“You’re going to send all of us?” I asked, throwing looks around the room in return for the ones I got. Questioning orders like this wasn’t done. Eve gave me the nastiest look of all. “That leaves nothing to defend the campus with.”
“We still have agents,” Ariadne said. “We need a unified front. After Des Moines, I want us to be prepared for anything you might encounter, and I doubt they’re going to hit us here in the hour or two you’re gone.”
“You call it being prepared for anything,” I said, “but this is Omega we’re dealing with and I call it putting all your Faberge eggs in one basket. And then throwing that basket off the top of the IDS Tower.” I paused, and wondered where that thought had come from before realizing it had been a subconscious suggestion I hadn’t even noticed. “Which I am told is fatal.”
Ariadne opened her mouth to respond, eyes looking up as she tried to come up with something. “I can’t really do anything with your eggs metaphor, so let’s put it this way—we’re dealing with an A-rated threat, so I’m sending in my A-Team.”
“Or your M-Squad?” I asked with amusement. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it fast and quiet and get back here. With whatever Omega is planning, this is not a fortuitous time to be absent from the campus for long.”
“Agreed,” Ariadne said. “Kid gloves for the pickup on this one. Take care with her.”
“You asking us to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s a civilian?” Bastian asked, his expression almost unreadable.
“Yes,” Ariadne said. “Take her peacefully, if possible.”
“Omega doesn’t do ‘peacefully,’” Reed spoke up. “They do bloody, violent and destructive, and that’s about it.”
“We do that pretty well ourselves,” Eve said with a wicked smile.
“And that’s fine—if she starts it,” Ariadne said, turning to look at Eve. I couldn’t see her face, but her tone shifted. “The last thing we need is a civilian casualty for some poor British nanny who picked the wrong time and place to get her passport done before she took her dream vacation to see the Mall of America.”
“Wrong season to visit,” Eve said, “Christmas shoppers and all that vileness. Horrible idea.”
“We will take all precautions not to harm her in any way,” Bastian said, ending any debate. “Eve will be at the fore; her nets are second to none for non-lethal containment. Sienna and Reed will follow up, being effective in-fighters, and Clary and Parks will keep overwatch.” He looked around at each of us until he saw the nod. “With your permission, ma’am?” He looked to Ariadne, who gave him the subtle nod of approval, and with that he opened the door and walked out first.
“So, yeah,” J.J. said as Parks left next, “go get ‘em, guys.” He looked at me and his cheeks burned crimson. “And girls.” He turned and caught an icy glare from Eve (which was probably just her normal expression). “And women.” He nodded his head, bobbing it like a jack-in-the-box. “Yeah.”
I filed past J.J. Clary didn’t even try to rush ahead of me like he normally did, for which I…didn’t care, for once. Reed trailed behind me, then spoke as we walked through the cubicle rows. “Good play, you think?”
“Going on the offensive against an Omega agent?” I asked. “Yeah. Leaving the campus stripped of its best guardians? Not so much.”
“Scott and Kat are still here,” Reed said.
“One’s got a hole in her memory the size of the loop on the rollercoaster at Valley Fair and the other is broken into more pieces than that porcelain angel of Ariadne’s that Eve stuck under Clary’s ass at the Halloween party as a joke.” I shook my head. “We just need to hurry, that’s all.”
“You think they’re coming here?” Reed said, and for once he was hard to read.
“I think they’re coming for Old Man Winter,” I said. “Take him out, you think the Directorate keeps rolling along?”
“Ariadne can keep it going,” Reed said. “Why are you worried about this now? He’s been around for a good long while, a few millennia. You think he can’t take care of himself?”
“No,” I said quietly. “I know he can’t. He’s worried about it, thinks he’s at the top of Omega’s target list. He’s pushing me to step up because…it’s like he can feel the axe descending, like he can feel its shadow on the back of his neck. I’ve never seen him like he is now, and I’ve known him for almost a year now.”
