With Silent Screams (The Hellequin Chronicles, Book 3)

by Steve McHugh

  “Karl wasn’t a very accommodating host. In fact, I’d say he was an utter prick. The werelions must have taken him with them. I assume it’s too much to hope he’s dead.”

  “He could be, but I wouldn’t bet on the little cockroach dying without someone tearing his head off.”

  “I’ll remember that for later. They know you’re watching them by the way, bragged about it in fact. They don’t seem to care too much though.”

  “I sort of assumed they knew something. Damn, I’d say we’d have to try a different tactic, but we tried to contact Charles Whitehorn and he’s had to leave town on urgent business.”

  “Any ideas where they might go?”

  “No, but you certainly spooked them enough to run. I’d be careful once you leave D.C., they may try to get a measure of revenge.”

  “Because attacking me worked so well last time.”

  “Oh it won’t be a direct assault, they’ll go through that agent you’re with.”

  “It’s probably a good idea if she stays with me then. I’m going to take her to Shadow Falls. I need to speak to Simon to try and get something from him.”

  “That’ll mean talking to Galahad.”

  “I’ll come to that when I get there, but these werelions are following Simon’s old plan. They confirmed it. Now I need to know what the hell that plan was.”

  “Good luck, Nate. And if it happens that neither Karl nor Charles make it back to D.C., no one is going to miss them.”

  “Take care, Roberto,” I said and hung up.

  I followed Caitlin a few moments later, walking in on an argument that had erupted between father and daughter. The fight stopped as Mr. Moore caught sight of me.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, getting my daughter caught up in your Avalon bullshit?” he snapped, pointing a boney finger at me.

  Mr. Moore was a tall, skinny man, with thick gray hair. “I asked you a question, boy!” he snapped again, taking a step toward me.

  “Dad, if you could just listen for one second,” Caitlin said, trying to get the attention of her irate father. “Nate doesn’t work for Avalon, I said he used to work for them.”

  Mr. Moore turned on his daughter. “Used to? They always fucking say they used to, but that never seems to stop them from pissing around with the laws of this country. And you, young lady, what kind of insane trouble have you gotten into that you’re working with some goddamn spook from who-knows-where?”

  “Dad, you never listen, you only hear what you want to. I’m trying to tell you what’s happening and you’re just talking over me.”

  “I haven’t seen you in over a year. And you come here in the middle of the night with one of them.” He waved in my direction. “What the hell am I meant to think?”

  “You’re supposed to trust me.”

  Norman’s expression softened, but I could still see the angry fire in his eyes. “Oh, Caitlin. You’re a Federal officer, running around with Avalon. That’s not exactly displaying good judgment.”

  I was never going to get them to calm down and actually talk while they were arguing, so I opened the door and slammed it shut. With a little air magic to carry the sound all around the room, it resembled a gunshot more than a door slam.

  The fighting stopped immediately and both Moores turned to look at me with fire in their eyes.

  “We’re here to talk to you about your wife.”

  “Boy, I don’t know who you think you are but—”

  “Shut up,” I interrupted. “Just so you know, if you call me boy again, I’m going to punch you in the jaw. Now, let your daughter talk. You’re not angry at her, you’re angry that some Avalon spook is in your home.”

  “My ex-wife,” he stated, “is of no concern to me.” He turned to his daughter. “Please tell me you’re not investigating that woman. Please tell me you’ve given up, Caitlin. Going after her is only going to cause you trouble. I’ve seen agents get too close, allowing their emotions to compromise the job, if you do that it’ll get you hurt.”

  “It’s a bit late for that, Dad,” she snapped. “Nate is helping me.”

  “This charlatan is using you. And he just threatened a federal judge.”

  I had to laugh. “Add it to the list of people I’ve pissed off tonight. Besides, considering your ex-wife just tried to kill your daughter and me, I’m thinking you may want to make her your concern.”

  Mr. Moore turned to his daughter, any anger or resentment in his face evaporated. “Is this true, did she hurt you?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “I’m fine, just a little shaken. She had Joshua with her.”

  Mr. Moore’s hand shot to his open mouth. “My boy,” he whispered. “She has my boy.”

  “He’s not a boy anymore, Dad,” Caitlin told her father with a pained expression. “He’s a monster.”

  “No, no, not. Not my boy.”

  “You’ve seen the eyes of a killer,” I told him. “Someone who enjoys it, considers it a sport or a fun way to spend the evening. Your son now has those eyes. There’s no boy left. I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Moore’s face crumpled and Caitlin rushed to him, both of them holding one another in a moment of tender need for the comfort of another. I left them to their pain and walked to the kitchen, getting myself a drink of water while I waited for the inevitable conversation once Caitlin and her father calmed down.

  “So you used to work for Avalon?” Mr. Moore said as he walked into the kitchen alone.

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “Gone to freshen up. She’s had a crappy day. You going to answer my question?”

  I finished my drink of water and placed the glass in the sink. Normally, I would have answered him first, but since he’d been rude to me, he could bloody well wait. “Yes, I used to,” I said. “I don’t work for Avalon now.”

