Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  Somehow, speaking this simple truth let some of the sting of all these months of injury, something I’d not ever been able to put my fingers on exactly before, let loose a tide of feeling I could finally put a name to.

  Stinging anger at the world’s ingratitude toward the person who’d saved them more times than they’d ever know.

  “You should be careful what you wish for,” Isabella said, taking my hand gently, our living room quiet now, our eyes meeting over the distance between us. “You might just get what you want…and then you might find…it was not what you wanted at all.”

  8.

  Sienna

  John’s fridge had been inadequately stocked, at best, and between the t-shirt I was now wearing that proclaimed Kytt’s allegiance to some (presumably) UK band named (I am not, as Dave Barry would say, making this up) “The Stranglers,” and the near-lack of anything life-giving available to eat in this house, I started to suspect this chick’s judgment was off.

  John himself didn’t help that suspicion. He was, as one might expect from a hostage, by turns sullen, and scared, and then verbose in that I’m-a-nervous-Scot-and-you-can’t-understand-a-thing-I’m-saying sort of way. For the last half hour, as I’d alternated watching Sky News and the BBC, John had favored me with a hash of his opinions of various topics, including how America was getting it wrong in so many ways. Even though I couldn’t disagree with him in many regards, it was still a perpetual irritation to hear your country run down in front of you, and I wondered if he thought he was ingratiating himself to me or was just too nervously stupid to know he was pissing me off by the second.

  I was chewing the last meat off a chicken bone, and my patience was wearing thinner than my Stranglers t-shirt, which I suspected had been made by infants in a sweat shop somewhere, such was the quality. Still, of all Kytt’s clothing, it fit me the best, probably because it fit her the worst, if I had to guess. All her jeans had holes in the knees for some reason, and, thinking back, I recalled seeing twenty-something girls with exactly that look in Edinburgh. Apparently the American eighties had come late to Scotland.

  “I just don’t know why you Americans don’t—” John started to say.

  “Shut up, John,” I said, not as lightly as I might have on a truly full stomach. The one leg of chicken and a few slices of stale bread hadn’t done much to alleviate my stomach’s pissiness. I was about two steps away from opening a can from the pantry described as “Spotted Dick,” because there wasn’t much in there other than that, and the fridge was now bare save for a bottle of HP sauce, which I had honestly contemplated drinking just for the calories. I gave it a sniff and decided it wasn’t worth it. “If you don’t stop shit-talking my country,” I said, giving John my full attention again, “you’re going to see what Merle Haggard called, aptly, ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me.’” His eyes swelled, and he swallowed visibly at that threat, then nodded. “I need a map,” I said, staring him down.

  “In the car,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “Cash?”

  “Wallet in the bedroom.”

  I was ticking through my mental list. “How much?”

  “Fifty pounds, maybe?”

  That’d do. It would have been better if it had been thousands, but I was beggaring, not choosering. “How full is your gas tank?”

  He stared at me curiously for a second, then got it. “It’s about half full of petrol. I should warn you—it’s not a new car.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, because I didn’t, insofar as if it moved, I’d work with it. The UK had some sort of rigorous emissions testing standard anyway, so if the car was a giant piece of crap, it probably wouldn’t have passed that, leaving me feeling confident it wasn’t a total garbage bucket. “I’ll try and keep it intact so that the police are able to return it to you whole after I’m done with it.” If he took solace in that, he didn’t give any sign, still looking like a frog I’d squeezed too tight in the holding.

  “Are…are you leaving soon, then?” he asked, doing a little fishing when he found his voice.

  “Soon enough,” I said, and flipped on the TV in the corner of the living room. It came on to the news, and I was treated to a man staring right into the camera, dressed up in a suit and looking quite coiffed.

  “—again, announcing that Police Scotland—” his accent wasn’t too bad “—are seeking assistance with their manhunt for Sienna Nealon.” He paused, looked at the camera and said, “Err…I mean…womanhunt? Personhunt?” He tried ‘em all out, apparently worried about offending someone, presumably not criminal me. He blushed, and went right back to reading.

  “Hmph,” I said, paying little attention to what was going on now that he was just blathering. “Let’s hope they don’t find her.” I flipped the TV off and looked at John. Archie came up to my ankle again, breathing heavily. “Does he need food before I go?” I dropped down and gave Archie a good petting on the back of the neck. “Who’s a good boy? You are. Yes, you are.”

  “Uh, no, he’s fine,” John said. “You can go anytime, no worries about us.” He smiled, the most forced, plasticine thing I’d ever seen.

  “All right,” I said. “You’re sure about that map in the car?”

  “It’s in the glove compartment,” John said with a swift nod. I meandered over to him as he talked, and he watched me with a wary eye like I was going to strike him dead or something.

