“So you remember?” I asked, watching his lined and sagging face.
“I remember a great pain in the back of my head,” he said, “and little else after that. Until just now, when someone ... touched my mind. Someone who should not be able to touch my mind.” He looked concerned. “Sovereign.”
“Sovereign?” I asked. “He woke you up?”
“I believe so, yes,” he said. “With the words, ‘Someone should tell her.’” He blinked. “Which was ironic, since I was about to tell you before Weissman so rudely interrupted me.”
“Tell me what? How to beat Sovereign?” I leaned forward, hoping to hear something I’d been looking for, something I’d been longing for.
“Perhaps,” he said, still looking dreadfully tired. “At the very least, something helpful. Some knowledge of what he represents. What he wants. What he—”
“I need to know,” I said, standing, leaning over the desk toward him. “I need to know some basics. Something to start with. To defeat him. I need to know my foe.” I squeezed my hands together, knuckles pressed against the hard surface of the desk. “I need to know what type of meta he is.”
Janus started to open his mouth, his lip quivered, and he looked down. He folded his hands in his lap and lowered his head. “Yes. Yes, you do. You need to know. Very well, then,” he said and looked up at me, face resolute, like he had committed at last to stepping over some line that he had sworn he would never cross.
“Sovereign is ... an incubus.”
Chapter 46
Sovereign
January 21, 2012
Minneapolis, Minnesota
They pulled into the grocery store parking lot following the little yellow Volkswagen beetle. Is this really it? Sovereign thought as they parked the car a few hundred feet behind the Volkswagen. They were both following another vehicle, a sedan, one that had just burned out of a Minneapolis neighborhood in a big hurry minutes earlier.
“Looks like they’re pulling off in this grocery store,” Weissman said. He didn’t look quite so oily today; he looked younger, was dressed in a coat and jeans, and his face didn’t look nearly as old as he was. “Any idea why?”
“Because she’s here,” said the man who had worked the last six hundred years to be known as Sovereign and not the name he was born with. “They placed a tracker on the bumper of the car she escaped in; her brother, he works for Alpha, and he’s inside explaining it all to her right now—all about metas, about our world.”
Weissman gave it a moment’s thought before pushing a stringy black lock out of his eyes. “Is she ... ?”
“Is she what?” Sovereign’s eyes never left the front of the store, with its massive orange-lettered display. “A scared seventeen-year-old? Definitely.”
“Is she a succubus?” Weissman asked. He kept his irritation in check, but Sovereign could feel it. It was there, always, stewing under the surface of Weissman’s mind. His black heart is just as dirty as his greasy hair.
“She doesn’t know,” Sovereign replied. “Her mother dressed her like she’d be one, though. Gloves, heavy clothing, all that. She even made rules about it.” He sifted around again, touched her mind. Even at a distance he could feel it, and it was unlike the ones he had felt before. Damaged? Wounded, he decided. Like me. “Mom wasn’t too kind to her, it doesn’t look like. Locked her up in a box whenever she was bad, tried to keep her contained.” Overbearing parent? I can relate to that. He felt a little surge of elation at the commonality. This could be it. It could be her, finally. After all this time.
“Wolfe’s just lurking over there next to the Beetle,” Weissman said, pointing a long, thin finger into the distance where the Volkswagen was parked. “Can’t believe he drives that thing.” He glanced over nervously. “He can’t see us, can he?”
“I wouldn’t worry about Wolfe,” Sovereign said, still staring at the front entrance.
“Hard to believe there are this many players after her and she’s only just left her house,” Weissman said.
“Omega knows what her mother is,” Sovereign said, thinking it over. “They’ve been after another succubus for years.”
“Why?” Weissman asked. “Do they know—”
“Of course they know,” Sovereign said. “They’re the ones who made the rules. Who put the constraints on our people, isolated us from other metas, pushed us out of the mainstream and acceptability. The minute Hades died, incubi and succubi became persona non grata in the meta world, and they were the ones driving the change.” He felt a slight smile come on.