  “I deal with Avalon a bit in my job, all federal judges do. I’m not a big fan of their secrecy and the fact that they seem to think the law doesn’t apply to them.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that during the finger-pointing and shouting. Not to cause another row, but it doesn’t apply to us,” I pointed out. “Well, not all of it anyway.”

  “If I had my way, Avalon and the whole lot of you would be outed to the world. Having sorcerers and monsters running around the place, waging war, innocent people get hurt.”

  “That’s precisely why we’re not outed to the world. If that ever happens a lot of innocent people will get hurt. You know full-well that anyone can discover things about our world without consequence, but if someone tried to make a public spectacle, so that everyone was left with no doubt over what we are, that person would vanish before they could ever achieve their plan. Anyway, it’s a moot point, because your daughter isn’t human. So, outing us all would hurt her just as much.”

  Mr. Moore paused for a second and regarded me with slightly less than friendly expression on his face. “I don’t trust you.”

  “Wait till you get to know me, we’ll get along famously.”

  “Making flippant comments won’t change my opinion.”

  “Being rude to me and dismissing your daughter because of the company she keeps isn’t going to make me think you’re anything other than an ass, but here we are.”

  Mr. Moore sucked on his lower lip—either frustration or a nervous habit, it was hard to tell. “That was out of line, what I said earlier to Caitlin. I do trust her. She’s a damn good agent and an even better daughter. But she has blinkers on when it comes to her mom.”

  “So would I if my mum was a raving psychopath.”

  “My daughter tells me that I can trust you. That you’re a good guy. Is that true?”

  “That depends on your definition of good guy,” I said. “I try to do the right thing. That doesn’t always work out, though.”

  “If you hurt her, I’ll make
it my mission in life to destroy you.” He held my eye while he spoke. If nothing else, Mr. Moore had some balls of steel.

  “Dad, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Caitlin said as she re-entered the room.

  “I’m just letting him know.” He walked over to a drinks cabinet and opened it, picking up a bottle of bourbon. “Nate, you can call me Norman. Do you want a drink?”

  “Whatever you’re having is fine,” I told him.

  He filled two glasses, each with a large measure of alcohol and brought them back, passing me one before he took a seat on the chair next to me.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I enquired.

  Norman motioned for me to continue.

  “Caitlin told me that you’re not her birth father. Any chance whoever that is, is helping your ex-wife? Do you know who he is?” I paused. “I know that was more than one question, but your ex-wife is involved in some serious shit, I’d take any help you can give.”

  “I’m not Caitlin’s biological father.” He turned to his daughter and took her hand in his before looking back at me. “I raised this girl into a fine, upstanding woman. A woman who deserves more than a dad who works all hours and a mom who, in your own words, is a raving psychopath.”

  “You did a good job,” I told him and Caitlin mouthed a thank you.

  “There are some things you should know about Patricia. Things I haven’t told anyone.”

  “Caitlin, you sure you want to be here for this bit?”

  Despite the shocked look on his daughter’s face, I was pretty certain Norman would have had to use explosives to get her to move.

  “Caitlin was two months old when I met her mother, Patricia,” Norman began. “I have no idea who her father is, although clearly he’s an alchemist, so that should narrow it down. I also don’t know why he wasn’t around, but when I first met Patricia, it was like walking into a tornado. She was passionate and loving and caring. Our relationship started to sour after the first two or three years. Patricia would go away for days or weeks at a time and never tell me where she was or what she was doing. She would turn violent and angry at the drop of a hat. More than once I caught her hitting or screaming at Caitlin, and every time I tried to involve myself, she’d turn that rage on me.

  “One day, when Caitlin was about four, I decided enough was enough and filed for divorce. She responded by running off for two weeks. During that time, I went out for a drink and met a young lady. We ended up sleeping together. Two days later I received a letter with photos of our encounter. The letter was unsigned. It said that from now on I was to do as I was told and recant the divorce papers. I was certain that Patricia had set the whole thing up just to blackmail me; she’d hired the woman, a prostitute, to seduce me. And I fell for it like a fucking idiot.”

  “You had an affair? Surely that wouldn’t end your career.”

  “Probably not on its own, no. Though it certainly wouldn’t do me a lot of good. But what sealed it for me was the fact that the woman’s body was found a week later. Her throat had been cut with a dagger. A photo was sent to me. It was my dagger, a present from my wife when we got married. There was a note with the photos, behave or your family is next. I couldn’t believe that Patricia was involved in the murder, not at the time anyway. And I couldn’t go to the police, not with my dagger being the murder weapon.”

  “This is getting worse,” I said with a sigh and drank the rest of my whisky, which Norman immediately refilled.

  “I confronted her when she came home and she swore it wasn’t her. But for the next few years, I lived in a sort of limbo. Scared to put a foot wrong and not really trusting her. For her part, she didn’t even act like it had happened and eventually I started to believe that it was someone else. It helped that she spent less and less time away from here, I started to think that there was no way our marriage was anything other than perfect. She’d gotten better with Caitlin; I never saw the anger or violence anymore. Then one day we had a party and both of us got very drunk and ended up sleeping together and she got pregnant from it.

