Lies Ripped Open (23 page)

“I’m not taking it over,” Felix snapped. “I’m just pushing them toward doing something I need them to do. Influencing them, if you wish. It lets me read their thoughts without them ever knowing I was there. I originally discovered the Reavers were back by accident. I’ve been monitoring them ever since. Been about twenty years now.”

“Anything you can tell us?”

Felix nodded enthusiastically. “Lots. But I’m trying to get a pinpoint on whoever is in charge this time round. Until I do that, I can’t give you anything.”

“Why?”

“Because despite all of the names I’ve discovered, the dozens of them, I’ve never been able to track down those in charge. The leaders of this resurgence of Reavers elude me.”

“My wife was looking into them too,” Alan said. “It got her hospitalized.”

“I heard. One of those whose mind I took knew about it. I’m very sorry, Alan. And while this may sound callous, is there any chance you have some of her research?”

I shook my head. “She’s got it all booby-trapped. We can’t get to it until she wakes up.”

Felix looked deflated, but he placed his hand on Alan’s
shoulder
. “She’ll be okay. She’s tougher than you.”

Alan barely nodded.

“So why can’t you find those in charge?” Remy asked.

“I don’t know. No one knows who it is. And I mean no one. I haven’t been able to risk taking anyone too high up in the organization, only lower or mid-level members. Nothing is shared about the hierarchy that happens outside of the individual groups of Reavers. It’s very insular.”

“But you think you have something?” Ellie asked.

Felix nodded enthusiastically. “I picked up some information about high-level members a few weeks ago from one of those I controlled. The same one who told me about Fiona’s attack. They were worried she knew something she shouldn’t. I couldn’t get the names of those in charge, but I did get the name of some SOA agents who are helping.”

“Any you feel like sharing?” I asked.

“One of them is Agent Kelly Jensen.”

“Oh shit,” I whispered.

“You know her?”

I nodded and explained how she was the one who got me to go to the hostage situation in West Quay. How she was the one in charge. “You sure?”

“A hundred percent. She works with a small team, including a griffin and a man by the name of Mortimer.”

“Fucking hell, the whole lot of them were in it together.” I very much wanted to punch something in the face. “How long do you need?”

“Twenty-four hours. I’m so close, Nathan, so very close. We can destroy them this time. Once and for all. Purge the stinking cancerous bastards from our midst.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “In twenty-four hours, whether you have those in charge or not, I’m going after Kelly Jensen. Just one more thing. Is Merlin involved?”

Felix shook his head, pushing his hair back over his shoulders before he spoke. “No, not this time. Elaine has him by the balls on this one. If Merlin does anything so brazen again, she can get him removed from his position. He won’t risk that. No, this is someone else. This is
something
else too. The beginning of something bad, Nathan. Something, evil.” Felix paused and glanced up at me, a slight smile on his face. “I’ve been getting hints about things. About a change in the air. The ball has been rolling for years and now it’s gathered enough speed to make it dangerous.”

“How do we stop it?” Remy asked.

Felix’s smile broadened. “Now that Nathan’s here, we blow it into tiny little chunks.”

“Yeah, I’ll go get started, should I?” I said. “Look, you can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous. We’ll all go to a hotel in Sheffield or Leeds, somewhere far enough away.”

“I can’t leave, Nate. I’m safe here. No one can get in except me or Alan.”

“In that case, Alan and I will go see what we can find out around the town. If the Reavers are coming, I want to know who they’re bringing and when they get here. They might kno
w yo
u’re in Doncaster, but I doubt they know you’re here. I want to be able to thin their ranks somewhat.”

“I’m coming,” Ellie said. “My nose is better than yours. And besides if I have to stay in here, I may just go crazy.”

Everyone turned to look at Remy.

“He has live chickens and enough weapons for me to have tingly thoughts. I’m staying,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. “Someone has to. Just in case those bastards do get through.”

“We’re going to make getting to you a death trap,” I said. “By the time we’re finished whoever the Reavers send are going to wish they hadn’t bothered arriving in the city.”

We said our goodbyes, and then Alan led us out of the
cavern
and up the ladder to the street outside. We all stood in the cool air as Alan replaced the door, which rematerialized just as miraculously as it had vanished originally.

I took a step and felt like I’d been punched in the chest. I stumbled back and looked down as blood spread out across my chest. I dropped to one knee, while my friends shouted and rushed to me.

“Nate, Nate, what happened?” Ellie asked, fear dripping from every word.

