Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (8 page)

“That seems a bit of an overreaction.” Janus guided the car into a left hand turn at an intersection, and far up ahead over a hill I caught a view of downtown. A building that looked like an elongated version of a Faberge egg with glass windows shone in the morning sun. “You will learn to control them, given time.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, looking up at him. “Seems like most succubi I’ve talked to already have a firm grasp of how to control their souls pretty much out of the gate. Even my aunt Charlie couldn’t understand how I had so much trouble with them.”

“Because they’re metas,” Janus said tightly. He hesitated, leaving something unsaid.

I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, tight-lipped, his hands on the steering wheel. “You mean the souls I’ve taken.” He looked sidelong at me, only briefly, then nodded his head once, sharply. “Why does that matter?”

“It matters,” Janus said. “Using the powers we metas have requires a certain amount of will. Think for a moment on the minds you have absorbed—Wolfe was a force of nature, a beast of his own sort. Gavrikov was one of the most destructive beings to ever walk the planet. Bjorn was the son of a man who proclaimed himself the God-King of the Norse. These are not your normal souls, and your introduction to your powers was not done as it usually would be, by accidentally and partially absorbing someone close to you before awakening to your abilities. You had no such warning, and the first minds you took in were ones that had more willpower than you did yourself.”

I frowned at him. “Would it matter if I absorbed someone with less will?”

“I don’t think you are getting the point,” Janus said, and shot me a cautious look. “You had two strikes against you, as they say. You absorbed metas, who are naturally somewhat more predisposed toward stronger will because of their abilities, and you absorbed them wholesale. That is not usual for a newly manifested incubus or succubus. Typically they would take a piece of someone first, stopping before the task is complete, giving them the ability to acclimate themselves to the … shadows, I believe your people call them—the results of a partial absorption—rather than dealing with a full and complete personality embedded within you from the start.” His expression darkened. “And not just any personality, but Wolfe’s.”

“‘Shadows’?” I thought for a moment then concentrated hard within me, searching for something inside, a faint wisp of Ariadne’s memories. They were there, a small echo of the woman herself, a few thoughts, some sights and sounds, smells, sensory memories that I was able to peek through just as I had a few days earlier when I had absorbed them from her. There was very little there—a few memories of Eve, of Old Man Winter, a few highly personal. “You mean the part of a person that remains even if I don’t take their whole soul.”

“Yes,” Janus said with a nod. “By absorbing just that portion, there is no battle of wills with the newly absorbed, because there is very little will that comes along with small fragments such as those. They are a mere shadow of the full person, you see? A typical succubus would learn who they are after perhaps taking a shadow or two through accidental contact with a human being in most cases. In the case of your mother and her sister, I am told they were raised to know in advance what they would likely be and were prepared. It is how your mother learned to become disciplined with her power. She had no fearsome Wolfe to face right out of the gate, she learned to control a shadow, then accumulated another and another before taking in her first soul, and by then she was fully ready for it. Charlie too, though I have only suspicions to go on there.”

“How do you know about how my mother learned?”

“Two ways,” he said. “One, we have her old Agency personnel file, which includes the account of her upbringing in her own words.” He gave a slight smirk. “And second, we have access to a source that complements this.”

I let the phrase hang out there for a minute. “You mean she’s told you herself.”

Janus let out a long laugh. “Good heavens, no. Your mother hates Omega. We clashed with her when she was at the Agency, and there is so much blood between us now that she would not voluntarily give us a drop of her spit if we told her it would save the entire world.” He shook his head. “No, the source I speak of is
her
mother.”

There was a long pause, and I realized I was holding my breath. “You know my grandmother?” I hadn’t even hoped to ponder the idea of my mother’s mother; I had never been allowed to discuss the outside world when my mother had me in confinement, and thus the topic never—not even once—came up. She didn’t even acknowledge she had parents, never referenced them, and I had always wondered if they even still lived.

“No,” he said quickly. “She is no longer alive. Before she passed, however, which … is quite another story … she did make record of your mother’s upbringing, which was … shall we say … untraditional for a meta.”

