by Steve McHugh
I left them to it and passed a few dozen middle-aged American tourists eating ice cream cones that they'd probably had to remortgage their houses to afford. A few of them wore those ridiculous union jack hats that stores sell Americans so everyone else can tell them apart.
I got into the first black cab I reached and asked the male driver to take me to The Friar. Despite the close proximity of the pub to where I was standing, I wasn't exactly shocked to discover that he was happy to oblige.
The journey took all of two minutes and cost more than the tube ticket I'd used to travel twenty times the distance. I'm in the wrong bloody job.
The pub had been built inside a beautiful old building, possibly Georgian—it was hard to tell after all the work that had been done to the exterior. Several grey-stone gargoyles hung from the roof top, peering down on those beneath them with a set indifference.
I entered the pub and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. A large, stained-glass window down one side only allowed a small amount of light in. Low hanging lights had been placed throughout the interior, but they could only help so much. I walked to the bar and ordered a Scotch from a tall, skinny man who looked like he needed to get a bit of sun and eat a good meal. He returned with a glass containing a shot of Scotch, neat. He hadn't even asked if I wanted ice in it. I liked the place already.
I drank a measure of the golden liquid, feeling the warmth as it cascaded down my throat. The door to the pub opened and I looked up just as a familiar voice said, "Hello, Nate."
I turned to see Jenny. And downed the rest of the Scotch.
Chapter 17
"I'm not here to fight, Nate," Jenny said.
That was strange, because my first impulse was to throw a giant ball of flame at her. "You shot me," I said holding back my sudden anger.
"With a tranquiliser dart."
"Oh, that's okay then. Wanna shoot me a few more times?"
Jenny smiled, she had a nice smile. She'd changed her hair colour to a deep purple, left loose over her shoulders. She wore a pair of blue combats, a tiny black vest with a picture of AC/DC on it and some white Nike trainers. A black rucksack hung over one slender shoulder and she had a small jacket in one hand. My mind crept back to the last time I'd seen her naked, moving on top of me. And then it went to the moment she shot me. The memory of being shot by a woman pretty much kills any sexual urge you have toward her. And if it doesn't, you have issues.
"I was sent to help you," Jenny said as she walked past me and took a seat in a booth, at the rear of the pub. I ordered two Cokes, alcohol was not going to be a good idea, and took them over to our table.
"How very gentlemanly," she said.
"I just didn't want you to get me one and lace it with sedatives."
Jenny laughed and my groin did a little happy dance. Okay, apparently I have issues.
"So you fancy explaining why you shot me?"
"It was my job. Shoot you, take you to your hotel and leave you there for pick up. But I used a lot less tranquiliser than I was meant to. It took a little explaining about how you'd managed to wake up and escape by the time my lord's men arrived." She smiled at the memory. "Apparently, I'm very persuasive."
"So sleeping with me was part of the plan?"
Jenny's smile intensified. "Oh no, that was definitely all for me."
It took a Herculean effort not to drag her somewhere secluded and have my way with her. I pushed the thought aside before it took hold. "Who do you work for?"
"My lord is the only name I have. He's not exactly personable with his staff. Sorry." Jenny rummaged through her rucksack, where I caught the glint of gun metal. She passed a red file across the table to me.
I opened it to find my name written on the first page. "What is this?"
"It's a copy of the file we have on you. And a few things my lord managed to acquire from other sources."
I flicked through a few more pages but Jenny's voice drew my attention back to her. "Read that later, right now there are more pressing matters." She reached back into her rucksack and removed a brown envelope, which she passed to me. I opened it, spilling the contents onto the table.
"Photos?" I asked, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I stared at myself, caught in black and white. "What's happening here?"
"I've been ordered to do a few things at this meeting. One of them is to explain why my lord and his vast resources are currently after you. These photos help do that."
"Who ordered you? Who is the woman on the phone?"
"Nate, please look at the photos." Jenny's sharp change of tone from playful to all business was a little jarring, but I did as she asked.
There were a dozen photos in total, all of me. I wore a dark jacket and combats, although the shading suggested they weren't the same colour. The photos could have been used as a flick book, showing the seconds pass as I entered a building and attacked its inhabitants. After the third photo, two bodies were on the floor, and a gun had appeared in my hand.
"Nate?" Jenny said and placed her hand against mine. And my brain went nuts as I collapsed against the wall and passed out.
*****
Ten years ago.
I entered the building, an old abandoned office block near the London docks, aware of what I would find inside. Six humans and my target. He had to be kept alive, everyone else was expendable. They were mercenaries, no one I needed to feel sorry for. They'd been paid to work for a monster like Dr Welkin. They'd witnessed the atrocities carried out at his hand. They deserved their fate.
I opened the door and faced the first of the humans. Shock crossed his face before I slammed my fist into his throat, crushing his windpipe. I spun round to face a second man who had been standing behind the door when I'd opened it. A quick elbow to his jaw snapped his head to the side before he could reach for the gun in his hip holster. I took advantage and stepped behind him, breaking his neck and dropping him to the floor.
