Shadow Tag, Perdition Games

by L E Fraser

  “He hid it well,” Reece said. “He was an extremely intuitive person and a gifted manipulator.”

  “He saw what Fadiya needed—companionship—and he played to her desires,” Aazar said. “She wanted to stay. I thought I was saving her.”

  “What did you tell your parents?” Reece asked.

  “That I’d put Fadiya on a train to Hamilton to visit our auntie,” he said. “But no matter how hard I tried to convince them to let me die, they refused. They claimed that Allah had bestowed the gift of intelligence on me, and I was duty bound to help humanity.” He removed a bottle of water from his backpack. “Allah commands impeccable respect toward parents. I couldn’t stand against them because severing family relations is an act of fasad—corruption—and is a great sin.”

  “But they must have realized Fadiya wasn’t with her aunt,” Reece said.

  “They did, and I admitted that I hid her,” Aazar said. “Eight months later, I read about the massacre at Bueton and believed my sister was dead.” His hand shook as he sipped from his water bottle.

  “What happened when authorities found Fadiya alive?” Reece asked.

  “My mother took her directly to Princess Margaret Hospital, where my oncologist extracted some of her bone marrow to save my life,” Aazar said. “Fadiya was mentally unwell and didn’t understand the pain.” His voice caught and a tear ran slowly down his gaunt cheek. “Before our parents could subject Fadiya to more suffering, I convinced a psychiatrist to demand a competency hearing.”

  “And the Ontario court ruled in favour, preventing any further operations,” Sam said with a sigh. “That’s when your parents transferred Fadiya to Serenity Clinic.”

  “Where someone is drugging and raping her. My little sister, who I have a duty to protect,” Aazar said through his tears. “Fadiya is a victim of forced prostitution. I believe you now.”

  “I dealt with some human trafficking with the provincial police,” Reece said. “Just one girl forced into servitude produces over one hundred thousand dollars a year.”

  “It could be more, if you’re catering to a fetish market, where a client rapes a patient in a lockdown facility,” Sam said. “In addition to other deviant gratification, there’s the adrenaline junkie fix.”

  “And if they’re selling my sister, they’re probably enslaving other girls as well,” Aazar said. “Did you know that five young girls have disappeared from the withdrawal unit this month?”

  Sam frowned. “I know about three. There’s no proof anything sinister happened in those cases, though.”

  “I don’t believe they left of their own accord,” Aazar said defiantly. “I believe they were taken and sold into slavery.” His eyes hardened. “I would kill to avenge my sister’s honour. Some people are not worthy of life.”

  The front door banged open and Eli marched to the table. “Danny is admitting me into a psychiatric hospital on an involuntary hold,” he announced.

  “What?” Reece stared with disbelief at Danny, who was calmly unclipping Pepin’s leash.

  “His Asperger’s has become uncontrollable,” Danny said without expression. “I’m his power of attorney. Eli is a danger to himself and others.”

  Reece opened his mouth and then closed it again, stunned. Danny had cracked. That was the only explanation. He looked at Sam, expecting her to intervene, but she merely sipped her wine and raised an eyebrow.

  “Let me guess,” Sam said at length, turning in her chair to look at Danny. “You’re taking him to Serenity Clinic.”

  “Where they will put me in lockdown.” Eli smiled. “I will protect Fadiya until Aazar can get her out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Journal

  I SPENT A week in Cyril’s camp, lonely and despondent. Away from the bayou, I could no longer feel Pearl’s essence. Without her light, I existed in a cavern of darkness where my senses became numb and the memories of my beloved family dwindled. Amid the chaos of the camp, I slept for long hours and dreamed of a lane flanked by towering oak trees that led to a brick mansion, its verandah ringed with urns spilling over with sweet olive.

  Cyril graced me with his company on just one occasion. He sat at a rickety camp table that might once have held Robert E. Lee’s plans for the Battle of Chancellorsville. On its gouged wooden top, he placed a birth certificate from somewhere called Lethbridge, Alberta, an Ontario driver’s licence, and a Canadian passport. He handed me a sheaf of papers: high school transcripts. I leafed through them. The marks were my own, which I had earned in Louisiana, and the highest were in math and science.

