Bad Grace (Watcher Chronicles Book 1) (16 page)

After the initial shock and disbelief of her admission, a wave of confusion washed over Frank, quickly followed by anger. “That’s the line you’re going to feed me? That’s your attempt to gain my trust?” He was shaking with boiling rage.

Michelle had her hands up again. “It’s true. I’m Jack’s daughter.”

“Don’t fucking lie to me! Jack doesn’t have a daughter.”

“I can prove it.” She began to reach into the side pocket of her combat pants.

“Don’t!” Frank shouted, moving a step closer, the gun held tight.

She stopped moving. “Hey, take it easy. I’m just getting some photographs, that’s all.”

Frank said nothing, but kept the gun on her. Michelle started moving her hand very slowly again, her eyes on Frank the whole time. He watched her reach into the pocket and take out some photos. She slowly held them out for him to take. “These photos were taken when I was younger. Jack, my father, is in them with me.”

“Photographs mean nothing,” Frank said. “They can be easily faked.”

A quiet intensity came over her as she tried to keep her cool. “I can assure you, these are not faked.”

“Throw them across the floor to me. Slowly.”

She did as he asked and slid the photos towards him, then sat back in the chair. Frank kept his eyes and the gun on her as he bent down to pick up the photos. There were three in all. He glanced back and forth between the photos and Michelle, who watched him intently. From his quick glances he saw a blonde girl in all the photos, at different ages, from very young to a teenager. Jack was with the girl in the photos, looking as Frank remembered him at the different times the photos were taken. In one of the photos there was a woman, vaguely reminiscent of Jack. “Who’s the woman?”

“My aunt,” Michelle said, sounding slightly more relaxed than she did a moment ago. “She raised me until I went to the Facility to start my training.”

“Jack had a sister?” Frank was confused by all of this. The whole time he had known him, Jack had never mentioned that he had family of any kind. His story always was he was an orphan and he never married. Definitely no kids. “That shit will just drag you down, Swanson,” he told Frank once. “Remember that.”

“I hardly ever seen my father when I was growing up,” Michelle said. “I didn’t see him many more times than in those pictures. I thought he was in the army, that’s why I never seen him. Then my powers activated when I was eighteen and he came and took me to the Facility.”

Frank tossed the photos back on the floor. “Why would he never mention he had a daughter?”

Michelle shrugged, looked away for the first time. “Ashamed, I guess, for not being there when I was growing up. When he took me to the Facility, he said we had to keep our connection a secret. He said he didn’t want to have to treat me differently just because I was his daughter. I had to be just another trainee like everyone else there.” Her voice was tinged with bitterness.

If she’s lying, Frank thought, she’s doing it well. “Why was Jack murdered? And by who?”

Tears immediately began to well up in Michelle’s eyes. The more he looked at her, the more of Jack he began to see in her. Could have been suggestion, but he thought he saw the same steely resolve in her eyes that Jack always had. A look that said he had things under control, despite his outward appearance. “The demon killed him.”

“Which demon? Tolloch?”

Michelle shook her head. “I’m not sure what he’s called. I’ve hardly ever seen him. Before he killed my father, I’d only seen him once, hiding in the shadows of Leland’s suite when I walked in unannounced a few months ago. Then I saw him… kill my father.”

“Why?” Frank asked.

A few tears escaped down her cheeks. “Because they knew he was working with you. Working against the plan.”

“Who’s they? And what plan?”

Michelle sighed. “You want to lower the gun first?”

Frank hesitated a second, but he lowered the gun and then went and sat in the chair opposite her. He kept the shotgun sitting across his lap, his hands resting on it. The girl seemed to be telling the truth, but he wasn’t ready to let down his guard just yet. “Tell me exactly what happened Jack the night he was killed.”

Michelle didn’t seem entirely comfortable at his request. If she was really Jack’s daughter, he didn’t blame her for being a bit reticent at first to talk about his murder, which she was. She straightened up though, kept herself in check, as any good soldier would. “I was off duty, in my quarters, when I was called to Leland’s suite. Something I’m used to. I was practically his PA as well a member of his security team when he went outside of the Facility. When I get to Leland’s suite, I find him in there with that demon, Tolloch you said his name was?”

