The sight of the man’s face looming over her seemed to make it easier for Diana to concentrate… as her eyes focused on his face, her will focused, too. The pain and shock in her torso diminished and grew distant, as if she had succeeded in pushing it away on the first try. She found her voice.
“Do… do you got a phone?” she asked.
“I sure don’t,” he said. “If you’re fixing to make a call, better make it fast.”
“I’ve got one,” Diana said. She tried to move her arm and found it woefully unresponsive. “In my pocket. I need you to call for help.”
“That’s not what I’m here for,” the man said.
“It’s okay,” a woman’s voice said, from out of sight”above” Diana’s head, as she lay. “I’ve got a phone… and help’s already been called.”
The main straightened up and looked over Diana’s body at the newcomer. She hadn’t heard anybody approaching, hadn’t felt anything.
Just because you get shot a couple of times is no reason to be sloppy, she chided herself, and she started extending her awareness. From the position of the woman’s voice, she was between five foot nine and five foot eleven inches tall… shorter, if she was in heels. Normally, footwear would be the first thing Diana Peacock noticed on an unseen person approaching… and stride length would have given her a good approximation of height, along with the location of the heart.
Right now, Diana couldn’t hear any heartbeat above her own… which was thready and weak and impossible to shut out enough to listen for another’s.
“Do you know who I am?” the woman asked.
“I expect I will,” the man said.
“I expect you will, too, some day.”
“No, you don’t,” the man said. “Woman like you never does. No matter what you say, no matter what you tell yourself, you think you’re just going to go on going on.”
“How very zen,” the woman said. “Do you know who I work for?”
“Do you?”
There was a brief pause, in which Diana heard many half-swallowed sounds of irritation from the woman. She scuffed her foot. Heels. Stilettos.
“I’m not talking about… that,” the woman said. “That’s a sideline. I’m talking about my real boss, the power behind mine. Do you know who it is I represent?” The man didn’t respond. “Fine. Play it cool. But I’m pretty sure you do know, and right now, I need you to do me a favor.”
“I’m not known for doing favors,” the man said. “Though I expect I’ve already taken care of a problem or two of yours in my time. You’re welcome.”
“Yeah, you’ve taken care of a lot for me,” the woman said. “And you’ve taken a lot away… but none of that is here nor there because you’re going to do one thing for me right now.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It’s a prediction,” the woman said. “I don’t make many of those nowadays… I used to be famous for them once. I was an oracle, you know, but that’s a dangerous line of work these days.”
“Unpredictable,” the man said.
“Yeah. The point is that I don’t make predictions lightly. It’s best to listen when I do.”
“Been a long time since anybody threatened me,” the man said.
“I don’t do that very lightly, either,” she said. “But I do it more often than I make predictions. I need you to leave this one alone, and if you don’t… things are going to get messy.”
“You think messy bothers me?”
“I don’t mean gory,” the woman said. “I mean cluttered, untidy, disorderly.”
“How disorderly are you talking?”
“Do you know who George Romero is?” the woman asked.
“Might,” the man said. Diana had a very good view of his lower lip, and she watched it twitch.
“His movies bug you a little, don’t they?”
“Might,” the man snarled.
“I can do that,” the woman said. “All over the world. I can do that.”
“No one’s got that kind of power,” the man said.
“No one has that kind of power, but that’s because every time somebody gets it, someone comes along and takes it away from them before they can fuck the world over with it,” she said. “I’ve been doing that kind of thing for a long time now. I’ve got a lot of power lying around that I don’t ever plan on using.”
“But you expect me to believe you would use it, on behalf of someone you don’t even know,” the man said.
“Not for him,” she said. “For me.” Diana could practically hear the woman’s eyes narrowing as she said the next bit. “Like I said, you’ve taken a lot away from me over the years. I’m taking this one thing back.”
There was silence while Diana felt the world slipping away from her. Everything but the pale man was getting fainter and farther away. She felt cold, very cold… colder than she’d felt since learning how to reject the illusions of the material world on a snowy mountainside.
This was it. While some kind of preternatural pissing contest was happening over her body, Diana was dying… she couldn’t deny it any longer.
Then the pale man said, “Fine, have her. I don’t want her,” and she was back. “But you and I are gonna meet again.”
“Next time, maybe you’ll know my name,” the woman said. Diana turned her head and craned her neck and saw the slitted bottom of a black dress, and behind that black stockings embroidered with black vines and crows on them.
“Already do,” the man said. “Maybe if you were a touch more respectful, you would know it.”
Diana sat up, only realizing after she’d started the motion that her body was no longer telling her it was injured. She had the nasty graze on her arm, but nothing in her stomach or chest. A shadow fell over her.
“Goddess, I hope you’re Agent Seven,” the woman in the black dress said, coming around and offering a gloved hand to Diana. She was wearing a church hat complete with veil that was utterly at odds with her eveningwear attire, and carrying a big black parasol.
“You aren’t Zero, are you?” Diana asked, not really guessing the woman was. She’d never detected any hint of electronic alteration on the male voice that sometimes gave her mysterious orders through her phone.
“I’m afraid not,” the woman. “Trinity Night, at your one-time service.”
“Which one are you?”
“You said it, sister,” Trinity said. “Agent One.”
“Were you the first one recruited?” Diana asked. “Did he recruit you personally?”
“No, I was recruited by Agent Two to replace the old Agent One. Look, let me make this easy on you… I don’t know anything more about him than you do,” Trinity said.
“That was what he meant when he said you don’t know who you work for,” Diana said. “The pale dude, I mean.”
“I’m afraid so. Did you understand anything else of what just happened?”
“I’ve got a theory,” Diana said. “Not sure how much I like thinking about it.”
“Don’t think about it, then,” the woman said. “Really. Don’t. You had a bad scrape and you pulled through. Don’t look more deeply than that.”
“Is this part of the deal?” Diana asked. “If I… have another bad scrape, are you going to come and do that whole thing again?”
“I really doubt it would work a second time,” Trinity said. “And it’s only coincidence that I happened to be available and in the area. I’m not exactly ‘on call’ for Zero… I have a lot of fires in the iron at any given moment. Anyway, I really wouldn’t expect him to take extraordinary efforts to preserve his agents if he doesn’t have an immediate purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” she said. “I’m not the first One. Anyway, it was nice meeting you,” she said, sticking out a gloved hand again. Diana shook it. “I think you’re the last one I hadn’t. Anyway, I’m sure you have things to do. I know if I’d just been put into a bad scrape by somebody, I’d be looking for some bloody vengeance.”
She turned and started to walk off, leaving Diana a little flabbergasted. It had been shocking enough to face a shooter she couldn’t “read” well enough to avoid, and then to find herself… then having… well, that was still a bit much to process, but, basically, having all that happen on top of it…
It was a little disorienting.
But one thing that Trinity had said caught in her brain a second too late, as the other woman reached a plain black door and opened it.
The only one I haven’t met.
Diana knew Agent Eight very well, and through him Agent Nine. The others were a mystery to her.
“Wait!” Diana called to Trinity as the woman stepped through the door and started to pull it closed. “Who are the others?”
The door clicked shut. There was a sort of finality about the sound, and Diana instantly lost all interest in following the woman through it, though her fierce curiosity about Zero and the rest of the Circle of Ten remained.
“I can’t do anything about that now,” she told herself. “But I can find the bitch who shot my arm.”
She’d heard enough of Bulletina’s conversation with her handler to know where she was staying. That was a start.
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