  “Your père was a good man with a bad habit,” Cyril said in a thick Cajun accent. He dropped a stained envelope on the table between us.

  I shoved it back to him, cringing as my fingertips grazed my mother’s spattered blood. “He said to give it to you when I arrived. It’s payment for this.” I gathered the identification and stuffed it into my jacket.

  Cyril pushed back the envelope of money. “I owed him,” he said. “Now the debt is paid.”

  “The morphine you gave him paid the debt,” I said gruffly. “You did enough.”

  Cyril’s cold eyes drilled into mine. “Some demons are beyond mortal man’s ability to conquer. It don’t change the goodness in a man’s heart. Your père was a good man.”

  Curiosity got the better of me. “Why did you owe him?”

  Cyril opened his shirt. Across the upper left quadrant of his chest was a puckered, circular scar. “He saved my life. He saved the lives of two of my soldiers.”

  I slid the money back across the table. “I need three things from you. Take the cost from this.”

  I told him what I wanted and why. He sat silently for a few moments. “The first two ain’t a problem,” he said. “The other one is. Could be a couple of days.”

  “Tonight,” I insisted. “Get it from a veterinary clinic. I need a syringe and rope, too.”

  “What you need is to get out of Louisiana,” he said. “Blu, I promised your père I’d do right by you. College is different up north. The government helps pay.” He pointed at the transcript I held. “You earned them marks for true. You could be a doctor. Make your père proud.”

  “He’s dead. That was his choice. I’m going to Lafayette.” I thought about the inferior man who resided in the palatial estate, entitled and heartless toward his kin. I’d made a vow a long time ago, and I meant to see it through.

  Cyril stood. “You’ll get you what you ask.” He studied me in the dim light. “Virgile Landry, he was a piece of shit and y’all done the world a favour. Back on the bayou, you done the right thing to protect your mère. You do what you’re planning, that’s different.”

  “I’m not asking your permission or your blessing,” I retorted. “Get what I ask and you’ll never see me again. I promise you that.”

  His expression hardened. “Wait here. Someone will come for you. My debt is paid.”

  Even with his parting comment, I believed he’d keep my new identity secret. After everything I had done, and everything I planned to do, I still clung to a whisper of adolescent idealism. I truly believed Cyril would keep his promise to my father and do right by me. I believed he would never betray me. It was a mistake that cost me dearly in the end.

  At a little after midnight, a man with a sub-machine gun strapped across his chest handed me a car key, a thick coil of rope, a vial of succinylcholine chloride, a syringe, a package the size of a box of tissue, and a cell phone. “Press three to detonate. Range is sixty yards. There’s a two-minute delay. Truck’s behind the mess hall.” He walked away.

  The truck was an old brown Ford pickup. One of a million in Louisiana. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I loaded the syringe and capped it. I followed 90 East and reached Lafayette without arousing attention. Outside the city, I drove to an oak-lined lane that led to a looming brick mansion. I switched off the headlights and coasted down a slight decline to the back entrance. The house wa
s dark, and the only sound was the oscillating warbles of cicadas and the occasional call of a great horned owl. A good half acre from the back of the estate was a scattering of utilitarian cabins. My father had rarely spoken of his childhood home, but he’d told me that the servants lived on my grandfather’s land, in lodgings reminiscent of slave quarters. They would be safe in those run-down shanties.

  I tucked the rope over my shoulder, shoved the package into the deep pocket of my long black coat, and walked to the back entrance. My father had once told me that my grandfather viewed home security systems as a sign of weakness for cowardly men unable to protect their property. It seemed the old man’s opinion hadn’t changed over the years, because only a deadbolt lock secured the kitchen door. It took me longer than I thought it would to pick it, but eventually I was able to jimmy the pins until I could turn the lock with my tension wrench.

