by D. N. Hoxa
“You think we’re fools?” a man with long brown hair tied behind his back said, smiling weirdly.
“Is that a trick question?” I asked, narrowing my brows.
His eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open. I knew that it was inappropriate to joke at a time like that, but I couldn’t help myself. And I could almost hear Aaron chuckling.
“I already knew you wouldn’t believe me. But I have someone who was there. Snow?” I called for Edison’s witness without wasting precious time.
The head-shifter simply nodded, and then a man, who I guessed was Snow, reluctantly stood up. He had white hair, unnaturally white skin, and his eyes were gray, almost colorless. They reminded me of McGraw, and I flinched before I could help it.
“Why don’t you tell us about your friend, a shifter who was killed together with the group of five others?” I asked him, and Snow nodded. He took his sweet time before he spoke, though he wasn’t as freaked out as Evan had been.
“Emmet, one of the shifters that was killed for being here last year, was my friend. Every day in the last week before he got killed, he was being followed. He knew who they were, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just said that he needed to warn someone, and so he set up a meeting. I insisted on following him to meet whoever he wanted to warn, but he wouldn’t let me. I did see two nymphs and a shifter waiting for him before I turned around to leave him on his own,” Snow said, and his body shivered. “And when I…heard screams…I tried to go back.” He bit his lip and looked down at his feet. “I couldn’t. The place was filled with Royal Guards.”
He dropped on his chair like all strength had left his body. He kept his head down, and I could swear I saw his chin shake. He felt guilty for leaving his friend alone.
“It’s impossible,” the same man with long hair said, but I could see the suspicion growing in his eyes.
“How do we know he’s not lying?” a woman from the end of the room called.
When I looked her way, I saw Kyahen sitting at the very end of the row with his legs crossed, smiling. He was enjoying this.
“He’s not. I can see that most of you are still not convinced, but it’s okay. You are going to tell us the other part yourselves.”
Even Ned was surprised. With the names from the list Christopher had given me already memorized, I took a deep breath and continued.
“Mister Julian Moore?”
They all started looking at one another, until someone stood up. He was a man in his late forties, with brown hair and green eyes. His chin kept shaking while he looked at me wide-eyed, having no idea how I knew his name or what I wanted with him.
“Mr. Moore, would you mind telling us what you know about the potion? If I am not mistaken, you were part of the laboratory staff that performed the tests on the supernaturals,” I continued, just as Christopher had told me.
The man’s mouth fell open, and he started looking around as if he was asking for help. But no help was going to come for him, and I already felt like shit for making him tell the truth unwillingly.
It’s necessary, I reminded myself, but I still felt no better.
“I…I don’t…” he started to say but stopped. Swallowed. Looked up at me. “I have helped maintain some documents…” he tried again, and then clamped his mouth shut as he looked down at his hands, struggling to figure out what the hell was happening.
“What have you seen with your own eyes?” I urged him.
“I-I-I…” A layer of sweat covered his face already. “I have seen a shifter doctor inject a blue liquid matter into a warlock’s IV. I-I-I have s-s-seen the warlock scream as if he was in agony, but I didn’t hear him because the windows were soundproof in the office. I have seen a room with c-c-corpses…supernaturals who couldn’t handle the t-t-tests they were doing…”
But his chin began to shake so badly that he could no longer even speak a single sentence.
“That’s enough Mr. Moore. Thank you for your honesty,” I said, and he eagerly sat down again. The others watched him wipe the sweat off his face, completely terrified. I turned to give Ned a look, and he had his hand folded under his chin. This time, I didn’t need Aaron to tell me how Ned was feeling. His face said it all: angry-as-hell.
“Now, Mrs. Natalie Summers, if you please,” I said to the audience.
A couple of seconds later, a woman with dark blonde hair and blue eyes looked at me with her mouth agape. She knew what was coming, and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t control herself. But she seemed less scared than Julian Moore, so that was at least an improvement.
“Natalie, if I’m not mistaken, your cousin had gone missing for several days now. And when you found him, something was wrong with him, is that it?” I asked her and waited until she finally nodded. “Do you mind telling us what happened to your cousin?”
She wiped her mouth three times before she spoke.
“My cousin Daniel and I meet once a month at a bar in New York. And last month he didn’t show up. I called him and emailed him, but when he didn’t return any of my messages, I got worried and went to his apartment. He wasn’t there. I contacted everyone he knew, but they said he just…wasn’t there one day. I thought that maybe he had decided to travel or something, so I stopped looking. Until one day, I found him at my door, and he…he…didn’t remember how he got there or why he wasn’t home for two weeks. He said that he remembered being told to drink water that was mixed with something b-b-blue in it and that he had a terrible headache ever since. But he doesn’t remember anything…”
Natalie began to cry. Each one of her tears made the burden I was holding heavier. So many innocent people…
“That’s enough, Natalie. Thank you.”
When she sat down, she had her face covered, and her whole body shook while she continued to cry in silence.
