Family tgitb-4

by Robert J. Crane

  I swallowed hard. “And what if you can’t ever find the leak? The traitor?”

  Her eyes hardened. “Then it’s still in the hands of the Director what would be done with you. But don’t imagine he’s much more lenient than I am. Assume he’d be worse, as you make your decision.”

  I stared back at her, in the depths of her eyes, saw the feeling there beneath the gray, colorless exterior. “Are you telling me to go?”

  She seemed to soften, her face falling. “Yes. Don’t make me lock you up again. Just go. Get out of here. I’ll find you once we find the traitor, and you can come back if you want. There’s no point to you being confined here. Take your mother’s out and get clear.” She pressed the watch back into my hands, the edges pressing against my gloves.

  I looked at her, then at the watch, and my face dissolved. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  With greatest reluctance, she took a step forward and I felt her arm around my shoulder, and she gave me a squeeze, careful not to touch me with her skin. “It doesn’t matter. Just go. This is going very, very badly. We’re losing this war with Omega, and it’s not even close to the worst it can be. Your mother has been dodging Omega for years.”

  I pulled back from her, and felt the moisture in my eyes. “Okay.”

  She nodded at me, and I felt her hand on my back as I turned to look at Reed, who stared at me, impassive. “You know you always have another place to go.”

  “I might have to take you up on that,” I said. “But…I guess we have something else to resolve first.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “You want me to come along?”

  “Sure,” I said, and led the way out the door, Reed and Ariadne a couple steps behind me. “Let’s go see my mom.”

  Chapter 20

  The elevator ride was quiet and long. The atmosphere hung heavy in the box, neither Reed nor Ariadne speaking as we went down. I, too, held my peace, with nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said. When the tone dinged to let us know we’d reached the first floor, it startled me, sounding more than a little like a chime that precedes a bad announcement, like an impending execution.

  I walked out the front doors of the headquarters building and saw a small assemblage waiting on the lawn. My mother was there, standing just behind Kat Forrest, who looked to be perfectly coiffed, her blond hair in order, her makeup applied like usual, her clothes in fine form.

  I, on the other hand, was wearing the same clothes I had worn yesterday. My hair was mussed because I hadn’t bothered fixing it since I slept on it earlier. I didn’t wear makeup, so there was that.

  My mother looked vaguely bored, studying her hands as though she were about to do her nails. Her dark hair was bound in a tight ponytail, just like she always wore it when we were sparring. She wore a black leather coat over a dark shirt, and tight jeans, much tighter than I would have felt confident wearing. Actually, they reminded me a little of Charlie. I realized with a shock, after a moment, that the reason she was looking at her fingernails was because she wasn’t wearing any gloves, which was highly unusual in my experience. Breaking a house rule; not at all like Mom.

  The four members of M-Squad were spread out in front of her, from Clary at the farthest left to Bastian next to him, then Kappler, and Parks at the far right. Every one of them was on edge, standing tense, except Clary, who was already shifted into a rocky skin, presumably to counteract my mother if she tried to touch him. Mom, for her part, seemed unconcerned by this show of force against her, and I wondered what sort of ace she had up her sleeve that allowed her to be so indifferent to the overwhelming numbers against her.

  “Hi, sweetie,” my mother said as we approached, looking up from her nails and giving me a fake smile, presumably more for the audience and less for me since I knew she was being false. “I was close by, so I figured why wait three hours when I could free my precious little baby now.”

  “You are such a bitch,” I told her as I walked between Clary and Bastian to stand opposite Kat. I looked around my blond colleague to look my mother in the face as I said this.

  “And you are awfully ungrateful seeing as how I’m getting you out of this little jam that your own bad decisions have landed you in.” She said it mildly, without much concern either way. In the past, the level of smartassness I exhibited with the one sentence I had uttered to her would have landed me in the box for days without much in the way of leniency.

