Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (23 page)

“Sure,” Hera said with a subtle nod. “Have a seat.” With a wave, she indicated my bed, which was the only thing other than the chair beside it that could be sat on in the room.

“No, thanks. I’d really rather stand after the last day or so’s action.” I didn’t intend to patronize her, but I’m sure it came off like that. I really just didn’t want to sit. Or feel like I was in her charge at all.

“Right.” I noticed she remained standing, too. “So, you know what’s going on out there.”

“I’ve heard,” I said. “I told Reed what I know about Century’s plans. Any chance you’re going to be able to save those people in Ireland and Scotland?”

“We’ll try,” she said, her face grey with what looked like the weight of that thought. “It’s a pretty big burden to carry. I don’t know if Reed’s told you much about us, but we’re hardly as well funded or connected as Omega. We’re stretching the limits of our resources at this point.” She lowered her head slightly. “At the rate metas are being killed, though, it’s not looking too pretty for us as a race.”

“Do you know what’s carrying out the killings?” I asked and caught a trace of curiosity from her. “I was at a village, a site of one of the massacres a few days ago, and it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” I paused. “And I’ve seen Wolfe at work, so it’s not like I’ve never witnessed a massacre.”

“True enough,” she said. “We’re not exactly sure. As you probably know, Century has a hundred members. A very tight-knit cabal, and those members were chosen very carefully for their skills and abilities. They’re powerful. They don’t have any weak links.” She edged a glance toward Breandan, who flushed under her gaze. “Anyone you run into from Century is either a mercenary or a member of their inner council. They’ve certainly not been hesitant to use bloodthirsty men with guns, but most of the damage is being done by metas.”

“What types do they have at their disposal?” I asked, curious. “And how did they recruit them?”

She gave a light smile, and it was like a beacon in the dark of her wearied expression. “Near as we can tell, they were approached one by one over the last few years, chosen by Weissman and Sovereign. If someone decided they didn’t like the sound of it, decided they didn’t want to come along for the ride … well, let’s just say they weren’t seen again.” Her smile faded. “Now that’s speculation, since no one’s told us about any such meeting. But some very high-profile metas have disappeared in the last few years, unexpected and unexplained. For those types, that’s just not usual. Some of them were very well known within the community—people like …” she hesitated, “Persephone, for instance. Loki. Set.” She shrugged. “Quite a few others. All gone, all disappeared. I’d have to guess most are dead.”

I narrowed my eyes as I thought about it. “So if they were recruited they wouldn’t have resumed their place in meta society? You assume none of them said yes and … I dunno, went back to Century’s secret undersea volcanic lair?”

She smiled again, this time carefully. “There might be some lingering out there, but I would think that the temptation would be to have them exert their influence in the name of the conspiracy that they were now part of. After all, if some of their members are highly placed in the meta community, they could use that influence to press for calm while this storm started blowing their way. And they might have done just that. It’s not like we didn’t see signs of this years ago. We just didn’t know what we were looking at. The puzzle was missing almost all its pieces. Now that more of them are on the table, the picture is starting to appear, and I don’t care for the shape of it at all. We’re down by two-thirds of the meta population already.” She said this with a little bit of a drawl, and I realized that she really didn’t have much of an accent. “I suspect they mean to finish the task at hand in the next few months, and then … whatever their plans are for humanity, it’ll be showtime.”

I thought about what she’d said, and something didn’t add up. “I knew someone who worked for them, a meta.”

“Oh?” She eyed me. “You’re talking about that doctor that worked at the Directorate?”

“Zollers,” I said. “I don’t think he was part of the inner council, not by the way he talked about it. I mean, maybe he was, but he was supposedly going to have to go on the run from them.”

“Sounds like he’d be a veritable wealth of information about them if we could get our hands on him,” she said. “I doubt he’s within easy reach, though.”

