Authors: Joe Ducie
Baldy thought about it, and I saw
the look on his face and knew what was going to happen next. His eyes narrowed,
survival mode kicked in, and his lips pulled back from his bloodied teeth in a
snarl. I’d seen that look in the eyes of a hundred Renegades—men and women I’d
killed during the Tome Wars. I’d seen it in King Morpheus Renegade’s eyes when
I’d pierced his heart with the Roseblade atop the highest tower in Atlantis,
and I’d seen it in the eyes of his Immortal Queen, Emily Grace, as she had
kicked me broken and bleeding from the top of that same tower.
His hand slipped lightning-fast into
his jacket and emerged carrying a cold, silver pistol. Baldy swung the gun
around, toward Brie. My palms burst to life with ethereal, Willful light—
A clear shot rang out and echoed
through the lobby.
The bullet took my would-be-assassin
right between the eyes. His head snapped back, and a spray of gore—blood, bone,
and brain—exited his skull.
He died before he hit the floor.
Detective Brie whimpered—a small,
lonely sound somewhere between a cry and a gasp—and swayed on the spot. I
banished the Will from my palms before she saw it and made to catch her, but
she steadied herself and kept her gun aimed at Baldy.
The commotion had finally brought
people out of the lecture theatres and workshops adjoining the lobby. Brie
ordered them back, securing the scene as she had been taught, and approached
Baldy with caution. She kicked the silver gun from his hand and across the
marble floor to his duffel bag, which most likely held the rifle he’d used to
kill a duck not five minutes ago.
“You,” Brie said and pointed a
severe finger at me. A slight tremble to her voice, as if she were on the verge
of tears, made me pause. “Don’t you
dare
go anywhere.”
“No, ma’am.”
She holstered her weapon and flipped
open her phone. I could already hear sirens in the distance, from the call
she’d made back at the tavern.
Ethan was sitting up, holding his
head in his hands. I kept a careful eye on my surroundings, in case Baldy
wasn’t working alone, and kneeled down next to my apprentice.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
Ethan looked up. His left eye was
fused shut, and he was drawing low, ragged breaths. “Think I broke a rib,” he
wheezed. “Or three.”
I gave him a gentle pat on the
shoulder. “I’d heal it, but we’re being watched. We’ll get Sophie to tend to
you later.”
He mumbled something
incomprehensible that sounded a lot like a string of violent curses.
“Well, that’s what you get for
chasing down men with guns.”
“Took the elevator to the fifth
floor,” he said. “The doors opened and there he was… He knew I knew soon as our
eyes met. Chased him down two floors and… Did I do good?”
“I’d give it a six out of ten, to be
honest. Your form was sloppy, but you did stick the landing.”
Ethan chuckled and then winced. “Ow…
ow… Don’t make me laugh, you bastard.”
“Chin up,” I said, as Brie put her
phone away and began to walk our way. “I’ll teach you something cool next Will
lesson as a reward, hmm?”
“How is he?” Brie asked, one hand on
her hip.
Ethan waved her concern away and
tried to stand. I forced him back down with little effort. Quite a crowd was
gathering on the outskirts of our little crime scene. What seemed like a
thousand smart phones were snapping pictures and, from what I understood of the
damn things, recording video.
“How are you, Detective?” I asked.
That hand on her hip was pale, clenched, and shaking. Her olive skin was a
pasty shade of white. “Let me find you a seat…”
“Just stay where you are, Mr. Hale,”
she said, swallowing hard. “Grey and the uniforms will be here soon. You—you’ll
have to give another statement and perhaps explain why killers are leaving you
messages in blood by night, and trying to shoot you by day.”
“I don’t—”
“Stop,” she said, and raised her
palm. “Just don’t.”
I nodded, got to my feet, and
crossed my hands behind my back. “Do you think this chap here is our killer
from last night?” I didn’t think any such thing, but keeping her talking was
good. Whatever had killed that man in Kings Park hadn’t been human. The
ferocity and the Forget-themed message were testament enough to that.
