Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (33 page)

“But you just said you were going to make me suffer,” I said, smiling at him. “That makes it seem like I don’t have anything to lose.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna make you—”

I sprang to the side, away from him, and the blast of wind that came in my wake swept him up and slammed him into the ceiling. “I’m guessing that being flung in the air isn’t the sort of thing you can just ‘time freeze’ your way out of. Gravity and all that, am I right?”

Weissman hit the ground firmly and squarely on his ass, and I heard the crack of something. “You …”

“Me,” I said, still whirling in motion as another tornado started his way from Reed, who was now on his knees. I bounded toward him, changing direction mid-move, angling toward Reed. I saw Weissman disappear in the second before the tornado hit him and he reappeared just behind Reed, his knife raised.

“Ah, ah, ah,” I said and collided with him just before he could deliver the killing strike. “Shouldn’t shortcut these things,” I said as I cranked his arm back and heard it crack, just before he disappeared again. The only thing that had saved Reed was Weissman’s desire to freeze time as little as possible. I hoped I had broken his wrist. I thought I had. It would pull some joy out of his day.

I saw a flash of movement behind me and I realized that there was a second me, dressed exactly the same, rolling off her feet in the opposite direction I was. Weissman reappeared next to her, and I saw his left hand with the knife in it this time, and he thrust the blade into my doppelganger’s belly. It passed through as easily as if he’d swept it through air, and his face burned with scarlet rage.

“Rakshasa,” Karthik said as he punched Weissman in the back of the head. “Did you enjoy my illusion?”

Weissman rolled to his feet and I saw him twirl the knife in his left hand. He kept his right at an off angle, curled toward him, cradled a little. I knew if I could get hold of it I could hurt him more.

Hurt him, Little Doll. His power requires intense concentration. Without focus, he cannot use it as easily. Give him something else to think about … make him angrier. Make it personal.

Something flashed behind Weissman, and for a second I thought it was him, shifting in time. It took me a second to realize it was Karthik again, another illusion. Weissman sensed it, twitched, turned on pure instinct and flashed as he lashed out—

He missed the tornado that vaulted him into the air from behind, flinging him into the high ceilings of Omega’s bullpen. He came down again with a scream as he was forced to catch himself on his right arm. I nearly winced for him. Instead, I rushed him and slammed my foot into his knee with all the momentum I’d built running toward him. I heard the snap of bone and saw the top of his shin break through skin, giving his pants a bloody stain at the knee.

“Ouch. Pretty sure that’s gonna take time to heal,” I quipped. “So, Weissman, how much time do you have?”

“More than you,” he grunted, and the crackle of electricity filled the air.

“Oh?” I turned as Eleanor Madigan lashed out at me with a bolt of lightning that hit me in the midsection and sent me into the wall. Other flashes lit the room and I heard others flung as well; Reed landed beside me.

“Shit,” he whispered, grunting in pain. “We forgot about the one that craps thunder.”

“I didn’t forget her,” I said, “I just had to delay dealing with her. I thought the guy who could move faster than lightning was more important than the lady who threw it, at least at the time.”

Eleanor Madigan’s eyes were lit with the glow of electricity running through her hands in the dark room. She stood before us, and I wondered if any of the other metas who were on the floor had any ability to hit her at range with anything. Almost as though she could sense my impending order, I saw her hand rise at me, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get a chance to shout for them to do something.

The blast of gunfire next to her head caught me by surprise. Not as much as it caught her by surprise, since it sent her brains out the side of her head, but it was still a little stunning. The muzzle flash lit the face of Breandan Duffy, a pistol in his hands at point blank range next to her head. Silence filled the air in the room as Madigan’s body slumped, lifeless, to the ground.

“Shouldn’t you have said something like, ‘Your luck’s just run out’?” I asked Breandan as I struggled back to my feet, muscles burning in pain.

He shrugged. “I’m a bit new to this whole fighting thing. I was too busy burning all the luck I had to keep her from noticing me. Didn’t have time or thought to make a quip.” He held up the pistol and then blanched at it and aimed the barrel back down. “But … I did learn to shoot someone in the head the other day, so I figured if I could do it once by accident, I could probably pull it off a second time on purpose.”

