Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (32 page)

“Um, hi,” I said, a little distracted. The others were falling behind me.

“I’m Raymond,” he said, his eyes still in shadow from the low light. “Or at least that’s what I call myself now.” I caught a whiff of a cologne. It smelled cheap.

“Raymond,” I said calmly, “are you gonna release my friends from your death hold or—”

“You don’t need to threaten me,” Raymond said. He put his hand down for a minute and I heard the breath of life return to the people behind me. “We’re related, you know? Hades was my dad. We can talk for a minute.”

“You don’t look like the son of a god,” I said patronizingly.

“I worked in a factory in Toledo until about nine months ago,” he admitted. He was cool, placid even. “Weissman came along and told me what they were planning. Asked for my help.” A smile broke out across Raymond’s fat face as he recounted the story. “It’d been a long time since anyone wanted anything to do with me. You know what I mean, right?”

I felt a little sizzle in the back of my head. “Not really.”

“Come on,” Raymond said, almost abashed. “I know how metas treat your kind. Our kind. I gave up on getting a favorable reaction to my abilities years and years ago and just started hiding it. I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone like you.” He took a step closer to me, and I could see the light fall across his gut. “You can’t control it, can you?”

“No,” I said, watching the light play over him. “But you can? I’d think that someone would have tried to make you an offer like Weissman’s years ago.”

Raymond shrugged. “They did. I’ve worked for governments before, sometimes, when I needed the money. I always needed time after a job, though, to get used to the voices, to … get them integrated in, you know? To get them to listen, and shut up when they’re told. It’s easy to get lost in the more forceful ones.” He wore a faint smile. “Hell, I remember it was a while before I learned how to keep them from walking all over me. Talking all over me.”

Kill him.

“Quiet, Wolfe,” I said, and he was. “I know what you mean.”

“I know you do,” Raymond said, so softly, his voice just desperately quiet, like he was the gentlest soul on earth. He took another step toward me, into the light. He really was a big man, and for all the threat his power carried he looked like a teddy bear, with beetle-like eyes that stared out at me in the dark. I could almost see the thirst for approval dripping from him, and I wondered how long it had been since he had really connected with another human being before Weissman had approached him. I would have guessed decades. “No one else knows how it works but us. It’s close, what you go through and what I go through. Very close. The difference is just scale.”

“I can’t imagine having as many voices in my head as you do.”

“You get used to it,” he said. “It’s worse with the metas. They’re different than humans; their wills are stronger. They fight back harder. Dad knew some tricks with his power, could do things I can’t.” His face fell. “Some things you don’t really see much of anymore. He didn’t want to share, you see. Not that he didn’t care, he just wanted to protect himself.

“I met your mother once,” Raymond said, and he extended a hand again, just for a moment, and I heard a half dozen screams behind me. “Sorry.” I could hear the genuine apology in his voice. “I didn’t want your friends interrupting our talk, and they were starting to get their wind back.”

“You knew my mom?” I asked, apparently unconcerned with the pain of my colleagues—and friends. I was torn, this tantalizing bit of my family’s history just hanging in front of me.

“Just met her the once,” he said. “Long time ago, when she was just a little girl. Her mom was one of my sisters.”

I blinked. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah,” he said with a nod, “we grew up together.”

I thought about that for a moment. “But …” My eyes widened at that. “When was that?”

He thought about it for a minute. “Oh … um … 1970s some time? Seventy-one, maybe seventy-two. I don’t remember exactly. Your aunt was still a baby at the time.”

“But if you were both children of Hades,” I said, “and he died—”

“He died before the Year Zero,” Raymond said then paused. “We’re kind of old, I guess, if that’s what you were getting at.”

I swallowed. “I didn’t know my grandmother lived that long.” I watched the beetle eyes. “Is she …?”

“Died in 1989. I found her last resting place in a cemetery in Michigan.”

“Huh,” I said, marveling just the least little bit at what I’d heard, at connections to a family I hadn’t known anything about. I watched him, and he watched me. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

“No, we don’t,” he agreed. “You should be with us. You belong with us. What Sovereign is doing—it’s something that should have been done a long time ago.”

