Enemies(90)

Sometime after I had that thought, I drifted off into sleep, and the world changed around me. I was with Adelaide again, and time had shifted. I watched as the darkness took form, becoming the office around me, the same one I had been lying in when I had fallen asleep.

“He’ll be along shortly,” Janus said, shifting back and forth on his feet. Janus wasn’t a man predisposed to show his nerves, at least not in my short experience with him. His discomfort was tangible, and he stood there with a file folder, shuffling it back and forth between each hand.

“Why am I here?” Adelaide asked, and I could see her nerves showing as well. She stood next to one of the bookcases, eyeing the titles on the shelf. She looked up. “Is this about my next assignment?”

“I am not sure,” Janus said, taking a look toward the couch, the one I had been sleeping on. It was empty, unoccupied, the yellow upholstery looking to be in slightly better repair than what I was lying on some twenty-odd years later. “Would you care to have a seat?”

“No, thanks,” Adelaide said. “I should … probably just keep myself out of trouble.” She pulled her hand away from the bookshelf, as though she were afraid of damaging the dusty, leather-bound volumes.

“You are no trouble,” Janus said with quiet calm. “You are … one of our best, if I am being honest.”

Adelaide gave him a weak smile in return. “If you’re being honest? Does that mean you’re not honest that often?”

Janus chuckled. “It means I’m often not allowed to give a frank assessment. Unbridled truth often gets sacrificed on the altar of the greater good.”

She watched him with eyes that showed a clever intelligence, and I wondered what she was thinking. “Does that mean you have to hold things back in order to be good at your job?”

Janus stared out the window, his reaction not immediate. “I suppose it does,” he said after a moment. “If we are being honest,” he flashed her a smile, “that galls me as well. Since the day I was old enough to associate myself with the world our kind created, I have been a servant to others who had more power than I. True, I was an influencer, an advisor, but a servant nonetheless. I have always tried to do the right thing in every circumstance.” He cast his gaze down and pulled off his glasses. He tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and began to wipe the lenses. “At times, it has meant telling one person a particular kind of truth and telling another a completely different one.”

There was a flash of amusement. “Doesn’t that kind of make you two-faced?”

He finished wiping his glasses and put them back on the bridge of his nose, adjusting them to look down at Adelaide. “It would hardly be the first time I was accused of such things. The problem with being an empath who walks the corridors of power is that you always know what the person you are speaking to wants to hear. If you possess within you the desire to ultimately please people, it is very hard not to bend your words in the direction of what they want.” His face sagged. “Bad news is never a welcome guest, but of late it seems particularly interested in overstepping its bounds.”

Adelaide’s interest was purely casual, at least on a surface level. She was pretending to pay attention to other things, but all the while I got the idea she was listening intently. “Oh?” she asked. “Lots of bad news lately?”

“Having you kill Mr. Nealon was unfortunate,” Janus said, watching her carefully.

She froze. “You did want him dead, though, right?”

“Of course,” Janus said. I saw the release of tension from Adelaide after the moment’s silence. “And you did very well on that. But … we have a bit of a new problem.”

“Oh?” She ran her finger over one of the bookshelves as she took slow steps, one at a time, her gaze falling over the shelves as she walked. “What is it?”

The door opened on the opposite end of the room, causing both of them to turn, and interrupting Janus’s response. “I believe I will let him explain,” Janus said.

The man who entered the room looked a little like Rick: dark hair that was beginning to show just the hints of grey, dark skin, confident. This one, however, looked ever so much older and wiser. His eyes were jaded, unworried, the kind of calm, cool darkness that I expected one might find in a man who’d done ugly things for any number of years. He smiled as he shut the door behind him, and I sensed an oiliness about him that caused Adelaide’s skin to feel greasy.

“If it isn’t our star succubus,” he said as he strode across the room. His steps were slow, measured, and he seemed to take great pleasure in savoring his movement as he drew closer to her.