Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (18 page)

Finn
moved as quickly as he could down the street, angered and mortified by his
fall. Even though he was broken, he should be able to walk down the street
without falling flat on his face.

As he approached the door to his home he
pulled out his phone and instructed his home system to unlock the outer door.
He slipped inside and placed his back to the outer door and took a few deep
breaths. He was tempted to throw his phone at the inner door in frustration.
Slowly he regained control of himself. He walked over to the inner and lined up
his remaining eye with the retinal scanner set to the side of the door. The
slight grinding whirring sound of the bolts sliding home indicated that the
scan was successful.

His hand was reaching for the handle when he
heard a soft sound behind him, the sound of the outer door closing.

He had forgotten to lock the outer door.

Someone was in the hallway with him. He
looked up at the curved mirror over the inner door and saw a dark figure
standing a few feet behind him. He froze, unsure of what to do.

“Finn, is that you?” Her voice was barely
audible.

His heart lurched in his chest. He spun
around. “Bex,” he said.

She looked the same as she did when he saw
her last, twenty-one years ago on the beach in the ancient University town. Her
hair was shorter, but otherwise she was the same. Not broken as he was. She was
untouched by the passage of time. His heart lurched in his chest. “Bex,” he
said again.

“Bex.” She looked thoughtful. “No one’s
called me that since, since …” she trailed off. “Call me Rebecca. Please. I
can’t bear to be Bex, not anymore.”

Darkness like a black ink dispersing
through water flowed around her, obscuring his view of her. When it cleared she
was gone, the outer door open to the street.

He smiled; he found her and she was alive.
When he had found Charlie, at the back of his mind he hoped that Bex was
nearby, but to have her seek him out, that was more than he could hope for.
Maybe she was not completely beyond redemption.

Donald and Lewis had been in the flat for
two days, taking turns sitting by the window and watching the building across
the road. The subject of their surveillance had not left his abode since they
had saved his cowardly ass at the Festival.

“Ach, so boring,” said Donald. “Shall we see
if there’s anything left in the kitchen?” He could not be bothered to
communicate directly with Lew mind to mind, so he spoke.

Lew grunted in what Donald assumed was the
affirmative, not that he cared what Lew’s response was.

Donald left Lew at the window and went
through to the small kitchen area deeper in the flat. The flat was tidy but
felt cluttered due to the large number of knickknacks scattered across all the
horizontal services and attached to the walls. They were mostly of ceramic
ducks and pigs with the occasional troll thrown in for variety.

The kitchen was cramped. The yellowish-brown
wallpaper soaked in the light and made the dingy room seem smaller. There was
just enough space for a small table made of tubular steel and white plastic and
four matching chairs. The table was pushed to the side, trapping one of the
chairs between it and the wall. Sitting rigidly upright in two of the chairs
were the tenants of the apartment, an older man and woman. Both were worn, grey
and naked. They looked to be in their mid-eighties. They had looked
considerably younger two days previous when they had first answered their door
to Don and Lew. The man had one eye swollen shut and the squashed shape of his
nose suggested it had been recently broken. Crusted blood stained his chin and
chest. The woman appeared to be less damaged. She had a trail of bloody drool
running from the left corner of her mouth.

“No, please don’t get up, I can help
myself,” said Donald to the couple, then he chuckled. Their eyes had swiveled
wildly towards him as he entered the room. He gave a silent command and they
both collapsed onto the table, taking great, heaving gulps of air. “That hurt,
didn’t it? So sorry for the discomfort,” he said.

He pulled out the remaining chair, reversed
it and straddled it. “I just wanted to say to you that you have been great
sports, letting us stay here and providing such wonderful hospitality. My
partner and I, we really appreciate it. Well, I really appreciate it. I am not
so sure about him, dour bastard that he is,” his voice was kindly and warm. The
man, who had started to recover first, raised his head a little and took a peek
at him out of his one good eye. When Donald met his gaze he flinched and ducked
his head.

“Now, now, no need to be like that. I know
we’re not the best house guests. We don’t always tidy up after ourselves, we
haven’t really said thank you, and the torture of course. No, not very good
guests at all.”

