The Rational Faculty (Hazard and Somerset: A Union of Swords Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  “You’re sure?”

  “Ree, come on.”

  Hazard took the book. Somers had remembered correctly; the text on this page described the foundations laid for the original buildings of Wroxall College: six structures, four on South Quad and two on North Quad, that had housed the primary divisions. Hazard skimmed paragraphs. Cornerstones. Trouble at the St. Elizabeth quarry. A symbolic shovel of dirt. Original foundation work could still be seen by the public in various sub-basements as part of college tours until 2009, when the sub-basements had been shuttered for a variety of health and safety concerns. They were no longer being used except for occasional maintenance service.

  “Call Cravens,” Hazard said. “And Engels. Tell them to bring everyone they can.”

  While Somers made the call, Hazard read the pages again. Then he headed out of the apartment, book under his arm, with Somers jogging behind him.

  Dulac took one look at Hazard’s face, swallowed, and kept quiet.

  It took time for everyone to assemble: Cravens and Engels and an older woman, blond going gray, in a uniform that marked her as head of security of Wroxall College. She introduced herself with a gruff handshake and a voice like the bottom of a whiskey bottle: Max Skalman. In a larger circle, deputies and Wahredua PD and Wroxall rent-a-cops waited for instructions.

  “Six original buildings on campus,” Hazard said. “Six sub-basements that have been closed off for almost ten years.”

  Engels was fixed on Hazard, but Cravens threw a questioning look at Skalman. The security chief nodded.

  “Divinity,” Hazard said, pointing to North Quad, “and Law.”

  “It hasn’t been Law in a hundred years,” Skalman said. “It’s the Chem building now.”

  “Medicine,” Hazard said, pointing to South Quad.

  “Tauber Business School now,” Skalman said.

  “Natural Philosophy, the library, and the college.”

  “Natural Philosophy is still natural philosophy, but the library is called the Old Library now, and the original college is the admin building.” Skalman shrugged. “In case it matters.”

  “All right,” Cravens said, “Chief Skalman will divide up her people; we need someone in every building that knows how to access the sub-basements. We’ll have deputies and police officers search—Hazard, damn it, wait.”

  She kept calling after him; Hazard kept jogging. A few moments later, Somers pulled up alongside Hazard. “You’re making my job harder.”

  Hazard ran a little faster.

  “Asshole,” Somers said, just loud enough that Hazard knew he had been meant to hear it.

  Hazard didn’t waste time. Let the others search Divinity and the Old Library and whatever the fucking business school was called. He knew where Rory and Phil and Mitchell were being held: the law building. The name might have changed when Wroxall dropped its law school, but that didn’t matter. What mattered for a psychopath, what mattered in a game like this, was history. Resonance. Meaning. And it meant something, having his hostages—

  —victims, a dark part of Hazard’s mind corrected—

  —in the law building. This guy was thumbing his nose at the police, at the sheriff. He was having a laugh, and he was laughing especially hard at Hazard. This was a reminder that Hazard wasn’t police anymore. He wasn’t part of the law. He was just a nobody. This was a reminder that Hazard couldn’t do anything to stop this guy.

  Do you like puzzles?

  Hazard pushed the words out of his head. He pushed himself away from the dark whirlpool of helplessness and despair. Let this asshole play jokes. Let this asshole think he was clever. Hazard was going to find him, and when he found him, it wasn’t going to matter that Hazard wasn’t police anymore. All that mattered would be Hazard and the Blackhawk holstered under his arm.

  By the time Hazard and Somers reached the Chem building—formerly the Law building—on the North Quad, rent-a-cops were pulling up in golf carts. They probably didn’t call them golf carts, Hazard guessed, but that’s what they were: glorified golf carts.

  “Sir, we need you to—”

  “The door,” Hazard said. “Right fucking now.”

  The kid, who looked like he weighed about twenty pounds and was about to sweat right out of his uniform, took a second look at Hazard’s face and ran to unlock the door. When Hazard passed the kid, he grabbed the big flashlight at his belt and kept walking.

