“What about her?” Morgan whispered, nodding at Sienna. “Are you just going to leave her there?”
Greg thought about it for a minute before answering. “Yes. I’ll ready the rest of the house, and … we’ll come up with our plan for what’s next after everyone is awake tomorrow. I’m sure that won’t be easy, given the state she finds herself in, hounded on all sides. But for now …” He stared at the woman in the middle of the floor, her face relaxed, exhaustion having claimed her, “… for now, yes … we should just let her rest …”
56.
Sienna
I awoke to someone poking me, sun making its way through my eyelids from some source outside my consciousness. My shoulder ached from sleeping on a floor for hours, my neck had a little crick in it, and the feeling of a steady tap of someone’s finger against my shoulder made me want to roar to my feet like a lion and break their damned hand. “What the hell?” I growled, rolling over to find Guy Friday about to nudge me with a finger again. I caught it just before he poked me in the boob, thus saving his life again.
“Language,” Greg hissed from just over Friday’s shoulder, scowl on his face and a look of fatigue under his eyes. I doubted he’d slept.
I looked around the room and saw Morgan lying next to Eddie, looking just as scandalized at my use of the word hell. Her son was dead to the world on the pillow next to her, I saw as I floated to my feet, his mouth open and his right arm laid over his mother’s face in a very unnatural way. That didn’t seem to bother Morgan nearly as much as my little swear; she was probably used to catching an elbow or two from Eddie when sharing a bed with him. “What?” I asked. “He’s not going to learn the mildest profanities in his sleep, okay?”
“Shhh,” Greg said, and beckoned me forward, out of the room. Friday tiptoed along comically while I floated out, leaving Morgan and Eddie to snooze, I guess. Or Eddie to snooze and Morgan to cuddle. “We need to plan,” Greg said once we were all safely on our way downstairs, still taking care to be quiet.
“I suppose,” I said, yawning. “Probably can’t stay here in Hughesland forever, after all. Though I could use a day off, Ferris Bueller.”
“Har har,” Friday said as we reached the ground floor and stepped into a living room that was bare to the walls.
“So now we know Greg’s secret,” I said to Friday. “Turns out all this time he was Mr. Little and you were Mr. Big.” I grinned, because I found it funny. Friday just stared at me blankly. “Mr. Big was a character—”
“From Sex and the City,” Friday said. “Carrie’s true love. I got it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re an interesting fellow sometimes, Friday,” I said, looking around the empty living room. I hadn’t been in here last night, so this all came as a slight surprise.
I looked around questioningly, and Friday, surprisingly, answered. “Greg’s bailing out. Because of Sam.”
“I thought you said he couldn’t find you here,” I said.
Greg was more subdued today than yesterday, and I chalked it up to worry and lack of sleep. “I don’t think he can, but my family’s safety isn’t worth the risk. I’m starting over again anyway. Leaving here will perhaps make it a cleaner break.”
“You leaving behind the luxury life of the assassin?” I asked, watching his reaction. The fact that there appeared to be peace between him and Friday should have been mind-boggling, but Greg had probably explained what was up over a beer or something, as guys weirdly did, and I expected Friday was probably all, “It’s cool, bro,” and they were fine with each other. Weirdos.
“Yes,” Greg said.
“Good choice,” I said. Not like I was in a position to turn him into the feds for murder and assassin-work anyway, being way higher on their priority list than he would ever be. I was living in a weird space these days, more disconnected from the law and justice done by the government than ever before, and more renegade-y than I would have preferred.
Oh, who am I kidding? I always liked being judge, jury and unaccountable executioner, though I preferred to do as little of the last bit as possible.
“I’m willing to give you a ride anywhere you’d like,” Greg said, “but after that … we part ways. I need to go get to the business of establishing my new life and while I’m sympathetic to your predicament—”
“Lemme stop you right there,” I said, “because maybe we can help each other out. This Sam guy … is he a pro?”
Greg’s eyes blinked a few times in calculation. “Yes, I suppose.”
“So he’s not going to do an assassination for zero money, right?” I waited for the answer, because my plan hinged on it.
“If someone he hated crossed his path, he’d kill them, but … no,” Greg said, “I doubt he’d continue hunting you down if the contract was off the table.” His eyes lit up. “Oh. McGarry.”
“Is that your boss?” I asked. “Former boss, whatever?”
“Yes,” Greg said. “He’s—”
Ding dong.
Company’s here, Harmon said. And, possibly, an answer to many of your woes.
“That’s foreboding,” I said.
“Just ignore it,” Greg said, frozen in place. “It’s probably just UPS.”
“We should answer it,” Friday said, eyes strangely fixed in place. The doorbell rang again, like whoever was waiting on the doorstep was in no particular hurry but wanted to remind us they were, indeed, there.
“No,” Greg and I said at the same time, and he went on, “I have a small camera on the porch.” He beckoned us toward his office.
When we stepped in, I noticed he’d packed pretty much everything except for the TV and a few odds and ends that I suspected he planned to leave behind. Even looking at it, I couldn’t see the place in the corner of his office where the door to his secret hideout was mounted in the wall. Damn, that sucker must have been tiny.
