by Alan Baxter
Claude smiled to himself. Riding with the old man again, just like the old days. His father had not been around much while Darvill was a kid, but his influence had been manifest often. He had encouraged Darvill’s occult studies. And when Claude had turned sixteen, his dad had become a regular feature in his life, sharing the field experience and grooming Claude to be his main outside contact. He enjoyed that time together and, if Hood could maintain this new level of control, Darvill thought he might enjoy finding out just what his father had become, and where that might take them. Regardless of how much he had come to empathise with Caine during the Obsidian Incident, it was all shattered now. He wanted to finish Caine and his bitch Kin lover. And that would only be the start of his adventures with his newly powerful father.
‘The urge to murder, son. It hasn’t gone away.’
Claude glanced at Hood again, wondering if the old bastard was reading his thoughts. ‘You can keep a better hold on it though, right?’
‘For now. But I don’t know for how long. You’ve killed. You know the thrill.’
Claude shrugged. ‘Sure, depending on the circumstance. Ending someone intent on ending you carries a great satisfaction.’
‘It’s the ultimate, the power over someone’s life. It’s clearer to me now than it ever was.’
Claude laughed. ‘You were always so happy to manage the business and make the money. You left the magic and the mayhem to me once you knew I was up to it. Changed your mind now, eh?’
‘No, just decided to embrace a more hands-on aspect of the life. I never left it all to you. There were many things I did for myself. But change, son, it’s inevitable and we have to roll with it. The only certainty in life is change. And I have a powerful need to kill.’
‘We’re only an hour from Caine’s place. Hopefully we’ll find him in and all your killing urges can be sated.’
Hood twitched and shuddered in his seat, muttering under his breath, but he said no more.
The drive was uneventful, the freeway giving way to narrower single lane roads and eventually to the rolling country so recently familiar to Darvill. Hard to believe it had only been a few short months since he had last been here, looking for Caine to find out what had happened to Hood. Now he returned with the man himself, all that shared experience in Obsidian fresh, and the urge to kill strong in him also. He grinned. He almost felt sorry for Alex and Silhouette. But this time, he was in control. He had no need to endure an alliance of which he wanted no part and it was time to make Alex pay.
He pulled into the driveway to Alex’s house and a large, black Land Rover with opaque tinted windows blocked the way. A man in all black combat fatigues waved a hand and approached.
‘The fuck is this?’ Claude said. He wound down the window.
‘Can I help you?’ the guard asked.
‘Here to see Alex Caine,’ Claude said, with a dashing smile. ‘We’re friends from out of town.’
‘He’s not here at the moment, I’m afraid. Maybe you could come back. I can take a message.’
Claude put a hand on his father’s leg as Hood began to growl in annoyance. ‘We’ve come a long way, we can’t just turn around.’
The guard’s face hardened, all civility evaporating. ‘You’ll have to leave now.’
The passenger door flew open before Darvill could react and Hood leapt from the car. The guard jumped backwards, bringing a small automatic weapon up from his hip as Hood slid across the car’s bonnet. The weapon barked and flashed, deafening in the country quiet, and Hood’s shirt danced and shredded under the hail of automatic fire. It didn’t stop him for a moment and he grabbed the guard around his throat with one hand, lifted him high and slammed him headfirst into the ground. The man’s head burst like ripe fruit. Hood straightened up and roared with laughter.
Darvill slipped quickly from the driver’s seat as the sound of pounding feet approached, responding to the gunfire. His father would be unstoppable in the short term and they needed someone alive. More weapon fire and shouts of alarm rang out, then screams of pain and Hood’s maniacal laughter. Darvill rounded the Land Rover and saw three more people rushing towards Hood and one man standing by the house, his face ashen, talking urgently into a phone.
Darvill ran for the lone fellow, glancing back as he went. Hood ducked a burst of point-blank fire and came up to punch the man to the ground. With an animal roar, he grabbed one of the man’s legs, stood on the poor bastard’s hip and wrenched hard. The leg tore free and the man screamed briefly before falling unconscious. Hood swung the dismembered leg wide like a baseball bat, slammed the gory stump into the side of another guard’s head even as that man riddled Hood with more ineffectual bullets. Blood and body parts began to rain in all directions.
