Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  “You make them seem innocuous,” I said, “as though they had no culpability in sending all the fiends that they did after me. Wolfe was just the start, remember? Henderschott was no peach, either. And trying to get Fries in bed with me—”

  “I don’t think that having Fries sleep with you was part of any plan,” Janus said stiffly, “I believe that was a concession made to get him to try and recruit you.”

  “Nice,” I said. “It’s good to know that your organization would have no problem with a man using me for sexual gratification without thought or regard for what were to happen afterward. That certainly strengthens my opinion of you.”

  Janus let out a sigh. “I am not condoning the actions they’ve taken.”

  “I don’t hear you condemning them, either.”

  “I have a hard time mustering much anger for condemnation given what’s presently on its way toward us,” Janus said. “Yes, I would not have done it that way myself, but I understand the fear—the raw fear—that Century breeds. Look at her,” he waved back toward the Greek restaurant a hundred yards behind us. “She’s convinced that we’re returning to the darkest age of our history, a time when Hades was annihilating entire populations—”

  “You don’t think that sounds like what’s happening now?” I looked him over.

  “Oh, I’m very certain that Century is taking some pages out of Hades’s book,” Janus said calmly. “But Hades is dead. Very dead. Very certainly dead. I watched him die, and it was in a manner that left no ambiguity as to whether he might rise up again or not.”

  “You’re being vague.”

  Janus gave a slight nod, made a sound of acknowledgment. “Some ground is best left untrod. There are things I cannot tell you, things about why we need you, specific things about yourself that I am simply not allowed to get into.”

  “Sounds like we’re back to the same issue as with Fries—you people don’t care how you use me so long as you get to use me, huh?”

  “It is neither as simple nor as vulgar as you put it,” he said, sounding a little exasperated. “What would you be willing to do to save the world? To save your people?”

  “Very little at present,” I lied. “Remember, I’m here for revenge, not because of the gallantry of your quest.”

  He let out a mild exhalation of annoyance then shook his head. I was sure it was feigned, though, that he could see through my lie. “Very well. We’ll have to work on rekindling your concern for others as we go on. We have things to do now, anyway.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “We’ve just swayed some girl into coming into your fold, so what else is on the agenda? More recruitment?”

  “Heavens,” Janus said, “if only. If only there were more to recruit, more to protect. Unfortunately, there are few, which is part of the problem with our little subspecies. Too few and far too dispersed to be of great use. This is why Century is such a threat. They have banded more of the powerful metas of the world together than Omega has ever been able to.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I want Winter, and I still don’t care about all this other stuff, these hoops I have to jump through to get him. What’s next?”

  “Yet still I notice you continue to absorb the background and the history I give you on all these events,” Janus said. “It is almost as though you are learning, saving them up for a time when you will need them.”

  “Look at it however you want,” I said. “But don’t forget the agreement under which I came here. You can try and recruit me for the next three months, but if you don’t deliver on the promise of getting me to Erich Winter and allowing me to kill him, all your recruitment efforts will be for naught.”

  Janus gave me a slow nod. “Very well, then. Let us move on.” He turned and started to walk back down the street as the wind came howling through again.

  “Wait,” I said, and he paused to look back at me. “Where are we going?”

  A small smile lit his aged features. “Why, to Omega headquarters of course.” The light faded from his eyes. “I believe it is time that you came into the den of those you have so long despised so that you can see for yourself exactly what you are up against.”

  Chapter 9

  Janus’s car was a black Mercedes that slid through the light morning traffic as I stared out the window at the bright, sunlit London day. The blocks passed one by one, though it was disconcerting to find myself sitting in the place where the driver would be were I in America and that we were driving on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to. Janus had the window slightly down, and a soft breeze ruffled my hair as we waited at a traffic light.

  There was a stir in my mind, a chorus of voices in the back, having a conversation that I was trying my best to ignore. It was a mild squall, though it didn’t feel like it. A vein throbbed in the space behind my eyes, a solid twitch that pulsed with every beat of my heart, a little shooting pain that made me wonder what sort of discussion was going on in my brain. I listened for a moment, caught a heated dustup between Bjorn and Wolfe about Hades, and then got distracted.

  “You can hear them in your head, yes?” Janus looked sideways at me from the driver’s seat, an almost-touching look of concern etched on his features. I say “almost” because I wasn’t inclined to believe it was real. He did have a specific purpose, after all, and it wasn’t to make sure that I felt loved and cared for. Or if he did have that purpose, it was a means to the end of getting what he wanted.

  “Yes.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers, hoping that massaging the tension would relieve the pain. It didn’t.

  “What are they speaking about?” The car accelerated away from the light when it turned green, down the street ahead of us.