  “Because you’re playing at something else,” I said, letting my recklessness run away with me again. “You don’t care about getting me out except for as a means to an end. So what is it? You want Andromeda’s autopsy report? Want to see the body yourself? What is it about her that’s so important to you that you’re willing to come out of hiding and move heaven and earth, break onto the Directorate campus over and over to find out?” I blinked at her. “What is it about her…” I choked and hated myself for feeling this much emotion and letting it come out in front of everyone. “…that’s so important?” That’s more important than me? – that was what I wanted to say.

  I saw the slight wash of emotion over Mother’s face, followed by the red flush of embarrassment. “This is not the time or place for…any of this.” She cocked her head and looked past me. “What. The. Hell…are you doing here?”

  I followed her gaze to where Reed stood not far behind my shoulder. “Confabbing,” he said. “Trying to establish a tie between the Directorate and Alpha. What are you doing? Other than being a frightfully underwhelming parent to your daughter?”

  I watched my mother’s complexion turn even more scarlet as she reacted stronger than I would have imagined. “Oh, that’s just…rich.”

  “I’m sorry…” I said, not actually apologetic so much as confused, “…but you two know each other?”

  “Oh, I know him,” my mother said, her face becoming a mask of barely controlled anger. I recognized it only because she was starting to get her emotions under control. She was usually cooler than that, but she had let slip, Reed’s appearance causing her to let out something she hadn’t intended to let out. “I doubt he’d remember me, since the last time I saw him was about twenty years ago.”

  “I remember you,” Reed answered, stone-faced as well. “I’m kinda surprised you recognize me. It’s been a while. I was just a kid, after all.”

  “You look just like him,” my mother spat back at him. She seemed to calm. “Why do you remember me?”

  I watched Reed as his eyes narrowed, and I saw a flicker of genuine pain cross his face. “I know I was young, but it’s kinda hard to forget the day your dad introduces you to his new wife.”

  Chapter 21

  “What…the…” I breathed. “You were married to…” I blinked. “Wait,” I said to my mother, “you were married?”

  “To your father,” my mother returned. “Until he died.”

  “Then does that mean…” I blinked again, and turned to Reed, who gave me a shrug and a shake of the head. “You’re my brother?”

  Reed nodded. “Half, anyway.”

  Kat spoke up, drawing my attention along with everyone else’s. “What…the hell is going on here? Can I go yet?”

  “Stay where you are, Kitten,” my mother snapped at her.

  “My name is Kat!” A withering glare from my mother caused Kat to flinch. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, chastened.

  “So Sienna and this dude are brother and sister?” Clary piped up from behind me. “Cuz I thought I caught ro-mantic tension between them. Heh,” he guffawed. “Guess it’s more like BRO-mantic tension!” He burst out in uncontrolled laughter which was echoed by no one. “What?” He turned to Bastian. “Roberto, that is funny! Come on!”

  I turned to Reed. “All this time you’ve been playing Leia to my Luke and you never told me?”

  He frowned. “What? I’m totally Luke. You’re the girl. Can you make objects move through the air?” He raised his finger and I felt a gust of wind blow my hair. “No? I’m Luke. You’re Leia. G
et it straight.”

  “So who’s Han Solo?” Clary asked seriously. “And Darth Vader?”

  “I’m going to kill every last one of you pathetic geeks,” my mother said. “And I’m not even going to be nice about it. I’m going to just start draining souls. Will you please stop with the moronic Star Wars references? The movies came out in the 1970s. Most of you weren’t even born then. Move on with your lives.” She reached up and slapped Kat on the ass, causing the blond girl to jump. “Start walking. Sienna, get over here.”

  “You know,” Clary said, “I think Kat should be Leia, because that gold bikini would look way better on her than Sienna.”

  I turned and gave him a glare. “I hate you, Clyde.”

  “Hey, girl! Ain’t nobody calls me Clyde!”

  “Sienna.” My mother’s tone snapped at me, drawing my attention back to her. Kat was already walking across the fifty or so feet of space between us. “Get over here.”

