Lies Ripped Open

by Steve McHugh

  “What does that mean?”

  “I . . . I don’t know yet. But it can’t go on like this. I can’t keep pretending I’m doing good when I’m ignoring what’s happening in Avalon. Does Merlin even attend the council meetings anymore?”

  Elaine shook her head. “I’ve taken control of them. Merlin is so consumed with Arthur.” She paused. “But you didn’t contact me for that.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “We went to see Felix. It’s likely that he’s betrayed us. The others want to go visit him again, but if he did betray us, we’d be walking into a trap. I need to know if the Reavers have any property they use in London. I need to know where to go next. The last murder was horrific, even more so than what came before; the next one will be too. They’re going to try and constantly better themselves. This is a game to them.”

  “Felix would never betray you unless forced to.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, Avalon isn’t exactly his biggest love.”

  “You don’t understand. Felix would never betray you without a good reason.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again. “Why me?” I asked eventually.

  “That’s something you need to talk to him about. I’m sorry, Nate, but I can’t answer that. My advice is to find him.”

  “And if he didn’t betray us?”

  “Then he might have more information on his former comrades. He might know who leads them.”

  “Once this is done, I’m coming to talk to Merlin.”

  “Can I change your mind?”

  “No,” I almost whispered.

  “He’ll not take kindly to your interference.”

  “I don’t care, Elaine. He needs to be told, he needs to stop turning a blind eye. He’s slipped into darkness. There’s still time to stop him from submerging in it.”

  My hours immediately following the time talking to Elaine were spent sleeping. Time in the circle for those unused to it was always exhausting. Once I was up, I gathered everyone in the living room downstairs.

  “I’m going to see Felix,” I said.

  “Not alone you’re not,” Diana said. “We’ll all go.”

  I shook my head. “If he betrayed us, he’ll try to kill you.”

  “But not you?” Alan asked.

  “Apparently not, no.”

  “So what are we meant to be doing?” Fiona asked.

  “Felix said the Reavers were in Whitechapel. I don’t think that’s a lie. I think the murders are taking place here because it’s where they’re staying. I need you to search the place.”

  “Search Whitechapel?” Alan asked with a laugh.

  “If you come with me to Felix, he could kill you,” I snapped. “Otherwise you’re just going to stay here and wait. You can either go out there and try to find something, anything, which might help. Or sit on your arse and twiddle your thumbs. Which one do you think is more likely to stop the tally of dead from growing again?”

  “Fine, we’ll look around,” Alan grudgingly agreed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Take the carriage,” Diana said and passed me a silver knife. “This might be helpful.”

  I lifted my jacket and showed her the row of six silver blades that sat on the small of my back. “I’m good. I’ll be back here in a few hours.”

  I left the house, pulling the collar of my jacket up to stop the rain, and told the driver, who was sitting inside the carriage, to take me to Felix’s house. He agreed and after one sizeable bump as we set off, we were soon on our way.

  If I was honest, I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at Felix’s. The possibility that he’d betrayed us stung. I’d been told to kill him and I’d let him live, surely that meant something. But then Elaine said he’d never betray me. Was that because I’d let him live? Felix had said that we needed to talk; maybe he wanted to confess that he was involved with the murders. Maybe Felix was still in charge of the Reavers. There was a whole lot of maybe, and not a lot of definitive answers.

  The carriage stopped and I got out, telling the driver to wait for me. He nodded once, and I wondered exactly what he was. He hadn’t spoken the entire time he’d been driving the coach, and didn’t appear at all concerned about the trolls in the grounds. I made a mental note to ask Diana when everything was done, and walked up to Felix’s house.

  I’d considered how I was going to get inside. Knocking on the door was the most logical, but if he was working with the Reavers, then it was also a good way to give him the advantage. I shrugged and knocked on the door; I was in no mood for games. If he wanted a fight, I’d give him one the likes of which he’d never forget.

  I knocked a second and third time, before getting fed up and placing my hand against the door, using fire magic to burn a hole through it, melting the metal lock. The door swung open with a small push and I stepped inside the dark and quiet house, closing the door behind me.

  “Felix, I don’t have the temperament to fuck around today,” I called out.

  There was no reply.

  I took a few steps further into the house and the door swung open. I readied a ball of flame, until I saw that it was Fiona, looking very wet as she entered the house.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “I thought you might have noticed the bump on the carriage when I grabbed hold of it.”

  “That was you? Why are you even here?”

  “To help. I’m a conjurer; I might be able to see if anyone starts throwing illusions around the place.”

  “Felix isn’t a conjurer,” I explained.

  “Well then, in that case I’m here because Elaine told me to go with you whether you liked it or not.” Fiona smiled, although it was more of a challenge than an expression of happiness. “Apparently she’s worried you’ll get yourself killed.”

  I considered arguing, but what was the point? Fiona was here now. “We need to search the house.”

  “I’ll take upstairs, you down here,” she said and ran off before I could reply, leaving me alone in the foyer of a cold, dark house.

