Power(12)

Marius smacked his dry lips together and then licked them before taking up the piece of cheese again. He’d dropped it in his frenzy. His breathing had almost returned to normal, and he could swear he smelled the faint hint of smoke from the old man’s fire.

Every day was like this.

See you tomorrow, the voice whispered in his ears, fading as though the speaker was going into the distance, walking over a hill toward the horizon. She’d be back, though. She always came back.

“Yes, Mother,” Marius said, low enough that he hoped not even the animals could hear him.

She always came back. That was her defining characteristic. Mostly it seemed to happen when he was around people, this constant, grating sense in the back of his mind that she would be there. She would always be with him. She would continue to make him look mad, provoke him, drive him into scorn and scrutiny.

He looked around the barn, took a deep breath of the air of his home. “I need to leave,” he whispered, and deep inside he knew the truth of it. Here he was unwelcome, in this small place, where everyone knew him and his madness. But perhaps somewhere else, where no one knew him …

The answer came to him, just like that. Somewhere big. Somewhere that no one would know him, no one would see him.

Rome.





Chapter 6


Sienna

Now





I drifted in dream, feeling heavy in thought and mind. It almost felt like I was experiencing fever dreams, as if an excess of thought was causing my head to spin and my body to break into the waking world every few minutes to turn over on my couch.

The world was dim around me, and that tired feeling just stretched over me. Everything held a familiar, dreamlike quality, and I pushed my toes against resistance beneath them and felt something grainy. It felt like dirt, and I looked down in the darkness to see that it was indeed dirt between my toes.

I realized with a shock that I was standing, and that there was an earthy aroma in my nose. I glanced down to see if I was having one of those naked dreams, but let out a sigh of relief when I realized I had on pajamas. I glanced up and saw darkness before me, only a few lights illuminating the place where I stood.

There were half-built walls all around, and I looked up to see a ceiling of latticed rebar above me. I was on a construction site, and it looked awfully familiar. It took me another second to place it, and only another second after that to realize exactly what was going on. “Come out,” I told him, speaking into the darkness.

“Okay,” he said, and he was suddenly there, as though the darkness had spit him out when I wasn’t looking. “You catch on pretty quick; I was ready to wait a few minutes for you to acclimate, but boom! You figured it out seconds after coming in. What was the tip off?”

“It’s the construction site where we last met,” I said to Sovereign as he regarded me across the empty space between us. I folded my arms in front of me against my pajama shirt. The soft cotton felt good against my skin. “I don’t remember wearing this, though. Did you get to dress me for this little meet-up?”

He gave me a slight nod. “It’s the power of the dreamwalk, yeah. After a while, you figure out how to shape it to your advantage—location, the clothes your subject is wearing, how they perceive you. You, being a succubus, have more control in this situation than, say, a normal person would, but it’s still in my hands at the outset.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, and glanced down at the pajamas. They were … fluffy. “What the hell, then?”

He shrugged. “I was aiming for comfortable.”

I gave him a glare and looked him up and down. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, looking very Joshua Harding and not very Supervillain at the moment. “Then dress me normally—” I stopped and felt a flare of anger. “Actually, you know what? You shouldn’t be dressing me at all, this is appalling—”

“I’m sorry,” he said and held up his hands in surrender as he took a step closer to me. “I apologize for even coming into your dreams this way, but I needed to see you. Needed to talk to you.” He looked genuinely contrite. “I need to … to say I’m sorry for what’s happening to you right now. I didn’t know what Weissman was doing.”

That rage that had been percolating in my skull? It came out. “You didn’t know your sick friend was kidnapping me for a fun bout of torture with the two heads of Cerberus before delivering me to you in a mashed-up, quivering mess?”

“I had no idea,” he said, and a flicker of rage crossed his face. “And if he wasn’t dead, he’d be experiencing my full displeasure right now—”