“I don’t know,” I admitted and touched my chest. The initial pain had vanished, replaced with numbness.

“There’s some sort of weird residue on you,” Alan said.

A growl sounded from Ellie’s throat as several people walked through the open gate. Ellie and Alan sprang to action, but they were quickly subdued, each of them shot with some sort of dart.

Agent Kelly Jensen stood before me, with a smile on her face. The SOA agent I’d grabbed by the shirt was beside her, hatred burning in his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she told me, crouching down to look in my eyes as she spoke. “Tranquilizers.” She touched my shirt. “Had to use something a bit more impressive for you. An old friend wanted a shot.” She moved my head and I saw Mortimer—the man who had murdered Liz and Edward Williams—a rifle over one shoulder, walking across the scrubland on the other side of the road from us.

“Not burning,” I said.

“It’s not silver. You’re not allowed to die yet. You’re to witness the death of everything you hold dear, that’s your punishment for trying to destroy us all those years ago. That wasn’t a normal bullet, though. You want to know what it is?”

I nodded, although it was difficult to raise my head
afterwards
.

Kelly placed her mouth next to my ear. “A manticore spine crafted into a bullet. You’re going to be paralyzed in a few
seconds
. You won’t die, but you’re not going to be able to do anything to help your friends. I’m curious to see what happens to the venom already in your body.”

“Don’t kill them,” I managed.

“Oh, no one here is going to die today. You’ve brought us to Felix. So they get to live for a while longer. At least until you wake up.”

“How did you find me?” My eyelids felt heavy.

“I’m fae, and you lost blood at the hostage situation in West Quay. Which, by the way I was in charge of. When those idiots fucked up taking the Williamses and turned it into a clusterfuck, it was my idea to get you to go in. I figured maybe we could salvage something from the mess they’d created. Unfortunately, I couldn’t kill you myself, not with so many non-Reaver witnesses. So you lost all that blood and I used it to track you. It takes ages to get going, but once it does, boom, nowhere you can run.” She stood up and stretched, while a griffin landed beside her. “Don’t kill him,” she commanded.

The griffin walked toward me. “You should be grateful there’s someone who wants you dead more than I do.” He smashed the end of his spear into my head and the world went dark.

CHAPTER
24

November 1888. London.

W
hat the fuck does this mean?” I asked Fiona, waving the paper I’d found in her face.

She took it off me and read it through. “It says you went through the Harbinger trials at the age of thirteen. That Merlin and Felix were the ones responsible, and that Felix wasn’t very happy with the idea.”

“I know what it says,” I snapped. “But I don’t understand it. How is this even possible?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing. The minimum age for the Harbinger trials is a hundred. Putting a thirteen-year-old boy through that would be . . . insane. He’d be lucky to survive without permanent brain damage.”

I glared at Fiona.

“Sorry, but I have no idea if this is even real.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Felix left a note saying sorry about everything. We’ve got to find him. The Reavers have him. We need to find him, I need to know if this is . . . is real.” I felt light-headed, felt like someone had hit me in the head with a brick. I stepped back and sat down on the cold stone floor.

“Are you okay?” Fiona asked.

I shook my head. “If this is true, how many years of my life are a lie? A fabrication caused by Merlin and Felix for whatever reason they decided to fuck around with the head of a child . . . of me.”

I wanted to storm off to find Merlin and force him to tell me the truth. But that wouldn’t get me anywhere. And it would mean that Felix would still be missing, that Jack and his merry band of lunatics would still be free to kill. One job at a time.

There was a bang upstairs. Fiona and I froze.

“That was the front door,” she whispered.

I closed the cabinets beside us and switched off the lamp. “Can you conceal us?” I asked Fiona.

“Of course,” she said, and we backed up against the wall opposite the cabinets, beside the staircase a new arrival would have to descend. “If you move quickly this illusion will shatter though.”

“That’s fine, if I need to move quickly the illusion won’t be needed anymore.”

Illusions being created over a person by a conjurer feel tingly, as if your entire body is dying to be scratched. The sensation only lasts a few seconds, but a few seconds is still a long time when you have the notion that small insects are crawling all over your body. Standing in a basement full of various bugs didn’t help matters.

“We’ll just look like part of the wall, now,” she said when finished. “You can talk, but only whisper. The illusion isn’t calibrated for normal voice levels.”

I glanced down and a large spider crawled over my shoe. I resisted the temptation to punt it across the room and it quickly crawled away when the door opened and light was cast down from the floor above.

