Power (6 page)

“I have been in a coma for several months,” Janus said with a faint air of irritability. “Forgive if I do not rush to offer information that seems completely useless at this juncture. The girl is dead, after all.”

“On Weissman’s orders,” I said.

“So she was supposed to do what Sienna is doing?” Scott asked “Fight Sovereign?”

Janus hesitated. “If need be.”

Scott narrowed his eyes. “I sense there’s more to this than you’re telling us.”

“She was also kept as a possible bribe,” I said. “An attempt to buy off Sovereign.”

“That is what was called ‘Plan B,’” Janus said warily.

“Ah, Omega,” Reed said, blowing air between his lips in barely concealed fury. “You’d never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

“Heh,” J.J. said. “It’s a Star Wars line.” He glanced around the table. “It was a good line. Perfect placement.”

Janus ignored him. “It was not my plan,” he said to Reed. “It was originated by the old Primus, in the time when I was out of Omega’s operational command. I argued most strenuously against it in favor of training a succubus to fight Sovereign instead, but the Primus wanted the truth about incubi and succubi kept secret because—”

“Because the moment the secret was out,” I said sourly, “there was no putting that particular genie back in the bottle.”

“Correct,” Janus said, glancing sidelong at me. “In addition, he had reached a point where after so many attempts to ensnare you—Wolfe, Henderschott, Fries, Mormont, the vampires—he believed that even were I to bring you into the fold, your loyalty would always be suspect.”

“Because it was predicated on one thing, right?” I asked him. “On a common enemy.”

“And once that enemy was gone …” Janus said with a slight nod. “He was not a man prone to solving one massive problem by unleashing another. He was very careful to protect his interests and those of the Ministers by finding solutions that would insulate them from additional fallout.”

“Yeah, he was a real prince,” I said acidly. “Unfortunately, the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of his failure to act.”
And yours
, I didn’t say.

“How did you know?” Janus asked after a moment’s pause. “About Adelaide?”

“She’s left a ghost in my head,” I said, looking back at the photo of the stasis unit. “She’s the one who told me how to use my powers.” She’d told me a lot of things, actually. Showed me things. I felt a shudder and suppressed it.

Things I wasn’t ready to talk about just yet. That I couldn’t talk about.

Remember
.

“How is that possible?” Scott asked, and his voice sounded a little hoarse. He cleared it, looking around the table self-consciously.

“She was the stronger succubus,” Janus said, shaking his head very lightly.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “She touched me for a long time, like … way longer than it would have taken for a succubus’s power to work.” I caught the hint of something in Janus’s gaze, a flicker, and he looked away from me. “What are you not telling me?”

Janus paused, and when he answered it was with more than a hint of irritability. “Nothing that pertains to defeating Sovereign. Let us keep the focus on the matter at hand—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Reed said, leaning forward on the table. “You don’t just get to dish out and withdraw a little bit of info like that. You’re saying there’s a way to control a succubus—and assuming that’s right, presumably an incubus’s power, too, right?” He glanced around at all of us, his look somewhere between incredulity and relief. “This could be the thing that stops Sovereign.”

“She could still use the powers of the metas she’d absorbed,” I said with the shake of my head. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t keep them—us—from being able to use what we’ve got already.”

“Nor does it keep a succubus or incubus from being able to absorb fresh souls,” Janus said with that same wary air, now flecked with the barest hint of indignation. “Should we apply this particular treatment to Sovereign, it would do precisely nothing. It is little more than a method for a succubus to voluntarily control their absorption powers.”

I swallowed as I felt a rush of hope run through me. Control my powers? Make it so I could keep from absorbing someone’s soul the moment I touched them?

Make it so I could live a normal life?

“I’d be interested in hearing about it even so,” Scott said from his place down the table. I met his gaze for half a second and looked away.

“It is not relevant to the discussion at hand,” Janus said, and the menace in his voice was unmistakable. There was a sudden, dark pall over the table, a palpable anger that made everyone lean back a little in their chairs.

“Whoa, there,” Zollers said. “Restrain yourself, Janus.”

