Stolen, page 10
“To say nothing of how furious he's going to be when he finds out how you sold out your country,” I said quietly, “And if you think he's mad, you won't believe what I'm going to do if you don't get back in my good graces, quickly.”
“Oh, I can imagine quite a lot these days,” Hayling said, quivering slightly. “I can't stop myself from it, in fact.” He bit his lower lip, then nodded. “I'm in. For the sake of my life.”
I looked at the Gustafson family, who'd been quiet but exchanging glances. Madison looked at David, David to Nick, and then they all looked to Amanda, who was the oldest. “I guess,” she said, after interpreting these indecipherable (to me, anyway) signals, “we're in. But we want our freedom.”
“As promised,” I said. “You do this mission, you're free.”
“Am I free after one mission?” Hayling asked.
“No,” I said. “They tried to wring remorse out of me for wrongs I'd done to them, and they didn't kill a soul in the process. You betrayed your country and murdered countless people, some of them real patriots. You've got a lot of digging to do to get yourself out of this hole you're in.”
“Drat,” Hayling said weakly. He shivered.
June looked at Arche. “What about you? Or were you already in?”
The hacker known only as ArcheGrey1819 blinked a couple times. “Oh, I've followed her to various insane places for a while now. I was already in.”
The door snapped open and struck the wall behind it in a wild swing, and there, looking in at me with a furious look on her blond-framed face, was a woman with model-good looks and a damned good reason to invade the room. She slammed the door shut behind her, plopped down surprisingly gracefully into the only empty chair, and looked up at me with burning green eyes that reminded me of a forest on fire. “I'm in, too. Whether you want my help or not.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, extending a hand to indicate our new guest, “I assume you all know the infamous Kat Forrest. What you probably don't know about her is that she's the mother of Harry Graves. She'll be joining us as our medic.” I nodded at Arche, who projected a picture of Kat up on the screen from one of her Hollywood headshots. “There won't be much greenery for her to work with, but she's got other skills. And she's really angry. We do good work with anger around here.” Kat shot me a slightly less flaming look once she realized I'd anticipated her.
“Cool,” June Randall said, frowning. “Do we have a name for the team? Something pop-culture-y, like Nealon's 14?”
“The Dirty Baker's Dozen,” Hayling chirped, then looked around the table. “Plus one.”
“Catchy names are irrelevant,” I said. “What matters is what we're going to do – and what we're going to do...is kick China so hard in the balls that their birth rate is going to go to zero.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fen Liu
Zhongnanhai, Beijing
“It was a good move,” Wil Waters said, in Mandarin, his image on her screen. He was not here, in the Zhongnanhai, which was the administrative capital and government complex for China, located in the former Imperial gardens next to the Forbidden Palace. She'd finally broken the tech mogul from his regular use of English, which Fen Liu detested. She'd attended college at Yale, so it was hardly a stretch for her to converse in it, but Mandarin was the language of the future, so why look backward? “Yep.” Waters nodded on the screen. “I think she'll come running anytime now.”
“That was the idea,” Fen Liu said, sitting behind her desk, her sky-blue, conservatively cut jacket resting lightly upon her shoulders. Honestly, the people she had to tolerate in this job – Waters, other members of the Politburo, the population of her country and – now – the two others she ruled? The only thing that made it tolerable was that she ruled them. Some, obviously, like here and Russia. Others, less, since America was ruled through that sock puppet Nicole Muller. Whom Waters was interfacing with presently. Hardly the optimal liaison, but at least he knew the country.
“She's awfully resourceful, though,” Waters said. “Aren't you worried that she's going to find a way to escape your trap?”
Fen Liu raised an eyebrow in amusement. “We know her every associate, their every power. We have countermeasures in place or ready to be deployed. Even this opening gambit of hers, starting a storm in the South China Sea, is obvious chicanery relying on the powers of her brother and the Byerly clan. She's deploying the same strategy those criminals used in Houston last year to rob that museum. You recall – the one where they kidnapped her brother.”
