Hikers - The Collection (Complete Box Set of 5 Books)

by Lauren Algeo

  She was pretty, in a striking way, with good bone structure and flowing auburn hair. He dipped into her mind a little to find out more about her. He didn’t want to go in too deep and alert her that he was there. He knew some sensitive people got uncomfortable when they felt an intrusion in their heads. Her name was Susannah and she was twenty-one years old. The book she had been reading for the last couple of days was a thick tome on philosophy. Perfect.

  He approached her the next morning, when she was sitting alone on a bench outside one of the buildings, waiting for her next lecture. She was nervous about talking to him at first, she hadn’t had too much interest from men, but he calmed her down. They discussed classes, the weather and current topics, and by the time she went inside for her lecture, she was very fond of him. He was pleased with his choice; she was intelligent and spoke eloquently. Now he just needed the family background.

  He began to court Susannah. They went to the theatre, and for dinner and lunch. After a handful of dates, she was suitably in love with him and he was satisfied with his choice of mate. They arranged a dinner at her parent’s house that weekend so he could meet them. He subtly planted the idea in Susannah’s mind that they’d actually been dating for six months and were head over heels in love.

  The dinner was a success of course, he was a charming and respectful guest, and her family loved him. He found out her family were all in good health and had no history of any serious illnesses. At the end of the meal, he took her father aside and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Her parents were delighted and gave their approval to him. It was the only way for her to live with him and give him children without raising any suspicion.

  The wedding was a small affair that took place a month after he’d first seen Susannah at the university, although no one knew the real timescale, they thought the two of them had been together for nearly a year by then.

  He endured the wedding with gritted teeth. Playing this caring character went against every fibre of his nature. The desire to kill drove him almost insane but he couldn’t risk this relationship before he got what he wanted from it. He allowed himself a couple of suicides to ease the mounting pressure. He snuck out at night and persuaded a few tramps to end their miserable lives. It relieved the need for a while, however he was getting restless and yearned to go out on a real job. He wore his mask as well as he could at home until the wedding.

  They consummated their marriage on their wedding night. It was awkward, and he felt no pleasure during the intercourse, but he achieved what was necessary to try and procreate. They had a brief honeymoon weekend at a bed and breakfast by the seaside, and had sex as many times as they could. He planted the idea of a baby in Susannah’s head as well and tried to make the sex as enjoyable as he could for her so she would want more. His efforts proved successful and six weeks after the wedding, they discovered she was pregnant.

  The Grand was overjoyed. He couldn’t wait to find out if a child could inherit his gift. He read up on babies and pregnancy, and tried to do everything possible to ensure they had a healthy child at birth.

  About six months into the pregnancy, he had a weak moment and took on a job. The resulting murder had never felt so sweet. After that, he controlled himself and prepared for his child’s arrival instead.

  He tried to read up on his gift in science books from the library but they wouldn’t acknowledge the power he had as fact. His abilities seemed to be confined to the fiction section so he dismissed books. What did these desk-bound scientists know anyway?

  The nearer the birth drew, the more restless he became. The child was tantalisingly close, a protégée for him to train. With his teaching, the strength it could possess would be phenomenal.

  In May, Susannah gave birth to a healthy baby boy. The Grand stared into his son’s dark eyes and tried to gage if he had inherited any of his abilities. It was too soon to tell. They named the boy Edward, after the late king of his childhood. It was a strong, powerful name, which he hoped the boy would live up to.

  Susannah was besotted with the baby so he was able to go out on jobs and spend more time trailing targets. He felt euphoric at being able to kill at will now his son was here safely; the possible heir to his mental fortune.

  It happened when Edward was six months old. The baby had advanced rapidly, giving the Grand more encouragement that his child possessed the same genetic talent. By five months, he could crawl, sit unaided and was attempting to find his feet to walk. His eyes gleamed with intelligence that he couldn’t yet express.

  Edward was sitting in his high chair, playing with a cup, while the Grand read a newspaper. He liked to see if there was any coverage of his murders, it always interested him to see how they justified his kills. The latest was a man he’d had set on fire as his client had paid for a particularly painful death. The police hadn’t caught the vessel he’d used for the job instead they were blaming a local gang.

  His son’s banging with the cup grew irritating.

  ‘Stop that noise,’ he thought as he turned the page of his paper.

  The banging stopped. He glanced up with mild curiosity, expecting to see Edward chewing on the cup and dribbling, but instead his son was sitting upright and staring straight at him. He carefully put the cup down on the tray of the chair and dropped his podgy arms to his lap. As if to say, there you go father.

  The Grand raised his eyebrows in surprise. Had his son merely been responding to his power or did he have a deeper understanding? Edward smiled gummily at him.

  He spent more time with his son, reading and teaching so they could communicate more. His son was a natural – he grasped the English language quickly and soon he could put sentences together. Susannah thought their boy was a genius and let him continue with his teaching.

  When Edward was three, it became apparent that he did indeed have the same gift. By then, Susannah had already given him another child: a daughter, Celiah, who was two months old.