“That’s not a very long time to know somebody.” Reed kept impassive, casual. “That’s about how long you’ve known me, after all, and I’m way more of an open book than Winter.”
“We’ve had long conversations because we’re related,” I said, shooting him a half-assed sneer. “Because I wanted to know about our father, and what he was like, and all the things I missed with him being, you know—dead for my entire life. I’ve worked with Old Man Winter, though, and you get kind of a bead on him after a while. There’s emotion under the surface, and for the first time, I’m seeing worry. He knows bad things are coming, even though he doesn’t know exactly what all they are. There are things going on in the meta world that too many people have been warning us about, things we need to take seriously.”
“I wonder about that sometimes,” Reed said as we walked across the lobby, Parks and Bastian in front of us and Kappler and Clary about twenty paces behind. “Your mom told you something big was coming, and then Zollers said basically the same thing.
Now, it’s true Zollers was a psychic—”
“Telepath,” I corrected gently.
“Right, a mind reader,” Reed said, “so maybe he just fed back to you what your mom said just to mess with you?”
I felt a certain clenching pain in my jaw at the memory of my last conversation with Dr. Zollers. He hadn’t just told me that a storm was coming to the world of metas; he’d specifically warned me that no one was looking out for me, which seemed blatantly untrue. If he’d lied about one…“Maybe. Let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t mind being a telepath myself and being able to dig into Zollers mind to see what was real and what wasn’t, because,” I blanched as the breath of the cold outside air hit me in the face while Reed held the door open for me and I transitioned to the outside, “he deceived me for six months when he was playing my psychiatrist, so it’s kinda hard to tell if he might have slipped a truth in there somewhere.”
Reed nodded, and didn’t say anything else. We reached the garage and loaded into one of the smaller white utility vans in silence, almost exactly like the one we’d taken down to Iowa.
“No visible powers in the hotel,” Bastian said. “The last thing we need is attention on this run. No guns unless the situation gets dire.” Bastian’s inflection became slightly accented. “If you hear gunfire, you are weapons-free at that point, but keep the bullets contained. No civilian casualties, verdad ?”
“Righto,” I heard Clary say quietly, buried under the verbal affirmations of everyone else on the team.
The ride to Bloomington went quickly; the traffic was minimal at this time of day, and the freeways were clear as we cruised past tall glass buildings and retail spaces. We took an exit a mile from the Mall of America and got off on a frontage road that cut into a parking lot surrounded by small shrubbery and next to a vacant lot. The van doors swung wide and we deployed out the back, probably not looking terribly inconspicuous as we filed toward the hotel entrance. The building was tall, at least fifteen stories, boxy, square with cream-peach coloring that looked vaguely like stucco. The windows separated out every few feet with ornate shutters that added to the effect of making it look like a throwback, or something that might fit better in Italy than in Bloomington, Minnesota.
The lobby doors swung wide, and Clary held one open for me without meeting my eyes. I tried to ignore this, but good manners got the better of me. “Thank you,” I said as I passed, and he nodded without looking up.
Eve and Bastian led the way, Parks and Clary trailing behind. There was an open staircase in the corner of the building,
and the setup was exactly as J.J. had mentioned. An enormous courtyard lay in the middle of the hotel, the front lobby on one side, kiosks for coffee and muffins and such were scattered around the center of the building. Fifteen floors above us, an enormous skylight ran the length and breadth of the roof, shining daylight down on us through translucent glass that, just for a flash, reminded me of how mother had painted the basement windows in our house.
“Break formation,” Bastian said so quietly that no one but a meta would have been able to hear him. “Sienna and Reed, take the far stairwell, Clary and Parks, keep overwatch down here after you tell management what’s about to go down. Parks, you do the talking. Clary,” Bastian’s voice got tight, “don’t say a word while he’s talking to them.”
“And as for exit?” Eve said under her breath.
“We have an escape route,” Bastian said, slowing his pace for just a tick. “Hold up our FBI IDs and walk her out the front.”
“This is not gonna be subtle,” Parks said in a gravelly whisper.
