“Great,” I said, rubbing my hands over my face. “So all I have to do is make up with a woman who’s got a deep personal grudge against me, fight off a superior army, and—oh, yeah—try and make some sort of peace with my mother.” I rubbed my face harder, focusing on the bridge of my nose. “By the time this is finished, I may wish I’d taken the jail option.”
Foreman did not speak for a long minute, and when he did, it was filled with a sort of quiet authority that I would forever associate with Old Man Winter, when he was a mentor to me and not a murderer. “You’ve left a trail of bodies behind you. A series of bad decisions, heated emotions, and broken laws. You’ve made mistakes,” he said, his eyes meeting mine, and I could feel his words resonate in me. To his credit, I never once believed he was using his powers to stir me. “You are awash on a sea of blood you’ve let, paddling against the tides of fate to keep from being swept up in an even greater wash. By all rights and under normal circumstances, you would be in jail. You would be in jail for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, depending on how long you lived. You deprived people of life in the name of your own self-satisfying vengeance, and that’s not the sort of thing that the soul just callouses over and forgets about.
“But these are not normal times,” he said, and I listened to every word as the guilt crept through me in time with his almost lyrical delivery. “You have an opportunity to save yourself, and it comes in the guise of saving others. You can’t just pay for a life with a life. You’re going to have to save a hell of a lot more than one life to balance the scales for what you’ve done. Every day you wake, until this crisis is resolved, I want you to remember that you are doing the impossible. The penance for your crimes is to do what no one else has done before, to beat a man who is hell-bent on destroying our people to the very last. It is ... impossible.” His voice was filled with quiet strength, and not a whiff of desperation was present in the way he said it. “But these are not ordinary times, and you are not an ordinary person. There is something about you that is Sovereign’s weakness, something about you that no one else in all the meta world has.” He straightened, and his spellbinding words drew me in just a little further as I hung on, waiting to see what he would say next. “Find it. Find out what makes you special, find out what it is that makes you unique. Find the strength to do the impossible.” He turned and opened the door, and took his first step out. “You do that, and you’ll actually earn your redemption.” With one more step, he was carried out of view, but I still heard the last words he said, echoing down the hall.
“Save us, Sienna Nealon. Save us all, and you might just save yourself in the process.”
Chapter 11
The flight came in from England a little over a day later, a Gulfstream IV that had been modified for the seventeen of them who were left plus a hospital bed in the back for Janus. I watched them disembark as the cold winter wind of Minneapolis greeted them. It was beyond brisk, a late November kiss that I could tell from Karthik’s reaction as he stepped off the plane’s stairs was more than he was used to dealing with in London.
“Not exactly a balmy day now, is it?” Breandan said with a grin as he crossed the snowy tarmac to reach me. The Irishman’s mustache was still waxed in the oddest affectation I could remember seeing ... well, ever. He bent and gave me a hug that lifted me off the ground and I let him. He was wearing a fedora, and I patted him on the back as he set me down.
“Welcome to Minneapolis,” I said and was promptly picked up again by the next man in line. Reed’s embrace was firmer than Breandan’s and just as appreciated. He gave me a peck on the cheek as I gave him one in return, albeit brief. He pulled back from me and smiled. “It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah, it didn’t take as long as we thought it would,” Reed said, watching me cannily then looking past me to the waiting vans. “Looks like you made some new friends in the last couple days.”
I smiled. “I’m a friendly person. People are just drawn to me. They want to help me.”
“Which affirmation book did you get that out of?” Reed deadpanned.
“Sienna!” A blond streak cut through the crowd and hit me with a surprisingly firm hug.
“Kat,” I said, giving her a light squeeze in return. I would have asked her to stop, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t have done any good. No matter how many times I tried to bat her away, Kat Forrest ... or Klementina Gavrikov ... or whoever she was this week ... just couldn’t seem to stop being nice to me. It annoyed me for reasons I can’t even fully describe.