I frowned. “Maybe not.” I looked around the room for a moment as I pondered whether I should mention that I thought he was out there, trying to influence me in some way. I decided to pass on it for now. “You know, Omega’s trying to do something similar to what you’re doing. Trying to limit the damage. Help metas.” I shrugged. “Or so they say.”

Hera pursed her lips, deepening the already-present wrinkle lines around her mouth. “And they probably are, too. I despise most of those bastards with every damned fiber of my being, but this is the sort of crisis that puts even us on something approaching the same side.. These aren’t the times when we’re making a mad dash to grab metas up to solidify our own power, or to draw our own lines, increase our little fiefdoms. It’s all or nothing days now, life or death. Tends to put things in perspective.”

I smiled. “If that’s the case, why don’t you put aside your petty differences and work with Omega on this?”

She gave me a smile right back, but it was thin and patronizing. “I don’t know. Why don’t you do the same with Erich Winter?” She gave it a second to sink in and stayed cool. “Because of bad blood. After enough of it passes between you, it becomes a river you have a hard time crossing. I don’t want to go back to them, hat in hand, and I doubt they much want to face up to me. So for the next little while, we’ll each just ignore the other and keep scrambling to do everything we can to keep Century from destroying our world.”

I sniffed, trying to ignore the faint smell of her perfume. It was fit for an old lady and not much else. “Have it your way, I suppose.”

“Besides,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “I still haven’t forgiven those bastards for some of the things they did in the olden days. I bet they could say much the same about me.”

“When you say the olden days,” Breandan interjected, “do you mean like … um …”

“Xerxes’s invasion of Greece,” Hera said, almost indifferently. “That one caused some major ripples in the hierarchy at the time. A lot of us were in different countries around the world, only getting together for special occasions and content to rule our own little lands, managing the humans from a distance, exercising our power judiciously. Everybody did their own thing. We were fragmented in our own states, but it was working.”

Her expression hardened. “Then some meta-jackass named Xerxes gets his loincloth in a twist and decides to declare himself a living god and starts invading the lands of others. He was hardly the first to try it, but … you know what an Athena-type is?” She looked rather pointedly at me.

“Sure,” I said. “I met one just the other day.”

“That boy could rile an army,” she said with a smile. “I never did get the whole story, but I suspect one of his parents was an Ares. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t taught them how to fight us. Made a mess out of our defense at Thermopylae.” She let her smile fade. “That was the beginning of the end for us, and a great many of us weren’t happy about it. Omega, though, they took it the worst. The Primus at the time was—well, guess.”

“Your hubby,” I said, and she let her amusement show.

“We were about done by then, but yes,” she said. “The power of the gods, our ability to control man by annunciation and revelation, was fading. I said we should step into the shadows. We, who lived longer than most, who knew human whim and desire better than the shorter-lived humans did themselves, we could exert control without being blatantly obvious about it.” She smiled again. “Leave it to a man to think that he needs to use a hammer when the touch of a hand will do. He never did quite get that lesson. Fortunately, when his brother took over after Zeus’s death, he understood it.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Poseidon?”

“Hell, yes,” Hera said. “You didn’t think I meant Hades, did you? No offense, but he would have made a worse Primus than Zeus, bastard that he was. Besides, he was dead by then, thank the stars.”

There were a few parts of what she said that flagged my attention, and I started to ask some questions, but she went on and I found myself listening along.

“Poseidon took over Omega, backed by the four ministers,” she said, “and he, with considerably less ego than his brother, recognized that there were other ways to rule the world. So he took us into the shadows, behind the scenes, made us legends and whispers. It took a while to make the transition, but he made money the tool by which we got what we wanted from mankind, and it worked pretty well for a couple thousand years, if I may say.”

“Why did you break off from them?” I asked, the less pressing questions fading to the back of my mind for later.

“Because Poseidon died,” she said. “And because the man who replaced him had not near the integrity of Poseidon, and took Omega in directions I didn’t think it should go.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m sorry, what? What directions did they go?”