  He took Edward along to the park for some fresh air and to feed the ducks while Susannah looked after the baby. There were some other children around the pond but Edward didn’t interact with them. He stared at the water and threw his bread methodically to the quacking ducks.

  The Grand sat on a bench and took in the minds around him; there were no dark thoughts there to amuse him. When Edward had finished throwing all of his bread, he expected him to come over to join him on the bench as usual, however that day he didn’t. Instead, he glanced at a little girl nearby and she came over and handed him the rest of her bread without a word.

  The Grand felt a flush of excitement. When Edward was finished with the second lot of bread, he came back to the bench.

  ‘Why did that girl give you her bread, son?’ he asked.

  Edward shrugged and swung his legs. ‘I asked her to.’

  ‘But you didn’t speak?’ he pushed.

  ‘I asked her in my head and she gave it to me.’

  His heart wanted to burst with pride. He could share his ability with his children, which would mean Celiah would have it too.

  Over the next few years he taught Edward how to control people’s minds. When to whisper suggestions and how he could read people’s memories. His son thrived under his direction and the Grand was elated to discover Edward had a very vicious streak. He excelled at punishing anyone he thought deserved it. Celiah followed her older brother’s example and picked up their skills quickly. He was so proud of them.

  He kept Susannah occupied with more children, and soon they had three sons and two daughters, with another on the way. A simple suggestion to Susannah led her to believe that she loved being pregnant and having babies, and wanted to keep going.

  The children knew not to talk of their gift to their mother, or anyone else, because no one would understand. If people found out, they would be separated so only father could be trusted. When each of them was old enough, and strong enough, he introduced them to his way of life. They loved it.

  Each of his childre
n was exceptional. Edward’s attention to detail was impeccable, he could find out everything they needed to know about a target, and he was passionate about violence. Celiah had a rarer ability than even he had – she could skim over people’s minds without them ever sensing she was there. People usually detected the alien presence in their heads but she could float on the surface and they didn’t know she was there until she went in deeper. His second son, Lucien, was positively brutal. He conjured up horrific ways for targets to be killed and relished every second of it.

  The Grand bred his own army of deadly assassins. He and Susannah had ten of their own children in total and they each inherited the gift. Some were stronger than others, and had slightly different abilities, yet they all had something. And they all had a powerful connection to him.

  One day at home, he discovered that if he sent a pulse out to all his children’s minds, they could each hear him. It proved to be very useful when assigning them jobs. One of his younger daughters, Rosalind, began to look after the clients and bring in jobs. She didn’t have as much flair for murder as the others but she possessed a great ear for seeking out troubled minds to hire them.

  As the children got older, it became a larger scale business. They branched out across areas in the UK and worked on several contracts simultaneously.

  Edward was the first of his children to have a child his own. He was seventeen years old and very strong willed; he wanted to see if he could pass on the ability too. He’d chosen a girl and impregnated her quickly. Unlike his father, he did not remain with the girl after the precious child was born. He’d grown to detest the girl during the pregnancy and instead had her jump to her death from the hospital roof after the delivery. Then he took the baby, a boy, back to live with his father.

  The Grand had been pleasantly surprised by the new potential heir. Susannah had been slowly dying for the last few months. Constant pregnancy and childbirth had ravaged her frail body and the doctors had told him she had cancer in her breast that was spreading fast. He kept her as pain free as possible. When she grew too ill to even get out of bed, he had her take an overdose of sleeping pills to kill herself. It wasn’t for pleasure this time though, it was out of respect. She had, after all, provided him with ten fine children.

  He’d often wondered how the children never seemed to hurt themselves, and he’d decided the strength of their minds must extend to their bodies. They were a super efficient species. If one of them cut themselves or broke a bone, it healed almost instantly. He didn’t question how it worked but he came to think of them as invincible.

  Almost invincible… one of his younger daughters was the first of his children to be killed. Alexia hadn’t been working jobs for very long and was still learning. She made the fatal mistake of being trapped inside a man’s mind when he died. The Grand felt no satisfaction at having his theory proved right.

  More of his offspring began to reproduce and each of their children had a part of his abilities. A few of them were weaker, however some of the grandchildren were as strong as his. He thought of them all as his children.

  Contracts were flowing in and the business boomed. Two world wars had caused chaos in the country and his sons and daughters flourished as they took on riskier contracts; ones with high profile victims, and more public killings. If the target was harder to get to, they orchestrated mass deaths so it was more difficult to tell who the intended victim was. The clients were satisfied it could never be traced back to them, and whoever had been in charge of the contract was even more satisfied. A mass murder was ecstasy in their minds. All those terrified, confused people; it gave the Grand more pleasure than he’d ever felt before. Of course, they couldn’t use that as a means for murder all the time, it had to be balanced with smaller-scale killings.

  When a son or daughter was ready, he gave them a simple murder to execute. Starting small and then building up their skills until they could handle anything.

