35.
Sienna
“This is a safe house,” Wexford said as he bolted the door behind us. He’d led me into a nearby hotel just a couple hundred feet from the train station, a pretty swank-looking place that had looked like it might be one of those rare European hotels that had so much lux going for it I’d want to stay there rather than the cookie-cutter American chains I preferred while abroad.
“Oh, good,” I said. He’d led me up through the servants’ entrance and stairwells to this room, on the third floor, and we’d seen not a soul along the way. “Because I’ve been staying in unsafe ones these last few days and it hasn’t been working out so well for me.”
Wexford smiled thinly, leaning against the door. “I sense you’ve had a rough go of it.”
“Can you read my mind again?” I asked, making my way over to the bed. My clothes were still shredded, I was soaked in blood—including, still, my face despite my best attempts to use spit to rub it off. I couldn’t clean what I couldn’t see, after all.
“Indeed,” he said, a little wearily.
“Then you know what’s happened,” I said. There was a certain comfort that came from arriving here. Even seeing Wexford standing there at the train station had been a relief of sorts. With the exception of the cop I’d brainwashed to forget I was a criminal, I hadn’t exactly been sunning in a sea of friendly faces these last few days, and they’d been a little stressful.
He seemed to think for a minute, then nodded. “Yes, now I see. Rose, her name is?”
“Rose, her name is, but by any other name she’d be thorny as hell,” I agreed, stepping through into the bathroom before I could see his reaction to my witticism. I turned on the cold tap and looked in the mirror. My face was bloody, all right. I got to work on it. “I went into this thinking the perp was an incubus. I guess that shows me not to assume. And as you’ve no doubt ascertained from poking around in my skull, she’s royally pissed at me and I have only suspicions as to why. All I know for sure is that she’s gone to some rather extreme ends in the name of vengeance for…whatever the hell got her panties in a twist.”
“Perhaps I might shed some light on that,” Wexford said, and I caught sight of him standing behind me in the mirror. He moved, and on the bed behind him was a manila file. “For your suspicions do seem to be correct.”
I turned off the tap and almost lunged for it. When I opened it up, I found surveillance photos of Rose, all from a distance, all from cameras she didn’t know were there. Digging a little deeper, I found candids of the sort families took of their kids—her with other people, smiling. A mother, a really old dad or maybe grandfather. I looked up at Wexford. “You know her?”
“She’s known to us, yes,” Wexford said with a nod. “Rose Steward. She lived in the metahuman cloister in Scotland…at least until—”
“The war,” I said, my legs delivering me onto the bed with a gentle thump. “That cloister—”
“Was wiped out by your old friend Weissman—”
“That shitbird was no friend of mine.”
“—and your Great Uncle Raymond,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the file.
I processed that. “Look…that sucks for her and all, but…why is she so pissed at me? I didn’t kill her family, and I didn’t really like the people who did.”
“It would be difficult for me to speak to her motivations without seeing inside her mind,” Wexford said, pacing back and forth in front of the bed crisply, with lordly precision. “All we can say for sure is that she is indeed, for some reason, quite obsessed with you, and has…done a number, I think you call it, on your abilities and your…person.” He seemed to wince at the sight of me. Having now seen myself in the mirror, I couldn’t blame him.
“Nice way of saying she’s ripped me eight new ones,” I said, falling back on the bed. Here with Wexford, I felt oddly safe again. Maybe it was his mind control working, but I didn’t think so. There was something about human conversation that was a pleasant lubricant to the spirit after a hard series of mental hurdles. I’d been on the run for months, but Rose had upped the game on me, and damn if it wasn’t taking a toll. I wanted to sleep again, but I fought off that instinct easily, sitting back up. “And you had no idea what she was doing up in Edinburgh before I went up there?”
“Indeed not,” Wexford said, turning to look at me. “If it’s as you see it in your mind—that she has ‘taken the city,’ nearly—then this comes as quite the surprise to Her Majesty’s government. I am the only telepath that I know of in the government, and while we always have a decent traffic of officials coming back and forth from Edinburgh, they would hardly notice…whatever it is you’ve noticed.”
“I’ve noticed mobs chasing my ass through the streets,” I said. “Fearless, angry, seemingly controlled by other sources. Meta sources, presumably. Rose, if she’s behind all the stuff I’ve seen…” I shook my head. “Your country lost a pretty decent amount of citizens to her.”
Wexford’s face fell, and I could tell he was feeling it. “Indeed…” he said softly. “It seems we’ve missed one of the tragedies of our time as it happened upon our very soil.”
“You really did,” I said, let my head sag as I stared at the patterned carpet, which had an older look to it. “How did you find me, by the by?”
Wexford almost smiled. “For one with direct access to most levels of government, it isn’t terribly hard. This whole island brims with security cameras, after all.”
“Mm,” I said, then frowned. “Hey, how high a level would you have to be to see—”
The door to the room blew open, shattering as it flew out of the frame. I ducked my head instinctively, rolling off the bed as a spray of wooden shrapnel blew overhead and the door shot into the room, launched like it had been blown out of a cannon. I didn’t see Wexford, since I was trying as hard as I could to mush my face to the carpeting, but as soon as I was down I immediately sprang up again, pushing to my feet in time to see—
Wexford had taken the door head-on as it had flown into the room. It had split him almost in two, and his eyes stared dully at the ceiling, the wreckage of his body leaving me in no doubt…
He was dead.
“Ye did miss one of the greatest tragedies of our time,” Rose spat as she hovered her way into the room, hair floating and her face blazing red, “you great ruddy idiot. You and the whole government missed it, with your heads up your arses in London. You missed the slaughter of a whole people, nearly, your own people—you didn’t give a fig, hiding in your country estates—” She practically spat at Wexford’s corpse, which lay still and silent on the ground beneath her as she hovered in.
I was frozen in place, Rose looking darkly at him, and then she swiveled to look at me. “And you,” she said, bleeding that malevolent loathing out in my direction now, “you…you were as responsible as they were for it, you and your high and mighty self…”
Without a thought, I turned and sprinted for the window, hurling myself through the glass at high speed, thinking only one thing—
Run.