“Okay, we’ll get you a plane—I’ve almost got one, but it’s—”
The front of the house exploded in a blast of red energy that surged toward the cop car parked about twenty feet in front of me.
“Reed!” Angel shouted, and she was already moving, faster than me, faster than anything I’d maybe ever seen other than Colin Fannon.
It wasn’t faster than the speed of light, though, and that was the speed at which Peter’s laser traveled from out of the front of the house and into the cop car nearest me, where it hit and blew up the engine, catapulting me backward into the pavement and knocking me into the hot black of unconsciousness.
21.
“Reed?”
I was in the darkness a second after I hit the pavement, my head aching in the black. There was a dim light around me, a faint feeling of familiarity like I’d been here before. My skull hurt like it had been used as a standin for one of those machines where you test your strength at the fair, and some big guy comes along and wins his girl a stuffed animal by bringing down a sledge to ring a bell. My head felt like the bell and the sledge target, both at the same time, and I tried to shake off that cloudy feeling that seemed to persist in the darkness.
I knew that voice though, as clear to me as my mother’s own. “Sienna?” I asked, looking around. I didn’t see her at first, but maybe that was because of my recent skull trauma. “Where are you?”
She stepped out of the darkness a moment later, lingering in the shadows, tentative. She was watching me like it was some kind of trick, a cloud of suspicion hiding under her eyes. It evaporated like an afternoon rain within a second, and she surged toward me, hitting me right in the center of my chest and sticking there like a suction-cup Garfield, arms around me and snugging me tight. “Reed,” she whispered, face buried in my shoulder.
“Uh, hi,” I said, a little—okay, completely—taken aback. “How’s it going?”
She didn’t let go, and didn’t answer, at first. She just stayed there, cheek pressed tightly against my shirt. I let the uncomfortable silence linger for a few seconds more, then cleared my throat and said, “That well, eh?”
With some seeming effort, she pulled back from me, and when I saw her face…
I knew that things…were most definitely not all right.
“What happened?” I asked, staring at her. My brow furrowed so thickly it felt like a series of deep ridges were dug in on my forehead.
“I screwed up, Reed,” she said, looking ashen in the shadowy dark of the dreamwalk. “Really bad.”
“Worse than accidentally nuking Eden Prairie and making a crowd of reporters shit themselves from fear?” I tossed out a joke, figuring it might take some of the tension out of the situation.
It did not.
“What happened?” I asked, my hands clutching her sleeves, which were…damp? In a dream? Probably a reflection of her real-world state, but still…a little weird. Not that Sienna didn’t go swimming from time to time, but…
“The UK government,” she said, almost choking as she started. “There’s a man named Wexford I met last time I came here—”
“Yeah, he’s the Foreign Secretary,” I said. “He offered you asylum over there. You told me about him.”
“He sent me to investigate a series of murders in Edinburgh,” she said, and now she seemed to be rushing to speak, hurrying to get it out. I let her talk, trying not to interrupt. “They said—they thought they were incubus-or succubus-related because of autopsy results from Wolfe—”
“Huh?” That was a tangled thread. My mission not to interrupt lasted all of three seconds, but I shut my mouth again. Clarity on this probably wasn’t that important.
Sienna didn’t seem to notice my interruption, so deep was she in spitting out her own thoughts, like a poison she was trying to excise from her system. “So I went to Edinburgh to see for myself, to try and track down the killer.” Her eyes flared, seemed to get dazed. “There was a guy named Frankie, and he seemed like he was the one. I was getting help from a local named Rose—she took a bullet for me and saved my life a few times—”
I processed through that one. People didn’t tend to take bullets for you all willy-nilly, but people also didn’t generally go jumping out of their way to save the life of a woman who was an international fugitive, even a super famous one like Sienna. I kept these thoughts to myself.
“—and it turns out that this killer was producing metas using the Revelen serum, Reed,” she said, her eyes ablaze now, fear and horror burning within her. “They’d been creating them—and then draining them for their powers.”
“Holy shit,” I said, because what else do you say to that? “How many?”
“Thousands,” she said quietly. “Tens of thousands, maybe. She’d been killing them for years—”
“Wait,” I said, feeling like I’d missed something. “I thought this Frankie was the killer—”
“No, it was Rose,” Sienna said.
I hesitated, thinking for a second. “Was Rose the local helping you?” She nodded. “And she took a bullet for you? Watched your back?” More nodding. “And now—”
“She’s trying to kill me,” Sienna said. “But that’s not the worst part.”
Uh oh. If that wasn’t the worst part, what could be so bad that it would render Sienna Nealon, the most fearsome warrior I know, into a pale, shaking, near-whispering wreck of a human being—
“She stole my souls,” Sienna said, almost under her breath, but it was loud as a gunshot to me. “She’s the stronger succubus, Reed, and she tried to drain me and…she stole my souls.”
“Which ones?” I asked, feeling icy fingers of alarm creeping up my spine from the small of my back, chills snaking their way up the back of my neck and across my scalp. They tingled like the skin was rising into mighty—not even goosepimples, more goosetowers, gooseskyscrapers on my skin.
“All of them,” she said. “Wolfe, Gavrikov, Bjorn, Zack, Eve, Bastian…and Harmon.” She was quiet for a few seconds as this sunk in. “She took them all from me. She took…everything.”
And now the bottom fell out of my stomach, like it had been held up by some decaying wooden slats and someone had just come along and kicked them right out from underneath, sending my stomach on a twenty-five-story plunge down the length of my body and then maybe down an old mine shaft afterward to boot, once it reached ground level. It felt like instant freefall followed by queasiness when it came to a plummeting stop. “Okay,” I said, trying to process through this new info. “Okay, so you have to get out of Scotland—”
“I tried,” she said, still near-whispering. “I called my banker and my fixer. I chartered a plane at an old airfield near where I was. The US government must have intercepted my call, because they were waiting for me with a Spec Ops team. Rose showed up a few minutes later, killed them all.” She said this with quiet authority.
“All right, well, you can try again,” I said, mind racing wildly. “Or I’ll book something for you—”
“And when I called my banker back…she’d wrapped him under her control and locked off my accounts, Reed.” Sienna’s voice was quiet and hollow. “All the ones in Liechtenstein are gone now. She took all that money.”
I smiled faintly. “But not the one you set up in the Caribbean to finance the new agency, right?” She shook her head. “I mean, even if so, that’s not a deal breaker. The agency has its own accounts now, and up until this last month or so, we’d been showing a nice little profit. I can book a private plane, meet you in Edinburgh—”
“No,” Sienna said, almost choking on it. She put a hand on my chest, brushed against the white broadcloth shirt, which was sweat-damp even in this dream. “She’ll know, if it’s in Scotland. You don’t understand, Reed. She controlled the entire Edinburgh police force. Through a—a—like a third party person—it was through Frankie, and she was controlling him the entire time—gah, I don’t know what you call it—”