Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  “But you weren’t,” she said. “They called you a hero. The President gave you a medal.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a nod. “But… it didn’t look like that was what was going to happen at the time. And Sovereign…” I shook my head. I was so over talking about that dipshit. “He was a real piece of work.”

  She gave me a curt nod and averted her eyes. “And your young man?” She looked up, and I caught a hint of slyness. “That blond fellow who helped walk you out of your house afterwards?”

  “How did you know he was my…” I saw a spark of laughter behind those eyes, and I knew I’d been had. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” I said simply.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” Ms. Webster said, and I caught genuine regret in the way she said it. “Sometimes it works out for the best, though. And you’re so young! It’s better to be unfettered when you’re that age. I’m sure he’ll treasure the memories of your time together, though.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, feeling a slithering sense of guilt crawl up from my stomach.

  “Oh, it ended that badly, did it?” She seemed more regretful for asking about it than anything.

  “Well, it didn’t end well,” I said. “But… I’m sure he doesn’t remember me at all anymore. Not that way.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “A fine-looking lass like you would be impossible to forget.”

  “No.” I felt the color drain from my face. “Not impossible.”

  Not for someone who could remove memories.

  “What was the problem, dear?” she asked, jolting me out of my trance. “I had more than a few dust-ups with Matthew’s father, God rest his soul, but we always managed to work it out in the end—”

  “It was work,” I said, cutting her off. Why was I telling her this? I hadn’t told anyone this. My brother was good enough to keep his mouth shut after Scott had left the Agency, at least about my love life. “I work a lot,” I said, answering her inquiring gaze.

  “Work is important,” she said, and I got the feeling she was choosing her words carefully to avoid tripping over them.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “So what was the problem?”

  “He… didn’t always want to be competing with my job,” I said. I smoothed the wrinkled leg of my pants.

  Marjorie’s gaze pierced deep, and her eyes did not move off me. “But it’s more than a job to you, isn’t it, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling it. “Yes, it is. It’s everything I have.”

  “Surely you must have friends?” This with just a hint of concern.

  “I did,” I said, smoothing that pant leg again. Was that a crease or a wrinkle? “But they all moved on to other things.” I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. “They all have lives.”

  She inclined her head just slightly. “And what do you have?”

  I felt a sharp pang inside. “A purpose. I—” I stopped when I heard motion on the stairs, and Matthew descended with a furious clomping like a goat shambling down. Or a cow. Or a—something heavy. Something that didn’t wear a trench coat.

  “Got another mess on our hands,” he said as he swept into the sitting room. That trench coat really billows. It’s cool. And a good look for him.

  “Did they find Angus?” I asked, rising to my feet. Marjorie was a little slower to get up.

  “No,” he said. “Someone different. Flat in Westminster, body torn to pieces and flayed—”

  “Matthew!” Marjorie said, flinching away with a look of horror.

  “Sorry, Mum,” he said, contrite. “Looks like Maxwell Llewelyn all over again, but this one was done in his own home.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, already sweeping out of the room. He headed me off, opening the front door before I could get to the knob myself. Or, more accurately, I let him open the door for me. Like a gentleman.

  “I’ll make sure to leave a light on for you, Sienna dear,” Marjorie called after me. “And I’ll turn down your bed if Matthew hasn’t already—”

  He shut the door before I could thank her.

  Chapter 20

  Philip watched the crime scene via the London surveillance cameras. It had been easy enough to get access; it was something he’d figured out early on by having Liliana go to work on one of the engineers. Making his way into the system had been the easy part.

  Sifting the damned data? That had been impossible. Which was a shame, because that had been what Philip had wanted when he’d set out on the project. To have something watching at all times, in the moment? That was just one more step toward invincibility.

  Still, it had its uses. He could tap into any camera in the city that was linked to the network, and he could shut them down as needed. He’d done just that on their way to and from every site thus far. With all the cameras in the city of London, it would be impossible to notice the few of them that went offline while he was moving.

  But now he was watching. He had eyes on the door to the apartment, could see the Metropolitan Police buzzing about. He’d watched the crime scene unit go up a few minutes earlier. He didn’t envy those fellows their jobs today; Liliana had left such a suitably impressive mess that even walking in the door was sure to contaminate the evidence at least a little.

  Here he would sit; here he would wait. She’d be along shortly, he was sure of it. That was the whole reason he was watching, after all. To see her.

  Because she could be the sweet capstone on this whole endeavor. The little plastic figurine on top of the cake.

  Sienna Nealon.

  Her death would be the sweetest triumph of them all.

  Chapter 21

  I got out in front of the building and looked up. It wasn’t out of place in the London landscape. Big, impressive facade with Greek columns and lots of marble. It was only about four or five stories high, too, which also seemed the standard for much of the city. It looked classy, though, unlike a few places I’d been.

  “This is a twenty-thousand-quid-per-month flat,” Matthew said, adjusting his coat. He looked faintly nervous, and I wondered why.

  “I assume that’s a lot,” I said. He gave me the pitying look I reserved for morons. I guess that’s a lot.

