Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (12 page)

As we lifted off, it occurred to me that that was exactly where I stood with the entire rest of the world as well. I didn’t know whether to be upset at the thought or not, so I just ignored it and held on, letting the rattle of the flight settle into my uneasy bones, and I tried to remember that, if I were to be honest about it, this was as close to feeling normal as I could expect at this point in my life.

There was someone waiting on the roof of Omega’s headquarters as we touched down, a familiar figure in a suit. For the briefest of moments I wondered if they’d somehow dragged Ariadne in to work with them, but as we began to descend I realized the woman’s hair was shorter and not red. The door swung open after we touched down and I recognized her as she gestured for me to get out. “Eleanor Madigan,” I said with a nod as I walked past her. “I almost didn’t recognize you without lightning spitting from your hands.”

“Based on what I’ve heard of your visit thus far, I’m certain you’ll be seeing that side of me before we’re all done,” she said in even tones, her light British accent reminding me of a flying nanny I’d seen in a movie a long time ago. “Sir,” she said to Janus with utmost respect.

“Eleanor,” Janus said as he stepped out of the helicopter. “We missed you on our excursion.”

“Ah,” Madigan said with a curt nod. “I’m afraid I was handling some business south of the Thames this morning and couldn’t get it concluded in time to reach you before you left. I do have a message from the Primus, however.”

“Oh?” Janus said, a thick, grey eyebrow raised in slight surprise. “Go on.”

“He requests the presence of your company immediately,” Madigan said, nodding sharply, almost as if she was bowing in deference to him. “He says the local police at the incident site have already had a preliminary finding from a local pathologist.”

“Indeed?” Janus said. “Well, then, without further ado, I suppose.” He turned to me. “Sienna, if you’d care to wait, you may, or if you’d prefer to go back to your hotel—”

“No, sir,” Madigan said. “The Primus requests her presence as well.”

“Requests it, does he?” I asked, feeling cheeky, as they’d say locally. “Well, in that case, let’s not disappoint your King Douche by keeping him waiting.”

Janus sighed audibly over the sound of the rotors finishing their last few turns. “I would ask you to try to be polite, but I know that would be fruitless, so I merely ask you try to restrain your desire to do violence until you may visit it upon someone who is fully deserving of your wrath—such as, say, Erich Winter.”

“You don’t want me getting into a rumble with your Big Cheese?” I asked, watching Janus register extreme discomfort and Bast’s face lock into irritation. “Fair enough. I’ll try not to needle him if he doesn’t needle me.”

“Dear God,” Janus said in seriousness as he turned away from me, “this will be the shortest meeting in the history of Omega.”

I didn’t ask what he meant as we descended back to the main floor, emerging from the same elevator bank as last time. There was a door on the wood-paneled far wall, the only one that wasn’t open to a glass-windowed room. I followed Janus through the quiet of the work floor, the cubicle dwellers keeping to themselves, heads down.

Janus paused and opened one of the double doors for me. With a last look that suggested something along the lines of
Play nice
, I stepped inside. Part of me wanted to ask Wolfe, Bjorn and Gavrikov what I should be expecting, but I didn’t want to have a conversation with myself as I was walking in to meet the man. Or woman. Not like I hadn’t met women who were totally psychotic beasts who ran over people with nary a thought. One of them was even in my head.

I was disabused of the notion that the Primus was a woman as soon as I walked in the door. The office was in a state of renovation. Half of it was covered in wood paneling reminiscent of everything I’ve ever imagined a country club would look like in the olden days. There were blank spaces on the walls where paintings had until recently been hanging, dirty outlines marking their removal. There were countless bookshelves as well, some of them emptied. From the accumulation of dust, I guessed that the cleanup had been recent.

The man behind the desk was younger than I expected. He didn’t stand to greet us but watched, his posture lazy as he sat there, impeccably dressed in a suit that probably cost more than I made in a month when I was working for the Directorate. He had a leg up on the desk, resting it, and was tilted back in his chair. His hair was brown, his eyes were dark, and his features were sharp. I felt coldness radiate off him in waves. Not literally, like Winter, just a chill eye, like I was being surveyed by someone without any emotion. It decreased his attractiveness by a considerable margin, making him ugly to look at. He wore a little smile, and I would have sworn it was there just for me, but I got the feeling he’d been wearing it since before the door had opened.

