Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (2 page)

“Rather than two-faced, you mean?” I ignored the heavy sigh that Janus let out in response. “I’ll give you credit, it was clever,” I said. “Did you come up with that one all by your lonesome?”

He gave me a wary look. “We can’t all be as witty as you. But … you want Winter, then? To fit him for a coffin, I expect, like you did with the others?”

I stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Which former Directorate employee told you about them?”

To his credit, he didn’t blink away. “None of them. One of our cleverer technical fellows managed to get coroner reports for Clary and Parks, as well as a crime scene report for Kappler’s condominium.” His words came out slowly, almost as though he were chiding me. “That one was quite messy, as I understand it. Bullets in the walls, blood everywhere, two women missing.”

“One’s alive,” I said coolly.

He cocked his eyebrow again. “Ah, the fabled Ariadne lives on to provide guidance to the next one to try and get out of the maze.” He waited for me to respond, and when I didn’t, he went on. “Because, you see, the original Ariadne, from myth—”

“I got it.” I thought about it for a second. “But that wasn’t her—”

“No,” he agreed. “The original was quite a bit … huskier than you might have imagined.” He shrugged. “Theseus did what he had to do, you know.” His hands came to rest on his knees, and I watched his fingers knead them. “So, Winter. You want him dead, and you think I can help you in some way.”

I let my gaze drift from Fries’s inert body to Janus. “Can you?”

He stood. “I could, but I would only do it if you give me a compelling reason, not out of any need Omega has for him to be dead.” He looked at me carefully. “If you want Winter, you must negotiate for him.”

I let out an impatient sigh. “This isn’t a negotiation.”

“Everything in life is a negotiation,” Janus said. “If we were to decide to go out for breakfast—” My stomach rumbled at his suggestion—“and you wanted Chinese but I wanted Greek, which would we decide on?”

“I generally don’t think of egg drop soup when considering breakfast,” I said warily. “I prefer real eggs.”

He waved a hand at me dismissively. “You know what I am saying. We would discuss back and forth, have a bit of give and take, if we were reasonable people. I would try to persuade you to my way of thinking, you would try to persuade me to yours. The give and take, yes? I’d like this, you’d like that—”

“I’d like medical attention,” Fries said in a low moan from the couch.

“You’re about to get
my
attention again,” I said and pointed the gun at him. “Will that suffice?”

“No,” he croaked.

“No is a good word,” I said, “You should learn what it means when a woman says it to you.”

Fries looked up at me. “I—”

I pointed the gun at him, refining my aim to put the white dot of the center sight just below the middle of his forehead. “Choose your next words carefully, James.” I waited, and he said nothing. “Good choice.” I looked back to Janus. “What do you want from me?”

He smiled, his teeth showing only the slightest bit of yellowing. “I want you to come to London, to Omega headquarters. I want you to see how we work, the scale of what we’re currently involved in fighting.” His smile faded but only slightly. “I want you to join us.”

I felt the slow grind of my molars. “No, thanks. I’ve already been part of one sham of a meta organization that nearly killed me. You know what they say about not learning from your own mistakes, right?”

He stared at me blankly. “I don’t believe I’ve heard that one.”

I ran the old phrase back in my head to make sure I had it right. “A wise person learns from the mistakes of others, a normal person learns from their own, and a fool learns nothing, ever.”

“So does that make you a fool or normal?” Fries asked me with a pained cackle.

“I’ve shot you on several different occasions now,” I said, “so what does it make you for continuing to get shot by me?”

“I’d avoid you if I could.”

“Come on, James,” I said with a little false enthusiasm, “you can do it. Try harder.”

“If I may,” Janus said, “might we come back to my offer? I could give you assurances that Omega means you no harm—”

“All of which are meaningless to me,” I said, “because of Wolfe, Henderschott, Fries,” I waved the gun at the mess of James still huddled on the couch, “Mormont, the vamps, Bjorn—hey, he’s a real charmer, and now I’m stuck with him forever in my head—”

Janus’s eyes twitched closed for a moment then reopened as he grimaced. “He is … with you, then? In your mind?”

“Usually at the moments of least convenience,” I said. “He’s blissfully quiet right now.” A voice sounded in my head:
Just listening, Cookie.
“It would appear I spoke too soon.”