  I followed him into the lobby. We found the first corpse behind the security desk. Guy had had his throat slashed and bled out right there. There were dried, bloody handprints in the carpeting where he’d struggled to hang on to life with whatever little strength he’d had left.

  “Looks like he died first,” I said, “and because he was in the way.”

  “Keen detection skills you’ve got there,” Webster grunted as we made our way to the elevators. We waited until one dinged and stepped inside. “What did you talk about with Mum?”

  “Oh, she showed me naked baby pictures,” I said casually. He froze, eyes wide.

  The elevator doors opened onto a swarm of cops in the hallway. Every door was flung wide, neighbors being questioned, the whole damned floor turned out for this event. It was probably the most excitement this building had ever seen.

  For their sake, I hoped they never saw anything more exciting than a torture murder.

  “Detective Inspector,” came the familiar voice of Alistair Wexford, standing behind a knot of officers ahead of us. I started a little, a bit surprised to see him there. It took me a second to realize Mary Marshwin was standing in his shadow, her eyelids looking lined. “Ms. Nealon,” said the Foreign Secretary, acknowledging me with a nod of the head.

  “Minister,” Webster said urgently, his voice respectful. It was an ass-kissing tone of voice. I knew it because I couldn’t deny I’d had to use it myself now that I had people to report to. Not like I used it often—I was my agency’s director of operations, after all, and my supposed boss was in Washington, D.C., firmly ensconced at the top of the Department of Homeland Security—but I had a job to do, and the less friction I got from the executive and legislative branches of the government, the better off I was. Speaking gently and taking some
of the needles out of my words was a small price to pay to be left alone most of the time.

  I had enough shit on my plate without knocking it off the table and having to clean it up because I’d been impetuous. That thing I’d done to Ambassador Halstead was like the Sienna of old and was probably a reflection of my irritation with the bureaucracies I had to answer to now.

  “What are the foreign secretary and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police doing here at a simple murder scene?” I asked as we walked down the hallway toward Wexford and Marshwin. They were standing in front of an open door; the Commissioner to one side with an unobstructed view and Wexford a little to the right, where he couldn’t easily look into the apartment. I got the sense that this was not a fun time for him.

  “The victim was a Russian national,” Wexford said, a little stiffly, and—if I wasn’t imagining it—a little pale. “He was a diplomat with their embassy.”

  “Yay for international incidents,” I said with a fake enthusiasm. “What did he do at the embassy?”

  “I don’t know offhand what his official title was,” Wexford said, “but unofficially I am informed that he was chief of station for London.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Webster admitted.

  “Head spy,” I said. “Was he a meta?”

  Commissioner Marshwin gave me a tired look. “We wouldn’t know.”

  “Let’s assume he was,” Webster said. “It’s a tenuous tie, I’ll grant you, but assuming he was, then we’ve got our motive. They’re killing metas.”

  “And assuming that he’s not, we’re now at a place where there’s no pattern,” I said. “Unless this was a deliberate attempt to skew the pattern. I mean, going from ex-Omegas that were with me in the old fights to a Russian diplomat? Très strange, eh?”

  “There is something else,” Wexford said, and his complexion definitely changed on this one, going sheet-white. “Something that would indicate a tie to you, Ms. Nealon.”

  I stared at him blankly. “I don’t know any Russian diplomats.”

  Commissioner Marshwin gave me a hard look. “It’s entirely possible he didn’t know you, either… but…”

  I caught a lot of something lurking behind her words. “But what?” I shouldered my way closer to them, passing Wexford to get a look into the apartment.

  Marshwin didn’t bother to answer me. She didn’t have to.

  The room was a bloody, bloody mess. Like nothing I’d ever seen before, which was saying something since I had one of the world’s most prolific serial killers sitting inside my head. For spite, he used to give me flashes of his greatest hits, the kills he was most proud of.

  But this…

  This was just…

  … it was…

  Butchery.

  I could tell where the torso was because that was where the balance of the crime scene investigators were. It wouldn’t have taken metahuman vision to see the name carved into the exposed muscle. And it certainly wouldn’t have taken metahuman vision to see it written on the walls in five—no, six—different places around the apartment, including on a tasteless nude picture hanging on the dining room wall.

  Sienna Nealon.

  My name.

  Carved into the body.

  Written in blood.

  Everywhere.

  Chapter 22

  I pride myself on having a strong stomach, but I got right the hell out of there as soon as I could. It was one of the single grossest things I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot. I could hear Webster shouting behind me, but I didn’t care.

  I made it out the front door of the building before my stomach emptied its contents. The nasty, acidic taste mingled with the remains of Lancashire hotpot made me even sicker, overwhelming my sense of smell. Cops were all around me, polite enough not to mock or laugh. Maybe some of them had been sick, if they’d seen it. I’d made it down several flights of stairs and out the door before I’d heaved, so that was something.

  “You all right?” Webster asked, delivering the obvious and expected question.

  “Do I look all right?” I asked, spitting the last bits out and rising to my feet.