  I checked the knots and bindings. “You sit your ass in this chair until Kytt gets home tonight,” I said, yanking a little harder than was strictly necessary on one of the flannel shirts I’d bound his feet to the chair legs with. It was snug; he might have to cut through it, which he’d have a hell of a time doing given his hands were now bound behind him and anchored to the chair independently. I’d used the clothes, and duct tape, trying to achieve some measure of binding that wouldn’t cause him to lose a limb to lack of blood but still keep him tied up for a while as I made my escape from Scotland. “In that time, if I were you, I’d think about how great she is, and how lucky you are to have her, and how many other women in this world are ever so much worse and more fearsome.” I threw that last part in because what the hell, he needed to occupy his mind on gratitude, and drawing a contrast between hellish me and his lovely significant other seemed like a safe way to do so.

  “Oh, yes, I’m a lucky man indeed,” he said, nodding his head fiercely.

  “Damned right,” I said, and gave Archie another pet as he wobbled up to me. “All right, boy. Stay. Both of you.” And Archie dutifully plopped down next to John as I headed for the exit, grabbing the car keys off the ring by the door as I plunged out into the daylight. “Making friends everywhere I go,” I muttered, mostly to myself, as I swept out into the weak summer sunshine.

  9.

  John’s car was functional, and that was about it. Another of Europe’s ubiquitous shoe cars, it had the virtue of at least being not too old, I guess, though I suspected from the smell it had been used to haul livestock, however one would manage that with only enough passenger space to carry a lamb if it had been butchered first.

  I took the winding roads east, following the map, having found the destination immediately upon getting my hands on it. I’d quickly sketched out the route, which was pretty much back roads the whole way. I had it spread out on the seat next to me, giving myself plenty of time to get where I was going. And it was good thing I did, too, because the airfield was not on this map, so I was basically going by my recollection of what I’d seen on the phone screen before I’d broken it.

  That was fine, though; I had time to drive in circles around the area I knew it was in, tracking it down. It was out on a kind of half-ass peninsula north of the Firth of Forth. Bordered to the east by the North Sea, and with St. Andrews up north of it, I had a solid idea of where I was going—roughly. I’d caught the name of the town of Lochty, and the road the airfield was on, and from there I just drove until I got to that locale.

  The cloud cover was heavy overhead for
most of the trip. I tried to stick to back roads, which slowed my progress but helped me avoid any police entanglements. In fact, I didn’t see a single cop anywhere along my route. Looking at the nature of the car, I didn’t have to worry about GPS tracking or LoJack in the thing, for which I was also grateful. I turned on news radio and tuned it out for the most part, listening to the continuing excitement over the fact that Sienna Nealon was in Scotland, which was apparently the most thrilling thing that had happened since the Haggis disaster of ‘07 or whatever passed for major news around here.

  The hilly countryside was pretty, and I was lucky in that although there were a lot of blind corners coming around hillocks, I didn’t run into any police roadblocks along the way. I was slightly tense as I drove, the maddening silence inside my head chipping away at my resolve. Until today, it had been a while since I’d actually driven a car, and I’d never done it on the wrong side of the road.

  My mind settled into a steady rhythm as I got on a long straightaway, and finally my thoughts veered into a territory I hadn’t wanted to contemplate: my missing souls.

  “Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. This silence was killing me.

  I hadn’t even known another succubus could steal my souls, but in fairness, I hadn’t exactly dealt with many of them. My aunt Charlie, my mom, and myself—those were the three succubi I’d known before Rose came into my life. I cursed myself again for not having listened to my suspicions about her, the same suspicions I get for everyone, but damn! I mean, she was a good actress. I’d been around a lot of criminals, and I’d yet to meet one that could perform like her. That was some classically trained stuff right there, and I didn’t wonder that hard why actors from the UK ended up so famous lately. Maybe she’d been in theater when she was young.

  My thoughts wandered back to my souls. I knew what a succubus could do to a soul if they wanted to apply pressure. Agonizing pain was a tool at your disposal, if you wanted to break one of your captives. You could basically turn your brain into a 24/7 torture dungeon for them, if you had a little help.

  And based on the number of powers Rose had, and the number of corpses she’d left behind…I guessed she had a lot of help at her disposal.

  Every single soul she took was another centurion in her personal, mental army. I’d seen it happen on a very small scale with my own souls when they’d taken a run at Harmon one night when he’d first arrived in my mind. There was a horrific, howling noise as they jumped him, one that had woken me out of a sound sleep with the horror of the screaming. I’d put a stop to it, of course—Bjorn claimed it was just hazing, but I’d heard what I’d heard, and Harmon, though quiet about it, had been less insufferable for a few days afterward. That told me that no matter how fine he said he was, whatever they’d hit him with—their combined wills, near as I could suppose—it must have hurt quite a lot.

  That was six against one. Rose could have thousands of souls ready to pour the fire on my few.

  Wolfe could take care of himself, I knew. He’d probably been through worse.

  Then again, when I’d killed him…he’d screamed and begged just like anyone else would. He probably wasn’t used to taking pain anymore, having become the guy who more often dealt it out.

