“Would you suggest shooting him?” Ariadne asked.
“No,” I said with a shake of the head. “Guns don’t even break the skin. The tranquilizer darts, though. Maybe if we loaded him up with those darts…”
“Based on what we’ve seen, one of his powers seems to be to adapt to attacks – the shock cannon that Kurt hit him with was less effective each successive time it was used, to the point where he shrugged it off when he attacked us here.” She cast a sidelong glance at Old Man Winter. “We suspect his resistance to bullets is something that has developed over time; it’s doubtful that the darts or the toxin would be as effective this time around.”
“He has always been uncannily adaptable to changing situations,” Old Man Winter said, “and has lived through battles that have killed lesser metas by the hundreds. There is a reason that Wolfe and his brothers have lived for thousands of years.”
“There has to be a way to beat him,” I said with urgency. “Something. Some weapon in your arsenal that you haven’t tried yet, like that shock cannon…something that can just buy us a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said, voice gentle. “There’s nothing. We’ve bluffed him well enough that he seems to be steering well clear of the Directorate, but until M-Squad returns, it is only a bluff. We need to keep you here, protect you, until we can work out this situation. It’s the only course we have available.”
My voice cracked. “Unless I give myself up.”
“Ridiculous,” Ariadne replied. “You know what he would do to you. Do you really want to go through that?”
“No,” I answered. “But neither do I want to keep sacrificing others, watching bodies pile up and families get destroyed because I’m too scared to face Wolfe.”
“Give us a little more time,” Ariadne said in a pleading tone. “Let us get M-Squad back. Once they’re here, we can take care of Wolfe.”
I put my hands in front of my face and started doing the mental arithmetic. Two dead in the parking lot outside the grocery store. Eight at my house when I wanted to face Wolfe the first time. Eight more when he attacked the Directorate campus. Ten last night, none of whom I’d even met. Almost thirty dead at the hands of Wolfe, every single one of them because they stood between me and that maniac. How many would it take? What if I left town? Like Zack said, he might eventually find me, but how many people would he kill in the interim? Hundreds? Thousands? Would he eventually just burn the city to the ground?
The fear choked me again. I wasn’t as afraid of dying as I was of what Wolfe was going to do to me first. I had caught a sample of his idea of play and the thought of uninterrupted time with him doing what he liked was enough to make me sick again. He would violate me in ways that I couldn’t imagine, based on my limited experience in the world and with men. In a way, my naïveté probably spared me from being even more fearful. Or maybe the fear of the unknown made it worse.
I looked back to Ariadne and Old Man Winter, who were looking at me, waiting for a response. I wanted to be brave. Part of me wanted to fight him again, to knock him down, to make him fear me the way I feared him.
But my hands felt weak. They shook. I couldn’t beat him, I knew that. I didn’t want him to touch me, didn’t want to smell his disgusting, rotten breath or feel his claws caressing my skin and drawing blood, didn’t want to feel him rubbing and pushing against me again. I choked on my cowardice and justified it in my head – I didn’t want to be near him again. Ever.
All I wanted was to go home, back to the simple world of Mom, and when I was bad, the box. Nobody but me got hurt there. Nobody died.
But Mom was gone. My house was forfeit; it was Wolfe’s domain now, he owned it, and every thought I had of it from now on would be tainted by the memory of how he beat me, broke me in that basement in a way my mother and the box never had. I had nothing left but the Directorate, and no one to trust but these two people that I didn’t even know.
I looked from Old Man Winter to Ariadne, each in turn. Winter was brooding and quiet while Ariadne was waiting with patient expectation. I choked on my words, but finally they came out, filling my ears with the sound of my cowardice, drawing a nod from Winter and a smile from Ariadne.
“You win.”
Twenty
Two days and twenty-eight dead bodies later, I wished I hadn’t listened to my fear. I had been stewing in a basement room of Headquarters, walls made of reinforced concrete and plated with steel or some other metal that didn’t bend when I punched it out of fury or frustration or sheer pitying despair. I punched it a lot.
Ariadne had done everything in her power to make me comfortable in my oversized room. I had my own bathroom, they’d brought in a bed from one of the dormitories that felt like it was cushioned with air – not that I’d been sleeping, but I lay down on it a lot while I watched the news.
They’d brought me a big TV and it was tied in to all the networks. I flipped back and forth between three different local channels and the national news stations depending on who was on commercial. Having never been able to watch TV for more than an hour a day, news was never on my to-watch list. I always caught a smattering over Mom’s shoulder at night while I studied at the table, but I much preferred sitcoms and dramas over news.
I found myself glued to the goings-on. One network proclaimed: “Minneapolis: City Under Siege” while another network decried that Minneapolis was “In the Grip of Terror.” The third was speculating on the source of the violence and assigning blame politically.
The local stations were somewhat less objective as the anchors seemed to be in fear for their lives. It was hard not to feel for them the same way I’d feel for characters on the TV shows I watched – sitcoms had the ability to bring me to tears, which I always hid from Mom. She would roll her eyes and make snide comments about “weakness.”
As I watched the news hour after hour, as the days ticked by, I felt nothing but weak. I wished I’d told Ariadne and Old Man Winter to stick their offer of safety in a warm and uncomfortable place. I stared at the walls as the news showed photos of the latest victims, trying to avoid the looks on the faces of the family in the picture. They were all smiling, but it felt like they were silently accusing me of dooming them to death. This one was a family with a dark haired father, a blond haired mother and two little blond girls. All staring at the photographer with happy smiles on their faces.
Now dead. Because of me. Because of my cowardice.
The door slid open and the agent outside stuck his head in. “Visitor, miss.” He said it without a wasted syllable or any emotion. After two days and a half dozen such messages, I was beginning to suspect that the agents assigned to guard me had very clear memories of their fellows who died at my house, and what they had died for. There was not a drop of the milk of human kindness in any of the men I had interacted with while in this place. The only friendly face was Ariadne’s, and she had dropped in for conversations twice now – ones which I had kept civil by virtue of not wanting them to end prematurely.
After twelve years alone and one week in the company of others, I found myself not wanting to go back to alone.
I was sitting on the bed, t-shirt and pajama pants on, in violation at last of Mom’s fourth rule, the only one that I had been following lately, the one that demanded I remain fully dressed, down to my gloves and shoes at all times, ready to move. (When she wasn’t home I frequently took my shoes and my gloves off, among other things, which led to punishments if I wasn’t quick enough on the days she’d arrive unexpectedly early).