by Lincoln Cole
Arthur did, but he held it ready at his side.
Jim groaned from nearby on the floor, clutching his wounded knee. He emitted a string of curses, aimed at Arthur as he tried to pull himself up using the couch arm.
“Cheap shot, going for my knee like that.”
“You should spend more time on those rehab exercises they gave you.”
“How’d you know?” Jim asked, dragging himself up onto the couch. His face grew pale from the pain.
“Lucky guess.”
Jim winced, touching where Arthur had hit him. “Frieda told you, didn’t she?” Then he cursed at her. “That bitch. When the Council hears about this ...”
“The Council won’t hear about it,” Arthur said calmly, walking over to where Jim lay. “As far as they’re concerned, Emily had gone when you got here. Unfortunately, you could do nothing about it. Understood?”
“Like hell I’ll let you walk out of here—”
“It’s either that,” Arthur said. “Or the Council will find a lot of bodies and Emily gone.”
Jim fell silent for a minute, refusing to look at Arthur. Finally, he nodded.
“Fine. We got here too late.”
“What?” Emily rose from the sofa. Her smug expression evaporated.
Jim ignored her. “You can take her. We won’t try to stop you or come looking for you. Just get the hell out of here.”
“You can’t do that,” Emily yelled with wide eyes. “You’re sworn to protect me. Shoot him. I demand that you shoot him.”
Jim grabbed her and shoved her toward Arthur. She tripped and stumbled, but Arthur caught her before she fell to the ground. Her body trembled, but he had no pity for her. When she looked up at him, a terrified expression settled on her face.
“What happens to me now?”
Arthur looked her square in the eyes. “Depends on how quickly you tell me the truth.”
“About what?”
“About why you had my family murdered.”
◆◆◆
Once he had Emily safely under control, Arthur got out of Afterlife as fast as he could. Carmen gave him a look of mild annoyance and disbelief as he left, but after a quick call up to the VIP room to make sure Elgin had sanctioned his actions, she let him go. He didn’t breathe easy again until he got Emily into the backseat of his car.
Emily begged with him to let her go, but once she realized that her pleas had no effect, she resorted to screaming. Arthur used duct tape to bind her wrists and cover her mouth. He didn’t want to hear her speak, and the more she begged and pleaded, the angrier he became.
Had his wife and daughter begged like this before they got murdered? In his control, he had the woman who had gotten them killed … how could he possibly let her go? Though he had promised Jun he wouldn’t kill Emily, he didn’t know what would happen if he had to listen to her pleading and sniveling for too long.
He could barely believe that he had her—the person who had betrayed his family; the reason his wife and daughter had died. She sat in the back seat of his car, completely at his mercy. That, honestly, gave him enough to kill her, but he needed evidence first. He needed answers.
His first and ultimate question, though, was why? Why had she sold him out? What price had she set, and to whom had she sold him? Arthur had made a lot of enemies in his time serving the Council, and he needed to know which one of them had gotten to Emily.
He drove them outside of Sacramento to an area where the city currently underwent a lot of construction. They had started a lot of projects, as the fiscal year closed, to guarantee funding, but now they sat on the money since they had more projects than contractors. It made these buildings the perfect place to operate away from prying eyes.
He took her to the skeletons of a dozen buildings that stood unoccupied. No doubt the crews wouldn’t come back for months, which meant they would remain alone and undisturbed. Emily would quickly realize that screaming would do her no good.
He found an unoccupied building, broke open the door, and dragged Emily inside.
She didn’t struggle anymore, but her face had grown ashen when Arthur brought her into the dim interior of what would, eventually, become an office building. He found a five-gallon bucket and sat her on it, and then grabbed one for himself to sit across from her on the empty ground floor of the building.
Then he just waited, sitting silently in the darkness. He stared at her, letting the circumstances of her situation set in. Terrified, Emily’s eyes darted around the room, looking for any way out of the situation.
Finally, after about ten minutes, he reached up and rudely ripped the tape from her mouth. She let out a gasp of pain followed by a whimper.
“Arthur, I don’t know what you think I did—”
He held up his hand. “We need to talk.”
“You can’t do this,” she whispered, a hint of whininess in her voice. She sounded like a teenager pleading with her parents. Except for the staring at the floor and making gasping and sobbing noises. “You need to let me go.”
“Not a chance.”
“When my brother hears of this ...”
Her brother made for a powerful figure, and having him involved in the situation did worry Arthur quite a bit. He had become the reason that Emily would prove so difficult to prosecute if the Council accused her of betrayal. And stepping on the toes of Bishop Leopold Glasser could have sizable consequences.
Which meant Arthur now tread on dangerous territory and couldn’t do anything serious to harm Emily … at least, not without good reason. He intended to honor his promise to Jun Lee and had no intention of killing her.
Although, she didn’t need to know that.
“If you don’t tell me what I want to know right now, then your brother will never find your body.”
