Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,42

metas, building their strength, and...given their history, probably up to no good.”

“No, seriously.” I let out a short laugh. “What are they up to? What’s their objective?”

Reed sighed. “I don’t know. No one does. We just know they’re making power moves, collecting metas...kinda like the Directorate, but even more shadowy, if that’s possible.”

“I don’t love the sound of that,” I said.

“You’re telling me.” Charlie spoke up, bringing the car to a squealing stop at a red light. “I’ve tangled with their sweep teams before – they’re the ones they send out to bring in metas they want to talk to.” She laughed. “They’re a fun bunch, but they oughta stick to catching newbies; kids that have just manifested and don’t know what they’re doing.”

I stared at the laptop cradled in my hands. “Why does Omega have a safehouse in Eau Claire?”

“Because the Twin Cities is too hot for them.” Reed’s answer came with a cringe in his voice. “Minneapolis or St. Paul would be too close to the Directorate. Eau Claire’s only an hour away, and a few hours from Chicago, where they have a lot bigger presence.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why have a presence up here at all? What are they hoping to accomplish?”

“Tracking metas,” Charlie said. “Just like you guys. Track ‘em and collar ‘em, recruit the ones that seem promising. It’s all anybody does nowadays, keep snatching up every unattached meta out there.”

“What’d you find in the safehouse?” Reed leaned forward and I felt his hand on the back of my seat.

“A guy with a couple snakes lying on the kitchen floor, dead.”

Reed frowned. “The guy or the snakes?”

“All of them,” I said. “Looks like the snakes grew from his shoulder blades. Kinda creepy.”

“Sounds like a Zahhak,” Reed said, exchanging a look with Charlie, who nodded.

“What’s a Zahhak?” I wrinkled my forehead.

“Look it up on Wikipedia sometime; it’s a pretty scary meta to go up against.” He entered a pensive state, his fingers resting over his mouth. “They’re pretty rare, but I heard Omega has one – or had one, I suppose.”

“Why have they been after me?” I turned to question Reed on this one, and when I looked at him, his expression was suddenly pained, a twisted grimace. “You know, don’t you?” He nodded, slow, not looking away. “Why are they after me?”

“They’re not after you, specifically.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve never been the end to them, always the means. They’re after your mom.”

I exchanged a look with Charlie, who seemed surprised. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I think she knows something...something from when she was with the Agency – you know, the government group that was destroyed before the Directorate came onto the scene?” I nodded. I knew Mom had been at the Agency with Old Man Winter before I was born. “Anyway, something happened that has a lot of people scouring for her.”

I turned back to Charlie. “Do you know what it is?”

She let out a long cackle. “Your mom and I aren’t on what you’d call ‘speaking terms’. I haven’t talked to her since way before you were born.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She turned the steering wheel to bring us into the parking lot of a hotel that was shaped like a giant, round cylinder. “She didn’t like the way I did things and I didn’t care for the way she told me to run my life.” She pulled the car into a parking spot just outside the lobby and gave me another lazy shrug. “So I told her what she could do with her opinions and we didn’t really need to talk after that, cuz it’d all been said.”

“Can’t imagine what she might have taken issue with,” Reed said under his breath.

Charlie shot him a searing look and jerked her head toward the lobby. “We should get rooms here for the night, unless you want your friends to continue sleeping in the back of the car.” She turned around and saw Kat’s head in Scott’s lap. “Although she seems comfortable there.”

I checked us in to four rooms, using the Directorate credit card for two of them and my personal card for the other two. As I swiped it through their reader, I was reminded that I needed to call Ariadne and make a report, since Scott and Kat were unlikely to do so in the next few hours. Once I was done, I hurried back to the car and Charlie drove us to the outside entrance nearest to