Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (20 page)

My right hand, the one with the syringe, grips the bolt and twists it. Granger lets out a yell. I slide my hand down on the bolt and jam the syringe deep into her flesh, depressing the end. Granger's ears can't pick up the minuscule click of the needle's point embedding in her muscle, but mine can. 

"I'm going to make sure you spend the rest of your life in prison with nothing but the memory of your dead family to keep you company." I dig out my mobile and walk away from Granger, pretending to dial Trevor. I speak into the mouthpiece. "Granger's here. MacKay shot her with a crossbow. Hang her out to dry."

I turn around and spit at Rosamund Granger's feet before I go.

I know Rosamund Granger.

I know that the worst thing to her would be spending her life in prison.

I know that hatred is something she understands, because hatred is all that drives her.

It's because of that I let her go, let her believe the bobbies will get there any second. Because I know it'll make her run. And she will get away. I know she will.

I will follow her. I will dog her steps until she takes me to her fanatical politicult's leaders. And then I will take every single member of Britannia down even if it means I go straight to hell with them.

nineteen

I wait five minutes behind the maintenance door, listening to Granger escape, loathing myself for what I've just done. I may have condemned more innocent people to die. But if I put her in prison, someone would just take her place, and she is at this moment one of the only identified members of Britannia. I've identified one more, but no one gives a single fuck what I say on that count. No one with the power to do anything about it, that is.

After my five minutes is up, I really do ring Trevor and repeat the same to him I pretended to say to him in front of Granger. Let him think she's Houdini.

Then I pound up the stairs and hurry to the end of the loft. Sarah MacKay is pacing under the open hatch when I arrive.

"Let's move," I tell her, glancing upward at the hatch. "I'm going to have to lift you. Keep your body as stiff as you can."

She looks doubtful until the moment I crouch down and lift her by her legs, seamlessly transferring my hands to under her feet. Sarah wobbles, and I try to steady her. 

"Grab the roof," I tell her. She obeys. 

"I can't pull myself up," she says. "Never could do a pull-up."

I give her feet a shove until she's scrambling over the lip of the hatch. Once she's up, I tell her to stand back and jump, not bothering to climb out. I land next to her on the roof, and her face is ashen even in the darkness.

"You really are a superhero." Sarah raises one hand to her face, and I can see that it's shaking.

"At least the running, jumping, lifting lorries bit of it," I say, aware I sound glib. "We've got to get you down from the roof without anyone seeing."

Within a half hour, I have Sarah deposited safely into the hands of Trevor's witness protection people. She doesn't thank me. I'm not sure I would in her place either. 

It's just past half six in the morning, and as much as I want to go home to Taog, back to the warm, safe space we create when we are together, I know I can't. I didn't put a tracer on a mass murderer just to go back to bed.

I pull up the app on my mobile and enter in the tracer's information. When the map pops up, I expect it to show Edinburgh, but instead it veers west toward Glasgow and stops, a pulsing white light over Falkirk.

My fingers stop on the screen, and I make myself zoom in on the spot. It's not just Falkirk; Granger's maybe two streets away from Grahamston train station. Right where we found Kinnon's body.

I can't exactly hop a train to Falkirk dressed as I am, so I run home and throw on the same clothes I wore over my costume the other day. If I hurry, I can get to Falkirk, scope out Granger's whereabouts, and be back to Edinburgh in time for work. I pack a rucksack with clothes for work and sling it over my shoulder.

My heart races the entire train ride, my eyes glued to the white pulse on my screen. She's not moving, and she clearly hasn't tried to seek out any medical care for the bolt in her shoulder. But then, Granger's the type of person who would shove it through the other side of her body and find a way to yank the bloody thing out herself. She may be a psychopath and a killer, but she's also the toughest son of a bitch I think I've ever met.

When the train pulls up at Grahamston, I can't help but flash back to the last time I was here. Was it really just last week Trevor brought me along with him and I identified Kinnon O'Dair's body where it lay in a pool of blood? I've seen far too much blood in the past six months, and more in the past fortnight than anyone ought to see in a lifetime.

The tracer still isn't moving, and when I leave the train station, I duck behind a wall to change, again leaving my rucksack in a bush. This time I wedge my umbrella over it, hoping the rain will hold off until I return.

I find the abandoned lot where Kinnon was murdered. There's no sign of the violence now; the rain has washed away his blood, and the bobbies and investigators have left it much as it ever was. But I know, and I'll never forget that it's where a good man met death.

Climbing the same building I used as a vantage point, I remember vomiting in the corner of the roof. Even that's been cleansed by Scotland's constant showers. From the roof, I look at the app on my phone again. There's a house not a hundred yards away, and that's where the beacon is pulsating. 

I can see it easily from where I am, a somewhat ramshackle edifice that is in only slightly worse repair than the rest of the houses here. That night, I was only a football field's length away from Granger's hiding place, and none of us were any the wiser. The house butts up against the lot where Kinnon was killed.

The thought gives me chills. 

There are no lights on in the house that I can tell, and the windows that are visible from my perch don't appear to have curtains. Granger's not one for risks, which tells me that she's either in a cellar or a loft, not on the ground floor where anyone traipsing by could peek in and see the face of Scotland's Most Wanted.