Frank nodded. “He’s working with Leland.”

“I guessed that. My father was in the room too. He was stood in the middle of the room, stock still, apparently unable to move a muscle. He looked in pain. The demon was doing it to him. I ask Leland what’s going on and he says your father is about to die and that unless my father tells him what he wants to know, I would be killed as well.”

Frank frowned. “Leland knew you were Jack’s daughter?”

“He was the only one,” Michelle said. “My father just looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes. I had never seen tears in my father’s eyes before. That just wasn’t him, you know?”

Frank knew. Jack was as old school as it gets. Men simply didn’t cry or show emotion in his world. Certainly not soldiers. “I know.”

“So he tells Leland about you guy’s killing a load of demons at a bar in the Southside, and then about the demons in some old factory, stealing souls.” She paused for a second. “The whole time he’s saying all this, he looks… ashamed that he’s giving up his friends, but he wants me to stay alive so…”

“I get it,” Frank said. “I take it he then told Leland about us coming to the Facility?”

“Yes,” Michelle nodded. “And then, once Leland had heard that, he nodded to the demon who was using his power on my father and the demon just—” She stopped, her face twisting with the horror of the memory. “Twisted my father’s head around without even touching him, killing him right there in front of me.”

“Jesus,” Frank said, grief and anger swelling up inside him. He gripped the shotgun in his lap tightly with both hands. “Why didn’t they kill you as well?”

“When I watched my father fall to the floor, with his head like that, and I knew he was dead… my grace exploded.”

“You did a grace explosion?”

“I didn’t mean too, like it was some kind of survival mechanism, but it saved my life. Distracted Leland and the demon so I could run out of the room.”

“How’d you make it out of the Facility?”

“I’ve lived at that facility for the last nine years,” she said. “I know every way in and out there is, including the ones hardly anyone else does. Doesn’t matter if the whole place is on lockdown.”

Frank considered her for a moment. If she was going to make a move on him, she would have done so by now. Her story also sounded believable to him. He recognized the gut wrenching grief in her as he was feeling the same thing himself. Only her training was keeping her under control, preventing her from breaking down. Much like his own training was, only she was doing a better job of concealing hers. “Alright,” he said. “Where you have been until now?”

“Staying dark,” she replied. “Still am. Coming here was a risk, but it seemed like the best choice. My father trusted you, probably more than anyone else.”

“Not enough to tell me he had a daughter apparently.”

“You don’t have secrets, Frank?”

I think we both know the answer to that one, eh, Frank?

“Okay.” He took the gun of his lap and rested it against the side of his chair. Then he reached down and grabbed the whiskey bottle from off the floor. “Drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Frank swigged from the bottle, wiped his mouth, and rested the bottle against his leg.

“My father said you drank too much,” Michelle said.

Frank couldn’t help but smile. “He was probably right.”

Michelle’s face relaxed and her previous intensity lessened somewhat as she sat back in her seat. “Actually, give me the bottle. If you can’t have a drink when the world is going to complete shit, when can you?”

Frank was starting to like this girl. He handed her the bottle and watched her take a large swallow before handing the bottle back to him. After he had taken another swig himself, he said, “So what’s Leland and this demon planning? Obviously burning the whole damn city to the ground is just the start. You were close to him. You must know something.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I may have worked closely with the man on a lot of things, but he was also very secretive about a lot of stuff. He only told me what I needed to know.”

“Sounds like, Leland,” Frank said. “So what did he tell you?”

“Like I said, almost nothing. But he would lock himself away for long periods, hours at a time in his suite, obviously talking with others because I often heard voices in there with him.”

“You never eavesdropped?”

“It wasn’t my job to spy on my boss, the leader of our kind. I took my job seriously. I believed in what I was doing at the Facility.”

Frank nodded. “I don’t doubt that. Jack—your father—was the same, as you probably know already.”

“Where do you think I got it from?” she said. “I did what I was told and nothing more.”

