Sienna looked at her through slitted eyes as the woman approached and held out her hand. Sienna stared at it for a moment, then grudgingly took it and gave it one shake before letting loose. “Hi. You know my name.”

  “I do,” Penny said, the smile not missing a beat. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Not to skip over the pleasantries, but … why am I here?” Sienna asked. Her bare arms were folded in front of her, and she’d left her jacket in the car. The gun on her hip seemed like a message.

  “Because you accepted an invitation to investigate a meta-related curiosity.” Penny’s amusement was genuine, twisting her lips as though she were trying to contain a laugh. “And look—here’s one now. A whole town of us metas, smack dab in the middle of Texas.” Penny’s drawl was unmistakable.

  “You’ve been here a little while, then?” Sienna asked, not warming up, but … she was so young. Curiosity oozed out in spite of her desire to maintain a thorny facade. “With that accent, you’re not a recent transplant.”

  Penny’s smile turned more genuine. “Nope. Been here a good long while.” She turned around, looking out the far end of town toward the green fields in the distance. “As you can see … we’ve done what we can here to turn things a mite more pleasant. Bring the fields of home to the fields of … well, nothing.”

  “You the mayor, then?” Sienna asked, her tone bordering on indifference.

  “We do more of a council thing here,” Penny said, and her guard was up, too. Penny had dealt with difficult people before, Sophie knew. Hell, her whole history was dealing with difficult people, starting with one of the most intractable that had ever lived. She made a gesture to the people behind her. “You want to stand there and glare, or you want me to make some introductions?”

  “I can do both,” Sienna said.

  Penny almost chortled. “Good grief. Yes, I imagine you can. All right, then.” She turned to the first fellow on her left, a dark-skinned man who was tall, formidable, and who looked like he’d never smiled in his life. He wore a white shirt and black slacks, even in this heat, and his tie was perfectly crisp. “This is our … sheriff, I guess you could say—Anbay.”

  Sienna snorted. “Middle Eastern God of Justice … and now he’s a small-town sheriff in Texas. There’s some irony there, not well buried.”

  Anbay inclined his head. “I would shake your hand,” he said, words still softly accented, “but I think you don’t care, and I like my soul and powers right where they are.”

  “You can always tell the people who’ve been living a while by the risks they run,” Sienna said. “That’s smart. A handshake doesn’t much impress me, so why even bother burning some of that valuable skin touch time. I’m guessing you’d make a good big city cop—or an army officer.”

  Anbay did not budge. “I have done both in my time.”

  “Of course you have,” Sienna said, and she looked at the next of them. “Who’s this?”

  Penny, watching the whole exchange with eyebrows raised in amusement, turned to the next in line. “This is Ang.” The man she indicated was dressed in a much more casual style and looked to be in his thirties. He had what they called these days ‘dad bod,’ though Sophie remembered when it was just called soft living. His Persian ancestry was hinted at in his skin tone, and his posture was a slouch that made Sophie want to slap him in the back to get him to stand up straight.

  Sienna stared at him for a second. “Would that be … Angra Mainyu? Persian God of … well, all hell breaking loose?”

  “You’ve studied your mythology,” Ang said, similarly not extending a hand. Sienna seemed to take this in, only a flash of her eyes to mark her observation. “Very impressive.”

  “When you’re tasked with kicking the ass of any mythological a-hole that turns up and causes trouble, it helps to know a thing or two about them,” Sienna said. “Myth says you brought intemperate weather, darkness, plague, a long winter and smoke to ancient Persia. That’s a lot for a single meta.”

  “My legend is … exaggerated, perhaps,” Ang said with a thin smile. “Or perhaps not. Who can say?”

  Sienna’s look got even more guarded. “Well, you could, but the fact you’re not being forthcoming tells me a little something about your intentions here, so …”

  “You can’t blame anyone for not being excited to talk about their powers to a succubus,” Penny said. “I mean … we’re welcoming you in here, but … old habits. I hope you understand.”