People started to panic. They started looking and thinking and analyzing what they heard, and I felt a little bit better. But I still had more to do to get them where I needed them.
“We’ll go on with Mr. Doug Sanders,” I called over the whispers.
A look back and I caught Amber with her face buried in the files that I had given them before I turned to see a young man, probably a few years older than me, look at me with more guts than the others had. This was getting better and better.
“Hi, Doug. Do you mind telling me about your father, what he does, and what you overheard him say about the potion?”
His father was a warlock who was pretty important to the Council. A scientist of some sort. Good to know the kid hadn’t taken after him at all. Doug cleared his throat and immediately started to speak, as if he’d taken heart from the confessions of the others before him.
“My dad runs a laboratory, and I am not sure what he does because he never tells me, even though I always ask him. I tell him to trust me, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t think I’m capable of doing anything good,” he said.
I flinched. Shit. I didn’t want him to tell the whole world about the issues with his daddy, but what could I do at that point?
“I overheard him talk on the phone and in a meeting on the fifth dimension one day. He was saying that the potion had evolved and that they could soon reach a point when they would be able to use the potion without it effecting supernatural minds, like it doesn’t affect human minds. For now, though, they had to work with what they had. He also told me that I knew nothing when I asked him about the potion and that I shouldn’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong—”
I cut him off before he could tell us what else his mean daddy told him.
“That’s enough, Doug. Thank you very much.”
I had two more people on the list, but at some point during Doug’s speech, I had changed my mind. The people looked terrified, yes, but not so calm and scared anymore. Most of them were angry, and that was what we needed.
I turned to Ned. I had seen him and everyone else at the group sip from their bottles of water. It was only fair to ask them, too, and Ned was the firs
t on my list.
“Ned.” He gave me a cold smile as if he knew all along that I was coming for him. “Tell me what you think about all that you read and heard so far.”
This was tricky. It could backfire and blow this whole thing to pieces. My heart skipped a beat when his grin grew wider…but only for a minute. Until he realized. I imagined the lump forming in his throat and the voice in his head urging him to only speak the truth, just like Horatio had described it. Ned’s eyes grew wide, and he started to panic. I smiled at him. It was his mistake to think that I would’ve gone there unprepared.
His hands pulled into fists and the others looked at him with narrowed brows, not understanding why he had started to sweat all of a sudden.
“Come on, Ned. Tell me. Tell us all what you think,” I pushed and winked at him.
His eyes were red with anger, but there really was nothing he could do. He was the first one I didn’t feel bad about putting into that position.
“I…think that…there really is something…going on that…Master is not telling us,” was what he said.
Fucking hell. He was fighting it. The fucker was fighting Veritas.
“Okay, have you known of the laboratories and the tests on the supernaturals?” I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“N-n-o. I haven’t. This is the first time I’ve heard of it and I can’t imagine why…Master hasn’t told me…”
The man was strong, I’d give him that, but I was far from done.
“Do you believe what you’ve heard here so far?” I asked him again.
“Yes.” He blurted because he wasn’t able to help it.
“Do you think it’s possible for Samayan to do something like this?” I spit dryly. I already knew the answer, but the others needed to hear it.
“Yes.”
“Do you think it’s likely for Samayan to do something like this?”
Again, “yes.”
“Why?” I whispered and enjoyed watching his wide eyes that were now begging me to stop.
“Bec-c-cause he wants…absolute power.”
When they all began to talk at the same time and the room turned to chaos, Amber Hawk was the only one keeping her calm as she analyzed me with her sharp eyes. I held her stare for a while, and I told her with my eyes that I wasn’t intending to back down. I had them, and I had them good.
“Silence!” I called, but each one was angrier than the other. I had to wait for a good five minutes until they stopped yelling. The room quieted down enough for one man to stand up.
“This is ridiculous! Master would never do this He would know that when we found out, we would do something about it,” he said.
“What are you going to do, drown him in your tears?” someone yelled from behind him before I could.
“No. He would know that we’d fight back,” he insisted.
“You can’t fight master!” another shouted.
“Of course we can. He’s not invincible,” the first said. He would’ve never had the balls to speak those words had it not been for Veritas swimming in his veins.
“Not invincible, but close,” I said, and that got their attention again. “Samayan has gone behind your backs because, even if all of you got together against him, you are no match for him.”
Ned slammed both his hands on the table in front of him. “What is this?! I demand you tell me what that means!” he shouted. Oh, he was in for a surprise.
“It might come as a shock to all of you to know that your Master has enhanced his powers, and not one of you can even get close enough to him to say a word if he doesn’t want you to. He has reached a point that ,even if you wanted to, you will not be able to put him down.”
“What do you mean? What are we going to do?” a woman asked, terrified and panicked.
Thank God for Veritas. It was the question I was waiting for.
“We fight.”
“But how? You just said we can’t.”
This came from Amber. When I saw her face, I realized she had been just as surprised by her question as I had. She had not seen it coming at all.
