There was a stir in my mind, a chorus of voices in the back, having a conversation that I was trying my best to ignore. It was a mild squall, though it didn’t feel like it. A vein throbbed in the space behind my eyes, a solid twitch that pulsed with every beat of my heart, a little shooting pain that made me wonder what sort of discussion was going on in my brain. I listened for a moment, caught a heated dustup between Bjorn and Wolfe about Hades, and then got distracted.
“You can hear them in your head, yes?” Janus looked sideways at me from the driver’s seat, an almost-touching look of concern etched on his features. I say “almost” because I wasn’t inclined to believe it was real. He did have a specific purpose, after all, and it wasn’t to make sure that I felt loved and cared for. Or if he did have that purpose, it was a means to the end of getting what he wanted.
“Yes.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers, hoping that massaging the tension would relieve the pain. It didn’t.
“What are they speaking about?” The car accelerated away from the light when it turned green, down the street ahead of us.
“Bjorn and Wolfe are arguing about Hades,” I said. “I’m not paying much attention right now.” There was a moment of quiet in my mind. “Wolfe worked for Hades, along with his brothers, right?” I heard Bjorn howl something at Wolfe about murdering children, which got a swift and visual reply that almost made me retch, something on the order of not bothering to deny but instead glorying in that fact.
“It takes a toll on you, yes?” I saw him start with the concern again, and I remembered the last time someone had come at me with that sort of fatherly interest; it had come to a rather abrupt end when he orchestrated the murder of my boyfriend.
“That obvious, huh?” I let my fingertips lightly dance over my forehead, soothing the skin there with just the barest touch, light over the top of it, the sensation distracting me from the throbbing pain.
Janus let out a low chuckle. “Perhaps not to all, but I am an empath, and your emotional states are as obvious to me as a physiological defect would be to a physician.”
“I’m deformed,” I said, “I’ve got seven souls in one body. It’s like I’m Siamese twins but only in my brain.” I blanched as Bjorn shot a withering reply at Wolfe, something about working for a pure evil—which I thought was ironic, coming from the source. “Or like having an internal hydra in my mind. I’d gladly cut off some of their heads,” I growled, causing them to quiet for a moment, “but I expect the only thing that would get the job done would be doing it to mine.”
“That seems a bit of an overreaction.” Janus guided the car into a left hand turn at an intersection, and far up ahead over a hill I caught a view of downtown. A building that looked like an elongated version of a Faberge egg with glass windows shone in the morning sun. “You will learn to control them, given time.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, looking up at him. “Seems like most succubi I’ve talked to already have a firm grasp of how to control their souls pretty much out of the gate. Even my aunt Charlie couldn’t understand how I had so much trouble with them.”
“Because they’re metas,” Janus said tightly. He hesitated, leaving something unsaid.
I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, tight-lipped, his hands on the steering wheel. “You mean the souls I’ve taken.” He looked sidelong at me, only briefly, then nodded his head once, sharply. “Why does that matter?”
“It matters,” Janus said. “Using the powers we metas have requires a certain amount of will. Think for a moment on the minds you have absorbed—Wolfe was a force of nature, a beast of his own sort. Gavrikov was one of the most destructive beings to ever walk the planet. Bjorn was the son of a man who proclaimed himself the God-King of the Norse. These are not your normal souls, and your introduction to your powers was not done as it usually would be, by accidentally and partially absorbing someone close to you before awakening to your abilities. You had no such warning, and the first minds you took in were ones that had more willpower than you did yourself.”
I frowned at him. “Would it matter if I absorbed someone with less will?”
“I don’t think you are getting the point,” Janus said, and shot me a cautious look. “You had two strikes against you, as they say. You absorbed metas, who are naturally somewhat more predisposed toward stronger will because of their abilities, and you absorbed them wholesale. That is not usual for a newly manifested incubus or succubus. Typically they would take a piece of someone first, stopping before the task is complete, giving them the ability to acclimate themselves to the … shadows, I believe your people call them—the results of a partial absorption—rather than dealing with a full and complete personality embedded within you from the start.” His expression darkened. “And not just any personality, but Wolfe’s.”