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  “Waiting for me,” I said. I caught a hint of disappointment from Zollers, though he hid it well. “He was an incubus, and so he could – we could—”

  “I don’t need to hear any more,” Ariadne said, waving a hand in front of me to cut me off. “I’m going to send our staff investigator to debrief you. He’s going to start putting together a picture of what you know about Omega, and how this happened.”

  “If I may,” Old Man Winter said, in a tone that let us know he wasn’t so much asking for permission to interject as he was warning everyone else to shut up. “While this…Omega operative may have gotten access to your cell phone, it was not the cause of our recent setbacks. The ambush of our agents was in motion prior to your call with Ariadne, and the battle in Kansas was already underway.” He looked at me, boring into my eyes. “You are not responsible for this. The fault rests with someone else.”

  Ariadne seemed to think about this for a moment. “Very well. They couldn’t have gotten the data from her phone. I still want our investigator to talk to you about this – this – this—” She stopped, closed her eyes, and exhaled. “All right.” She shook her head again. “Anything else, tell the investigator. His name is Michael Mormont.” She shook her head and turned to leave.

  Old Man Winter waited, still staring me down, but after another moment he broke off and followed her. He stopped at the door and turned. “You saw your mother.”

  “I did,” I said, afraid to meet his eyes. Why did I feel this overwhelming sense of shame? Probably because I got suckered by an Omega operative who damned near got me to lose my virginity to him less than twenty-four hours before he beat the hell out of me.

  “Did she say anything?” he asked. “Anything of consequence?” His hand was on the door, on the metal frame around it, and I saw a small sheen of ice spreading out on the steel in a light spiderweb pattern, radiating out from his hand across the metal wall.

  “No,” I said. “Just told me I’d screwed up and that I’d screw up again.” I clenched my fist and felt pain shoot through my arm where I’d been shot. “Just like always,” I whispered.

  Old Man Winter nodded. “She has always been…a hard woman. My chosen surname is Winter,” he said, with the slightest smile, “but she is the very definition of it – harsh, unrelenting, unforgiving.”

  “You used to work with her at the Agency?” I asked, referring to the government-controlled precursor to the Directorate. No one had ever really explained to me what happened to the Agency, other than that it was destroyed.

  “Our paths would cross occasionally. She was an agent, one of the best. I was in…administration. I knew her only in passing.”

  “What happened?” I asked, in genuine wonder. “What happened when the Agency was destroyed? Why did she flee, give up her name and everything and hide for almost two decades?”

  “Fear, I would think,” Old Man Winter said, possibly breaking some kind of personal record for number of consecutive sentences in a row. “Fear for you and your safety. It is a dangerous world for metas.” His eyes narrowed. “And especially for a succubus.”

  I opened my mouth to ask another question about the Agency and its destruction, but as though he sensed he didn’t want to answer it, he left, the doors sliding shut behind him. “What was that supposed to mean?” I asked Zollers, who chewed his lip as he watched Old Man Winter leave.

  “I don’t know. Not being a meta myself, I suppose I’m not down with the lingo.”

  “‘Down with the lingo’?” I asked. “Did you really just talk like a geek fanboy?”

  “Naw,” he said, “that was totally street.” He paused, tried to keep a straight face, and then smiled. “The street where the comic shop is located, anyway. So…” he said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Why?” I asked, distracted, staring at the doors that Old Man Winter had just walked out of. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked mockingly.

  “Sounds like,” Zollers replied, “but that’s not why I want to talk to you. Standard Directorate procedure after you’ve been through a firefight. Gotta make sure you’re not suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

  “I’m suffering from multiple gunshot wounds,” I said. “I’m suffering from a lack of answers and an abundance of questions—”

  “Something I’m sure you’ve never dealt with ever, at any point in your life.”

  I let that hang in the air for a second, then blew air out of my lips and shook my head, only mildly amused. “You know me too well, Doctor.”

  “I try,” he said. “You could make it easier, though. Come see me when you get out. And you know.” He looked at me with a narrowed, piercing gaze that was coupled with a knowing smile to devastating effect. “If you don’t, I will hunt you down.”

  “I’ve been made aware of that before, yes.”

  “All right, then,” he said with a nod, then hesitated, as though he remembered or realized something. He looked at me somewhat tenderly, then nodded again and walked out, his posture stiff. I started to ask him what that was about, but shrugged. We all act a little weird sometimes.

  As the doors shut, I heard movement to my left and turned to look. Reed was still asleep in the corner of the medical unit closest to Dr. Perugini’s office, but there was motion in the bed next to him.

  It was Zack. His eyes were open and fixed on me, and his face was crumpled in a way that caused my heart to drop in my chest. His lips were twisted, eyes squinting, emotion plastered over every inch of his handsome face, and I had another jolt of realization – he had been listening when I told the others about James, about what I had done.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. He didn’t reply. He just shook his head, bowing it down. After a moment he looked back at me in silent accusation, then closed his eyes and rolled over, giving me nothing but a view of his back.

  Chapter 7

  I got discharged from the medical unit a few hours later. Zack still wouldn’t speak to me, and I didn’t bother trying very hard because truthfully, I was more than a little ashamed. I mean, I was nearly in bed with another guy less than twenty-four hours after breaking up with Zack. Not my best day ever.

