Revenant (The Midnight Society #3) (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Four

Shadow

“Where are we headed?” Leah asked as she rode shotgun next to me in the car.

“McDonald’s,” I replied.

“Seriously? You’re girlfriend got captured and you think the best thing to do is to stop off and get a six pack of Mc Nuggets?”

“You still remember I have a thing for Mc Nuggets,” I pointed out.

“Yes. And I still remember how you enjoy dodging my questions.”

I glanced in my review mirror and caught a glimpse of Abel, who sat in the backseat, frowning.

I rubbed my chin and sighed. “If you were Beau or Yuen Xi or Calisto or lord knows whoever the hell else is after us, you think a McDonalds would be an obvious place to find us?”

Leah sighed. “I suppose not,” she replied, easing up on her line of questioning. “I assume the rest of the Scooby gang is meeting us there?”

I nodded. Lincoln and Isadora had taken off in the spare Lexus in the garage while Braydon insisted on taking his own Harley. He didn’t take to the idea of abandoning it.

“What then?” Leah asked.

“You’ll find out once we get there,” I replied.

“What’s the difference if you tell me now?”

“Why can’t you just wait?”

Leah snickered. “Same old Shadow; always insistent on keeping everything to yourself. It was one of the many reasons why I broke up with you in the first place.”

“Are we seriously going to go there?” I asked.

“I’m just saying.”

“Well don’t say anymore.” Some things would never change between us, like the way we argued. She
still
enjoyed pulling her passive-aggressive bullshit on me. And I
still
didn’t want to hear any of it.

Communication had never been one of our strengths.

“Look, I know you like playing the dark, brooding hero but for Christ’s sake, let someone else in for once just to alleviate some of that burden you put on yourself. You’ve been doing everything on your own thus far and look at all the lives lost because of it.”

Was she implying that I was responsible for all that’s happened?

I pulled over the vehicle to the side of the road. I wanted to hate her at that moment and cuss her out with a string of profanities. I wanted to be angry.

But the truth was I wasn’t angry.

I was sad because she was right.

I knew a small part of her still blamed me for Lucien’s death, and deservingly so. I
was
the one who physically killed him, despite being brainwashed.

Maybe if I wasn’t doom and gloom all the time and allowed someone to help me sort through my emotions none of this would have happened. Someone who loved me would have seen the writing on the wall and fixed me.

“Shadow, I’m sorry. Shit, I didn’t mean what I said.” she began.

I swallowed hard. “Everyone’s death is linked back to me somehow.”

She frowned. “You’re not the only person responsible for all that’s happened,” Leah said.

“Well, my bitch of a sister does have a role to play also,” I agreed.

“That’s not what I meant, but yes, your sister is evil and deserves a thousand deaths,” she shifted in her seat. “But think about it, Shadow. Think about the culture of the Midnight Society where money and power take precedence over everything else. Love, friendships, community, and most of all family, they all take a back seat to the glory of power and wealth. We were taught to lie, to cheat, to crush our enemies and do anything possible to come out ahead of everyone else. The strong survive and the weak perish. Living in this sort of environment, how can we possibly not create more people like your sister? How can we possibly not avoid all the chaos and destruction?”

“You saw this early on, didn’t you?” I asked.

She nodded. “I saw it in my father, I saw it in my brother, and I saw it in you as well. And God, it made me sick to my stomach. I needed to leave the Midnight Society before its poison seeped into me as well.”

“I guess you leaving me wasn’t because I was the world’s worst boyfriend.”

She shook her head. “You were bad, but I loved you at the time. Hell, I still love you now, Shadow. You never forget your first love. But the environment we were in both made us worse people. You were bad for me, Shadow. I was bad for you.”

There was truth to that.

“So you up and joined the CIA,” I replied.

“It was all a matter of chance how that came about.”

Abel, who was silent this entire time, finally chimed in. “Intelligent people are always noticed by the CIA. They tend to stick out in society and radiate this light that you just can’t look away from. From the moment I saw her, I knew we needed her in the organization.”

“I totally forgot you were sitting there,” I muttered, realizing the earnest conversation between Leah and I had just been shared by the CIA’s psychoanalyst. I could only wonder what he was thinking with respect to our past relationship and to the Midnight Society itself.

“I’m assuming Leah has informed you about the Midnight Society then?” I asked. “Our big secret organization is not so secret amongst the CIA?”

Abel readjusted his glasses. “Well, yes and no,” he replied. “The suspicion of a secret, governing body outside of the White House always existed. However, every time someone took the first step to investigate this possibility an order would come from high up to squash it.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, your Presidents have always been pussies. It doesn’t matter if it’s Republican or Democrat—though the Democrats seem to put up a better fight against us.”

Abel smiled. “I actually first learnt of the existence of the Midnight Society through another source, and not from Leah.” he said, “I did manage to deduce, however, that she came from that type of environment.”

I looked at Leah curiously. “Really? Well I guess Leah always had a poor poker face.”

“Hey, I kept everything a secret up until the point when I found out Lucien was murdered. I was pissed at the Midnight Society. Conveniently Abel asked me the
right
questions on a day I was in the
wrong
frame of mind. I’m only human.”

“It was my informant who also gave me Leah’s name as a former member of the Midnight Society,” Abel said.

I was starting to grow more curious of Abel and his interest into our organization. “Abel, you said that strict orders were given to not undertake any investigations into the existence of our organization,” I restated.

“Correct.”

“So it seems like you’re doing a whole lot of investigation.”

“That’s true.”

