Robert Crane - Soulless

I let out a snicker, more from disbelief than anything. “And they’re…what? Out to take over the world?”

Charlie shrugged, and I turned to Reed, who rolled his eyes. “Probably not in a literal sense,” he said. “Not anymore, at least. But yeah, like she said, they’re a cabal, and they have a ruling council and a pretty strong organization. At this point they’re collecting metas, building their strength, and…given their history, probably up to no good.”

“No, seriously.” I let out a short laugh. “What are they up to? What’s their objective?”

Reed sighed. “I don’t know. No one does. We just know they’re making power moves, collecting metas…kinda like the Directorate, but even more shadowy, if that’s possible.”

“I don’t love the sound of that,” I said.

“You’re telling me.” Charlie spoke up, bringing the car to a squealing stop at a red light. “I’ve tangled with their sweep teams before – they’re the ones they send out to bring in metas they want to talk to.” She laughed. “They’re a fun bunch, but they oughta stick to catching newbies; kids that have just manifested and don’t know what they’re doing.”

I stared at the laptop cradled in my hands. “Why does Omega have a safehouse in Eau Claire?”

“Because the Twin Cities is too hot for them.” Reed’s answer came with a cringe in his voice. “Minneapolis or St. Paul would be too close to the Directorate. Eau Claire’s only an hour away, and a few hours from Chicago, where they have a lot bigger presence.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why have a presence up here at all? What are they hoping to accomplish?”

“Tracking metas,” Charlie said. “Just like you guys. Track ‘em and collar ‘em, recruit the ones that seem promising. It’s all anybody does nowadays, keep snatching up every unattached meta out there.”

“What’d you find in the safehouse?” Reed leaned forward and I felt his hand on the back of my seat.

“A guy with a couple snakes lying on the kitchen floor, dead.”

Reed frowned. “The guy or the snakes?”

“All of them,” I said. “Looks like the snakes grew from his shoulder blades. Kinda creepy.”

“Sounds like a Zahhak,” Reed said, exchanging a look with Charlie, who nodded.

“What’s a Zahhak?” I wrinkled my forehead.

“Look it up on Wikipedia sometime; it’s a pretty scary meta to go up against.” He entered a pensive state, his fingers resting over his mouth. “They’re pretty rare, but I heard Omega has one – or had one, I suppose.”

“Why have they been after me?” I turned to question Reed on this one, and when I looked at him, his expression was suddenly pained, a twisted grimace. “You know, don’t you?” He nodded, slow, not looking away. “Why are they after me?”

“They’re not after you, specifically.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve never been the end to them, always the means. They’re after your mom.”

I exchanged a look with Charlie, who seemed surprised. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I think she knows something…something from when she was with the Agency – you know, the government group that was destroyed before the Directorate came onto the scene?” I nodded. I knew Mom had been at the Agency with Old Man Winter before I was born. “Anyway, something happened that has a lot of people scouring for her.”

I turned back to Charlie. “Do you know what it is?”

She let out a long cackle. “Your mom and I aren’t on what you’d call ‘speaking terms’. I haven’t talked to her since way before you were born.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She turned the steering wheel to bring us into the parking lot of a hotel that was shaped like a giant, round cylinder. “She didn’t like the way I did things and I didn’t care for the way she told me to run my life.” She pulled the car into a parking spot just outside the lobby and gave me another lazy shrug. “So I told her what she could do with her opinions and we didn’t really need to talk after that, cuz it’d all been said.”

“Can’t imagine what she might have taken issue with,” Reed said under his breath.

Charlie shot him a searing look and jerked her head toward the lobby. “We should get rooms here for the night, unless you want your friends to continue sleeping in the back of the car.” She turned around and saw Kat’s head in Scott’s lap. “Although she seems comfortable there.”

I checked us in to four rooms, using the Directorate credit card for two of them and my personal card for the other two. As I swiped it through their reader, I was reminded that I needed to call Ariadne and make a report, since Scott and Kat were unlikely to do so in the next few hours. Once I was done, I hurried back to the car and Charlie drove us to the outside entrance nearest to the rooms. She and I each grabbed one of the unconscious members of my team and dragged them into the building while Reed walked ahead to make sure we didn’t run into anyone. Fortunately, the hotel seemed quiet.

We made it to our rooms without incident, and after depositing Kat and Scott onto the king-sized bed in their room, Charlie grabbed the key for her room and left. Reed lingered, watching the door to the room until it shut. After it did, he remained silent for almost a minute, listening. When I started to say something to him, he held up a finger to his lips and then opened the door, looking up and down the hall. He shut it and walked back to me, stopping only inches from my face. “How well do you know your aunt?” he asked in a low whisper.

“Not well.” I looked into his concerned eyes and felt a tremor within. “I met her about six months ago when she tracked me down, and we’ve been in contact on and off ever since, meeting whenever she’s been in town.”

“Do you trust her?” He didn’t break eye contact.

“Only a little,” I said. “I don’t exactly know her well.”

“She didn’t come on the mission with you?”

“No.” I shook my head. “She said she tracked my cell phone GPS.”

“Uh huh.” He licked his lips, thinking. “Sounds a little funny.”

“Why so suspicious? You think she has something to do with Omega?” He stared back at me, as though waiting for something. “What? What am I missing?”

He turned a slight smile, and looked at me with expectation. “Come on,” he said. “You know.”

“Come on, what?” By this point I was just annoyed. Kat and Scott were passed out on the bed behind me and who knew when they’d be coming back to consciousness. I had to report to Ariadne that we’d gotten in a violent clash with Omega forces, ending with two people not associated with the Directorate getting involved to save our bacon, in an incident that would certainly have drawn more than a little attention.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m gonna go…recover for a bit. Let me know if anything major happens.”

I shook my head, feeling my annoyance fade at the remembrance that he’d wrecked his car to save me from the Omega sweep team. “Reed…” He looked back over his shoulder, almost out the door. “Thanks.”

He nodded, a little smile breaking on his face, and left.

I tried to reach Ariadne, but her cell phone went straight to voicemail. I tried her office, but her assistant told me she was out and unable to be reached for several hours. When I asked her to connect me to the Director, she informed me that he, too, was unavailable. I sighed, told her to have them call me urgently, that I had run afoul of Omega, and left it at that.

I stayed in Kat and Scott’s room, watching the light fade outside the beige curtains as the day ended. I looked at a clock when the last rays of sunlight were still visible, and it was just after 9 P.M. Neither of them had moved, but their pulse was regular, they reacted to prodding and other stimuli; they just…didn’t seem to want to wake up.