Ray stood at the window looking down. The rage was subsiding and fear was starting to set in. This little incident would send him back to prison for sure.
Rachel, trembling with the delectable waves of emotion, hit him on the back of the head with a lamp.
She then dressed, stepped over the supine form of Ray and left before the police arrived.
Her work was done and she was content.
Northern Frontier, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Hael was one of the chosen people.
Anointed by Emperor Enki II, Supreme Ruler of City and Empire, Hero of the Rebellion and Scourge of the Feral, Hael was the commander of the Ninety-First Legion. He was the youngest commander in the history of his people and he had never led his troopers into battle.
That was going to change in the next few minutes.
He had been harrying the enemy, the filthy Ferals, for almost a week with his Nightfeeders — never letting them rest, never letting them relax. He had driven the Ferals to the valley below his current vantage. They were waiting for the inevitable now, huddled and stinking in their animal skins and decorative colored shells.
Hael looked to his right and nodded to his older brother Lucan. Lucan was smiling fiercely, eager to prove himself, eager to kill.
He looked to his left to his younger brother Bral. Bral was aware of his brother’s gaze but did not take his eyes from the enemy below. His face was expressionless. The single tear running down his cheek betrayed his dread of the task ahead.
Hael lifted his arm. Bronze blades sang and they were unsheathed across the ridge. Leather creaked as the troops readied for the charge. Hael dropped his arm. With a roar, his troopers plunged into the valley.
Chapter 1
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
Charlie was on her way home from work. It was bucketing down, but the cold and the wet did not bother her. Not much had the power to make her uncomfortable, other than boredom. She was actually feeling pretty good — it had been a fun day at work.
She was one of the few people on the planet who actually liked her job. Oh sure, some people claim to like their job, but they don’t, not really. They like the money they are paid and the useless things that money allows them to buy. They like the perks, the occasional sandwich or cookie left over from a business meeting that they were not invited to, or maybe a free drink or two at Christmas. Some liked the opportunity to bully, mock or just plain despise their coworkers. Some liked stealing stationary or tools from their employers. Very few people liked doing the actual tasks that they were paid to do. Charlie was one of those lucky few. She found that working with the elderly was very satisfying. The retirement home was understaffed and overpopulated, so she could really make a difference in her charges’ lives.
Today had been particularly satisfying. Nice, old Major MacTaggert had been desperate to use the toilet and no one else was around to help him. Seeing an opportunity to make a difference, she offered to help him. She then managed to find reasons for not taking him to the bathroom. He ended up begging for her to take him. Eventually he shat himself.
His humiliation had been delicious. She had then berated him and called him disgusting and made him try to clean himself up. At one stage she thought he was going to have a heart attack. Unfortunately, he didn’t. However, all in all, the whole episode was very satisfying.
Her job gave her many opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives.
She had even made a little game out of finding novel ways to make a difference. Most people just don’t make the effort to make work fun; their loss.
She stepped out of the bus onto slick cobbles of the Grassmarket. Yellow light spilled out of the windows of the many bars and restaurants lining the road. You could intermittently hear the muted roar of music, laughter and tinkling glasses as someone entered or exited one of the establishments and released a bubble of sound and light into the street. The Castle loomed darkly down on the revelers from the top of the extinct volcano in the center of the city.
She was meeting the rest of her coven at the Irish Pub. She could never remember the names of Irish Pubs; they always seemed to be named after the proprietor, unless the proprietor happened to be named Chen or Patel and then they were usually just called Murphy’s. The English, the Scots and the Welsh seemed to have a better idea about how to give a pub a memorable name, like the Farmer’s Arms, the Red Dragon or even the Cock and Bottle.
As she approached the door to the Irish Pub she tried to make out the name spelled out by the curling cursive script of the sign, perhaps, O’Mally’s or O’Mully’s? It didn’t really matter.
Then, she felt a small niggle. There was someone in pain up at the castle. There were many things she could resist. She could forgo sex, drugs, even food and drink but someone in pain was something altogether more difficult to resist, so why bother resisting?
She quickly moved towards the castle to stake her claim, before one of the others noticed and decided to investigate.
She darted up a set of stairs that would take her from the lower road up to the Royal Mile. As she turned the corner she could see a truly pathetic crippled creature looking out at the city. Charlie dismissed the vague feeling of familiarity as she felt a warm glow just below her belly button.
Umm, cripples, she loved cripples.
In her vast experience, cripples usually had their emotions locked down pretty well. They insulated themselves from the world, never showing the emotional toll that their condition took on them. With a little bit of effort, they would crack and their anguish would flow out. Scrumptious.
This cripple was more buttoned down that usual. She could neither read nor feel anything of his emotions, other than the slight niggle that had drawn her to him. She got wet thinking of the volcanic bubble of emotional magma waiting to burst forth for her.
She pulled down the short hem of her black raincoat and ran a hand through her short, wet, ginger hair as she approached him.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
He startled and then winced in pain. People usually could not sneak up on him. “Yes, yes it is. It’s one of my favorite spots to view the city.” His heart was pounding. He exerted every ounce of his will to appear calm. Hopefully she thought she had just startled him, nothing more.