I shook my head. “Raymond … this isn’t right.”

“Isn’t right?” A lifetime of scorn was obvious in his demeanor. “What they’ve done to our family isn’t right. Keeping incubi and succubi under their boots, suppressed—”

“Ummm, hello?” I said, as sarcastically as possible. “Suppression? You’re in the process of wiping out the whole damned species of meta-humans! Do you not possess any metrics to gauge how much irony you’re spewing right now?”

“We’re destroying the old order,” Raymond said, “to bring about a new one, a better one, for humans and metas. Omega and all their little satellites like Alpha and the Directorate, they’re just standing in the way of a better world. This one is so locked into structures of power that hand it over to people like … well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” I said, feeling a chill inside. “Tell me.”

“You met the Omega ministers, didn’t you?” he asked, watching me. “Weissman said you helped kill them.”

“Not intentionally,” I said tightly, “but that was how it turned out.”

“If you’ve met them, then you know,” he said. “They were never about sharing power. They were about hoarding it for themselves while the rest of us choked to death on the noxious clouds of whatever remainder they couldn’t get their hands around.”

I squinted at him as I tried to work through that one. “That was … uh …”

“Yeah, I think I might have mixed a metaphor a little too hard there.” He took another step toward me and he was almost fully visible in the light now. “You should be with us. Sovereign … he wants you with us. He knows you’d be great, he’s seen what you can do.”

“I don’t think he’s seen what I can do yet,” I whispered, looking up at Raymond.

“It shouldn’t be like this,” Raymond said, almost pleading. “The sons and daughters of Hades and Persephone were a family. We shouldn’t be fighting. It’s not right.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s funny you say that, because,” I pointed to Kat, who was lying prostrate, gasping for breath, “she’s a Persephone, and you were choking the life out of her with the rest only a couple minutes ago.”

Raymond’s face fell, and he looked suddenly unsure of himself. “Damn. I just … I can’t just go off the list, okay? The plan says …”

“Your plan says wipe them all out,” I replied. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t just, and I kinda think it’s been crafted by an effing madman.”

Raymond’s face showed just the slightest hint of amusement. “‘Effing’? Aren’t you from Minnesota?”

“When in London, do as Londoners do.”

He nodded, and I caught a whiff of sadness from him. “You’re not gonna budge off this, are you?”

“Let you kill my friends?” I pointed to Reed. “My brother?” I pointed to Kat. “One of your relatives?”

He didn’t blink. “She’s one of your relatives, too.”

“I’m not willing to admit that yet.” I didn’t blink away from looking at him. “You say that we should band together, but you’re failing to notice that my band is going to get short shrift if I join yours. How about you join mine and we go wipe out Century together?”

He shook his head slowly. “What they’re doing to upend Omega and the old order needs to be done—”

“Wake up, Raymond,” I said softly. “This is all that’s left of Omega. Of your old order. I’m in charge since this morning, and I was their worst enemy up until a week ago. They’re done. The old order has been swept aside. You guys have already won. Alpha’s finished, Omega’s toast, and the Directorate was destroyed in America. There’s nothing left now but Century, and they mean to do more than wipe away the old world. They mean to kill off anyone who could fight against their vision of a new one.”

He looked at me with those dark eyes. “I know. But it’s going to be worth it. I promise.”

I gave him a slow, resigned nod. “Don’t make a promise you know you can’t keep. It’s unseemly.” I gave him a little smile. “It’s time.”

“I don’t want to do this,” he said. “We’re family.”

“Apparently you’ve never seen how my branch of the family treats each other.” I cracked my knuckles one by one. “I can’t let you do what they’d have you do. If you’re not going to stand aside, I’m going to stop you.”

“It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Then don’t make it that way.”

He shook his big head, slowly. “I’m sorry. I know what’s coming. You don’t. But it’s all right; you’ll see it for yourself, because I won’t kill you.”

I let out a slow, disappointed sigh. “Well, you got one of those right.”

I launched myself at him with a kick that caught him in his massive belly. All the air went out of him in one second and he hit his knees. I followed with a knee to the face that rolled him over and sent him five feet into the air before he came down again, hard, on the thin carpet.