The woman started to shake and snuffle as
he spoke. The man closed his eyes and his lips moved silently in prayer.

“I’ve been talking to my partner and we
think that we may be able to let you go when we are done here. You know, as a
kind of thank you for letting us stay here.”

The man lifted his head and peeked again;
his lips had stopped moving. Donald could feel the stirrings of hope in the
man. The woman was past caring. She was burned out, not even listening. Her
misery provided a background trickle of emotion to Donald and Lewis, nothing
too special. The man looked like he still had some spirit left. That was good,
very good.

“You would need to promise to never say
anything to anyone. Could you promise me that?” asked Donald. The man nodded
vigorously. Donald could feel that he was not convinced, but he was getting
there. “But how can I trust you? For all I know you may run off to the police
and give them a description of us.” The man shook his head. “Hmmm, how can I
trust you?” Donald put his finger to his lips, appearing deep in thought.

The man was starting to look desperate, this
was something he could hold on to, and his hope was growing.

“Maybe, if you did something that would get
you in trouble with the police if you turned us in. Hmmm?” The man still had
some hope, but it was starting to curdle into nausea; he could tell something
bad was coming. “I know. How about this? If you cut the throat of your darling
wife there, I will let you go. That would be bad, so bad that you would never
turn us in. Sounds fair, don’t you think? No reason for both of you to die, is
there? Look at her; she’s ruined now anyway.”

The man buried his face in his hands and
sobbed. Donald could feel a delicious vortex of emotion roiling through him.
Hope was still there, but it fought with fear and despair. There was also
disgust, disgust with himself for wanting to take the deal, for wanting to
live. The emotions were delightful.

Donald pulled a bread knife out of one of
the drawers under the counter and put it on the table in front of the man.
“Here, why don’t you think about it? And, once again, thanks again for the
hospitality. People just don’t take the time to say thank you anymore. It’s
disgraceful, it really is.”

He tilted his head to the side, gave the
man a jolly wink and stepped out of the kitchen.

“What did you do in there?” said Lewis. “I
didnae think they had anything left, the emotions are divine.”

“Thanks. My ingenuity surprises even me
sometimes.” Don crossed the room to look out the window.

Suddenly the flow of emotion stopped.
“Shit,” said Don. He stepped across the room and looked into the kitchen. The
man had killed his wife and then himself. He had put the knife under his chin
and slammed his head down on the table, impaling his brain.

“Ah well, you win some and you lose some,”
said Don.

Lewis -> Donald:
Donald, come through
here.
He broadcast contained urgency.

“Look, it wasn’t my fault, he was stronger
than I thought,” said Donald as he re-entered the family room.

Lewis -> Donald:
Not that, I don’t
care about the snacks. Have a look, across the road. Can you think of a reason
why our sister in arms, dearest Baby, would be visiting our surveillance
subject?

After
dinner they went a wine bar, they ordered beer and shared a desert. The wine
bar was known more for the quality of its deserts than its wine, so they had a
couple of pints. He was feeling good; they were talking about little and
laughing a lot.

“So, you going to walk me home, Finn, my
boy?”

“Walk you home? Sure.”

“And tell me,” she leaned forward and
lowered her voice, “can you be quiet, Mr. Alexander?

“Uh, yeah, I think so, why?”

“Well, if I am going to sneak you into Old
Hall, you will need to be quiet. You don’t want to wake the old troll who keeps
us girls safe, whether we want it or not.”

“And do you want it?” his face went red. “I
mean …”

She laughed.

He grabbed her hand and turned serious. “I
will probably kick myself for asking this,” he took a breath, “but what about,
what’s his name? Brian?”

“You know his name is Brian and I have some
good news for you. Brian and I are no longer together.”

Finn smiled. “Let’s go along the beach and
then cut across the golf course; it’s quicker,” he said

She pouted, “You really don’t know girls
very well, do you, Finn? Last thing a lady wants is quicker.”

He blushed again.

“I’m kidding,” she said. “But I like your
idea. Let’s walk along the beach and look at the stars and waves. And if you
don’t ruin the mood somehow, I will sneak you into the last all-female bastion
of this University, Old Hall.”