“More subtle than having Eve fly her out a window,” Bastian replied. “Let’s go.”
Reed and I split from them, Clary and Parks making their way to the front desk while Eve and Bastian made for the nearest staircase. I cut across the courtyard, making my way toward open-air stairs built into the far corner.
“Couldn’t he have assigned us the elevator?” Reed asked.
“Precautionary,” I said. “What if today is the day the elevator breaks down while we’re in it? Control is the name of the game, and you want to retain all the control over the situation you can at a moment like this, even if it’s avoiding an astronomically small risk like elevator failure.”
“What about spraining an ankle taking eleven flights of stairs?” Reed asked with a smile. “What’s the risk on that?”
“You know, that’s probably not a bad point, if you were a clutz. We’re metas. We make Olympic gymnasts look clumsy by comparison.”
We took a couple rounds of stairs without speaking. Reed broke the silence. “How come I’ve never seen Bastian use his power?”
“You see him use his meta strength,” I said, trying to outpace my brother but not make it look like I was.
“Yeah, I didn’t mean the passive powers,” Reed said, “I meant his main one. I don’t even know what he is.”
“He doesn’t use it at all, that I’ve seen.” I let my hand ride the rail as we made our way up, enjoying the tactile feeling of support and the gentle slap of the leather on the metal to coincide with each step. “I’ve heard the whispers though, that he’s a Quetzalcoatl-type, whatever that is.”
“Oh,” Reed said. “Well, that would explain it.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, the rumors don’t exactly cover that, since I don’t think anyone’s ever seen it.”
“You know who Quetzalcoatl was?”
“Sure,” I said, “the feathered serpent. Mesoamerican god.”
“Right,” Reed said. “Walk among the beasts of the ground, fly among the birds of the air. He can transform.”
“Kinda like Parks and his animal forms?”
“No,” Reed said with a smile. “I’ve seen pictures. Think demon-from-hell type stuff. The Mesoamericans who named them feathered serpents might have a talent for understatement.”
“Oh,” I said. “Probably why he doesn’t use it. I asked him once, and he told me he prefers to use weapons—a control thing, of course.”
“Of course.”
We reached the eleventh floor and emerged into the hallway, separated from the yawning maw of the courtyard by only a high railing. “Majestic,” Reed said as he looked down.
Far below, I could see Clary standing next to the coffee stand. “Oh, yeah, it’s a great view. Just once, I’d like to fight in a wide open field rather than in a mall, or a house that collapses on my head, or where I could be dropped eleven stories—or fifty—to a splattering end. Somewhere boring.”
“How about a basement?” Reed asked with a half-smile.
“Keep it up, wise guy, and I’ll throw you off myself.”
Eve and Bastian approached from the other side, converging with us upon the door of Eleanor Madigan’s hotel room at a very casual pace. We all stopped, wordless, outside, halting on either side of the frame so there wouldn’t be any chance for her to see us through the peephole. Bastian held up his hand and gestured to indicate we would be breaking down the door in seconds. I steadied myself and drew the replacement pistol I’d pulled from the quartermaster and took a deep breath, pressing my shoulder to the door next to the frame. Eve stood across from me, Bastian behind her. It was understood that I would be second through the door, and I pulled my gloves off, wiping my hands on my jeans, ridding myself of the excessive sweat on my palms.
I tried to concentrate, tuning out the faint warbling sound of music being piped in over speakers, the scent of lilac pumped into the air conditioners to give the place a nicer smell, the feel of the crosshatching of the gun’s grip in my hand and the sight of Eve tensing across from me, her arms bared because she had left her jacket in the car, her pixie-blond haircut almost white because of the lighting.
She moved, rolling herself off the frame and in front of the door, gun drawn, and kicked, breaking it off its hinges. “FBI!” she called and burst into the room, leading with her pistol in one hand and her other hand extended, ready to cast one of the webs of pure energy that her Peri-type meta powers allowed her to command.