  I cast a look back at Reed and Ariadne, and caught muffled rage from Reed, directed at my mother. Ariadne was a bit more complex, stiff and impassive. I took a first hesitant step, then another, my feet carrying me toward Kat. The wind was warm, the dark skies and the light from the lamps nearby casting the only illumination on the whole scene. When I drew close to Kat, she stopped me, her hand on my sleeve. I looked down where it rested, then up to her wide, round eyes, sincere. “Don’t go with her,” she said quietly. “She’s so…so…mean. So cold.”

  I looked at her, her perfect hair, her new clothes, her flawless makeup. “Why do you say that? Did she lock you in a metal box with no food and little water for days at a time?”

  Kat’s expression turned scandalized. “No!”

  I felt a subtle shift in my emotions toward indifference, toward tiredness and uncaring. “Count yourself lucky. She must like you more than me.”

  “Sienna,” my mother said warningly, a dark look on her face.

  There was a beep behind me, urgent, and I stopped and turned to look. All motion seemed to freeze in the formation, and everyone turned to see what the noise was. It was Bastian’s radio, and he held his hand up to his ear. “Yeah? Oh, damn.” He looked up at Ariadne, sharply. “The vamps. They’re here – we’ve got four men down by the dorms.” A klaxon sounded in the distance and speakers all around the campus took up the warning, blaring as the spotlights activated on every building and we were flooded with light.

  “Oh hell,” Ariadne said, completely ruffled. “The entire population of metas – GO!” she shouted to M-Squad. “Don’t wait, GO!” She fired a look at Kat. “They’ll need you, too.”

  Kat looked back at me, and I felt a cool calm settle over me. She bit her lip for just a second before she took off after Clary and the others. Parks had already transformed, taking the lead as a wolf. Kappler was flying overhead, her usually invisible wings catching just enough light to reveal them against the dark, fluttering hard like a butterfly’s.

  “Reed…” Ariadne said, pleading, and I saw him look torn. The tension rose on his face, watching me, then he looked back to her. “We could really use your help.” She looked at me. “We could use all the help we can get.”

  “I know what I’m in for if I stay,” I told her. She nodded once, and started to run, wobbling in her heels, before she stopped and kicked them off.

  Reed was the only one left now. Regret tinged his features. “Find me,” he said, and I nodded. He thrust his hands down at the ground, and with a burst of air he shot up in a controlled leap that carried him a hundred feet along toward the dormitory building. Another blast of air cushioned his landing and then he launched off again.

  “Well, wasn’t that fortuitous?” My mother spoke from behind me, drawing my attention back to her. “I expected we’d have to fight our way out.”

  I looked at her warily. “What was your plan for that?”

  She shrugged, as if she had not a care. “Fight our way out. Duh.”

  “Why are you here, Mother?” I asked, worn out and sick of all the emotion, revelation, wondering and worrying.

  “I’ve got my reasons,” she said, and I saw the skin crinkle at the edge of her eyes as she looked at me severely. “But you could do with a little more gratitude to me for saving your skin back at Eagle River, and again now.”

  “Thanks,” I said without feeling. “But you’re still not answering the question.”

  “I got what I came for. We can leave.” She turned as if to emphasize that point, and started to walk away.

  “What did you come here for?” I asked, taking a few steps to keep up. “Why are you here?” She was taking the path that wended toward the woods where I’d encountered her before. I waited for her to answer for a minute. “What is it about Andromeda that’s so damned important?”

  “You—” She whirled around and pointed a finger at my face. “You should learn to keep your mouth shut around others.”

  “So you were here for Andromeda,” I said resignedly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What’s ridiculous about reasoning?” I asked, and let my legs carry me past her along the path she had been walking. I heard her follow me, and I kept going. “You went halfway across the country to let her loose. You’ve exposed yourself to all sorts of danger coming here twice to…” I frowned. “Wait, you didn’t know she was dead last time you were here.” I turned to her. “What were you doing here then?”

