"No." I didn't look away, exactly, but neither did I look toward her.

"Uh huh." She bored in on me and stepped back into the kitchen, peering through the tiny pa.s.s-through that looked out into the living room. "You guys break up?"

I sat down and tugged at my jeans, which felt tight, restrictive and hotter than they had any right to be considering how low the air conditioner had been set in here. I'd feel the electricity bill this month, I bet. "No. Not exactly." She stared through the little square hole at me, not looking away. "We had a fight."

Her face disappeared, but her voice was still loud. "Lemme guess: about touching."

I felt my lower lip jut out, puckering. "What else would we fight about?"

"Couples fight about lots of things, sweetie." Her voice came from the kitchen, over the clanging of a pan. "But succubi tend to argue about one, if they're crazy enough to be part of a couple."

"You calling me crazy?" I said it with an air of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Little bit. You are just like me, after all." I caught a grin through the pa.s.s-through and then I heard water pouring down the drain in the sink. A minute later Charlie emerged from the kitchen. "I mean, there's a whole world of men out there. You don't really have the luxury of sleeping with the ones you like and expecting them to be alive in the morning, so..."

I looked away from her. "Yeah. I know it, he knows it, but it still makes us both crazy." She sat down on the couch next to me, splaying out and putting her bare feet on the gla.s.s coffee table I'd bought as a replacement for the one broken months ago. "How do you deal with that?"

She had her mouth open, her tongue rolling over her molars, the very picture of disinterest. "You don't sleep with the ones you don't want to die, and you don't get close enough to anybody to have it matter."

"I just...I'm sick of being the world's greatest tease to my boyfriend. He's a good guy, and..." I stopped as her chest jerked in a case of the giggles. "What?"

"You don't have to be a tease. I mean, there are other ways to*"

"Well, yeah, I mean, I know but*" I stuttered as I answered her.

"Just making sure. I wouldn't have expected your mom to teach you anything."

I blushed. "She didn't. But I mean, I know stuff*"

"Sure you do, sweets. Sure you do." Charlie slapped me on the thigh and clicked her tongue against her teeth. "So are we going out to eat or what? Cause I'm starving and I poured the Ramen down the sink."

"What?" I blinked, still thinking about what we'd been talking about a sentence before. "Oh, sure."

"Your treat, right?" She gave me a wide grin. "Not all of us have high-paying gigs with the meta cops. The rest of us have to make our money honestly, and I blew the last of my cash getting back into town. Haven't had a chance to stop by the...ATM...yet."

"Sure." I nodded at her and reached for my purse, which was hanging at my side. "My treat. There's a Greek place over in Eden Prairie that's really good*" My attention was caught by the sudden ringing from my bag. "Sorry." I grabbed my cell phone and answered it while Charlie looked on with an eyebrow raised. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Are you off-campus?" Ariadne's voice was clipped, urgent, washed out slightly by the connection.

"Yeah." I looked around the living room. "I'm just at my house, checking to make sure everything's still all right."

"I need you at Headquarters immediately." Her voice was pinched, more hurried than usual. "The Director and I need to speak with you."

"Umm." I swallowed, heavy. "Is this about*"

"I'm not going to discuss it on an open line. Report to the Director's office in forty-five minutes." I heard a click and looked at the screen of my phone. She'd hung up on me.

I looked up to see Charlie staring at me, her head slanted to the side. "About this Greek place?"

I felt the tension in my guts and wondered if I was about to get a thorough a.s.s-chewing back at the Directorate. "I can't. I just got called back to work."

Charlie's jaw dropped slightly and then twisted to a kind of cold disbelief. "I just threw out the Ramen."

"I'm sorry." I put my phone back in my purse and my hand pushed my hair behind my ears before it fell over my eyes. "I have to go." My hand came out with ten crisp twenty-dollar bills and I handed them to her. "This should cover dinner and a little more. I'm sorry to leave so abruptly, but*"

Her eyes lit up and she took the money a little quicker than I would have thought. "It happens." She tossed her hair over her shoulder and bit her lip as she counted the bills.

"How long are you in town this time?" I tried to catch her eyes, but they were on the money still.

"Not sure." Casual indifference. Great. "A day or two, maybe more, maybe less." She smiled, oddly infuriating me. "You know how it is. Sometimes I get the call and I have to get outta town."

