Rollerskater: Rhyme
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This instalment contains depictions of torture and some bloody scenes.
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Days passed.
There was no sunlight. No fresh air. No plants.
Only a dark room, filled with wooden furniture and fixings, and two wooden posts to which she had been chained. Terror had given way to tears, and tears to silence. She could not move. Only wait for them to return. Which they did, every few hours.
The heavy door came open. She did not lift her head, only gazed at her captor.
He was tall, blond-haired, with blue eyes like sapphires, and dressed in black. He strode across the room, followed close behind by two others.
“How are you, Great Ur?” he said, in his soft, musical accent. “Did you get any rest?”
She did not respond to him.
“It is wonderful to have you under our control,” the man said. “You’re a very valuable prize indeed. Our master will reward us greatly for this.”
He smiled.
“Duc Aloysius Mayer of the Second Great Empire of Blood. Sounds rather fitting, doesn’t it?”
Still, Liberty said nothing.
He gestured to the other two, who approached her with a set of equipment. It was equipment she was familiar with. She tried in vain to resist, but already they were approaching her, inserting something into her arm. It felt sharp and burned her skin like a fresh scratch. In the corner of her eye, mechanical bellows began to work, and a stream of blood began to run down a clear tube into two vessels on the machine’s top.
“Stop,” she said, quietly.
“Never,” Aloysius said.
She hung her head, as if refusing to accept a terrible truth.
He grabbed her by the hair, and forced her to look at him.
“You are ours, now,” he said. “Look at you. This is what has become of Great Ur. A pathetic, wretched little whelp. The self-appointed protector of this Earth, of the devolved, primitive human race. You are going to lose this war, Great Ur, and we shall once again reign upon the Earth.”
Liberty scowled, then, gritting her teeth, spat in Aloysius’s eyes. He recoiled and growled in anger.
“If you wanted me dead, you’d have killed me by now,” she said, weakly. “But you need me alive.”
Aloysius slapped her hard with the back of his hand, cutting her cheek.
“That may be so,” he said. “But that does not mean that we cannot make you wish for death.”
Leaning in to the wound on her cheek, he licked at her blood, then away, wiping his lips.
He turned to the other vampires.
“When you are finished here, leave her to bleed,” he said.
They did as they were told.
As she drifted into unconsciousness, she sent a plea out into the strings using what energy she had left, quiet but desperate: Help me.
But there came no reply.
*
Emily Bush is crying.
“But you can’t. You can’t. I won’t let you!”
“That is not your decision to make, Dr. Bush,” the Project Director says, barely masking his cruel elation. “These orders come direct from the Prime Minister. Blake Parish refuses to cooperate with the British state. He is therefore considered a danger to national security. Given that the cost of imprisoning him would be too great, SAID-MI5 have determined that he must be executed forthwith.”
“He’s a person, for God’s sake, not an animal!”
“And he will not work with us. A person with that much power, opposing the right of Her Majesty The Queen to reign over this nation, cannot be allowed to exist. He dies tomorrow, at 0900 hours precisely.”
Tears stream down Emily’s cheeks. Blake Parish doesn’t deserve to die. He hasn’t done anything wrong.
“Then I resign,” she says, hatefully.
“No,” the Project Director replies. “Because I’m going to ask you to do something, and you aren’t going to be able to refuse it.”
Bush glowers at him as she wipes tears out of her eyes.
“What,” she says, “Could you possibly—”
“He hasn’t been told,” the Project Director says, succinctly. “He doesn’t know, Dr. Bush. Do you want someone else to tell him? Or would you rather it come from someone he trusts? Someone, perhaps, that he loves?”
Bush seems to crumple.
“No,” she says, softly. “No, I can’t…I can’t do that…”
“Then a soldier will inform him of his fate, Dr. Bush. And he will die, knowing that you knew that he was going to die, and you didn’t tell him. Now, is that something you really want?”
Emily Bush stops crying.
She stands up straight, tall.
The Project Director really is a small man, in more ways than one.
“You’re sick,” she snarls. “There is a rot in you, that not even the greatest doctors in the world could cure. Least of all me.”
She turns away from him, to the screen that shows Blake, hanging there, just as he has done for months and months. Patient, quiet, resolute.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll tell him.”
She bows her head in shame.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “God, I’m so sorry.”
*
It would be done by tomorrow morning.