  I stepped out of the headquarters building to find the sun shining, fluffy white clouds draped intermittently across the sky, with a warm wind pushing them along. It was a beautiful summer’s day and not too hot, for once. The scent of fresh cut grass permeated the air in front of headquarters.

  Dr. Perugini had had someone retrieve clothes from my room, so I was walking out of the medical unit in a pair of jeans and a loose fitting long-sleeved T-shirt. My arm still felt a little painful, but the place where the bullets had been pulled out only the day before were now simply angry red spots, just a little scabbing giving any indication that there was ever any deeper injury there.

  I didn’t want to think about the internal pressure I had weighing on me – not about Mom, nor Zack, nor James, not about Omega, or anything, really. I knew Ariadne’s investigator, Michael Mormont, would find me sooner or later, and I was sure that would be a joyous exploration of my many screw-ups, but I counted myself lucky that I’d been unconscious when he’d stopped by the medical unit earlier.

  No, I needed a distraction right now. I didn’t have an assignment, and I was done with training—

  I stopped walking. Parks had hammered it into our heads, over and over, that we were never done with training. “Training never ends,” Parks had said, his dark eyes visible beneath his gray, bushy eyebrows. “Not for the true professional. Training’s a way of life for the prepared, for people who are always looking for the edge in a fight. And you never know when that fight will come.”

  I understood him in a way that Kat and Scott had never quite come around to. It made sense to me. Probably because my mom had the same philosophy, and we had trained every day, on martial arts, on weapons, on fighting.

  I found my feet carrying me past the newly rebuilt science labs, past the gym, to a nondescript building tucked at t
he far side of the sprawling Directorate campus. The gym housed workout equipment, suitable for employees to exercise and maintain physical fitness. But this was the training center, a three-story boxy building of concrete and metal. It housed a gun range, a full martial arts studio, and a dozen classrooms with materials suitable for any lesson you wanted to learn.

  I walked through the double glass doors and into the gray-carpeted hallway. The carpeting was thin, like it was just barely stretched over the concrete floor. I entered a drab hall that was all glass windows on both sides. I looked through the windows, which were bulletproof glass, down onto the firing range below. The stalls where the shooters stood were all empty, the range quiet.

  I pushed open the heavy door that separated me from the range. All was quiet; I walked down the staircase, my tennis shoes squeaking against the rubber-plastic substance coating each stair. When I reached the bottom, the smell of gunpowder greeted me, the sweet smell of fired bullets. To my right was the rangemaster’s armory, and I pulled open the door and walked in, drawing a raised eyebrow from the man behind the counter.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” Glen Parks said, his lips puckered, giving his rugged face a skeptical tilt. “Being newly discharged from the medical unit, I assumed you’d have other things to do.”

  “I didn’t enjoy being shot,” I said, “and maybe some practice will help keep it from happening again.”

  “Not losing your gun next time would probably help more than target practice.”

  “I didn’t just lose one, I lost two. And a backup knife.”

  It was hard to suss out his reaction, his face remaining masklike even as his fingers drummed out a steady rhythm on the counter in front of him. “Good girl. You’ll be needing some new ones, then?”

  “I’d like to stick with my Sig and my Walther,” I said, sidling up to the counter and leaning on it with my uninjured arm. “And I’d like to get some practice in; a couple hundred rounds with the Sig at least.”

  “And the Walther?” he asked.

  “Fifty or so,” I said, and he pulled boxes of bullets off the back shelves and set them on the counter, then walked to a cabinet behind him and opened it, rummaged around for a minute before coming back with two gun cases. He opened the first to reveal a Walther, then the second to reveal a Sig Sauer that was exactly like the one I had lost.

  I took both pistols, their cases, and the bullets, along with the ear protection and eye protection, and went out onto the range. There was something therapeutic about having the gun in my hand. I pulled targets out of the bin in the corner; they were all black and white outlines of a vaguely man-shaped person. I hung the first from the clips and sent the target downrange with the little button that caused the hanger to zip along the cord. The paper target waved, fluttering along until it was a good fifteen feet away from me.

  I put in ear plugs, then slipped the muffs over my ears. Having been exposed to a small war’s worth of gunfire and explosions over the prior few days, I wondered if this would make any difference. I put on the eyewear, then pulled the Sig out of the sleeve. I smelled the unique hint of gun oil as I brought the slide up to my nose and took a deep sniff. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve always thought that after a while, the faded smell of gun oil smells just a little like curry.

  I fired through a hundred rounds pretty quickly, stopping a few times between magazines to change the target. I looked at my results every time I reeled in the silhouette outlines. I visualized James Fries as the outline in the targets and it seemed to help. There could be no doubt I needed more practice with a gun. Even though I felt fairly confident I could put a severe hurting on someone, my mother would have viewed anything less than flawless results as an indicator that we needed to practice more. Flawless results only meant you needed to maintain your skills in this area, and focus on becoming better somewhere else.