“I hope I’m not intruding.” She walked over to the guard rail and then turned from the view to look at him. Her pupils dilated slightly.
“No, no, not at all. It is nice to talk to someone for a change.”
“You do not talk much then?”
“No, not much, I mostly keep to myself.” He broke her gaze and looked out to the city again.
“I see. You said this is one of your favorite spots. Do you come here often?”
He thought a second and replied, “Well once a week or so. Is that often? I suppose it depends on how many things you do with your time.” He involuntarily looked back at her and was immediately trapped by her magnetic green eyes.
She smiled and her attractiveness ratcheted up a few notches. “Well, would you say that once a week was often for you?”
He grimaced slightly and said, “Yes, I suppose I would. How about you, what brings a pretty girl like you out in the rain?”
She smiled a little more widely at the compliment. “I needed a break from studying. My friends are indulging in a little retail therapy. I’d rather go for a walk than shop, even a walk in the rain.”
“Ah, shopping, the core of the world economy,” he murmured.
She snorted in agreement. “I thought I would see if I could get into the castle and take my mind off my studies and then I saw you over here and was curious.”
“About the scars?”
Lightning flashed.
“No, just about what you were thinking. I didn’t see the scars until you turned to speak. You seemed sad.” Thunder rumbled. She reached out and gently touched his face. He felt a tingle where her fingers brushed the scar tissue.
“You did well not to flinch,” he said. He felt the bile of shame in his throat as he said this and felt control of his emotions slip a little.
He watched her closely. She did not respond verbally, but her pupils seemed to swell even more. The green of her irises were almost completely eclipsed by her black cavernous pupils, possibly just the aftereffect of the darkness following the lightning but possibly not.
He pulled out his phone and looked at its glowing face. “I should get back; it was nice to meet you. Sorry, I missed your name.”
“No you didn’t, I didn’t tell you.” She just looked at him, waiting for him to ask. The silence of a few expectant seconds felt like hours. She relented, “It’s Charlie.”
“As I was saying, Charlie, it was nice, no, a pleasure to meet you. Maybe I will see you here some other time?”
“Maybe. Maybe next time we could go for a drink.”
“Maybe.” He turned to go.
“And you? What’s your name?”
He hesitated a second and said, “John, you can call me John.”
He tried not to let his excitement show as he slowly made his way home. He would need to prep Lab B. It would need to be ready for use again soon.
Charlie watched him hobble down the road, then closed her eyes and leaned on her hands on the wall that jutted from the edge of the cliff. Her legs were trembling. She could barely restrain herself from reaching between her legs. Anticipation was the best aphrodisiac.
She took a deep breath.
Her mark was on him now. The others would be jealous, but they would leave him to her.
“John, my darling we will definitely meet again,” she whispered under her breath with a half-smile. “I wonder why he lied about his name,” she thought. A good liar could smell a lie and she was one of the best.
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Jonni Brown woke up as his head bounced off the surface of the desk.
He coughed self-consciously into his hand and looked over at Finn to see if he noticed. Finn hadn’t; he was focused on the experiment that was playing out on the monitors in front of them. Jonni and Finn were sitting on a couple of plastic chairs in front of a steel desk that held two black and white monitors. Behind Jonni and Finn was a heavy steel door that sealed them off from the outside world. When engaged in winkling out the mysteries of the human mind the outside world represented potential corruption of experimental results.
The monitors on the desk showed two other people, a man and a woman, sitting by themselves in rooms that were very similar to their own. Instead of the monitors, they each had a set of cards in front of them. Every thirty seconds the man would select a card and hold it up to the camera so that Finn and Jonni could see the design on it. Fifteen seconds later the woman in the other room would select a card from her deck and hold it up for the camera in her room, allowing Finn and Jonni to see her card and record the results of the trial.
Jonni had been looking forward to the trials today. Subject N, also known as Babs, had performed phenomenally on the cards the last time she had participated in the trial. She had matched all but one of the cards selected by the target subject, demonstrating a massive, statistically significant psi effect. Today was different, or it had been before he drifted off.
He looked over at his friend again. Finn’s shoulders were rigid and he was peering at the screen with the woman. She had just selected a card and was lifting it towards the camera. Finn was moving his head to the side, as if that would let him see the card more quickly. She turned the card to face the camera, “Yes!” said Finn. Jonni saw the two subjects place their cards on their tables, stand and leave their respective rooms.
“So, um, how did she do?” Jonni said. “Before I got distracted there, she seemed to be doing pretty shite.”
Finn was looking down at the chart he had been filling in, and he did not look up as he said, “Yeah, I can see how your snoring would distract you.” Finn signed the bottom of the chart and looked up at Jonni, “She continued to do terrible, remarkably terrible. So terrible, in fact, that she completely nullified the statistical effect she demonstrated last time.” Finn was smiling as he said this. His eyes were dancing with excitement. Why the fuck was he smiling?
“Uh, but that’s bad isn’t it?”
“We shall see. I had a thought the other day. A thought I need to talk to Proctor about.”