“I recall,” Waters said. “It was a very public incident, so it surprises me that she would use that as her stratagem.”
Fen Liu blew air noiselessly from between her lips. “She is a good fighter. But she is hardly a genius-level strategist, and in spite of what everyone seems to believe, she's never fought a war with an actual country before.”
“Revelen?”
She could hold back a scoffing noise. “A tiny nation state, and a limited conflict – with her great-grandfather, no less. A family squabble in which she used one grenade launcher and one tank.”
“You might want to keep in mind she killed a lot of people there. And remember the Network – I knew most of those people, and only one was an idiot–”
“Ah, yes,” Fen Liu said, “the brilliance of a western 'tech bro.'” She scoffed again. “I remain unimpressed. Sienna Nealon is a glorified cowboy lawman, straight out of your Wild West, but given classical powers. A few more years and she would have ended up coming to her end hunted by your own governments because she is constitutionally incapable of keeping her finger off the trigger in a world that doesn't appreciate such easy violence.”
“Personally, I always appreciated her easy violence. Until she turned it loose on me.”
“She is a small mind, and unimaginative,” Fen Liu said dismissively. “She will charge like a bull at the red cape I have waved. And if not, I'll kill another one of her friends, and another, and the noose will tighten – until I get them all.” She stared down at her fingernails – short, but perfectly manicured, as was appropriate for the Premier of China and the real most powerful woman in the world. “I will see her broken, destroyed, and – finally, once the point is made to everyone in the world who might get the idea to resist what is coming – dead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sienna
Then
Let me take you forward a bit from our last interlude. Silver City was in my rearview, but that Wade guy kept popping up – occasionally, teasingly, not annoyingly – in my dreams. He flirted, he coaxed, we talked.
We talked. Maybe the last succubus and incubus on earth (I believed at the time) and what we chose to do in those occasional moments when we met up, in the dream world, with all possibility before us...was talk.
How often did I see him? Maybe every two weeks. It was a running joke between us; either I was sleepless from running down criminals and conspiracies, or he was sleepless from that super secret work he did at that not-so-secret employer whose name definitely did not rhyme with Smentral Smintelligence Smagency.
It was an easy back and forth, a friendship for that window before Reed and I made peace, and a surprising joy even after. I was crisscrossing the country bringing in troublemakers and crooks, he was...doing whatever he did in exotic places he couldn't talk about. I took down the Clary clan and their friends, stopped the bomber in Los Angeles, foiled assassins and bioweapon plotters in Chicago, and the Bitch Queen of Wall Street in New York. (That one would cause me quite a bit of trouble later, unsurprisingly.)
Then came the court decision that turned loose every criminal I'd ever captured.
Remember that? When a bunch of them, fresh from their court-ordered release out of the Cube, ripped apart my life, injured and nearly killed almost all my friends, isolated me, and then tried to murder me outside my office, resulting in me lighting off like a bomb in the middle of Eden Prairie?
Maybe you don't; I can't blame you. It was a while ago, after all, and you weren't the one who had to go on the run living in safe houses all across America and the world while the federal government, mobilized by President Harmon (then dead) but kept on the hunt by President Gondry, stalked my every step.
“Where are you on this week's exciting installment of The Fugitive?” Wade asked, about six months into my tenure as a wanted woman.
“Not sure I should tell a federal employee,” I said, lounging on a luxurious sofa in my imagination. “What if you get together with your other alphabet friends and let slip that I'm in Las Vegas?” I put my hand over my mouth. “Oops.”
He cringed. “Didn't you just cause trouble in Vegas a few months ago? That thing on the Strip?”
I shrugged. “Since then I've been reliably sighted in Oglesby, Illinois; Olathe, Kansas; Simi Valley, California; Bar Harbor, Maine; and Calabash, North Carolina. I'm a one-woman caravan.”
Why had I told him where I was, actually? Pretty simple, really:
I was lonely.