  Bjorn, Eve, Bastian, Gavrikov…they all were pros who knew the score, like Wolfe, a little, in that regard. Harmon, too, to a lesser extent. Pretty much every one of them had been in meta battles at some point, and they’d be familiar with the way things went, with the way of the world, really. Might makes right, and Rose had a lot of might on her side.

  I wasn’t under any illusions about this turning out “right,” though.

  My arm was rested against the window, the warmth of the sun feeling pretty good against the skin, a far cry from the fiery feeling I’d experienced when Rose had put her hands on me and ripped the souls out of my body. I shivered a little at the thought, hands shaking on the steering wheel until I got myself back under control. No one had dominated me like that in a long time, and it felt…

  I nudged the car to the side of the road for a moment and took long, steadying breaths. I was fine. Physically, I was fine. A hundred percent, even, for my own powers.

  But if that were true…why did it feel like a huge chunk had been carved out of my flesh?

  I was keenly aware of that missing space inside, a hollow center that made me feel like Rose had cut me open and ripped out a few internal organs. Sure, maybe I could survive for a little while without them, but sooner or later I’d keel over dead without what was missing. It was a gaping, empty hole within, a painful cavern inside me that echoed every time I spoke, resonating with a kind of agony that I hadn’t fully experienced, even when all my friends had betrayed me and the US government had turned on me.

  It was the feeling of being…alone. Actually, truly, completely alone.

  “You bitch,” I said in a voice that sounded very, very small.

  I imagined her face in front of me, and right there with a desire to punch it, squarely, in its freckled paleness, was another desire—to not hit her. To quail away, to turn and run.

  I hated that feeling, and the shot of worry that it sent rushing through my veins. It was a physical reaction to the thought of Rose, a sense of fear that was like a hobble fastened to me, cramping my desire for action.

  She’d made me fear her. That made me hate her even more.

  I spent some time composing myself. Not a single car passed me during that interval, which made me feel like I’d picked the right roads to traverse. I wiped my eyes, cursing the fact that I was actually despairing, alone, in a damned European shoe car, on the side of the road in Scotland. I felt so wretched I could barely put words to it, and I was on my way to a rendezvous that would see me fleeing this country for safer ground.

  I think I hated that worst of all.

  It took a while to get myself back together, but I finally did it. At least I hadn’t full-on ugly-cried, I thought to myself, reveling in this one small victory as I nudged the vehicle back on the road, my destination bleary but visible in the map next to me. I’d held it in, for now, keeping all this fury and sadness and loneliness and isolation buried inside.

  I resolved I’d keep it buried until the next time Rose and I crossed paths, when I was ready for her.

  And then…I’d find some way to make her give me back what she’d taken from me.

  10.

  I found the airfield about an hour and a half before my plane was supposed to land. It wasn’t much of an airfield, more like a grass strip in the middle of miles of farmland, but it was nestled in a little valley, and there wasn’t a ton of cover nearby save for a grove of trees to the west.

  Parking the car miles away seemed like the wise, cautious approach, and now that I was missing most of my godlike powers, I needed to be more careful. So I hiked across the farmland, exercising my right to wander across endless fields, and snaking my way carefully through the woods once I reached the western approach to the airfield.

  I crept through the woods slowly, taking care not to crunch a single leaf. Fortunately it was summer, not autumn, so there weren’t too many leaves on the ground, though there were enough that it required some caution. I listened with every step, avoiding rustling the underbrush. The trees were tall, reaching high into the sky, and I contemplated climbing one, maybe jumping from bough to bough and observing the field from a distance at that height.

  But that was more of a thing for the old Sienna, the one who could cancel out gravity. Not this one, who would probably break a tree branch loudly and send herself plummeting helplessly to the ground to break a leg, thus ensuring that I’d be waiting nicely for Rose and her police helicopters to eventually find me if they passed this way. I wasn’t sure they were going to, but I was paranoid enough to not want to chance it.

  I spared a thought for Alistair Wexford, my contact in the UK government. I felt bad that I hadn’t touched base with him in a few days to explain what was happening up here, but he hadn’t
exactly given me his phone number, so it was at least partly his fault. I wondered if he had any idea what was actually going on. Probably not, given that he’d sent me into the thick of it, but then I’d been betrayed already in the last couple days, so I wasn’t prepared to fully write off the idea that he was involved in Rose’s scheme somehow, though I was still extremely muddled on what Rose’s scheme was, other than beating the hell out of me.

  Once she’d let the mask of her acting drop, I’d seen a real hatred in her eyes, the kind that was breathtaking to behold. Whatever I’d done to her, it had put a bee in her vagina, and she seemed pretty raw about it. Whatever she had in mind for me, I had other plans. In fact, I wanted to be as far from her when she executed her plans as possible. If I could have caught a rocket to the moon on that day, I would have taken it.

  Nah. Nah, I wouldn’t. I didn’t even want to run now, not really. But I needed something to beat her—some help. Wexford’s name floated to my mind again. Another idea came up, too: