Badder

by Robert J. Crane

  Now she was broken.

  “It’s over, Reed. I love you.”

  And then she was gone.

  Without even saying goodbye.

  41.

  Sienna

  I was jarred out of the darkness of my dreamwalk with Reed, leaving it on perhaps not the greatest note, but the one that fit for the moment.

  It was dark in the dreamwalk because I was in the darkness, the world around me shrouded by black cloth that was wrapped around my head.

  I was bagged, like a hostage, except…

  No one was going to pay the ransom for me, because Rose…didn’t give a damn about money.

  The world moved around me. A thump, and I realized I was in the back of a vehicle. Probing with my feet, I found the boundaries of my world, and they were large. I seemed to be in the back of a van or truck, my feet sliding around and making contact with metal walls. I was as gentle and quiet as I could be, trying not to let whoever was driving know that I was awake.

  No need to raise the alarm, after all.

  Just as I was starting to get an idea about the limits of my little world, the vehicle bounced to a stop, and I thudded my head against the rubber floor. My arm made contact with it, skidding slightly as the rubber resisted against my skin where my sleeve had been torn by Mr. Blonde hours before.

  The sound of someone killing the ignition, then opening a door up front of me, came through the metal walls, muffled, but clear enough. The squeak of doors opening below my feet came next, and strong hands reaching in and dragging me out. I fought a little, but not too much. Token resistance, really, because blind and bound in metacuffs, there was no easy way to fight back.

  And I was going to fight back, in spite of what I’d told Reed.

  I had to.

  But I also had to try and convince him not to come back. Rose had known he was coming this time—any one of a thousand things could have tipped her off, but the sudden betrayal of Colin Fannon was a worrying one—and I needed to at least try and keep Reed and the others clear of this giant mess I had gotten myself into.

  Because otherwise…he’d come back, and Rose would be waiting.

  And the next time…I wasn’t so sanguine about his chances of escaping her.

  Case in point. Here I was, trussed up and hooded, being led across snowy ground by rough hands—

  Wait.

  Snow?

  In summer?

  The crunch of snow beneath my shoes was unmistakable, the gentle chill of winter tickling my flesh and raising goosebumps that were, for once of late, not related to the hair-raising predicaments I seemed to keep getting sucked into.

  “Take that off of her,” Rose’s voice sounded from somewhere in front of me, and suddenly the world brightened as the black hood came ripping off. The light was blinding for a few seconds, but I got my bearings again pretty quickly.

  Rose was hovering ahead like an angel—fallen one, maybe—smiling benignly upon me. Colin Fannon was at my shoulder, the black hood in his hand. At my other shoulder was Mr. Blonde, that jag who’d cut me open at the train station in Edinburgh before that mystery girl called him off.

  She didn’t seem like she was around to save my ass from harm this time though, which was just as well for her health, cuz Rose didn’t seem like the type to tolerate lesser bitches in the pack.

  “D’ye like it?” Rose asked, raising her arms to indicate the massive snowfield we were standing in the middle of. There were curving-topped mountains in the distance, but this little stretch of plain had been blanketed beautifully and perfectly. “I wanted you to feel a little at home, y’see. I know your native land is a bit like Scotland in this regard—the big snowfalls.”

  “Gee,” I said, clinking my cuffs behind my back, “thanks. I appreciate the effort.” Pure snottiness. I wouldn’t let her think for a second she’d actually beaten me, even if she skinned me alive an inch at a time.

  She shrugged lightly. “For someone with the power of a frost giant at their disposal, it’s an easy thing.” She floated a little closer. If I could get the meta cuffs around her neck and pull hard enough, I could take her head off. That’d put an end to her pretty swiftly.

  “Uncuff her and leave us be, will ye?” Rose gestured to Fannon and Mr. Blonde. “It’s time for some real talk.” Her green eyes glittered, and she shot me a malicious and dazzling smile. “Some girl talk.”

  They had me unlocked in a hot second, falling over themselves to execute her command. They were gone a second later, taking my best weapon with them. “Thanks for nothing, Fannon,” I called after him. He didn’t even acknowledge me, and when I looked at his eyes, they looked…

  Blank.

  I’d known Fannon a little bit. Probably the least well of nearly any of the associates at the agency. He was a lot of things—kind of a hippy, into being vegan and environmentally conscious…

  Blank-eyed and empty? Not so much.

  “You’ve got a lot of sick puppets,” I said, watching their retreating figures head back to the van. They got in, started it up, and began to pull away, leaving tire tracks in the snow as they crunched their way across the field.

  “Excuse me?” Rose asked.

  I turned back to her. “Uhh…sorry…I think I made a mistake. Sock…sock puppets, that’s it. You’ve got a lot of sock puppets.” I waved at the van driving off. “You’ve got your hand up a lot of asses, Rose.”

  “I do have a certain way with people,” she said, absolutely straight-faced. “You could say…I know the secrets of their souls.” She drifted a little closer to me. “Like you, for instance.”