Leader’s spirit snapped back into her bod.
She flowed to her feet from where she was crouched against the cave wall.

Leader:
Time to go.

A darkness flowed through the old sapper
tunnels and out of the castle onto South Street. The coven was a dark wind
flowing through the town.

Fast.

Silent.

Deadly.

The few people on the streets unconsciously
stepped back into doorways to avoid them as they passed. The more sensitive of
the townspeople shivered as they felt ancient evil brush past.

Leader led them down to the beach. It
seemed they were going to go over ground to the train station. That made sense;
they could move almost as fast over broken ground as along a road.

The beach was deserted except for a couple
of students sitting beside each other in the sand talking, a male and a female.
The female was resting her head on the male’s shoulder, and his jacket was
wrapped around them to ward off the seasonably cold wind coming off the North
Sea.

“Take them. Keep the girl to sustain us on
the road; we will need to move fast. Do what you will with the boy, but make
sure he dies,” she said.

They reached the couple just as the boy’s
lips touched the girl’s.

The sky was clear and they looked up at a
billion stars as they walked along the path through the sword grass to the
sand. They sat down to take off their shoes at the edge of the beach so that
they could feel the cool, dry sand beneath their toes.

With the sound of the surf in their ears,
he said “Bex, what I said at dinner that time at the Indian … You know, about
loving you.”

“Careful, you may still blow this,” she
said. “But seriously, at first I didn’t get it; you shy boys are so weird. If
you like a girl, you leave the room as they enter, or you talk to everyone
around them, but not them. You glare at them.”

“I wasn’t glaring, I was mooning. No wait,
I didn’t mean that.”

How he loved her husky, full-bodied laugh.
He wanted to dedicate his life thinking of different ways to get her to laugh.

“So are you going to kiss me or what?” he
said.

“Cheeky bugger, that’s my line. But yes, I
think I will. I must do my best to encourage shy boys.”

She tilted her head up and he leaned in to
kiss her. His head exploded in fireworks.
I always thought that “fireworks”
was just a saying
, he thought.

He tasted sand in his mouth, and realized
he was face down on the ground.

Then he heard Bex scream.

She heard the faint patter of feet
sprinting across the sand. Suddenly Finn was gone and she found herself held
against a man’s chest, looking down on Finn stretched out on the sand.

Bex screamed.

Her captor clamped a hand across her mouth.
The flesh of the hand was rippling as if there were a legion of beetles
wriggling under the skin. The hand elongated, and talons grew from the tips of
his fingers. Bex’s eyes grew wider as she felt the metamorphosis against her
face. Not only the hand was changing, but her captor was getting taller and
broader. The temperature of the beach dropped significantly and she could feel
the heat being leached from her body by the figure holding her. As he grew, her
feet were lifted off the sand, until they dangled at his knees. He tipped his
head forward and whispered to her, “Silence.” His voice was a beautiful deep
bass that pierced to the center of her being. He removed his hand from her
mouth, and she tried to scream, unsuccessfully; her vocal cords were paralyzed.

She could see that he was not alone. His
companions were also swelling, getting taller, stronger. They too had grown
talons. 

Her captor continued to whisper in her ear,
“It’s a pity your man did not know when to give up. Well, a pity for you and
him; it is quite the opposite for us. He could have stopped his research at any
time.”

A red-haired female, Bex could not think of
her as a woman anymore, picked Finn up with her left hand, his feet a few
inches off the sand. Her right hand was poised above his face, and her talons
glistened wetly. In spite of their now-massive size, there was nothing brutish
about them. They looked sleek, powerful. They reminded her of big jungle cats,
tigers, no, maybe panthers. There was definitely something of the night in
them. She could not imagine them in the light of day.

“Come on, Charlie, don’t play with your
food,” said a smaller, dark-haired female. Smaller being a relative term. Prior
to the change she had been a petite five foot nothing; she was now more like
six and a half feet tall. Her voice was the tinkling of silver bells with a
faint accent, French possibly.

The one called Charlie turned to look at
the now-giant pixie and said, “Wait your turn, Eve, there will be plenty left
for you.” Her voice was no less beautiful, not as high, sultrier.

“Just don’t mess him up too much before I
get my chance. We will all get more that way,” said Eve.

