The Girl in the Box 03 - Soulless (13 page)

“No, seriously.” I let out a short laugh. “What are they up to? What’s their objective?”

Reed sighed. “I don’t know. No one does. We just know they’re making power moves, collecting metas...kinda like the Directorate, but even more shadowy, if that’s possible.”

“I don’t love the sound of that,” I said.

“You’re telling me.” Charlie spoke up, bringing the car to a squealing stop at a red light. “I’ve tangled with their sweep teams before – they’re the ones they send out to bring in metas they want to talk to.” She laughed. “They’re a fun bunch, but they oughta stick to catching newbies; kids that have just manifested and don’t know what they’re doing.”

I stared at the laptop cradled in my hands. “Why does Omega have a safehouse in Eau Claire?”

“Because the Twin Cities is too hot for them.” Reed’s answer came with a cringe in his voice. “Minneapolis or St. Paul would be too close to the Directorate. Eau Claire’s only an hour away, and a few hours from Chicago, where they have a lot bigger presence.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why have a presence up here at all? What are they hoping to accomplish?”

“Tracking metas,” Charlie said. “Just like you guys. Track ‘em and collar ‘em, recruit the ones that seem promising. It’s all anybody does nowadays, keep snatching up every unattached meta out there.”

“What’d you find in the safehouse?” Reed leaned forward and I felt his hand on the back of my seat.

“A guy with a couple snakes lying on the kitchen floor, dead.”

Reed frowned. “The guy or the snakes?”

“All of them,” I said. “Looks like the snakes grew from his shoulder blades. Kinda creepy.”

“Sounds like a Zahhak,” Reed said, exchanging a look with Charlie, who nodded.

“What’s a Zahhak?” I wrinkled my forehead.

“Look it up on Wikipedia sometime; it’s a pretty scary meta to go up against.” He entered a pensive state, his fingers resting over his mouth. “They’re pretty rare, but I heard Omega has one – or had one, I suppose.”

“Why have they been after me?” I turned to question Reed on this one, and when I looked at him, his expression was suddenly pained, a twisted grimace. “You know, don’t you?” He nodded, slow, not looking away. “Why are they after me?”

“They’re not after you, specifically.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve never been the end to them, always the means. They’re after your mom.”

I exchanged a look with Charlie, who seemed surprised. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I think she knows something...something from when she was with the Agency – you know, the government group that was destroyed before the Directorate came onto the scene?” I nodded. I knew Mom had been at the Agency with Old Man Winter before I was born. “Anyway, something happened that has a lot of people scouring for her.”

I turned back to Charlie. “Do you know what it is?”

She let out a long cackle. “Your mom and I aren’t on what you’d call ‘speaking terms’. I haven’t talked to her since way before you were born.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She turned the steering wheel to bring us into the parking lot of a hotel that was shaped like a giant, round cylinder. “She didn’t like the way I did things and I didn’t care for the way she told me to run my life.” She pulled the car into a parking spot just outside the lobby and gave me another lazy shrug. “So I told her what she could do with her opinions and we didn’t really need to talk after that, cuz it’d all been said.”

“Can’t imagine what she might have taken issue with,” Reed said under his breath.

Charlie shot him a searing look and jerked her head toward the lobby. “We should get rooms here for the night, unless you want your friends to continue sleeping in the back of the car.” She turned around and saw Kat’s head in Scott’s lap. “Although she seems comfortable there.”

I checked us in to four rooms, using the Directorate credit card for two of them and my personal card for the other two. As I swiped it through their reader, I was reminded that I needed to call Ariadne and make a report, since Scott and Kat were unlikely to do so in the next few hours. Once I was done, I hurried back to the car and Charlie drove us to the outside entrance nearest to the rooms. She and I each grabbed one of the unconscious members of my team and dragged them into the building while Reed walked ahead to make sure we didn’t run into anyone. Fortunately, the hotel seemed quiet.

We made it to our rooms without incident, and after depositing Kat and Scott onto the king-sized bed in their room, Charlie grabbed the key for her room and left. Reed lingered, watching the door to the room until it shut. After it did, he remained silent for almost a minute, listening. When I started to say something to him, he held up a finger to his lips and then opened the door, looking up and down the hall. He shut it and walked back to me, stopping only inches from my face. “How well do you know your aunt?” he asked in a low whisper.

