“It’s succubi. If a bunch of us got on London double deckers, that’d be succubuses.”
“Ah ha ha!” He laughed weakly and sounded fake. “The point is, did you just rip the soul out of the man?”
“No,” I said as I stooped to pick up three narrow magazines and a pistol, which I tucked into my belt. “I pulled his memory from the briefing he got before he came here.”
“And saw what?” Breandan asked, watching me wide-eyed.
I stopped and stared back at him before I answered. “A guy at the front of the room giving the order to kill you. His name’s Weissman. I think he’s a meta and almost certainly a member of Century.”
“Sorry, who?” Duffy gave me the look of a man who’d missed a step. “What’s Century?”
I tried to find a way to say it that didn’t sound absurd. “They’re a group of metas that are planning to kill every other meta on the planet … except for them.” Nope, that wasn’t it.
Breandan’s face got comically screwed up again. “Right. And this Weissman, he’s the James Bond villain sitting atop their little organization? Stroking a fluffy white cat as well, I trust?”
“Didn’t see a cat,” I replied and pulled three more magazines out of the belt of a dead commando, “just him, by himself, right now, in a warehouse not terribly far from here.”
“And you are picking up all these bullets because …?” he waited expectantly, though I could tell from the tone he knew what was coming.
“I’m going to go have a chat with this Weissman,” I said, taking a deep breath in through my nose as I stood to look at Breandan. “You see, he and his little henchman’s club, they killed someone a while back that I cared about, and I haven’t been able to properly repay them for it.”
Breandan looked down on me with his superior height, but I could see the skepticism in his face. “Oh, yeah? Who was that? Your mother?”
“Oh, God no,” I said, almost laughing. “I said someone I cared about.” I looked around soberly, trying to decide if I’d pulled everything of value from the bodies on the floor. “No. Her name was Andromeda.”
“Andromeda?” he asked, and I could hear the little noise from him that told me he was beginning to wonder not if I was crazy, but just how crazy I was. “That was her given name?”
“Hell if I know,” I said. “I only knew her for a few hours.” I watched his expression change, and I knew that telling the truth wasn’t doing my cause any favors in his eyes. “Listen …” I said softly, “maybe you should stay behind. What’s going to happen with this Weissman could get messy.”
“Oh, messy?” Breandan gave a wave to indicate all the dead bodies around him on the floor. “Well, all right then, I should definitely keep clear of it if it’s going to get messy. Because it certainly isn’t at all messy here, no, bodies on my floor is a perfectly normal effing day!” His eyes got wilder, and I saw a tick in the light crows feet around his eyes as he waved a hand around. “Are you serious? There are dead people on the floor of my flat, ones who came here to kill me!”
“Yeah,” I said with a little cringe, “see, this is why you should stay behind. I don’t know if you can handle what could happen with Weissman—”
Breandan extended the pistol in his hand to aim at McClaren’s head and fired it once, then jumped like he’d been the one shot. “Jesus!” It sounded like he said “Jay-sus!” Blood had splattered on the wall, and McClaren’s corpse was now lifeless on the floor, dropped by the momentum of the shot.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I asked, looking from the body to him in quick order.
“Well, I didn’t mean to!” he said, looking from McClaren’s corpse to me with panic in his eyes. “I was going to point it at him to show you how serious I was,” he waved the pistol toward me and I slapped a hand on his, twisting the gun out of his grip while keeping the barrel pointed away from me. “And it just went off!”
I stared at the pistol in my hand as I took a step back from him. “They do not just … go off. You have to pull the trigger for them to go off.”
He waved at it, clearly agitated. “Well, it … don’t they have a safety or something to keep that from happening?”
I held up the weapon. “It’s a Glock 17. No, it does not have a traditional safety. First rule of guns—do not point one at anything you do not want dead.”
Breandan looked back to McClaren’s corpse. “And is he … is he …?” He kept trying to form the question, but it was clear his emotions were getting in the way.