Echoes (Book 1): Echoes

by Caplan, A. M.

  As much as she wanted to, Hannah didn’t look back, walking out of the airport and into the cool evening. The waiting taxi pulled forward and she climbed in.

  “The Greyhound station on Spring Street, please.” She settled into the seat and tried to pick out Asher’s form through the glass of the door. She saw the doors open, and he was charging toward her, a look of horror on his face.

  “Hello, Hannah.”

  A familiar pair of eyes looked back at her from the driver’s seat before she felt the crack against her temple. So much for my plan, she just had time to think before everything swam away to blackness.

  31

  Her eyes opened to fog, then shut again of their own volition. Forcing them open, blinking rapidly to clear the mist from her eyes, she saw a face come into focus directly in front of her.

  “Gabe,” she mumbled.

  “Yes, yes, there we are.”

  She tried to get up, but her hands were secured with wide leather bands to wooden arms, like she was strapped to an electric chair. Her head was pinned back by a restraint across her forehead that pressed painfully against her swollen temple. It would be a miracle if she wasn’t brain damaged from all the blows to the head. If she made it till tomorrow, that is. Her ankles were similarly lashed down, and didn’t give when she struggled.

  “No sense wasting your energy. You’re snug as a bug in a rug, Hannah darling, and you’re going to stay that way for the time being.”

  Hannah strained against the bonds, futilely. “Gabe, what’s going on? Let me go.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, my dear. I am under strict orders to keep you breathing, for the present. I would hate to deprive Amara of whatever it is she has in store for you. She’s rather cranky when disappointed.” He grinned, the smile that had seemed roguish and charming now cruel.

  “Why are you doing this?” Hannah gave up straining and instead tried to figure out where she was. Gabe rose from where he’d been seated next to her and strolled casually to the wide window where a slit of sky was visible over a knob of trees.

  The room they were in was large, squat and square with a low, dark ceiling. She couldn’t move her head, only able to see a long, medieval-looking dining table lined with stiff carved chairs, one of which she was strapped to. The walls were paneled in dark wood, bare except for evenly spaced torchieres that gave off a dim glow.

  “Gabe, let me go,” she said again.

  “Sorry, dearie, really can’t. I promised I would keep you secure until she could make it back.”

  Amara. She was coming.

  “Why are you helping her? I thought Asher was your friend. You betrayed him for his sister?”

  He turned from the window, eyebrows raised. “Betrayal? Betrayal is only a thing if you actually believe in loyalty. And friendship? Oh no, how about morality, and dare I say, love?” Gabe laughed in the lightest, most nonchalant way. “Not for me, darling. Those are all just constructs of the mortals and the imbecilic, like Asher. The man is as old as time and he still thinks like a human. I can’t figure out how that prize pig turned out to be such a pale shadow of the creature his sister is. They shared a womb, and all he got was the size.” Gabe leaned casually against a chair. “He got nothing while she got all the intelligence and looks and backbone. While she’s ruled kingdoms, wiped out entire armies, brought death to whole cities down to a person, he’s done nothing.” He shook his head. “Asher is just a pitiful pawn in a game where she’s queen.”

  “Gabe, let me go. I’m nothing to you. Just let me go before she gets here. I don’t matter.”

  “You don’t matter? No, not for your own sake, I guess. Nothing about any of you humans does. Amara has the only thing that really matters in this existence. Power. Power is the only thing that lasts.”

  “You don’t need me, Gabe. Let me go.”

  “Sorry, dear heart. I really do need you. Because Amara has plans for you. I won’t ruin the surprise, but this time she’s outdone even herself. Now bite your tongue, or I will.”

  Gone was the beguiling accent, the rascally facade. Gabriel was a beautiful snake, a cold venomous creature, and Hannah was stunned to silence.

  He cocked his head at a sound she couldn’t hear. “And here she is now,” he said. “My darling, that was fast, even for you.”

  “I didn’t want to miss a moment of a party as exciting as this one. It’s so very seldom anything really interesting happens. I was so anxious to get back I didn’t even delay to kill anyone,” a low voice murmured. Hannah strained to turn her head. Someone should delay Amara again by removing her head, even if it was only temporary.

  “Tut tut, looking a little rough, Hannah.” Amara squatted down level with Hannah’s face and considered her with cool, blue-gray eyes, a slight smile pulling up the edges of the perfect mouth. “Though it is the only way I’ve ever seen you look, so maybe you’re just naturally a disaster.” She tilted her head to the side. “Yes, I can see the resemblance. Especially with that hair.”