The building I'm on is only two levels, and I make the jump to the ground easily, landing inside the abandoned lot's ten foot fence. I keep to the fence, making my way to the house. I keep my ears open as I go. Passing the couple other houses on the way, I hear the early morning sounds of people getting ready to face the day. Water from showers, the clank of cookware, a baby's mewling insistence on being fed. This is a poorer neighbourhood, but these are normal people who have no idea what sort of monster lurks just down the street.

Again I feel a pang of guilt for not turning Granger in. A small voice in my mind tells me I still could, that I could turn over the tracer information to Trevor and his team, but that would effectively cut me out of this. They're not going to be the ones to find Britannia's head and cut it off. I am.

It takes me about ten minutes to decide what to do now that I'm here. The tracer app shows that I'm currently within twenty feet of Rosamund Granger, but it doesn't differentiate for altitude, so she could very well be underground or above my head. Either way, she's close. 

I jump the fence and stay beneath the window level just in case. The sky is still dark in the pre-dawn hours, and I'm thankful it's winter. The limited daylight is a boon for all the sneaking around I do. Tattered grass rings the house, looking like it was cut weeks ago, but no one took a trimmer to the edges. A few stalks stick to the foundation of the house, inches longer than the grass around them. I can't tell if there's a cellar to the house from here. Making a circuit of the foundation, I deduce that there's not. Which leaves a loft. Peering in a window, it looks like the house is uninhabited in the vein of a vacation rental. The sofa is made up nicely with old, albeit clean cushions. The kitchen is in order, pots and pans hanging from hooks over the range, the kettle on the worktop ready to boil water for tea. No dirty dishes, no macintosh or jacket hanging inside the front door, no shoes littering the floor. A vacation rental would look plenty normal in the more picturesque areas of the highlands and islands, but in a dingy chunk of Falkirk, the too-tidy set up inside is my best clue that this is Granger's hideout and likely has been for some time. 

Making my way back to the rear of the house, I climb the fence and gingerly pull myself up onto the roof, trying my best to utilise my strength and agility to muffle any sounds. While the residents of Edinburgh might blame very fat squirrels for my movements, Granger won't.

I slide onto the roof on my stomach. There's a chimney about ten feet from me, and it's there I aim. 

Halfway there, I hear Granger's voice.

My breath hitches like the spandex of my costume on the shingles.

I put my head to the roof and listen, thanking the serum for my enhanced hearing.

"Aye, I'm all right. Pulled the damn bolt out myself."

I want to snort; instead I rejoice in being right in my own prediction of Granger's response to being shot with a medieval weapon. For the first time I wonder how and where Sarah MacKay learned to use a crossbow. If we both survive all this, perhaps I'll ask her.

"What I want to know is if you're all right, Ed." Granger's tone changes, and I start at the name. Ed. Edmund Frost was the defrocked doctor responsible for the serum that gave me my powers as well as the bomb that almost destroyed my city. Who is this Ed? I strain my ears, wiggling along the roof until the app on my mobile tells me I'm sitting directly atop Granger. I can make out a male voice on the other end of the line, and I nod my head in a decisive expression of glee. 

"I'm okay, Mum," he says, though his voice suggests otherwise.

Mum. Granger has another son.

"You'll have to be more convincing than that. What's wrong? Are they mistreating you?"

"It's nothing. They want me to help with some schematics, and I'm trying to stall them."

"Don't do it, love. Whatever they tell you, don't do it."

Afire with curiosity, I press my face to the shingles, hoping I can glean something more from this conversation. Why is Granger telling her son not to help someone? Who has him, and why are they allowing him to speak to his mother if he's a prisoner?

I remember what Granger said before.
I want my family back.

She must have been talking about her son Ed.

"I should have never brought you into this. You or Andrew," she says, though to my ears the addition of Andrew's name sounds like an afterthought.

"You did what you thought was best," Ed says, his voice weary and heavy as though he's said that sentence hundreds of times.

"I'm going to get you out. You won't have to live the life I led, Edmund. I swear it."

There's a long pause, and for its duration I wonder if her son — named after her brother, I'm certain — has hung up on her. But then he speaks again.

"You don't have much time left, and you're injured now."

Rosamund's voice is strong and confident as a standard bearer. "You let me fuss over that. I've had worse."

"He wants to speak with you." 

I can't believe my good fortune. I imagine hearing John Abbey's voice on the line, imagine the confirmation of everything I suspect laid out in front of me. For the seventeen seconds it takes Rosamund Granger to grunt her approval and for Edmund to hand off the phone to someone else, I think I've hit the jackpot.

But the voice that filters through the phone lines and into my artificially-enhanced ears is not John Abbey's. It's an unfamiliar male voice I don't recognise.

The remaining conversation is short. To the point.

"You have one week, Ros."

"I might need more than that. They're still scattered about and under guard—"

"We don't care. You almost exposed us all, and you allowed our most painstakingly laid plan to crumble to pieces. This is your penance, and you won't see Edmund again until you fulfil it. Find a way."

There's silence, then, and it is deafening to me.

Then I hear a muffled, suppressed yell from Granger, as if she's stuffed her face in a cushion. Maybe she has.

One week. If she's only got a week, I need to know why that's the deadline. I set a countdown on my mobile.

twenty