Broken(36)

    “Must be something in our chosen profession,” Scott said. “Something that makes a body want to drink heavily.”

    I thought about it for a moment. “You know, you might have something there.”

    He cast an accusing eye toward the shot occupying the bar in front of me. “Yet still you remain as sober as a priest.”

    I took a sniff of the alcohol wafting off the shot in front of me. “Probably the memory of what happened to me last time I wasn’t.” I gave a slight shrug. “They say judgment is the first thing to go.”

    He laughed, a sound so bereft of any amusement I wondered if it might be better called a bark. “What are you up to, Sienna?”

    “Me?” I stared at the drink in front of me and thought about lying. “I’m going to kill Old Man Winter.”

    There was a pause. “Good for you.”

    “You really mean that?”

    “I don’t know,” Scott said, and I saw a line of water drip down the shot glass in his hand. “I know I’d like to have a convenient target for my emotional toxic waste.” He sighed. “I can’t even hate her. She saved my life, because of that dumb bastard Clary—” He turned to me. “I could hate him.”

    I watched him carefully. “You could. But he’s dead.”

    Scott didn’t even bat an eyelash, just looked at me with undisguised curiosity. “Did you?”

    I looked back at the drink and took it, slopping it down in one. I slapped the glass back down on the bar and cringed as the alcohol burned all the way down. “I did.”

    His expression settled, going from a kind of muted rage to relaxed. “I’d say, ‘Good for you’ but I kind of doubt it actually is any good for you.”

    “It doesn’t feel very good,” I conceded. “I got Parks and Clary. I had Eve, filled her with bullet holes, but she got away. That leaves her, Bastian and … “ I let my jaw harden, “the man himself.”

    He looked at me and I could see the wheels turning for him. “Do you think he was playing us all along?”

    I cocked my head at him. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean Winter strung us along, right?” Scott’s hand came off his glass and he gestured wildly. “He made you think he was on your side all along, and then bam—kills your boyfriend. Do you think he ever actually gave a damn about us or was he just playing some sort of game that only he knew about?”

    “I don’t know,” I said. “I think he did what he did for reasons that he didn’t share. He wanted me to kill, to ‘do what was necessary,’“ I said in a faux Old Man Winter accent. “I don’t know that he ever cared, though. I think he was always focused on his own means, this war with Omega and Century and whoever else. The storm, my mom called it. We were just the tools for him to use to get whatever he needed out of it.”

    “So did we do any good?” Scott asked, as the barman refilled our glasses. “Was there any point to all the training, the missions? I mean, the Directorate’s toast, so I guess Omega wins, right?”

    “Reed’s still out there, somewhere in Rome,” I said, thinking of my brother. “I don’t know how to get ahold of him, but he’s out there. Alpha’s probably still fighting them, in Europe. All that other stuff is still going on, some other group—Century they’re called—they wiped out all those metas in China and India. So I don’t know. Maybe Omega did win. At least, between that and what happened afterward, I don’t know where I fit anymore.” I felt a snarl curl my lips. “I guess I’m on my own side, now.”

    “That’s a tough place to be in a fight like this,” Scott said. “We were always the little kids playing in the old gods’ play yard, though, right?”

    I stared straight ahead at the bottles behind the bar. “I guess. I don’t know.”

    “Well,” Scott said with an air of making a great pronouncement, and I saw him looking me over, “it sounds like you made a good start with Parks and Clary. But … if you missed Eve, I’m betting she’s working with Bastian and Winter. They know you’re coming now, right?”