Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (18 page)

I could see the flash of memories, of things coming from his mind, facts and thoughts. I knew his name was Roger McClaren, that he was an American, a mercenary, hired by a group who he didn’t even know. I saw him in a room with the others that had come. There was a man giving him orders, a man who seemed vaguely familiar to me even though I couldn’t place him. He was tall, with a mop of hair that was out of control, and he stood before the mercenaries.

“He’s an Irishman,” the man told the mercs in a flat accent, his head distorting in the memory as I watched it. “Name is Breandan Duffy. Should be a soft target. Sweep him up and we’ll have another for you to hit by the time you get back. I want London ops wrapped up by this time tomorrow so we can start heading north to deal with a few strays before we clean out that cloister in Scotland.” His eyes flashed. “There’s work to do between now and then, so get done with this one quick.”

“Question, sir,” came the voice of one of the men outside McClaren’s field of vision. “What type is this one? Should we expect much resistance?”

“Our telepath says he’s a luck-changer,” the man at the front of the room said, his dark eyes never moving off the man he was speaking to. “That jibes with the intel we got on him from an interrogation. Swarm him, hit him fast, you’ll not have any problems. He’s unpredictable in his habits, though, as he’s some sort of petty thief, so waiting for him to come out of his flat at a certain time is out. His offensive capabilities are minimal, and the telepath puts his disposition as more of a risk of flight than fight. He’s on the seventeenth floor so you should have him trapped.” He shook his head, his dark hair flopping about his face. “Minimal resistance risk. Take him down, report back. We’ll have three more down by sunset and the day after tomorrow we can get up to York.”

Another question came from behind McClaren. “This can’t be all of their kind in London. I thought there were more of them.”

The man at the front of the room smiled. “There are. And we’ll be back, with some help. We’ve got some resources in country that have already wiped out one cloister. They’re on their way to do the job to a couple in Ireland before they meet us back here after we finish in Scotland. We’ve got a lot of work yet in London, but we’ll need more than just guns to do it.”

I sensed the mood shift in the room, as though someone else was about to ask a question, but McClaren stood up and sketched out a rough salute to the man in the front of the room. So McClaren was the squad leader. “Yes sir, Mr. Weissman. We’ll get this Duffy stitched up and be back in a couple hours.”

Weissman smiled coldly, his thin face not capable of much warmth or sincerity. “I have no doubt.”

The world faded around me and I came back to a screaming in my head, a searing at my fingertips, and I pulled them off McClaren’s face with great reluctance as he slumped to the ground, unconscious. I looked down at him and shook my head. “Quit whining. Any other succubus on the planet would have eaten your soul just now just for the cheap thrills, and frankly, knowing them, that would have been worse for you than you can imagine.” I turned to look back at Breandan, and I realized that I’d only been in the memory for a second or two, even though it had shown me minutes worth of time in Mr. McClaren’s life. “They were here for you.”

“Well, yeah,” Duffy said, unsurprised. “They did break down the door to my flat, after all.” He frowned. “Wait, did you think they were here for you?”

I watched him, in near disbelief. “There are people after you, trying to kill you?”

His face etched surprise. “There are people trying to kill you, too?”

I gave him a look of pure annoyance. “You could have mentioned that people were trying to kill you before you let me sleep in your apartment!”

He gave me a wide, unexpressive shrug. “And when were you planning to mention that someone was gunning for you?”

I scowled. “After I slept.”

“Look,” Duffy said with a slight grin, “clearly, we’re both in some sort of peril here. It could have been either one of us that caused this spot of bother to descend on my flat—”

“No,” I said, looking back down at the unconscious McClaren, “they didn’t know I’d be here.”

“Yet I’m quite thankful that you were,” Duffy said, “as if you hadn’t been, I’d be dead.” He seemed to think about it for a moment before his face turned serious. “I guess having you catch me pickpocket you was a lucky thing for me after all?”

I stared back at him and pursed my lips. “Don’t get all sappy on me now. I get the sense that this sweep team is only one piece of what this organization has available in the U.K.” I reached down and ripped McClaren’s belt off, then stepped back into the bedroom to start gathering magazines from the other fallen mercenaries.