A slight look of concern crossed his face but he waved it away. “This is ultimately irrelevant.”

“It’s relevant to me; he’s really annoying sometimes—”

Janus’s expression darkened. “I meant to our discussion.”

I rolled my eyes. “Try living with three former employees of Omega in your head. I swear, the only thing I have more of than former Omega employees is former Directorate ones.” I went on, feeling a little like a gossip. “And Gavrikov! Do you know he never shuts up about your stupid girlfriend?”

“You want Winter,” Janus said, his voice straining to get us back on topic even as he seemed to be trying to keep emotion off his face, “I can give you assistance in killing him. But there will be a price.”

“Why don’t you just tell me where he is and call it a … present.” I smiled. “Like a goodwill present to make up for all the shit you’ve put me through.”

His expression turned to pitying. “Let us call him what he really is—leverage. A motivator for you to begin going through the actions it will take to convince you that Omega is the sole force fighting to preserve meta-humans from the impending calamity that Century is bringing.”

I felt a tug at his words. “I don’t care about Century. About any of that.”
Liar, liar,
Zack said quietly in my head.

“No?” He stared coolly back at me, and let a hand go to one of his pockets, smoothing it shut. “I find it hard to believe that somewhere, beneath that … hard-edged exterior you carry around you, that there is not a care present at all for your fellow man—and woman, I suppose they would say nowadays.”

“I care about paying back Winter.” I let the knife edge in my voice reflect the emotions I had beneath the surface. “I want him to die for what he did to me. You give me him, and I’ll help fight your little war.”

He hesitated, thinking over his next line, and I caught a hint of pity. “It is a war that belongs to all of us, I think. I hope in time you will see the truth of that.”

“So long as I see Erich Winter’s head on a pike first.”

Janus gave me a low nod, but his shoulders seemed a little more slumped than when he had come in. “Very well. I will set our intelligence gathering in motion to track him down. But,” he said wagging a finger at me, “it will be some time before we venture off to get him, even if we were to locate him tomorrow. That is the bargain—you will come with me, see our efforts. I tell you this so there is no misunderstanding. You see our work, what we do, and in three months, I will give you Erich Winter. Can you agree to that?”

“Will I find him without you?” I asked sarcastically.

He shook his head. “I think not. He has not survived for thousands of years through countless feuds among our fickle and murderous people by stupidly walking into danger.” He waited in silence for a moment before speaking again, as though hoping I would leap into the conversation to answer before he had to ask the question. “Will you come with me to London?”

“Please do,” Fries said with a low moan.

I gave it a long thought; there was a strong disagreement in my head. I don’t just mean that I was internally at war; I mean that Wolfe, Gavrikov and Bjorn were enthusiastically supportive of the idea of me going to London—to meet with Omega, to pursue revenge—while the other voices, Kappler, Bastian and Zack, were somewhat more reluctant. It was like being in the middle of a shouting match, and I could barely make out all the different arguments being made in my head, just the general tone.

“Will you come with me?” Janus asked again, and the cacophony died down.

I stared at him for a long moment as I went through all the options. “Yes,” I said, and there was a chorus of disharmony in my head at the decision. “I don’t see any other way to get what I want, so yes.” I listened in particular to one voice, one that I almost had to strain to hear behind the other, louder ones, but it was there. Zack. My love.

Watch your back.

The flight was crowded, full to the brimming, actually, but it was direct from Minneapolis to London, and so I couldn’t complain about that. The sterile air in the plane was dry, and I felt it cause my nose to dry out with it, as if I had inhaled a desert into my nostrils. The guy next to me was on the wrong side of thirty with earrings in both ears and sandals—sandals! In Minnesota. In winter. Try to figure that one out. He was dressed like the kind of guy who would go around calling everyone “bro” but probably let it slide into “brah.” He also rudely hogged the entire armrest on that side in spite of my efforts to find a place to rest my elbow, thus pushing me into the overlarge woman in a black suit who sat to my right. She wore a sleeping mask, had five different pillows stationed about her body for comfort, and had been lightly snoring since takeoff.