It was just after that fun occasion in Florida where June Randall had surprised me during a bank robbery by setting up an ambush and blown my brains half out. On the edge of real death, I'd been trapped in my own mind watching my life bleed away, Scott Byerly by my side, unable to do a damned thing to help.
“I just don't want to see you get caught,” Wade said. He had bags under his eyes, but still looked handsome.
“So now I've told you where I am,” I said, “at considerable risk to myself–”
“At no risk,” he said with a wan smile. “I told you, I'm foreign enemies only. You're a domestic problem and – to my mind – not an enemy. In fact...” he cleared his throat, looking down, “...I'd like to see you. If I could.”
That made me freeze. “You're seeing me now,” I said, deflecting.
“No, I'm dreaming of you now. A common – and pleasant – occurrence, even when you're not actually present. But I'd like to actually see you, with my actual eyes. Maybe hold your actual hand with mine for a minute, enjoy the touch of a fellow human being without feeling their soul begin to drain into me.” He winced; I knew that look. This was a man who'd been draining partial souls, and forced to quit before reaching the sweet fulfillment that came from fully taking one. No one else could know; it was like stopping in the middle of sex when the itch just hadn't been scratched yet. It was hell.
“I don't know,” I said. He'd mentioned this idea before, us getting together, and I'd put him off before my fugitive days. It had been easy; I was busy, he was busy. Continents separated us most of the time. It might shock you, but I was still wary of him being an incubus, expecting him to go full James Fries or Sovereign on me.
“Think it over,” he said, and I could tell he was a little disappointed. “I'm coming back to the States in a week or so.”
“And you don't have anyone else to spend your leave with?” I snarked. But really, I was fishing. “Studly Navy SEAL guy; surely there must be some pretty girl with more tits than brains, waiting on you with an open heart and wide-open legs?”
He got the saddest look in his eyes. “This probably won't surprise you, but I haven't had a girlfriend since...well, since.”
I chuckled. “Lay down some cloth on her skin, use protection, and she'll be fine, pal.” I said it so easily, but behind my words I felt this ache within at being so cavalier. What the hell was I talking about? I imagined him with some buxom blond, taking my advice, and it stung me in my center.
“Yeah...probably not gonna do that,” he said, glancing away – shyly, if I was not mistaken. “I guess maybe I'm weird or old-fashioned – probably weird – but I don't really go in for the one-night stand, and asking a girl to cover herself over in that way would tend to blow the whole 'secret identity' thing I'm supposed to be maintaining for my employer.”
“You are weird,” I said, then lowered my voice, taking the humorous edge out of it. “But...that's not a bad thing. There's something unseemly about an incubus who has a high body count – of the sexual variety, I don't care how many people you kill as long as they're bad,” I added quickly.
He wore an impish smile. “You might be the first woman I've ever met who's less concerned about how many people I've killed than about how many I've slept with.”
“I'd be pretty hypocritical if I held you to account in that arena when clearly I'm a madwoman who keeps dropping corpses,” I said. “I mean, can you think of a woman who's killed more people than I have? Because I'm pretty sure you have to turn back the clock to Elizabeth Bathory to find one, and I'm not all about using blood for my skin care routine.”
“Your skin looks fine anyway. It's a pasty sheen, a nice alabaster.”
“What can I say? I neither tan nor burn.”
“So it's a 'no' on meeting face to face?” he asked. He seemed stoic, but his disappointment was obvious.
“I didn't say 'no,'” I said, hesitating, playing a little with my hair, which was, in my dreamwalk, still long and dark and lustrous. Also? Well-coiffed, something it seldom was in real life. “I just have concerns.”
“...With me?”
“With you,” I said, “with my fugitive life, with men in general. I don't know if you know this, but I had a boyfriend before this whole thing of shit slid off and splattered onto the latest fan. And while we are, I think, safely broken up–”
“You don't seem so 'broken up' about this breakup, if I may observe.”