The mayhem was a good distraction for the man on the phone and Darvill snuck in behind and slipped his arm about the man’s throat. Locking his other elbow into the man’s back, he squeezed a choke hold on and the guard thrashed briefly and quickly sank asleep. Darvill lowered him as his father strode along the driveway. He was covered in dripping scarlet, his clothes ragged, his face split in a lunatic grin that chilled Darvill’s bones.
‘Ah, you took one yourself!’ Hood said, disappointment in his tone.
Claude held up both hands. ‘He’s not dead, but don’t kill him! Not yet! We need to ask him some questions, yes?’
The guard moaned and shifted as he came around. He froze at the sight of Hood, instantly awake again.
Hood frowned. His hands clenched and loosened quickly, his face twisted as he clearly fought some internal battle. After a moment he drew a deep breath and his rage seemed to dissipate. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. I wonder what’s going on here.’
‘These people are Armour,’ Claude said. ‘I recognise the look. Caine worked for this group and that’s what started the whole Obsidian thing. If he’s gone and all these fuckers are here, something serious must be going down.’
Hood stood tall, stretched his arms high. He dragged his hands back down over his face, his clothes, revelling in the feel of the blood and gore that coated him. He spread it around like a salve and it seemed to calm him further. ‘Ahhh, okay then. Let’s interrogate this bastard.’
‘Don’t kill him,’ Claude said. ‘I have to make sure there are no more.’
Hood nodded and, for the moment at least, Darvill believed him. He ran a quick jog around the house, in through the back door, and swiftly checked the rooms. It seemed everyone had responded to the mayhem out front and all paid dearly. He returned to find the sole surviving guard propped against the wall of the house, his eyes wide as he stared in open terror at Hood. Hood stood stock still, a statue in red.
Claude crouched beside the man. ‘Name?’
‘John Doe.’
Claude laughed. ‘Of course.’
The man said nothing.
‘You’re Armour. I’m not asking, I’m telling you. I know about you and about Alex Caine. Now before that fella at the gate met an untimely demise, he told us Caine isn’t here. He wasn’t lying, it turns out. So where is he?’
Doe sniffed, swallowed, never taking his eyes off Hood. ‘I’m not telling you anything.’
‘You were on the phone, so I can only assume reinforcements are on their way.’ Darvill leaned forward and yelled, ‘Which means we do not have time to fuck around!’
Doe flinched, but said nothing, still staring at Hood.
Claude sat back. ‘Tell me where Caine is. What’s going on here? Why all the Armour personnel?’
Doe clamped his jaw shut. Hood moved forward, Doe’s eyes widening again as he came. Hood crouched and picked up one of Doe’s hands. The man tried to pull away, but Hood’s grip was like a vice around his wrist. He pulled Doe’s index finger out straight and took the fingertip between his thumb and the first knuckle of his own index finger. Staring into Doe’s eyes, he squeezed suddenly and Doe’s fingertip burst with a crack of bone and a spray of blood as the nail detached. The man screamed and
thrashed, but Hood refused to let him go.
Darvill grinned. He could get to enjoy field work again with his old dad. ‘Answer my questions,’ he said to the panting operative.
The man shook his head, gasping for breath.
Hood dragged Doe’s middle finger free and promptly crushed the tip of it with his iron grip.
Doe screamed and paled further, his white face flushing a sickly green. His eyes fluttered on the verge of passing out and he sobbed. ‘Stop, please!’
‘Answer my questions,’ Darvill said calmly.
‘I can’t!’ Doe screamed between sobs and the tip of his ring finger erupted in a spray of crimson. For a moment the operative sank unconscious from the pain, but Darvill slapped him awake again. He sobbed and gasped for breath, snot smearing across his mouth and chin.
Hood held up the man’s arm where he gripped it about the wrist and squeezed. Bones ground together, popped and cracked. Doe wailed and beat the ground beside him with his free hand. ‘I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know! They didn’t tell us! They said only that Caine had been abducted and we had to stand guard at his house in case anyone or anything came for him. Some of the guys think they can feel Fey influence here.’