I led with my gun, following behind her only a pace or two, watching her blouse ruffle as she slid through the hotel room’s entry, past the bathroom without clearing it. I pointed my weapon inside; the lights were off, and I ducked in and flipped them on while Bastian passed behind me to back up Eve. I ripped the shower curtain off the rings to be certain the room was clear, then turned to see Reed pass the bathroom door. I could hear them in my earpiece now that we’d gone active, and Eve’s clipped Germanic accent reported, “Clear,” both in my ear and also muffled on the other side of the bathroom wall.
“Her clothes and personal effects are still here,” Bastian said as I joined them. A simple queen-sized bed sat in the middle of the room, red overtones on everything from the carpet to the bedspread giving the place a warm feeling. The bed was made, the suitcase open but in perfect order. “But this room doesn’t look very disturbed. Too clean.”
“To you, perhaps,” Eve said, unsmiling. “This is how it looks whenever I travel.”
“You make your own bed?” Reed asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I prefer everything well ordered.”
“Sighting,” Parks’ voice came over the earpiece. “We have eyes on target; she is in the lobby and moving toward the elevator.”
“Reed,” Bastian said, “make sure the hallway’s clear. Let’s see if we can set the door back up and lure her in.”
“That’s a negatory,” I said. “That sucker is off the hinges. Even an idiot would bolt if they went to unlock the door and it just fell in.”
I saw Bastian’s eyes waver as he pondered the options. “Then we take her getting off the elevator.”
“You might wanna hurry,” Parks voice came in reply, “because she’s in.”
“Move,” Bastian ordered, but we were all in motion already. I kept my pace to the high end of human potential in case anyone was watching, as did the others. We charged along the walkway, the doors of the rooms to our right seeming like a blur of squares shooting by with nothing but open air to our left. We turned the corner and saw the elevator bank; it was built into the walls, with a subtle overreach that had the walkway run under it, like a tunnel, elevators on both sides. The wallpaper took on a browner tone here, protected from the skylights by virtue of being covered over and isolated from the main area. Four elevators, two on each side, serviced the floor. There were potted ferns stuck between each elevator to add some green to the otherwise sterile environment. The yellow lighting on the walls cast the place like a darkened steakhouse
at midday, cave-like, with only the suggestion of daylight showing in through the apertures that led back to the open-air walkways on either side of the elevator bank.
I dodged to the side of the elevators, positioning myself in the middle of two of the doors, waiting to hear the ding. If the light lit up on the opposite side, I would have to move fast, but I was ready to do so. I kept one hand free of my gun; the other gripped the pistol tightly. I saw Reed station himself near where we came in, gun in hand. Eve took up position in the far corner, giving her the view of the entire room. Bastian blocked the opposite walkway entrance.
The dinging sounded, and I felt the tension, the sweat back on my palms now, the stress I hadn’t even known I was feeling bleeding through me. The triangular light above the door to my left lit up red, and the doors began to open.
Eleanor Madigan emerged, not really looking around as she stepped out of the elevator. Her profile was different than I would have expected from her photo, strong cheekbones but a more pronounced nose than was evident by the front-on passport photo. She wore very casual attire, jeans and a sweatshirt from the Mall of America. She sensed I was there, turning to look at me. I waited to see her reaction, my gun hidden behind me; if she was Omega, she would know me.
A flicker of recognition passed behind her eyes. Her hand came up and I batted it aside with my pistol as I wrapped a hand around her neck. Her eyes widened, this time in outrage, all her teeth displayed in a feral look that was half-grimace, half-snarl. She reached out a hand, past me, toward the elevator and her fingers extended, grasping for something.
I heard the crackle before it hit me; electricity flowed out of the call buttons, snapping across the distance between her fingers and the metal like bolts of lightning. A charge ran up my hand and every muscle in my body seized, clenching, my head exploding in a burst of pain like someone put a thousand knives through me and I contracted in a full-body heave. I held tight to her neck for as long as I could, which felt like a year but was probably more like a second, before I was propelled through the air into a wall as I fell, limply, to the ground.
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