  With a long, perfect finger she pulled down the collar of Hannah’s shirt. Her eyebrow cocked up in amusement. Hannah forced herself not to flinch at her touch.

  “Asher, Asher, when will you ever learn. Boy is a hopeless romantic.” She shook her head and laughed softly. She lifted the pendant up by the chain. “Sentimental fool. I took a rope to the last throat this hung around.” She pulled the necklace aside. “Hmm, I thought there would be a scar.”

  Amara stood up, considered Hannah for a moment, then walked toward the door, pausing for a moment to call back over her shoulder.

  “Gabriel, would you do the whole bad guy thing where you tell the entire story? I’d love to, but I need to make a few phone calls, get up to speed on daddy dearest’s arrival.”

  Pulling out the chair next to Hannah, Gabriel sat back and tented his fingers.

  “Nice dungeon, Gabe. Is it yours or are we in the basement of a Medieval Times?” Hannah glared at him, still trying to feel for any give in her bonds.

  “Mine? Good gods no, this place is horrible. Just visiting. The real owners got hung up somewhere.” He smiled.

  She was certain he meant that literally. Straining her head, she tried to get a look out the window, but her vision was limited.

  “Looking for Asher? Don’t look too hard. He won’t find you here, and even if he could, we’d have him boxed up and in a timeout before he even made it to the door. I really think it’s just a matter of getting the dosage right. It’s amazing the new technology out there, how it’s really changing things. You’ve only seen the fly by the seat of your pants method, but this is a finely tuned operation. Much classier. Plus there’s easily a dozen men armed to the teeth out there to keep things from going pear shaped again. You were a little slipperier than expected, but we learn from our mistakes, don’t we.”

  “Christ, Gabe, get on with it. One of us is getting older here.” Hannah was finding out abject fear made her mouthy. She considered making an effort to control it, to avoid shortening her already bleak future, but decided she might as well go down swinging, at least her tongue, which was the only part of her she could move.

  “So very sassy. Fine. Let’s skip to the part you don’t know. Now let me see.” He paused to listen for a sound her ears couldn’t make out. “Yes, I think we have time for the long version. Amara is bringing your father around, but I can’t yet hear his supercilious tones.” He looked her over. “The resemblance really is uncanny. Unmistakable really.” Gabe picked up a strand of Hannah’s hair and eyed it under the light. “Not really black, is it, more of a bloody dark red. Hmm.” He dropped it and patted it into place. “Amara can be a little impatient. She blew up my perfectly good bar before I got all the information out of Asher I’d hoped to. However did he manage to find you before his sister did? Your picture popped up in the newspaper, but there was his, right beside it.” He shrugged and leaned back against the table. “It was clear your father must have approached him about tracking you down. Why else would
Asher be doing anything besides his usual running for a bolt-hole? Why Michael thought Asher would be as equipped to find you as Amara I can’t imagine, though somehow that giant oaf managed. I guess Michael was desperate for results and thought two heads would be better than one, even if one of them is empty.”

  God, what a sanctimonious prick. He was really eating up this villain stuff. As much as Hannah wanted to drag out the remainder of her short life, she wished he would shut up even more.

  “It worked like a charm, mostly. Asher was stupid enough to send you to me and follow right behind and stay there, giving Amara time to catch up. Then the idiot called me about getting some documents. Literally handed you to her on a plate.”

  Hannah’s wrists were beginning to bleed from rubbing them desperately against her restraints. Gabe shook his head.

  “Don’t bother. You’re just wasting energy. You know, Asher never did let on how he found out about you, let alone tracked you down. The whole hitting him with the car story is interesting, but what was the point?”

  Hannah didn’t react. It wasn’t true; she didn’t believe for a moment that Asher had actually been looking for her before she hit him. But they did. And they had no idea Asher was coming to her again and again for a totally different and totally inexplicable reason. She felt the weight of the necklace around her neck.

  “All because of your dear father, with his unique ‘gift.’ He’s ended lives in quantities that would make a genocidal maniac blush. Makes me look like a kitten. It’s impressive, considering how many of them he managed to father before he killed them. No wonder he likes to work in quantity when he can. Shame cults are harder to get rolling these days.” He smiled with satisfaction. What an ass. “You, however, are the only one that has evaded him. It seems after he impregnated your mother she managed to elude him. Temporarily. Some people get a whiff of fear from us, you know. Like an animal that suspects a predator. A fascinating instinct that sometimes pops up among the lower orders.”

