“Maybe,” I said, noncommittal. “You didn’t have to deck him for it.”
Zack licked his lips. “He didn’t even feel it, did he?”
“Only a little,” I said. “Why’d you do it?”
“Frustration.” He let out a muted exhalation combined with an exasperated sigh. “I wanted to knock the crap out of Reed, too.”
“Good job showing some restraint. If Reed really is a meta, he would have pummeled you, unlike your friend.” My hand left my fork behind and I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “What happened in South America?”
“I went to find M-Squad.” He put his hands on the table. “I found them.”
“And a flaming metahuman in a casket.” I stared him down and he tried to play it off but failed. “What happened? You got sent to retrieve them, but they were gone a long time; longer than Old Man Winter thought they’d be gone.”
He concentrated, as though he were bringing up details of a story. “They were sent to our facility in the Andes Mountains.”
“How many facilities does the Directorate have?” I crinkled my nose, trying to make it seem like an innocent question.
“Six in North America, two in South America, two in Europe, four in Asia, one in Australia, two in Africa.” His eyes darted back and forth, looking up the whole time, as though he were trying to recall. “I think that’s it. Anyway, they got sent down to the Andes facility—”
“For what?”
“Because the facility went dark. Completely offline, radio blackout, silence, dead air, all that. And we hadn’t even had the facility that long—”
“What?” I frowned. “Was it new?”
“No, we took it over from someone else. Are you going to stop interrupting me so I can finish my story?”
“Sorry.”
“So anyway, it went offline, and Old Man Winter had a suspicion he knew why, so he sent M-Squad down there with that coffin contraption after telling them about Gavrikov.”
“I thought you said they went offline?”
“They did. Somehow he knew it was Gavrikov.”
“How—”
“I don’t know,” Zack said, exasperated. “Because it’s Old Man Winter, and he knows all kinds of things he shouldn’t theoretically know. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” I nodded, and he went on. “Gavrikov was there for some reason. He had come to the facility with something in mind. He killed the entire staff—about fifty people, in case you were wondering—and set up shop. Well, M-Squad started playing feint-and-parry, trying to get him boxed in so they could force a confrontation, but he wouldn’t engage them directly.”
He took a breath, and I jumped in. “Before, you said Gavrikov had energy projection capability...”
“Yeah, he flies and can throw fire. I heard from M-Squad he can even explode.”
“Reed mentioned that Gavrikov was responsible for the Tunguska explosion in 1908.”
I watched as Zack’s jaw dropped open. “You told him about us capturing Gavrikov?”
I shook my head. “He already knew.”
Zack’s mouth became a hard line, his eyes looked down at the table, and I could tell he was suppressing a kind of deep internal fury. It was the wrong moment for it, but I actually thought it was damned cute. Outwardly, I gave no sign. I hope. “How did he know?” he asked, restraining whatever anger he was feeling.
“I didn’t ask.”
“If ever you get a chance again,” Zack said, measuring his words, “do ask. This is something that only a dozen people in the world knew as of this morning.”
“Sure. Though I think you’re naïve if you believe he’d tell me. So did he explode for you guys? Wipe out a few square miles of real estate in the Andes?”
Zack was distracted, but he went on. “Not quite, but I guess Clary had him pinned in a building at one point and he blew up, left nothing but a crater. It took Clary a while to climb out of that one. Anyway, Gavrikov has a shield of fire around his skin, so tranq darts can’t make it through—”
“So how did they get him?” I was getting impatient. I blame Wolfe. He didn’t have much to do with this one, actually, but I blame him anyway.
“It was pretty ingenious, I thought,” Zack said with a smile. “He wasn’t willing to leave the facility. He’d just fly to a different building whenever they came for him, throw some fire if they got close, do anything to keep them at bay while he jetted off—”
“He doesn’t sound so dangerous,” I said. “Except for the fifty people he killed, I suppose.” I felt sheepish.
He sounds like fun
, Wolfe thought.
You should let him out.
I ignored him.
“Anyway,” Zack went on, “they managed to set a trap for him when I got there. They used me as bait.”
“What?!”