"Yeah, maybe you can explain how that works to me sometime." I laced it with irony. "I need some help, when we get a chance, you know, keeping them under wraps*"

"Pfffff." She turned her exhalation into a full-blown insult by rolling her eyes at the same time. "We've been over this. You absorbed them, not vice versa. It's not that hard. You just make them do what you want them to do. It's your body, not theirs. If they give you any flack, tell them to sit down and shut up, that it's your head and you'll run it however you please."

I pondered how to explain to her how powerful Wolfe could be when he wanted to a.s.sert himself. The drug that Dr. Zollers had put me on helped keep him on a leash, along with some other pointers about building a wall in my head that Charlie had given me over the last few months, but I didn't feel like it was enough. He was still back there; I could feel him sometimes, and I hated it. "All right. I gotta go."

"Call me, kiddo. We'll do lunch sometime." She winked at me and started toward the bedroom.

"Just make sure you do the dishes before you leave." She stopped in the hallway and shot a look back at me, a little frown with a slanted down eye that made me wish I hadn't said anything. "You left them in the sink last time and I didn't find them for a week."

"Ugh, fine, yes, Mom." She said it with a laugh and another roll of the eyes. "Tell your bosses I said hi."

"Yeah, right. Because you want the Directorate to know about you."

"h.e.l.l no. I'd like to remain far off their radar, if you please." She tugged on her waistband. "They've probably got a file on me. You should check sometime."

"I don't think so," I said. "They don't have any record of my mom having a sister."

"Uh huh. If you were the suspicious sort, you might think something of that * like I was lying?"

I started toward the door. "I don't think you're lying, Charlie."

"Why's that? Doesn't everyone in the meta world want a piece of you? Having someone pretend to be your aunt when you still don't totally know who to trust? Seems like kind of a winning strategy to get close to you, if it worked." She was stock still, waiting for me to respond.

"You're right." I opened the door. "But that's the problem, isn't it?" I smiled at her and a puzzled look crossed her face. "You may be my aunt, but I don't trust anybody."

I caught a flash of a smile from her as I backed out the door. "Heh. You really are just like me. See ya later."

I closed it behind me, stepping out onto the warmth of the porch, and felt the heat pervade me again. "Guess it runs in the family."

Chapter 5.

I wondered if I was in trouble the whole way back to the Directorate, pondering if the man in charge (Old Man Winter, we called him, because he was old, a frost giant, and his name was Erich Winter) was going to run me through the mill for what I'd done to one of his stars. I parked in the Headquarters building and took the elevator straight from the garage to the top floor, where his office was. It was still sunny out when I arrived, in spite of the fact that it was nine o'clock at night. And ninety degrees. I love Minnesota.

It was d.a.m.ned quiet when I knocked on the door, and a m.u.f.fled call of "Come in," was followed by the door swinging open to reveal Glen Parks, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. I checked to make sure I was in the right place. Old Man Winter was sitting at his desk, his back to the window, gray hair and cold blue eyes visible even at this distance. Ariadne was at his shoulder, but her clothing had changed since I had seen her on the grounds earlier. Her red hair was pulled back and her blouse was white.

Parks moved aside for me to enter and I blinked as I stepped into the office. Scott Byerly and Kat Forrest were seated in the chairs in front of Old Man Winter's desk, Kat still looking slightly washed out, and Scott was quiet, his fingers resting on his chin, eyes forward. "Looks like the party started without me." I clutched the strap of my purse a little tighter, wondering if I was about to get smacked down. No one said anything.

Scott stood as I approached the desk, offering me his seat. I smiled and shook my head, then turned my concentration back to Ariadne and Old Man Winter, who both stared at me, Old Man Winter with his usual stoic calm, Ariadne intense, her eyes almost on fire. Scott found his way back into the seat and the silence continued, unabated, as I shifted my weight between my feet for the next thirty seconds or so, hoping someone would say something before I had to resort to small talk.

"I suppose you're wondering why we called you all here." Ariadne was the one that spoke, the lines visible at the corners of her eyes.

Kat and Scott exchanged a look with each other. Kat sat up straighter in her seat, her eyes a little wide. "Um...because Sienna nearly killed Eve?"

"I didn't..." I stopped myself just in time. I didn't look at Old Man Winter. "It was an accident."

"Unfortunately, we don't have time to hash over training accidents at the moment." Did I detect a note of regret and acrimony in Ariadne's voice on that one? Her mouth remained a severe line. "We have other business." She looked over Kat's shoulder to Parks.

