With Silent Screams (18 page)

He picked wrong and charged at me. I knocked the blade away with the back of my forearm and slammed my free arm into his face. He staggered slightly as blood streamed from his ruined nose and waved wildly with his knife. I ended it quickly with a blast of air to his head, which rendered him unconscious before he knew what had happened.

As soon as he dropped to the floor, two more men I recognized as bouncers ran onto the floor and started firing in my direction. I dove behind of the bar and found Caitlin next to me a moment later.

“Plan?” she asked.

“Stay here, back in a second.”

I stood up and threw a column of air at the two men, knocking them to the ground. The second the guns were pointed away I hardened the air around their legs and pulled them toward me. I jumped over the bar and grabbed the first by the throat, cracking his head against the hard wood of the bar, as the second tried to scramble away. He got a few feet before I surrounded him in a circle of enraged flame. He turned onto his back and aimed his gun at me again, which he quickly dropped when I threw a ball of fire at it.

I strode toward him and as I reached down and grabbed him around the throat, lifting him from the ground, he pissed himself. I lowered him so his feet no longer dangled in the air and then head-butted him hard on the nose.

“You fucking little idiot,” I said. “You came up here and started firing wildly. It’s lucky there was no one here or you’d have killed someone.” A blade of molten hot fire appeared from my hand.

“Please don’t kill me. I just took the job because it was a cool place to work. I just thought I’d get to hang out with cool people and get laid a lot.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Go home, never come back here. People will be keeping an eye on you.” I brought him closer to me, until our noses were almost touching. “Do not disappoint me. I do not give third chances.” I removed the fire and watched as he sprinted off toward the exit.

“You really going to have someone watch him?”

“No, but he doesn’t know that.”

“I thought you were going to kill him for a moment there.”

“For a moment there, I was.” I noticed two more groaning men next to the one that Caitlin had kicked. “You’ve been busy.”

“Worked out some aggression.”

She retrieved her shoes and carried them with her as we made our way down the stairs and onto the ground floor. Five bouncers stood together by the far wall and all of them showed us their hands as we walked toward them, wanting us to know they were no threat. One of them was the guy from the front door, who glanced down at the ground as our gazes briefly met. Dozens of people were huddled under tables and behind the bar, all aware of what had happened above them.

Once outside, we discovered that the line had vanished, no one really wanted to hang around when they heard gunfire, although there were a lot of people just milling around as sirens sounded in the distance.

Caitlin and I hurried to the car. I put the key in the lock only to be struck in the head from behind, knocking me against the car. My attacker clamped a large hand on my shoulder and spun me around, hitting me again, this time in the stomach. It was like being hit by a car, and I dropped to the concrete as the air rushed out of my lungs.

I glanced over and saw that a young, thick man held Caitlin’s arms behind her, ensuring she couldn’t use her alchemy.

“Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin,” a woman said as she strode toward us from the shadows. The huge slab of mountain that had been hitting me stepped back and crossed his massive arms.

“You’re such a disappointment, little Caitlin,” the woman said again as the streetlights illuminated her face. Although she appeared to be in her late forties, I got the impression she was much older. “Hanging around with rough sorcerers will get y
ou killed.”

Caitlin’s face was forcibly turned toward the newcomer and her mouth dropped open in shock.

“Do you remember us, Caitlin?” the woman asked and tapped the mountain man on the arm.

“Joshua?” Caitlin asked. “Is that you?”

The mountain man smiled, showing his razor sharp canines. “Big sister.”

“Sister?” I asked and stared at the woman. “That would make you
.…
”

“Patricia Moore,” Caitlin whispered. “Mom.”

CHAPTER
20

I
sat against the car door, for several minutes, while a still restrained Caitlin chatted to Patricia, her mum. Chatted was probably the wrong word to be fair, it mostly consisted of Caitlin swearing at her mum, who seemed to ignore her daughter by continuing to list her disappointments.

After only a few moments, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be the most productive meeting of all time, but Joshua never stopped staring at me with murderous intent. I was pretty certain that getting away without any serious injuries to Caitlin or myself had left me a very limited set of options.

So, I sat and listened and tried very hard not to tell everyone to fuck off and set them on fire.

After what I was sure was several days of sitting still, I got fed up with the whole thing and was just about to interject myself into the conversation, when Caitlin decided to calm down. “What do you actually want?” she asked.

Patricia glanced down at me before turning around as someone caught her attention. A slender young woman with a face that wouldn’t take looked out of place on a modeling agency’s books stepped out of a nearby car, her shoulder-length brown hair was tied back and she flashed her bare long legs as she walked confidently toward us.