Emily sputtered. “I swear, I had nothing to do with your family’s death.”
“You mean their murder.” Arthur leaned forward. “They got murdered, Emily, after you told the Ninth Circle where to find them.”
“I didn’t. Someone else must have.”
“No one else could have.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“Don’t bother trying to deny it,” Arthur said. “We’ve gone past that point. You’re one of three people who knew where I lived, and the other two didn’t do it. You had the information, and now I need to discover the motive.”
“Maybe they trailed you back home,” she said. “How do you know you didn’t give your family away?”
“This will go a lot easier if you let me ask the questions,” Arthur said. “I told you; we’ve gone past the point of arguing or pleading, and you won’t convince me of your innocence. You’ll only piss me off.”
“I didn’t do it! I swear.”
“Did you do it for the money?”
“I didn’t do it.”
He ignored her. “Your options are to tell me what I want to know, or I’ll torture the information out of you.”
“You know that doesn’t work. You won’t get the truth through torture.”
“No,” he said. “But I’ll have a lot of fun trying.”
Emily’s body shook, and Arthur had to admit a moment of petty satisfaction. She had called it correctly, and torturing her would prove ineffective. He would get her to swear she was the Pope if he went down that road.
Fear, on the other hand, could make a powerful motivator on its own.
Part of him hated doing this at all. It seemed shady and beneath him, and it wasn’t who he was. Or, at least, not who he used to be before his family got killed. Back then, he had considered himself an honorable man, willing to do the right thing even when not easy.
Now, he just wondered if his daughter had cried like that before they cut her throat.
“I’m a member of the Council. You can’t do this. You are a Hunter. You serve me.”
“You can argue the semantics and rules of the situation all you want. It doesn’t change what will happen. I won’t enjoy torturing you
, Emily, but make no mistake, I will do it. Who was your contact in the Ninth Circle? To whom did you sell the information?”
“Arthur, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone from the Ninth Circle. I serve the Council faithfully and would never betray you. Do you think I could live with myself if I had a part of what happened to your family?”
“I guess we shall find out the answer to that at the end of our conversation.”
He stood and walked over to a table littered with construction tools. There, he picked up a screwdriver, eyed it for a second, and then set it back down.
“I just want to know who you told,” he said. “It’s a simple piece of information and can save us both a lot of time and energy.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t.”
“If you cooperate, I’ll turn you over to the Council and let them deal with you. No doubt they will offer you a painless execution. That’s a way better offer than you’ll get from me.”
“I don’t have a contact. I don’t know anyone in the Ninth Circle. I don’t know anyone, period. I swear, I would never deal with that cult or any cult. I would never betray the Council. Arthur, please, you have to believe me. I might not be a perfect person, but I’m not a killer. You know that.”
Arthur hesitated. She stuck to her story a lot more firmly than he had expected. Emily made a good liar, but under the circumstances, he doubted she could pull off something this convincing without at least a small slip-up.
She had it right, too. He didn’t like her. She would screw over a lot of people to get her way, but he also knew she wasn’t cold blooded. The woman had never struck him as a killer, and he knew killers.
It added doubt to Arthur’s mind. The conversation hadn’t progressed how he’d expected. With her self-serving attitude, by now he had expected her to give up her information in exchange for something else. She would have, at least, offered a deal.
Maybe, he admitted, she told the truth.
But, if not Emily, then who?
“You had to tell someone,” he said, finally. “Maybe not someone in the cult, but someone you weren’t supposed to. You were the only one who knew about my family, so you must have slipped up.”
“I tell you, I didn’t. I got sworn to secrecy and would never tell anyone outside the Council. Hell, I don’t even know many people outside the Council who would even believe me if I told them what we do.”
“Think, Emily. The Ninth Circle didn’t find out by accident. Who did you talk to?”
“No one, Arthur. The only person I ever talk to about Council business outside of the Council is …”
She looked up from the ground and at Arthur. Realization spread across her face.
Horror settled there, too.
“What is it? Who did you tell?” he asked.
Slowly, she shook her head.
“No, he wouldn’t.”
“Who did you tell?” Arthur took a threatening step toward her. “Who betrayed my family?”
She became a completely different woman now. In only seconds, she had gone from argumentative and scared to broken. Clearly, she didn’t want to believe that this person might be capable of something so horrible, but she believed it just the same.
“My brother.”
◆◆◆
Arthur felt sick to his stomach.
“Your brother? The bishop?”
“He’s the only person I talk to, and I tell him everything.”
“But why would he …?”
Arthur failed abysmally in discerning how to continue because it felt so hard to believe. He wouldn’t have, in fact, if not for the look of utter betrayal on Emily’s face.
Leopold Glasser had incredible power, and people trusted him both inside and outside of the Council. Though arrogant like his sister, he had incredible loyalty to the Church and Council, unlike her. He made for one of their staunchest supporters and greatest beneficiary. The idea that he would betray them seemed inconceivable.
