“But—”
“If the next words out of your mouth are anything besides ‘Yes ma’am, I’ll never do anything like it again’ then I will personally have Bastian come down here and deal with you.” She faded. “He wanted to, desperately.” Clary shrank away, almost seeming to recede into the bed.
I snorted and instantly regretted it. Ariadne turned her withering stare on me. “Don’t get me started on you.”
I coughed and tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry. I…overreacted when Scott put his hand on me.”
She continued to stare for a second longer then shook her head in disbelief. “Overreacted? You nearly killed him. How is that an overreaction?”
I thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “Because it sounds better than the way you put it. He wanted to see what I could do in the worst way. So I showed him. In the worst—”
She let out a noise of disgust. “Is that how you’re going to operate if we train you to be an agent?”
Clary looked up in surprise. “You’re gonna make her an agent?”
“Shut up,” Ariadne spat at him and whipped her head back around to me. “You wrecked the cafeteria and blew up the kitchen. You could have killed somebody.”
“Um,” I shook my head, “I believe that the persons most likely to have gotten killed today were myself and Byerly, in that order.”
“What about me?” Clary’s face was puckered, as though he were insulted by what I said.
“You don’t count.” I looked to Ariadne, who was steaming. “He was trying to kill me! I just repaid the favor.” I looked down. “If it’s going to be a…um…an insurmountable obstacle—”
“It’s not an insurmountable anything.” Ariadne’s withering stare turned to a simmer. “But if this is what we can expect from you as an employee—”
“I didn’t mean to.” I said it low, almost under my breath. “It just got out of hand, I’m sorry.” An ugly thought occurred to me. “Oh, God. If I take the job, does that mean you’ll be my boss?”
She folded her arms in front of her. “Yes. Why?”
“I think that might be a dealbreaker.” I tried to sit up. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to not make insubordinate wisecracks about you.”
“Tell me about it,” Clary said, nodding his head.
“I said wisecracks, not dumbasscracks.”
“I think we can typically overlook incidents of…” she paused, “…over-exuberant verbal witticisms. However, failure to follow orders is looked down on, as is destroying campus property.” She frowned. “Or in your cases, the whole damned campus.”
I stiffened and wondered if she was accusing me of blowing up the science building. It didn’t seem fair, since I was being held responsible now for two incidents which were started by the houseguest in my skull, that mongrel that still needed to be housebroken and taught not to play with other people’s bodies.
“Be that as it may,” she looked daggers at Clary and then turned back to me, “we can overlook this, but any further incidents would provoke our full displeasure.”
Clary looked at me. “They’re gonna let you skate!”
I looked over at him. “Yeah. Awesome.” I turned back to Ariadne. “Anything on my mother’s stuff yet?”
“What?” She took a step back. “Oh. That. Our forensics lab was in the science building.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So it’s gone.”
“Yes.” She wavered, looking as though she wanted to offer me some sympathy, but thought the better of it. “I’m sorry.”
“Bummer.” Clary was nodding his head, then he brightened. “When do you start training? Cuz that’ll be fun.”
Chapter 15
I walked out of the medical unit under my own power shortly before nightfall. My broken bones were knitted, though my skin still had scabs in numerous places that would take until the next day to heal.
“Get out and don’t come back!” Dr. Perugini shouted as the door swung closed behind me. Clary walked out along with me and I kept an eye on him, though he was whistling a pretty happy tune the whole way out. Turned out that Kat Forrest had given him his eye back with her healing power after I blew up the kitchen. It took a little while before Perugini was sure it was fine, but when she ripped the bandage off I almost fell off the bed in shock. No wonder he wasn’t holding a grudge.
Byerly had left a few hours earlier. It was awkward after he woke up. Clary leavened the moment with a few choice jokes that were fairly graphic and involved my powers and how they’d affect someone in an intimate setting. Needless to say, Byerly didn’t laugh and neither did I, and when Perugini pronounced that he was in fine form after Forrest’s ministrations, no one was more relieved to see him gather his clothes and dart out than me.
“You wanna get something to eat?” Clary asked me as we cleared the Headquarters building. “I’m starving. I didn’t get my lunch before we got into it, y’know.” His earnestness would have been endearing if he hadn’t been trying to beat the daylights out of me only a few hours earlier.
“I’ll pass.” I left him behind, walking back toward the dorm. I was hungry too, but I doubted I’d be welcomed in the cafeteria for a while—assuming it was even operable at this point. I had a feeling that the below-zero temperatures I’d encounter would make any sort of meal eaten there a chilling experience. And that was just from the pissed-off people. We’d broken a lot of windows, which meant it’d also be literally cold in there.
I went back to my room, closed the door, and dug into the stash of food I’d gotten from my apparent burglary of the cafeteria a few days earlier. There was no doubt in my mind that Wolfe had done it, taking my body for a joyride while I slept. Now that he’d taken control during my waking hours, that was even more worrisome. I could tell Ariadne and Old Man Winter, I suppose, but only at the risk of being locked away and never allowed out again. I didn’t enjoy the thought of a cell of my own in Arizona, so I’d decided to play the whole incident off as me being reckless. I assumed it worked. It was hard to say.
“How do I get you out of my head?” I asked the question aloud, but no answer was forthcoming from inside or out. I chewed on a piece of beef jerky and sat down on my bed. No one but another succubus could answer my question, and the only one I knew of was Mom.
It occurred to me that I had a few powers to go along with the fatal touch of my skin, one of which was something Wolfe had called “Dreamwalking”—the ability to touch the minds of others while sleeping. I’d had conversations with Reed and Wolfe by doing that, and all it took was a willingness to fall asleep while concentrating on the person I wanted to talk to.
I was a little afraid to sleep after the control Wolfe had exerted on me, but I was more afraid of having to admit to Old Man Winter and Ariadne that I had him in me and that he was taking control. I finished my beef jerky, chewing slower and taking more time than was necessary even for that tough stuff.
When I was done, I lay my head down on the pillow and clicked off the lights. I thought of Mom, of the house, of the old days when we were a family. I could feel the tug of fatigue on my eyelids, but I lay with them wide open in the dark, worrying over what might happen when I closed them. Wolfe was a monster, a beast that I had once hoped I could put down like a rabid animal. Instead he was cohabitating with me in my own body.
It was bad enough when I only heard his voice. Now he’d set free a crazed man who could explode with the force of a bomb and turned even more of the Directorate against me. If I took the job they offered me, there would be no doubt it was going to be a hostile working environment. Most of the metas I encountered in the halls had done a swift direction change when they saw me coming as I walked back to my room.