harmon said with his usual sarcasm. He was unflappable, a bit of a cipher when he didn’t want his emotions to show. Zack imagined that would have been incredibly useful during his last job—President of the United States—but now it was distinctly annoying, because it always felt like Harmon was cut off and above it all.

  Well. It had felt like that. The occasional note of fear was creeping in here and there, and that was hardly unexpected. Harmon had seemed to just get used to being one of Sienna’s souls, and now…

  Now they weren’t anymore.

  “I don’t like this bitch,” Bjorn said, almost snorting his anger. Rose had greeted him with a distinct lack of kindness, ripping into him with a kind of agonizing touch that Sienna could have imparted at any time, but never did—or at least hadn’t for a long, long time.

  “Join the club,” Eve Kappler tossed in. Her arms were folded, her eyes set and hard. “She ca
lled us ‘boring.’”

  “At least she did not hit you with torturous pain,” Bjorn said, sounding a little resentful. The grey Scottish sky hung over them, and below, the redhead shuddered under the chill of the blowing winds and now downpour. She was so thin, so sad…she looked a bit like a wet cat left out in the rain.

  “We are not on sound footing, that’s for sure,” Roberto Bastian said. The former squad leader carried a sort of military precision and a reserve of his own that seldom cracked. It was showing some signs of strain now though, with their familiar ground ripped away from them—quite literally torn out of what had been their home for, in most cases, years—and now landed here, in an unfamiliar mind, witnessing unfamiliar spectacles.

  “What did she do with Wolfe?” Zack asked, chewing a lip that no longer actually existed. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “He’s her new fair-haired boy-toy,” Harmon said with dry amusement—or perhaps a sarcastic lack thereof. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”

  “He’s living life on the Lido deck,” Eve said, “and we’re down in the bilge pumps.”

  “This is bilge all right,” Bjorn said, seething. He locked eyes on the redhead in the rain. “If I could, I would go down there and pound her until she was nothing but blood and bone strewn over these rocky Scottish grounds.”

  Harmon stared out at the thin figure in the rain. “You should go try that.”

  Bjorn seemed to take it as a dare. “Perhaps I will.” And he turned, thundering off toward the memory of Rose.

  “Now that we’ve eliminated most of the idiocy,” Harmon said, glancing at Bjorn running toward Rose in the distance, “can we have a discussion about what’s next that doesn’t involve vague and stupid threats? I’d like to talk about this clear-eyed.”

  “His eyes certainly aren’t clear,” Zack said as Bjorn passed through the past Rose, still standing there alone. Bjorn sailed through her in a tackle that didn’t land, as though she were mist, or he were. “All he sees is red.”

  “What do you think is going to happen here, Harmon?” Gavrikov asked stiffly.

  “I think it’s obvious,” Harmon said, and Zack detected a measure of reluctance. “Rose is going to go after Sienna. She’s going to try and kill her. And with Wolfe on her side…she might well succeed.”

  Zack’s face burned like Gavrikov had lit off a fire within it. “Lots of people have tried to kill Sienna. No one has succeeded yet.”

  “No one else has been this well matched,” Harmon said. “Think about what Rose has been doing. She’s created metas specifically for the purpose of draining them and stockpiling their powers. She is the meta equivalent of a nuclear bomb.” He looked apologetically at Gavrikov. “No offense intended, what with you previously occupying that role.”

  “I saw it as more the meta equivalent of a Swiss army knife,” Eve said, pensive. “Because of the versatility.”

  “No offense taken,” Gavrikov said. “But I agree with Zack. Many have tried to kill Sienna. All have failed. This Rose? I do not think this time will be any different.”

  “It will be different,” Harmon said, “because she is different. Think about it. Whoever she is, whatever her axe to grind, she has planned this for years. She set a trap for Sienna, drew her in, got close to her, and managed to cloud her suspicions long enough to pull off the greatest sucker punch since 1941. Now Sienna’s back to being a vanilla succubus, none of us to aid her.”

  “That’s happened before,” Zack said. “And she wiped out the people that came after her then, too.”

  “I’m starting to agree with the President,” Bastian said, snugging his arms tighter around him. “Think about it, Zack. In any engagement, there are factors for and against you. Maybe you’ve got favorable weather and your opponent doesn’t. Or you’ve got a strategy and you ambush them on ground that works to your advantage. Sienna had powers that others couldn’t or didn’t have. The ability to heal from almost any wound. The power to throw fire or blow up like a bomb. To net up her enemies in twine of light. Or even,” and here he seemed to turn away slightly, “go dragon if all else failed. She’s got none of that now, so on Sienna’s side—she’s lost her advantages. At the same time, on the other side of the equation, Rose has stacked them up. And when it comes to locale, we’re on unfamiliar ground to Sienna, so…” He shrugged.

  “You think she’s unbeatable,” Eve said, “because you want to believe she’s unbeatable.”

  “Because no one has beaten her yet,” Zack said.

  “Yet,” Harmon said, “being the operative word. But no one has ever stacked the deck this hard against her. She has little left to rely on.”