  I ignited my magic, giving me some semblance of night vision, and began searching through the numerous large rooms that made up the ground floor of the house. After half an hour of meticulous searching, I’d found neither Felix nor anything that might suggest where he’d gone. There were no signs of a struggle, no notes or messages that could indicate anything. In fact everything looked much tidier than when I’d last been here.

  Eventually I’d made a full circuit of the floor and found myself back in the foyer, next to the grand staircase. There was a door on one side of the staircase, which stuck slightly as I opened it. More stairs led down into the darkness beyond. I remained cautious as I descended them, not because I was concerned about who, or what, might be lurking at the bottom, but because the stairs were steep and I didn’t want to slip and embarrass myself as I flew down and landed in a heap.

  The basement contained half a dozen tall, wooden cabinets, all of which were locked, and none of which could be distinguished one from the other. I considered just breaking the locks, but if Felix had any kind of security measure, not using the key was likely to end in a very bad way for me. I left them alone and went back up the stairs, hoping that Fiona might have had more luck.

  I found her sitting on the bottom step of the staircase.

  “Any luck?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I found these in a drawer.” She threw me a large keychain, with several different keys on it. “Couldn’t find anything to use them on though, but I assume they unlock something.”

  “I found a bunch of cabinets in the basement. These might work.”

  Together, we made our way back downstairs and used the keys on the cabinets, unlocking all six of them, before opening them in turn. The first three contained files, hundreds of files about past operations, notes about people and who they worked for. It appeared as if Felix had documented everything he’d ever done or been aware of.

  We spent a
good half hour picking files at random and reading through them.

  “Some of these files describe criminal acts that Avalon was involved in,” Fiona said. “There’s a whole section here about some assassinations that Avalon authorized and the Reavers carried out. On other Avalon personnel. Did Merlin authorize them?”

  I grabbed the file from her hands and apologized before reading through it.

  “This here is the mark of the Reavers,” I said, pointing to a red seal mark. “And this one is just some depressed wax, there’s no mark or anything. They clearly didn’t want to be discovered.”

  “You think Merlin did this?”

  I honestly didn’t know. I flicked back through the file. “The Reavers were tasked with killing a family in France. I’d like to think Merlin would draw the line at the murder of children, but I can’t say that for sure.”

  “This is the evidence that Elaine needs.”

  I passed Fiona the file. “Take that one. It should be enough to help Elaine. We don’t have time to grab all of these.”

  I opened the fourth cupboard and found weaponry hanging inside it; swords, knives, axes, even a crossbow. All neatly arranged. The fifth cupboard contained more files, but after grabbing one and reading through it, they appeared to be files of those people whom Felix had put through the Harbinger trials.

  Fiona grabbed a file and started reading too. “These trials aren’t for the fainthearted, are they?”

  “Apparently not, no. The subjects believed that they were living their lives off somewhere for ten to fifty years. The loves, the sights, sounds, everything they experienced was all a construct inside their head. Fifty years of near daily mental programming just to make a soldier as good as the Harbingers. I wonder if it’s worth all that effort?”

  Fiona grabbed a second file and a large number of them teetered toward us. We tried to stop the pile from falling, but it was too late, they spilled out of the cabinet, all over the floor.

  “Shit,” Fiona snapped and started grabbing files from the floor, stuffing them back into the cabinet. “You take a look in that one.”

  I did as she asked and moved to the final cabinet, opening it up and finding it empty except for a note of paper stuck to the rear of it and a file on the bottom. I removed it from the cabinet and began reading. Nathan, they’re coming for me. They’re going to find me and they’re going to kill me. They took someone dear to me; I had to inform them that you were going to Mister Baker’s. I’m so sorry for never telling you the truth. If you find me before I die, I hope I can apologize for what I did. For everything I did.

  I placed the note on a nearby table and picked up the file, opening it to the first page and reading it with almost immediate horror.

  SUBJECT: Nathaniel Garrett

  AGE: Approximately 13

  HARBINGER TEST TIME: Approximately 15 years

  CARRIED OUT BY: Merlin and Felix Novius

  OBJECTION: Harbinger testing to commence in earnest at the request of Merlin. Let it be known that I, Felix Novius, am against this procedure being conducted on a thirteen-year-old, no matter his supposed potential. May whatever gods exist have mercy on our souls for what we are about to do.

  CHAPTER 15

  Camelot, Albion. Now.

  Lucie and I left the hospital, and caught the subway to the third stop in the residential district. It was a fairly short walk through crowded streets to reach the row of three-story houses that Fiona had lived in. It was a fairly quiet neighborhood, with each house having a small lawn with a brick wall and gate.

  “Every house here is owned by an Avalon employee,” Lucie told me as we reached the gate for Fiona’s house. “And yet no one heard anything, no one saw anything.”

  “You think some people in Camelot are helping the Reavers?”

  “Some probably are, some are probably scared it’ll happen to them. Whether they mean to help the Reavers or not, they still are by staying quiet.”

  I pushed open the gate, which squeaked slightly, and took the steps to Fiona’s front door.

