• • The Wolf Pack
• April 14, 2024

The Wolf Pack (Chapter 37)

The Ones Who Sit at the Table

ION

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“Ion, explain this to me, exactly how it is that the Savaage is better off after everything you’ve done.”

I ignore the question, I look around the big, dark room. The lights have to be off for the holograms to work correctly, some of us can’t be here in person. I wish I wasn’t here, everyone else either doesn’t want to be here or just wants to complain and moan. I don’t much like complainers, at least not ones who complain out loud.

I turn my head from the round table to check on Hundress standing besides me. I needed to bring someone to stand in my corner. It’s strange, the Savaage has these unspoken rules that anyone who’s present has to bring a bodyguard in case. It’s a joke, there aren’t any bodyguards who couldn’t be bitch slapped by any head honcho, but still.

Well, any member except for the most powerful.

Our bank.

Yes, believe it or not, I understand the importance of the dollar.

Why was I looking at Hundress again? Oh yes, to ignore the others, and one doesn’t take it very well.

One of them actually present, uses his super speed to whip out of his seat and place his arm on my chair. Mercury Jack stands in his skin tight grey suit, with its mask and white eyes, with an orange outline of the Roman symbol for Mercury on his chest. You’d be forgiven for thinking he was one of the heroes given his fashion sense, but apparently nothing else can stand the g’s he experiences going super fast.

Mercury Jack spins me in my seat, and growls at me, “You were asked a question, now answer what the hell you think you were doing?!” He’s not the calm, cool, or collected one among us. He’s the one eagerly working towards getting himself killed.

That’s why I like pushing him.

Hundress hand tightens and I hold my hand up to her. She feels she must defend me, if I die she’s not exactly going to be spared, but I hardly need her help. I don’t need help to get under the speedster’s skin.

“Me?” I ask back with a hand over my tie, openly mocking him. “I was just doing what I promised the Savaage I would do, get what is necessary for the army.” And the cantorium, for me.

“That’s not all you were doing,” Mercury growls again, showing a clear lack of professionalism. “What did you hope to gain from plugging into the superhumans like batteries?” revealing exactly what it is he wanted to know.

I don’t lie, what’s the point of lying when the truth works so much better. People kill themselves over the truth. “Well, I was getting the power source for the army of course.”

Mercury slams his hand on the table at lightning speed, putting a hole in it. “There it is, the crux of why we’re all paying for you!” he yells at me, jabbing his little finger in my face.

You see, here’s the funny thing, getting a power source for our plans is supposed to be his job.

“I just thought you could use a little help,” I offer with a shrug of my shoulders.

I also wanted to cause trouble, and by saying what I did, I get what I want. Mercury is fuming, I wish I could snap a picture of how his whole body begins to vibrate.

“Mercury, Mercury, calm down,” asks another head at the table. Both Mercury and I look at the monster in the three piece suit sitting across from me. When I say monster, I mean that in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

His skin is so pale, pure white, but I can only see that from his mouth and his hands. He wears a mask over the top of his head. A plain wooden, red mask, that has it’s color from something other than paint. He gestures to the seat to his right, where Mercury sits.

All the whlie, he flashes his razor sharp pearls that definitley never forgets to brush.  

“Ion only wanted to help you,” he says with a pat down next to him, “come back to your seat, you must be making your friend nervous.”

Mercury Jack grumbles, and looks at the brute who stands beside his chair.

The big, tall, hulk of a man in the dark cloak doesn’t speak much, doesn’t say much, or for that matter, think much. It’s not of my creation, and since it wears a green skin tight suit like his boss, I can’t tell much of anything about him either. I’m sure it’s the orange lining in the suit like the white lining in Mercury’s that protects his mind from me. The speedster telegraphs what he’s thinking so much that hiding his mind was a futile effort.

When the speedster refuses to answer Mr. January’s request, the well dressed demon’s own disciple gets defensive. A woman-of-color, hiding under a black domino mask and a white hood. She reaches inside her white leather jacket for the revolver that shoots more than bullets.

Like Hundress, she isn’t much for words, and like Hundress she doesn’t stand to see her master insulted, though that’s more to do with loyalty on her part. Unlike me, Mr. January doesn’t order her to stand down.

Her raising of her pure white revolver towards Mercury, despite the fact that she could never hit him, and angers Mercury’s own bodyguard. Like a mindless hulk, he growls his own name, “Saturn Smash…”

Mr. January raises his cold white hand from the table to quell his soldier. “That’s quite enough, Fade, I don’t want to see poor Saturn upset.” With that, she lowers her weapon back into her jacket.

Mercury Jack skulks away from me, around the table, taunting Mr. January and his disciple that, “Yes, wouldn’t want to upset Saturn, but what about me?!”

He makes it all about himself yet again, slapping his chest in some brutish sign of anger. Oh god, he’s so, so, what is it that the kids say now? Extracurricular. He’s simply too much for his own good.

For that reason, Mercury questions the unspoken moderator at the table, the one in the middle, the hologram who’s certainly too afraid to be in a room with the rest of us. “What are you going to do about this, hmm? It’s a clear sign of disrespect that Ion seeks to encroach in my jurisdiction.” When she doesn’t answer, when she’s too busy crunching numbers, Mercury Jack yells, “Burke!”

She snaps her pencil in her hands at his calling of her last name. The elder matriarch of the Burke family, not the current head of Burkestone Industries, but the mother of said head.

Espada’s old granny, Elizabeth Burke.

“Enough, Jack,” she growls at him.

I can’t say she looks much like her granddaughter, she’s died her hair but I see right through the brown to her natural gray. She may be fit enough to avoid a cane if she wants, but mental stress has made her hair grayer than a wolf’s. She looks like her daughter, her likely replacement with the judging eyes and pointed nose.

Elizabeth tells Mercury, “I’m trying to figure out exactly what kind of mess I need to dig us out of,” and with a nod to me, “thank you for that by the way.” I wave my hand as a welcome gesture.

Mercury Jack finally starts to step slowly to his seat, but not without giving me and Hundress the stink eye, his eyes shrinking with his emotes, the immature brat that he is.

When he takes his seat between Elizabeth and Mr. January, he rests his head in his hand.

With a shrug of his shoulders, he complains, “What. Are. We. Going. To. Do?”

“Well,” she begins, “I’m going to take control of the PR mess, keep my children from sticking their noses in it, and make sure that S.I.L.A.S. wants to keep our existence to themselves. As for you, all is according to plan. Ion has the blueprints for an army, Mercury, you find us a power source, Mr. January here will find us the able bodies, and I bankroll all of your mistakes.”

“You don’t sound very happy, Elizabeth.” Mr. January clasps his hands over the table as he plays the part of someone with interest so well. I’m not sure that he doesn’t have any. “Please, if there is anything you need, do tell us.”

Elizabeth turns her eyes to him, and then to me. “Ion,” she says.

“Yes, Elizabeth?” I answer back.

“Do you want to die?”

The question makes even Mr. January stiffen. He tugs at the collar of his shirt and asks, “Pardon?”

“You heard her,” Mercury says, trying to hold in some kind of childish excitement.

“I just can’t explain why else you would work so hard to help those kids grow stronger,” Elizabeth elaborates.

Hmm, I find it hard to smile. It seems this old dog has some bite in her after all. I just needed to find the right button to push.

“Oh,” I say, as if that explained everything, “I fear your mistaken, I would do no such thing, I plan to live forever.”

“Truly?” she asked, and I nodded my head. “Keep acting the way you are, and you won’t see the turn of the century.” It was hard not to smile at the gall. “I’ll keep that in mind.”