Charlie turned back to Finn and raked her
claws along his torso from shoulder to hip, shredding his shirt in the process.
His mouth stretched wide to scream; however, he could not seem to get more than
a strangled gasp out. She then slowly scored the left side of his face, leaving
four bloody tracks down his face and through his left eye. The wounds started
to smoke, and the eye on that side of his face liquefied and ran down his cheek.

The other male stepped forward next. He
grabbed Finn and threw him twenty feet straight up in the air. He stepped to
the side when he came down and stomped his left leg. The sound of a dry branch
breaking shot across the sand. He stomped a few more times, pulverizing the
leg.

Eve then sauntered forward, “My turn,” she
said. She lifted him by his belt, and thrust her hand at his crotch. She jerked
her hand back. “Sweetbreads anyone?” she said, holding out his testicles in her
right hand. She turned back to him and took a nibble of the steaming organs,
watching him closely.

Finn was on the verge of passing out. The
one called Eve said, “Oh, no, not yet.” She leaned and looked into his eyes.
Finn jerked as if an electric shock had run through his body. He managed to get
a gasping scream out.

The male holding Bex spoke to her softly,
“He’s very strong, very sweet. You are too.”

They all tipped their heads back and seemed
to drink in the misery and horror for what seemed like hours, but for what was
probably just a few seconds. The aura of menace and danger swelled around them.
They heard a dog bark and all turned as one toward the sound, then, uncannily,
all looked to the one who had hung back the entire time at the same time. She
still looked human with short blonde hair.

“We cannot kill anyone else here. It would
draw too much attention. Throw him into the water and let’s go. He is done.”

The male picked him up in one hand and
reached back to throw him like a rag doll out to sea. The sight of his broken
jellied leg made Bex feel like vomiting. She screamed in her mind, “FINN!” with
all her might. The male holding him stumbled as he hit the apex of his throw
and Finn flew to the edge of the surf rather into the deep water further out.
The male looked at her, then the others, with a raised eyebrow.

“Sleep,” the male holding her said, and she
did.

***

Mara Novak was walking Daisy along the
beach. The night was clear, with no moon, and the stars in the sky were
breathtaking. She felt like she and Daisy were the only living things on the
planet, which, she felt, would not be a hardship.

She was sad. Earlier that day she had heard
that her good friend Jeffrey Proctor had succumbed to his burns and passed
away. The pain of his death demonstrated to her once again that the cost of
friendship was high — too high. Once again she vowed to not get close to
another again. It was a vow she had made and broken many times. The romantic
entanglements of her youth had all withered as her fear of trust was often
interpreted as indifference.

She would once again throw herself into the
world of intellect.

The slight breeze ruffled her hair as
walked. She let her mind wander. Although she loved her little world of academia,
proving over and over again that she was brilliant, it was never enough. As
exciting as the thrill of discovering something new or of disproving some
common belief were, she knew that she would eventually break her vow and seek
companionship.

And that was the heart of her problem:
companions never lasted long. She had no one to share her achievements with. A
handful of people across the globe understood her field enough to debate it
with her, and most other subjects did not interest her much. Her other social
interactions were mainly with students who, except for a few exceptions, she
loathed. She liked teaching; she just didn’t like the students. None of them
shared her obsession. They were all interested in their own little indulgences.
They were only interested in passing her class and promptly forgetting the
content.

And then there was Daisy, her golden
retriever. She did love Daisy. She did as she was told and listened intently to
everything she said.

Well, Daisy usually did as she was told. At
the moment Daisy was barking and running towards the water. This was a definite
no-no. Mara called after her and ran to catch up. The last time this happened
Daisy had found something dead and fishy to roll in. Mara was in no mood to
wash a fishy, sandy, sodden golden tonight.

As she caught up it indeed looked like
Daisy had found something bobbing in the surf. It was pretty big, maybe a
washed-up log, Mara thought. She pulled her torch from her bag and shone it on
the object Daisy had found. She had trouble figuring out what she was seeing
until she recognized the sound of a whimper over the sound of the surf. The
sandy lump of flesh was a person. She looked around wildly; she needed to get
some help.