I grabbed the gun from his holster and placed a round through the temple of the suffocating man, they deserved to die, but I was not in the mood to watch people suffer needlessly.
The gunshot brought a third merc out from a nearby room, pistol at the ready. He was dead before he had the chance to fire off a single shot. The contents of his head decorated the beige wall behind him.
The mercs wore body armour, Kevlar, over normal street clothes, but nothing to protect their heads. It was an oversight they wouldn't live to regret. With three down, that left only three to remove from this world before tracking down Dr Welkin. A man I was sure would be cowering somewhere. Men like him always do. They torture and rip people apart behind the safety of bulletproof offices and drugged victims.
I ejected the magazine from the dead guard's Ruger and checked the contents – ten bullets left, although the fact that they weren't silver meant these men were only expecting human problems. I re-loaded the gun and continued through the nondescript building, checking all of the offices along the lengthy corridor and finding nothing but rats and spiders.
After a few minutes of walking around the maze like structure, I stopped outside a large grey door. I'd heard a slight noise from inside. It had been quick and soft, but it was something that needed checking. I placed a palm against the door and concentrated. The glyphs on my hand glowed white and air seeped through the cracks in the frame, pouring into the room and flowing unseen through it. Every time it touched something I received a sonar-like ping. In my head I could map out the contents. It wasn't a hundred percent accurate, and had taken a lot of time to perfect, but it had saved my life more than once. The noise from the gunshots ensured that the three remaining mercs would now be prepared for me. That didn't mean they stood a chance, but it didn't mean I had to be stupid either.
The glyphs subsided and I walked a few feet to my left, unleashing a torrent of air at the thin wall. Brick and plaster dust exploded around me. I stepped through the hole and fired twice, once at each of the two men inside the room. Both fell to the floor, th
eir fates the same as their friend's.
The room was about twenty-foot square, and consisted of nothing but two dead men and a group of sockets that had been pulled from the wall. Wires spilled naked from the holes the damage had created. There was another grey door opposite me. I walked over ready to try the sonar trick again, but the door was ripped apart in a hale of gunfire. I dove aside, landing on one of the dead mercs as the bullets came once more, this time just above my head, perforating the thin wall. A submachine gun, probably an Uzi from the sound. I kept low and made my way to the wall. Some of the bullets had punctured through, giving me a good view of the room beyond.
The last merc stood about five feet inside the room, the gun trained on the door ready for me to make my move. I placed a finger inside one of the holes and shot a stream of fire through it.
More bullets hit the exact part of the wall where I'd been sitting, but I was already on the move, kicking the door open and firing twice before he realised what was happening.
The Uzi clattered to the floor, followed soon after by its user. I moved around them into what amounted to a large storage room. Several small windows sat on one side, none of them big enough for a grown man to get through. That didn't stop the Doctor from trying.
He'd shattered one of the windows, cutting himself on his thigh when he tried to climb through—blood dripped slowly onto the dusty, bare wooden floor. I walked over, grabbed him by his leather belt and dragged him back into the room, dropping him on the floor with a loud thud.
I looked at the window, about two-foot square, and then glanced at Dr Welkin, who could never be described as two foot anything. He was six feet tall, and weighed in excess of twenty-two stone. There were sumo wrestlers with a more flattering physique.
"I won't tell you anything," Dr Welkin said, his voice shrill and nasally. He reached behind him for the discarded Uzi, which I kicked out of his reach, through the open door and into the room beyond.
"You can torture me," Welkin yelled. "I won't tell you anything."
I crouched beside him, placing the end of the Ruger's barrel against his knee. "Wanna bet?" I said, and pulled the trigger.
*****
"Nate, Nate," Jenny was saying over and over, as she held my hand. "You okay?"
I blinked several times, before forcing myself back to a seated position. "I had a flashback. I was killing the men in those photos. I was after a doctor."
"Are you sure?" Jenny looked temporary taken aback, but any confusion soon vanished, replaced by her usual calm demeanour. "The magic that was used to make you forget was very powerful. Could you be mistaken?"
That got my attention. "No, it was real. Did you say magic was used to make me forget?"
"Blood magic. Powerful blood magic too. They were meant to rip the memories from your mind, before killing you. You escaped before whoever was tasked with the job could finish."
"Who was it?" My voice was filled with anger. I'd never realised how much I wanted my old memories back until everyone else suddenly wanted them too.
Jenny shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I don't know. All I know is that my lord wanted you hurt, badly. I remember how angry he was with you. How much he... hated you, although I don't know why."
The need to read through the file was immense, but I had to wait. It was my chance to get answers, and I wasn't about to waste it. "Who's Doctor Welkin?"
Jenny briefly scowled, and then stared at me for a long heartbeat. "It would be easier if I just explained from the beginning."
I drank some of my Coke, and motioned for her to continue.
"About twenty years ago, my lord hired a man by the name of Doctor Philip Welkin, a human geneticist, to oversee his newest round of soldiers."
"Soldiers?"