  I crept through an elaborate gourmet kitchen and around to the front of the dark house. A massive vestibule with a thirty-foot ceiling showcased an imperial staircase with gilded rails and polished mahogany banisters. Ten steps up from the foyer was a large marble landing. Two symmetrical flights of stairs rose from the landing to the second floor, which circled the two-story staircase. I climbed the stairs and my hatred toward my grandfather intensified with each step. He had lived in all this opulence and wealth, while Pearl and I had eaten swamp rats to survive.

  At the top of the stairs, moonlight from a glass cathedral ceiling above the vestibule provided sufficient light for me to detect a set of ornate double doors on the far side of the circular corridor. The other doors were single, so I walked toward the double doors, assuming they opened into the master suite. My sneakers squeaked against the marble floor and the long cotton coat rustled against my jeans. At the engraved mahogany doors, I grasped a crystal doorknob. It turned easily, and I gently pushed the heavy door, which opened into a sitting room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a wheeled book trolley, and a massive stone fireplace. Two doors led from the sitting room. The first I tried was a bathroom. The second was his bedroom.

  He lay on his back in a high four-poster bed with his head perched on a mountain of white pillows. Stiff with spray, his coiffured grey hair was a helmet around his wrinkled face. His gnarled hands rested on a maroon silk bedspread. Diminutive snores emanated from his wizened mouth.

  I backed out of the room, gently closing his bedroom door behind me.

  Outside the suite’s double doors, I shrugged the rope off my shoulder and tied a noose on one end. I attached the other end to the railing that surrounded the high circular corridor. I peered over the long drop to an antique foyer table on the main level. A peaceful surge of righteousness fluttered in my stomach.

  Retracing my steps, I entered the parlour and took hold of the brass handle on the book trolley. It rolled silently over a vintage oriental rug. Inside the old man’s bedroom once more, I parked the cart alongside the bed and put up the hood of my coat.

  He woke when I stabbed his jugular vein with the syringe.

  He squinted at me through the gloom, trying to discern my facial features from beneath the hood. “Remy?” he croaked.

  In less than sixty seconds, the short-term paralysis would take full effect and he would begin to suffocate. I had to move quickly. I wanted him to anticipate his death and feel the same fear Pearl had.

  “Not Remy,” I whispered. “I’m the urchin his Yankee whore spawned.”

  I rolled his limp body onto the trolley and wheeled it hastily across the parlour and through the double doors. He gurgled as I slipped the noose around his neck. I leaned over his face, vindicated to witness fear darkening his wide eyes.

  “You denied your kin. You left your grandchildren starving while your only son fought for your country. You’re a worthless man.” I lowered the hood of my jacket and stared into his eyes.

  His mouth opened and closed like a flopping catfish gulping for air.

  “I am the omnipotent judge of the unworthy,” I told him. “I am your shadow and see inside the darkest part of you. For the atrocities you committed against the innocent, I sentence you to death.”

  I rolled him off the trolley. His body plummeted over the railing. Gravity tightened the rope’s slack until he dangled helplessly, suspended by the noose around his stretched chicken neck. His callused feet swung above the elegant centre table, the price of which would have fed us for the entirety of my father’s tour of duty.

  I descended the stairs, never bothering to look back at my grandfather. His heartless superiority had orchestrated the desecration of everyone I loved. The only regret I had was that his execution had been fast.

  I placed the bomb on top of a six-foot-long gas range and exited through the back door. Mindful not to exceed the sixty-yard range, I drove up the incline to the lane. I pushed the number three on the cell phone and continued to drive to the main road. A minute later, I stopped and got out of the truck. The cicadas serenaded me as I waited. The C-4 explosive must have ignited the oven’s gas lines, because the explosion and resulting fireball were exquisite.

  I had kept the vow I’d made to myself when my grandfather had shamed my father two years earlier. As the grand old house burned, I felt a warm sense of rectitude. What my mother had begun by destroying a Fabergé egg the old man had valued over his son, I had finally ended. Our family saga had come full circle.

  I got into the truck and drove the three hours from Lafayette to Houston in quiet reflection. I shut my mind to Pearl’s tempting siren song that beckoned me home, where I could be with her and my parents for eternity. As I took the exit to the Houston airport, the sun rose behind me in a ball of fire that burned my youth to ashes and scattered the last speck of my soul into the indigo light.

