“Give me a name,” Eve said, readying her fist. “Give me a name, or so help me, my next punch will sever your serial killing head and end your little perverted reign of impotence forever.”
Fries’ once-handsome face was twisted, an eye already swollen shut. The strong smell of iron filled the air, and he seemed to have no strength in his neck. Eve had him suspended by the front of his shirt, which she had torn while pounding him into hamburger. He was missing at least eight teeth by my count, and his lips were split in three places, his face swelling so rapidly it looked like he had fallen into a bees’ nest. “Okay,” he said, now barely audible. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. I just saw him the other day…Janus. It’s Janus. Janus is running Operation Stanchion.”
17.
“Who the hell is Janice?” Bastian asked as Eve and I re-entered the observation room to find him waiting with Ariadne and Parks.
“Janus,” I said, drawing every eye in the room to me. “Roman god of doorways and transitions. Had two faces, supposedly. Not really sure how that would translate in non-mythological terms.”
“He is a liar,” Old Man Winter said, squeezing into the room behind us, Clary following him, “so the colloquialism fits for him being two-faced.”
“Did no one else manage to return any further information?” Eve asked, slipping off my gloves and handing them casually back to me. They were slick with blood, and I held them at a distance from my body, as though I were too good for them.
“No one got quite as…persuasive,” Ariadne said, “as you did. At least not for as long, or as close to the…uh…edge.”
“No one else came as close to beating their subject to death is what she means,” Parks said with more than a little acrimony.
“My only regret was that I didn’t finish,” Eve said. “He’s slime. He rapes women and kills them with his power, and finishes with their corpses. I bet he couldn’t even get it up if a woman wasn’t screaming in pain for him. I have never encountered a more loathsome creature in my life, and I wish I could beat him to death over and over.”
“This is to the damned edge of the line, Director,” Parks said in a low growl that reminded me of the wolf within him. “We don’t do this sort of thing, sir. Beating people in interrogations? Freezing someone’s arm and breaking it off?” He drew himself up. “We’re better than that.”
“Not the biggest fan of these aggressive tactics myself, sir,” Bastian said. “We let ‘em stew, we break ‘em traditionally, without laying a finger on them. Not one of them is tough enough to take the isolation forever.”
“We do not have forever,” Old Man Winter said. “We may not even have a day. Omega is coming, make no mistake. They have marked us as a threat, they desire to eliminate us, and they are operating on a timetable so aggressive we are left with few options.” He ran a cold, surveying set of eyes over us, not flinching away from looking anyone in the eyes. I blinked away from his first, though. “This is certain: the damage could be greater than anyone of us can calculate.”
“Should we evacuate the campus, sir?” Bastian said, cutting through the air that had suddenly gotten thick in the room. “Get the younger metas out of here, maybe give the admin staff some time off and keep a skeleton crew here for the next couple weeks while we wait for the anvil to drop?”
“Who knows how long it could be?” Ariadne said. “I mean, the Director says soon,” she favored him with a submissive nod, “but they’ve known where we are—where Sienna is—for quite some time. They could have moved against us at any point. It could be tomorrow, it could be the day after, it could be six months from now. Just because they’re putting their people into the country doesn’t mean it’s happening now. For all we know, we just took out their entire strike force.”
“You didn’t,” came Reed’s voice from behind Old Man Winter. He shouldered his way into the room. “It’s coming, soon. Like…next week or sooner.” He looked around at each of us, his long, dark hair disheveled from the wind outside. “My bosses say they’re just ratcheting it down right now, dragging the last few pieces into place.”
There was a stark silence, one that I finally broke. “Oh, good. Because I hate a long wait before I die.”
Reed shook his head. “They don’t want you dead. Anything but is the word. They want you alive, just like always.”
I let a little scratchiness enter my voice, probably from the fatigue and the fact my head was whirling. “Do your bosses know why Omega is so keen on having me alive that they’d start a war with the Directorate?” I caught a flash from Old Man Winter’s eyes as I asked, something that was both subtle and yet obvious; no one else reacted to my question but to turn to Reed to listen for his answer.
“If they do, they’re not sharing,” he said, “but they barely tell me a fraction of what they know over open lines. I only got this much out of them before they dropped a hammer of their own on me.”
I felt a chill unrelated to the Director’s presence. “What?”
“I’m to return to Rome immediately,” he said, and I could hear nothing but the sour notes as he said it. “Immediate recall. They have me booked on a flight that leaves in three hours.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, a sick pit in my stomach churning the acids within. “We’re looking down the barrel of imminent attack here.”
“I know,” he said, “and I told them to sit on the pointy end of an umbrella and open it. I’m staying.”
“No,” Old Man Winter said, “you should go. And you should take Sienna with you.”
“Director,” Ariadne said, silencing the voices that started to speak around her, “are we certain that sending Sienna to Italy is going to be safer than keeping her here?”
“Europe’s in a mess right now,” Reed said. “Not something my bosses wanted to get into on the phone, but I get the sense there are some pretty major moves going on over there at present. I’m not sure you’d be protecting her by getting her there. And our headquarters stays mobile by necessity—Europe is Omega’s backyard, and our relationship with them isn’t exactly peaceful coexistence, if you know what I mean. They’re trying to wipe us out, and vice versa.”
“Sir,” Bastian said, “if we’re facing imminent attack, we could really use a meta with her power on the line with us to defend the Directorate. Sending away one of our best fighters might not be the strongest idea.”
“Has anybody asked what Sienna actually wants to do?” Clary’s voice wavered before it came out.
All heads turned to me. I felt my mouth open and close before I spoke. “I’m not leaving,” I said, almost as surprised I said it as the others were hearing it. I saw Parks nod, a slight smile on his lips. “I’m not running from Omega, not ever again.” I felt my cheeks redden. “I ran from them once before and a lot of people died. I haven’t forgotten, not for one day, what that felt like. I won’t do it again. If they want me, they know where to find me, and I’ll be right out front kicking the ass off whoever they send to do the job.”
“No offense,” Reed said, “but that’s really dumb.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m a big girl now, and that means not running from my problems, even when they’re pretty big themselves.”
“You have no idea,” Old Man Winter said, and his voice sounded brittle. “But it is your life, and your choice.” He looked down, staring into the distance at Madigan on the other side of the window, before turning back to Reed. “Return to your people. Apprise them of our situation. Ask them for help. Tell them how dire our need becomes. Urge them to hurry.”