“It better be a brilliant fuckin’ thought.” Jonni sighed. “Sorry, it just seems so fuckin’ pointless. I’m going to end up like all the other bitter tossers who have made Parapsychology the science of disproof. I wanted to prove that psi exists, that the Mind matters. Anyway, fuck it, let’s get pissed. You coming on the pub crawl?”
“I was thinking of skipping it, I want to run some more numbers to see if my theory will hold up. It will need to be airtight if I bring it to Proctor. He’ll want Dawson to look at it too.”
The door opened. The man from one of the monitors entered the room. He was of medium height, with brown hair starting to grey at the sides. Except for his frigid blue eyes, he was completely unremarkable
“Speak of the devil. Dr. Dawson we were just talking about you. You are looking dapper this afternoon.,” Jonni was going to continue in the vein, except, as expected, Dawson cut him off.
“Shut it, Toad,” said Dawson. “Did either of you fuckups manage to keep your hands out of your pants long enough to record the results? How’d they look?”
“Uh, yeah, um, I recorded the results.” Finn was cowed by Dawson. Not just at that moment; Finn was generally cowed by Dawson. Jonni did not really care how Dawson spoke to him, but it made him furious to see his brilliant friend treated like a smear of dog shit. Jonni knew from bitter experience that arguing with Dawson would only serve to make him more abrasive, so he held is tongue and glared at Dawson. Jonni’s protuberant eyes gave him an impressive glare, or so he thought.
“Well give it here, boy. I don’t have all day.”
Finn handed over the chart. Dawson snatched it and scanned down the list of results. “Just as I thought, nothing, you two must have been smoking crack last time you tested her.” He handed the chart back. “Input the results into the system tonight, before you leave. Do you think you can manage to do that?”
Dawson did not wait for a response before he pulled open the door and left.
“So, how about that drink?” When Finn did not refuse right away, Jonni knew he had a chance, so he set the hook. “I think that her royal pertness, Ms. Rebecca Jones, is coming. Come on, you know you want to. Don’t be a wee Mary.”
“All right, all right, I’ll come.”
“What, no more arguments? No more pressing statistical analysis? If I knew I only needed to mention your secret sweetheart, Bex Jones, I wouldn’t have wasted my time softening you up.”
Finn looked down at the chart again, his face turning a little pink. “I don’t know what you mean.” He stood and put his hand on the door handle. “Wait, softening me up? How?”
“Oh you know, the little things, I didnae use up all the toilet paper this morning, when I knew you were waiting. Normally I would have.”
Finn shook his head and muttered, “I shouldn’t ask.” He raised his voice a little. “So, what time is it at then?”
“Seven, meet me in the common room in the Bute building. Oh and bring a scarf; it is a three-legged pub crawl and you and me, pal, are partners.”
Finn sighed and left the room.
Finn entered the quadrangle bound by the Psychology building, the Divinity building, and the Bute building, which housed the Biology and Parapsychology departments. He paused and looked at the massive oak that dominated the space. The oak was rumored to have been planted by Mary Queen of Scots in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Apparently, even oaks have sell-by dates. The tree was being cajoled into surviving by supports and straps that prevented it from collapsing under its own weight.
Finn could see Professor Proctor on the far side of the quad. Proct
or was the current holder of the Bruce Chair of Parapsychology.
Adolphus Bruce had been some crazy, rich American, who had bequeathed a Chair in Parapsychology to the University. The Chancellor of the University, allowing his greed to overcome his common sense, had agreed to establish the Chair and in doing so had managed to alienate himself from his fickle peers for the remainder of his career. Academics are notoriously unforgiving in the geek eat nerd world that they inhabit. The incredibly intelligent spend vast amounts of time trying to disprove, discredit or scoff at the pet theories of their peers. Scoffing being the most satisfactory, as it is usually used if no evidence exists to discredit or disprove. Hence, when the Chancellor agreed to establish the chair, all those with any real or imagined grudges took the opportunity to shun him. Proctor, as the holder of the chair, was held in slightly higher regard, as he was not an administrator.
Proctor was in the middle of a discussion with Dr. Mara Novak and Dr. Andrew Dawson.
Mara was a marine biologist in her mid-fifties and was good friends with Proctor. In academic circles that meant that she did not call him a fraud and a quack to his face. Her severe dress and tightly pulled-back hair was softened by the warm smile she directed towards Finn as she noticed him across the quad.
Finn walked over to the group and caught Proctor’s eye. The professor nodded to him. Dawson ignored him as he related a story in his usual forceful manner, hands chopping the air and the occasional drop of spittle flying from his lips. After waiting for a few more minutes, with no acknowledgement from Dawson, Finn moved away and sat on the bench that had been built around the trunk of the tree. He picked at the flaking green paint on the bench as he waited for Dawson to wind down.
Proctor eventually extricated himself from the conversation and made his way over to Finn.
“Poor Mara, I hate to leave her with him, but one must look out for one’s self. Dr. Dawson’s intensity may make him a great researcher, but it doesn’t make him less of a prick. Ah well, I will try to make it up to her later,” he said. “What is it, Finn me boy? I’m running late for a date with a beautiful single and I do not want to keep her waiting.”
Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) Page 2
