21.
“Reed?”
I was in the darkness a second after I hit the pavement, my head aching in the black. There was a dim light around me, a faint feeling of familiarity like I’d been here before. My skull hurt like it had been used as a stand-in for one of those machines where you test your strength at the fair, and some big guy comes along and wins his girl a stuffed animal by bringing down a sledge to ring a bell. My head felt like the bell and the sledge target, both at the same time, and I tried to shake off that cloudy feeling that seemed to persist in the darkness.
I knew that voice though, as clear to me as my mother’s own. “Sienna?” I asked, looking around. I didn’t see her at first, but maybe that was because of my recent skull trauma. “Where are you?”
She stepped out of the darkness a moment later, lingering in the shadows, tentative. She was watching me like it was some kind of trick, a cloud of suspicion hiding under her eyes. It evaporated like an afternoon rain within a second, and she surged toward me, hitting me right in the center of my chest and sticking there like a suction-cup Garfield, arms around me and snugging me tight. “Reed,” she whispered, face buried in my shoulder.
“Uh, hi,” I said, a little—okay, completely—taken aback. “How’s it going?”
She didn’t let go, and didn’t answer, at first. She just stayed there, cheek pressed tightly against my shirt. I let the uncomfortable silence linger for a few seconds more, then cleared my throat and said, “That well, eh?”
With some seeming effort, she pulled back from me, and when I saw her face…
I knew that things…were most definitely not all right.
“What happened?” I asked, staring at her. My brow furrowed so thickly it felt like a series of deep ridges were dug in on my forehead.
“I screwed up, Reed,” she said, looking ashen in the shadowy dark of the dreamwalk. “Really bad.”
“Worse than accidentally nuking Eden Prairie and making a crowd of reporters shit themselves from fear?” I tossed out a joke, figuring it might take some of the tension out of the situation.
It did not.
“What happened?” I asked, my hands clutching her sleeves, which were…damp? In a dream? Probably a reflection of her real-world state, but still…a little weird. Not that Sienna didn’t go swimming from time to time, but…
“The UK government,” she said, almost choking as she started. “There’s a man named Wexford I met last time I came here—”
“Yeah, he’s the Foreign Secretary,” I said. “He offered you asylum over there. You told me about him.”
“He sent me to investigate a series of murders in Edinburgh,” she said, and now she seemed to be rushing to speak, hurrying to get it out. I let her talk, trying not to interrupt. “They said—they thought they were incubus- or succubus-related because of autopsy results from Wolfe—”
“Huh?” That was a tangled thread. My mission not to interrupt lasted all of three seconds, but I shut my mouth again. Clarity on this probably wasn’t that important.
Sienna didn’t seem to notice my interruption, so deep was she in spitting out her own thoughts, like a poison she was trying to excise from her system. “So I went to Edinburgh to see for myself, to try and track down the killer.” Her eyes flared, seemed to get dazed. “There was a guy named Frankie, and he seemed like he was the one. I was getting help from a local named Rose—she took a bullet for me and saved my life a few times—”
I processed through that one. People didn’t tend to take bullets for you all willy-nilly, but people also didn’t generally go jumping out of their way to save the life of a woman who was an international fugitive, even a super famous one like Sienna. I kept these thoughts to myself.
“—and it turns out that this killer was producing metas using the Revelen serum, Reed,” she said, her eyes ablaze now, fear and horror burning within her. “They’d been creating them—and then draining them for their powers.”
“Holy shit,” I said, because what else do you say to that? “How many?”
“Thousands,” she said quietly. “Tens of thousands, maybe. She’d been killing them for years—”
“Wait,” I said, feeling like I’d missed something. “I thought this Frankie was the killer—”
“No, it was Rose,” Sienna said.
I hesitated, thinking for a second. “Was Rose the local helping you?” She nodded. “And she took a bullet for you? Watched your back?” More nodding. “And now—”
“She’s trying to kill me,” Sienna said. “But that’s not the worst part.”
