I put my hands in my lap. “Then after the sun went down, it hit me how much I…I missed my wife and my little girl. Sure, we talked on the phone. Sure, I occasionally got shore leave that let me spend a few days with you. But it just…we both know it wasn’t the same. That night is when I knew I had to get out. The next day, I went straight to my XO and told him my plans.”
My eyes went back to the stars and I felt a smile crawl across my face. “It seemed like forever getting there, but that glorious day in Norfolk finally came. Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved serving aboard the U.S.S. Ramage, as fine a ship of the line as you could get. Hell, my shipmates even threw me a going-away party the night before. It’s why I looked green around the gills when I got ashore.”
The smile faltered. “I was so happy to finally come home. You were there and I wouldn’t miss any other important days in my little girl’s life. From then on, you were my crew and our home was my ship. And there wasn’t a thing we couldn’t—”
I grabbed the sides of the boat and snapped my head down. The pain hit me like back-to-back tsunami waves. The tears forced their way past my closed eyes and down my face. God, this was too much…much too much.
I opened my eyes as a ripple danced across the water below me. It took me a second to realize that it was caused by one of my tears. A second ago, it was part of the precious fluids of my body. Now it was just another drop of salty water in a vast ocean full of them. That it came from my body didn’t matter in the slightest.
In that moment, I finally understood. I knew why I hadn’t taken a drink that day, why I talked to my family for the first time since their deaths, why I used up the last of my gasoline to drive my boat out so far from shore. Before, that revelation would have scared me. Now, all I felt was a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt in well over a month.
“Marissa…Line,” I said, my voice dropping into a near-whisper as I gazed deeper and deeper into the waters below me. “I’m sorry for so much. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better husband or father. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. I’m sorry that we never got to enjoy those years together I thought we’d have.”
I leaned further over the side. “I’m coming home.”
It was hard to tell when the exact moment happened. The increase in my leaning over the side was so gradual that it felt like I hadn’t moved. One second, I was sitting in my boat with pain and regret tearing me apart. The next, I slipped into the water with a quiet splash. I fancy that I caused as much of a ripple as my tears.
My ears were instantly muffled by the ocean around me, making the world mercifully silent. I flipped myself around, aiming my head for the distant ocean floor. I idly wondered how far down that was…a mile, two miles? Didn’t matter…I wouldn’t be seeing it.
I made two broad strokes in that general direction. After that, I let my momentum do the rest. What was about to happen didn’t matter. The two people I loved the most in the world, they hadn’t mattered. So why should I, one insignificant man in a world full of them, matter? The world already told me it’d go on without me. All I was doing was finally agreeing with it.
Before long, I gagged on the water. I had to fight my survival instinct to turn around and swim up. Probably too late for that anyway. Even if I could get back to the surface, there was no guarantee the boat was still within swimming distance. Besides, I was tired…so very, very tired. I just wanted to get it over with.
A little after that cheery set of thoughts crossed my mind, everything went black.
Chapter five
Slave To The Dark
The first thing I was aware of was the taste in my mouth. God, it was foul…beyond foul. It reminded me of old motor oil and black tar. That crap was bad enough to make me open my eyes and look around.
I was laying on some sort of black, sooty ground, kind of like a cross between sand and volcanic ash. Whatever the soil actually was made of, my lips were open just enough for it to rattle my taste buds. My arms felt as stiff as my dinghy’s boards, but I managed to make them move and pushed myself off the ground. Once I got into a kneeling position, I tried to spit out some of the murky stuff. The taste faded away as I got a good look at my surroundings.
Well, maybe “good look” is pushing it. I was on some sort of shore that was nothing like anything I’d seen around Cold City. Or anywhere else I’d ever been. Nothing but black soil stretched out as far as my eye could see, which wasn’t that far. A solid wall of darkness cut my vision down to nothing after about twenty feet. The smell coming off the ground was every bit as nauseating as the taste. It made me grateful that there wasn’t a breeze.
Then I noticed that the sticky soil clung to my clothes like it had my tongue. I did what I could to wipe the tar-like substance off me, but all that did was stick to my palms, leading me to yet more wiping, until I couldn’t find a clean spot anywhere on myself.
The sky overhead was every bit as black as the ground after a certain distance. No stars, familiar or otherwise, winked down at me. The only exception was hues of red in the distance, glowing like a setting sun, or the distant flames of a furnace. What time was it? Dusk? I thought it was night already.
That’s when it all came back to me: the decision to come back to the docks, the one-way ticket to sea, talking with Marissa and Line, that final, fatal drop into the ocean depths. I was dead…or should have been. Either way, where exactly was I?
I looked at what I chose to believe was the setting sun again. It was so dim that looking directly at it didn’t hurt my eyes in the slightest. Its weak light reflected off the waters in front of it, and I could see heavy bubbles on the surface, like a cooking pot at full boil. The rotten egg smell in my nose told me why: sulfur. Some of that scent came from the soil too. No wonder it tasted bad.