“Not well.” I looked into his concerned eyes and felt a tremor within. “I met her about six months ago when she tracked me down, and we’ve been in contact on and off ever since, meeting whenever she’s been in town.”

“Do you trust her?” He didn’t break eye contact.

“Only a little,” I said. “I don’t exactly know her well.”

“She didn’t come on the mission with you?”

“No.” I shook my head. “She said she tracked my cell phone GPS.”

“Uh huh.” He licked his lips, thinking. “Sounds a little funny.”

“Why so suspicious? You think she has something to do with Omega?” He stared back at me, as though waiting for something. “What? What am I missing?”

He turned a slight smile, and looked at me with expectation. “Come on,” he said. “You know.”

“Come on, what?” By this point I was just annoyed. Kat and Scott were passed out on the bed behind me and who knew when they’d be coming back to consciousness. I had to report to Ariadne that we’d gotten in a violent clash with Omega forces, ending with two people not associated with the Directorate getting involved to save our bacon, in an incident that would certainly have drawn more than a little attention.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m gonna go...recover for a bit. Let me know if anything major happens.”

I shook my head, feeling my annoyance fade at the remembrance that he’d wrecked his car to save me from the Omega sweep team. “Reed...” He looked back over his shoulder, almost out the door. “Thanks.”

He nodded, a little smile breaking on his face, and left.

Chapter 13

I tried to reach Ariadne, but her cell phone went straight to voicemail. I tried her office, but her assistant told me she was out and unable to be reached for several hours. When I asked her to connect me to the Director, she informed me that he, too, was unavailable. I sighed, told her to have them call me urgently, that I had run afoul of Omega, and left it at that.

I stayed in Kat and Scott’s room, watching the light fade outside the beige curtains as the day ended. I looked at a clock when the last rays of sunlight were still visible, and it was just after 9 P.M. Neither of them had moved, but their pulse was regular, they reacted to prodding and other stimuli; they just...didn’t seem to want to wake up.

There was a knock on my door and when I looked through the peephole, Charlie grinned back at me, her smile overlarge and distorted by the glass as though I were looking at her in a funhouse mirror. Her cutoffs and tank top were gone, replaced by a red dress not unlike the one I had seen her wear when we first met, something with very little length and quite a bit of cleavage exposure. I tried to smile, but inwardly grimaced as I opened the door. “Hey.”

“Hay is all around us; this whole damned place is a farm town.” She made a slight gyration, as though she were dancing to music only she could hear. “What do you say we go find a couple cowboys to while away the dull hours with between now and morning?”

“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Because we don’t have enough carnage on our hands already without killing a couple of poor locals that are just out for a good time.”

“It’s not about killing,” she said in a soothing voice, “it’s about having some fun. Unwinding.” Her smile was oddly infectious. “You’ve been watching these vegetables all day. You need to get out and let loose. Have the other guy watch them for a while.” She strolled over to Scott and brushed his cheek with her hand, letting it linger a moment longer than I would have, and a slight shudder ran through her body. “Ooh. Is he a Poseidon type? Tastes like the ocean to me.”

“Tastes?” I’m pretty sure my face was locked into disbelief. “You touched him.”

“Yeah, it’s a sense you start to develop with maturity.” I felt a rough swell of annoyance as she walked to the other side of the bed and let her hand drift onto to exposed cheek of Kat. “Mmmm. Persephone type? If you ever get a chance – you know, maybe tangling with one that’s a ‘bad guy’,” she used air quotes, driving my eyebrows up almost to my bangs, “you need to take a drink of a Persephone. They are double yum.”

I closed my eyes and felt a throbbing in my temple. “I know you did not just suggest that I drain—”

“A bad one,” she said, her voice suddenly higher. “I’m saying that if you run across a bad one cuz I know how focused you are on that sort of thing, catching ‘bad guys’ – you should definitely drain them dry, because they are all kinds of tasty, let me tell you.” She did a pirouette and came around the bed, then brushed my hair out of my eyes, careful not to touch my face. “Come on, get the other guy and get ready. We need to go out, niece.”