Except …
The fact that he had so much trust and lived beyond reproach put him in the perfect position to do exactly what he’d done. He had lied, cheated, and manipulated to find out about Arthur’s family and use that information against him.
Though hard to believe, in his heart, Arthur saw the truth of it.
◆◆◆
At any given time, the Council of Chaldea had thirteen active Council members. They served the Catholic Church as a secret organization that the Church could call upon to handle sensitive supernatural problems when they didn’t want to get their hands dirty.
But they didn’t form actual members of the Church. Instead, they made for allies. The Church had played a critical part in forming the Council many centuries ago, but over the years, the Council had expanded to deal with all manner of supernatural threats and worked outside the Church’s command. They didn’t serve any religion in particular, and nor would they refuse to help anyone based on religious or political principles.
Yet, despite that, the Catholic Church had always been the primary monetary force behind the Council’s operations, giving them funding and political clout well beyond their meager means. Most of the Catholic clergy knew little or nothing about their Order, but some of the bishops did. Bishop Leopold Glasser was one such bishop, and he donated significant funds toward keeping the Council in operation.
The idea that he would lay behind this …
That represented something else entirely.
“Your brother? You think Leopold did this?”
She hesitated and shook her head. “No, it couldn’t be him. I’ve gotten it wrong. I must be wrong.”
“Did you tell him about my family?”
“Yes. But as an off-handed thing. Something mentioned in passing. We sat talking about the Hunters, and he didn’t know if you served as priests and weren’t allowed to have families. He assumed familial ties could become a liability, but I told him that you were allowed to marry, and your families had protection.”
“And then you told him about my family,” Arthur said.
Emily nodded. “I used you as an example. I didn’t think.”
“You never told anyone else?”
“No. But my brother would never do something like this. No way. Not unless he felt he had no other choice.”
“Don’t try and justify.”
“I’m only saying—”
He raised a hand to stop her words. “What else did you tell him? Did you tell him about any other families you got tasked to protect?”
“Just that. Except …”
“Except?”
“Leopold asked me a few days ago about a couple of members of the Council. I didn’t think anything of it, but he seemed more specific than usual when we talk.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
She winced. “I did. I thought he just had an interest in knowing more about the Order since he donates so much money to us. One of the people he asked about was Frieda, but I don’t know much about her. She’s private and doesn’t have any living family members that I know of. But the other …”
“Who?”
“Aram Arison. He has two young children.”
“You told him where he lives?”
She nodded. “Not his family, specifically, just the city where they reside. But I said he was the leader of a congregation and which one. You don’t think they could use that information to find Aram’s family, do you?”
Arthur didn’t answer. He walked away from Emily and pulled out his phone. He called Frieda.
She answered right away. “What is it, Arthur? You have Emily?”
“Yes. Where is Aram?”
“What?”
“Aram Arison. Where is he? Where is his family?”
“He’s in India dealing with Council business.”
“What about his family? Are they home?”
“Arthur, you know I can’t tell you—”
“They aren’t safe, Fried
a. Where are they?”
She hesitated. “Washington State on vacation. They just got there. Aram is supposed to meet them tomorrow.”
“You sent him?”
“Yes. So that he can take care of some Council business in the area.”
“He’s meeting with Bishop Glasser, isn’t he?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“It’s a trap. His family isn’t safe.”
“What do you mean? We have two Hunters keeping an eye on them, and we’ve had no reports of anything out of the ordinary.”
“Leopold,” Arthur said. “He betrayed us. He got my family murdered.”
Frieda fell speechless on the other end of the line.
“Frieda?”
“That can’t be right.”
“He’s the only person Emily told, and he asked specifically about Aram. He’s the only other person who knew about my family, and now he knows about Aram’s, too. You need to get me to Washington and send me Aram’s family’s location.”
“Jesus, Arthur. This is …”
“Way bigger than we thought,” Arthur said, rubbing his face. “And way worse. We don’t have a lot of time. Whatever might happen, it will unfold before Aram gets there.”
“You need to stop this, Arthur.”
“I thought I was out of commission?”
“Not anymore. Head to the airport. I’ll have a ticket waiting for you on the next flight out.”
Arthur hung up and slid the phone back in his pocket. He looked at Emily. She sagged on the bucket with a look of utter despair on her face.
“You think it was him, don’t you?” he asked. “You think Leopold did it.”
She looked up at him. Finally, she nodded. “That’s terrible, because he’s my brother, but it’s true. He’s always had a dark streak to him, and these last few years he … changed. We talk less and less, and he always seems to have an agenda.”
Arthur didn’t know how to respond. “For what it’s worth,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She gave a sardonic chuckle. “What do you plan to do with me, now? Kill me?”
“No.” Arthur picked up a box cutter from the table, walked over, and cut the tape binding Emily’s wrists. She rubbed them to help with circulation and pulled the excess tape loose, surprised that he had cut her free.