“I can’t know that, can I?” she
snapped. “Sorry. I’m just… I’ve never…”
Brie trailed away and I wanted to
reach out and touch her forearm, offer some comfort, but that felt too
friendly, given the nature of our relationship to date. “You’ve never had to
use your weapon before.”
Brie stared at what was left of
Baldy’s head, lying in a widening pool of blood, and nodded. “No. No, I haven’t.”
Taking a life was… hard. And that’s
coming from a man responsible for the direct death of millions. Destroying
something living, however corrupt or evil, is numbing. Every creature in the
universe is born knowing right from wrong—my grandfather told me that, once
upon a time—and killing, however justified, is wrong on a fundamental level.
The deliberate act of ending someone else’s life was morally reprehensible,
even in self-defense.
But then morals are all well and
good in theory. In the real world, in all the real worlds, we sometimes could
not afford the luxury of morality. Or a good night’s sleep.
“Kill or be killed,” I said gently.
“You did the right thing.”
Brie met my gaze, and her eyes did
not waver, or blink, for a long moment.
“To protect the innocent,” I
continued. “To ensure the least amount of life lost—yours, mine, Ethan’s—you
did the right thing.”
“I’m not sure how innocent you are,
Mr. Hale.”
Police detectives were trained to
read people. I guess half a day was all this sassy young detective needed to
size me up. She had my number, through and through. A wailing evacuation siren
began to stream through invisible speakers overhead and all across the
university.
It had only taken about twenty
minutes, but someone had decided a gunman on campus was cause to evacuate. Most
of the crowd in the lobby shuffled back into their lecture theaters, collecting
bags before heeding the warning. A lot stayed put, still gawking at the dead
man.
About five minutes later, a cadre of
uniformed officers stormed into Engineering Building 23 and closed down the
crime scene. They cleared out the lobby and strung that yellow caution tape
around things, looking busy and important. A couple of paramedics hauled Ethan
onto a stretcher and took him away.
After that, things happened very
quickly. A group of detectives from Joondalup Police Station, just two minutes
from the university, took Brie aside and bombarded her with questions. I was
left with a “protective” guard of two uniformed men, given that the shooter had
been aiming at me. I was no fool—they were there to ensure I didn’t slip away
during the chaos. They sat me down on a cool metal bench alongside the
automatic doors.
Senior Detective Sam Grey, the man
who had driven me home just that morning, strode into the building in a finely
pressed suit a quarter of an hour later. His reading glasses rested on the
bridge of his nose, just below his snowy white hair. He took one look at Baldy
and gave me a curt, appraising nod, before rescuing Brie from her colleagues and
finally sitting her down in a row of chairs underneath the stairs.
A cup of steaming coffee appeared
from somewhere and made it into the young detective’s hands. A splash of scotch
probably would not have gone amiss either. Alas, all my bottles were at home.
Eventually, Grey made his way over
to me and took a seat just to my left. He motioned the two officers away and
took off his glasses, cleaning them on the cuff of his suit jacket. I thought I
caught a glimmer of something that could have been friendly in his eyes.
We sat that way for a long moment.
“Nasty business,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Thirty years as a detective, and
I’ve never had to draw my service revolver. Not once.”
“That’s a good record.”
“Annie—that is, Detective Brie, has
been a detective for six months.”
“A not-so-good record, but at least
she’s still alive.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Now would you
care to explain, Mr. Hale, how you find yourself at the center of two major
crime scenes inside of twelve hours?”
Straight to the heart of the
matter—I liked that. Too much bullshitting in the world, if you ask me. “What?
You’re not going to play ‘good cop, bad cop’?”
“I’m an old cop, son. I don’t play
games.”
“In all honesty, I can’t explain
it.”
Which was the truth, in a way. A poor
truth. I couldn’t explain the bloody message or this latest attempt on my life.