That hit home. “Yeah,” I said, sighing, because I was feeling a little busted, “but I should be, shouldn't I? I haven't had many boyfriends in my life, either, okay? Like...three, with a couple other, uhm, passing liaisons thrown in for okay measure. Not good measure, because they weren't. Anyway, I don't know. Romantically–”
“It doesn't have to be romantic, Sienna,” he said softly. “It'd just be nice to touch, to feel...again, without worrying about draining someone.”
“Yeah...” I grimaced. “When we're apart, when we're talking like this...it's easy to pretend we're just friends, Wade. But you're a lonely incubus and I'm a lonely succubus, and...dammit, I like you, okay? I didn't want to. I've had really bad, burned-me-like-a-nuke experiences with incubi in my past. I was fully prepared to go to my grave possibly thousands of years down the line still having a blanket hate ban on incubi.
“Then you show up, all reasonable, and cavalry-like, in New Mexico, not forceful or insane, and...you let me friendzone you for two years now.”
“Hey, listen, lady,” he said with what seemed like performative annoyance, “you're in my friendzone, too, okay? Don't pretend it doesn't take two to tango non-platonically. I'm a busy guy, we're pretty much never in the same time zone, I enjoy our talks, and frankly, a commitment is a bit much for me at the moment.”
“But you're an incubus and I'm a succubus,” I said. “You're a touchy-touchy kind of guy, and I'm a...not...kind of girl, at least most of the time. I know it's driving you nuts, not being able to feel someone pressed tight against you, breathing, their skin against yours–”
“Not true. I found out I can touch animals without any problems, so I'm thinking of getting a dog when I get back stateside. A dog can sleep beside me without getting drained, so...y'know...don't think I need you or anything.” He flashed me a grin.
“Yeah, there's some stuff I think you'd like to do to me that you're hopefully not going to do to a dog.”
“Ewww,” he said, his whole face scrunching up. “However hard up you think I am, I assure you I'm not anywhere near there. I'll take the cloth and latex before I go bestial.”
“Good boy.”
“That's...what you say to a dog. Are you sure you weren't projecting just now?”
“Hey, man, I made my peace with cloth and latex a long time ago, bub. Look...my point is...if we meet, it's not going to be just getting a drink at a bar somewhere like last time. There's a thing between us, and the dreamwalks have made it easy-ish to ignore. But it's there. I see it in your eyes.”
“You can see things in my eyes? Are they like magic 8 balls? Do I want chicken wings right now?”
“Based on my limited experience with you, you want chicken wings all the time,” I said. “And also...more than chicken wings.”
He nodded. “Fried mushrooms in ranch sauce.”
“Also...someone who can hold you who's not a dog.”
“Oh, you're so sure that I need you and want you, huh?” His eyes flickered with amusement, teasing. “Listen, I'm a very disciplined man–”
“Really, Navy? Those tales about rum, sodomy, and the lash just took on a whole new meaning.”
“–It doesn't have to be anything other than drinks,” he said. “Boozing. Hanging out. Palling around. If we're reading each other’s eyes, then I gotta tell you – you look like you could use a friend.” He offered me a sad smile, one that seemed to knife me right in the heart.
I templed my fingers and rested the tips just beneath my nose, contemplating him – and this pain in my chest – for a few quiet seconds before admitting, “Perhaps.”
“Okay,” he said, “perhaps some beer–”
“I have grown to like whiskey.”
“Fine, whiskey,” he said. “And chicken wings.”
“And fried mushrooms? Because I'm trying to eat healthier so men that are definitely not you will find me more attractive.”
“Men who are definitely not me find you attractive anyway, but if you don't want fried mushrooms, no mushrooms.”
“I'm not opposed to mushrooms. Or things that look a little like mushrooms...in theory, at least.”
He cocked his head at me. “'Things that look like mushrooms?'”
“Vaguely like mushrooms. Tall ones. If you squint. In theory. Maybe.”
“That might be the least committed attempt at propositioning me anyone has ever made. Bravo, Ms. Nealon.”
“That was so vague you can't possibly distill any propositioning out of it. But...” And I sighed. “...Yes. If you come to Vegas, I will see you. Okay?”
