Pandora stared at him, noting that there was something… off-kilter. “You experienced the visions?”
“I did. We all did. But you allowed us to live, didn’t you? You wanted us to know that you believed in our mission and wouldn’t kill us even when you had the chance.” When Pandora didn’t answer, Hiroshi continued, taking her silence as agreement. “What I saw was… amazing. Terrifying.”
“But you are not dissuaded from your intention of ruling as Emperor?”
“Oh, no! Not at all. In fact,” he lowered his voice and leaned close. “I’m terribly aroused.”
Pandora’s eyebrows rose in surprise. The look of hunger in his gaze and the warmth that seemed to emanate from him, both were intoxicating. For the first time in a very long time, Pandora felt like a woman and she was all too aware of Hiroshi’s maleness.
This new body of hers was responding to his proximity and she wondered if the Sins were influencing her words as she said, “Craig and Potter, leave us.”
The two academics exchanged quick glances and then hurried away, both of them glad to be free of this place. Neither of them were killers at heart but they were a part of this now and the dark knowledge frightened them both.
When they were alone, Hiroshi began undressing, his excitement making his voice tremble. “I saw such terrible things. It was like I was Death himself, deciding who lived and who died.”
“I want to eradicate Sin,” Pandora responded, her eyes hungrily drinking in his body as he revealed it.
“We’ll eradicate it all. Everything!”
When he embraced her, she not only did not pull away, she reciprocated his kiss.
Chapter IX: City of the Damned
The morning papers called it a variety of things but the one that would catch on in future years was “The Midnight Madness.” Gravedigger and her allies had been too far away from the hotel to suffer from Pandora’s attack but the tales of terror and the damage left behind was all too apparent the next day. In all, nearly two dozen men and women were killed while many more suffered both physical and mental injuries, some of which seemed likely to impair the victims for many years to come.
“It had to be Potter’s machine.”
Assembled around a table set with breakfast, Gravedigger’s aides alternated bites of their food with reading the various newspaper front pages that were scattered amongst the plates. Charity was not with them, which allowed a little more personal freedom in their comments. Though all of them considered Charity to be a friend, she was also their employer and leader and all of them deferred to her in the appropriate manner.
Cedric, who had made the decree concerning Potter’s machine, pushed his plate away and dabbed at his face with a napkin. “I think we need to call around to the various hotels and figure out where Tamaki is staying. Even if he’s smart enough to be using a fake name, it can’t be hard for us to locate a group matching their descriptions.”
Mitchell studied a photograph on the front page of The Washington Post. It showed a wide-eyed young woman on her knees, surrounded by police officers. Her mascara had run, leaving dark tracks down her face. A burning car could be seen in the background. “We need to be careful. We don’t know the specifics of what Potter’s machine is capable of. The last thing we need to do is break into Tamaki’s headquarters and end up having our brains oozing out of our noses.”
Li made a face and set down her fork, having suddenly lost her appetite for scrambled eggs. “Yuck.”
“Sorry,” Mitchell muttered, having realized his mistake. He looked over at Mortimer, who was smearing butter onto a biscuit. “What do you think, Mortimer? Any idea what we should be doing?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Where do you get off saying that?”
“Gravedigger was already out when we woke up. That means she’s already decided what should be done and she’s doing it. When and if she wants to bring us into her plan, she’ll tell us. Until then, I’m going to rest, read and eat.” Mortimer looked around the table, his gaze finally settling on Mitchell. “I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s a really strange thing that she’s surrounded herself with so many different assistants. In my day, I would have one or two around from time to time but they didn’t live with me or travel with me. Josef worked solo most of his career, didn’t he? You weren’t with him the entire time, were you?”
“I was there for most of it.”
Mortimer held up a single finger. “That’s one person. One. By having a single agent working in his employ, he was able to forge a tight relationship with you and the two of you eventually could guess what the other was thinking, right?”
“Of course.”
“That’s unlikely to happen with all of us. There’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”
“That’s why she shouldn’t have let you join us,” Cedric responded with a cool grin.
Mortimer shrugged, refusing to take the bait. “I just think it’s unusual, that’s all. It’s not what I or any other Gravedigger has done. I understand that she considers each of you to have different skills but I think having so many people to keep track of might hinder her down the line.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Li pointed out.
Looking curious, Mortimer waited for her to continue.
“You said that she’s not acting like all the previous Gravediggers. But she’s not like the others. She’s a woman.”
“You’re saying that she needs more help because she’s a woman?”
Li gave a little giggle, hiding her face behind one of her hands. “No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I just mean that men place a value on being self-sufficient. Women are much more likely to realize the importance of family and a strong group of friends. We’re not as challenged by differing opinions as men are.”
“It’s not a matter of being challenged,” Mortimer argued.
“Of course it is. That’s why Charity had to make it clear to you who was in charge. Because as a man, you define yourself by your place in the pecking order. She knew that and she was hesitant to let you into the group until you understood how we worked here. This is the modern world of 1937! Times have changed from the days when you ran around as Gravedigger.”
The verbal dressing down was delivered so sweetly that Mortimer found it hard to get angry about her words. Nonetheless, he certainly understood that he had just received a rebuke.
He resumed eating his breakfast. “All of that takes us back to my original point: this is Charity’s world and we’re all just living in it. She’ll tell us what she wants, when she wants it.”
GRAVEDIGGER SPRINTED FORWARD, leaping across the chasm that separated one building and the next. She had never been to the nation’s capital before and she had to fight against the urge to fall prey to tourist tendencies.
She had woken before all the others and crept out before dawn. She knew they were all mentally and emotionally exhausted from the events of the day before. Leaping out of a crashing airplane and barely escaping with life and limb intact was enough to take most people out of commission, even ones as stout as her friends.
Several of the newspapers had mentioned that the majority of the deaths had actually occurred in a relatively small area. It seemed to Gravedigger that this must have been the epicenter of the event, with the strength of the psychic wave diminishing as it spread out from there.
That gave her an idea of where she could begin her search, leading her to this particular neighborhood. While it was possible that Tamaki might own property, she thought it more likely that he was staying at a hotel. Unfortunately, there were five different possibilities within a three-block area.