“They could be hiding down there,” one voice said. He had an accent that placed him from east London.

“Go fuckin’ look then,” the second man said. He was also English, but his accent was northern, possibly from up
Newcastle way.

“We’ll go together, there’s two of them. I watched them come into the house.”

“You don’t think you can take two of them then? You can kill whores and people who don’t fight back, but not some Avalon bitch and bastard?”

“You think you can take them both, be my fucking guest. Those drugs we got from Baker won’t keep the trolls asleep for long. Do you wanna wake up with a bunch of trolls in a rage, because I know I don’t. You down there,” the man shouted.

“Are you fuckin’ touched in the head?” the second man asked. “What fuckin’ idiot is going to say, ‘Yes, I’m right fuckin’ here. Feel free to come down and stab me.’”

“Right, well we’ll go together then.”

Boots touched the top step, which creaked. There was a pause and then more steps, until they reached the bottom.

“There better be a light,” the first man said.

“It’s here,” the second man told him and soon after the oil lamp was lit. “See there’s fuck all here.”

The second man was a good head taller than me, but
slimmer
. He had short hair that appeared to be balding at the front, and the appearance of someone who worked hard for a living. His chin jutted forward in an exaggerated way. He wore a long black coat that he had unbuttoned, and a curved dagger sat on his belt. The dagger was sheathed, but his left hand constantly hovered around the hilt of the weapon, waiting to use it. He played with a set of brass knuckles on his right hand, which was slightly red with blood. He’d used those knuckles recently.

The first man was barely five feet tall and stout, like a large barrel. He wore no coat, but was in a nice-looking gray suit. He removed a pocket watch from the breast pocket and flicked it open. “Got half hour,” he told his comrade. He glanced around the cellar we were in and I noticed he had a waxed moustache. He appeared elegant and more refined than his friend, who had opened the cabinets with abandon.

“Fucking hell, look at all of this shit,” he exclaimed and grabbed a handful of files. “Jack was right; this bastard had shitloads on us all.”

“Burn it. Felix won’t be needing it again where he’s going.”

“We should leave it ’til last though, just in case we don’t find those two.” The second man glanced around the room. “I saw them come in. Where could they be hiding?” He drew his dagger and walked around the room, looking behind the cabinets and in any place that someone could possibly hide.

“They ain’t here,” the first man said. “This old place probably has secret tunnels and stuff. They could have left. They could be watching the house, waiting for
us
to leave.”

“So that we lead them back to Jack? That’s very clever. These two are devious little bastards.”

“It’s just a theory,” the first man pointed out. “They could also be hiding under the beds upstairs.”

The second man picked up some of the files from inside one of the cabinets and flicked through the paper, before throwing it up into the air. “Maybe we should bring Felix back here to watch his world burn before we kill him.”

“That’s up to Jack, not us.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Jack should let us have a bit more
freedom
.”

“And maybe Jack will cut your bollocks off if you ever let him hear you say that.”

The second man mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but he didn’t sound too thrilled about being threatened. “We’re all
Reavers
here. Jack’s no better than anyone else.”

“Except he is in every single way better than us. If you don’t see that, your life is going to be a lot shorter than mine.”

“He does let us cut up those women.” The second man’s smile could have been seen from the front door. “I enjoy that.” He absentmindedly played with the blade on his knife. “When do you reckon he’s going to let us get more? It’s been a few weeks since the last one.”

“You brought a lot of trouble our way with that last murder. Too messy.”

“What about that bloke who’s always with Jack? He sent a fuckin’ kidney to the coppers. A kidney. Who does that? Who goes out of their way to piss off the fuckin’ coppers? He’s fuckin’ nuts. Scares me more than Jack ever did.”

“Well it’s up to Jack who does what,” the first man said,
without
looking up from the file he was reading.

“What’s that?”

“It had a note on it for that Nathan bloke. Apparently they put him through the Harbinger trials.”

“Like us?”

The first man nodded. “Looks that way.”

“Did he fail too?”

“Doesn’t say. He was thirteen years old though.”

“Thirteen? And they say that we’re monsters for killing folk. Putting a thirteen-year-old through those is . . . well, it’s
inhuman
.”

“I’m surprised you know what the word means.”

“I’m surprised I haven’t cut ya fuckin’ throat.”

The first man chuckled, although there wasn’t any humor in it. “Just go search over there by the stairs, I’m reading.”