I turned to look at our trainer and he stepped forward, a folder in his hand. "In the last twenty-four hours there were a string of convenience store robberies from Gillette, Wyoming across the Interstate 90 corridor in South Dakota that have caught our attention."

Scott snorted, and when we all looked at him, his face went red. "Sorry. It's just funny to hear I-90 described as a corridor. It's a big, long stretch of dusty plains and nothing."

Parks stepped between us and set the folder on the desk, opening it to reveal some photos. "Corridor or not, this could be a problem. No fatalities so far, but there were a.s.saults during each of the robberies. The one in South Dakota included an a.s.sault on a local police officer. Several concussions for the store clerks, some trouble remembering what happened, including the a.s.sailant, who," he coughed, "appears to have overpowered all the victims without a weapon." He pointed to one of the photos. "This clerk was lucky: his head nearly went through the counter, but he lived."

I stared at the picture he indicated. The shelves behind the counter were trashed, the gla.s.s broken, and blood stains ran in a circular splatter down the surface. It looked like whatever had happened had been painful. "You think it's a meta."

Parks paused before answering. "Yeah. It's the Sherriff's Deputy in Draper that puts it over the top for us. He was knocked out before he could draw a weapon or react. That's not normal. a.s.suming he was following procedure, he wouldn't have let someone get so close to him." He looked at each of us in turn. "We've seen this sort of pattern before. It's probably a young meta, a junior h.e.l.lion who's getting hold of his oats, thinks he's a bada.s.s, not quite ready to cross into the realm of killing just yet, but getting there."

"Probably dangerous if cornered," Ariadne said, leaning on the desk with both hands. "M-Squad is being dispatched to help some of our agents from the Texas branch deal with a severely dangerous meta that's wreaking havoc in western Kansas, and our other agents are on a.s.signments, which leaves us with no one to follow up on these incidents."

I perked up and saw Scott and Kat do the same. "No one?" My question was tentative, and I was reminded of the times when I would get Mom to break her rigid and inflexible rules. I called those occasions miracles, because they didn't happen very often.

Ariadne's mouth became a thin line. "We're strained. Meta activity is up * way up. We're spending a lot of time chasing ghosts lately * things that don't pan out." She brought a hand up to push her hair back and I caught a glimpse of something, written hard across the faded lines of her face. Ariadne wasn't old, more like middle age, but in that moment she sure as h.e.l.l looked it. "We have no one else to send, and this needs to be followed up on. Congratulations." Her eyes bored into each of us in turn. "You're up."

"This is serious business," Parks said, his arms folded as he stood apart from Ariadne and Old Man Winter. "You're not kids anymore and I vouched for you, told *em you're ready to give it h.e.l.l. Don't take any stupid chances, and watch each other's backs."

I swallowed my excitement. "What do want us to do, exactly?"

Ariadne exchanged a look with Parks. "The last robbery was about three hundred miles south of the Twin Cities, at six o'clock this morning, in Owatonna, Minnesota."

"I know where that is." Scott was awake with a little excitement. "They've got an awesome outdoors store down there*"

"You're not going down there to go shopping." Ariadne cut him off without mercy. "You're going down there to ask questions and establish a direction to head." She opened a packet and slid the contents across the desk to us. I saw my face on a driver's license, as well as one for Scott and Kat. There were also three leather holders that looked a lot like wallets, but when I picked one up and flipped it open it held the credentials of an FBI Agent named Katrina Ahern, with a picture of Kat.

I held it up and dangled it in the air in mild surprise. "Impersonating a federal agent is a felony."

Ariadne met my stare, grim and serious. "It's real. Your names and pictures are in the FBI database and you'll pa.s.s muster unless you do something deeply stupid. My advice?" She let a little half-smile loose as she said it.

"Don't do anything deeply stupid," I said, staring at the FBI ID with my picture in it. "You said these are real*"

"They'll even get you into an FBI field office if you had some reason to go there," Parks said. "I wouldn't recommend it, though, because you'll likely have to answer questions you won't want to. These are so you can bypa.s.s local law enforcement if they give you any guff, and to get civilians to answer your questions. Now, you all look like friggin' kids, but we'll dress you up professionally and that oughta take care of most of the problem."

