by Steve McHugh
"How do you think it's going?" Sky asked. She'd been calm the entire time we'd been sitting in Elijah's large living room. The couches were uncomfortable, purchased more for show than functionality. Actually, that pretty much described the entirety of the room's furniture. Expensive and uncomfortable.
"He's not going to say anything," I said.
Olivia stopped pacing and stared at me, her eyes hard and cold. "Why would you say that?"
"He hates Matthew," I said. "Really hates him. Did you see the look of rage that Elijah had when Matthew dragged him away. And that had nothing to do with him having been launched down a flight of stairs. He won't say anything to Matthew, or any of his wolves, because doing so will mean he lost. And that's what he can't stand. The idea of losing to Matthew."
As if on cue, Gordon entered the room. He appeared tired and fed up as he carried a glass of water over to a chair and sat down. "He won't say a damn thing," he said after taking a long drink. "Just insults Matthew over and over again."
"I don't know how much longer I can do this," Matthew said from the doorway. He was drying his hands on a tea towel, which was stained pink. "He's not giving anything up."
Sky glanced at me. "Can you break him?" she asked.
I was aware of everyone in the room suddenly staring at me. I wasn't sure of the answer. "Yeah," I said anyway. "But I'm going to need a few things."
"Such as?" Matthew asked.
"Did you find anything in that soundproofed room of his? Like knives, saws, implements of torture."
"A set of knives," Gordon said.
"Get them for me. And I'll need a gun."
"You can't kill him," Olivia said. "There's only six hours before Reid said he'd call. We need to know where Kasey and Tommy are before then. We need to get them out, Nate. I won't leave them with those… monsters."
"I don't plan on killing him. I just need to use a gun."
"Anything else?" Matthew asked.
"You mentioned that Elijah wanted his son to be alpha. Where is he?"
"He lives with his mother, word is he hates his father" Gordon said. "Do you need him here?"
I shook my head "No. At the moment he's a future ally, he doesn't need to see his dad being interrogated." I stood and stretched. "Okay, let's go see our guest."
Olivia and Sky followed us as I made a slight detour and filled two glasses with ice cold water from the fridge. And then we all went down to the basement. Two huge werewolves in well-made dark suits stood outside one of two doors. They moved aside at Matthew's gesture.
"We'll be in here," Matthew said, pointing at the door on the right. "We can hear and see you, so as soon as he gives you what you need, we'll be ready to go."
I spotted a group of folded chairs against the far wall, and grabbed one before entering the soundproofed room. I'd expected a dungeon, all dark and grim with chains hanging from the ceiling. But it was actually a large white room, with a sprinkler system in the ceiling and a drain in the middle, which I knew had been installed to remove blood. I dragged the chair across the floor with a noise akin to fingernails on a chalkboard, and placed it in front of Elijah.
He was sitting in a sturdy metal chair in the centre of the room, above the large drain hole, his wrists bound to the sides of the chair with thick rope. The sorcerer's band I'd put on his wrist was still there. His face was bloody and swollen, but he still managed to grin when he saw me. "Matthew couldn't get it done, so he sends you, that right?"
"Oh, I'm not here to hit you. I don't really feel that punching people does anyone any favours. In the long run, all it does is hurt your hand and make you tired."
"So what are you going to do?" Elijah sneered.
I remained silent, unfolding the chair and placing it in front of him, before leaving the room. I returned with Elijah's tray of exquisite knives, each made from silver with a mahogany handle and a golden E engraved on the hilt. I also brought in a small table, placing it next to Elijah who grinned when he saw the knives.
"Those aren't going to help you. You might as well start punching again."
"You do jump to a lot of conclusions," I pointed out as I sat in front of Elijah. "I'm here to tell you a story."
Elijah spat a lump of red blood onto the floor beside me. "You can go fuck yourself."
"It's just a story, there's no need to get upset about it. If you'd like, I can gag you while I tell it."
Elijah forced a smile. "Feel free to continue."