“How did she die?” I whispered, and turned my head to look out the window.

“Another time, perhaps,” Janus said softly. “This falls under the domain of things I am not allowed to tell you.”

“Way to build trust,” I said, but the words lacked feeling. I had become used to being given only the minimums in my life—the minimum level of information, of trust, of love from the people who supposedly cared for me. I felt a swell of umbrage from Zack at this thought, but I quelled it with the truth of how we began—that he had been intended to spy on me for Old Man Winter, to seduce me to keep me in the Directorate’s reach. I felt fresh pain from him, as if I had stuck my finger in a wound and twirled it around—beneath the continued argument between Bjorn and Wolfe, which had settled into low level bickering. I knew I’d hurt him, but I felt fairly resigned about the whole thing.

“I apologize,” Janus said, and there was a scratch in his voice. “If it were up to me, I would tell you everything, lay it all out on the table, let you sift through the entire mess at will. And it is a mess, make no mistake,” he said, scratching his chin, which was smoothly shaven in spite of the wrinkles, “filled with the requisite errors of judgment on all sides, anger and fighting, threats and escalation, ambitions and squabbling. Yet all of it has led us to the point where we stand today.”

“You make it sound like an episode of a soap opera,” I said, massaging my temples with my forefingers. “Or a little like the bickering in my head.”

“It is probably not so far off,” Janus admitted, “and every side has its secrets, things that they think will be the end of their cause should they creep out.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your secret, Janus?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I have none that would ruin me. I know a few that would cause my employer considerable difficulty should they come out, but none that would cause me so much as a moment’s discomfort.”

“Oh?” I asked, feeling a nasty little desire to prove him wrong. “How about the fact that you’re sleeping with Kat?” There was a surge of anger behind my eyes from Gavrikov at the mere mention of that, and Bjorn and Wolfe instantly settled down to watch the fireworks.

“Hardly a secret,” Janus said with a shrug. “Not exactly controversial, either. As old as I am, do keep in mind she is over a hundred now herself. It is not as though she were actually eighteen—though I suppose it appears unseemly, given my age. Still,” he said darkly, “behavior much, much worse than that would not even be frowned upon by Omega, which I suppose lends credence to any argument you might care to mount about the type of people we are.”

I stared at him, watching with undisguised curiosity. “You freely admit it?”

“Certainly,” he said with a shrug. “I am not forbidden to, and I have already told you I associate with monsters in the course of my duties. It is not as though this is some news to you.”

“No,” I said quietly. “Just surprised you admit it, is all.”

“There is very little I would not do to save our people—and the humans—from whatever is coming at the hands of Century,” Janus said. “That means working with people of power who are very long-lived and who have allowed immortality to sweep away much of their decency. Where they might have started out as good people, in their centuries of life, they have accumulated power and traded away a great deal of that decency in exchange.” He shrugged again. “This is simply the way it is with the powerful and long-lived. You give a person absolute power, and few can withstand the corrupting influence it presents.” He cracked his neck by turning it to each side, and I cringed. “If you need any further proof of that, merely think about how you felt about killing only a month ago—and imagine the moral drift that could occur over the course of lifetimes, even to a person who had a strong center once upon a time.”

“We’re not all monsters,” I said in barely a whisper.

“No,” Janus agreed, “but given enough time and exposure to power—of the world-ruling variety—we all have to capacity to do at least one terrible thing. The difference with a monster is that it never even occurs to them that it is a terrible thing.”

He kept quiet after that, steering us down the streets in silence. I watched the buildings pass one after another until we reached a neighborhood just on the cusp of downtown. The massive skyscrapers were just above the horizon and I wondered which we would be going to when Janus turned, taking us down an old alleyway lined in red brick. I watched the lines of mortar between them streak by as we went, until we came out in another alley, turning right. We went for about a hundred feet before he turned into what looked like a loading dock. He pulled the car through a garage door that opened when he touched a button mounted on his visor, and we entered a parking lot with about thirty vehicles dispersed around it. I realized it must have been under the building, and the loading dock was there to cover the fact that it was a clandestine entrance.