She shrugged. “I think there’s plenty of money to be made by legitimately supplying humans with what they want and need. Owning corporations, merchants, employing people was a way that we made gold hand over fist for millennia. The replacement Primus, the one who ran Omega until his son Rick took over a few days ago, was a servant of my late husband. His right hand man, if you will. He considered organized crime to be the last frontier for increasing the margins and the control Omega exercised over people, and so he took them into a very different place.” She leaned toward me. “Now understand, we were gods. Our hands were not clean, by any means. We killed people, sure. I tried not to, but it happened from time to time, usually while I was avenging some wrong done to one of my followers. It’s not as though they had a very good criminal justice system back then, and crimes on women tended to go unpunished.

“But I tried to steer us hard away from the course of being bloodthirsty killers,” she said with narrowed eyes. “That was what Hades was. What his little triad did, those Cerberus boys. They were the scum of our kind, and most of us didn’t want to sink to their lows, didn’t want to be compared to them. Hell, some of us had even died trying to bring his ass down. But that was all lost on Rick’s father.”

“Who was he?” I asked, interrupting her. “The Primus? Who was he in the old myths?”

She shrugged again. “His name was Gerasimos, but the only way you would have heard him mentioned in myth was as Alastor, which was a nickname way back, a sort of curse that mortals wished on each other to signify what he had done, which was carry forth vengeance for Zeus, to strike down those who offended him for whatever reason.” She rolled her eyes. “Often nonsensical and fueled by alcohol. Anyhow, he took over after Poseidon’s death, and we had a bit of a clash, he and I. He earned that name by killing people. I didn’t approve, but it didn’t matter so long as Zeus was in charge. Which is another reason I hate that man to this day. Poseidon had reason, less ego, would at least hear you out.” There was something behind her eyes that was akin to longing. “He shouldn’t have died. He was the one who united the old-world gods, brought us together, expanded influence from Europe to Asia, even made inroads to South America.” She shook her head again. “I don’t suppose this all matters, but you know why I’m telling you all this, don’t you?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Because I asked?”

“That’s close enough to true,” she said with a smile. “I’ve heard that Erich Winter tended to feed you a little at a time and keep the rest to himself, doling it out whenever he felt like it. I expect after what happened, it might have made you a little suspicious.”

“So you want me to trust you?” I asked and sent a canny look toward Reed, whose face was neutral. After that, I looked to Breandan, who wore a poker face of his own. “You’re drowning me in exposition so I won’t think you’re keeping things from me?”

She wore a maddening fragment of a smile, and I watched her tap her fingers on the side of her legs while she seemed to contemplate something. “Is it working?”

I thought about it for a second before answering. “It’s not hurting your cause. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard the tales?” she asked, watching me for a reaction. “I call them tales, but they’re more like rumors, straight from the fields of west Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, from people who have seen things like you found in that church basement.”

“You mean about how death is coming for them?” I asked, drawing a nod from her. “About how death is reaching out his hand for the metas, again? Just like what happened before.” Her expression was carefully guarded, but her lips were upturned just the slightest in the corners. “They talked about it like it was Hades, right? Like it was him all along, back again?”

She finally broke into a smile. “So you have heard.”

“Janus said he’s dead,” I replied. “So did you, just a few minutes ago.”

“And so he is,” she said and glanced at Reed. “Get the car ready, will you?”

He nodded and brushed his way out of the room, his ponytail swinging behind him. He didn’t even protest or ask her why, just did it. I wondered at that but only for a moment before Hera got my attention again.

“I’m having him get the car because I think it’s time you learned what use I would have for you,” she said, almost quietly. She gave a nod to Breandan. “You can bring your friend with you if you’d like, but the next lesson I’ve got for you is going to require a little trip back in time, and I can’t do that here. I need a little help.”

“Back in time?” I asked. “Like … really back in time, turning back the clock?”

She laughed lightly. “Figuratively. I want to show you something, something that will help to explain things better than I could without the visual aid. Will you come with me?”