An icy-cold fear roiled through my gut as I put the pieces together. I stopped believing in Christian fairy tales at roughly the same time I decided I needed to leave Chicago.
What I was seeing right now made me wonder if that was a serious mistake.
As if to emphasize that thought, a strange growl filled the air, like a dog’s voice mixed with a human’s, and maybe a tiger’s too. The one thing I remember the clearest about it was how it made the cold I felt in my stomach worse. So much worse.
I heard the growl coming from my left…then my right…behind me…in front of me. I swallowed hard as I tried using the pinprick of sunlight to find what was making those noises. All sorts of fears I picked up on the streets—being rat-packed by a mob of bored kids, being beaten by cops, being chased by gangs—hit me like a jackhammer.
Eventually, the noisemakers stepped into the dim light. Not that it did me much good; they looked as solid and substantial as smoke. I couldn’t even trace their outlines, which shifted every other second, despite the lack of wind. They mixed hisses in with the growls, slowly drawing the circle they made around me tighter and tighter. I was trapped in the midst of a full-body noose that was going to eventually choke the life out of me…or destroy whatever of me was left.
I looked around for gaps I could run through to get away from these hungry ghosts. But they moved so fast and they were so formless that no exit really presented itself. Besides, where would I go? I had no idea where here was, and even if I did, these…things would probably catch me before I got too far.
I braced myself as the huddle they were making drew close enough for me to reach out and touch. Only a matter of time now, I thought.
A female voice, coming from the boiling riverside, suddenly barked out orders. For all the traveling I’d done, I couldn’t tell what language she was speaking. What I did recognize was the implacable authority in that voice. My best COs had that same quality, the kind that made it plain that disobedience was not an option. The smoky things took the hint and backed away from me. Even so, they still had me surrounded, making running away impossible.
As I vainly sc
anned the shoreline for signs of the speaker, a soft sound like shifting sand came from my left. It was well out of the light radius of the dying sun. I tensed. More shifting sand sounds came towards me…footsteps. The smoke pack growled and hissed again, but this time in deference. They backed up even more as the new arrival melted out of the Stygian night around me.
The first thing the light caught was her flaming red hair. It was a brighter version of the departing sun’s color, glowing with its own fierce hue. It was long and flowing enough to cover up half her face. The other half was obscured by the darkness, though I saw a piercing green eye punch its way through to look at me. And it looked at me like I was an insect.
What little I could see of her dress made me think of ancient Rome. But it was a more provocative outfit than most porn fantasies. While her chest was fully covered by the dark material, her legs were utterly exposed, all the way to the hip. I vaguely recalled that the noblewomen of Sparta wore such clothes during the classic Greek period.
But what really got my attention were her movements. She had a natural grace and poise that complimented her dark-complexioned beauty the same way her outfit did. Her hair fell back completely to reveal coldness in her face. She looked like a marble statue pissed off at her sculptor for getting an important detail wrong.
The pack of shadow creatures parted like a curtain before her stride. She didn’t stop until she was right in front of me. That’s when I noticed that she had at least a couple of inches on me…barefoot.
“Bellamy Vale,” she said. “At last.”
Her voice had an ageless quality about it, like it had seen the birth and death of the world and hadn’t cared about anything since.
“Where am I?” I asked, still vainly looking around for a way out.
The broad smile her crimson lips gave me had an undeniable malice about it. “Take a guess.”
I backed away from her as far as I dared. “Hell.”
She tilted her head to the side as her smile lost some of its edge. “Close enough.”
I took an uneasy breath. The foul air around me instantly made me regret that choice. “So…who are you and what do you want?”
An instant later, her ice-cold hand was squeezing my larynx without mercy. Her chilly grip was a vivid contrast to her burning emerald eyes. “You have not earned the right to know who I am. Never again presume that you do.”
She let me go and I fell to my knees, gasping and coughing from her grip. As I got back to my feet, she said, “Regardless…the true question is, what do you want?”
That one took me by surprise, enough to make me give her a confused look. “Is that a trick question?”
While she didn’t grab me again, the look in her eyes told me she was seriously thinking about it. “It is a very straightforward one, human. What is your answer?”
I gave the matter some thought. Given what she just said about our actual location, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was some sort of ruse, a little afterlife parlor game designed to punish me for my sins. On the other hand, I had nothing to lose by telling her straight out. If she knew my name, maybe she already knew the answer anyway.
“Revenge,” I answered. “Revenge against the driver who killed my wife and daughter.”
Her lips curled up in something even nastier than the smile. “That, I can grant. But such a thing will come at a price.”
“I don’t care,” I snarled at her. All the prices I’d paid to find my family’s murderer gave me less than nothing. What was one more if it finally worked out?
The curl in her lips formed a sneer. “You should. In exchange for the mission I will charge you with, I will give you the man who took their lives.”
So it was a man who was behind the wheel that night. Not that it narrowed down the suspect pool that much, but it was a start.
“What do you need from me?” I asked.
