Free Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven by Robert J. Crane

them.”
    “Because they’re metas,” Janus said tightly. He hesitated, leaving something unsaid.
    I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, tight-lipped, his hands on the steering wheel. “You mean the souls I’ve taken.” He looked sidelong at me, only briefly, then nodded his head once, sharply. “Why does that matter?”
    “It matters,” Janus said. “Using the powers we metas have requires a certain amount of will. Think for a moment on the minds you have absorbed—Wolfe was a force of nature, a beast of his own sort. Gavrikov was one of the most destructive beings to ever walk the planet. Bjorn was the son of a man who proclaimed himself the God-King of the Norse. These are not your normal souls, and your introduction to your powers was not done as it usually would be, by accidentally and partially absorbing someone close to you before awakening to your abilities. You had no such warning, and the first minds you took in were ones that had more willpower than you did yourself.”
    I frowned at him. “Would it matter if I absorbed someone with less will?”
    “I don’t think you are getting the point,” Janus said, and shot me a cautious look. “You had two strikes against you, as they say. You absorbed metas, who are naturally somewhat more predisposed toward stronger will because of their abilities, and you absorbed them wholesale. That is not usual for a newly manifested incubus or succubus. Typically they would take a piece of someone first, stopping before the task is complete, giving them the ability to acclimate themselves to the … shadows, I believe your people call them—the results of a partial absorption—rather than dealing with a full and complete personality embedded within you from the start.” His expression darkened. “And not just any personality, but Wolfe’s.”
    “‘Shadows’?” I thought for a moment then concentrated hard within me, searching for something inside, a faint wisp of Ariadne’s memories. They were there, a small echo of the woman herself, a few thoughts, some sights and sounds, smells, sensory memories that I was able to peek through just as I had a few days earlier when I had absorbed them from her. There was very little there—a few memories of Eve, of Old Man Winter, a few highly personal. “You mean the part of a person that remains even if I don’t take their whole soul.”
    “Yes,” Janus said with a nod. “By absorbing just that portion, there is no battle of wills with the newly absorbed, because there is very little will that comes along with small fragments such as those. They are a mere shadow of the full person, you see? A typical succubus would learn who they are after perhaps taking a shadow or two through accidental contact with a human being in most cases. In the case of your mother and her sister, I am told they were raised to know in advance what they would likely be and were prepared. It is how your mother learned to become disciplined with her power. She had no fearsome Wolfe to face right out of the gate, she learned to control a shadow, then accumulated another and another before taking in her first soul, and by then she was fully ready for it. Charlie too, though I have only suspicions to go on there.”
    “How do you know about how my mother learned?”
    “Two ways,” he said. “One, we have her old Agency personnel file, which includes the account of her upbringing in her own words.” He gave a slight smirk. “And second, we have access to a source that complements this.”
    I let the phrase hang out there for a minute. “You mean she’s told you herself.”
    Janus let out a long laugh. “Good heavens, no. Your mother hates Omega. We clashed with her when she was at the Agency, and there is so much blood between us now that she would not voluntarily give us a drop of her spit if we told her it would save the entire world.” He shook his head. “No, the source I speak of is her mother.”
    There was a long pause,