  “Bjorn and Wolfe are arguing about Hades,” I said. “I’m not paying much attention right now.” There was a moment of quiet in my mind. “Wolfe worked for Hades, along with his brothers, right?” I heard Bjorn howl something at Wolfe about murdering children, which got a swift and visual reply that almost made me retch, something on the order of not bothering to deny but instead glorying in that fact.

  “It takes a toll on you, yes?” I saw him start with the concern again, and I remembered the last time someone had come at me with that sort of fatherly interest; it had come to a rather abrupt end when he orchestrated the murder of my boyfriend.

  “That obvious, huh?” I let my fingertips lightly dance over my forehead, soothing the skin there with just the barest touch, light over the top of it, the sensation distracting me from the throbbing pain.

  Janus let out a low chuckle. “Perhaps not to all, but I am an empath, and your emotional states are as obvious to me as a physiological defect would be to a physician.”

  “I’m deformed,” I said, “I’ve got seven souls in one body. It’s like I’m Siamese twins but only in my brain.” I blanched as Bjorn shot a withering reply at Wolfe, something about working for a pure evil—which I thought was ironic, coming from the source. “Or like having an internal hydra in my mind. I’d gladly cut off some of their heads,” I growled, causing them to quiet for a moment, “but I expect the only thing that would get the job done would be doing it to mine.”

  “That seems a bit of an overreaction.” Janus guided the car into a left hand turn at an intersection, and far up ahead over a hill I caught a view of downtown. A building that looked like an elongated version of a Faberge egg with glass windows shone in the morning sun. “You will learn to control them, given time.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, looking up at him. “Seems like most succubi I’ve talked to already have a firm grasp of how to control their souls pretty much out of the gate. Even my aunt Charlie couldn’t understand how I had so much trouble with them.”

  “Because they’re metas,” Janus said tightly. He hesitated, leaving something unsaid.

  I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, tight-lipped, his hands on the steering wheel. “You mean the souls I’ve taken.” He looked sidelong at me, only briefly, then nodded hi
s head once, sharply. “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters,” Janus said. “Using the powers we metas have requires a certain amount of will. Think for a moment on the minds you have absorbed—Wolfe was a force of nature, a beast of his own sort. Gavrikov was one of the most destructive beings to ever walk the planet. Bjorn was the son of a man who proclaimed himself the God-King of the Norse. These are not your normal souls, and your introduction to your powers was not done as it usually would be, by accidentally and partially absorbing someone close to you before awakening to your abilities. You had no such warning, and the first minds you took in were ones that had more willpower than you did yourself.”

  I frowned at him. “Would it matter if I absorbed someone with less will?”

  “I don’t think you are getting the point,” Janus said, and shot me a cautious look. “You had two strikes against you, as they say. You absorbed metas, who are naturally somewhat more predisposed toward stronger will because of their abilities, and you absorbed them wholesale. That is not usual for a newly manifested incubus or succubus. Typically they would take a piece of someone first, stopping before the task is complete, giving them the ability to acclimate themselves to the … shadows, I believe your people call them—the results of a partial absorption—rather than dealing with a full and complete personality embedded within you from the start.” His expression darkened. “And not just any personality, but Wolfe’s.”

  “‘Shadows’?” I thought for a moment then concentrated hard within me, searching for something inside, a faint wisp of Ariadne’s memories. They were there, a small echo of the woman herself, a few thoughts, some sights and sounds, smells, sensory memories that I was able to peek through just as I had a few days earlier when I had absorbed them from her. There was very little there—a few memories of Eve, of Old Man Winter, a few highly personal. “You mean the part of a person that remains even if I don’t take their whole soul.”

  “Yes,” Janus said with a nod. “By absorbing just that portion, there is no battle of wills with the newly absorbed, because there is very little will that comes along with small fragments such as those. They are a mere shadow of the full person, you see? A typical succubus would learn who they are after perhaps taking a shadow or two through accidental contact with a human being in most cases. In the case of your mother and her sister, I am told they were raised to know in advance what they would likely be and were prepared. It is how your mother learned to become disciplined with her power. She had no fearsome Wolfe to face right out of the gate, she learned to control a shadow, then accumulated another and another before taking in her first soul, and by then she was fully ready for it. Charlie too, though I have only suspicions to go on there.”

  “How do you know about how my mother learned?”

  “Two ways,” he said. “One, we have her old Agency personnel file, which includes the account of her upbringing in her own words.” He gave a slight smirk. “And second, we have access to a source that complements this.”

  I let the phrase hang out there for a minute. “You mean she’s told you herself.”

  Janus let out a long laugh. “Good heavens, no. Your mother hates Omega. We clashed with her when she was at the Agency, and there is so much blood between us now that she would not voluntarily give us a drop of her spit if we told her it would save the entire world.” He shook his head. “No, the source I speak of is her mother.”