It was my first flight, and I didn’t know anything about flight etiquette, but as the person in the middle with no armrest and her hand (and stump) folded across her chest, I was about ready to unleash some of my fury by throwing my elbows outward. Unfortunately, that would kill my seatmates which, I sensed, would please no one but Wolfe. Perhaps it would please me. The pain that my hand was causing as it grew back was staggering, and a few times I bit back the urge to beat someone to death from both that as well as garden-variety annoyance with the whole situation.

The dull blue pleather seatback was stretched in front of me after I lowered the grey tray table to let my hand and half-hand rest on it for a change. I inhaled the dry air, taking a sip of the cup of water the flight attendant had brought me a few minutes earlier, trying to contain my annoyance at being mushed by the guy I called Brah and the Sleeper. Janus had wisely booked himself into first class using his corporate advantages. I hadn’t complained at the time, but I certainly was prepared to give him an earful upon landing. I let the low thrum of the engines carry me off to sleep.

I stepped off the plane some nine hours after takeoff at Heathrow airport. In truth, it didn’t look dramatically different from what I had left behind, save for the boring, by-the-numbers hallways that took me to customs with Janus trailing somewhere behind.

I had gone home before meeting Janus at the airport and packed clothes. I had a spare passport under the name Sienna Clarke that I flashed at the area of customs where there were signs referring to it as the UK Border. I wondered at that, since it seemed to me I was well within the country at this point, but it wasn’t really my place to argue the semantics of national borders.

The clerk stared blandly at me for a few moments. “Purpose of visit?” he asked.

“Tourism,” I answered, and he gave a sort of half-shrug and waved me on after handing back my passport.

I met Janus in the terminal near the baggage claim area. I had nothing to pick up, but he stood there in his tweed suit coat, waiting expectantly around a silver steel merry-go-round composed of segmented belts. He flashed me a sideways look. “This is where we part ways for a bit.”

I looked back at him in disbelief. “Huh, what? I just got here.”

“Indeed you did,” Janus said. “And you are most welcome to go to our headquarters, if you’d like—”

I changed to a glare of annoyance. “I’d very much NOT like.”

He gave a simple nod. “As I suspected. I am not presently going to our headquarters; I am going to take a taxi and visit Klementina before I return to working on Omega business tomorrow morning.” He ignored my look of distaste. “Therefore, we part ways here. We have booked a hotel for you in the city, and I have a bit of pocket money for you to spend.” He handed me a wad of twenty-pound notes. “I will meet you tomorrow morning for breakfast in your hotel lobby. Ah.” He reached down and swept a small suitcase off the luggage conveyor in front of him.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I asked. “It’s—” I looked at the clock hanging high above us from a wall, “—it’s not even noon here yet.”

He looked unworried as he began to roll his bag away, toward a sign that indicated taxi service. “Take the London Underground to the Russell Station stop.” He indicated the wad of bills he’d handed me. “There are directions to your hotel on a paper note with the bills. Go on a sightseeing tour, see a film at the cinema, whatever you want.” He shrugged. “You are here visiting, and thus in charge of your own time. Enjoy it.” With that, he turned and began to walk away again.

I watched him go, feeling only the slightest edge, some irritation, but beneath it was the real driver of my present emotion. I looked to either side of me. There were crowds of people jockeying along the baggage carousels, while others breezed past me, bringing their own intoxicating mixture of smells and sight, their clothing ranging from the bright to the dim. The sound was loud, the chatter of a thousand voices. I watched Janus leave and felt the little tether between us that I hadn’t even been aware of dissolve.

I was alone again—but this time in a land I knew nearly nothing about.

I found the entrance to the London Underground without much difficulty. Signs were clearly posted, and helpful employees seemed to be stationed at the sticky points to help me through. I managed to procure a ticket for Russell Square’s tube station from a finicky machine that didn’t immediately want to accept the first note I fed into it. After it finally acceded and spat out a ticket, I made my way through the gates and waited in a big, open, tiled space that was like a cylinder laid on its side. Within the cylinder was another, this one cut into the ground in front of me and stretching off to my right and left, tracks running down the bottom of the channel. As I was looking from the edge of the platform, I felt a stir of air begin to blow from my right, out of the blackness that I knew would eventually spit out the train I was waiting for. I caught a whiff of that same filtered air that was so prevalent on the plane, but this was cooler somehow, less dry. It sent a tingle over my flesh as I took a step back from the edge of the platform.