  It was a different rent-a-cop who led them into the basement, which had scuffed linoleum and hanging fluorescent lights and dust bunnies the size of Rottweilers. This guy was older, probably ten years past Hazard and Somers, and he walked with a bad limp. He moved fast, though, taking them past door after door, most of them padlocked, many of them marked with small plaques that indicated which department currently used them for storage. Some were marked with warning signs where hazardous chemicals were stored. The Chem building would be a hell of a place to lure people, Hazard thought, if you wanted to do something nasty to them.

  Sounds were louder in the confined space. The thud of their steps went up Hazard’s spine. When Somers cleared his throat, Hazard shivered like someone had goosed him with a static charge. Sweat soaked Hazard’s shirt and jacket; he could smell himself, the flop sweat of fear, adrenaline leaching out of his pores. His heart hammered—not in his chest, but in his ears, in his throat.

  The rent-a-cop stopped at a door and flipped the padlock. When the lock hit the door, it rang out. The noise shouldn’t have been a big deal.

  To Hazard, it sounded like a gunshot. The whole world shrank down to that one fact: someone was shooting at him. In the narrow hallway with the linoleum and the dust bunnies, he knew someone was shooting at him. Just like in the Haverford, in its maze of corridors. His hand went to the Blackhawk. But part of him just wanted to run.

  No, he told himself. He couldn’t get his hand off the Blackhawk, not yet. But he didn’t run either. No, he told himself again. You’re not there. You’re not in the Haverford. You’re not being shot at by Mikey Grames. You’re in a hallway. You were startled by a loud noise.

  But panic rose in his chest like floodwaters, drowning him, putting out the fire in his lungs because he couldn’t even pull in enough air to keep the blaze going.

  “Ree?”

  You’re in a hallway, Hazard told himself, suddenly wanting to cry, wanting to bawl his eyes out. You’re in the basement of the Chem building.

  “Ree? Hey, you’re here, right? You’re with me?”

  Hazard took a breath. And then another.

  “Yeah.” He eased aching fingers away from the Blackhawk. He was shaking so hard he wanted to lie down and sleep for a month. “Open the door.”

  “Why don’t you get back upstairs and radio Cravens—”

  “And tell her fuck all? Open the door, please.”

  The rent-a-cop had watched all of this without a word; now, he worked the key in the padlock, wriggled the lock from the hasp, and stepped out of the way.

  Somers stepped toward the door. “I should go first.”

  But Hazard had already caught him by the shirt and dragged him back, and before Somers could react, Hazard had thrown open the door and started down the steep flight of stairs.

  “Yeah,” he growled over his shoulder, “right. I’m going to let you go first into somewhere dangerous.” He shook his head. “Get a fucking clue, John.”

  Somers didn’t reply, but his steps came close behind Hazard as they went down into the sub-basement. When Hazard reached the door at the bottom of the steps, he thought maybe it was locked on the other side; it was warped, the boards uneven and obviously cut by hand, and when Hazard pushed, it didn’t move. He tried again, this time laying into it with his shoulder. With a squeak of wood protesting, the door popped free of the frame and swung open.

  Turning on the flashlight, Hazard played the beam back and forth. The first thing he realized was that the ceiling was low; he would have to hunch over, fo
rcing him to move slowly and awkwardly through the space. If someone were planning an attack, the sub-basement would neutralize Hazard’s normal advantages of size and speed. The second thing he realized was that this place was old, built before modern construction practices had mastered the art of sealing away nature: the floor and walls were quarried stone, tool marks still visible in the limestone, and the air held a humid chill that worked its way through Hazard’s tactical jacket and into his bones. It smelled like a cave, the cool, wet dark.

  The light caught nothing but the bleak gleam of limestone, and Hazard felt a knot loosen between his shoulder blades. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe they weren’t here. Maybe they—

  A sound. Not a cry. A whimper, maybe? Or just a weak exhalation?

  Hazard’s mind ran through possibilities: a faulty furnace, broken ductwork, some sort of compressor with a weak gasket. But he knew it was none of those things. The sound he had heard was human. It was the sound of a creature in pain. Maybe dying.