  “And I hope you get around to explaining,” Sienna said, “you know, after the introductions. Lemme help you with the next one: Uncle Bjorn says hi, Modi.”

  The next one was a tall man with a shock of blond hair that had been shaved on the sides. His face was long, and usually emotionless. To this, though, he pursed his lips, and his eyes narrowed. “Tell that filth I have nothing but contempt for him,” Modi said with a thick Nordic accent.

  “I think he got the message already,” Sienna said, smirking, then turning her attention to the next man in line, a similarly tall fellow. “Are you gonna shun your uncle, too, Magni?”

  Mag was darker of hair, more open of face, and kept himself a little more classically maintained, his dirty blond locks pulled back in a tight ponytail. “He was a filthy bastard in life; I don’t imagine I have any more to say to him in death than I did then.”

  “He’s still a filthy bastard,” Sienna said. “He’s just got a smaller audience these days.” She tapped the side of her head. “So, Mag … you’re a frost giant?”

  Mag matched her posture, folding his arms in front of him. “Perhaps.”

  “Related to Erich Winter in any way?” she asked. Her eyes were ten degrees cooler than they’d been a second earlier.

  “Every Norse meta is related in some way,” Mag said. “But you have my condolences for what he did to you.”

  “Thanks,” Sienna said. “Coming from you that means … absolutely nothing.”

  “Look, Sienna,” Penny said, “we all have … plenty of fertile ground for grievance between us. Metas are long-lived, powerful beings. We run afoul of each other constantly—or we used to. It’s less the case these days—”

  “Cuz most of us were wiped out, yeah,” Sienna said. “Nothing like a genocide to clear away old grievances.”

  “It wasn’t the genocide that did it,” said the red-haired man just behind Penny. “It predates that.” He spoke with a faded Irish lilt. “It was the Great War that did it. Finally convinced us that our day was over. Sovereign may have come in and done the deed of wiping most of us out, but our psychology changed forever after 1918.”

  “A history lesson from an Irishman,” Sienna said, staring at him shrewdly. “And a good insight, at that.”

  “This is Cu,” Penny said. Cu offered his hand, and Sienna shook it, once.

  “Gavrikov says you’re Cuchulainn,” Sienna said. “The ‘Irish Achilles.’”

  “I am indeed,” Cu said. “On all counts.” He flexed his hand.

  “Hm,” Sienna said. “Who are the guys in the back, there?”

  “That’s Men and Shen,” Penny said, nodding at the two Asian gentlemen standing behind her. They were in traditional garb, and both bowed, low, to Sienna, who registered a hint of surprise with only her eyes. Then she was back to neutral.

  Sophie and Penny exchanged a look; this girl … had been through some shit. Especially for one so young.

  “Chinese Door Gods,” Sienna said, then looked to Anbay. “Are they your deputies?”

  “Everyone’s a deputy if need be,” Anbay said, still forbidding as hell.

  “Well, Sophie,” Sienna said, looking sidelong at her, “that leaves you. And Penny.”

  “I’m no one of importance, I assure you,” Sophie said. “My place in myth is virtually unknown.”

  Penny just smiled. “What about me?”

  “What about you?” Sienna asked.

  “You want to try your guessing game with me?” Penny asked.

  “I wasn’t guessing for anyone but Anbay and Angra,” Sienna said. “Bjorn knew your Norsemen, and Gavrikov met Cu back in the day at—I dunno, a meta mixer for singles for all I care.” Her eyes glittered a harsh, steely blue in the sunlight. “Wolfe’s being real cagey right now, which means he knows you but doesn’t want to say. If you call yourself Penny, I’m gonna guess …” Her mouth tightened into a line. “… Penelope.”

  Penny nodded, almost imperceptibly. “And what do you remember of my legends?”

  “Married to Odysseus, in Homer’s account,” Sienna said. “Wise and clever. I always wondered if Odysseus was a meta, given all the crap he went through to get home to you.”

  “Odysseus was most definitely a meta,” Penny said. “No mortal man could have survived all that he went through.”