I nodded my thanks. "It was roughly 440 A. D when Merlin took me to China for the first time. I was around thirty years old, give or take a few years, and Merlin had described the trip as training. So, I trekked for thousands of miles to a strange land. I learnt the language on the way and was left on my own within a year to work with a warlord. I lived and worked there for half a century, and it was good training, but that's not the story. You see, after those fifty years had passed, Merlin re-appeared and told me I had a new assignment, a new task to explore. So, I was taken south and introduced to the lord of the area. I assumed at the time that I was going to be working for the new warlord in a fighting capacity. Instead I was introduced to a baker by the name of Xiao Jing.
"I spent three months living with Jing, his wife and family-two young girls and an older boy, helping bake bread. That's all I did for three months. Bake bread. I actually got pretty good at it, in fact I'm still pretty good at it, but after that length of time I began to wonder what Merlin's point had been. Merlin had already left to go who knows where, so I just continued baking, and living my life with Jing's family.
"And then one day, Jing was called to the warlord's palace, and I was asked to accompany him. I followed Jing through the palace and down into the basement where I started to notice that the guards gave us a wide berth. We walked down dark corridors and opened a door at the end. Inside was a man strapped to a chair in the centre of a room, much as you are in this one. Like you, his face was bloody. The guards had beaten the shit out of him for hours."
I grabbed my glass of ice water and took a long drink, leaving the second glass full without asking Elijah if he wanted any. "There was no one-way mirror like the one behind me. Instead, there were little slots inside the wall that people could open from a room on the other side and watch what was happening."
"Is there a point to this?"
I slapped Elijah across the face hard enough to snap his head to the side. "Don't be rude, I'm getting there. You see, Jing wasn't just a baker; he was also a very specialised information gatherer. In fact, his skills at torture were used all over the south of the country.
"In this instance, the man in the room was accused of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a prominent member of the higher class that lived near the palace. At first I thought that Jing would start cutting on him, or breaking bones. But instead, he just sat and talked to him for hours. He explained what was going to happen, and asked the man if he was going to tell them who had committed the crime, but the man refused to speak. So Jing had the man's son, a fifteen-year-old boy, brought in to sit beside him. And Jing tortured that boy for an hour. He used sharp pins to cause the boy to scream in pain, and the man broke. He told Jing that it was his other son who had raped and murdered the girl. That he was just trying to protect his older son.
"I'll never forget what happened next. The boy got down from the chair he was in, hugged his father and walked out. It had all been a ruse. The boy had gone to the warlord and begged for his father to be released, saying that it was his older brother who had committed the crime and that he'd done it before. Jing had hatched the plan to get the father to try and protect his innocent son, by giving up the guilty one. That's why Jing spoke to the man before anything happened; he wanted to know what kind of man he was. You see, Jing had this extraordinary ability to tell when someone was lying."
"So what happened to the older boy?"
"Oh, the man was released and the older son brought in. Jing made him confess to half a dozen
similar crimes over the next few hours. Then he had the boy taken outside and beheaded. It was the first time of many that I would spend in the palace with Jing. Over the coming years, Jing taught me how to torture someone. Not always with pain and brute force, but with psychology, knowing what works for what person. The ability to read someone and know, just know, how to break them. I studied with him for a long time."
"And what kind of man am I?"
"You see, now, there's the problem. I don't have time to sit and chat with you for hours. I can't afford to do that. So here's what's going to happen. You have one chance. Right now. You tell me where Peter took Tommy and his daughter."
Elijah laughed. "Who the fuck do you think you are? When I get out of here, I'm going to have you and everyone you care about flayed."
I sighed. "My name is Nathan Garrett. I worked for Merlin doing the things that needed to be done. You might know me by another name." I leaned toward Elijah. "You can call me Hellequin."
Elijah's eyes never left mine, and I saw the utter fear in them at the mention of my old name. But he soon covered it with bravado. "Bullshit, he's a myth. He never existed. Avalon created him to scare children."