“I apologize,” Janus said after a moment more. He stood abruptly, and his chair clattered as he did so. “I’m afraid I must withdraw from this conversation. I have nothing more to add to the discussion at this time.” He looked around the room once briefly, his eyes so low that he never met any of ours, and then he left the conference room as quickly as I’d ever seen him move.

“Wow,” J.J. said. “That was super awkward. What do you think his secret was?”

Kat had a flushed look, slightly alarmed, and her gaze was rooted on the door. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him act this way before. But if he says he’s got nothing more to contribute that would help, I believe him—”

“I don’t,” Reed said sourly. I wheeled my gaze to him. “I don’t care what he says, he’s still Omega in my view, and they’re all filled to the brimming with secrets and lies.”

No one said anything to that, but Kat flushed and left in nearly as much of a huff as Janus had. The rest of us sat there for a minute more in eerie silence, while I wondered if Reed was right.

Chapter 9

Scott lingered as the meeting broke up. So did Reed and Zollers, but they hung back. I sat in my chair, the smell of leather thick in my nose. My fingers danced over the surface of the leather covering the arms, soft, pliable material slick with the sweat on my fingertips. Just nerves, I hoped.

Nervous for the weakling?
Wolfe asked.

I appreciate your assistance
, I told him,
but unsolicited opinions aren’t my favorite things ever.

Since the Little Doll asked so nicely
, he said, and I caught a glimpse of his fearsome smile in my mind’s eye before he sauntered off to the back of my head. I could feel the press of the others in my head, too, now that I had let them out of their prisons. They seemed reticent to say anything, though, and that was just fine by me.

Reed and Zollers remained at the other end of the table, watching me with careful eyes. They didn’t bother to pretend they weren’t paying attention to everything I was doing, and I respected them for it. False discretion wasn’t going to convince me they weren’t eavesdropping; they were metas, and they’d have to at least leave the room in order to avoid hearing a conversation between Scott and me.

Scott shuffled up, hands in his pockets. He took a moment to meet my eyes, but when he did, I could see the emotion in them. “I just wanted to tell you … I’m in. All in. Whatever it takes to stop these bastards.”

“Good,” I said, a little more choked up than I would have thought I’d be. I looked up and saw Reed hide a wry smile by turning away from me. “That’s … it’s good to have you on the team.” I wanted to smack myself for the excessive formality I was lapsing into, but let’s face it, I didn’t want to have a deeper, more private conversation with my brother and my therapist in the room. That’s practically family counseling, and it was not something I was up for.

“Way to come off the bench at the buzzer, Arthur Curry,” Reed said, and he turned back for just a second to smirk.

“Who the hell is Arthur Curry?” Scott asked, confusion stitching a downward line across his brow.

“Aquaman,” I said with faint amusement. He looked at me and his forehead puckered further. “Arthur Curry is Aquaman.”

“What the hell, Reed?” Scott gave him an insulted look, to which my brother just shrugged. He turned back to me. “And, uh … I’m sorry about your mom.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll, uh … deal with it later,” I said and meant it. “No time for mourning at the moment.”

“Can you and I talk later?” he asked. The annoyance on his face at Reed’s jibe had faded, replaced with something else, something closer to concern.

I took a breath before answering. “Yeah. Though we might want to do what we’d talked about before everything hit the fan and just … wait until things settle out with Sovereign.”

“Sure,” he said, and I watched him swallow heavily. “Sure, we can do that. Wait until everything is, uh … over … before …”

“Thanks.” I smiled faintly. Part of me didn’t want to put it off. Part of me wanted to dig into it right now and get it out of the way. This wasn’t the sort of thing I really wanted to leave open, like a wound, while I was heading into battle, but I wasn’t sure it was the sort of thing that could be fixed with a couple stitches, like … a smaller wound, I suppose.

The truth was I didn’t have any idea what to say. My feelings regarding Scott were immensely complicated, and I was still feeling exhausted from all the garbage that had been dumped on us in the last few days.

“Well, okay, then,” Scott said, and he swung toward the door almost as though he were on a string, being pulled toward it. His movements were mechanical, shuffling, and reminded me a little of how he’d acted after Kat had lost all memory of him. He disappeared through the door without another word.