“Good call,” I said, striding over to him. I held my hand out and he gave me the pistol a little reluctantly. I forced a smile. “You did good. Really good. Saved our bacon. And I don’t mean your crappy English quasi-ham bacon, either. I mean the really tasty American kind.”

He flushed and feigned irritation. “You’re just lucky you took the gun away before leveling that insult.”

“Or you’d shoot me in the head?” I asked, amused.

“Actually, in the Irish tradition, I probably would have just done you the courtesy of a kneecapping.”

“A kneecapping, huh?” I hefted the gun and snapped it around so fast it made Breandan step back in fear. I fired off two rounds before anyone in the room had a chance to react.

A soft moan filled the air in the shocked silence after, and Reed was the first to speak over it. “Uh, Sienna … you missed.”

“I didn’t miss,” I said, looking down at Weissman. He had bloody spots on his belly now, and he was holding them in with his hands, clutching at his stomach. “I hit him just where I wanted to.” I looked down at him. “How does it feel being gutted, Weissman?”

“Screw … you …” he said, breathing agony.

“You wish,” I said coolly. “I don’t think you’re going to be screwing much of anything for the near future. Though I bet you’d be the world’s fastest man, wouldn’t you?”

He ignored my goad and took a long, seething breath. “You can’t kill me—”

“I can’t?”

“No,” he said, grunting. “You win for now, though. But what do you think you really bought here? Time?” Little flecks of bloody spittle washed down his chin. “This is temporary. This is a poke to the eye. It’s annoying. It slows us down, that’s all. We’re in the Americas now, and it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re done there—”

“A matter of a longer period of time, if I’m not mistaken,” I said. “Since your mass killer is no longer available to make it easy and painless for you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, gritting his teeth. “We have other ways. We’ll bring overwhelming force to every encounter. We’ll crush them, break them to pieces, leave them for the crows. And eventually, we’ll be back here for the rest of you.”

“Listen,” I said, and stood over him, almost exactly as I had James Fries only a week—and a lifetime—ago. “I don’t think you understand where we’re at now, so let me explain something to you.” I leveled the gun at him and he watched me over the barrel. “You are my enemy now. I know who I am because I know who you are, and what you stand for is everything I will oppose to my last breath.”

He licked the blood from his lips. “I’ll give you credit. You’re tougher than I thought. After everything you’ve been through, you shouldn’t even be standing right now.”

“The only reason I’m still standing,” I said, glaring down at him over the sights, “is so I can keep myself between you and the people you want to kill.
My
people.” I kept the gun barrel fixed on him.

“Between us and them is a dangerous place to be,” Weissman said, and I saw his hand twitch as he tried to hold his guts in.

I grinned. “What are you going to do, Weissman? Kill me? Like I said, you’re my enemy now. Maybe you can scamper away before I pull the trigger again, maybe not. But next time I see you, I will kill you.”

“That remains to be seen,” Weissman said, and he tried to drag himself upright and failed. He looked back at me. “I’m done with you.
He’ll
be coming for you next, you know.”

“Who?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. “Sovereign?” He nodded slowly. “If you see him before I do, tell him I’ll be waiting,” I said, and I gave Reed a sidelong glance. “In Minneapolis.”

Weissman looked back at me, eyes filled with fury as his face split into a smile. “I don’t need to tell him. He already knows. And he’ll find you—when he’s ready.”

“Oh,” I said, and raised the pistol at his face. “In that case—”

I fired three times in rapid succession then stopped. I waited until the muzzle flash cleared from my eyes to confirm what I already knew when the third shot went off.

Weissman was gone.

“Maybe you could have killed him sooner?” Breandan suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”

“I actually thought you were going to let him get away unchallenged,” Reed said. “I thought a little bit of the old Sienna was peeking out there for a minute.” His voice held just a hint of melancholy.

“Sorry,” I said softly, “but no. Every instinct I had told me it was a bad idea, because that bastard is too damned hard to kill.” I felt a bleak disappointment in myself. “I should have tried to take the shot sooner.”