  “You don’t know shit about me, Rose,” I said, looking sideways, pretending to be bored. I was actually hanging on her every word, hoping she’d give me a seed with which to destroy her, or get close enough that I could take a reasonable chance to choke her to death.

  “You really hate me now, don’t you?” She drifted closer and closer, only a few feet away now, grinning madly. “Good. I’ve hated you all this time. Had to fake my way through it while I was hanging about with you.”

  “You’re a wonderful actor,” I said. “I bought it. You’re a master at feigning sincerity.”

  “That’s not me,” she said, still smirking. “That’s Hamilton. He’s classically trained. I just draw on him anytime I need his skills. He’s been in the theater since the days that Medea was performed live.”

  “Blah blah blah,” I said, pissing on her little reminiscence. “What now?”

  She cocked her head at me. “Now…you’re going to try and kill me, of course.”

  That felt awfully on the nose. “Oh?” I asked. Of course I wanted to, but the fact that she’d just casually suggest it…

  “See…” Rose said, drifting even a little closer, “what we have here, is a couple of succubi with a dispute over who’s the best. I don’t really care that I’m stronger than you—because I am. I don’t really care that I’m better than you—because I am. What I care about…is you knowing, in your heart, in the depths of your empty, soon-to-be-ripped out soul—” this she said with a rising ferocity “—that I own your arse—” and she darted in faster than my eye could track her and slapped me right on it, making me jump “—wholly and completely. You belong to me now, Sienna Nealon. You’re going to attack me so that I can show you—eliminate that little doubt, that hope that’s feeding your soul, the one that says, ‘Yeah, you can still beat her.’ we’re going to knock that right out of you, starting now.” And she smiled. “So…strap it on, lass, and let’s have a go. Give me everything you’ve got. I’ll even give you the first hit for free.”

  I debated whether to do it or not to rise to her goad, but I’m me, and there was no way I was going to pass up a free hit against someone who’d caused me this much agony, especially when I judged that if I sat there passively, she’d eventually starting pounding on my ass anyway, and if I was going to take a beating, I at least wanted to deserve it.

  So I slugged her in the face with a c
ouple fingers sticking out in a point, not pulling the punch as I drove it right into her eye socket like an old pro. Her eyeball disappeared under my assault and Rose took the hit with a shock.

  I didn’t stop there, either. I hooked my fingers into the cartilage behind her nose and I ripped it out as I yanked my hand back, following up by dragging her toward me and elbowing her in the other eye as hard as I could. A hit like that from a normal human would cause trauma; my strike caused so much overpressure that her other eyeball exploded and she was blinded, half her face hanging off.

  Not wasting any time, I seized her by the hair, taking care not to spend much time touching her skin, and lifted her off the ground. I was going to drive the back of her head down into the point of my knee, shattering her skull and spilling her brains all over this pretty white snowfield she’d created. I had a grip on her by the small crater I’d created in her face and was yanking her down when, very suddenly, she slipped my grasp.

  “Oh my,” she said, floating eerily back up into the air, blood racing down her pale chin and cheeks from the gaping places where I’d torn muscle, tissue and bone. Her eyeballs reappeared first as her skin knitted itself back together, and she rasped, “That’s not nice, Little Doll.” And her green eyes sparkled as she was left looking almost as flawless as before, save for a few streaks of blood.

  Something about the way she said it almost knocked the knees from beneath me. It was pure Wolfe, speaking through her. She’d just used his powers to perfectly heal from my assault in a matter of seconds, which meant…

  He was with her now. Really, truly with her, doing her bidding and repairing her face from my near-lethal assault.

  I swung at her again, coming at her with a series of punches and attacks designed to showcase my martial arts expertise. She fought back, flawlessly, her form perfect, her speed and dexterity miles beyond my own—

  And she finished me with a perfect counter that swept aside my punch, turning me around, and landing a shattering blow against the small of my back.

  My legs went out, numb and as good as dead. My face hit snow, cold and bitter, and my chest followed. The landing drove the breath out of me; she’d broken my spine, I could tell from the way I couldn’t move anything below the waist. I tried to push up—

  “Now, now.” She landed heavily on my back, putting a knee right between my shoulder blades and then dragging me over. She was still smiling. “If you get too out of control, I’ll break your spine just below the neck, really give you something to heal over, aye? I want to talk now—”

  “I’ve got nothing else to say,” I almost spat.

  “Good, because I’m the one who’s talking,” she said, putting a hand over my mouth for a second and mashing my lips so that one of them split open. She did it so casually that I almost believed she was simply too strong to fully appreciate how easily she could hurt me. “So zip it.”

  She settled, staring right down at me. “You know why I hate you? Did the Englishman tell you?”

  “You lived in the cloister here in Scotland,” I said, roughly, not wanting to dignify her question with an answer but not feeling like this was not the conversational hill where I wanted to make my last defiant stand.

  “Aye, I did,” she said. “It was a village, y’see. I was raised there my whole life. Never left until…after.” She looked out into the distance. “When…your great uncle came, along with your friend Weissman—”

  “Weissman was no friend of mine,” I spat. “I tried to kill his ass.”