  “I know what you’re thinking, was I sure the baby was mine? And the answer is no, I have no idea. But once Joshua was born, I didn’t care. I trusted Patricia and we were a family. But soon after, I started to notice that Caitlin was always scared when Patricia would take her out for the day. She wanted to spend as little time as possible with her mother, I saw the fear on my daughter’s face and I started to think that I’d been wrong. That was when Patricia started leaving again, taking Joshua with her for days at a time.”

  “She left for good when Caitlin was nine, yes?”

  “Patricia came back for Caitlin’s birthday and then vanished with Joshua. She told me we were done and she had more important things to do, that Caitlin was a disappointment to her, but that she’d come and find her when or if she needed to. She told me she’d cheated on me over and over again, with dozens of men and that she’d sent those letters blackmailing me. She’d murdered the prostitute too. She dropped my dagger on the sofa beside me and told me that if I ever went to the police, she’d come and make Caitlin watch as she skinned me alive. And then she left and we never saw either of them again. Although when I filed for a divorce and it was made official on Caitlin’s sixteenth birthday, I heard from her. She sent me a letter with photos of her having sex with a variety of different men. But there was a letter. It said that if I ever took Caitlin away from her, she would find Caitlin and me and kill us both. It’s why I didn’t move until after Caitlin finished college and went to the FBI.”

  Caitlin hugged her father tightly. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  “Because I know you, I know how angry she makes you. Telling you about her threats would have done little, other than made you even more determined to find her. And I didn’t want you within a hundred miles of her. It’s not your job to protect me, it’s mine to protect you.”

  “But, Dad, you should have told me. All these years you’ve kept that to yourself. Is that why you kept turning down the job in Washington, because of her threats?”

  “I couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

  “So, you don’t think she’d come after you anymore?” I asked.

  “She has no reason to, although I’ve no idea what her warped mind thought at the best of times.”

  Caitlin stood and took her phone out. “I’m getting some protection here.”

  “Caitlin, no,” Norman argued. “I won’t be kept here like some prisoner. Besides do you really want to explain why the serial killer you’re after is your mom?”

  “Call Roberto and ask him for help,” I said, throwing my phone to Caitlin. “Last call on there. Tell him I’ll owe him.”

  Caitlin nodded and walked off to make the call.

  “This is unnecessary,” Normal protested again.

  “You know what, Norman. I’ve lived for a very long time, and in that time I’ve seen people like Patricia lash out at those who used to love them. If she thinks she can to you, she will. I promise you that. Do you think you could kill her, or your boy, if they came calling?”

  Norman’s expression told me he couldn’t.

  “Just let Caitlin do what’s best. In the meantime, I have a few more questions. Did Patricia ever mention a Simon or a plan in Maine?”

  “Simon, yeah. Not until we’d been together a few years, though. She was in love with him. That was obvious. She said he was her ex from many years ago. The rest, no.”

  “So, you didn’t want to see anything was wrong, and by the time it was obvious, it was also too late.”

  “Maybe you’re not quite as stupid as you first appeared.”

  “And maybe you’re not quite a crotchety old asshole,” I said with a smile. “Maybe.”

  “You think you can stop Patricia and her people?”

 
I nodded. “I have to, because otherwise a lot of people are going to die. You and your daughter included.”

  I went for a walk on the grounds of the lavish house when Caitlin returned, allowing her some time with Norman. She found me after an hour or so as I sat by a sizeable pond watching the fish swim around without a care in the world. Lucky buggers.

  “I think your calling as a ninja is pretty much shot,” I called out to her as she made more noise than a stampeding rhino as she approached me.

  “Well that’s a terrible shame,” Caitlin said and sat beside me.

  “So, how are you holding up?”

  “Well, I just found out that my mom, who I already think very little of, blackmailed my father and threatened both him and me. Although, none of it really surprises me.” She exhaled deeply before speaking again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my mom and her…pride, I guess. I should have done it sooner.”

  “Yes, you should. But you didn’t and we’ve moved on. Your dad likes me.”

  Caitlin laughed. “Yeah, he said you were a cocky son-of-a-bitch. I think that’s about as high praise as you’re going to get from him.”

  “You know if you come with me, it’s going to result in you crashing into them both again.”

  Caitlin nodded, sadly. “I figured that out. We have to stop them from hurting anyone else. Something big is happening here. Karl, the senator, and my mom are all working together. They’ve killed multiple people, including your friend Bill and those who survived Simon’s original attack over thirty years ago, and no one goes to that much trouble for anything small.”

  “Okay, so what do you think is going on?”

  “I think my mom, brother, and the rest of the werelions are being used as muscle. If anything goes wrong they’re the ones in the firing line. My mom said that they were Vanguard. What’s that?”

  “The Vanguard are a group of terrorists who exist to cause problems for Shadow Falls. They see the place as an affront to Avalon. They’re insane, but they’re also highly trained and don’t employ people as far gone as your mum and brother. Someone helping Simon said the same thing back in ’77.”