In the late hours of the evening, Barnabas Mortimer took himself to the bathroom.
Strange, really, that this was the same room where Gabriel Seymer had died, and yet it never really seemed to affect him. A man’s corpse had been found laying on this tiling, right at the corner of the tub, and yet Mortimer remained unbothered. Seymer’s death was just a fact, an event that had happened. He felt nothing for the dead man.
He had always hated him. Ever since they were children, he had hated him. He had hated him all the way to Westminster, where he had been soft; too soft. Favouring a worthless neoliberal realpolitik over any real convictions. The man had no love of Queen and Country, only the twin abstractions of Economy and Policy. Coasting on the status quo, not seeking to better Britain. At one time, this nation had controlled more than a fifth of the world’s surface, until the communists and zealots had swooped in and taken it all away.
As a matter of fact, Mortimer thought, Seymer’s softness had been a major factor in getting him killed. Maybe that was why Mortimer felt so unaffected by it. In a sense, he believed that the dead man had it coming. That he had deserved it.
Things would fall into place soon enough. His enemies could not outrun him forever. It was a case of fighting the good fight – fighting for Britain’s pride and glory. To elevate himself to the highest office of state, and then…well, then the awakening could begin, and the righteous and deserving could emerge. Open season on the weak and miserable.
He turned on the tap, and cool water began to pour out. He bent over, splashing his face with it, then proceeded to wash his hands.
The tap sputtered out, suddenly.
Mortimer raised an eyebrow. Strange. A drop in water pressure? Works outside?
He gave a blow to the faucet, and a metallic reverberation clanged through the piping.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Mortimer stared down into the sink, and raised his eyebrows at what he saw.
Rapidly, he turned the tap off, and backed away from the sink, fumbling for his mobile phone.
A gurgling sound came from inside the plumbing. The pipes began to knock, and a loud sound of hissing began to grow in the tap.
The hissing grew louder and louder. He quickly punched in the number 999—
The tap exploded.
Spraying from the now-open hole in the sink came fluid that was not clear like water, but opaque, like milk.
It was coloured pink.
Mortimer dropped his phone.
The walls and ceiling were sprayed with liquid, which coalesced into a puddle on the floor.
The puddle was still for a few moments. Then, slowly, it began to ripple.
Out of the puddle emerged a head, on which appeared long, lilac hair, and a face which looked back at him in anger and disdain.
A woman emerged. She was tall, so much taller than the pictures had made her seem. Taller than him at any rate – not helped in the least by the golden rollerskates she wore on her feet. She loomed over him like a bear, approaching him angrily.
Mortimer turned to the bathroom door.
“Police!” he shouted. “Help me—”
Her hand was on his throat, now. He felt her nails dig into his larynx, as she lifted him into the air with not even a trace of effort. He writhed against her grip, but she held steadfast, and he met the gaze of something ancient and terrible.
She shook her head, and just for a moment, he knew her word as law.
“Hello, Prime Minister,” the Rollerskater said. “I think it’s time we had a little chat.”
*
There was a knock at the door.
Harri-Bec went to it, sliding a chain into a bolt on the door, and opened the door.
“Who—?” she asked. “Oh, God. Socks.”
“Hi, Harri,” Socks said. “Mind letting me in?”
“Yes, of course,” Harri said, closing the door, removing the chain and opening it. “God, am I glad to see you.”
“And you,” Socks said.
“Come in.”
Socks stepped through the door, entering the flat. He looked a little unkempt, but otherwise no worse for wear.
“SAID-MI5 captured me after the ambush at the pub,” he explained. “I managed to escape.”
“What about K-Os?” Harri-Bec asked. “I haven’t heard from her in days.”
“She’s safe,” Socks said. “She didn’t tell me where she was going, only to keep my head down. I thought you’d go back to the safehouse in Camberwell.”
“Well, you weren’t wrong, there,” Harri-Bec said. “The authorities still don’t know about this place. What about the others? Have you heard from them?”
“Afraid not,” Socks said. He turned his gaze to the ground. “The vampires…got Liberty during the ambush. I didn’t see where Chelsea and Dolly went.”
“Oh, Socks,” Harri-Bec said, putting her arms around him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Enough,” Socks said. “She’s not dead. I know she isn’t. I can feel it. I won’t cry until I know for sure.”
There came a soft sound from the other room. Socks looked to Harri-Bec, then proceeded into the living room.