"My lord is in the arms business. He supplies his weapons to anyone who can afford them. And very few people can."
"These weapons, they're living beings, yes?"
Jenny nodded. "Have you ever heard of the Harbingers?"
I shook my head.
"They're the elite warriors of Avalon. They undergo a series of mental and physical trials to ensure that they operate at peak performance. It involves increasing their abilities, both magical and otherwise, through the use of psychics and rune work. The point of the trials is twofold. Firstly, they give the participants access to power that would otherwise take them a hundred years to learn and develop. And secondly, it creates a loyalty and bond between each other, which is almost unbreakable."
"Your lord wants his own version of these soldiers?"
"For centuries my lord has taken those who crossed him and changed them, making them into vessels of destruction, gargoyles and nightmares, for anyone with enough coin. But my lord has always wanted to have his own Harbingers. His own elite soldiers."
"Why not just stick with what he was doing?"
"The creation of nightmares and gargoyles is long and complex. It more often than not leads to the subject's death. Making a Harbinger-like soldier should be much easier and produce a more pliable subject, but Avalon has always kept their creation a closely guarded secret. Or it was until my lord found someone within Avalon who thought as he did. Over time he was able to discover the secrets of the Harbinger's creation. After that he hired Welkin, a man notorious for both his brilliance and his lack of ethics."
"What aren't you telling me?"
"The process of creating a Harbinger is not without its dangers. It takes anywhere from one to five years of intensive treatment, and that's on people who are already hundreds of years old. Normally the survival rate of a Harbinger creation is ninety six percent."
A cold feeling started in my stomach. "Normally?"
"Welkin theorised that it would be better to use children, those from thirteen to eighteen, to create Harbingers. He surmised that they would be more loyal and capable than their adult counterparts. Welkin also suggested that they could be used as a surprise offensive. And he said it could all be done within eighteen months.
"He used children of non-human parentage, whose abilities hadn't yet surfaced. Having non-human parents is no indication that the child will gain any abilities, but despite this, Welkin never checked to find out if the children were human or not. Of the forty-one children he used in his experiment fifteen years ago, six survived the process."
I felt sick. Welkin murdered over thirty children for an experiment. An experiment conducted all in the name of making more money. "Where are those children now?"
Jenny looked down at the table. "I don't know. They were sold and I'm not privy to the buyers list."
"When did I get involved?"
"You raided the warehouse where the next group of kids were being held—sixty-four children, the majority of whom were waiting to go through the Harbinger process. Welkin claimed to have refined it, that seventy percent would survive it."
"You said the majority."
A tear fell down Jenny's cheek. "To prove his point, Welkin took ten of the children and forced the experiment on them. He said it would be done within a year. And he was right, it was. Seven of those ten survived."
Ten years ago would put Jenny at about fifteen. "You were one of those kids."
She shook her head. "My sister was. She died in the initial wave of experiments. I was deemed too valuable to use in such an experiment."
"Why?"
"It's complicated," she said and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Anyway, before Welkin could run the experiment, he began to get paranoid. Saying he was being stalked, and his life was in danger. He wanted to postpone it, but my lord refused. Welkin vanished soon after. At first we thought my lord had removed him, but when those kids were freed it became apparent that someone else had gotten to Welkin. The doctor's body was found a few weeks later. The details of what you did to him are in the folder."
I didn't want to wait that long to find out. "What did I do, Jenny?"
"You tortured him, kept him alive long enough for him to give you what you needed
. Welkin died hard—broken bones, lacerations, part of him had been turned to charcoal." A small smile spread across her lips, and hatred shone in her eyes.
"Welkin was a fucking monster.” Her words dripped bile. "He experimented on children and made Josef Mengele look like a nice rational human being. He deserved a lot worse."
"Why do you work for him? Your lord, I mean."
Jenny looked away for a brief moment and then continued as if I'd never spoken, "You were ambushed when removing the kids from the labs."
"What about Dani? What does she have to do with all this?"
Jenny shook her head. "Welkin's replacement wanted to try some sort of nature versus nurture crap. Two girls, one was placed with Daniel Hayes, a scientist who was meant to be cold and scientific about the whole thing. And another with the woman who died yesterday, Dani's fake mum. The scientists wanted her to shower Dani with presents and trinkets. They paid her millions to take the job. The plan was then for both girls to be taken back at the same time in order to find out how their lives had affected their abilities."
The scientists hadn't counted on both Dani's mum and Daniel actually loving the children placed with them. "Dani's not human?"
Jenny shook her head. "I hope for her sake she is, but the truthful answer is I don't know. We're working off the basis that she will retain the abilities of at least one parent."
"And they were?"
"Her mother is psychic. I've no idea about the father."
How was I going to tell Dani that she might not be human? I decided to get my other questions answered as I tried to figure out that particular puzzle. "Why did your friend murder Daniel Hayes?"
"My lord willed his death. We might be going against him now, but if we'd refused to kill Daniel, or to set you up, we'd never have gotten Dani out. All the planning would've been for nothing. Daniel had to die. It was a sacrifice we were willing to make."