The second man appeared irritated at being told what to do, but he did it anyway. He walked toward us, looking under the staircase. “There’s no one here,” he declared.

“I know, I just wanted your stink away from me,” the first man said with a genuine laugh.

The second man stood still, glaring at his companion. “That wasn’t funny.”

He took a step back, ending only a few inches away from where Fiona and I hid. Fiona motioned with a slight move of her head, for me to glance down, where she held up three fingers. She dropped one finger, so only two remained, and I nodded for her to go ahead. She didn’t bother dropping more fingers.

Fiona exploded from a standing position, launching herself up toward the man in front of us, who had no time to react before she’d rammed his head into the staircase. The first man turned at the noise and tried to run, but slipped on the papers at his feet, giving me ample time to throw a ball of air at him, which threw him back into the open cabinet behind.

He responded by grabbing several of the files, and throwing them at me, making it rain paper. He darted forward, the glint of a blade the first I knew of his plan before it swiped up at me through the paper haze.

I dodged aside, grabbed his wrist, and smashed my forearm onto his elbow. He shrieked out as the joint broke, but didn’t drop the blade, so, keeping hold of his wrist, I stepped around him, kicking his legs out and putting all of my weight on the broken joint as he crashed to the floor.

He finally dropped the dagger after I broke his wrist, before a kick to the head sent him into the darkness that comes with being unconscious. I left one man and moved quickly to the other, who was straddling Fiona on the dirty floor, his dagger still in one hand, while he used the other to pin her arm to the floor. He noticed me, and for the briefest of seconds his concentration wavered. That was all Fiona needed. She grabbed the dagger from his hand, and plunged it into his thigh. He screamed out, and Fiona punched him in the jaw. I heard it break and he fell back to the floor.

Fiona stood and grabbed the dagger. “This is your femoral artery,” she explained to him. “If I remove this dagger, it won’t end well. It’s silver, yes? I saw you at Mister Baker’s place of
business
. I know that you’re an alchemist. I know you’re involved with the Jack the Ripper murders. I know that you’re a Reaver. Are we clear on what I know?”

He mumbled something.

“Good, because I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want answers. I know your jaw is broken, but you can just answer with a yes or no, if you’d prefer.”

I glanced over at the first man, who was groggily getting back to his feet. A blast of hardened air at his temple took him back to the ground with a crash. “I’m going to take him upstairs,” I told Fiona. “You okay down here?”

Fiona grabbed the dagger hilt and twisted it slightly. The killer on the ground whimpered slightly. “I’m fine.”

“Answer her questions and you may get out of this in one piece,” I told him.

“No,” Fiona told him, “you’ll die here. The only question is how bad that death will be.” She twisted the hilt again. “Shall we begin?”

I took the first man up to the same room that Felix had taken me to when I’d first arrived at the house with Alan and Diana, what felt like years previously, but had in reality only been a few days.

While the man was unconscious, I used the time to prepare for what I was going to need to do. When I was ready, I threw a pitcher of water in his face. He woke up with a start, and immediately struggled.

“I found some old chains when I was searching the house,” I told him, pointing to the chains that ensnared him, tying him to a large metal ring that had been put into the floor. “They’re pretty worn, but shouldn’t be easy to break. You were out for a bit, so you can’t be all that powerful.”

“You have no idea what I am.”

“You’re fae,” I said. “I noticed the wings when I carried you upstairs.”

The façade evaporated from the man’s face, replaced with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and larger than normal ears. Fae only changed their appearance when losing control, or
hunting prey.

“What’s your name?” I asked, ignoring the snapping of
hi
s jaws.

“I’m going to tear you—”

I punched him in the nose. “Shhh,” I said softly. “Be nice, or I’m going to remove those teeth for you.”

The façade slipped back over his face. “You’re Nathan
Garrett
.
You should be helping us, not fighting us.”

“That’s an interesting idea. Why should I be doing that?”

“We’re doing this for Avalon, for all of us. We’re doing this because of what we want Avalon to become.”

“The only thing I want Avalon to become is devoid of deluded little animals like yourself.”

The man tugged at the chains again. “What did you do
to me?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “The chains though, well that’s different. You see in one of these rooms, Felix has an arsenal. Seriously, dozens and dozens of weapons all lined up and on one side I found two ordinary looking chains. The links are a bit bigger than usual, but that’s it. But then I discovered a link in the floor here to put chains. So, I said to myself, why would Felix want to hold people with chains?”