I pursued him with the viciousness of Wolfe, kicking him in the side of the face and snapping it back. The tactical detachment of Roberto Bastian told me to hit him in the head again, to impede his cognition and analysis of the fight by knocking the crap out of his brains (that last part might have been me). I punched with the white-hot anger bubbling over from years of repressed rage that waited below the surface of Aleksandr Gavrikov, and I kept myself from laughing at the joy of a fight the way Bjorn would have. I coldly determined that another kick to the face would just about put him out, so I landed one with perfect execution the way Eve Kappler would have done it—precise, on form—and Raymond hit his back, sputtering blood. He didn’t try to rise again.

“Okay,” he gasped, blood trickling down his face. “Okay, I give up.”

Stop.

And listening to the better angel of my nature, I heeded Zack’s counsel and stopped, watching Raymond shudder in pain at my feet.

“You’re tougher …” Raymond said. “Tougher than they thought you were going to be.”

“That’s me,” I said quietly. “One of these days you’d think they’d stop underestimating me.”

“I should tell you,” he whispered. “I should tell you why, why they’re so afraid of you—”

“DON’T!” I shouted, but it was too late.

A spurt of blood opened from his neck and he gagged, the geyser spraying into the air around me.

“I, for one,” came the voice from behind me, “am not so much underestimating you as trying to maintain a realistic picture of how big of a pain in my ass you could possibly be.”

I swiveled and Weissman was there, cradling his oversized knife again, wiping the blade on a cloth in his hands. It took me a minute to realize it was a patch of shirt, from Raymond. “The prodigal jackass returns,” I quipped. “Where’s your little sidekick?”

“She’ll be along in a minute,” Weissman said, polishing the blade. “You realize, of course, that every single one of your friends here is going to die before we’re through?” He was thoroughly unamused.

“Why?” I asked. “Because you’ve put a little distance of time between the last occasion you over-milked your powers, and your time-spinning buddy isn’t going to be aggravated if you halt the flow for a few more rounds now?”

“No, mostly because you’ve pissed me off.” His eyes were hard, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I thought about just leaving London for last, going and clearing out North and South America first. Maybe hit those last Pacific islands we’ve skipped over.” He pointed the knife at me. “But, no. I bring our best damned resource here to London to finish the job, the last Hades-type on the planet. Do you know how long it took me to find him?” Little flecks of spittle flew out of Weissman’s mouth in rage. “Forever. Just about forever. He’s not quite the linchpin of our plan, but he was close. He made my life easier. Now,” he waved the knife in sharp gestures around me, “I have to do this annihilation the hard way. I have to take all our people into the field and kill these last metas with overwhelming force. Because somehow you talk Raymond the mass murderer into growing a conscience.” He waved the knife at Raymond’s corpse. “I mean, do you believe that? He almost told you everything.”

I smiled sadly, looking at the body of the man who was related to me. “I’m persuasive.”

“You’re a pain in my ass,” Weissman said, and he pulled himself off the wall he had been leaning on. “You’re a pain in my ass is what you are. And if you weren’t Sienna Nealon, I would kill you over the course of several days and spread your body parts over a five-mile radius out of pure spite.”

“You’re not really a warm person, are you?”

“Oh, little girl,” Weissman’s voice was low, running over gravel, “I want to make you hurt so bad. I just want to bleed you for a while. I’d like to kill you, but I know how he’d frown on that. So I think I’m just gonna … cut all your tendons from the waist down, rip out your liver and shove it so far down your throat that you’ll never even notice it’s missing, then hang you from a meat hook and let you watch what I do to your friends.”

I didn’t smile as I looked back at Weissman. “How do I beat you to death?”

Weissman’s expression of fury turned to amused disdain. “You can’t. You’d be a fool to try.”

He’s afraid to push his powers because Akiyama will kill him if he stops time for too long,
Wolfe whispered.
Make him move, make him keep using them, and he’ll get irate, get sloppy. He can’t freeze time for more than a few seconds at a stretch, so if the Doll forces him into a situation where he can’t save himself but by using his powers for longer, the Doll wins.