“You ‘get the feeling’?” Duffy looked back at me with alarm. “I’m not too up on what succubuses are capable of—”

“It’s succubi. If a bunch of us got on London double deckers, that’d be succubuses.”

“Ah ha ha!” He laughed weakly and sounded fake. “The point is, did you just rip the soul out of the man?”

“No,” I said as I stooped to pick up three narrow magazines and a pistol, which I tucked into my belt. “I pulled his memory from the briefing he got before he came here.”

“And saw what?” Breandan asked, watching me wide-eyed.

I stopped and stared back at him before I answered. “A guy at the front of the room giving the order to kill you. His name’s Weissman. I think he’s a meta and almost certainly a member of Century.”

“Sorry, who?” Duffy gave me the look of a man who’d missed a step. “What’s Century?”

I tried to find a way to say it that didn’t sound absurd. “They’re a group of metas that are planning to kill every other meta on the planet … except for them.” Nope, that wasn’t it.

Breandan’s face got comically screwed up again. “Right. And this Weissman, he’s the James Bond villain sitting atop their little organization? Stroking a fluffy white cat as well, I trust?”

“Didn’t see a cat,” I replied and pulled three more magazines out of the belt of a dead commando, “just him, by himself, right now, in a warehouse not terribly far from here.”

“And you are picking up all these bullets because …?” he waited expectantly, though I could tell from the tone he knew what was coming.

“I’m going to go have a chat with this Weissman,” I said, taking a deep breath in through my nose as I stood to look at Breandan. “You see, he and his little henchman’s club, they killed someone a while back that I cared about, and I haven’t been able to properly repay them for it.”

Breandan looked down on me with his superior height, but I could see the skepticism in his face. “Oh, yeah? Who was that? Your mother?”

“Oh, God no,” I said, almost laughing. “I said someone I cared about.” I looked around soberly, trying to decide if I’d pulled everything of value from the bodies on the floor. “No. Her name was Andromeda.”

“Andromeda?” he asked, and I could hear the little noise from him that told me he was beginning to wonder not
if
I was crazy, but just how crazy I was. “That was her given name?”

“Hell if I know,” I said. “I only knew her for a few hours.” I watched his expression change, and I knew that telling the truth wasn’t doing my cause any favors in his eyes. “Listen …” I said softly, “maybe you should stay behind. What’s going to happen with this Weissman could get messy.”

“Oh, messy?” Breandan gave a wave to indicate all the dead bodies around him on the floor. “Well, all right then, I should definitely keep clear of it if it’s going to get messy. Because it certainly isn’t at all messy here, no, bodies on my floor is a perfectly normal effing day!” His eyes got wilder, and I saw a tick in the light crows feet around his eyes as he waved a hand around. “Are you serious? There are dead people on the floor of my flat, ones who came here to kill me!”

“Yeah,” I said with a little cringe, “see, this is why you should stay behind. I don’t know if you can handle what could happen with Weissman—”

Breandan extended the pistol in his hand to aim at McClaren’s head and fired it once, then jumped like he’d been the one shot. “Jesus!” It sounded like he said “Jay-sus!” Blood had splattered on the wall, and McClaren’s corpse was now lifeless on the floor, dropped by the momentum of the shot.

“What the hell did you do that for?” I asked, looking from the body to him in quick order.

“Well, I didn’t mean to!” he said, looking from McClaren’s corpse to me with panic in his eyes. “I was going to point it at him to show you how serious I was,” he waved the pistol toward me and I slapped a hand on his, twisting the gun out of his grip while keeping the barrel pointed away from me. “And it just went off!”

I stared at the pistol in my hand as I took a step back from him. “They do not just … go off. You have to pull the trigger for them to go off.”

He waved at it, clearly agitated. “Well, it … don’t they have a safety or something to keep that from happening?”

I held up the weapon. “It’s a Glock 17. No, it does not have a traditional safety. First rule of guns—do not point one at anything you do not want dead.”

Breandan looked back to McClaren’s corpse. “And is he … is he …?” He kept trying to form the question, but it was clear his emotions were getting in the way.