“This is a pinhole camera,” Greg said, “shrunken to impossibly small.” He clicked the TV on, and it showed us a clear color image of the front porch, though the resolution looked a little funny, probably due to the camera being so small.
On the front doorstep stood a man, dressed in luxurious suit, with silver hair and a perfectly groomed mustache. He had a pleasant look on his face, patient …
And he was instantly familiar to me.
“I don’t know who that is,” Greg said. “He could be working with Sam.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, peering at him. I was ninety-nine percent sure I knew who that was, but he was so damned out of place compared to where I’d last seen him, thousands of miles from here, that I couldn’t quite believe it at first.
Then the man turned, and looked straight at the camera, favoring us with a muted smile, and I knew it was him.
“Announcing Alistair Wexford,” Friday intoned, clearly the speaker system of choice for communicating our visitor’s message straight to us, the knucklehead, “Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom.”
“What?” Greg asked in disbelief.
“Wexford’s a telepath,” I said, inclining my head toward the monitor and counting on Friday to see it, which meant Wexford would. Wexford mirrored my motion back to me, letting me know that, yes, he was watching us just as we were watching him. “I met him in London a couple years back when I got tangled up in a murder mystery involving some members of a group called Omega that I used to, uhmmm … run. Sort of.”
“What the hell is he doing here?” Greg asked, as overheated as I’d ever heard him. He was clearly not prepared for this contingency, and it was freaking him the eff out—or as near to it as Greg probably got.
“He comes bearing a message,” Friday said, with a bit of an English accent, “and an offer for Sienna Nealon.” Wexford smiled on the monitor, and somehow I felt just the slightest bit of reassurance. Like maybe there was a way out of all this. “And perhaps … a solution to your current dilemma.”
57.
Augustus
Back in my place in Minneapolis I
slept like the rock I’d mashed Omar with, waking to the sounds of the city already in motion. I showered, dressed, and headed out to Eden Prairie in my Mercedes, rolling on into the office just after nine. I figured normal working hours could be a little flexible after yesterday’s craziness, and apparently I was right, because once I nodded and passed Casey, our receptionist, I found Scott and Veronika were the only ones in so far. No sign of Reed, which meant while the boss was away, the paperwork could wait in favor of play.
“What’s up, preppie boy?” I asked Scott as I poured my first coffee and rolled over to his desk.
“Nothing,” he grunted, leaning back in his chair at his cubicle. “Thanks for the assist last night. That Poseidon you clashed with … he was tougher than me. I couldn’t even get a grip on that water he was using.”
“Yeah, he was a real badass, all right,” I said, blowing the steam off the surface of my coffee. It’d be a while before it was safe to drink. “That Persephone was no joke, either. You ever seen Kat turn an entire forest against someone like—heh.” I stopped to guffaw.
Scott smiled. “You just got the joke of her last name, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking up as Jamal came wandering in, Colin blowing the papers off the desk a step behind him. “Yo, you two.”
“When are we going paperless?” Colin growled, zipping back around and picking up his mess. He disappeared out the door for a second and returned with small rocks that he placed on the top of strategic paper piles to keep them from blowing away. “This is such a waste.”
“Of what?” Scott asked. “Your time?”
“Of natural resources,” Colin said, “to say nothing of the chemical waste from the process. And the forests don’t need any additional help getting plowed down.” His eyes flashed. “Especially after what Sienna did yesterday.”
I paused with my nose over my coffee. “Yesterday? You mean the day before, right? The LA thing?”
“No,” Colin said. “It was all over the news this morning.”
“Yo, Casey,” I called out there, “did you get the paper this morning?”
“No,” she called back around the corner.
“Waste,” Colin growled. “Get a digital subscription on your iPad.”
“You know it takes electricity from burning fossil fuels to charge those up, right?” Jamal asked with the ghost of a smile.
“What’d Sienna do yesterday?” I asked, waiting for someone to enlighten me.
“She had a standoff with federal law enforcement in Montana after she blew up a lumberyard,” Reed said tightly as he strode in with a purpose, and not a happy one, it didn’t look like.
“Targaryens ain’t got nothin’ on her,” Jamal said, “they ought to put the words ‘Fire and Blood’ on her sigil.”
“Listen up, people,” Reed said, striding up to his office door and turning around. “I know we had a big day yesterday—a tough one, but a good one—but this isn’t the time to slack off.”
No one spoke up, so I went ahead and threw in my two cents. “Uhh … all we have left is the paperwork, man. That and tracking down the boss of this whole thing, McGarry, which … I mean, unless Jamal or J.J. or Abby gets a line on him … we’re kind of done, right?” The three of them had taken a stab at finding McGarry yesterday, and apparently they’d come up real dry. Like Death Valley dry. Cassidy had placed him in motion, flying somewhere, but we hadn’t been able to track him at all, which had left Jamal with a real scowl.
“Then we need to get our paperwork done,” Reed said, producing a chorus of groans from those of us who’d bothered to show up on time or close to.
“Lame,” Veronika pronounced.
