“Raymond,” I said calmly, “are you gonna release my friends from your death hold or—”
“You don’t need to threaten me,” Raymond said. He put his hand down for a minute and I heard the breath of life return to the people behind me. “We’re related, you know? Hades was my dad. We can talk for a minute.”
“You don’t look like the son of a god,” I said patronizingly.
“I worked in a factory in Toledo until about nine months ago,” he admitted. He was cool, placid even. “Weissman came along and told me what they were planning. Asked for my help.” A smile broke out across Raymond’s fat face as he recounted the story. “It’d been a long time since anyone wanted anything to do with me. You know what I mean, right?”
I felt a little sizzle in the back of my head. “Not really.”
“Come on,” Raymond said, almost abashed. “I know how metas treat your kind. Our kind. I gave up on getting a favorable reaction to my abilities years and years ago and just started hiding it. I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone like you.” He took a step closer to me, and I could see the light fall across his gut. “You can’t control it, can you?”
“No,” I said, watching the light play over him. “But you can? I’d think that someone would have tried to make you an offer like Weissman’s years ago.”
Raymond shrugged. “They did. I’ve worked for governments before, sometimes, when I needed the money. I always needed time after a job, though, to get used to the voices, to … get them integrated in, you know? To get them to listen, and shut up when they’re told. It’s easy to get lost in the more forceful ones.” He wore a faint smile. “Hell, I remember it was a while before I learned how to keep them from walking all over me. Talking all over me.”
Kill him.
“Quiet, Wolfe,” I said, and he was. “I know what you mean.”
“I know you do,” Raymond said, so softly, his voice just desperately quiet, like he was the gentlest soul on earth. He took another step toward me, into the light. He really was a big man, and for all the threat his power carried he looked like a teddy bear, with beetle-like eyes that stared out at me in the dark. I could almost see the thirst for approval dripping from him, and I wondered how long it had been since he had really connected with another human being before Weissman had approached him. I would have guessed decades. “No one else knows how it works but us. It’s close, what you go through and what I go through. Very close. The difference is just scale.”
“I can’t imagine having as many voices in my head as you do.”
“You get used to it,” he said. “It’s worse with the metas. They’re different than humans; their wills are stronger. They fight back harder. Dad knew some tricks with his power, could do things I can’t.” His face fell. “Some things you don’t really see much of anymore. He didn’t want to share, you see. Not that he didn’t care, he just wanted to protect himself.
“I met your mother once,” Raymond said, and he extended a hand again, just for a moment, and I heard a half dozen screams behind me. “Sorry.” I could hear the genuine apology in his voice. “I didn’t want your friends interrupting our talk, and they were starting to get their wind back.”
“You knew my mom?” I asked, apparently unconcerned with the pain of my colleagues—and friends. I was torn, this tantalizing bit of my family’s history just hanging in front of me.
“Just met her the once,” he said. “Long time ago, when she was just a little girl. Her mom was one of my sisters.”
I blinked. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah,” he said with a nod, “we grew up together.”
I thought about that for a moment. “But …” My eyes widened at that. “When was that?”
He thought about it for a minute. “Oh … um … 1970s some time? Seventy-one, maybe seventy-two. I don’t remember exactly. Your aunt was still a baby at the time.”
“But if you were both children of Hades,” I said, “and he died—”
“He died before the Year Zero,” Raymond said then paused. “We’re kind of old, I guess, if that’s what you were getting at.”
I swallowed. “I didn’t know my grandmother lived that long.” I watched the beetle eyes. “Is she …?”
“Died in 1989. I found her last resting place in a cemetery in Michigan.”
“Huh,” I said, marveling just the least little bit at what I’d heard, at connections to a family I hadn’t known anything about. I watched him, and he watched me. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”