  “Yeah, by all accounts he went through hell,” Sienna said, “and all to get back to you.” She gave Penny the once over. “I wonder why.”

  Penny’s eyes flickered, but only for a moment. “He had his reasons, I’m sure. Well. Now that you … know us, Sienna Nealon—”

  “I don’t know all of you,” Sienna said. “This town … it’s built for hundreds. I’ve met nine. Are the rest hiding?”

  “Yes,” Penny said.

  “I told you this was the welcoming committee,” Sophie said.

  “So you’re here to … judge me?” Sienna asked. “To request something of me?”

  “Yes,” Penny said.

  “Which is it?” Sienna asked.

  “Both,” Penny said. “And more.”

  “Great, which comes first?” Sienna asked, and here she stirred, evincing the impatience that had been so evident in the car ride but had disappeared once they’d reached the border. “Judgment or request?”

  “Judgment always comes first,” Penny said. Now her smile was gone.

  Sienna brought her arms back, put her hands on her hips, breaking the wall she’d constructed in front of her for the first time since they’d arrived. Sophie saw it. So did the others, she knew. “You want to judge me? And then ask me for something?”

  “Yes,” Penny said.

  Sienna laughed. “How about … no.” Her brow knitted itself into a thick line.

  “What … do you mean?” Penny’s face became still, instantly.

  Sophie knew that look. All too well.

  “I mean how about we flip the script,” Sienna said, and that impatience, hinted in the car ride, bloomed into full-on anger as she set her feet, “and I judge … you.”

  25.

  Reed

  New York

  The alarm wailed in the distance as we charged over the field toward the supposedly abandoned factory. I could have taken the lead and flown over on the winds, but I needed to be at least a little careful about how crazily I threw those around, given that Greg Vansen was out here somewhere, miniaturized and flying. Me creating a tornado for him to be sucked up into wouldn’t be doing any of us—or at least not him—any favors.

  “How’d they detect us?” Augustus asked. He was talking in a normal volume, but the sound of the alarm would have drowned it out with any non-metas.

  “The electrical activity coming off Greg’s plane, or a motion sensor,” Jamal said. “Finely tuned, with enough resolution, it could probably pick him up moving at high speed.”

  “They’d have to know they were looking for small things, too, right?” Angel asked.

  “If they know metas well enough—and us,” I said, running through the field, “they’d know to look for just that.”

  There was a fence ahead, and it was a tall one, ten plus feet of chain link. Designed to keep out the riffraff, and with signs posted every few yards warning against trespassing.

  I jumped it, easily. Augustus followed, and then Angel, who seemed like she might stumble but caught herself, perfectly. Those reflexes—so enviable.

  “Um, some of us are not quite so strong and fleet of feet or whatever as you lot,” Eilish said, standing back outside the fence.

  “Yeah, I have deep insecurities from that time I almost failed gym class,” Jamal said.

  “You should have dressed out, fool,” Augustus said. “That’s literally all you had to do. Put on your gym clothes, show up, try.”

  “I didn’t want to undress in that locker room,” Jamal said. “It was humiliating. And this was before I had powers, and before ‘bullying’ was a watchword, back when it was just an assumed part of your school experience.”

  “Pipe down,” I said, and thrust both of them up over the fence with a gust apiece.

  “Whoa!” Jamal said, coming down in a rush. I kept the tornados as confined as I could, hoping Greg hadn’t decided to steer within a foot of either of their bodies at the exact moment I was bringing them over.

  “We got incoming,” Augustus said. “Fifty yards that way.” He pointed to the rising hill that separated us from the factory ahead. “They’re about to crest.”

  “You want to handle this?” I asked.

  “I s’pose I could,” Augustus said, cracking his knuckles. He squinted into the darkness, concentrating, hand extended.

  Guards were shouting over the wailing siren. The first came up over the hill, silhouetted against the shining light from the factory—

  And promptly disappeared.

  Augustus started to whistle, a slow tune that put me in the mind of Ella Fitzgerald. But one of her peppier tunes, maybe. I hardly knew them all.