“There is someone in your world that does not belong,” she explained, pacing around me like a cat toying with a mouse. “She gained the protection of someone from her world that guards her steps. She must be eliminated.”
I snorted. “Oh, why don’t you just come out and say ‘killed’ like a regular person?”
“If you prefer…but the point remains. When you have accomplished this, I shall supply you with the name and location of the man you seek.”
“No deal,” I said with a shake of my head.
That statement made her stop dead right in front of me and glare. “What?”
I guess no-one had denied her command in a very long time. “You heard me.” I gave her the glare back. “You want this job done so bad, I get the name and address upfront.”
The unseen creatures around us started up with their chorus of growls and hisses at those words. I knew I was playing with fire, but I kept my eyes fixed on her.
She closed the distance between us so that she could look down her nose at me. “Do I need to remind you that you are in no position to negotiate terms?”
“I beg to differ,” I said, letting my intuition guide me. “If this was something you could do yourself, you wouldn’t have bothered talking to me in the first place.”
“Are you under the misimpression that my threats are idle?” she growled at me as she grabbed me by the shoulders. She pushed me back towards the pack.
“Not a bit.” I tried holding my ground, but she had the strength of an incoming train. “But what good does getting rid of me do you? I die or whatever you’re about to do to me, the job still isn’t done and you’re still stuck with finding some other man to handle things. I got a feeling that you’re not exactly swimming in options.”
She stopped pushing me back to give me another penetrating look. Finally, she let go of my shoulders and stepped back towards the center. I followed her but kept a couple of steps between us, for safety’s sake.
“Understand this, Bellamy Vale,” she said with a sour expression. “If you betray me, the penalty for doing so will make what I was contemplating just now seem a light punishment by contrast.”
I shrugged. “Oh, that’s understood. But I want you to understand this: I am done with false hopes and broken promises. As long as you deliver on your end right now, I’ll do whatever job you put in front of me once I’m done.”
A delighted hum escaped her at my reply and her lips curled back into that predatory smile of hers. “I shall hold you to that. So…we are in agreement?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a clarity and peace I hadn’t felt since the hit-and-run.
“Then step forth.”
I did what I was told and her hand sprang out, the palm slapping the back of my right shoulder. A burning sensation cut right through the clothes and straight into my skin, making me cry out in pain. I could hear my shoulder sizzle from the touch of the woman’s hand. The smell of cooking flesh drowned out the other ugly smells of our surroundings.
The burning spread like a rash on speed throughout my body. Every muscle, bone and vein inside me felt like it was catching on fire and burning like a Yule log. Two seconds later, the pain became unbearable. I screamed and had just enough presence of mind to wonder if this was punishment for holding my ground, when my legs buckled and the world went black again.
Chapter six
Faith Has Been Broken
I opened my eyes to find myself lying flat on my back, feeling damp and chilly. Shock number two came when I picked myself up to find out I was in my boat. I wasn’t at sea anymore, either. Somewhere along the way, it drifted into Neptune’s Fork, a small, nasty creek that was just a couple of miles from the city limits. Of course, compared to the river I just saw, this little tributary was as pristine as a vestal virgin.
A quick glance up confirmed that it was still night, though clouds were beginning to obscure the stars I was telling Line about earlier. In a way, the cloud cover extended to the sea itself, with th
e night fog reducing visibility down to just twenty feet.
That last observation made me wonder if I went over the side of the boat in the first place. What if I just passed out about the time the gas ran out, and the rest was just a wish fulfillment fantasy or a soul-searing nightmare? I reached under my worn shirt to where the Riverside Hellsister touched me. My fingertips found a mark on my shoulder, a still-swollen third degree burn that felt hot to the touch. A chill that had nothing to do with the night air hit me. The burn had a distinctive pattern about it, like a cattle brand.
Further out to sea, a small dinghy came out of the fog’s edge. A hooded figure was rowing it, really putting his back into the effort while the boat skimmed across the water. Sitting in the boat was the woman, looking just as imperious and intimidating from there as she ever had up close. Her head turned in my direction, and I thought her eyes locked onto mine. It lasted only a few seconds before the fog swallowed the small ship again.
Eager to look somewhere else, I glanced down at the bottom of the boat. A gleam of metal caught my attention, making me reach for its source.
It turned out to be a nondescript knife. It had a blade, a hilt and a handle, but it didn’t match any knife design that I’d ever seen. Regardless, the balance and weight felt just right in my hand, reminding me of the times I’d trained with a Marine K-Bar.
Something about the material on the handle felt off, and I opened my hand enough to see paper wrapped around it. Some sort of sticky substance held the paper in place. As I tore it free, the goo stuck to my hands, and I could smell that all-too-familiar scent I remembered from the river shore.
My hands shaking a little, I unwrapped the paper like it was a Tootsie Roll and flattened it on the boat bottom. There were words written on it that I couldn’t quite make out. I set down the knife to pull out a set of waterproof matches from a nearby tool box. I struck one off the box and read what was written.
Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book One) Page 5