“You know that keeping him at a distance is going to come back to bite you in the ass sometime between now and the final battle, right?” Reed asked, and I turned my head to find him standing there, leaning on the back of one of the chairs, watching me.

“Everything comes back to bite me eventually,” I said. “Leave my house, get drawn into a war. Kill Wolfe, piss off his brothers. Fail to kill Weissman when I had a chance, he comes back and kills my mom.” I said it grimly, but I didn’t feel sorry for myself about it. I didn’t know many people who’d been left with the shitty choices I’d been given in the last year and a half. Any people, actually. All I had were shitty choices. And I didn’t feel sorry for myself about it, not anymore. This was just reality. “I’ll deal with Scott when I figure out
how
to deal with Scott,” I said. To me, it had the ring of bracing honesty. I didn’t know how my brother or Dr. Zollers took it, but their facial reactions didn’t indicate they took it well. I looked to Reed. “Are we still in lockdown?”

“We’re always in lockdown,” he said, breaking a smile. “We live in a perpetual state of lockdown around here. It’s all we do anymore.”

“Good,” I said. “We may not have much left, but better safe than—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving me off as he started toward the door. “You should know that I’m ‘all in,’ too.” He paused at the doorway. “In case you didn’t already know.”

“I knew,” I said and felt the hint of a smile grace my lips. That took some doing at the moment, piercing through the shroud of numbness that felt like it had settled on my bones. “But I appreciate you saying it anyway, Hal Jordan.”

Reed’s eyes narrowed and his lips puckered in deepest betrayal. “Green Lantern? You consider me a Green Lantern?”

“You can kinda fly, but you’re no Superman,” I said with a shrug. “Just a touch of arrogance—”

“Ohhh, I am retracting my all-in,” he said and slapped the doorframe with mock irritation. He smiled, rolled his eyes and started to sweep out. “We’ll talk later, right?” His look turned to hesitancy, and I knew what he wanted to talk about—Mom.

“Yeah,” I said and glanced at Zollers. “But I have a feeling I might be all talked out on the subject pretty soon.”

“Maybe
I
won’t be,” he said quietly.

“Okay,” I said and gave him a nod. He left without another word.

“So …” Dr. Zollers said, completely unreadable.

“So,” I said. “Therapy session, huh?”

“Not necessarily,” he said, edging toward me quietly. His hands were folded in front of him, and he looked solemn. “Seems like everyone wants to talk to you now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Gotta console the grieving, I suppose.”

“Are you?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Grieving, I mean?”

I felt that faint smile broaden. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you? Psychiatrist to the last.”

“Reminds me of a joke I heard,” he said with a faint smile. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a hint of impatience.

“Only one. But it has to really want to change.”

I felt an absurd little laugh escape my lips at that. “That’s … terrible.”

“It truly is,” he said, and the familiar light that had always been in his eyes twinkled. “Do you know why so many of them want to have a conversation with you like I am right now?”

“They’re worried about me,” I said. “Worried I’ll … I don’t know, go charging off the edge of a cliff or something. Worried I might drop the ball on running this war.”

“They’re worried about you,” he agreed. “Not the war. I mean, Li is worried about the war. But Scott, Ariadne, Reed—none of them are worried about the war in relation to you. They’re worried about you because … it’s you.”

“And what’s Janus worried about?” I asked.

“No idea,” Zollers said with a shake of his head. “I can’t read him, not even a little. His empath powers blot mine out without him even having to try. I can’t even read the others when he’s around, he’s so strong.”

“To answer your question … I’m fine,” I said without enthusiasm.

“I don’t have to be a telepath to know that’s not true.”

“In relation to what happened with my mom, I’m fine,” I corrected. “For now. It’s not like I feel nothing, I just …” I sighed. “I hate to go all Scarlett O’Hara on this, but I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

He frowned, his lips compressing in a tight line. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so … now that I can read you, mentally, you do not feel fine.” He paused, as if he were stopping to take the temperature of the air, his eyes drifting into open space. “It’s not about your mother, the distress I’m detecting. It’s—”