  “Did you hear that?” Somers said. His hand was warm and solid on Hazard’s shoulder, bone and flesh in a world that had turned to mist and the bone-white gleam of limestone. “Go upstairs and call this in to Cravens.”

  It took a moment for Hazard to ignore the suggestion, and Hazard wasn’t proud that it took him that long. But he shook off Somers’s hand, dropped into a squat, and worked his way into the sub-basement.

  The posture was awkward, worse than Hazard had expected, and it slowed him even more than he had anticipated. He shuffled forward, playing the light back and forth. Already his neck was beginning to cramp; when he straightened it by reflex, the crown of his head smacked stone, and he had to bite back a curse. The ache moved down his shoulders, into his arms, his lower back, his hips. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe he needed to try something like yoga.

  He realized, as he swept the beam of light back and forth, why he couldn’t spot the source of those wounded noises: like the floor above, the sub-basement was divided into storage areas, although the doors had long since been removed, leaving cells honeycombing the limestone. The noises were coming from inside one of those cells, but the stone and the dark made it impossible to tell from which. He took another step, and a new noise met his ears. A low, murmuring rumble.

  He moved quickly and surely, the tactical boots finding purchase even on the slick stone. The closest cell: empty. Somers zagged to the next across the way, glanced at Hazard, and shook his head. Empty too. They moved on.

  The rumble grew louder. The wounded, panting breaths grew closer.

  Another cell. Empty. Hazard looked for signs of passage, clues that might tell him where someone had walked before him. When he ran the beam of light ahead of him, though, he saw only the uninterrupted gleam of moisture on the floor. Whoever had come here before Hazard and Somers must have done it several hours ago. Or, Hazard thought, had used another entrance and a different route.

  At the next cell, opposite Hazard, Somers stopped, glanced, shook his head. They were moving slower now. The sound was so loud that Hazard knew they were close, and he took time to dry his hands on his jeans and adjust his grip on the Blackhawk. That low murmur now sounded different. It had variation in it. Differences of pitch and intensity. It wasn’t just one sound; it was many.

  When he reached the opening to the next cell, Hazard understood why: bees. He was looking at a swarm of bees, their black and gold bodies glinting in the beam of his flashlight. They were crawling all over a round object set on something ungainly and misshapen. And that didn’t make sense at all; bees lived in hives outside, where they had ready access to pollen and nectar. If they built a hive inside a building, it would be near an easy point of egress, not deep in a basement that had been locked up.

  But the impossibility troubled Hazard only for a moment before he realized what he was seeing, and then everything changed. The bees’ droning magnified into something like the ocean. He remembered once, as a child, very young, being left to his own devices while his mother went to the store. He had snuck a cherry Coke out of the fridge and drunk it while he went out exploring. He remembered seeing a dead dog in an abandoned lot, maggots growing out of rotting flesh. He had puked. A lot. And he had run home, shivering like he had a fever, and hidden under a quilt. The taste of cherry-Coke vomit had kept him company until his mother got home later that night, and he had tried to explain everything and worked himself into hysterics.

  He could taste cherry Coke now.

  “Holy fuck,” Somers said. “That’s a body.”

  Somers was right: the bees weren’t crawling over something round set on top of an uneven pedestal. They were swarming over the remains of a human head, still perched on a human body, although it was clear, now, that the body was suspended from the higher ceiling of the cell on wires and posed like a marionette. One foot forward, toward the cell’s exit, as though he were leaving. The head—that cherry-Coke taste surged into Hazard’s mouth again—turned back, as though looking for someone. Or something.

  “Who—” Somers began, stepping forward and waving a hand, as though he might clear away the swarm.

  “Don’t,” Hazard said, catching him by the arm.

  Somers grunted; Hazard knew he was grabbing too hard. But he couldn’t make his fingers relax.

  The sound of labored breathing called Hazard back. Someone else was still here. Someone alive. He released Somers’s arm, and this time when Somers took the lead, Hazard followed. Death was one thing, but this—

  The dead man had been shot in the head, ripping away bone and tissue so that, where once the man’s face had been, bees swarmed in a shifting mass. Hazard suddenly felt very light and very sure because he knew he would find whoever had done this and kill him.