"I figured you might say that." I grabbed a four inch knife and drove it into Elijah's knee just above the joint until it hit the bone.
I walked over to the glass as Elijah screamed in pain while the silver caused the wound to burn. "Can we get some bandages?"
A few seconds later the door opened, and one of guards brought me a selection of still wrapped bandages. He gave me an odd glance, he'd probably heard my old name, but I ignored it and took the bandages back over to Elijah.
"This is going to hurt," I said and removed the knife.
Elijah screamed obscenities at me as I opened a bandage and wrapped it around his leg. It took two bandages before the blood no longer seeped through, by which point Elijah was panting as the pain subsided.
I held the last part of the bandage in place. "You plan on telling me now?"
"There's nothing you can do, that would make me tell you."
I raised my eyebrows in shock. "Nothing? Nothing at all? Oh, dear Elijah. Everyone breaks. Everyone. It's just a matter of stimulus and time. But I don't have the latter. So, one last chance."
"Go to hell, you fucking prick."
"We don't seem to have any pins for the bandage. It's not much use without one." I turned back to the glass. "Can we get a pin in here?"
"Turns out Hellequin's a pussy," Elijah sneered.
"No pins?" I said to the mirror. "That's okay, I've got one." I grabbed a six inch, but incredibly thin blade from the tray, and plunged it through the bandaged knee. "There we go, we can use that."
Elijah commenced screaming once more.
I grabbed the hilt of the blade and pushed it further, until the blade came out of the opposite side of the leg, cracking the bone as it moved. "Still think I'm a pussy?" I whispered.
Orange glyphs lit up across my arms as I started to heat the blade. Elijah bucked against the chair, trying to free himself, but within moments the smell of burnt flesh filled the room.
"Do you still consider me a fairy-tale you son-of-a-bitch? Where are my friends?" I remained calm as I spoke, never raising my voice.
The bandages ignited, bathing Elijah's leg in fire.
I stood back and let the smell engulf him, allowing the screams to echo around the room, before using air magic to put the flames out. Elijah's screams had become a whimper.
"Fuck-" he started.
He never got to finish his sentence; I drew the gun and put two rounds into the good knee and one in his shoulder. The explosion of noise bounced off the walls, as the silver bullets shattered bone, ensuring that, even if Matthew allowed Elijah to live, he'd be crippled for the rest of his life. Never able to run with the pack again. Almost a death sentence for a werewolf.
"I didn't want to do it," Elijah mumbled. "But they offered me so much. The pack. They offered me the pack."
"Who did?"
Elijah shook his head, weakly. "I don't know. I swear. They're from Avalon. I dealt with… with Reid and Peter. But it was Avalon who arranged for Neil to be broken out of jail. He was meant to take the fall just long enough for Peter to kill that LOA bitch, that's why we had him follow all of those women. Why we let him keep the pictures he took. We needed to make it look like he was back to his old ways. But Neil got caught and Peter started to get crazy. He wanted more barren, he wanted to send a message. And Reid just let it happen. He said that Peter would kill Olivia, hurt the LOA, and then go after Matthew. And then I'd be alpha until my boy was old enough to do it."
"Why do you hate Matthew so much?"
"I can't follow a queer."
"What?" I asked genuinely confused.
"He's a fag."
I kicked him in the chest so hard that it flipped him and the chair over onto his back. "You are the single most moronic werewolf I've ever met. What does his sexuality matter?"
Elijah coughed as I pulled the chair back to an upright position. "It's wrong. We should have a strong alpha, not someone who can't even give us a female alpha because he's too busy fucking men."
"I don't care about any of this. I only care about one thing. Where are Tommy and Kasey?"
"You won't get to them in time."
He had the audacity to smile, so I kicked the hilt of the blade where it jutted from his leg, making him cry out.
"LOA office," he whispered.
"What?" I asked, unsure if I'd heard him right.
"The LOA office in Winchester. Peter should be there right now, killing every single, fucking agent he can get his hands on."