  She paused in her walk, stopping just in front of me. “Tapping Directorate communications so I could get Dr. Sessions’ results from her physical exam, after he’d run it, and Zollers’ psych exam results. I would also have loved to read the debriefing materials from after they questioned her – she’d have been a font of great information all around. Of course, I didn’t know she was dead, so when I explored my tap later, I got autopsy results, which weren’t what I’d hoped for.” There wasn’t an ounce of emotion from her.

  “Why take Kat?” I looked at her, and she sighed, and started walking again. “Why take her with you? She seems like a liability, having to drag her along wherever you were going.”

  My mom waved a hand at me. “When you can render someone unconscious with a touch, having a hostage that fits neatly in your trunk is never a liability; it’s an asset. Especially when your hostage is a meta, and your enemy is Erich Winter.”

  “You’ve got a grudge against Old Man Winter?” I was following her still, and she didn’t say anything but I could see her demeanor change. “He acted like he didn’t even know you when I asked him about you before; like you two worked at the Agency but didn’t ever cross paths—”

  She whirled around at me, eyes alight. “Did he now?” she asked, with a suppressed smile that was near maniacal in its intensity. My mother was not prone to displays of much emotion and I took a step back from her at the sight of it. “We knew each other. Of course we knew each other.”

  “Enemies?” I asked, and she shook her head. “Friends?” She shook it again. “Frienemies?” I tried again, and she looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “We were acquaintances,” she said. “But when the Agency was destroyed, we were two of the only survivors.” She smiled. “Tell me something – when you’re betrayed from the inside and your organization is destroyed, what do you think that makes the survivors?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not giving it a moment’s thought. “Does it matter—”

  “Suspects,” she said, and I halted. “There were only three people that survived the destruction of the Agency. Me, Erich, and one other. And that makes every last one of us suspects. At least, in my mind.” She shook her head. “I know I’m paranoid, and that you never accepted that I locked you in the house for any good reason, but I did. I swear I did. I had to keep you in the bounds, had to keep you hidden, because there’s more going on here than you would believe.”

  “Why not tell me?” I asked. “Why not just be honest?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said sarcastically, “I should explain
to my six-year-old girl that she can’t leave the house because someday she’s going to gain powers that will allow her to kill with a touch. I should tell her that any lifelong fantasies she might harbor about a normal life were a joke, a trick of a child’s mind, and that – oh yes, this is the best – powerful forces from within that world of superhumans would want to capture her, to take her away from me, and turn her to their own purposes.”

  I let the silence hang between us. “Maybe if you’d given me a purpose of my own—”

  She rolled her eyes and reminded me of Charlie again. “You didn’t need a purpose at six, or sixteen. You needed to be kept safe from monsters like Wolfe and Omega…and worse. I would have told you when the time came.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked. “Why did you just leave?” I looked at her, and I didn’t even feel anything as I asked questions that had been on my mind for months. “You locked me in the box and you left, just left, didn’t even say goodbye, or tell me what was happening, or—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and I saw genuine contrition. “I got waylayed by Wolfe, and I barely got away with my life. By the time I got free, I couldn’t—” She stopped, broke off. “I did everything I could for you, I promise. And I’m still working for your benefit, even though you might not believe that—”

  I would have responded but something stopped me, the same something that caused her to break off mid-sentence. Sound, movement, something fainter than the sirens going off in the distance, warning us about danger that was supposed to be at the dormitory but instead was coming to us. The vampires, both of them, were moving toward us at speed.

  “What the hell are those?” I heard my mother ask as she drew a gun from her waistband.

  “Angel and Spike?” I suggested.

  “Get behind me,” my mother said as she stepped forward to block me from them.

  “Unless you’ve got some sort of miracle bullets in there,” I said, catching hold of her hand, “those will do nothing. They’re vampires, and they don’t take any sort of damage from guns.”