“Well, I went in and tried to reason with him, pinning him in place while the hammer fell. See, I was a new face—he’d seen them for weeks on end while they went back and forth. They tried to talk to him at first, too, I guess. Didn’t work out. Anyway, once he figured out I was human, he shot at me like a missile— I mean, he was gonna kill me, but Clary was positioned perfectly, took the hit for me, got a hold of Gavrikov and managed to knock him unconscious.”
I was going over what he had told me, but it didn’t quite make sense. “How did Clary put a hand on Gavrikov if he had his fire shield up?”
Zack’s smile was smug. “Clary can change his skin. In this case, he shifted into some kind of metal. It was actually dumb luck; Clary moves a lot slower than Gavrikov, and if he had been even an inch to either side, he wouldn’t have been able to grab him and club him out.” He leaned back in his chair. “After that, we stuffed him in the containment unit and carted him back here.”
“Bravo,” I said in a hushed voice, thinking of the containment unit. It was tiny, a coffin by any other name, a horrible, claustrophobic nightmare. I tried to think of Gavrikov’s victims rather than about the means of his confinement. I forced a weak smile. “I’m sure the world is better off with one less monster wandering around.”
“I think so,” Zack said, eating another piece of bacon. The smell of my plate had stopped being appealing, so I watched him in silence as he ate, trying to think of something else to talk about. “You know,” he said, “you still have quite a list to work through.”
“List?” I stared at him, blankly.
“You know,” he said. “Of things you haven’t done—go to the movies, a mall, an amusement park...”
“Oh.” I had forgotten that we had talked about that when last we saw each other. Nothing like having a mass murderer rattling around in your head to put some of the irrelevant things in perspective.
“You do still want to do those things, right?” He looked at me, all earnestness, and I couldn’t flinch away from those eyes, those deep brown eyes, rimmed with concern. I got a sudden, uncomfortable feeling, like I was being put on the spot.
“Yeah,” I said, and felt like my answer was burdened with a reluctance that seemed like metal scraping across stone. Slow and painful.
“How about this,” he went on, “why don’t we go out tonight—get dinner and see a movie. You can cross it off your list.”
He smiled, and I felt my stomach twist. Did he just ask me out? Did I just get asked out for the first time? I blinked, almost in disbelief. Was it that he was spying for Ariadne and Old Man Winter that prompted this or had what he told Scott been true? Maybe he felt like he owed his life to me.
I mentally slapped myself. It wasn’t like that, it couldn’t be. After all, even if things went well and the date ended with a kiss, it wouldn’t just be my first date—it’d be his last, and the next time I saw him would be at his funeral.
“Just friends,” he added, as though that would make me feel better. It didn’t. It made me feel a hell of a lot worse.
“Sure,” I said with another weak smile. Wolfe was cackling again, that bastard. “Thanks for offering to...be my guide.”
“It’ll be fun.” His phone rang and he answered, pulling it out of his pocket. “Yeah...I’m with her now, we’re getting some breakfast. Sure, we’ll see you in five.” He finished his call and looked at me. “You’re done, right?”
“What?” I didn’t understand what he was asking until I looked down and saw my half-full plate. I hadn’t taken a bite in several minutes. “Oh, yeah, I’m done.”
“That was Ariadne. She wants us at Headquarters to talk about the warehouse.”
“Okay.” I stood, taking my tray with me to the nearest garbage can and dumping it in. I felt uneven; my head hurt a little, my heart hurt a lot, and I was once again suffering under the realization that my life had been so upended from what I was familiar with that I didn’t know what I wanted.
I mean, even if he wanted me, I couldn’t touch him, right?
Chapter 7
Ariadne’s office was right next to Old Man Winter’s in the Headquarters building. His was cold and Spartan, and I expected the same from her based on her wardrobe. When Zack knocked on the door and she called for us to enter, I was surprised.
Her office had the same view of the grounds as Old Man Winter’s, but that was where the similarities ended. Whereas he had a desk that looked like it was made of a massive piece of natural stone stacked on top of two others, hers was a warm cherrywood, with a workstation and hutch against the left wall and a more formal desk between her and the two visitor chairs. There were pictures scattered around the office of Ariadne with other people, ones that looked a little like her—a man and a woman who were older, another that looked like her sister, and a few of her with her sister and some kids.
“Dear God,” she said as I came into the room. “Are you all right?”