As we walked in, heading toward the two aged wooden chairs sitting in front of the desk, he gave me the slightest incline of his head as he watched me. It made me feel a little dirty. He made a motion toward one of the chairs in front of him, and I sat, adopting a posture just as lazy as his. I realized with only mild surprise that Kat was sitting in the other chair, her nose still a little swollen but looking far better than when I’d last left her.

“Sienna,” Kat said reluctantly.

“Gutterslut,” I replied with a cordial nod.

There was a moment’s pause then Kat cracked a nervous smile. “Just like old times, huh? Sitting in front of Old Man Winter’s desk? Or Ariadne’s?”

“Do you even remember those days?” I didn’t look at her. Bast and Madigan took a seat on a couch about ten feet behind us, against one of the walls.

Kat paused, as though taken aback by the question. “Of course I remember those days. I haven’t forgotten everything, just—”

“Just the last guy you were sleeping with,” I said, looking back to see the Primus favoring me with a sly, almost malicious smile. I cast a look back at Janus and grinned. “I’m taking wagers—who do you think will forget the other first—you or her?”

Janus looked wary again. “I don’t have the power to forget things the way a Persephone-type would—”

“I meant from old age,” I said, twisting the knife and noticing the flash of irritation in Janus’s eyes, “but if you’d like to forget her sooner, I have some expertise in that area—”

“This is all so cute,” the Primus said in a high voice, his accent unmistakably American. “I may not even need to watch TV tonight. Not like the BBC has anything interesting on it anyway,” he said, an ugly tone undercutting the lightness in his voice. “All the sniping, backbiting, the repartee. It’s like a reality TV show airing right here in my office. You know, minus the reality part of it.”

“You’re not from England,” I said, tracing a look back to the Primus.

He gave a slight shrug of the shoulders to go with his grin. “Born and raised in Los Angeles. What can I say? I’m of the new world, not the old.” He waved his hand around the room, indicating all the construction. “That’s why all this stuff, these remnants … they gotta go. This is the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. I’m here to bring Omega into the next age, not keep it cowering in the last one.”

I looked at him carefully, putting things together. “You’re new.”

“I’ve been around for a while,” he came back at me.

“I meant as Primus,” I said. I looked back at Janus and he gave me a subtle nod.
Rick,
Wolfe’s voice came to me.
Son of the last one.
“Your name is Rick.”

Rick brought his hands together and clapped them twice in approval. “Very good. Who told you? Wolfe?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Could have been Bjorn or Gavrikov.”

“Wow,” Rick said. “You got both of them, too, huh?”

“Yeah. Isn’t it in my file?” I shot him a mean-spirited look.

“Your file’s pretty incomplete, especially regarding our own agents and how they died.” Rick turned his gaze to Kat. “After all, we haven’t really had someone who’s gotten close to you until recently.”

“What about Mormont?” I asked.

Rick shrugged. “What about him? He went mercenary, tried to make a big play to bring you in and failed. I read about that op and felt sad for the idiots who backed it.” Rick looked pointedly past my shoulder to where Bast was sitting. “Why would you trust some sad-sack human who’s banking for a big payout to deliver the most powerful succubus of our time? Dumb. Just dumb. Typical of the kind of backwards, non-visionary thinking that used to fill this office.” He looked around, and I realized he was waiting for someone to speak up and defend his father. I felt bristling behind me, but whether it was from Madigan, Janus or Bast, I didn’t know. I just knew it was present and contained. Barely. “We’re working on remedying that, though,” he said with a smug grin.

“Oh, yes,” I said with some smugness of my own. “Visionary thinking. That’s what you’ve been lacking around here. I’m sure that’ll fix everything.”

“It’ll help,” Rick said without any trace of humility or worry. “But enough of that. Let’s hear about this village.” He shifted his attention to Janus. “What’s the word?”

“All dead,” Janus said. “But I suspect you already know that.”

“I’d heard,” Rick confirmed then shifted in his chair to put his other foot up on the desk. “Did you see how?”