There was Monica, who looked back at him joyfully.
“Dad!”
She moved as quickly as she could over to him and put her arms around him, hugging him so tightly he thought for a moment she might crush him.
“Hi, Monica,” Socks said. “Loosen your grip, please.”
“Oh, sorry,” Monica said, relenting. “I don’t know my own strength. I was so worried about you.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” Socks said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Harri-Bec’s expression darkened.
“We’re certainly not,” she said.
Socks looked at her, puzzled.
“Did something happen?” he said.
Harri-Bec was silent a few moments.
“Monica, sweetie,” she said, croakily, “Why don’t you go into the other room for a minute?”
Monica smiled.
“Yes, Miss Harri!” she said, and lumbered out of the room, leaving just Socks and Harri together.
“Well?” Socks insisted.
Harri-Bec looked back at him, tears in her eyes.
“Paddy…” she said, hesitantly. “Paddy didn’t make it.”
Socks had to sit down.
“Really?” he said, his voice quiet and hollow. “Shit…”
“Me and Callan watched him…go,” Harri said. Her voice was a dull rasp. “Monica was in the room with us, but I’m not sure she understood what was happening.”
Socks looked down at the ground.
“What now?” he asked.
Harri-Bec went to the window and gazed out on the street below.
“Something bad is coming,” Harri-Bec said. “I can feel it, in every street in London.”
“When you say ‘something bad’…” Socks said. “…do you mean this Armageddon everyone keeps talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Harri-Bec replied. “It’s like everything is converging. Converging on a single point.”
“Where?”
Harri-Bec looked at him, biting her index finger.
“Something’s coming to Point Zero.”
Socks looked back at her, not understanding.
“Charing Cross.”
Socks took this in, then scratched his forehead idly.
“How soon?” he said.
*
She was weakening with every passing minute. Even breathing hurt. The wounds in her arms were not healing. They were burning incessantly, a constant reminder of the state of helplessness in which these ancient nemeses now held her.
The extinct people from whom she had descended required sunlight to survive, the currents of wind and water vapour in the air. They had learned from the plants, learned the secret of eating-without-eating, doing-without-doing. It was only when they had grown too greedy, refused to accept the reality of death and of entropy, that so many of them had turned their gaze away from the Earth and to the body, to blood, the blood that ran in all veins, to sate their hunger for life, for ever greater power.
Every night, she thought she heard voices elsewhere in the vampires’ manor. Cries and yelps. Men’s voices, women’s voices. Perhaps it was the exhaustion or the starvation making her hear things. They were taking enough from her to live on, she was sure of it.
She shed tears either way, for the limitless victims of the vampire curse that she could not save, for the litany of violence that preceded her coming into being, and that would outlast her.
Humans created rituals, banes and ways of killing vampires as a way to retreat from the awful, ugly truth: That nothing could stop them. Perhaps there was something in garlic that made the blood less palatable; something in places of worship that felt like a bulwark against them, something about locked front doors that felt secure.
But this was a people who believed their right to rule this world had been stolen from them by an enemy, and they sought to affirm it once and for all, by any means necessary.
She called out again in the strings, a weak little cry: Help me, please help me.
For a long time, the silence continued, with no answer. Eventually, she began to give up all hope.
Then, late at night, she heard a voice, distant and quiet, but clear and understandable all the same. Just one word, but it was enough to put her mind at ease, even for a moment.
Coming.
*
She stands before Blake, and despite his condition, she’s the one who feels trapped.
His head is bowed, solemn. It’s as though he’s known this was coming for some time.
“I see,” he says, quietly. “Then my life ends tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, Blake,” Emily says. “I thought it was best that you hear it from me…”
Blake sighs.
“How kind of you,” he says, bitterly.
Emily bites her lip, feeling a lump rise in her throat.
“What of my daughter?”
She looks up at him. Behind the dark goggles, she almost sees two eyes looking back at her.
“We…don’t know,” she says. “We still don’t know.”
Blake registers this information for a moment.
“That’s my girl,” he says. “And may you never find her.”
Bush turns away from him.
“Do you…hate me, Blake?”
The words don’t come for a long time. But eventually, they come.
“Hate you, Emily Bush? No. Despite all that your employers have done to me, I cannot hate you.”
Even with less than twenty-four hours to go before his death, he maintains magnanimity and dignity. What monster should end such a life, extinguish such a flame?
