“Not quite ‘Getting locked in a metal box’ trouble,” I said before leading her out the door, “but close.”
As I made my way down the hallway, I could hear her behind me, stalking along, keeping pace. The beige carpeting and white walls were uniform and boring with only a few wall-hung decorations to break the monotony. I took a left and opened the rear door where a suited agent nodded at me before I stepped outside into the cold. I wasn’t wearing my coat because I’d left it inside without thinking.
My mother followed behind me a few steps, sauntering into the chill air and taking a deep breath, which frosted in front of her as she exhaled. “Well, here we are.”
“Here we are,” I said. “Again.”
We stared at each other in tense silence for a minute until she spoke. “So ... are we going to fight?”
I nodded. “I think so. Unless you want to stop challenging my authority at every turn.”
“If your ideas weren’t the product of an eighteen-year-old’s idiotic idealistic notions, maybe I wouldn’t have to challenge them constantly.” She kept her hands out, evenly spaced. She didn’t look tense, but I knew she was wary, prepared for me to attack her. I wasn’t going to make it that easy on her, though, when the moment came.
“First of all, none of them are final, just brainstorms—”
“Your brainstorms aren’t exactly getting me wet, if you’ll pardon the—”
“Gross,” I said. “I have a job to do, one I’m taking seriously. I understand you don’t want to be here—”
“That’s an understatement,” she said, cutting me off. “If I weren’t presently being blackmailed by the U.S. government into helping you try and teach a pig how to fly, I’d be so deep underground that one poorly-placed shovel from a Chinese farmer would unearth me.”
“So go,” I said, throwing my arms wide. “I know Foreman says he’ll come after you, but I’m the one in charge of metahuman policing and you know what? I don’t have the manpower to waste on your old ass right now.” I threw the ‘old ass’ part in as a dig just to piss her off. It’s what I do.
She hesitated and I caught her looking slightly down as if she could see her own ass. She caught me watching her, and I’m pretty sure I had at least a slightly satisfied smile. “He’ll alert every border crossing, warn every department. They snagged me this time without meta help; I’m standing in a train station in New Mexico and bam! Fifteen men with guns surround me in a half moon: no escape without a ton of bullets perforating me. Probably would have killed me.”
“Aren’t you the one who told me to avoid confining spaces?” I said with a grin. “You know, when you weren’t throwing me into them to prove your superiority?”
“Very clever,” she sniffed. “How did they catch you?”
“Pretty much how they caught you. Ambushed me in customs coming back from England.”
“Where you took over Omega,” she said, and this time it was an icy glare. “Do you have any idea what that organization has done to our family?”
“You mean other than killing your father?” I sniped back, almost gloating.
She looked like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. “They ... what?”
“Simon Nealon,” I said and started to slowly circle her. She looked stunned, stunned enough that she didn’t move to counter me and maintain equidistance as she would have normally. “They sent an assassin after him because he knew about Wolfe, about some of their deep dark secrets.”
She looked flabbergasted, absolutely uncertain. “I ... didn’t know they did that. My mother ... she spent her last days with an Omega operative—”
“Oh?” I gave her a disinterested look. “Why?”
“Because he was incubus and he could touch her,” she snapped.
“Oh, God!” I said, something snapping into place. “Fries? She slept with Fries?”
My mother gave me a nasty smile. “Looks like you have something in common, doesn’t it? It’s why I didn’t bludgeon him to death when last we met. He didn’t kill her, and he did make her last days a little easier. His payment was that she spilled the beans about me and Charlie, told him all about us, our upbringings, everything.”
“Meanwhile, they killed your dad,” I said.
“They gave me a fair amount of hell in my Agency days, too,” she said. “I ran across Wolfe a couple times, and it wasn’t much fun for me either round.” She looked down. “But that was nothing compared to the last time, the time that you—”