Darvill tipped his head to one side. ‘Fey? They think the Fey abducted Caine?’
‘I don’t know,’ Doe sobbed. ‘Only maybe Fey have been here.’
Darvill sat back on his heels. ‘I don’t know a lot about what happened in Obsidian,’ he said thoughtfully to Hood. ‘Even debriefing me afterwards, these fuckers were careful to give very little away. But I’m pretty sure Caine pissed off the Fey with his actions there. I’ll explain later.’ He turned back to Doe. ‘So I’m guessing your bosses know a lot more?’
Doe nodded dejectedly, his breathing ragged with pain and fear, his body racked with tremors. ‘Please let me go,’ he said, almost too quietly to hear.
‘Tell you what,’ Claude said. ‘You tell us where the local Armour HQ is and we’ll let you go.’
Doe looked up, eyes wild. ‘I can’t do that!’
‘You won’t, you mean. Because you most certainly can. In Sydney, I presume?’
Doe shook his head. Hood flexed his fingers around the man’s wrist, like he was crumbling something to sprinkle on the ground. Bones ground and popped and Doe screamed.
‘Tell me where it is,’ Claude said.
The man had some strength, Darvill was prepared to give him that. It took several more bones and three times passing out before he finally gave up the location of the Sydney Armour HQ under St Mary’s Cathedral. He’d even, to his credit, tried giving a false location the first time, but Darvill was not easily fooled. Claude strolled back to the car as Hood finished the job. The man’s screams echoed through the country air.
Hood joined him in the car moments later, his face calm and satisfied.
‘That’ll see you right for a while, will it?’ Darvill asked.
Hood nodded, eyes low like a man on a drug high. ‘Oh yes, that’ll do me for now.’
Claude started the car. ‘Good. Let’s get out of here, before that bastard’s back-up arrives. We have to drive two hours back to Sydney. I tell you what, I’m getting some powerful déjà vu right now. But this time, it is definitely going to end differently.’ As he drove, he marvelled at his father’s display of physical power. He was not only invincible, impervious, but had returned from the magma with seemingly superhuman strength. Just what had Robert Hood become?
In a café in the central business district of Sydney, surrounded by people and bustle and noise, Jean Chang sat and trembled. She stared at the screen of the small tablet on the table next to her undrunk coffee. The tiny tag she had attached to the inside of Darvill’s satchel on the flight was performing perfectly, marking his location as somewhere two hours or so south of the city. She could only assume Hood and Darvill would stay together, and she knew Claude would never leave that satchel behind. He wore it constantly. She logged the information and picked up her cup with shaking hands. The coffee was cold, but she sipped it anyway, hoping it might help to settle her agitated gut. She wondered if she would ever stop quaking.
A dialogue box popped up on the screen, alerting her that the tag was moving faster again. They must be back in a vehicle. She frowned as the blip moved northwards. Were they returning to the city? Already? Was Caine dead? If so, she wondered what that meant, what their next course might be. They were bound to come after her. She thought again of Guangzhou, but wondered if anywhere on Earth would be safe from those two. Or if they hadn’t found Caine, had they discovered some lead to his whereabouts?
She made sure the tech was recording all the relevant data, made notes of her own and sipped more cold coffee. And for the hundredth time wondered just what the hell she was going to do with all this information. She should keep running, find somewhere to hide where Darvill and Hood would never track her down, if such a place existed. But some part of her, the decent, human part, felt the need to do something. She had known all along that Hood and Black Diamond were far from law-abiding. She knew their business was nefarious. She had chosen to accept that as she built a career. But cold-blooded murder? Wholesale slaughter? Such horror was beyond the pale for anyone. She had been a fool to think it was any different, really. The kind of wealth and power Black Diamond wielded did not come from playing fair or nice, but she had never considered anything like this.
Alex Caine had clearly done what he did to Robert Hood for a reason. That Hood was now free again was terrifying. It should never have happened and she was directly responsible for it, at least in part.