  The cell was deeper than Hazard had expected, and he followed Somers closely, keeping his grip on the blond man. For a moment, it felt like they’d keep going like this forever, disappearing into the darkness with only the drone of the bees. But then Somers’s light swept across a body, and then another, and then the chiseled limestone wall.

  The two men wore nothing, and their nakedness exposed the extent of their injuries. Mitchell looked bad; it was his breathing they had heard, loud and struggling. The reason was obvious: he had been stabbed at least once, a deep wound. Other cuts, superficial and plentiful, covered his body. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to know they were there.

  But as bad as Mitchell looked, Rory was worse. The gentle, fine-boned dancer who had laughed with them at dinner, who had stood on the porch, shivering, and asked Hazard what it felt like to be in love—that boy was gone. Savage cutting scored him all along his body. In some places, skin had been flayed. The mutilation of his face was worst of all—an exposed cheekbone, the grotesque flap of lower lip that was almost severed, an eye that Hazard knew would never function again. His chest moved, and it didn’t seem possible that he could be alive.

  “Go,” Hazard said, shoving Somers toward the nightmare of bees. “Get an ambulance, go!”

  Somers didn’t argue; he ran.

  Dropping to his knees, Hazard gave each man another look. Rory lay in half-dried blood that crusted the stone like sea-foam, but none of the visible injuries looked life threatening. Mitchell, on the other hand, had the deep stab wound. Hazard shrugged out of his jacket and wadded it against the wound. Mitchell groaned and shifted, trying to pull away, but Hazard kept up the pressure.

  “Hold on,” Hazard said, hearing the cliché in his voice from a great distance and wanting to laugh because the other alternative was to break down. “You’ve got to hold on.”

  Mitchell groaned again.

  But it was Rory who spoke. “Emery?”

  The word was slurred and hard to understand; some of that was how quietly Rory said the name. Some of it was his damaged mouth. But Hazard’s gaze flashed to Rory, and to his shock, he saw the young man struggling to get up. A futile struggle; Rory fell back again.

  “Rory,
stay still. You’ve got to hold on. Help is coming.”

  “He said you would come. He said Hazard would come.”

  The detached portion of Hazard’s brain, the portion that ran through facts like a careful machine, made Hazard speak. “Who said that I was coming?”

  Rory shook his head. “He said I had to hold on. He told me to hold on.” His head lolled, and he let out a small cry of pain. “Oh God, oh God, I’m really bad, I’m messed up really bad.”

  The urge to comfort weighed against the need for answers. “Who did this to you, Rory? Who brought you here?”

  “Phil.”

  “Phil did this?”

  Rory’s voice came back hazy. “He kept telling me to hold on. He kept telling me someone would find us.”

  “Who did this to you, Rory? What did he look like? Tell me anything you can remember, just keep talking, just keep telling me whatever you can tell me.”

  “Phil wouldn’t let me go.” Rory’s voice was fading; it held childish pique. “Phil wouldn’t stop, kept telling me to hold on, kept telling me it would get better. I just wanted to go. I just wanted him to let me go because it hurt so much and I was tired of hurting, but he wouldn’t let me go.”

  Hazard could hear the dangerous echo, the vibration of his own words, but he ignored the memory. “Who wouldn’t let you go?”

  “That’s love, right?” Rory made a wet, coughing noise, and blood foamed pink at his mouth.

  Fear made Hazard shuffle over to the young man, splashing his light around Rory’s body. Fresh blood. Lots of fresh blood, which meant Rory had worse injuries than Hazard had realized.

  “I’m going to roll you onto your side, Rory. I need to see how bad you’re hurt, and I need to stop the bleeding.”

  “He made me stay,” Rory was muttering. “He wouldn’t let me go. I just wanted to go and he wouldn’t let me go.”

  “Easy,” Hazard whispered, heat moving through him like an infection. “Just be easy for a minute, ok?”