I stared at the Driver's License with my picture on it. I wondered idly why I'd been given it, then realized it fit my new name, Sienna Clarke. I also noticed it added about five years onto my birthdate. I tried not to think about the implications of being twenty-three years old in a single stroke.

"All this is part of your cover story." Ariadne's voice snapped me out of my thoughts. "You're rookie agents, chasing down leads on a robber that's crossed interstate lines."

"What happens if we run across the real agents who are investigating it?" I asked because I was curious. I had a feeling it would be bad.

Parks smiled. "According to the FBI's computers, agents Clarke, Green and Ahern," he nodded at each of us in turn, "are the only ones a.s.signed to this case. Your only issues will be the ones you make for yourselves, which is why Ariadne was cautioning you not to make a spectacle."

"So you want us to track this guy down?" Kat looked a little confused. "Catch him or kill him...?"

"Capture, please." Ariadne's tone turned to ice. "If things escalate, we'll examine other options, but for now it's capture only. While the robber has used brutal means, as yet he or she hasn't caused serious, lasting harm to any of the victims. Like Parks said, we suspect a teenager, manifesting their powers and getting out of control with the taste of freedom they're experiencing."

She drew herself up, removing her hands from the desk and tucking them behind her back. "This is their tipping point. If we act quickly, we can save them and bring them back here. If you screw it up, they go the other way, become a criminal for life and either spend time in our Arizona facility or end up dead."

"You'll draw weapons from the armory in case things get out of hand." Parks was stern as he said it. "Just make sure you aren't the ones who make it go that way."

Ariadne shot a look at Parks. "They're all qualified to carry a sidearm?" After he nodded, she went on. "Remember that your best weapon is yourselves. You'll leave within the hour. Pack a bag and be prepared to be gone for a week or more. Any questions?" She waited for us to ask anything, but none of us did. "Keep your cell phones on you at all times. I expect progress reports every three hours while you're awake, even if it's only something as mundane as *We stopped to pee at a gas station'. If we suffer from anything on this excursion, it will be overcommunication, not under." She glared at each of us in turn. "And no fighting amongst yourselves."

"It's been like...months, since any of us fought," I said.

"And keep your temper in check." Ariadne looked daggers at me. "Are we clear?"

"Like Saran wrap, but without the flexibility." I smiled at her.

"You are being entrusted with a responsibility that is most serious." Old Man Winter finally broke his silence, leaving behind the role of set piece that he so often cultivated during meetings and gracing us with his deep, thickly accented voice. It was so smooth he could have been on the radio, but it was intimidating too, the way it spilled out, with more authority than anyone else I'd met. "This is your first step out of training. Agent Parks has a.s.sured us that the three of you are ready, but remember that you are still being tested, that you are not yet agents. Succeed and follow the rules and this can be a significant mark in your favor; fail and we will have to evaluate how effective your training has been."

His ice cold gaze fell on Kat first, causing her to shudder, then on Scott. "Be careful and achieve your objective. This is your chance." His eyes fell on me last of all, and I felt a freezing chill as he looked through me. "Do not fail us."

Chapter 6.

"Can you believe this?" Scott slapped the steering wheel as we cruised out the front gate of the Directorate an hour or so later. "This is it! Finally, the big time!"

Kat gave him a weak smile from the pa.s.senger seat, but she didn't say anything. I was stretched out across the seat behind them, supposed to sleep first so I could drive later if need be. It had been a long day, filled with more emotion than I had wanted it to contain. I checked my phone for the thousandth time since Zack had left. Still not a word, a text message, anything. We'd had fights before, but this one was different. He'd never not talked to me afterward. I chalked it up to him catching a flight and hoped he'd call me when he landed.

"Isn't anybody else as excited about this as I am?" Scott's disbelief was edging into his enthusiasm. He looked at Kat, who shrugged, then turned to me. "What about you?"

I yawned. "It's a h.e.l.l of an opportunity. Let's not screw it up, lest we get six more months of running around the woods, trying to subdue members of M-Squad without hurting them badly."

"About that," Kat said, turning to face me. "You got your head on straight? Not gonna go crazy and flatten this meta we're chasing, are you?"

"Let's catch him first," I said, "then I'll worry about whether I'm gonna put the severe hurt on him or not. After all, we're basically heading to some town in the middle of nowhere hoping there's a clue that will lead us on to the next place this person's gonna strike."

"Criminals are dumb." Scott turned the SUV onto US Highway 212, heading east. "It wouldn't surprise me."