  “We’re not going to settle this right now, today,” Eve said as they all watched Bjorn pick himself up and promptly attack the image of Rose again, to no effect. He turned on it once more, and this time seemed to content himself with punching at it, hands slicing through the face, the body, without any contact. He did not stop though, continuing to attack with merciless wrath the girl standing there in the increasingly pouring rain.

  “I don’t think we can settle this at all,” Gavrikov said, looking around at each of them in turn. “What were we ever able to do from within Sienna, after all?” He stared into the distance, the mountain rising above the village looming.

  “You used to set her hand on fire all the time,” Zack said, trying to breathe a little hope into them. “And Harmon—you can use your telepathy, can’t you?”

  “I can’t,” Harmon said. “She has an empath, and they seem to be blocking me, either intentionally or by proximity.” He looked around. “That said…Zack has a point. We’re inside the enemy fortress right now.”

  “I think we’ve all noticed that,” Bastian said. “Can any of the rest of you…just feel the seething rage around us?” He looked around. “The hills are alive with a whole lot of pissed-off people.”

  “I feel it, yes,” Harmon said. “I think it’s the other souls she’s taken and pressed into service. There must be…thousands.”

  “And we thought Sienna was a killer,” Eve said darkly. “Figures Wolfe would switch his allegiance to this Rose.”

  “I wouldn’t have called that, myself,” Zack said, truly feeling the disappointment and surprise combo, rolling through his—well, he didn’t have a body, as such, so it must have rolled through his soul. “He always seemed so loyal, right up until—”

  “Until we came to Scotland,” Harmon said. “Then he got sullen. Withdrawn. Stuck in his own head—”

  “Or lack thereof,” Zack muttered.

  “We can’t worry about him right now,” Harmon said. “We have problems of our own.”

  Zack could agree with that. The cold rain was coming down around them, and he looked up at the grey sky. It was complete and total, from one side of the horizon to the other—Scottish sunshine indeed. “What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

  “We wait,” Harmon said, though he did not sound sure. The others, still gathered in their little circle, shifted uneasily. Gavrikov evinced a hint of worry, one of the few times Zack had ever seen that from him that did not involve his sister. “Because really…there’s nothing else we can do right now…”

  2.

  Sienna

  My mother had a favorite quote when she used to train me: “There’s always someone bigger and badder than you.” In the way of all teenagers, I just thought she was stupid. Drunk on my own teenage invincibility, I didn’t think I’d ever meet that bigger and badder person.

  There was a pain in my shoulder. It radiated out along my arm, the product of getting dragged beneath a truck for hours. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you could call deleterious, but it still ached. It had been worse a few hours ago, before I’d caught some sleep under some bushes on the side of the road, but it was still present, like a reminder that I’d not only gotten my ass kicked last night, but kicked well and truly.

  The sound of car engines was a low buzz in the distanc
e, and I raised my head. I’d slept in the dirt, the remainder of my tattered clothes now covered with grains of sandy soil. I brushed the bottom branches of the tree above me, rattling the boughs such that I bristled, stiffening like I’d heard something. I had, and it was myself, and even that was enough to send a thrill of fear all the way through me.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother had a “bigger and badder” person in mind when she said that little ditty. His name was Sovereign. I eventually ended up fighting him and beating him, and since that day, six years ago, I had gotten in a lot of fights.

  Actually, saying “a lot” might be understating it.

  I had gotten in a heaped shit ton of fights, and I’d won every single one of them in the end. There wasn’t a person who’d stood against me that I hadn’t bested or let walk away. I kicked more ass than the proverbial Chuck Norris, whom the internets had suggested, lightly, was perhaps my father. There were a whole slew of jokes about it.

  And then I’d come to Scotland…and man, had I gotten my ass whooped.

  I finally found that badder person Mom had promised, and she turned out to be a real—

  “Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath, the sound of my voice piercing the early morning calm. There was little noise of nature in this thicket of trees, overcome as it was by the nearby road. The sun was either up and covered by clouds, or still working on rising. I was in Scotland, which meant it could go either way, really. I sat up, dragging the ragged ruin of my shirt along with me, a tragic tangle of cloth that hadn’t just seen better days, it had pretty much reached the end of its effective life as any kind of cover for my body. It lacked an entire sleeve, just as my pants were missing a whole leg.

  The wilds of Scotland did not answer my comment. I was in a seemingly endless forest that stretched off to hillocks on either side of me, trees giving me cover in this little valley that was pierced only by a road some hundred or so feet to my right. I was probably less than an hour outside Edinburgh, though it was hard to tell. I’d been in a rough state last night, shock and trauma having done their part. I’d been hanging on the bottom of a truck, lucky I didn’t get wrapped around the transaxle, holding tight to the chassis like Indiana Jones, for however long it had taken me to get to this point. I’d dropped to the ground when the thin sliver of the world I could see from the undercarriage had been green for a long time, and then rolled off the road to come to rest in the underbrush, where I’d remained until now.