I sighed. “Go out where?”

She leaned her head in close to me and gave me a mischievous smile. “The bar, here in the hotel.”

“I went to a bar last night. It didn’t end well. I almost killed some guy.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Was he cute?”

I felt a pang as I remembered, not for the first time in the last few hours, that I had broken up with Zack only this morning. And had kissed James last night. “Yes. He very much was.”

“Sounds worth it to me.” She looked me up and down. “You change and get ready, I’ll go knock on the other guy’s door and get him to watch the kids.” She turned and headed for the door.

“His name is Reed, you know.”

She waved a hand carelessly behind her as she walked out. “I’ve already forgotten it again.”

I stood there in the middle of the floor for about ten seconds, pondering my options. I could sit in my room, avoiding the horror that was drunkenness, the searing pain of a hangover and the loss of judgment that resulted from it, or stay here and stare at the walls. I had almost convinced myself that that was the wisest course, the soundest of ideas, when Zack wandered across my mind again, and I realized he’d be doing that for the rest of the night – just like he had been all day – and I’d have only the unconscious bodies of my two colleagues to keep me company.

There was a knock at the door, and when I looked through the peephole, it was Reed, looking a little cross.

“Your aunt just told me to get my ass over here and watch over two sleeping Directorate agents,” he said, nonplussed. “You can’t be serious.”

“I need to get out of here for a while,” I said. “We won’t be gone long.” I started toward the door, my bag on my shoulder, intending to go to my own room, which I hadn’t yet seen.

“What am I supposed to do if they wake up?” He looked at me in near astonishment, mouth slightly agape.

“If Kat wakes up first, explain the situation to her,” I said. “It’s not like you haven’t met before.”

“And if he wakes up first?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Get creative.”

I closed the door, which muffled his reply. I’m pretty sure it was a curse, and I’m equally sure I didn’t care. I went to my room and took a shower, a long one. When I was done, I dressed in a slightly looser suit, the most comfortable one I’d brought with me, straightened my hair and applied some makeup. When I came out of the bathroom, Charlie was waiting, lying on the bed, watching TV. She perked up when she saw me, and I stared at her, question on my face.

“They gave you a spare key,” she said. “I pocketed it when you handed me the packets. Figured I might need it later.” She smoothed her dress, which didn’t show even a sign of wrinkling, and smiled at me. “Ready to have some fun?”

“Sort of.”

“But not too much fun, because that’s probably against a Directorate rule of some kind.”

She dragged a little smile out of me with that one, and we were off. We crossed the lobby, an open air, ornate space with leather couches and decor that looked like it might be just as appropriate in a manor house as it was here. As we walked, I couldn’t help but notice heads turn to watch Charlie. Male heads. Lots of them.

We bellied up to the bar, and after I’d shown my ID, the bartender, a skinny guy this time, asked us what we wanted.

“What do you think, daahhhhhling?” Charlie said it with an exaggerated English accent, like she was a duchess or something.

Why break a winning tradition? I only knew one kind of drink, anyway. “Whiskey Sour.”

The bartender nodded and Charlie said, “Make it two.” He walked off.

“So,” I said. “What now?” I swiveled on my stool to take in the whole place. It was Sunday night, and there weren’t too many people around. There was a cluster of guys dressed professionally in the corner, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up, lots of laughing going on. I caught a furtive glance from a couple of them at Charlie, who, unlike me, was facing away from the bar and leaning back, her legs crossed and cool indifference beneath her slight smile.

“Now, my dear,” she said after a long pause, “we have fun.” The bartender set her glass at her elbow and she grabbed it, slow and smooth. “Keep ‘em coming.” She pressed it against her lips as she stared at the guys in the corner, taking a long, measured drink.

I picked up my whiskey and felt the chill of it in my hand, then took a sip. It still gave my mouth an involuntary spasm, but not as bad as the night before. I almost enjoyed it this time. It burned, though. I took another, and when I finished, I caught Charlie looking sidelong at me with amusement. “First time?” she asked.