“Ah, I remember you from Canada,” I said, remembering the picture of her in Bill’s file. He’d done some good work. It was a shame he’d never get to see it through. At the thought of my friend and his wife, butchered in their own home, my anger began to rise inside me. “I didn’t get your name though.”

“My name’s Bianca, did you miss me?” she cooed. “I said we’d meet again, and I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about our time together.” She crouched in front of me and ran a finger across my temple, showing me the blood before putting the digit into her mouth and sucking on it.

“Yeah,” I said, managing to put as much sarcasm in one word as possible. “I do miss the crazy.”

Bianca’s expression changed in an instant to anger and she slapped me across the face. “You should be nice. The things I don’t like anymore tend to get broken.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I told her as she stood and ran a hand along the chest of Joshua who grinned like a schoolboy who’d seen his first naked girl.

“When I saw you on top of that cliff in Maine, I was so relieved,” Patricia said with genuine emotion in her voice. “I had no idea it was you inside that cave, and to see you’d escaped from the troll gave me hope that you’d join us in our quest. And then I saw
him
.” She pointed at me and her voice filled with hate. “The murdering bastard who was with you.”

“You mean the people inside the house back in the
seventies
?” I asked.

She glanced down at me. “You slaughtered my friends,
people
I cared about. You and that pig friend of yours. But we taught him what it means to cross us. He thought he was clever, investigating us and calling Stratford PD to let them know what he found, but we have friends who work there, friends who let us know what he knew. The surprise on his face when we arrived. And the horror it held when he realized what we were going to do to him and that wife of his.” She crouched down in front of me and grabbed my jaw, forcing me to look at her. “I will cherish that moment for the rest of my life. Cherish his screams, his pleas to let his wife go. It was
…
well worth the wait.”

“You killed Bill and his wife,” I said, seething with anger.

“Yes, and then we killed that cop who had helped us find the little piggy. We left you that message because I wanted you here, you remember the House of Silent Screams. I wanted you to find us so that I can kill you last. Slowly, painfully as you realize that Simon’s plan, the Vanguard’s plan, is fulfilled, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

“You feel like telling me what Simon’s plan is?” I asked.

Her grin told me that chat time was over.

“How about Karl?” I asked, hoping to draw her back into revealing something. “I assume he’s the one who turned you all. You do realize he works for the ex-king of Shadow Falls, a place the Vanguard want to destroy. Doesn’t working with him go against your plans?”

“He’s realized his mistakes. He’s making up for it by helping us eliminate that place.”

“Well he’s currently bleeding to death on the top floor of that club, so his help is probably going to be limited now.”

Caitlin’s mum motioned for Joshua and the crazy girl to go check out what I’d said, leaving me relieved the moment they both left.

“Why are you even here?” I asked. “You couldn’t have known we were around.”

“After I saw you both in the forest, I called Karl and told him. He asked for the pack to come to D.C. to discuss our next plan. It was dumb luck that we were already here when you pulled u
p. Onc
e you were inside, I let him know who you both were. I was told to wait, that his men would bring you out.”

“His men are mostly unconscious or moaning in pain,” I said. “You do realize, I’m going to kill you for what you did to Bill and his wife, amongst other things.”

“You’ll be dead by the morning,” she said with a chuckle.

“Hey Caitlin, that guy holding your arms back, is he a relation of yours?”

“No,” Caitlin said. “Never met him before.”

“Good to know.” I hit Caitlin’s mum with a blast of air that took her off her feet and threw her with enough force into the side of a nearby van and through the metal. I quickly turned to Caitlin and caught her captor in the neck with a whip of fire, opening his throat. He let go of Caitlin and tried to hold the wound closed as blood poured out of it. “In the car,” I told
Caitlin
, who didn’t need to be told twice, and sprinted around the bonnet and got into the Mustang.

I ignored the injured werelion as the sound of metal tearing behind us convinced me that getting out of there as quickly as possible was a much better idea.

I didn’t stop driving until I was certain I’d put as much distance between us as possible. Werelions are, by their very nature, excellent trackers, but I doubted even they could track one specific car over several miles.

I pulled into a car park and switched off the engine. Caitlin took the opportunity to open the car door and dash over to some trees, vomiting the second she reached them. I watched for a few seconds to make sure she was okay before her shoulders began to shake from the unmistakable sobs that left her.

I exited the car and started walking over to her. “You want someone to talk to?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I’ll be by the car.”

“That was my brother and mom,” she said, more to herself than anything else. “I always knew my mom was fucked up, but my brother too. He was such a sweet kid. She’s turned him into some sort of monster.”