Uh oh. If that wasn’t the worst part, what could be so bad that it would render Sienna Nealon, the most fearsome warrior I know, into a pale, shaking, near-whispering wreck of a human being—
“She stole my souls,” Sienna said, almost under her breath, but it was loud as a gunshot to me. “She’s the stronger succubus, Reed, and she tried to drain me and…she stole my souls.”
“Which ones?” I asked, feeling icy fingers of alarm creeping up my spine from the small of my back, chills snaking their way up the back of my neck and across my scalp. They tingled like the skin was rising into mighty—not even goosepimples, more goosetowers, gooseskyscrapers on my skin.
“All of them,” she said. “Wolfe, Gavrikov, Bjorn, Zack, Eve, Bastian…and Harmon.” She was quiet for a few seconds as this sunk in. “She took them all from me. She took…everything.”
And now the bottom fell out of my stomach, like it had been held up by some decaying wooden slats and someone had just come along and kicked them right out from underneath, sending my stomach on a twenty-five-story plunge down the length of my body and then maybe down an old mine shaft afterward to boot, once it reached ground level. It felt like instant freefall followed by queasiness when it came to a plummeting stop. “Okay,” I said, trying to process through this new info. “Okay, so you have to get out of Scotland—”
“I tried,” she said, still near-whispering. “I called my banker and my fixer. I chartered a plane at an old airfield near where I was. The US government must have intercepted my call, because they were waiting for me with a Spec Ops team. Rose showed up a few minutes later, killed them all.” She said this with quiet authority.
“All right, well, you can try again,” I said, mind racing wildly. “Or I’ll book something for you—”
“And when I called my banker back…she’d wrapped him under her control and locked off my accounts, Reed.” Sienna’s voice was quiet and hollow. “All the ones in Liechtenstein are gone now. She took all that money.”
I smiled faintly. “But not the one you set up in the Caribbean to finance the new agency, right?” She shook her head. “I mean, even if so, that’s not a deal breaker. The agency has its own accounts now, and up until this last month or so, we’d been showing a nice little profit. I can book a private plane, meet you in Edinburgh—”
“No,” Sienna said, almost choking on it. She put a hand on my chest, brushed against the white broadcloth shirt, which was sweat-damp even in this dream. “She’ll know, if it’s in Scotland. You don’t understand, Reed. She controlled the entire Edinburgh police force. Through a—a—like a third party person—it was through Frankie, and she was controlling him the entire time—gah, I don’t know what you call it—”
“Like a sockpuppet account online,” I said.
She just stared at me. “Yeah. Okay. Sure, that. She controls people like they’re her own personal suckmuppets—”
“Sockpuppet,” I said lamely, because suckmuppet was actually more fitting, but I didn’t want to laugh.
“Whatever. She controlled them all, like a puppetmaster, and I didn’t even see any strings.” She was getting more animated as she spoke, and it was obvious this Rose, whoever she was, had hit Sienna in a way she hadn’t been hit before. It was more than a little disquieting to see my sister knocked onto the back foot like this, because even when President Harmon had turned all of us against her and made her a fugitive, she’d at least still had her massive, invincible superpowers and endless bank account to draw on.
Now…she was just about down to her sparkling personality, which was…alarming, since her personality only sparkled like a particularly sharp knife, and for just about the same reason.
“You can’t come to me in Scotland,” Sienna went on, quiet, firm, filled with conviction. “She owns this place, lock, stock and five hundred smoking barrels, since she has the cops.”
“Okay,” I said, running through my mental map of the UK from my days operating all over Europe with Alpha. “Newcastle-Upon-Tyne is the first English town past Scotland—”
“Too close,” Sienna said, shaking her head.
“York is halfway between London and Scotland,” I quickly amended. “There’s an airfield there. I’ll charter a private plane and swoop in, pick you up. All you need to do is show up, and we’ll GTFO, make for a non-extradition country, maybe in the Caribbean or something.”
She was silent for a long moment, like her brain was chugging along at half speed. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
I smiled. “I’ll be fine. This succubus—does she have a telepath or something? Like Harmon?”