“But you mentioned this plan of Leland’s.”

“I know. In a rare moment one day, my curiosity got the better of me. I had been observing Leland for months, watched his sometimes odd and secretive behavior. His requests to have things removed from the vaults.”

“Like the archangel feather?”

“Yes, amongst other things. He never said why he needed them and no one questioned him either. He was—”

“The head of the Council, I know. So you got curious. Then what?”

“I asked him if anything was going on that I needed to know about. He just looked at me and I thought he was going to hit me or something, but then he starts telling me that the angels he speaks with have a plan to make the city, and then the world, a better place.”

“And you believed him?”

She nodded. “He seemed sincere, or as sincere as Leland can be. He didn’t give any details. Just said it would be happening soon and that he expected me to be behind it, whatever it was, because that was my duty as a Watcher.”

“Only thing is,” Frank said. “He was bullshitting you, and his plan seems to have been the exact opposite—to make the city like fucking Hell itself.”

Michelle shook her head, still disbelieving of the whole situation it seemed. “He’s working with demons on this. I just don’t know why. He’s a Watcher, one of us. The head of us. Why is he helping to destroy his own city?”

Frank took a drink from the bottle, then said, “Firstly, Leland is not one of us. He’s never been a soldier and has always been a slime ball politician at heart. And secondly, he’s definitely not the head of me or anyone else I know.”

“Nor me either anymore. Can I have that bottle again?” She took the bottle from him and raised it to her lips and drank before handing it back.

They sat in silence for a moment, Frank looking at Michelle as she stared around the cabin, not really taking anything in it seemed, her mind too occupied. Eventually she said, “My whole world has been turned upside down. All I’ve ever known is gone now.”

“I don’t think you’re alone there,” he said.

“I miss my father,” she said quietly.

I know how you feel, Frank thought. “Listen,” he said. “I intend to stop that son of a bitch, Cunningham. I should have sunk him years ago when I had the chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had dirt on him. Was going to use it to ruin him. Someone talked me out of it.”

Michelle nodded. “So that’s why he dislikes you so much. He’s afraid of you.”

“I doubt that matters now,” Frank said. “We’ve gone beyond that.”

“So what do we do?”

“You’re asking me? I thought that’s why you were here.”

“It is. I can get you into the Facility without anyone knowing. But you still have to have a plan.”

Frank stood, stretched his legs and grabbed the cigarettes and lighter from of the fireplace mantle. He took a cigarette out and lit it, not bothering to offer Michelle one because he knew she didn’t smoke. No one at the Facility smoked. It was banned as a danger to health. Never stopped Frank though. It’s why he started in the first place. “Tell you what,” he said, blowing smoke into the room. “You help me with something I have to do first and then we get some people together and hit the Facility, take down your old boss.”

Michele was frowning at him. “What could possibly be more important than stopping Leland first?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

CHAPTER 24

Before he left the cabin along with Michelle, Frank went to the small bathroom to freshen himself up a little, splash some water on his face to try and lessen the effects of the whiskey. He anticipated looking like shit before he looked in the bathroom mirror, but he was still shocked when he saw his reflection. His dark brown hair for a start, was longer than it needed it to be, more unkempt than it normally was, with bits sticking out in odd places, making him look like some kind of mental patient just escaped from the ward.

Not that he cared. It was the apocalypse after all and he had better things to worry about than how his hair looked. His brown eyes were bloodshot from the drink and there was still streaks of blood and grime on his face and neck, all framed by a thickening growth of beard.

Michelle did a good job of disguising her certain disconcertedness at his appearance, he thought. Only went to show she was more concerned about getting on his right side instead of looking obviously taken aback by his ramshackle appearance.

His clothes were also filthy, his dark shirt stained with blood and sporting a bullet hole, as did his jacket, which was also torn at the shoulder, thanks to the werewolf that attacked him. Appearance wise, it was a new low for Frank, but he didn’t much care. After splashing some water on his face and wiping away most of the blood and grime, he dried off and left the bathroom to go meet Michelle in his car.