  Lucie arrived beside me and removed a key from her pocket, using it to unlock the door and push it open. We both stood there for a heartbeat. I didn’t want to go in, I didn’t want to think about Fiona being attacked in her own home, a place of safety. The thought made me angry, and I was already plenty angry.

  I took a deep breath and stepped into the house. Pictures adorned the wall of the corridor I found myself in. I walked over to one, a painting of a large green dragon, and saw that her husband had signed it.

  “Alan painted them for her while he was in prison,” Lucie said. “He appears to have a talent for it.”

  Indeed he did, the paintings were lovely. I’d have never guessed that Alan, a man whom just over a century ago I couldn’t have trusted with a pack of oranges, would end up married to Fiona.

  “Where was she found?” I asked.

  Lucie pointed to a door at the end of the corridor. “The door was open, she was half in the corridor and half in the room beyond. Her hands and feet were tied together with cable ties.”

  I walked to the end of the corridor, past a set of stairs and two more doors, and opened the door, discovering that the room beyond was a massive kitchen. “They just left her here?” I asked.

  Lucie nodded. “It looks like they went through to the study. It was torn apart.”

  “Fiona is a conjurer, any illusions she’s placed are going to stay there until either she removes them or she dies. She could have put anything about the Reavers anywhere.”

  “That’s why we’ve got so many agents at the hospital. I think someone will try again once they learn that they didn’t get the job done the first time.”

  “Okay, so let’s say she found out something about the Reavers. She’ll have hidden it behind a veil. We’ve got no chance of finding it until she wakes up. Anyone checked her computer?”

  Lucie nodded. “First thing we did. It’s passworded like you wouldn’t believe. She’s got some sort of software on it that fucks the entire hard drive should anyone try to crack it. She mentioned it to me a few months ago. Whatever is on there isn’t coming off anytime soon.”

  “Her attacker didn’t take the computer?”

  She shook her head. “It was scribed in runes. Picking it up would have caused a bit of a mess.”

  “She really was paranoid.”

  “The Reavers make you that way. She’d spent a long time looking into them before you arrived back in the late nineteenth century. And with their re-emergence she jumped back in with both feet. I should have done more to keep her safe.”

  “Like what? Post permanent guards? Then you’d just have an even bigger body count.” I walked over to the next door on the corridor and opened it. The mess of paper all over the floor led me to believe it was the study.

  “We didn’t try to tidy it. No telling with a conjurer what’s to be moved and what’s a nasty illusion just waiting to do something to some unlucky bastard. Let me ask you something, Nate, would you attack a conjurer in their own home?”

  “Not even if you paid me all the money in the world,” I said, meaning every word of it. Conjurers weren’t as outwardly flashy as sorcerers, but they were just as powerful. Illusions, veils, tricks, and traps; most of which contained the types of things that you really didn’t want to stumble across. The problem was they had to keep in proximity to their illusions. The few miles from the hospital to her home was certainly enough for Fiona to keep her secrets, but if she went through the realm gate, or even left Camelot, those illusions would probably crumble.

  “Several of the rooms appear to have been searched. I think they were in a hurry. Beds flipped over, that sort of thing. If they had more time they’d have been more meticulous.”

  “What if they were just making it look like something was searched for? That way they can trash the house and leave. Maybe they assume that whoever Fiona is working with will lead them to the information she had on the Reavers. If she gets hurt, t
hose she’s working with will panic and reveal themselves to her attackers. Or maybe it was a threat to someone else. A case of, if we can get to Fiona, we can get to anyone. They stab her, she crashes forward, but isn’t instantly dead. They didn’t expect her to be, that’s why they coated the blade with jorōgumo venom, so they tie her up to keep her in one place. But then why attack her after then? She was of no threat, so why assault her? If you want her dead, why not just stab her again? Why let the venom on the blade do its job, and risk her being found?”

  “Two people?”

  “One stabs her, goes off to make it look like her attacker wanted something, the other decides to attack her while she’s vulnerable. The first was quick, clean, and professional. One stab, ties her up, goes off to do his work. But whoever attacked her while she was tied up, that’s either personal or because they enjoy it.”

  “Someone who knows her? I can check on anyone with a grudge.”

  “But then if one of them is trying to kill her, why stop and leave? Her attackers took a big risk coming here, and an even bigger one not killing her. But they had to know they’d never find anything. All this mess is to make it look like something it isn’t. No, this is about the attack, not the ransacking.”

  “Maybe they really did mean to kill her. Do you think her attackers were interrupted?”

  “If someone knocked on the door, they’d see them. The door has a glass window in it; anyone standing in the corridor is exposed to the person at the door. And they’d just kill them so they weren’t exposed. What else would disturb two killers from actually killing someone?”

  “Another question. There are a lot of them.”

  “I don’t like questions with no answers.” I leaned up against the wall and closed my eyes. “The knife guy hears the commotion downstairs and comes to find his partner is attacking Fiona, and then stops him or her. The knife guy wants her to die of the venom, slowly. Maybe that’s personal too. A slow, painful death, especially as no one found Fiona for six hours, so it wasn’t anyone coming to the house that stopped them. What scares trained killers off ?”