“Dead?” I finished for him. “His brains are all over the wall and floor, so yes, I think we can safely say he’s dead.” It occurred to me I’d seen entirely too much of that recently, as though somehow in the moment I killed Glen Parks I’d opened a floodgate on an orgy of violence that had come dropping into my life.
“Dear God,” Breandan breathed. “I didn’t mean to.” He looked tense enough to crush an apple between his buttcheeks. “You’re awfully calm about this!”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Yeah, but you killed these lot!” He waved his hands at the other bodies. “How can you be so damned still about it!”
I shrugged. “They were trying to kill us. I find it hard to dredge up much moral outrage about them being the ones who died instead of us.” For some reason, I didn’t mention that it hadn’t been long ago that I had felt as he had. I looked over the scene of the chaos again. “Even with the suppressors, those gunshots were loud.” I eyed him in mild accusation. “Especially that last one. We should probably get out of here before the police come.”
“They won’t be coming for quite some time, if at all,” Breandan said quietly, too stunned to pull his eyes off the carnage around us. “Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve heard what sounds like gunfire in this building.”
“Marvelous,” I said. “Well, I’m going to go pay a visit to this Weissman and see what I can find out from him.”
“And the fact that he sent a heavily armed group of men to kill us doesn’t concern you at all?” Breandan looked me over. “Your first instinct is to go charging after him now you’ve learned who he is?”
I nodded slowly. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a straight line into this organization. The first time I’ve ever seen anything of them but men in black carrying guns, other than a telepath who kept pretty quiet about who he’d dealt with. These people are the bogeyman of the meta world, and they’re scaring the hell out of everyone around them. I want to turn that around for a bit.”
“You’re ballsy,” Breandan pronounced.
I looked down at my figure with a frown, as though I had to check. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
With one last forlorn look around his flat, he said, “I don’t suppose it’s going to do me much good to stay here. Sooner or later the police are going to show up and it’d be best if I weren’t here for it.”
I frowned. “This was all self-defense. It’d be hard to explain to the police but not impossible.”
“Then why aren’t you staying?”
I thought about it for a beat. “I’ve got things to do and explaining myself to the cops isn’t one of them.” I reached down and pulled the wallet out of the back pocket of one of the men, trying to decide if I wanted to risk using one of his credit cards to get a room. Probably not until I took out this Weissman, one way or another.
“Let’s just say my explanations to the police might fall on deaf ears, given my previous history with them,” Breandan said with a grin as he opened the sliding door to his closet, now stained red from the fight, and pulled out a small canvas bag. “Just give me a few minutes to pack and we can take off.”
“You understand what’s going to happen here, right?” I asked, dead serious. “I’m going to drive to the address I have for this Weissman, and I’m going to brace him hard, like I just did to McClaren. I’ve had a lot of questions dangled in front of me about this organization, Century, and it’s time I got some answers. When I say it could get messy, I mean it, because I’m going to walk in there prepared to bleed Weissman until he starts answering or until he forces me to milk his brain dry. Do you understand?” The quiet, hushed tones of my voice had drained all the color from Breandan’s face, and he gave me a short, sharp nod of acquiescence. “Good,” I said, and felt the wave of nausea crash over me again, both from what had happened five minutes earlier when I woke up coupled with the realization of what I’d done and who I’d killed in the intervening time. “Then if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be needing to vomit again—and after that, we’ll go find this Weissman, and kick down his door.”
Chapter 21
We took the assault team’s van. Breandan drove and I rode in the passenger side, head over a garbage can I’d taken with us from his bathroom. I sat over it in misery, the sick feeling I had in my stomach still mysterious in origin. I honestly didn’t know how much of it was from the clangor of voices that was occasionally rising in my head, the possibility I was pregnant, or if it was just stress and nerves from killing so many people in the last twenty-four hours.