  “You should have tried harder,” she said, then thumped me on the chest, breaking eight of my ribs. “I looked into things, after I first heard about you. Interviewed some old Omega folks—I shouldn’t say ‘interviewed’; I actually stole some of their memories, you know, before your pal Philip Delsim cut them to pieces—and so I know what happened.” She leaned in closer. “You decided to stay in London and make your stand there, with your little friends…” Her expression darkened. “…Instead of helping me and mine.

  “You could have saved my family,” she said, voice getting harder and colder by the moment. “My village. You could have fought your uncle with us, there, instead of in London. That’s just typical though, innit? Your family and friends lived—” and here she became even frostier “—and mine died. And now…” She smiled, but it was thin, and pained. “It’s time to pay the piper for that choice, my darlin’.”

  She forced her hand down on me, pressing it against the skin of my cheek. I tried to wrestle away from her, but she thumped me again with her knee, and my head went blurry. My skin started to burn where she touched it, then everywhere else. It spread down my face, down my neck, like someone had doused me in gasoline and lit the fire. Trapped between the cold of the snow and the heat of her touch, I burned.

  Rose was there, invading my mind, my thoughts, swelling inside me like she might come bursting out of my chest. It lasted for forever, or for a moment, and then she pulled her hand away, eyes rolled up in her head like she’d just had a grand old time.

  She let out a long breath, and then wiped her brow of non-existent sweat. “Whew. Have ye asked yourself what would happen if you didn’t take the whole soul from someone? If, instead—” she looked down at me, and licked her lips “—you just…disciplined yourself…and took a little nibble every day, or every few days?”

  Rose leaned her face in close to mine, til we were practically cheek to cheek. “You get a little piece of them at a time, like I just took from you.” She stroked my cheek and it burned immediately, her power going to work overpowering mine, carving off another little slice of me.

  “What…did you take?” I asked, my breathing taxed and heavier than hers. The cold here burned my lungs, and my breath steamed the air.

  “Nothing you’ll miss,” she said, eyes glittering. “Just a little memory from your past, something from your teenage years, some embarrassing, unimportant lesson or two. I steered away from the good stuff—your friends, your loves, the things you really value, because…” She leaned in again, almost brushing me but whispering in my ear instead. “I want to take those things from you in front of you…I want you to watch your friends die, knowing how much you still love them, how much you secretly care…something most people wouldn’t have known about you, but…I see you now, darlin’.” She put her teeth on my ear and bit it just hard enough that I flinched. “I’ve got a little piece of you now, and I’m going to come back on the regular to take another—and another—” She bit me again, and this time it hurt, because she ripped through the cartilage and took a corner of my ear, then spat it on the white snow, which was already turning crimson. “Soon enough, there’ll be more of you in me than in here.” She touched me on the sternum and rested her hand on my shirt.

  “I’m going to take a piece of your soul at a time,” she said, standing back up over me. “I’m going to take every friend you have left in your little family.” She looked around. “I’m going to make you suffer. Make it so you never see your home again.” She smiled and leaned down again. “Welcome to Scotland. You’re free to wander about the land here, knowing that—just like the last few days, I’m never more than a heartbeat away.” Then she stood up and started to walk away.

  I lay there in the snow she’d made, breath steaming the air, hurting like I’d never been hurt, the memory of everything I’d done to her…she just shrugged off.

  I’d thought I was invincible, had told my souls that…but I was wrong.

  Rose had taken everything from me, almost.

  And now she was going to take the rest.

  A piece at a time.

  “Enjoy your stay,” Rose called back, over her shoulder, as she walked away. “You know, as much as you can given that I’m always watching. It’s pretty country, even though it’s not your home.” She looked back, and her eyes glittered. “I doubt you’ll ever come to love it here like I do, but…that’s all right. It doesn’t really matter, after all, whether you like it or not…

&n
bsp; “You’ll die here just the same.”

  Sienna Nealon Will Return

  and the Scotland Trilogy will conclude

  in

  NEMESIS

  Out of the Box, Book 17

  Coming December 1, 2017!

  Available for Pre-order on Amazon Now!

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  Author's Note

  Thanks for reading! If you want to know immediately when future books become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by CLICKING HERE. The reason you should sign up for this is because I don't always set release dates, and even if you're following me on Facebook (robertJcrane (Author)) or Twitter (@robertJcrane), it's easy to miss my book announcements because…well, because social media is an imprecise thing.

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  Cheers,

  Robert J. Crane

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Editorial/Literary Janitorial duties performed by Nick Bowman and Jeff Bryan. Final proofing (and some Britishing) was once more handled by the illustrious Jo Evans. Scottish proofing was done by John Clifford, who you might notice also gets a cameo in this one. Any errors or weird Americanizations you see in the text, however, are the result of me rejecting changes to try and make things decipherable to an international audience.

  The cover was once designed by Karri Klawiter of artbykarri.com.