“Why?” I asked.

Abel removed his glasses and rubbed the corner of his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “Like Leah, I too have personal and emotional stakes in The Midnight Society.”

If he thought he could leave me hanging with that answer, he was mistaken. “And what’s your stake?”

“I had a daughter who had worked in a coffee shop in Moral City. It was an innocent job for an innocent girl. She was looking to make some money to pay for vet school. She was always bright that one,” he replied. “And then one day, she went to work and never came home. She was murdered, had her throat cut, along with several others in that coffee shop.”

I put two and two together almost instantly. The day Aria had called me telling me that Calisto had been kidnapped; it was inside a coffee shop. Everyone working there had been butchered.

“Jesus,” I muttered aloud.

“Small world, isn’t it?” Leah said, “Or maybe not? Sometimes I’m convinced the Midnight Society has a way of spreading its misery to practically everyone on this earth.”

“I’m sorry for the loss of your daughter, Abel,” I said with sincerity. “My sister…”

“Has pissed off many people,” Abel finished, “And like any megalomaniac playing with newfound power, she made many mistakes. It didn’t take me long to trace my daughter’s murder to Calisto and the existence of not one but two organizations: The Revenants and the Midnight Society.”

“So now I understand why both you and Leah have beef with the Revenants: my sister has murdered your loved ones. But there’s a third person in play against Calisto: your informant, Beau. What’s his stake in all this?”

Leah and Abel cast a look at each other.

“This is where things get stranger,” Leah said. “For a while, I had no clue who the informant was. All I knew was that he had a personal vendetta against Calisto and had found a place within her organization in a prominent role—though not one where he came into direct contact with her.”

Abel thumbed his chin. “I’ve known Beau as a mole from the start, though now I suspect the identity given to me is false,” Abel said. “It was I who had offered him the chance to help us in our cause to bring justice to Calisto and to destroy the Revenants. He agreed, and thus he began providing us with vital information which in turn we passed onto you.”

And suddenly, the picture became clearer. “You were helping me all along with hopes that I’d succeed in taking out my own sister.”

Able shook his head. “I still believe in justice,” he said, “And not the brand of justice the Midnight Society invokes. Despite me working outside the confines of the law, I still fully believe in it. What I wanted was the opportunity to make Calisto accountable for her actions before a court of law, while enlightening the rest of the world on the existence of the Revenants and the Midnight Society.”

“You know that’d never happen. You’d be killed before you got a chance to speak,” I said.

“Maybe or maybe not. Beau had given me a lot of valuable evidence regarding the existence of the Revenants, concrete numbers and documents with the signatures of prominent people implicating them. It became a matter of conveying this information to the public in an easily accepted form.”

“I suggested facebook,” Leah said.

Abel ignored the joke. “However it wasn’t until an hour ago that I realized I could no longer trust this information—that perhaps Beau had been lying to us this entire time.”

It didn’t make any sense.

“Beau was Calisto’s mole planted within our organization also,” I said.

Leah nodded. “And he was also our informant that we embedded in the Revenants.”

“I don’t get it. He was a double agent then?”

Abel shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a possibility. He proved that his loyalties didn’t reside with you when he kidnapped Aria. And he proved long ago that his loyalties didn’t lie with Calisto when he ordered the murder of her right hand, Elena Zhao. He knew full well Calisto would be the first person Yuen Xi would suspect. We also know with certainty he wasn’t working for Yuen Xi since he killed his only daughter.”

“Who is this guy then?” Leah asked. “Who the hell is Beau?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” I replied.

Leah seemed puzzled by my confidence. “We don’t know where the hell he is,” she replied.

“Yes we do. I placed nanotrackers on him. There’s one in his car, one on his shoe, and one hidden in his belt for good measure.”

“Why three?” Leah asked.

“In case the little shit found one of them,” I replied. “There’s nothing safer than planning for a triple contingency.”

“So you suspected Beau all along?” Leah asked.

“I suspected everyone,” I replied. “Almost all of you were fitted with a nanotracker.”

Leah looked surprised. “Even me?”

“That’s up to you to find out.”

“Great,” she said. “My ex-boyfriend has a homing beacon on me.”

Abel laughed. “Shadow, when all this is done you should consider quitting this secret society nonsense and come work for the CIA. It’s stimulating and rewarding work.”

“No,” I replied. “I wouldn’t fit in. Don’t you know by now, Abel? I’m one of the bad guys.”

“You’re not bad, Shadow,” Leah replied as she laid a hand on my wrist. From the way she touched me and the tone in her voice, I understood what she really meant.

I forgive you for killing Lucien.

“We’re here,” I replied, as I pulled up to the McDonalds, the same one Aria and I went to on our first date. In the parking lot, Lincoln, Isadora, and Braydon were already waiting for us.

I turned off the ignition and stepped out of the vehicle.

“I know where Beau is. I’m going to go and find him, kick his head in, and then save the love of my life,” I began. “I can’t promise you I know what Beau has in store for us and I’m damn sure that whatever it is, it won’t be pleasant. Saving Aria is my responsibility and mine alone. None of you need to be involved. Anyone who wants a break from all this shit can go inside the McDonalds now, order themselves a meal, and wait it out. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to go after Calisto again.” I paused and looked at everyone. “But I sure can use your help on this one.”

Leah was right. It was time I allowed others to help me. I only hoped that everyone still had my back.

It was Braydon who spoke first. “I ate an hour ago. I’m not hungry. Let’s go find your girl and kick that bastard’s teeth in.”