by Grace Martin
The guy led me down a corridor into a room clearly designed for ease of washing down. Linoleum curved up the walls for a few inches, so no… so nothing got caught in the skirting boards. A gurney covered with a cloth was in the middle of the room and I tried not to think what it had been used for. One wall was made up of stainless steel doors, like you see in movies. However, in movies they pull the bodies out of a drawer at a convenient height, which was not to be the case here.
Mr Slimeball checked his list. ‘Body’s in A7,’ he said to me, as though it meant something. He disengaged the wheel-locks on the gurney with a violent kick and pushed it close to the wall. He took off the cover, revealing a row of rollers, then cranked it up like a jack until the surface of it was higher than my head. Slimeball could barely reach up to open the door.
A small tug pulled out a board, bearing a corpse in a bag.
Air was forced out of my lungs by the grotesqueness of it all and I turned my head away. I couldn’t bear it. My father — jerked out of a hole in the wall in a cooling room onto a table that looked like something out of the Inquisition. Slimeball didn’t notice — he was lowering the gurney.
‘Come have a look,’ he said. He wiped his hands on the back of his trousers.
So I went to have a look. The body was badly ravaged. No wonder he was dead. Taking a step closer I looked at the face. It was my father’s face, stripped of the soul that enlivened it. He looked different, but it was definitely his face. I stepped closer still and lay my hand on his. He was cold, but it was the last time I would ever touch his hand. ‘Goodbye, Dad,’ I whispered, the words too precious for Slimeball to hear.
I stroked my finger over the cold hand to find the webbing between thumb and forefinger as I had done so often before. When I was a little girl Dad and I had an accident. He was helping Mum wash up, elbow deep in dishwater while Mum swiped at the plates with a tea towel. I was in the kitchen, too, and reached up to grab a stack of saucepans. They all came clattering down around me. I screamed, and I still remember the crack as one of the saucepans fractured my skull. Dad cried out but I hardly heard anything through the pain in my head and the blood that ran into my eyes.
I passed out, waking up on the kitchen floor with Mum’s fingernails digging into my tongue — she was afraid I would swallow it. Five minutes in front of a mirror was enough to teach me that my tongue was attached and could not be swallowed. I was spitting blood when the paramedics arrived. It was years later that I found out the reason behind the scar on my Dad’s hand. He’d had a hand full of cutlery when I screamed and his sudden movement had driven a fork right through the webbing on his hand.
A prosaic injury, but a distinctive one. This hand, under my caressing fingers, had no scar. In fact, it was pristine. It might have been a baby’s hand. I drew back my hand. This might look like my father, but it wasn’t him. I looked closer. Now that I was suspicious I could see that it wasn’t really my Dad. Tiny things were wrong — you don’t realise how well you know the look of a person until you see those details missing. And yet it looked too much like my father for it to be anyone else.
Who would do this? Who could do this? Whoever it was and however it was done, they expected me to just identify the body and go home. They must have gone to a lot of effort to do this. They expected the story to end here.
No way was that going to happen. If someone had killed my Dad then they were going to answer to me.
<<<>>>
About the Author
Grace Martin writes fantasy novels and loves to read. Her favourite authors are Sarah J. Maas, Anne McCaffrey and Suzanne Collins. She finds endless inspiration in the world around her and lives in Sydney with an obsessive, abusive and adoring mini cat. Connect with Grace via her website where you can sign up for her newsletter for exclusive notifications about coming promotions and new releases, or you can follow her on Instagram or Facebook.
Coming soon from Grace Martin
• Defiance: The Umbra Chronicles Book 2
Other works by Grace Martin
• The Night Princess
• Daughter of a Captive God, Book 1 in The Author’s Daughter Series
• A Game of Starlight and Secrets
Copyright Page
Vengeance: The Umbra Chronicles Book 1
Copyright (c) by Grace Martin.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except as permitted by copyright law. For permissions contact: gracemartinauthor.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