Reed gave a disappointed nod. “You really aren’t the same.”

I shook my head. “I’m really not. But I meant what I said. I’ve got a job to do, a purpose to fulfill, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if you can trust Weissman, exactly, but I think there’s some truth to what he said. I don’t think they’re going to pull all their resources out of the Americas until they’re done over there. Which means London is probably the safest city in the world for metas right now, at least in the near term.”

“What would you suggest?” Karthik asked me, in near disbelief. “Bunker down and hope the storm passes?”

“Kind of,” I said, and started toward the doors of the Primus’s office. I could sense them all following, and I heard the soft steps of their shoes on the carpet. I threw open the doors with both hands in a very dramatic fashion and flipped the lights as I came in. I walked to the bookshelf and looked for Dickens’s
Hard Times
. When I found it, I pulled on it, and it slid out only with effort.

“This is hardly the time to read the classics,” Reed said.

“Is there ever a good time for that, really?” Breandan added.

The wall slid open, revealing a hidden passage. I felt a rush of air as it opened, and lights began to flicker on along the sides of the hallway. “There’s always time for a classic tale,” I said as I entered the passage.

“Who are you?” Breandan asked, almost mocking. “A James Bond villain?”

“No, but I think the Primus of Omega kind of was.” I let my feet carry me down the concrete hallway to a staircase at the end. I glanced back to see Kat, Breandan, Karthik and Reed following behind me.

“Well,” Karthik said with a little smile, “you kind of are the Primus of Omega, now.”

We descended the concrete stairs into the moldy air. It was thick, and once we’d passed the first landing, there wasn’t much circulating, as though the whole area was cut off from the main air conditioning system. It retained the look of an unfinished space, the walls probably dating back to the original construction of the building.

I went down, down, down. I counted six stories, even though the building was only four plus a parking garage. I figured we were down in the depths now, below the garage, and I wondered what we’d find as the stairs came to an end under a lamp that buzzed and hummed, flickering on and off.

“Wait,” Reed said, cautioning me. “This could be something dangerous.”

“Could be,” I agreed, then grabbed the door handle and flung it open.

“And she doesn’t even give a thought or care to that notion,” Breandan said, peering into the darkened door ahead of me. “Very posh.”

I walked through without waiting for caution to overwhelm me, and lights began to come on throughout the cavernous room in front of me. It was furnished with height-of-the-1700s furniture, like a private apartment from the American Revolution. A gold-plated throne lay in the far corner, shimmering in the light, along with other treasures that I saw cause Breandan to just about drool on the floor.

Spread in the warehouse-sized space between us and the treasure trove were living quarters, complete with a kitchenette, floor to ceiling cabinets with some doors that led into another room, and even a set of six cots in the corner opposite the treasure. Along the wall to our left was a lab area, filled with scientific-looking equipment. In the middle of it all was an empty space where something had been, something big, and I wondered about it even as my eyes slid over six rows of filing cabinets that lay just feet away from us.

Karthik made a noise behind me. “The Primus’s emergency apartments,” he said, looking over the space. “I must confess, I thought they were a rumor only.”

“Where did he live the rest of the time?” I asked.

“He had quite a few palatial estates,” Karthik said, looking over the dim, dank space before us. “Nothing like this, of course. Places that were presentable, that allowed him to mingle with society. This space … this is …”

“It’s like a little slice of heaven come to earth,” Breandan said, his eyes still fixed on the gold in the corner.

“It’s like the last refuge of a man who knew things were going to get really bad,” Reed said.

“And who loved to … what? Experiment on people?” Kat waved a hand at the equipment along the wall. “You need your own personal science lab in your post-apocalyptic apartment?”

“Maybe,” I said, turning my attention toward the filing cabinets. “Let’s see what we have here.” I made my way over to them, brown metal with silver trim on the handles and doors. They looked like they were from the seventies—the 1970s, in this case, rather than the 1770s like the rest of the furniture. I came to a drawer marked with a large red S in the filing label. I pulled it open, and it was empty, all the way to the back.