Janus shook his head. “The bodies appeared unmarked to me, though I didn’t get particularly close.”

Rick smiled. “Feeling a little squeamish at the sight of the dead, J?”

Janus didn’t bite at the goad that was tossed his way. “I have seen my fair share, and that of several hundred others. No, I’m afraid that my problem was more oriented to a lack of experience with forensic pathology. We saw no signs of physical violence, but that doesn’t rule out poison, cardiac arrest—”

“Removal of souls,” Rick said with a pointed smile toward me. “So, you don’t want to speculate? Afraid to bet your ass that you might get it wrong and I’ll be pissed? Fair enough.” He slid a page off the desk and toward him. “Toxicology reports aren’t the fastest thing in the world, but the preliminaries for one of the victims came back pretty quick.” He looked around between all of us. “Anyone wanna guess?”

“Ooh, ooh,” I said, raising my hand, “I’m guessing they were bored to death, and that it originated from London, probably right here in this office, in your chair.” I looked around and caught Janus’s face fall. “Did I win a prize?”

“Nice,” Rick said, the smug not even dented. “Nope, you do not win.” He thought for a moment. “Although, technically, I guess, they could have been bored to death.” He threw the paper down. “The point is, it doesn’t look like poison, at least not from the preliminaries. It looks like they just up and died, keeled over while clinging to each other.”

“Are there actually poison-spewing metas that could do something like this?” I asked as a quiet settled over the office.

“Not that I know of, no,” Janus said, his hand covering his face, as though he could use it to wipe the expression off. He was distracted, unfocused, lost in his own head.

“What is it, then?” I asked. “What killed them?”

“In some of the previous cases, it has been bullets,” Bast said from behind us. “Or obvious meta powers, like a massive fire burning them to death.”

“But he’s saying there’s no obvious cause of death,” I said, pointing to Rick. “Who could just kill a room full of people like that, and not leave a sign of any sort that they’ve been murdered?”

“I don’t know,” Rick said casually, and the way he said it made me suck in a deep breath of air, the stale scent of old cigar smoke hanging in it and coloring my taste buds. He dropped his feet off the desk and leaned forward toward me, seeming to savor the very air I wanted to choke on. “No marks, no poisons, no signs of beating or bullets.” He smiled. “It’s almost like someone just touched them,” he said pointedly, with that wicked smile, “and they died.”

“So it was succubus?” I asked. “Or an incubus?”

Rick shrugged, still wearing a maddening smile. “I don’t know. Could you have done that?”

“Drain an entire room of metas without having any of them fight back or leave any sign?” I gave a quick look around the room. “I dunno. Want to try it right now?”

Bast stood suddenly behind me, and I could feel Karthik tense where he stood near the wall. “I think she’s kidding,” Rick said to both of them, with a slight wave of his hand. “Unless you can devour souls from a distance now.”

“That escapes me at present,” I said. “But there’s that old saying about looks being able to kill? Maybe I’ll work on it.”

“Perhaps something associated with fear,” Janus said. “They might have died of heart attacks or something of the kind—”

“So we’re back to theories and conjecture,” Rick said, flattening his hand and laying it along the top of the desk. “I prefer to work with hard facts.” He looked us all over. “Go figure it out, then let me know what you come up with.”

“How many meta cloisters are there in the United Kingdom?” I asked. “There can’t be that many.”

“There are not,” Janus said. “There is another in the north of Scotland and two in Ireland.”

“We don’t have the manpower to stage some kind of bodyguard force around every cloister in the isles,” Rick said. “I want our people protecting our own, here at headquarters. If you want to send out an envoy to convince these cloisters to huddle up with us, that’s fine, but we’re not gonna go running out to northern Scotland for anything other than a burial detail to see what’s up with those people.”

“What about the non-cloistered metas?” I asked, looking to Janus, who watched me with a flat stare. “Like that Athena we talked to this morning? Why aren’t more metas running like her, if this kind of calamity is falling on the cloisters?”

“Oh, but they are,” Bast said from behind me. “We’re finding them as well, in ones and twos.” She let out a cruel smile. “Well, we’re finding pieces of them, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, wait,” I said as I tried to process that thought. “You’re saying that they’re being killed, too?”