  Some of the younger children caused him trouble. Their minds developed so rapidly and they couldn’t control their urges as well. They disobeyed the rules and tried to kill at will, and they usually had to be disciplined by whoever their parent was. There came a child every now and then who was exceptionally gifted, as strong as him even. They were granted special privileges and he would allow them to go to a quieter location in the countryside somewhere to hone their skills. When they were ready, they would become part of his elite team – the children he gave the difficult, large-scale contracts to.

  The second time one of his children died, it was of his own doing. One of his son’s sons went too far and jeopardised their operation. He was slack with the secrecy they maintained and bragged about his ability whenever he could. Most people dismissed him as crazy but it was a punishable offence none-the-less. His own father had warned him however the child carried on causing grief.

  Then he committed one of the worst sins of all: he failed to complete a contract. He had been given the simple task of killing a male judge. It should have been a straightforward murder – an easy stabbing or car collision – but the child had gotten too over ambitious. He’d tried to manufacture a train crash when there was no need for a large-scale killing. He had failed to turn the driver of the train and couldn’t be bothered to find another vessel so had left the area.

  Five days after the job was assigned to him, the target was still alive. The Grand was livid. He had quickly sent another child to the town to get the job done then once that was taken care of he’d turned his fury to the wayward child. Disciplining from his own father hadn’t worked so he had to take more drastic measures.

  He’d sent a pulse out to the mind of the offending son. The son heard and tried to block him out. It was the last straw. He unleashed the full extent of his rage at the boy’s mind. Somehow it took the form of a high-pitched, intense buzz that grew steadily louder. The son crumbled under the pressure and begged for him to stop, only he didn’t. Instead, he built on the buzz until it ruptured the son’s mind. The pleading ceased and his head was suddenly empty. The Grand realised he had inadvertently killed the child.

  He had unlocked an even greater ability. Now he could instil a deep fear into his children with the threat of death to any who disobeyed his carefully considered rules. He was a god.

  Chapter 34

  The Grand walked around the grounds thinking of the past. He’d never encountered one person who knew of their existence before, let alone two. And they were seemingly working together to try and track his children? He didn’t like that one bit.

  He sat on his favourite bench and pondered how it was that these two people could hear them. It was not completely impossible they could have been born with the same ability as him. The girl was young enough to be the man’s daughter and she could’ve inherited the gift, as his children had. He briefly toyed with the idea of joining forces with another powerful family but dismissed it quickly.

  Celiah had told him they had not been happy with the fact she had killed a girl; therefore these people were not like them. How could anyone not enjoy the rich pain and intense suffering of other minds? So if they weren’t like his family, they were a threat. One that should be eradicated swiftly before they tried to disrupt any more of his contracts.

  He heard the sound of a car engine purring in the distance. It carried on the wind across the quiet fields surrounding the house. Evelyn was here with Greiger’s body.

  He shuffled slowly round to the front of the house and was leaning on the porch banister when she drove up the gravel driveway in a black 4x4 – no doubt sweet-talked from someone so she could transport the body.

  He sent a pulse to a son in the house to come and collect the body. He was there before Evelyn had even gotten out of the car.

  ‘Take Greiger to the lab,’ he instructed his son.

  Several years back, the Grand had converted one of the many disused rooms in the house into a laboratory. He’d been curious about how his children’s minds worked so on the rare occasions
when one died, he had studied their body for clues.

  There were no immediate markers to show how different they were from other people. Their brains were larger than average but all the same parts were there. He performed full autopsies for other causes of death, although the children’s organs were always perfectly healthy. Their causes of death had always been something he couldn’t see, something in the mind, rather than a physical trait.

  One glance at Greiger’s body in the boot of the car told him this one was different. He beckoned and the son manoeuvred his corpse out of the car with a great effort. Rigor mortis had set in and the body was like stone.

  He followed Evelyn and his struggling son through the house to the back corner, where his lab was located. He had the body laid flat on the silver table, then he told the son to leave. Evelyn stood patiently by the door.

  ‘There was… nothing unusual in the warehouse?’ he asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘No, it was empty.’

  She didn’t sound completely sure and he waited for her to continue.

  ‘Well, it was probably nothing,’ she added. ‘But in the dust around Greiger, it looked as though there were some fresh scuffs and footprints.’

  ‘How many… prints?’

  ‘It looked like two. A bigger set, and ones made by smaller shoes.’

  He gave a curt nod and she left the room. He circled the body on the table slowly. The harsh, bright lights suspended from the ceiling illuminated Greiger’s corpse. He looked even worse in here than he had outside.

  His skin had a grey-blue tinge and he could see the mottled red rash Evelyn had mentioned peeking out of his collar. There was some dark, dried blood on his chin and his face was contorted into an eternal grimace.

  The Grand took a large pair of scissors from the workbench near the door. It was lined with spotlessly clean instruments for performing autopsies. He’d gotten them from a very helpful woman at a morgue. He’d then used her body to practice on back at the house. It hadn’t taken him long to perfect the art of administering the correct incision and prising a ribcage open. The scalpels and clamps she’d given him were top of the range. He ran a finger over the bone saws, syringes and other tools – they held the key to finding out what had happened to Greiger.