“You’re about as helpful as a paddle made of papier-mache, aren’t you?” I sighed and closed my eyes.
He played with the Little Doll, with her emotions—
Yes, Bjorn agreed, this is the way of Erich Winter, and has been for as long as I have known him, all the way back to—
“I get it, you’re all old, you’ve known each other since thousands of years ago. Congrats on being part of the world’s first gentleman’s club—you know, absent any actual gentlemen. And honestly, probably absent any of the other things you’d find in a more modern gentleman’s club, like—”
Please, came Gavrikov’s voice, I must know more about my sister—
“Oh, shut up about your sister already,” I said, and Bjorn and Wolfe chorused their agreement. “No one cares about Kat, or whatever her name was before she evacuated her brain.” I felt the burn of anger. “She’ll be lucky if I don’t test Charlie’s advice about finding out what a Persephone’s soul tastes like when next she crosses my path.” My skin burned and I felt a strange desire to act out my words. “I wonder if she’d be all peppy like Kat if I drank her up or if she’d be like the slutty, grave-robbing whore that she is now—”
There was a flare in my head that felt like pain, like someone lit a pole on fire and thrust it into my ears, and it felt like fire burned, flashing around me as I fell to the floor. I gasped at the agony in my head, and only managed to open my eyes again after I felt Bjorn, Wolfe and another presence in my mind somehow battering Gavrikov to the back of my head, where he could do no harm. I lay on my bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling, as the thought of flame receded to the back of my consciousness. I could almost smell smoke somewhere in the distance.
Are you all right, Little Doll?
“Stop frigging calling me that,” I said, massaging my forehead with my thumbs. “I have a name.” There was a pause, silence, and I sat up. I clenched my eyes shut and let the hammering in my temples subside. There was a beep somewhere in the background and my eyes opened just wide enough to realize what it was. I crawled my way to the bed and reached up on the bedside table. The phone’s screen flared to life at the press of a button and I saw I had a new text message.
Downtown, the Carver Building. #2883. Will be there tonight after 7 p.m.
I read it twice, just to be sure, then turned off power to the phone. “Thanks, Kurt,” I whispered to myself.
You’ve done so well thus far, Little Doll—
“I told you to stop calling me that.”
—such fine work, what you’ve done. With the metal man especially, such a tasty way to beat him. Wolfe could not have planned it better himself—
Very well thought out, I heard a grudging respect in Bjorn’s tone, and it made me hate myself. Killing a stoneskin is not easy, not even for a succubus.
“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” I said and let the weariness settle over me. I saw Parks’ face in my mind, after I’d shot him, how deformed and destroyed it was after I’d sent bullet after bullet through it, the gray hair and beard drenched with blood and flecked with tissue. I envisioned Clary, and felt a stir within as Wolfe trilled with pleasure and I tingled with disgust. All I could see in the water was red, blood floating in wisps like threads weaving their way through it in the dark of the streetlamps; it was more black than anything, but my mind painted it the way I knew it was, crimson, violent, horrible. Just like what I’d done to them.
“Zack never loved me,” I whispered. “He was just doing what Old Man Winter told him to do.”
All the more reason to make Winter pay, Wolfe said. The Little Doll was hurt by him and hurts even worse now. Jotun must have known that the Little Doll would find this out; he rubs your face in his cruelty, taunts you with it, as if to show her that no one has ever cared for her. Winter orchestrated a great show to fool her, to play with her, to make her do his bidding …
Even at our height, with the most ruthless Primus at the head, Omega would not be so vicious, Bjorn said, and I could almost see his smile of self-satisfaction. Killing is not cruel compared to what he has done to you. A beating is physical; it fades in time. We are metas, we do not scar like ordinaries—like humans do. But this, what he has done … this will leave marks. He tries to make you more like him—