We pulled into a parking space and when the car stopped, I got out. The smell of oil and metal was heavy, along with the pervasive feeling that this place had been here for a long time, decades at least. Janus gave me a reassuring smile and started toward a heavy steel door at the far side of the lot. I followed, my quiet footsteps lost in the sound of his shoes clicking against the pavement. He thumbed a button on his key fob and I heard a lock click behind the painted steel door, which he held it open for me, like a gentleman.

I stepped inside a short hallway, and there was a security guard behind a plastic window to my right. I stared at him and he continued to read the paper his face was buried behind. “Sir,” he said with a thick British accent as Janus went by, not looking up from the newspaper.

“Shane,” Janus said in acknowledgment, looking at the man. “How is the family?”

“All well, sir,” Shane said, looking up and giving Janus a smile with his nod. “Thank you.” His accent was so thick it took my brain a moment to realize what he’d said.

“This way, my dear,” Janus said, holding out his arm to indicate heavy elevator doors at the end of the passage. When we arrived, the elevator dinged as though it had been summoned just for us. When the doors opened, there was a thin black woman waiting inside. I knew who she was before she said anything, from a memory I had seen. Even if I hadn’t already been familiar with her, I would have realized she was graceful just by the way she was standing. She wore a tan skirt, white blouse and a jacket that matched the skirt. Her necklace was a series of beads with a claw hanging down at the center of it, and her smile could only be described as catlike. It was directed at me, and I tried to decide if she was attempting to be disconcerting.

“Bastet,” I said, stepping onto the elevator before she could acknowledge me. Her knowing smile evaporated, but I could feel one of my own straining to break loose on seeing this presumably imperturbable woman caught off balance within three seconds of our first meeting. “How goes it?”

“Sienna Nealon,” she said, recovering quickly. “Of course you would know me because others in your service have known me.”

“If by ‘in my service,’ you mean rattling around in my head,” I said with a sharp smile, “then yes, that’s right.”

“Bast,” Janus said, stepping onto the elevator. He wore a smile of his own, but it was pure, deep amusement that wrinkled his brow. “You seem to have been taken a bit off your guard.”

Bast gave a smile, but it was shallow and insincere. “I’m used to knowing strangers but not being known.”

“Kind of a funny attitude for a goddess to have,” I said. “Weren’t you the object of worship once upon a time?”

Her nostrils flared in subtle irritation. “That was long ago. I prefer to work behind the scenes nowadays.”

“Sure,” I said with a nod. “It’s probably something you just get over after a while, being worshipped by thousands of people. It’s all, ‘We love you,’ ‘We adore you,’ ‘You’re beautiful’—” I pretended to look her up and down. “Well, you know, at least, you probably were once upon a time. After a couple thousand years, it’s understandable—”

“You really are quite adept at getting under a person’s skin, aren’t you?” Bastet said, looking at me sideways.

“I believe you’re a fan of doing the same,” I said coolly.

“So, how do you know me?” she asked, arms folded. “From Bjorn?” Her smile grew nasty. “Or that passing introduction I had to your boyfriend before—”

“Bast,” Janus said quietly, “Sienna is our guest here. It would be nice if you were to treat her as such.”

Bast seemed to consider this a moment, never taking her eyes off of me. “She has claws, Janus.”

“And you don’t?” he asked with more good humor than I would have had if it had been me with a potential recruit I was trying to impress.

She gave a catlike smile. “My claws are reserved for when I really need them.”

I smiled back at her. “So, they put a scratching post in your office, huh?” Her smile faded. “Litter box?”

“She’s not funny,” Bast said. “I thought she would be funnier.”

“I save my best quips for when I’m punching someone in the face.”

The elevator dinged and opened on an office floor, rows of cubicles with workers manning them, quietly tapping away at keyboards or having quiet conversations. The whole place was unremarkable, just like the fourth floor of the Directorate, really, with offices around the perimeter behind glass, sunlight shining in from behind. As the elevator doors opened, no one from the cubicles seemed to take any notice of us.