“Yeah, sure,” Clary said, and after a moment, he spoke again. “Say, you weren’t telling me to boot up the computer because you’re sick of hearing me tell stories, are you? Because I figured none of you were talking because you thought they were interesting.”
“If you could just go ahead and start it up—” Scott began.
“You really didn’t think that, didn’t you?” Clary said, and I could hear the rising disbelief. “Y’all are assholes. At least when Bastian and Parks want me to shut up, they come out and say it.”
“Shut up, Clary,” Reed said, his arms folded in front of him.
“Hey, you can’t talk to me like that, Alpha dog.”
“Sure I can, Beta dog,” Reed said. “Pretty sure I just did, in fact. What are you so pissed about? You told me to come out and say it, so I did.”
“Yeah, like an hour late.”
“More like four hours,” Scott said from the driver’s seat.
I felt Clary seething behind me as Scott took us off the exit ramp and into a neighborhood that didn’t look that different from the one I had lived in back in Minneapolis; tall oaks jutting skyward around us, red leaves falling and clogging the gutters, filling the channels on both sides of the street. The houses were older but not in bad shape, for the most part. Some were stucco, some siding, with the occasional brick facade just to break up the monotony. The lawns were all beginning to turn brown, the cool weather leeching the lively green from them as a signal that vitality and warmth were retreating for the season.
Older cars were parallel parked at the sides of the streets. The houses were built high off the road on either side of us. They had no front yards to speak of; instead a concrete terrace came four feet above the sidewalk, with a staircase in front of each house that led up to front porches. The whole place had the feel of a valley, with the houses overlooking the street.
“Omega put a safe house here?” Kat idly mused from the front seat. “Why?”
“If they’re recruiting metas like the Directorate,” Reed said, “it helps to have operations all over the map. That way, say a meta in Sioux Falls manifests and you get wind of it, you can dispatch someone to get to them before anyone else does.” He shrugged. “It makes a difference when you’re building an army.”
“An army?” I paused and turned my head to favor him. “Alpha doesn’t have safe houses all over the U.S., do they?”
“Nope,” Reed said with a casual shrug. “They have intermediaries like me to keep an eye on things, to try and get to any really powerful metas that come to our attention; our main focus is Europe. We’re really more of a token presence here, though, trying to watch Omega’s North American operations rather than offer any serious interdiction efforts.”
“Well,” Clary said, leaning forward over my shoulder, causing me to almost gag from the stink of his breath, which smelled like rotten fish, “you better watch and learn, Alpha dog, because we are about to do some serious interdicting.” He giggled, a low-pitched sort of thing that reminded me of the time I’d heard Scott choke on a hotdog in the cafeteria.
“Interdiction means interfering or stopping,” Reed said, looking at Clary with undisguised disgust.
“Well, we’re gonna do that too,” Clary said with a nod.