The kind of monster, Bush thinks, as she departs the room, that stands idly by and watches.
In the absence of external judgment, she condemns herself. A personal Nuremberg.
And yet, it is Blake Parish who faces the gallows. Not Emily Bush.
Never Emily Bush.
*
She was this lightning, this madness.
Her strength was terrifying. She gathered him up like a bundle of cloth and carried him into the conference room, and he, much like a bundle of clothing, scarcely struggled against her grasp. He yielded to her, as if his own biology forced him into the mode of a prey-animal, to accept that he was smaller and weaker than this being, this eternal, frightening woman, who now tossed him to the ground like a filthy rag, leaving him bruised and winded on rough grey carpet.
“Get up,” she growled.
He scrambled to his feet, steadying himself against a chair, wheezing and grasping at his throat.
“You won’t get away with this,” he said, hoarsely. “Terrorist, anarchist, freak. I know people. I’ll have you back in a cell in a heartbeat.”
And suddenly, in her hands, there was a shining, golden sword, which she held to his throat, making him cringe.
“Try anything,” she said, sharply, “and I’ll displace every atom in your body to a point in its timespan where it hasn’t yet become part of you, and ensure that it never does. Do exactly as I say, and I will allow you to live, you wretched piece of shit.”
Mortimer smiled.
“Ah,” he said, chuckling. “But if you wanted me dead, you’d have killed me already. You must be keeping me alive for some reason.”
“Yes,” she conceded. “I want to know exactly what it is you’re planning.”
“What the hell are you talking about, you insane bitch?”
“Now is not the time to play the fool with me, Mortimer,” the Rollerskater said. “I know.”
“Know what?”
There came a knock at the door.
The Rollerskater’s eyes left him for a minute, looking at the door, then back to him.
“Police?” she said.
“I should bloody well hope so,” Mortimer said. “But somehow, I doubt it.”
“Answer it,” she said, keeping the sword pointed at him. “Don’t say a word.”
He edged his way around her, opening the door.
“Ah, hello,” Mortimer said, smiling smugly. “Please, do come in.”
He flung the door open, and in entered a group of people, who all stared at the Rollerskater in bemusement.
The Cabinet had arrived. All of them.
All standing there, their mouths agape.
“She’s…” Boateng said. “She’s here.”
“Yes,” Mortimer said. “And I know for a fact that if she didn’t have a good reason to keep me around, she’d have killed me where I stood just now.”
The Rollerskater glowered at him, continuing to point the blade at him.
“Oh, do put your sword away, you daft bint,” Mortimer said. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
The Rollerskater snarled in rage, bringing her sword down on the table. In a flash of light, the table was undone, not so much exploding as simply ceasing to be.
The Ministers stared on in awe.
“My God…” Baird said, quietly.
The Rollerskater turned to them, pointing her sword at them.
“Alright,” she said. “Lock the doors. Now. Nobody enters or leaves this room without my permission. Have I made myself clear?”
Mortimer sneered smarmily.
“And why exactly should we take orders from you, Rollerskater?”
The Rollerskater grabbed him by the collar.
“Because I know what is happening and I know what you’re planning, Mortimer,” she hissed. “It goes well beyond this room. And believe me, it ends now.”
She leaned in close to his ear, then.
“And by the way, my name is K-Os.”
*
Weak, and weaker still.
A mouse had come by the other day. It stopped and and peered up at her. It twitched its little whiskers and blinked in the dim light, sniffing around her. She almost hoped it had come to gnaw her free, but it only washed its face, and disappeared into a dark corner. She cried.
Her calls into the strings went unanswered, now. Not even the gentle voice she had heard, the man who promised to come for her, answered. She was alone and in pain.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked, during another session of bloodletting. She felt dizzy and sick. They had taken so much from her, and she could not replenish what they had taken. They gave her almost no food, and no sunlight. Like a diseased plant, she was beginning to wither.
“Because you worship death,” Aloysius replied. “You yearn for our extinction. So we shall keep you alive and in pain for as long as possible. This is what we call mercy. We shall grant you the life you would take from us.”
She wheezed as she forced out her retort.
“And the pain?”