  After a minute, he brushed a sleeve against his forehead, wiping away beads of sweat. It was not warm. “Okay, that’s about it for me for now.”

  “How many did you get?” Jamal asked.

  “Close to a hundred,” Augustus said. “They’re buried up to their necks in tightly packed earth. Not going anywhere for a while, and definitely not shooting at us. Their guns are all stripped away.”

  I let out a low whistle of my own. That was some precision control on Augustus’s part, trapping them like that and then ripping their weapons off to be absorbed by the soil. It was finesse way beyond what he’d had before Harmon had injected us, along with Scott Byerly, with the power enhancing serum.

  “How many does that leave us?” I asked.

  Augustus concentrated, breathing heavy. “Uhm … forty or so? Maybe fifty? I dunno, I’m kinda wiped. If y’all could handle the rest, I could really use a break.”

  “Sit down, old man,” Eilish said, “let me show you how this is done.” And she started up the hill.

  “Uhm,” I said, taking off after her. The last thing I needed was our new Irish compatriot taking a bullet to the head while trying to save all our butts from harm. “Careful, okay?”

  She waved back at me and broke into a run.

  I managed to catch her just as she crested the hill, and she took a knee, dipping in below the long grass. “Hey, you lot—would ye kindly—”

  A steady rip of gunfire drowned her out and I tackled her, thumping down on her small frame as bullets whizzed over our heads.

  “Maybe you should have done this from behind the hill,” I shouted over the thundering of shots that flew over us, the lowest of them missing by a foot or less.

  “Can’t,” she said, a little muffled from my weight atop her. “How are they going to hear me back there with all these sirens going?”

  “I’m getting you a bullhorn when we get back,” I said, rolling off her and grabbing one of her belt loops as I tried to crawl backward. “You carry it everywhere from now on.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” she said as I pulled her over the hill, creating the smallest lift beneath us—less than a half inch—to break up the ground’s resistance as I yanked us back behind the cover of the earth.

  “Okay, new plan,” I said, retreating to where the others were coming up, ducked down to avoid the enemy fire.

  “Give me a minute,” Angel said, hitting the earth and crawling forward in the grass at meta speed. She was gone in seconds.

  “What’s she gonna—” Jamal started to ask.

  Gunshots were our answer. About ten of them from just above us, then they ceased.

  It was hard to tell in the thunder of the night, because a whole lot of shooting was still coming from the factory, but it seemed … diminished somewhat.

  About thirty feet to the left of where she’d opened up the first time, Angel fired again. Another six or seven shots, then she fell silent.

  But the incoming fire against us diminished again. Noticeably, even with the ringing in my ears.

  “She’s killing a few, then speed-crawling to a new position, then killing a few more,” Jamal said.

  “Classic sniper stuff,” Augustus said. “How long you think that’s gonna last?”

  “Hopefully until she wipes out the opposition,” I said, thinking. I wanted to give her some air cover, but—

  That proved to be completely unnecessary, as an Apache helicopter appeared out of nowhere, rotors whipping in the night, unleashing an onslaught of missiles and gunfire onto the enemy below.

  “Or Greg could just do his thang,” Augustus said. “Wipe out everything. Hopefully not our friends inside—”

  “Man, the Custis family ain’t no friends of mine,” Jamal said. “They tried to put us in the pen. For life.”

  “How is it you’re so smart but you can’t understand understatement for the purposes of expressing sarcasm?” Augustus asked. “Of course the Custis family are not my friends. They’re my enemies. Only a literal minded idiot would think that I was going to hang out with them and like, have a brew or something.”

  The Apache was laying down fire over the hill, and it was impressive to behold. I was canceling out the wind from the rotors before it utterly swamped our position, leaving us nothing but the roar of sound to deal with. “On your feet, people,” I said, waving them up. “I think Greg and Angel have just about wrapped things up for us.” I squinted into the night as I strode up the hill. “Now let’s get in there and find these clowns …”

 

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