  I relinquished Blu to the bayou, as an ethereal shadow beneath a cypress tree strung with Spanish moss. But I could not cast aside the memory of my mother’s humiliation on East Gaston Street when I was ten. I could not leave behind Pearl’s suffering at the Crawfish Festival or the flicker of shame in my father’s eyes when mindless people stared at his unsightly prosthetic. The only way to avenge society’s indignities against all the other innocent and struggling people was to break free from Blu’s chrysalis and emerge as someone new.

  For six months, I resided in my new birthplace of Lethbridge, Alberta, in Canada, studying the cultural nuances of the north, and learning to conquer my southern accent in solitude. I emerged from my cocoon as the perfect impostor, able to blend in amid the masses as an unremarkable and forgettable person. Then, I travelled to Toronto and hid amongst the two-point-seven million people in Canada’s largest city, while Blu lived anonymously in my shadow.

  Until Cyril betrayed me to Virgile’s brother and he came for his revenge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sam

  SAM WALKED THROUGH the hospital to the garden exit, juggling her phone, a large coffee, and a cranberry muffin. Outside, the late afternoon sun shone down from a cloudless blue sky. A calming fragrance of lavender wafted from the landscaping along the meandering stone walkways. From a high branch of an ornamental pear tree, two blue jays serenaded the patients and employees who congregated at bistro tables on the pink flagstone patio. Ophelia sat alone at a table for two and Sam strolled over.

  “Hi. Mind if I sit?” she asked.

  Ophelia looked up from her tablet, her mouth set in a straight line and her eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses. She snatched the tablet off the cast iron tabletop and jammed it into an ugly brown leather bag.

  “Sure, sit.” Neither her tone nor her expression suggested it pleased her to have Sam’s company, but she moved aside an empty plate and coffee mug from the centre of the table.

  Sam sat, lifting her face to the glorious sun. “It’s nice to have a break from the smothering humidity.”

  The nurse laughed but Sam had no clue what she’d found so humorous.

  “Oh, a muffin from Cardoon,” Ophelia said. “They’re
so yummy. I would have gone over there, but I overslept. These twelve-hour night shifts are brutal.”

  Sam pulled her muffin in two and offered half. “Do you know what the spice is? It’s good with the cranberry.”

  “Star anise, I think.” Ophelia nibbled on the half Sam had given her. “Or maybe cardamom. I always get them confused. The chef is super experimental. Her cooking is sublime.”

  Seeing an opening, Sam said casually, “I saw you at the bistro the other day.”

  Ophelia dropped the remainder of her muffin onto the table and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “Cardoon is Toronto’s undiscovered gem. A lot of people who work and live in the vicinity eat there.”

  “It was a couple of hours after the staff meeting last week,” Sam said. “I was surprised to see you out and about. You’d just finished a grueling night shift, remember?” Her distorted reflection stared back at her from Ophelia’s silver sunglasses.

  “I live in the neighbourhood.” The skin across her cheekbones tightened and her shoulders tensed. “I don’t sleep well during the day. I probably went for comfort food.”

  Sam took the lid off her coffee, thinking about the security footage she’d seen of Mathias and Ophelia. “You were with Dr. Beauregard. The conversation looked intense. After how rude he was at the staff meeting, I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Ophelia wagged her finger in Sam’s face. “You should have made your presence known, rather than eavesdropping and spying,” she said in a teasing tone that didn’t soften the hard edge in her voice.

  Refusing to back down, Sam said cheerfully, “So you do remember.”

  Ophelia jutted her chin forward. “If you must know, we had a difference of opinion on a patient. It doesn’t concern you.” She scrunched the rest of her muffin into the paper napkin, causing crumbs to scatter across the table and fall through its ornate wrought iron. “Speaking of patients, how are you making out with Fadiya? It strikes me as odd that Dr. Armstrong would assign you to an important patient when you have such limited experience,” she said with a tight smile. “Perhaps you’re out of your depth.”