“In case you didn’t just hear me,” Reed said, and he was clearly laboring under a lot of misplaced anger, “my sister just set off the entire national security apparatus again yesterday. We might have had a great day yesterday if not for her stealing all our thunder and turning it into a shitstorm for metahumans even tangentially connected to her. Like us.” He glanced around, that raw anger seeping out. “So, in order to atone for her sins, we’re going to process through every bit of paperwork those local law enforcement agencies want out of us. Today.
My heart sank, and I could feel the morale in the room going with it. “We are celebrating our victory with a few hundred pages of paperwork each.”
“Kid me would not have been excited to know how much paperwork adult, superhero private-eye me has to do,” Scott said, drifting back in his chair and looking at the ceiling.
“Somehow they leave all this out of the cop shows,” I complained. “Probably because it’s about as exciting as watching putty harden.”
“Well, get to spackling,” Reed said, turning around and heading into his office. “It’s not like I’m getting a free pass on this, after all.” He scooped up a pile off his desk and waved it around. “See? This is mine.” It was about two inches thick. “Now … get thee to work, people. Let’s get past this and get back to making a name for ourselves that’s not dependent on whatever dumbass thing my sister does on any given day.” He slammed the door lightly behind him.
“Somehow, I get the feeling this isn’t just about processing paperwork,” I said. And no one answered, but I could tell they were all in agreement, as I headed back to my desk to dig my way out of this mountain of reports.
58.
Sienna
“You’re pretty damned far from home,” I said to Alistair Wexford as we all stood a little awkwardly around Greg’s office. All his furniture was gone, which contributed to the entire scene being more uncomfortable yet.
“Yes, I don’t tend to cross the pond all that often,” Wexford said, looking around at our other guests with cool regard. He smiled, a little hint of warmth in a most peculiar situation. “But of course … these are special circumstances.”
“How did you show up right at my door?” Greg asked, watching Wexford with blatant suspicion. I couldn’t blame him for that; Greg was already about to run like hell before some random stranger showed up on his doorstep looking for the FBI’s Most Wanted fugitive.
“When Ms. Nealon and I met on her last journey to London,” Wexford said smoothly, still wearing that faint smile, “I made a connection with her mind that I was able to renew once I reached these shores to home in on her, as it were. And that led me to your door, good fellow.” He looked around. “I suppose since you’ve packed, you wouldn’t happen to have any tea, would you? And perhaps some chairs to make this conversation just a bit easier?”
“I could … probably dig something up,” he said, watching Wexford intently.
“That’s a good chap,” Wexford said with a smile. “And Friday? Do give Gregory a hand, will you?”
Friday nodded, looking like he was still a zombie well under Wexford’s control, following Greg out wordlessly. He even closed the door behind him, leaving Wexford and I in the office, alone.
“I haven’t seen you in years,” I said, “and you just show up out of the blue, looking for me.”
“Well, I noted your situation had taken a turn for the dire,” Wexford said with a trace of unease detectable beneath that British reserve. “I come on behalf of Her Majesty’s government with an offer.”
“You’re making me an offer?” I pointed at myself, like it wasn’t obvious with just the two of us in the room. After he’d bloodhounded his way to me across the Atlantic.
“We are aware, in the circles in which I run—” he started.
“Meaning the metahuman elements of the UK government,” I said.
“You Americans certainly are blunt, aren’t you?” he said with a charming amount of understatement. “Yes, the metahuman elements of the UK government. The new PM is fully briefed and aware of your situation. He feels you’ve received—how do you say it? A bad rap.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “Even before this whole nuclear bomb thing.”
“Yes, a most unfortunate occurrence,” Wexford said. “Still, ev
en before that, the truth of the Eden Prairie incident—I believe they call it at the high levels of your government—was well known and completely ignored in favor of such specious theories and frankly, mad explanations that cast you in the worst possible light. I have been lobbying on your behalf for a kind of asylum over these last few months. Unfortunately, the last Prime Minister had simply too much on her plate to consider, ahem … intervening in such a small matter. Her words, not mine, I assure you.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s certainly not been a small matter to me. Not these last few months.”
“I imagine after the death of President Harmon and all his efforts to destroy you, it’s been a bit lonely,” Wexford said with something approaching a note of regret. “In any case, the new Prime Minister, Everton Daniels—he has finally heeded my constant harping … and he wished me to offer you a safe haven in the United Kingdom.”
“Wait … what?” I leaned forward as Greg entered the room again, bringing with him something small in the palm of his hand. He touched it with a finger and a chair appeared, which he promptly set behind Wexford, who sat down in it very gracefully, without so much as a look. Greg put another one behind me, and two more to form a nice little square in the middle of the nearly empty office.
“He’s offering you a way out while the heat’s on here,” Friday said, coming back into the room with two cups of tea, piping hot. He handed the first to me, and I took it, not really knowing what the hell I was doing, then gave the other to Wexford, who accepted it with his customary grace and settled back to give it a good, long sniff. If he disapproved, he didn’t evince it in his expression. “You can go to England and hang out over there.”
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