“You can’t, but I can. I am the Elemental, and I have the power to defeat Samayan.” Whispers again. “But I cannot win against his army alone, not without you. If we want to have a chance, all of us, we must all fight together.”
“Impossible!”
“She’s lying!”
“Master’s just a vampire!”
The yelling and the whispering went on.
“True,” I said, picking up on the last one. “Samayan is a vampire. But a friend of mine here will tell you a story that will perfectly describe to you what I mean when I say that he has become nearly invincible.”
A second later, Arturo came out of our hiding room and into the spotlight, just like we’d agreed. He smiled weakly, but it didn’t reach his eyes. I mouthed a sincere apology at him, but he, too, knew now that it had to be done. It didn’t make it any easier though, and I knew how much it sucked.
Arturo stepped in front of everyone and turned his back on me. He took his time to look at all the faces directed at him before he started his story.
“My name is Arturo Di Gennaro and I am Nephilim—”
“You!” someone shouted from the crowd.
We all turned to look at a very angry Miranda. She looked like she was going to explode with fury.
“How dare you?!” she hissed.
I was going to tell her to shut the hell up, but Arturo did something even better. He ignored her completely and went on.
“I have worked in Lyndor as a trainer for the last century, until about a month ago I was asked to do something…something I didn’t want to do. And when I said so, they…killed my daughter, and so I ran away and looked for S…the Raven. I had been aware for quite some time that things weren’t as they seemed, but I wasn’t completely convinced until Seriel approached me. I was asked to perform the Binding Ceremony,” Arturo said, and my heart tightened with guilt.
“Stop this! How dare you? You have no shame!” someone called.
“How can you do this to your own kind?! This is…” someone else.
“You are a traitor of your own kind! This has to stop now,” a man said, waving his hands all over the place.
“Everyone, shut the hell up!” I shouted with all my voice. They calmed down a little but not completely, so I did the next best thing. I pulled my gun and directed it at them. The others did the same, and that definitely made everyone fall silent.
“This has to stop! We will not let him tell the whole world what is only ours to know,” the first man shouted.
“Apparently, the secret has reached your Master’s ears so it’s not a secret anymore,” I shouted at him and directed my gun barrel at his face.
“No! This traitor will keep his mouth shut…” a woman shouted, but I didn’t get to shout back.
Ned, once again, slammed his hands on the table. “He won’t.”
That sure changed a few minds. Ned’s eyes were on fire, and I could feel his magic leaking from the pores of his skin. I didn’t need to ask him to know that first, he had had no idea, and second, he now really believed that Samayan was going behind his back.
“Arturo…” I said and waved for him to step forward again.
His forehead glistened with sweat, and he breathed heavily. This was hard for him, yes, but he cleared his throat and went on.
“The Binding Ceremony is performed by the Nephilim and what it generally does is that it enhances the power of a supernatural to two or three times his normal energy,” Arturo said. “There are a lot of details that I will not share with you tonight, but if you do not believe me, ask your closest Nephilim if it can be done, and they will tell you that it can. And it has.” He kept biting his lips and playing nervously with his fingers, so I took over for a while just to give him a second to breathe.
“We believe that Samayan has performed the Ceremony, and not only once. That is why he is almost invincible.”
“Th
at’s ridiculous! Enhancing your powers, that’s…absurd. It’s impossible and it’s against the law,” Amber shouted. She looked like she was going to cry from anger.
“And that is exactly why we are here. Samayan doesn’t need you to protect him. He only needs you to do whatever the hell his mind tells him to order you to do, and he doesn’t need your opinion about it. That’s why we have to stop him, before it’s too late, before there’s nothing more left to do,” I yelled right back. “And as for impossible, Arturo here and every other Nephilim can tell you exactly how possible that is.”
“That’s enough! Traitor. No one more word about the ceremony,” a young woman said, and she had her gun aimed at Arturo.
I only had half a second to grab his wrist and pull him down before she fired. The sound of the gun echoed through the room.
And then all hell broke loose.
Bullets flying everywhere, chairs breaking on people’s heads, fists and kicks and knives and daggers and blood on the floor and the walls. This was our cue.
“Out!” I called as loudly as I could, and I pushed Arturo towards the entrance. Someone grabbed my arm before I could take a step.
I turned with Bob in hand, ready to take lives, only to see Ned’s wide eyes in front of me. He pushed my hand away and handed me a piece of paper. I took it, and before I looked up again, he’d disappeared behind the many sups that were trying to protect themselves.
Arturo and I made our way through the fighting, and I had to push Bob inside two people before we reached Mike. He opened the door, and I pushed Arturo out. I turned to look for the others and saw Jack and Aaron fighting back to back with the Nephilim who had called Arturo a traitor. That’s where I went.
The corner of my eye caught Kyahen. He was smiling a sick smile that showed all of his teeth, and he even dared to wink at me, right before he disappeared into thin air. The fucker. I knew better than to expect him to fight with us, but it still sucked. I wondered about Edison. I thought I saw a few of his guards fighting, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t have the time to check.