“Vengeance for our lost empire,” Aloysius sneered. “All you are to us is a farm animal. Your blood is our lifeline. You exist now only to serve us. There exist none who can save you, none who can hear your pleas. Oh, yes, Great Ur, we have heard your calls in the strings. Nobody will answer you. Nobody will ever come. You will stay here until our plans reach completion. Until that day, you will sit here and rot.”
She didn’t remember when he left. Maybe she lost consciousness from the pain or the loss of blood. She felt rage at points, rage at Socks for letting this happen to her, rage at K-Os for putting her in this position, rage at Monica for stealing fire from her mind, rage at her own father for leaving her alone…
And then she felt guilty, horribly guilty. Because her father hadn’t meant to leave. He had been taken. Why was she so angry at him? Why did she feel so betrayed?
Her vision began to blur.
The mouse came back one night, and looked up at her, this bedraggled giant chained in place. She could barely lift her head to acknowledge it. Of the two of them, she felt far more like a mouse, caught in a trap.
Hope was all she had left, and her supply of even that was rapidly depleting.
Weak, and weaker still.
*
Dawn comes, but the Project Director has already been awake for several hours, making preparations.
The executioner has already been picked. Standard SAID-MI5 decommissioning procedure, nothing outlandish: lethal injection to be delivered intravenously at 0900 hours sharpish. Bush has refused to witness it. She plans to tender her resignation later that day.
Silly bitch, the Project Director thinks. She let herself feel, let herself fall in love with her patient. But he belongs to the British state; if he will not cooperate, despite his incredible powers, then he is a danger to the British people, and must be destroyed.
For his part, the Project Director feels nothing, no sympathy at all. It’s like putting down a rabid dog. Yes, the sensitive ones and bleeding-hearts may cry murther and beg for clemency, but if you don’t want rabies, you eradicate the rabid. And most certainly, Parish is perniciously rabid.
He walks into the containment room, at the high metal ceiling and the concrete pillars placed all around.
There, hanging in the centre of it all, is Parish, quiet and still as he has been for almost a year now.
In a few hours, this room will be empty, the Project Director thinks. They’ll probably fill the base in with concrete, build a block of flats on top of it, forget anything ever happened.
He looks forward to washing his hands of the whole mess. There will be no rewards for his directorship, of course, no medals given. Just a quiet Civil Service pension, an early retirement, and an unspoken encouragement to move far away.
Perhaps, he thinks, I’ll go and live on the Isle of Man. Or Edinburgh. Or Gibraltar.
He hasn’t made his mind up, yet.
He turns to a soldier.
“Go and let Dr. Bush know that we’re about to start,” he says. “She ought to know, at least.”
The soldier salutes. “Yes, sir!”
Immediately he marches away, gun in hand.
The Project Director smiles.
For Queen and Country, he thinks. For Queen and Country.
*
The phone rang, and Mortimer sat up. He’d been forced to sleep on the floor. K-Os loomed over him, placing a skate on his chest.
“Do you mind?” he growled. “That might be important.”
“Say nothing of what is happening in this room,” K-Os said. “End the call as quickly as possible.”
Mortimer growled, struggling out from under her foot, and grabbed the receiver.
“Prime Minister speaking,” he said. “I…oh, I see…excellent. Excellent. Yes, of course. I’ll let the Cabinet know right away. Thank you. And good morning to you.”
He hung up.
“Who was it?” K-Os said.
“That was Project LUCIFER,” he said, smiling grimly. He received a blank look. “Oh, you don’t know what that is, do you? Well, I’ll give you a hint: One of your friends’ fathers is about to die.”
K-Os almost seemed to break. It was like watching a lion cower from a tamer’s whip. Delicious!
“Blake Parish,” she whispered. “You’re going to kill Blake Parish.”
“Indeed we are,” Mortimer said.
“Call it off,” K-Os said. “Now.”
“No, I don’t think I will,” Mortimer said. “Degenerate freak. He deserves to die.”
K-Os clouted him across the face with a hand that felt like it was made of something harder than flesh.
Mortimer reached for a box of tissues and removed one, dabbing it against his split lip.
“I knew it,” he said. “You can’t kill me. Not even when it could save a man’s life!”
K-Os looked hard at him. He simply smiled back, revelling in her hatred.
“There’s one thing you should know about me, Mortimer,” she said.
“Oh, yes? And what might that be, Miss Osborne?”
The other Cabinet members began to rise, and her gaze passed across each one of them.
“I can wait,” K-Os said. “I’m sixty-six million years old. I am very good at waiting.”