  He handed me a cloth handkerchief. “You look all right, yeah. ’Cept for that little spot of sick, there…”

  I dabbed at my lips. “Better?”

  “Much.” His nose wrinkled. “Mind stepping over this way? The smell—”

  “Yeah.” I passed him without waiting, just breezed by on my way to the curb.

  He followed a few seconds later, lingering behind me as I stared out across the street to the square beyond. “So… how are you enjoying your holiday so far?”

  I took a breath. It felt like blood was still draining from my face. “Holiday? That’s what you Brits call a vacation, isn’t it?” I glanced back at him. “Because this isn’t a holiday to me. Unless there’s a Dismembered and Inscribed Corpses Day on the calendar that I’m not remembering.”

  “I take it you’ve never seen anything like that, either?”

  “My name carved into a brutalized corpse and painted on the wall in their blood? No. No, I’ve never seen that before.”

  “It’s going to be all right—” he started.

  “Liar,” I cut him off.

  “Well, I was trying to be reassuring.”

  “Reassurance is for idiots,” I said. “We’ve got a killer who’s murdering people I know. Two people I knew well are missing—probably dead, given what we’ve seen so far. Now this guy is leaving me love notes at the scene of the crime.” I ran a hand over my sweaty, chilled forehead and realized I still had Webster’s handkerchief in my hand. I offered it back to him and he shook his head, so I pocketed it. “This is serious business. This guy has a plan for something. He has a motive. He has some connection to me that I don’t understand, and I don’t like mysteries.”

  “I do,” Webster said. I shot him a look, and he shrugged apologetically. “I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t find some appeal in untangling the knots.”

  “Maybe this has something to do with Omega,” I said, “or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe this guy has Janus and Karthik, maybe he doesn’t.” I was trying to reason it out, but it was like a giant, thousand-piece puzzle with nine hundred and ninety-eight of them missing. “We need answers.”

  “I agree,” Webster said. “So far, this bloke’s been near to a ghost as I could imagine short of him wearing a sheet and saying, ‘Whoooooooh.’”

  That shook something loose in my head. “The thing about those ghosts is that they’re always hiding for a reason. We’ve got a few strings to tug on. Maybe we can yank the sheet off his head.”

  “This isn’t Scooby Doo, you know.” Webster sounded reassuring. Again. I let him get away with it because he was cute. And well meaning.

  “But it’s not random acts of violence, either,” I said. “He’s a meta, that’s definite. He’s targeted at least two former Omega members; that’s not random. There’s something going on behind that sheet.”

  Webster looked like he was going to grudgingly admit something he didn’t want to admit. “Maybe. But this is a serial killer sort of pathology of the like I’ve never seen. These crimes are not only shockingly brutal, but amazing in their sheer viciousness. I’ve got people pulling local surveillance, maybe we can a spot this bloke on camera.”

  “That’d help,” I said. “While you’re doing that, there’s another string I can tug on.”

  “Oh?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  I sighed. “One I don’t particularly want to pull.”

  Chapter 23

  Katrina Forrest had been Janus’s longtime companion. They had history. They had background. They had sex, which was still icky to me because he was thousands of years old and she looked barely legal.

  But she was also the closest thing to Janus I could find without finding the man himself.

  I’d heard rumors through Reed that she’d parted ways with the old man a year or so earlier. I didn’t r
eally keep up with her because… well… because Kat and I weren’t exactly bosom buddies. But Reed, my darling brother, he kept the feelers out with everybody. He was the spider at the social center of a little web, keeping the little strings to all my old friends, who were now scattered to the winds. It was just as well. Someone in the family had to be warm and caring.

  I think it was just surprising to everybody that it was him. Not because they’d have expected it to be me, but because Reed wasn’t exactly the warm and inviting type, either.

  Still, his mom wasn’t my mom, and that probably made a world of difference.

  I’d called him asking for the number and he’d given it to me immediately. I had it dialed into my phone and was just staring at the lit faceplate, almost willing the “Vodafone UK” signal bar to die down in the upper left hand corner. I so did not want to make this call. And not just because of the absurd cost-per-minute of doing it.

  But I pushed the green button anyway, and a few seconds later it started to ring.

  She picked up on the fifth ring or so. I’d lost count after three, really, a feeling of dread filling my guts. It wasn’t like Kat and I had left things on bad terms. I just hadn’t spoken to her in almost two years and didn’t know what I was going to say.

  It turned out that I didn’t really need to worry about that.

  “Hey, girlfriend!” she said, perky as ever she was. Kat was a peppy person by nature. I was not. This was reason eight hundred and fifty million why I had not stayed in touch. “How are you doing?”

  “Up to my ears in shit and trying to keep my mouth closed.” The response was natural.

  She giggled, but it wasn’t because she was enjoying my pain. Probably. “Sienna, you’re always so funny. How are you always so funny?”

  “Because without humor and sarcasm to soften my words, I’d be called a bitter old hag by everyone. Listen,” I said, “I’m in London.”

  “Oh?” She perked up a little bit at that. How was that even possible? I’d assumed she’d reached max perkiness years ago. “You know Janus is in—”