  There was a long pause, and I realized I was holding my breath. “You know my grandmother?” I hadn’t even hoped to ponder the idea of my mother’s mother; I had never been allowed to discuss the outside world when my mother had me in confinement, and thus the topic never—not even once—came up. She didn’t even acknowledge she had parents, never referenced them, and I had always wondered if they even still lived.

  “No,” he said quickly. “She is no longer alive. Before she passed, however, which … is quite another story … she did make record of your mother’s upbringing, which was … shall we say … untraditional for a meta.”

  “How did she die?” I whispered, and turned my head to look out the window.

  “Another time, perhaps,” Janus said softly. “This falls under the domain of things I am not allowed to tell you.”

  “Way to build trust,” I said, but the words lacked feeling. I had become used to being given only the minimums in my life—the minimum level of information, of trust, of love from the people who supposedly cared for me. I felt a swell of umbrage from Zack at this thought, but I quelled it with the truth of how we began—that he had been intended to spy on me for Old Man Winter, to seduce me to keep me in the Directorate’s reach. I felt fresh pain from him, as if I had stuck my finger in a wound and twirled it around—beneath the continued argument between Bjorn and Wolfe, which had settled into low level bickering. I knew I’d hurt him, but I felt fairly resigned about the whole thing.

  “I apologize,” Janus said, and there was a scratch in his voice. “If it were up to me, I would tell you everything, lay it all out on the table, let you sift through the entire mess at will. And it is a mess, make no mistake,” he said, scratching his chin, which was smoothly shaven in spite of the wrinkles, “filled with the requisite errors of judgment on all sides, anger and fighting, threats and escalation, ambitions and squabbling. Yet all of it has led us to the point where we stand today.”

  “You make it sound like an episode of a soap opera,” I said, massaging my temples with my forefingers. “Or a little like the bickering in my head.”

  “It is probably not so far off,” Janus admitted, “and every side has its secrets, things that they think will be the end of their cause should they creep out.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What’s your secret, Janus?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “I have none that would ruin me. I know a few that would cause my employer considerable difficulty should they come out, but none that would cause me so much as a moment’s discomfort.”

  “Oh?” I asked, feeling a nasty little desire to prove him wrong. “How about the fact that you’re sleeping with Kat?” There was a surge of anger behind my eyes from Gavrikov at the mere mention of that, and Bjorn and Wolfe instantly settled down to watch the fireworks.

  “Hardly a secret,” Janus said with a shrug. “Not exactly controversial, either. As old as I am, do keep in mind she is over a hundred now herself. It is not as though she were actually eighteen—though I suppose it appears unseemly, given my age. Still,” he said darkly, “behavior much, much worse than that would not even be frowned upon by Omega, which I suppose lends credence to any argument you might care to mount about the type of people we are.”

  I stared at him, watching with undisguised curiosity. “You freely admit it?”

  “Certainly,” he said with a shrug. “I am not forbidden to, and I have already told you I associate with monsters in the course of my duties. It is not as though this is some news to you.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “Just surprised you admit it, is all.”

  “There is very little I would not do to save our people—and the humans—from whatever is coming at the hands of Century,” Janus said. “That means working with people of power who are very long-lived and who have allowed immortality to sweep away much of their decency. Where they might have started out as good people, in their centuries of life, they have accumulated power and traded away a great deal of that decency in exchange.” He shrugged again. “This is simply the way it is with the powerful and long-lived. You give a person absolute power, and few can withstand the corrupting influence it presents.” He cracked his neck by turning it to each side, and I cringed. “If you need any further proof of that, merely think about how you felt about killing only a month ago—and imagine the moral drift that could occur over the course of lifetimes, even to a person who had a strong center once upon a time.”

  “We’re not all monsters,” I said in barely a whisper.

  “No,” Janus agreed, “but give
n enough time and exposure to power—of the world-ruling variety—we all have to capacity to do at least one terrible thing. The difference with a monster is that it never even occurs to them that it is a terrible thing.”

  He kept quiet after that, steering us down the streets in silence. I watched the buildings pass one after another until we reached a neighborhood just on the cusp of downtown. The massive skyscrapers were just above the horizon and I wondered which we would be going to when Janus turned, taking us down an old alleyway lined in red brick. I watched the lines of mortar between them streak by as we went, until we came out in another alley, turning right. We went for about a hundred feet before he turned into what looked like a loading dock. He pulled the car through a garage door that opened when he touched a button mounted on his visor, and we entered a parking lot with about thirty vehicles dispersed around it. I realized it must have been under the building, and the loading dock was there to cover the fact that it was a clandestine entrance.