  The next hundred bullets went smoother, and I felt the kink in my shoulder dissolving. Whatever scar tissue was left from my encounter with the Omega gunman was disappearing thanks to my meta healing. I thought about Zack, still lying in the medical unit, unable to heal anywhere nearly as quickly as me.

  I missed the next shot completely, didn’t even hit the target.

  He was weaker than I was, no doubt. His human physiology made him more prone to injury and less likely to shake it off. I’d had occasions where I’d been beaten nearly to death and twenty-four hours later there wasn’t a sign I’d even been hit. He, on the other hand, scarred. He bled, heavily, and for longer. I wasn’t sure if I was even still thinking about his injury. Now I was thinking about the look on his face when he found out about James.

  I missed two more shots in a row, and didn’t bother for a third. I set the gun on the counter in front of me and took a deep breath.

  I was reeling in the target when I heard gunfire from the stall next to me. Absorbed in my own problems, I hadn’t even noticed someone else enter the range, which was sloppy on my part. For the girl who always seems to have an Omega operative chasing her, paying zero attention is the fastest way to an ugly end. I stepped back from my spot, my booth, I thought of them, even though there was just a divider between me and the next positions on either side – and looked left. Someone ran through an entire magazine, fast, fifteen shots in rapid succession. I looked downrange and saw their target; it was fresh, and holes were appearing in it, most outside the silhouette of the human body at the center. In gun terms, that’s what we like to call ‘whoops’. That might not just be in gun terms, actually.

  I caught a glimpse of curly, sandy blond hair as the shooter stepped back for a minute, rolling his shoulders as though trying to work some tension out of them. I didn’t want to offer unsolicited advice, but it wasn’t going to do a thing to improve his accuracy if he didn’t slow down and stop trying to blast through all fifteen rounds in ten seconds. I might have said it, too, but I knew better in this case. Hiding behind the clear plastic glasses that were supposed to protect him from stray shell casings was the face of Scott Byerly – solemn, determined and serious.

  I approached Scott slowly from behind, taking my time as he ran through another magazine, managing to land only his first couple shots inside the silhouette. The most he could have hoped for was that the proximity of his fire would cause the perpetrator to suffer from a fearful case of soiled pants, because the bullets were unlikely to stop him unless he somehow leapt in front of one of them in a panic.

  When he was finished, Scott stepped back and laid his gun down on the counter in front of him, barrel pointed downrange. If he’d known much about how to use a firearm, or if he’d been paying more attention during Parks’ lessons, he probably would have treated it more gingerly. He didn’t, though, and his face was stormy as I approached. He heard me, I knew, because his shoulders slumped as I came up behind him.

  “Hey,” I said, pulling my ear protection down to rest around my neck. I pulled the ear plugs out and put them in my pocket, the little pliant pieces of foam only slightly larger than the first knuckle of my pinky finger. “How are you holding up?”

  He didn’t answer, but stepped back to the gun, slapped another magazine into it and ran through the whole thing in about ten seconds, one shot after another. I barely had time to get my earmuffs back on before he loosed it, and when he was done, he still gave no indication that he’d seen or heard me. Of course, I knew he had. He was tense, his posture unnatural, stiffer than the usually laid-back Scott. He never took anything seriously. Or almost anything, I thought, remembering back to the time we’d met and clashed because I’d been responsible for the deaths of friends of his, then members of his family.

  I sat there as he fiddled with the gun, reloading a magazine from a box of 9mm bullets sitting next to him. I waited, wanting to see if he’d even acknowledge me, wondering if for some reason he blamed me for something I had nothing to do with. After a moment, I turned and started away, my earmuffs back around my neck, hugging the sides of it snug.

&nbs
p; “You think she fought?” Scott asked. I turned, and saw he was still loading the magazine, pushing the bullets into the clip with fumbling fingers. One dropped and it pinged against the concrete floor. He stooped to pick it up. “You think your mom hit her? Knocked her out? Or do you think Kat just went along with her?”

  I had to think about it. What we’d seen of the car my mom had been driving gave some clues. The interior was bloody, and there was a bullet hole in the car’s upholstery. The fact that she’d used her hands to drain the memories of our agents that had been riding with Kat was a sign that she had probably done the same with Scott’s girlfriend. “I think my mom took her,” I said, stating an opinion I could only back up through conjecture, “because she realized she was a Persephone-type, and that…tends to be useful.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” he said, almost snarling, and jammed another bullet into the magazine with savagery, pushing hard against the spring as if he could throttle it into giving Kat back to him. “What I’m asking you is if Kat just went along or if she fought your mom.”

  “I think she fought,” I said, answering without thinking about it. I knew what he wanted to hear, and I sensed that anything else I said could be dangerous. Not for me, because I had all the confidence in the world that I could flatten him before he could so much as raise the gun at me (not that he would), but for him and his fragile state of mind. “Kat’s not the sort of girl that would let a stranger abduct her without putting up a fight.” After a second of reflection, I realized that this was probably true; no lie needed, even though I apparently was prepared to deliver one without thinking about it. Kat was a fighter; not, perhaps, as much as I would have considered myself to be one, but she was no weakling. She may have been blessed with the power to heal, but I’d seen her put a hurting on a few people since we’d begun working together.