Almost.
“I imagine you’ve seen this story play out somewhere before,” Aleksandr Gavrikov said stiffly. He wasn’t wearing his habitual skin of fire, but he hadn’t worn it habitually for quite a while. When Zack had made his acquaintance—briefly—in life, he had scarcely gone without it. Now, as he stared at the Russian, whose eyes betrayed nothing but sadness most of the time, he felt a hint of pity for him, too. Gavrikov’s gaze met his own, and the Russian smiled, faintly, as if to acknowledge their shared plight.
Trapped in the head of an unfamiliar succubus. Prisoners.
“It does have some incredible parallels,” Zack said. The red-haired girl was just standing in the rain now, soaked to the bone as they all watched her. “There was more snow in Sienna’s tale. And the first time she touched my hand, I didn’t pass out, just felt lightheaded.” He spoke somberly, because damn if he didn’t feel somber. Dead for seven years, and now he’d been passed off from his familiar respite of Sienna’s mind into someone else’s.
And she…this Rose…did not seem friendly.
“So far I’m not enjoying the dime tour,” Gerry Harmon said with his usual sarcasm. He was unflappable, a bit of a cipher when he didn’t want his emotions to show. Zack imagined that would have been incredibly useful during his last job—President of the United States—but now it was distinctly annoying, because it always felt like Harmon was cut off and above it all.
Well. It had felt like that. The occasional note of fear was creeping in here and there, and that was hardly unexpected. Harmon had seemed to just get used to being one of Sienna’s souls, and now…
Now they weren’t anymore.
“I don’t like this bitch,” Bjorn said, almost snorting his anger. Rose had greeted him with a distinct lack of kindness, ripping into him with a kind of agonizing touch that Sienna could have imparted at any time, but never did—or at least hadn’t for a long, long time.
“Join the club,” Eve Kappler tossed in. Her arms were folded, her eyes set and hard. “She called us ‘boring.’”
“At least she did not hit you with torturous pain,” Bjorn said, sounding a little resentful. The grey Scottish sky hung over them, and below, the redhead shuddered under the chill of the blowing winds and now downpour. She was so thin, so sad…she looked a bit like a wet cat left out in the rain.
“We are not on sound footing, that’s for sure,” Roberto Bastian said. The former squad leader carried a sort of military precision and a reserve of his own that seldom cracked. It was showing some signs of strain now though, with their familiar ground ripped away from them—quite literally torn out of what had been their home for, in most cases, years—and now landed here, in an unfamiliar mind, witnessing unfamiliar spectacles.
“What did she do with Wolfe?” Zack asked, chewing a lip that no longer actually existed. “That’s what I want to know.”
“He’s her new fair-haired boy-toy,” Harmon said with dry amusement—or perhaps a sarcastic lack thereof. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”
“He’s living life on the Lido deck,” Eve said, “and we’re down in the bilge pumps.”
“This is bilge all right,” Bjorn said, seething. He locked eyes on the redhead in the rain. “If I could, I would go down there and pound her until she was nothing but blood and bone strewn over these rocky Scottish grounds.”
Harmon stared out at the thin figure in the rain. “You should go try that.”
Bjorn seemed to take it as a dare. “Perhaps I will.” And he turned, thundering off toward the memory of Rose.
“Now that we’ve eliminated most of the idiocy,” Harmon said, glancing at Bjorn running toward Rose in the distance, “can we have a discussion about what’s next that doesn’t involve vague and stupid threats? I’d like to talk about this clear-eyed.”
“His eyes certainly aren’t clear,” Zack said as Bjorn passed through the past Rose, still standing there alone. Bjorn sailed through her in a tackle that didn’t land, as though she were mist, or he were. “All he sees is red.”
“What do you think is going to happen here, Harmon?” Gavrikov asked stiffly.
“I think it’s obvious,” Harmon said, and Zack detected a measure of reluctance. “Rose is going to go after Sienna. She’s going to try and kill her. And with Wolfe on her side…she might well succeed.”
Zack’s face burned like Gavrikov had lit off a fire within it. “Lots of people have tried to kill Sienna. No one has succeeded yet.”
“No one else has been this well matched,” Harmon said. “Think about what Rose has been doing. She’s created metas specifically for the purpose of draining them and stockpiling their powers. She is the meta equivalent of a nuclear bomb.” He looked apologetically at Gavrikov. “No offense intended, what with you previously occupying that role.”
“I saw it as more the meta equivalent of a Swiss army knife,” Eve said, pensive. “Because of the versatility.”
“No offense taken,” Gavrikov said. “But I agree with Zack. Many have tried to kill Sienna. All have failed. This Rose? I do not think this time will be any different.”
“It will be different,” Harmon said, “because she is different. Think about it. Whoever she is, whatever her axe to grind, she has planned this for years. She set a trap for Sienna, drew her in, got close to her, and managed to cloud her suspicions long enough to pull off the greatest sucker punch since 1941. Now Sienna’s back to being a vanilla succubus, none of us to aid her.”
“That’s happened before,” Zack said. “And she wiped out the people that came after her then, too.”
“I’m starting to agree with the President,” Bastian said, snugging his arms tighter around him. “Think about it, Zack. In any engagement, there are factors for and against you. Maybe you’ve got favorable weather and your opponent doesn’t. Or you’ve got a strategy and you ambush them on ground that works to your advantage. Sienna had powers that others couldn’t or didn’t have. The ability to heal from almost any wound. The power to throw fire or blow up like a bomb. To net up her enemies in twine of light. Or even,” and here he seemed to turn away slightly, “go dragon if all else failed. She’s got none of that now, so on Sienna’s side—she’s lost her advantages. At the same time, on the other side of the equation, Rose has stacked them up. And when it comes to locale, we’re on unfamiliar ground to Sienna, so…” He shrugged.
“You think she’s unbeatable,” Eve said, “because you want to believe she’s unbeatable.”
“Because no one has beaten her yet,” Zack said.
“Yet,” Harmon said, “being the operative word. But no one has ever stacked the deck this hard against her. She has little left to rely on.”
“We’re not going to settle this right now, today,” Eve said as they all watched Bjorn pick himself up and promptly attack the image of Rose again, to no effect. He turned on it once more, and this time seemed to content himself with punching at it, hands slicing through the face, the body, without any contact. He did not stop though, continuing to attack with merciless wrath the girl standing there in the increasingly pouring rain.
“I don’t think we can settle this at all,” Gavrikov said, looking around at each of them in turn. “What were we ever able to do from within Sienna, after all?” He stared into the distance, the mountain rising above the village looming.
“You used to set her hand on fire all the time,” Zack said, trying to breathe a little hope into them. “And Harmon—you can use your telepathy, can’t you?”
“I can’t,” Harmon said. “She has an empath, and they seem to be blocking me, either intentionally or by proximity.” He looked around. “That said…Zack has a point. We’re inside the enemy fortress right now.”