“I’m as fine as I’ve been since I’ve gotten here.”
She beckoned for us to have a seat. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’ll take a whiskey on the rocks,” I said without blinking.
She froze. “I have soft drinks...”
“Bummer,” I said. “What’d you want to see us about?”
“About the encounters at the warehouse, and uh...” she blinked and shook her head. “Something else.”
“Great,” I said without enthusiasm. “Let’s start with the ‘something else’ that you don’t really want to talk about and work our way back to the warehouse.”
“Fine.” She tried to smile but it was so fake that it fell apart after about two seconds. “We have a forensics lab that can analyze the personal items from your mother that you found in the warehouse.”
“I’m not hearing the ‘something else.’” I leaned back in her chair with exaggerated casualness.
“Very well.” She rested her hands on the desk between us, folding them, for some reason bringing to my mind the idea that she must have been a goody-goody in school. “I’ve been ordered not to have them analyzed unless you agree to see our on-site psychologist.”
“Beg pardon?” My tone carried more frozen bite than the worst wind I’d experienced thus far.
“The Director would like you to see our counselor,” she said. “Understanding you’ve been through something of a ringer lately—”
“He wants me to submit to headshrinking?” My eyes were so narrow that I was surprised I could see anything out of them. “If he thinks I’m gonna do that, I submit to you that his head has been in the icebox for too damned long.”
One of Ariadne’s eyelids fluttered at my remark as she suppressed whatever her first response would have been. “He thinks,” she said, pacing herself, “and I agree with him, that you’ve been under a great deal of stress and strain—”
“Most of which seems to be the fault of your Directorate.”
“—and we are concerned with your long term health, mental as well as physical,” she finished without stopping to answer my accusation. “We are willing to help you in the search for your mother, but we feel that you’ve been through a high level of trauma in the last few weeks, more than is healthy for anyone,” she held up a hand and I restrained my sarcastic response, “let alone someone as young as yourself. This is not a negotiation. If you want our help, see our counselor.” Her hands went back to being folded on her desk as she awaited my response.
I caught movement from Zack out of the corner of my eye. “It’s not a bad idea.” I turned to look at him, and I’m pretty sure my glare was more potent than any flame Aleksandr Gavrikov could have tossed out. “You’ve been through a lot—gaining powers, your mom disappearing, being locked in a metal box as punishment, being stalked by a psychopath, beaten, injured, watching a ton of people die and blaming yourself,” he listed them as if he were ticking off points from a list. “It might not be a bad idea to talk to a professional about it.”
“What will they tell me?” I felt the rage, but I leashed it. Wolfe was cackling, but I bade him shut up. “That it’s normal to be stressed over being stalked by a psycho, imprisoned in your own house for over a decade, and finding out that you have superpowers?” I let the sarcasm fly. “I don’t care what kind of shrink you’ve got, he’s not qualified to deal with the crap I’d lay on him. I’d probably make him run screaming from the room, some of the stuff I could tell him.”
Ariadne raised an eyebrow. “So you feel you should deal with these things on your own?”
I bit back an angry reply. Even with Wolfe circling in the back of my head, I knew there was truth to what she and Zack were saying. I had been through a lot, more than most people went through in their lives, I suspected. I’d been near death twice in the last week or so, had Mom vanish on me, and had a variety of other things, great and small, on my mind. I blinked. Actually, it
was
amazing I wasn’t in pieces already, mentally. Maybe I was. I was hearing the voice of my greatest nemesis, after all, and he was dead.
“Fine,” I conceded. “I will...talk to this...person.” I said every word through gritted teeth. “When can you start looking over my mom’s purse?”
“We’ve already started,” Ariadne said. “Kurt had it delivered to the lab when he went to the medical unit. You’ll get the results after the first session.”
“Fine.” I wasn’t pouting, exactly. But close. “When can I meet with your psycho...analyzer?”
Ariadne’s mouth was a thin line. “Right now. He’s cleared his schedule to meet with you. He’s in a different building.” She looked to Zack. “Show her the way?” He nodded.
“What did you want to talk about regarding the warehouse?” I was in a little bit of a huff, but I wanted to get this over with so I could get the next thing over with. Actually, I just wanted to get the whole day over with at this point.