Sienna shook her head, frowning. “I don’t think so. She couldn’t seem to detect me or my thoughts. But she was definitely pulling the strings on people somehow. I was thinking a Siren, but…I don’t exactly know what using that power looks like.”
It was my turn to frown. “Breandan told me about it one time, because his girlfriend was one. Said that it was like when they spoke, people oozed to try and answer their requests, polite or not. Said she could really pour on the honey, make it feel like you were the only man in the world.” She stared at me with one eyebrow cocked, and I cleared my throat and looked down. “What? It was just a couple guys talking. I mean, I’ve never felt it myself, obviously.”
“I don’t know if that’s what she has or not,” Sienna said. “Maybe. It’d be tough for me to tell, not being a guy, but…there were women in Police Scotland that were coming after me too, and it was more…frenzied. Like when those reporters went feral on me in Eden Prairie.” She seemed to be giving this some thought. “It wasn’t cops on the job, it was wild dogs on the hunt, you know?”
“I think I get it,” I said, at least understanding the broad strokes based on her explanation. “Look…whoever this Rose is, and whatever she wants—”
“She wants me. Dead.” There was quiet certainty in Sienna’s voice.
“Why?” I asked, and she looked at me funny. “What did you do to piss in this girl’s cornflakes?”
She just shrugged. “I honestly don’t know, Reed. I have no idea. I’ve never met this girl before. I didn’t even know there was a succubus in Scotland. It seems like she’s been planning this for years, if what she told me before she turned on me is true. I mean, this grudge—it’s deep, like I killed her entire family or something.”
Something about what she’d said tingled in the back of my head, but I didn’t know why. “You’ve never even been to Scotland, have you?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, arms folded across her chest, frowning in thought. “The closest I ever even got was the first time I went to London, when we were thinking about coming up here to visit that meta cloister and protect it from—” She froze. I knew from looking at her that she had maybe discovered the source of my ill-found tingle. “Oh, God, Reed.”
“You think she…?” I asked.
Sienna closed her eyes. “She’s a succubus.” She put her head in her hands. “How could I be so stupid? She’s a Scottish succubus.” If there had been a wall around, she might have punched it.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to rally her back to the moment at hand. “We’re going to work through this.”
“Thousands,” Sienna whispered. “Thousands dead. That she killed. Because of me. Because—”
“Not now,” I said, seizing her by the shoulders, feeling the damp fabric of her shirt between my fingers. Whatever had happened to soak her to the bone, I bet it hadn’t been fun. “There will be time for guilt later. We don’t know for sure that…THAT…is why Rose is very, very angry with you—” She gave me a “you’re-an-idiot” look, which I ignored, because she was my sister, sarcastic to the nines, and I was used to it on all occasions. “And we can’t do anything about it either way. It happened years ago, Sienna, and there was nothing we could do about it at the time. We made the best choices we could, and now—now we have to…to keep doing that.” I took a breath, trying to breathe some conviction into those words, because I wasn’t necessarily feeling them right now. “Can you get to York?”
She looked rattled, answered quietly, “Yes. I think so. I’ve evaded Rose for a hundred miles or more so far. York can’t be that much farther. I’ll find a way.”
“Get to York,” I said, squeezing her shoulders tight. “Get to the airport.” My voice built in intensity, because something was happening around me, noise and fury, the quiet darkness fading as I returned to consciousness against my will. Sienna was right in front of me, scared, feeling like—like she was helpless, almost for the first time since I’d known her. My fearless sister, and here she was, filled with toxic fear. There was a roaring tempest around me, the sound of staccato shots being fired, the low whine of something sizzling its way, screamingingly searing through metal like a laser— “I will be there, waiting. Come to me, and together we’ll get you—”
The darkness broke, and I felt like I was seized from this unconscious vision and hurled back into the light. The last thing I saw before I woke up was Sienna’s face, pale, ashen and afraid.
And seeing my sister…my fearless sister…afraid, really, truly afraid, for the first time in years…
It scared me more than I had ever been in my entire life.