I’d not sensed a drop of Will in Baldy before he’d died, which made him just a
normal human unless he was masking his Will—which made no sense because he
could’ve escaped with it. Or killed us all in a variety of ways easier than a
bullet.
“I’ve been looking into you all
morning,” Grey continued. “You moved to Perth five and a half years ago. I
can’t place that accent of yours, and there’s no real record of you beyond
property purchase deeds, a bank account, and your utility bills stretching back
those same five and a half years. You don’t have a driver’s licence, which for
a big place like Western Australia is odd, and as far as I can tell you don’t
use the Internet—which, for a young man these days, is odder still. You file a
tax return every year, but that bookshop of yours runs at a significant loss.”
He placed his glasses back on his face. “Care to fill in a few blanks for me,
Mr. Hale?”
“Okay, you got me, I’m an alien. I
arrived on your planet five years ago to drink your women and sleep with your
scotch.” Grey stared at me. Something in his eyes became a few degrees colder.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. I do that sometimes, make light of things around tragedy.
It’s a flaw and I’m working on it.”
“Do you have any family in Perth?”
“No. I’ve no family in Perth.”
“Overseas?”
“As far as I know, it’s just me on
this big, blue marble. My father is dead, and I never knew my mother.”
Another poor truth. All I knew of
her was her name—Maria Hale. Whenever I thought of her, I thought of ambrosia
and dark, red lipstick. As far as I knew, she had abandoned my father and me
when I was two. Walter Hale had fathered another son years before all that, and
that strapping young man had grown up to become the current High Lord and King
of the Knights Infernal, Jon Faraday, who had taken his mother’s name. Walter
Hale had been killed in a Renegade skirmish when I was six.
So my living family, what I knew of
it, added up to one older half-brother and my father’s father, Aloysius
Hale—who had been imprisoned for my sins at the end of the Tome Wars nearly six
years ago now. They both lived in another universe, a sparkling jewel of the
Story Thread—Ascension City.
The heart of Forget.
“What was your father’s name?” Grey
asked.
I told him and he jotted it down in
his notebook. These detectives did love their notebooks. Doubtful there would
be much in the way of records on the man. He was born on True Earth, just like
me, but had spent most of his life in Ascension City. Just like me.
“What are you involved in, Mr. Hale?
Are you doing something illegal? Are you in trouble? Whatever it is, people are
dying, and you need to tell me.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing to tell,
sir.” Brie was sitting alone now, staring at the wall with her coffee mug
clutched between her hands.
“Most people—most civilians—run away
from gunfire, from danger. You—and that young lad, Ethan Reilly—headed straight
for it. Unarmed and, if Detective Brie hadn’t been here, most likely to your
deaths. What on earth possessed you to do that?”
I kept my silence and simply
shrugged. Only so much dumb I could play, so many times I could lie and avoid
the sordid truth. A truth this old detective would not believe, not this side
of the Story Thread. Here in the real world, magical powers and Forget usually
created more problems than they solved, at least when it came to explaining
their existence.
I was exiled here—I had nowhere else
to go. If I were to become a wanted man in Australia, then I’d have to flee.
But where? To Forget? To return home to Ascension City was to covet death. If
found by the Knights, I’d be imprisoned at the very least, if not executed. If
found by the Renegades, death was certain. A life on the run did not hold much
appeal.
Someone was intentionally backing me
into a corner, and that didn’t sit right. No, sir, not at all. I took a deep
breath and unclenched my fists.
“Look, am I under arrest? I’ve
committed no crime, have I?”
Grey looked down at his hands and
folded them together thoughtfully. His expression seemed to say “not yet.”
“You’re wrapped up in something dangerous, lad. I don’t know—”
Grey’s pocket rang. With a scowl he
dug out his phone. Across the lobby, Annie Brie was startled out of her musings
by her phone. One or two of the other detectives and officers nearby also
received calls at that moment.