*
The Northern line train pulled into Charing Cross at a little after eight a.m. the next day.
Socks had barely slept. Troubling dreams, some he remembered, some didn’t. Dreams of vampires jumping and clamping jaws down on his throat. Dreams of being trapped within the winding corridors of Monica’s internal matrix, the sound of machinery pounding in his head.
Worst of all were the recurring dreams of Liberty crying out in the dark.
He and Harri-Bec got off the train and made their way to the exit, with Monica in tow.
As they stepped outside, they surveyed the surroundings.
A normal day in London, so it seemed: Families hustling and bustling, buses passing on the Strand, the usual crowds in Trafalgar Square.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Socks asked.
“Yes,” Harri-Bec said. “This doesn’t make any sense. London was warning me of a convergence here, this morning.”
Monica looked intently around her, at the sky and the sun.
“Everything is so pretty here,” she said.
“Stay close,” Socks said.
“I will! Don’t boss me.”
Harri-Bec took two steps away from them, wrapping her arms around a lamp-post, and sank to her knees.
“Harri?” Socks said, concerned. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Yes,” Harri-Bec said. “It’s just…I feel something…someone…”
She winced, grabbing her head.
“My head,” she said. “God, it feels like…it feels like my head is on fire…”
“Is she alright?” a passerby asked.
“Too much to drink last night,” Socks said.
“It’s a Wednesday.”
“Look, just piss off, alright?”
He crouched down with Harri-Bec and put a hand on her back.
“Harri, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s…there’s someone here…I can see them now…”
Her eyes widened.
“Oh my God…”
*
He rode across the countryside on the back of a Friesian horse, keeping the goal clear in his mind. They might already suspect he was coming. If that was true, he had to be ready for it. If it wasn’t, then, well, they’d know he was there soon enough.
He stopped to let his horse take a drink of water in the early hours of the morning. His skills in communication through the strings were still clumsy, but he’d got the hang of it. Just like remembering a phone number, really, except with the requirement of some level of quasi-Buddhist quietude. It was murder on his head, but he had to tell someone where he was headed. Had to.
They met in a dark area of psychic space, one less trodden, like an underdeveloped synapse, off the beaten path.
“Callan?” she said. “What are you doing here? How are you doing this?”
“Ave no’ goat much in th’ way o’ time,” Callan said. “Listen, Harri – am aboot tae dae somethin’ pretty dangerous…”
Harri-Bec was silent a few moments.
“You’re going to help Liberty, aren’t you?”
“Aye,” Callan said. “A know whaur they took ‘er.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Whit a dae best,” Callan replied. “Am gonnae hunt some vampires.”
Harri-Bec’s image was indistinct. God, he wished he could see that young face again. So full of hope, so unworn by time.
“But that’s what you always do, isn’t it?” Harri-Bec said.
Callan laughed, slightly.
“This time’s a wee bit diff’rent,” he said. “See…these vampires ent jus’ the ones who took yer friend.”
He was losing the connection. Things were fading back in, like waking from a dream.
“This is personal.”
Harri-Bec was silent again.
“Are you going to die?” she asked, frankly.
“There’s a possibility—”
“Tell me the truth,” Harri-Bec said.
Callan paused.
“Am sorry,” he said. “Have a guid life, Harriet-Rebecca West.”
“Wait,” came the reply. “Callan, don’t—”
He couldn’t bear to hear any more. Couldn’t get cold feet.
He didn’t know who Liberty Parish was. He didn’t know how she fit into this jigsaw puzzle at all. But what he did know was that his single worst enemy was holding her against her will.
He wouldn’t stand for it. Not as long as he still drew breath.
He was coming. He was coming as sure as the swift approach of death.
His head pounded and his heart hurt. He felt something warm on his top lip, reached up and dabbed at it with a finger.
Blood. He’d had a nosebleed while talking through the strings.
Wiping it on his sleeve, he adjusted something under his coat, then resaddled himself atop the horse.
The hoofbeats of judgement were fast approaching for Aloysius Mayer.
Steeling himself, he rode off into the morning sunlight, the smell of dew on soil around him.
What a beautiful day for revenge.
Another time, another place…
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Illustration created using elements of an image by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
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ARC FOUR: BLOOD MOON
I | II | III | SSI | IV | V | SSII | SSIII | VI | VII | SSIV
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