Chapter 39
It took all of thirty seconds to confirm what Elijah had said, but we left him in the room for nearly an hour as Olivia, Sky, Matthew and I discussed our next move, all of us sitting in the living room of Elijah's grand home.
"What do you need from me?" Matthew asked.
"Your wolves," I said. "Whoever wants to fight, have them here in an hour."
Matthew walked off, phone in hand.
Olivia had stared at me intently since I'd left the basement, a flicker of anger the only emotion she'd even remotely shown.
"I'll leave you two to talk," Sky said. "I'm going to call my father and let him know what's going on. He may be able to convince Avalon to let him send more people to assist."
"Thanks," I said, as Sky left Olivia and me alone.
Instead of talking to me, Olivia walked out of the room, leaving the house by the front door, slamming it behind her. I left it for a minute, hoping she would calm down, before going after her. I found her stomping around to the side of the property, a look of thunder on her face.
"He's taken two people I love the most in the world, and now he has the people I'm meant to look out for. The phone lines are cut, and no one is answering their mobiles. There were maybe forty good people in that building and now they're probably dead. If I call Avalon they'll never even try to save Kasey and Tommy, nor their own people. They'll just flatten the whole place."
"It's going to be okay," I said.
"Fuck you," Olivia snapped, turning on me. "You lied to me. If I'd known that you were a fucking monster, I'd have never let you anywhere near my daughter."
"You're upset."
Olivia shoved me. "Upset? You're the fucking Bogeyman. My mum used to tell me that if I misbehaved the Hellequin would come for me."
I wasn't really sure how to respond to that. "I care about Tommy and Kasey, too."
"What the hell do you know about caring? You're a killer, that's all you ever were. What could you possibly know about loss? About having your soul ripped out at the possibility of losing the people you love the most."
Olivia turned to walk away. "Her name was Jane," I said, and Olivia stopped walking. "We were together for two years, married after a few months. I was happy. Genuinely happy. Even though she was human, and I knew I'd outlive her, I just wanted to enjoy the tim
e that we had together.
"It all ended on a damp November morning in seventeen-eighty-two. I'd been away working for Avalon for a few months and had been eager to get home. I found her inside the house we'd shared. She'd been butchered. Her blood decorated our bedroom. She was naked and appeared to have been dead for several days. My rage was… terrifying. I buried Jane with my own hands; placing her near a field that we used to love going to. And then I burnt the house to the ground."
Olivia's shoulders sagged, but she didn't turn and face me.
"I hunted her killer for a year. I didn't care who I hurt to get the information I needed. I was so single-minded, so determined to have vengeance. Eventually, I discovered that her murderer had been part of the King's army; which had been going through the area.
"The killer was an officer by the name of Henry. No idea what his last name was, it didn't matter. He liked hurting women, and once he'd finished with them, he kept their hair as a souvenir. The rest of his squad had waited outside while he brutalised and murdered the woman I loved. No one had helped Jane and no one had tried to stop him.
"I discovered that they'd been on training manoeuvres the day of the murder, just their squad of thirty. And after all my searching, I found them and I killed them. They died in one night of blood and rage. All but one. I left Henry until last. I took him away to a secluded place and had my fill of vengeance. It took a week for him to die. And when he finally succumbed, I buried Hellequin with him."
The memory of Henry's blind and bloody form flashed in my mind, his pleas had long since silenced because I'd removed his tongue. I hadn't wanted information from him; I'd just wanted to make him suffer. Before he'd lost his ability to talk, he'd told me that someone had paid him to do it, but he never said who. No matter what I did to him, he took that secret to his grave. And after a few years of searching, I decided he'd been lying. Trying to prolong his life for a short time more, hoping for mercy where there was none to give.
"I no longer had the desire to go by that name," I continued, still talking to Olivia's back. "I no longer wanted to instil fear with a word. I hoped that the legend would die, but it didn't, it grew, became more… fanciful.
