I hadn’t even known another succubus could steal my souls, but in fairness, I hadn’t exactly dealt with many of them. My aunt Charlie, my mom, and myself—those were the three succubi I’d known before Rose came into my life. I cursed myself again for not having listened to my suspicions about her, the same suspicions I get for everyone, but damn! I mean, she was a good actress. I’d been around a lot of criminals, and I’d yet to meet one that could perform like her. That was some classically trained stuff right there, and I didn’t wonder that hard why actors from the UK ended up so famous lately. Maybe she’d been in theater when she was young.
My thoughts wandered back to my souls. I knew what a succubus could do to a soul if they wanted to apply pressure. Agonizing pain was a tool at your disposal, if you wanted to break one of your captives. You could basically turn your brain into a 24/7 torture dungeon for them, if you had a little help.
And based on the number of powers Rose had, and the number of corpses she’d left behind…I guessed she had a lot of help at her disposal.
Every single soul she took was another centurion in her personal, mental army. I’d seen it happen on a very small scale with my own souls when they’d taken a run at Harmon one night when he’d first arrived in my mind. There was a horrific, howling noise as they jumped him, one that had woken me out of a sound sleep with the horror of the screaming. I’d put a stop to it, of course—Bjorn claimed it was just hazing, but I’d heard what I’d heard, and Harmon, though quiet about it, had been less insufferable for a few days afterward. That told me that no matter how fine he said he was, whatever they’d hit him with—their combined wills, near as I could suppose—it must have hurt quite a lot.
That was six against one. Rose could have thousands of souls ready to pour the fire on my few.
Wolfe could take care of himself, I knew. He’d probably been through worse.
Then again, when I’d killed him…he’d screamed and begged just like anyone else would. He probably wasn’t used to taking pain anymore, having become the guy who more often dealt it out.
Bjorn, Eve, Bastian, Gavrikov…they all were pros who knew the score, like Wolfe, a little, in that regard. Harmon, too, to a lesser extent. Pretty much every one of them had been in meta battles at some point, and they’d be familiar with the way things went, with the way of the world, really. Might makes right, and Rose had a lot of might on her side.
I wasn’t under any illusions about this turning out “right,” though.
My arm was rested against the window, the warmth of the sun feeling pretty good against the skin, a far cry from the fiery feeling I’d experienced when Rose had put her hands on me and ripped the souls out of my body. I shivered a little at the thought, hands shaking on the steering wheel until I got myself back under control. No one had dominated me like that in a long time, and it felt…
I nudged the car to the side of the road for a moment and took long, steadying breaths. I was fine. Physically, I was fine. A hundred percent, even, for my own powers.
But if that were true…why did it feel like a huge chunk had been carved out of my flesh?
I was keenly aware of that missing space inside, a hollow center that made me feel like Rose had cut me open and ripped out a few internal organs. Sure, maybe I could survive for a little while without them, but sooner or later I’d keel over dead without what was missing. It was a gaping, empty hole within, a painful cavern inside me that echoed every time I spoke, resonating with a kind of agony that I hadn’t fully experienced, even when all my friends had betrayed me and the US government had turned on me.
It was the feeling of being…alone. Actually, truly, completely alone.
“You bitch,” I said in a voice that sounded very, very small.
I imagined her face in front of me, and right there with a desire to punch it, squarely, in its freckled paleness, was another desire—to not hit her. To quail away, to turn and run.
I hated that feeling, and the shot of worry that it sent rushing through my veins. It was a physical reaction to the thought of Rose, a sense of fear that was like a hobble fastened to me, cramping my desire for action.
She’d made me fear her. That made me hate her even more.
I spent some time composing myself. Not a single car passed me during that interval, which made me feel like I’d picked the right roads to traverse. I wiped my eyes, cursing the fact that I was actually despairing, alone, in a damned European shoe car, on the side of the road in Scotland. I felt so wretched I could barely put words to it, and I was on my way to a rendezvous that would see me fleeing this country for safer ground.
I think I hated that worst of all.
It took a while to get myself back together, but I finally did it. At least I hadn’t full-on ugly-cried, I thought to myself, reveling in this one small victory as I nudged the vehicle back on the road, my destination bleary but visible in the map next to me. I’d held it in, for now, keeping all this fury and sadness and loneliness and isolation buried inside.
I resolved I’d keep it buried until the next time Rose and I crossed paths, when I was ready for her.
And then…I’d find some way to make her give me back what she’d taken from me.
10.
I found the airfield about an hour and a half before my plane was supposed to land. It wasn’t much of an airfield, more like a grass strip in the middle of miles of farmland, but it was nestled in a little valley, and there wasn’t a ton of cover nearby save for a grove of trees to the west.
Parking the car miles away seemed like the wise, cautious approach, and now that I was missing most of my godlike powers, I needed to be more careful. So I hiked across the farmland, exercising my right to wander across endless fields, and snaking my way carefully through the woods once I reached the western approach to the airfield.
I crept through the woods slowly, taking care not to crunch a single leaf. Fortunately it was summer, not autumn, so there weren’t too many leaves on the ground, though there were enough that it required some caution. I listened with every step, avoiding rustling the underbrush. The trees were tall, reaching high into the sky, and I contemplated climbing one, maybe jumping from bough to bough and observing the field from a distance at that height.
But that was more of a thing for the old Sienna, the one who could cancel out gravity. Not this one, who would probably break a tree branch loudly and send herself plummeting helplessly to the ground to break a leg, thus ensuring that I’d be waiting nicely for Rose and her police helicopters to eventually find me if they passed this way. I wasn’t sure they were going to, but I was paranoid enough to not want to chance it.
I spared a thought for Alistair Wexford, my contact in the UK government. I felt bad that I hadn’t touched base with him in a few days to explain what was happening up here, but he hadn’t exactly given me his phone number, so it was at least partly his fault. I wondered if he had any idea what was actually going on. Probably not, given that he’d sent me into the thick of it, but then I’d been betrayed already in the last couple days, so I wasn’t prepared to fully write off the idea that he was involved in Rose’s scheme somehow, though I was still extremely muddled on what Rose’s scheme was, other than beating the hell out of me.
Once she’d let the mask of her acting drop, I’d seen a real hatred in her eyes, the kind that was breathtaking to behold. Whatever I’d done to her, it had put a bee in her vagina, and she seemed pretty raw about it. Whatever she had in mind for me, I had other plans. In fact, I wanted to be as far from her when she executed her plans as possible. If I could have caught a rocket to the moon on that day, I would have taken it.
Nah. Nah, I wouldn’t. I didn’t even want to run now, not really. But I needed something to beat her—some help. Wexford’s name floated to my mind again. Another idea came up, too:
Suppressant.