I finally decided to say my piece. “So, the reason you seemed so close to that serial killer case is because the ones doing it are your own family? You saw them in the pictures on the jet, why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I wasn’t really sure what you’d do once you found out. I wasn’t really sure what I’d do.” Caitlin rubbed her eyes and placed a hand over her mouth. “They are
my
duty to stop.”

“That’s why your boss isn’t a big fan of you? You’re too invested in this case.”

She nodded. “He’s allowing me to investigate because I threatened to quit if he didn’t let me. Because of my dad he can’t just fire me, so he’s washed his hands of me instead.”

“You should have told me, Caitlin.”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t. My mom took Joshua away at a young age. She spent a lot of time turning him from the sweet kid that I remember into something more like the man he is today. I had to be involved, had to try and find out if there was anything of him left.” She turned to me. “Do you think there’s anything of him left?”

I thought back to looking into Joshua’s face, staring into his cold, empty eyes. I’d seen eyes like that on a very select group of people who had killed people and enjoyed it. “No, there’s nothing left of him now, but rage and hate.”

Caitlin burst into tears, using the tree to keep her upright. I removed my jacket and put it around her shoulders, she spun toward me and buried her face in my chest. Her sobs were deep and raw. I held her in place for an unknown amount of time until those awful sobs turned into mute anguish and I felt her body slump against me.

“I’m sorry, Caitlin,” I whispered. “I’m truly sorry.”

“So am I,” she said. “I always thought my mom would have changed him, would have made him cold and hard. But a murderer, someone who hunts people and hurts them? I never thought he would be taken that far.”

“It probably happened over years. She probably pushed him to do something he didn’t want, so she’d compromise, moving his moral compass slightly. Do it often enough and at some point, the thing you’d never do originally suddenly doesn’t sound
s
o bad.

“It takes a lot of patience to do it, but after a while you’ve got yourself someone whose moral outlook is exactly where you want it to be. Do you think your mum has that kind of patience? And I’m talking about months and years of molding someone into the kind of person she needs to help her.”

Caitlin didn’t even need to think about it. “Yeah, she’s more than capable of doing it.” She took a seat on the bench next to us. “It started when I was maybe four or five. When my dad was working, she’d take me hunting. We didn’t kill anything, just tracking animals and occasionally people. Over the years she took it up one step at a time, we moved from tracking to her killing the animal and leaving me to skin and cook it. From there, I killed the animal myself.

“Over the next few years she taught me self-defense and how to watch people for signs of strength or weakness. We’d sit on a bench, like this one, and just watch the people passing by. She’d ask what their ailment was or get me to pick the weakest member of the group.”

“She was training you to hunt people,” I said.

“I was about six when I got into a fight at school and broke a boy’s arm. The school called my mom who told me off for getting caught. I had to watch her burn my favorite stuffed bear for that one. Every time I did wrong, I was made to watch as she destroyed something of mine. When I was eight, just coming up to my ninth birthday, I disappointed her. So, the night of my ninth birthday, she came and told me that lovely little message that she put in the dead cops mouth, you remember the one? Well, she also killed my rabbit and left it in my room.”

“How did you disappoint her?”

“There was another boy in my class, a real bully. He would terrorize the kids in the neighborhood and get away with it because his dad was a high-priced lawyer. So Mom wanted me to teach him a lesson. I was meant to break into his house at night, make my way to his room, and then cut him bad enough to leave a scar on his face.

“I refused. So, she changed it to giving me an option. I either scarred the boy or killed the parents. I refused again. She beat me so badly I couldn’t walk for two days. I could barely move through pain. I still have the marks where she used a piece of tree as a whip to draw blood.” Tears began to fall once more.

“We’re going to stop her. We have to.”

“Yes, we will,” she said with determination. “Do you have
a plan?”

“They’re following Simon’s old plan, it’s time we went out found out what it was. That means going to Shadow Falls. Before that, I’m going to call Roberto and say sorry for starting a small war and then we’re going to go see your dad.”

“Fucking hell, no, not right now.”

“He’s a federal judge, whose wife is back in town to murder his daughter. He deserves to be made aware of the danger
he’s
in, let alone you. Besides he may know some things about Karl and his boss that Roberto didn’t.”

“He’s not going to be happy that we took his car. And he’s not going to like the fact that anything Avalon-related is involved. That’s going to cause an argument.”

“Would he be happier if we’d both been killed by his wife?”

“Ex-wife, he applied for a divorce, but the point still stands.” She stood and took a few steps before glancing back at me. “My mom, she really hates you, doesn’t she?”

I nodded. “I killed a lot of her friends, although it’s interesting that she wasn’t there at the time. Makes me wonder where she was.”

“And what she was doing,” Caitlin finished for me.