“Dead?” I finished for him. “His brains are all over the wall and floor, so yes, I think we can safely say he’s dead.” It occurred to me I’d seen entirely too much of that recently, as though somehow in the moment I killed Glen Parks I’d opened a floodgate on an orgy of violence that had come dropping into my life.

“Dear God,” Breandan breathed. “I didn’t mean to.” He looked tense enough to crush an apple between his buttcheeks. “You’re awfully calm about this!”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Yeah, but you killed these lot!” He waved his hands at the other bodies. “How can you be so damned still about it!”

I shrugged. “They were trying to kill us. I find it hard to dredge up much moral outrage about them being the ones who died instead of us.” For some reason, I didn’t mention that it hadn’t been long ago that I had felt as he had. I looked over the scene of the chaos again. “Even with the suppressors, those gunshots were loud.” I eyed him in mild accusation. “Especially that last one. We should probably get out of here before the police come.”

“They won’t be coming for quite some time, if at all,” Breandan said quietly, too stunned to pull his eyes off the carnage around us. “Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve heard what sounds like gunfire in this building.”

“Marvelous,” I said. “Well, I’m going to go pay a visit to this Weissman and see what I can find out from him.”

“And the fact that he sent a heavily armed group of men to kill us doesn’t concern you at all?” Breandan looked me over. “Your first instinct is to go charging after him now you’ve learned who he is?”

I nodded slowly. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a straight line into this organization. The first time I’ve ever seen anything of them but men in black carrying guns, other than a telepath who kept pretty quiet about who he’d dealt with. These people are the bogeyman of the meta world, and they’re scaring the hell out of everyone around them. I want to turn that around for a bit.”

“You’re ballsy,” Breandan pronounced.

I looked down at my figure with a frown, as though I had to check. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

With one last forlorn look around his flat, he said, “I don’t suppose it’s going to do me much good to stay here. Sooner or later the police are going to show up and it’d be best if I weren’t here for it.”

I frowned. “This was all self-defense. It’d be hard to explain to the police but not impossible.”

“Then why aren’t you staying?”

I thought about it for a beat. “I’ve got things to do and explaining myself to the cops isn’t one of them.” I reached down and pulled the wallet out of the back pocket of one of the men, trying to decide if I wanted to risk using one of his credit cards to get a room. Probably not until I took out this Weissman, one way or another.

“Let’s just say my explanations to the police might fall on deaf ears, given my previous history with them,” Breandan said with a grin as he opened the sliding door to his closet, now stained red from the fight, and pulled out a small canvas bag. “Just give me a few minutes to pack and we can take off.”

“You understand what’s going to happen here, right?” I asked, dead serious. “I’m going to drive to the address I have for this Weissman, and I’m going to brace him hard, like I just did to McClaren. I’ve had a lot of questions dangled in front of me about this organization, Century, and it’s time I got some answers. When I say it could get messy, I mean it, because I’m going to walk in there prepared to bleed Weissman until he starts answering or until he forces me to milk his brain dry. Do you understand?” The quiet, hushed tones of my voice had drained all the color from Breandan’s face, and he gave me a short, sharp nod of acquiescence. “Good,” I said, and felt the wave of nausea crash over me again, both from what had happened five minutes earlier when I woke up coupled with the realization of what I’d done and who I’d killed in the intervening time. “Then if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be needing to vomit again—and after that, we’ll go find this Weissman, and kick down his door.”

We took the assault team’s van. Breandan drove and I rode in the passenger side, head over a garbage can I’d taken with us from his bathroom. I sat over it in misery, the sick feeling I had in my stomach still mysterious in origin. I honestly didn’t know how much of it was from the clangor of voices that was occasionally rising in my head, the possibility I was pregnant, or if it was just stress and nerves from killing so many people in the last twenty-four hours.

Or it could have been Zollers. Maybe he had planted these Adelaide memories in my head. As fun as it was to glimpse into the past, I could do without the severe nausea.

I hoped that it was more the latter. Part of me worried it was the possibility of pregnancy, which would be … well, I didn’t know quite what it would be. I hesitated to say disastrous, but on a gut level, that’s how it felt.