Enemies(22)

“‘Shadows’?” I thought for a moment then concentrated hard within me, searching for something inside, a faint wisp of Ariadne’s memories. They were there, a small echo of the woman herself, a few thoughts, some sights and sounds, smells, sensory memories that I was able to peek through just as I had a few days earlier when I had absorbed them from her. There was very little there—a few memories of Eve, of Old Man Winter, a few highly personal. “You mean the part of a person that remains even if I don’t take their whole soul.”

“Yes,” Janus said with a nod. “By absorbing just that portion, there is no battle of wills with the newly absorbed, because there is very little will that comes along with small fragments such as those. They are a mere shadow of the full person, you see? A typical succubus would learn who they are after perhaps taking a shadow or two through accidental contact with a human being in most cases. In the case of your mother and her sister, I am told they were raised to know in advance what they would likely be and were prepared. It is how your mother learned to become disciplined with her power. She had no fearsome Wolfe to face right out of the gate, she learned to control a shadow, then accumulated another and another before taking in her first soul, and by then she was fully ready for it. Charlie too, though I have only suspicions to go on there.”

“How do you know about how my mother learned?”

“Two ways,” he said. “One, we have her old Agency personnel file, which includes the account of her upbringing in her own words.” He gave a slight smirk. “And second, we have access to a source that complements this.”

I let the phrase hang out there for a minute. “You mean she’s told you herself.”

Janus let out a long laugh. “Good heavens, no. Your mother hates Omega. We clashed with her when she was at the Agency, and there is so much blood between us now that she would not voluntarily give us a drop of her spit if we told her it would save the entire world.” He shook his head. “No, the source I speak of is her mother.”

There was a long pause, and I realized I was holding my breath. “You know my grandmother?” I hadn’t even hoped to ponder the idea of my mother’s mother; I had never been allowed to discuss the outside world when my mother had me in confinement, and thus the topic never—not even once—came up. She didn’t even acknowledge she had parents, never referenced them, and I had always wondered if they even still lived.

“No,” he said quickly. “She is no longer alive. Before she passed, however, which … is quite another story … she did make record of your mother’s upbringing, which was … shall we say … untraditional for a meta.”

“How did she die?” I whispered, and turned my head to look out the window.

“Another time, perhaps,” Janus said softly. “This falls under the domain of things I am not allowed to tell you.”

“Way to build trust,” I said, but the words lacked feeling. I had become used to being given only the minimums in my life—the minimum level of information, of trust, of love from the people who supposedly cared for me. I felt a swell of umbrage from Zack at this thought, but I quelled it with the truth of how we began—that he had been intended to spy on me for Old Man Winter, to seduce me to keep me in the Directorate’s reach. I felt fresh pain from him, as if I had stuck my finger in a wound and twirled it around—beneath the continued argument between Bjorn and Wolfe, which had settled into low level bickering. I knew I’d hurt him, but I felt fairly resigned about the whole thing.

“I apologize,” Janus said, and there was a scratch in his voice. “If it were up to me, I would tell you everything, lay it all out on the table, let you sift through the entire mess at will. And it is a mess, make no mistake,” he said, scratching his chin, which was smoothly shaven in spite of the wrinkles, “filled with the requisite errors of judgment on all sides, anger and fighting, threats and escalation, ambitions and squabbling. Yet all of it has led us to the point where we stand today.”

“You make it sound like an episode of a soap opera,” I said, massaging my temples with my forefingers. “Or a little like the bickering in my head.”

“It is probably not so far off,” Janus admitted, “and every side has its secrets, things that they think will be the end of their cause should they creep out.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your secret, Janus?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I have none that would ruin me. I know a few that would cause my employer considerable difficulty should they come out, but none that would cause me so much as a moment’s discomfort.”