She had no idea what she might do with the information she gathered, but she would gather it nonetheless. Someone, somewhere, could surely use it. Darvill had been anxious for her to track down an organisation called Armour when he had originally been looking for Caine, before his disappearance. Perhaps she needed to continue that work. Not for Darvill now, but for herself. For everyone else. She needed allies and if Darvill was an enemy of Armour, perhaps they were best suited to be her friends.
12
The agony pulsing through Alex seemed eternal. The Lady had no concept of time in mortal terms and she brought all that patience to bear on torturing him. The agony had become all-consuming, nothing existed but wave after wave of torment and Alex begged for death.
Mercifully, at least momentarily, the pain eased. Alex unashamedly sobbed, curled into a foetal ball on the floor of the chamber. He pressed his face into the strangely warm wood and howled.
After a time, as his cries eased to short gasps of breath, the Lady spoke again.
‘You have no idea how much I want to kill you, tiny mortal. But I can’t, not yet. So I will have to make do with this.’
‘Just fucking kill me, bitch,’ Alex said through clenched teeth. He screamed as pain lanced through him again.
‘I knew those cursed Eld had removed my Lord’s heart,’ the Lady said, as though they were simply conversing over afternoon tea. ‘But I also knew those greedy Kin had built something around it, too stupid to see through what they had so audaciously managed to achieve. So I could get it back if I was patient. So I waited. We tried many times to influence events. The Darak is a part of his heart. A part of him. You feel it beating even now, don’t you?’
Alex pressed a hand over his chest, noting again the double stammer of his pulse, his own and something else. Could it truly be this Fey Lord’s lifeforce he felt?
‘You have a piece of my Lord in your hideous meat body!’ the Lady screamed, and agony flashed through Alex again.
As it abated, the Lady said, ‘I knew we would eventually find our way to it. And sure enough, along you came. I thought Uthentia might finish you and we would get access to Obsidian then, for he was ever our beast. But you defeated our trained godling. I still find that remarkable and you should rejoice that for a while you earned a modicum of my respect. But while he is powerful, Uthentia is a dumb brute. A blunt instrument. Chaos is one th
ing, but chaos without mind is formless, directionless. No matter, I thought, I can still use you. And that’s what I did. But you destroyed Obsidian and actually did what the Eld had failed to do all that time ago, you arrogant, despicable, meddling ape!’
Alex braced, knowing the torment was coming again, and it did. It racked his body in electric heat, pushed into his bones as though they were splitting and bursting apart. Merciful blackness took him.
As consciousness returned, there was a moment of peace before the echoes of his torture shuddered through him. Alex squirmed and pulled himself up into a sitting position, hugged his knees to his chest. Finally opening his eyes, he jumped to see the Lady reclined on a chair opposite him. He was back in the white cell, featureless but for the Lady and her seat and the window high above. An orange sun was just visible, seemingly setting. The blues and purples were less evident, the remaining star cast everything with a fiery glow.
The Lady had resumed her human form, the red leather dress tight about lengthy curves. She sat forward. ‘So, what to do with you?’
‘Fucking kill me.’
‘Not yet. The last chance for my Lord lies in those shards buried in your fetid flesh.’
‘So take them!’ Alex yelled, and buckled as her pain thrashed him again.
‘You must learn some respect, worm. I am not going to kill you, you will not force me to do so, therefore I suggest you show some respect to avoid all this discomfort.’
As the hurt lapsed, Alex sagged to the floor again. He dragged himself back upright, determined to remain strong in the presence of this bitch. If she wasn’t going to kill him, he certainly wasn’t going to let her break him.
‘I cannot simply take the Darak from you,’ she said, ‘or I would already have done so. Your bizarre actions have created a situation unprecedented. By your strange magic, bonding as you have with that piece of my husband’s heart, you have afflicted it with mortal entropy. And therein lies the problem. If you die, the stone dies. If I remove the stone, it is still afflicted with mortality and will die. You may have a long life by the standards of your kind now you’ve released your arcane nature, but it is still an insignificant tick in the greater scheme of things.’
