“Like a sockpuppet account online,” I said.
She just stared at me. “Yeah. Okay. Sure, that. She controls people like they’re her own personal suckmuppets—”
“Sockpuppet,” I said lamely, because suckmuppet was actually more fitting, but I didn’t want to laugh.
“Whatever. She controlled them all, like a puppetmaster, and I didn’t even see any strings.” She was getting more animated as she spoke, and it was obvious this Rose, whoever she was, had hit Sienna in a way she hadn’t been hit before. It was more than a little disquieting to see my sister knocked onto the back foot like this, because even when President Harmon had turned all of us against her and made her a fugitive, she’d at least still had her massive, invincible superpowers and endless bank account to draw on.
Now…she was just about down to her sparkling personality, which was…alarming, since her personality only sparkled like a particularly sharp knife, and for just about the same reason.
“You can’t come to me in Scotland,” Sienna went on, quiet, firm, filled with conviction. “She owns this place, lock, stock and five hundred smoking barrels, since she has the cops.”
“Okay,” I said, running through my mental map of the UK from my days operating all over Europe with Alpha. “Newcastle-Upon-Tyne is the first English town past Scotland—”
“Too close,” Sienna said, shaking her head.
“York is halfway between London and Scotland,” I quickly amended. “There’s an airfield there. I’ll charter a private plane and swoop in, pick you up. All you need to do is show up, and we’ll GTFO, make for a non-extradition country, maybe in the Caribbean or something.”
She was silent for a long moment, like her brain was chugging along at half speed. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
I smiled. “I’ll be fine. This succubus—does she have a telepath or something? Like Harmon?”
Sienna shook her head, frowning. “I don’t think so. She couldn’t seem to detect me or my thoughts. But she was definitely pulling the strings on people somehow. I was thinking a Siren, but…I don’t exactly know what using that power looks like.”
It was my turn to frown. “Breandan told me about it one time, because his girlfriend was one. Said that it was like when they spoke, people oozed to try and answer their requests, polite or not. Said she could really pour on the honey, make it feel like you were the only man in the world.” She stared at me with one eyebrow cocked, and I cleared my throat and looked down. “What? It was just a couple guys talking. I mean, I’ve never felt it myself, obviously.”
“I don’t know if that’s what she has or not,” Sienna said. “Maybe. It’d be tough for me to tell, not being a guy, but…there were women in Police Scotland that were coming after me too, and it was more…frenzied. Like when those reporters went feral on me in Eden Prairie.” She seemed to be giving this some thought. “It wasn’t cops on the job, it was wild dogs on the hunt, you know?”
“I think I get it,” I said, at least understanding the broad strokes based on her explanation. “Look…whoever this Rose is, and whatever she wants—”
“She wants me. Dead.” There was quiet certainty in Sienna’s voice.
“Why?” I asked, and she looked at me funny. “What did you do to piss in this girl’s cornflakes?”
She just shrugged. “I honestly don’t know, Reed. I have no idea. I’ve never met this girl before. I didn’t even know there was a succubus in Scotland. It seems like she’s been planning this for years, if what she told me before she turned on me is true. I mean, this grudge—it’s deep, like I killed her entire family or something.”
Something about what she’d said tingled in the back of my head, but I didn’t know why. “You’ve never even been to Scotland, have you?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, arms folded across her chest, frowning in thought. “The closest I ever even got was the first time I went to London, when we were thinking about coming up here to visit that meta cloister and protect it from—” She froze. I knew from looking at her that she had maybe discovered the source of my ill-found tingle. “Oh, God, Reed.”
“You think she…?” I asked.
Sienna closed her eyes. “She’s a succubus.” She put her head in her hands. “How could I be so stupid? She’s a Scottish succubus.” If there had been a wall around, she might have punched it.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to rally her back to the moment at hand. “We’re going to work through this.”
“Thousands,” Sienna whispered. “Thousands dead. That she killed. Because of me. Because—”
“Not now,” I said, seizing her by the shoulders, feeling the damp fabric of her shirt between my fingers. Whatever had happened to soak her to the bone, I bet it hadn’t been fun. “There will be time for guilt later. We don’t know for sure that…THAT…is why Rose is very, very angry with you—” She gave me a “you’re-an-idiot” look, which I ignored, because she was my sister, sarcastic to the nines, and I was used to it on all occasions. “And we can’t do anything about it either way. It happened years ago, Sienna, and there was nothing we could do about it at the time. We made the best choices we could, and now—now we have to…to keep doing that.” I took a breath, trying to breathe some conviction into those words, because I wasn’t necessarily feeling them right now. “Can you get to York?”
She looked rattled, answered quietly, “Yes. I think so. I’ve evaded Rose for a hundred miles or more so far. York can’t be that much farther. I’ll find a way.”
“Get to York,” I said, squeezing her shoulders tight. “Get to the airport.” My voice built in intensity, because something was happening around me, noise and fury, the quiet darkness fading as I returned to consciousness against my will. Sienna was right in front of me, scared, feeling like—like she was helpless, almost for the first time since I’d known her. My fearless sister, and here she was, filled with toxic fear. There was a roaring tempest around me, the sound of staccato shots being fired, the low whine of something sizzling its way, screamingingly searing through metal like a laser— “I will be there, waiting. Come to me, and together we’ll get you—”
The darkness broke, and I felt like I was seized from this unconscious vision and hurled back into the light. The last thing I saw before I woke up was Sienna’s face, pale, ashen and afraid.
And seeing my sister…my fearless sister…afraid, really, truly afraid, for the first time in years…
It scared me more than I had ever been in my entire life.
22.
I awoke to the gunfire of a dozen Texas cops pouring it on, huddled behind cruisers and shooting at Peter. My head was against a curb, and the sound of the gunshots was like a heralding of the apocalypse. I blinked into the bright sunlight, shining down on me with the intensity of a heat beam, or maybe one of Peter’s lasers, and something shook me, shoving my shoulder.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Angel said, smudged with sweat and some other black substance across her forehead. “You know what you were saying about a peaceful resolution…?” She looked significantly, almost theatrically at the chaos unfolding around us. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
My head was hard against the curb, the endless blasts of gunshots painful to my meta ears. I blinked a few times into the sun, trying to recall what had just happened in the dream, way more vivid and real than this battle I found myself in. The police cruiser next to me, that I was hiding behind for cover, was scorched and blacked. A few more were on fire, flames crackling quietly, unheard under the gunfire.
Peter was out there somewhere, blasts of red giving away his position behind me. I sat up, the ruined cruiser acting as cover between me and him, and I rolled to my knees, my dream now coming back to me, afresh.
My sister was afraid. Scared. On the run. In a strange, foreign land.