  Pushing off with her good leg, Hannah tried to get the chair to rock, but Gabe kicked her in the ankle, not hard enough to hurt her, but to remind her she had no choice but to pay attention to him. “While Michael did manage to track her down and dispatch her, he was interrupted before he could finish you. It was the ceremonial garbage that got him, I imagine, all the knives and blood and whatnot. If he’d just snapped your little baby neck none of us would be here right now. Well, you anyway.” He gave her a nasty smile. “Whoever rescued you barely scraped by with the win, according to Michael. He had you bleeding in his hands then bam, he’s out, and you, gone without a trace. Someone did a masterful job of hiding you for so long. Any desire to share?”

  She didn’t even blink. Screw him.

  “Well, maybe later we can convince you to spill. Amara has a talent for loosening lips. Sometimes completely.”

  Hannah shifted uncomfortably against the tight restraints.

  “Get on with it, Gabe. The arch villain thing is getting lame. You’re giving me a headache. If you loosen this thing across my head it might help.”

  “Don’t interrupt, sweetheart,” he said, picking right up with his diatribe where he’d left off. “Michael didn’t look for you too hard in the beginning, I daresay, or he probably would have found you, but recently he found his need to locate you much more urgent. Can you imagine why?”

  “I’m sure she can’t, Gabriel,” Amara’s voiced chimed in. “Why even bother? He’s here.”

  32

  Hannah closed her eyes and kept them shut. Her father, right here in front of her at the end of it all. Gabe wondered if she could imagine why? She couldn’t, and she didn’t care to try. There weren’t enough minutes left to waste any on something as trivial as the why. The end of her story looked clearly written, so did she really need to spend her last bit of time filling in the gaps? She didn’t care to have the last thing she saw be the homicidal maniac who contributed the weird half of her DNA. Instead she thought about what came next.

  She wished she could’ve said goodbye to Asher, and thank him. If there was nothing else, nothing that came after, he would never face it, the possibility of disappearing into empty oblivion; Hannah took comfort in that. Knowing you were about to end, seeing the insignificant sum of all your days, the paltry accomplishments and dreams; it was an indescribable feeling.

  “Open your eyes. Don’t be so dramatic,” Amara said.

  The strap around her head suddenly loosened, and Hannah’s head dropped forward at the abrupt release.

  “So this is she?”

  Hannah looked automatically to where the voice had come from, and what she saw was not what she expected.

  “Hannah. What a plebeian name.”

  The man looked at her down a long, thin nose. They were right about one thing. The resemblance was undeniable. Their features were remarkably similar, the high cheekbones, the shape of the jaw, even the curved eyebrows. But his face was lined, his precisely combed hair—dark, with the same familiar tinge of red—was touched with gray at the temples. Mature. He wasn’t like the rest of them, frozen in time. He was older. How was this her father, a being with supposedly endless lives and youth? He should have been coming closer to perfection every time he died, not farther from it.

  “I know, shocking, isn’t it.” Amara was standing behind him, hands on her hips, next to Gabriel.

  “Give me her blood and then you can have her,” Michael said to Amara, looking down his nose at Hannah. “That was our arrangement. I only wish to be restored and continue my mission. When I have finished with her, she is yours to do with what you will, though I desire that it be as far away from me as possible.”

  Michael seated himself grandly at the other end of the table and held out his arm, all the time staring at Hannah in a manner that was not fatherly or kind, but disdainful. Finally he sniffed and looked away from her. Amara approached Hannah with a syringe, cracking her across the face with the back of her hand when she thrashed against the restraints.

  “Hold still.” She clamped a hand down at Hannah’s elbow and inserted the needle into the vein, pulling the plunger back. When it was full she eyed it with curiosity.

  “Amara, there’s gunfire outside. I think we may have company.” Gabe was looking out the window.

  “Damn it, how does he find me so fast?”

  “Or her. Did you check her for bugs?” Gabe asked.

  She paused, needle in hand, and looked at Gabriel with an expression that said an idea had come to her.

  “Do you want me to go sort it out?” Gabe moved toward the door.

  Hannah’s father, or Michael, or whoever he was, cleared his throat, still holding his arm out. “Now, before this becomes even more tiresome.”

  Amara nodded at him.

  “Not yet, Gabriel, help me with this first.” As Gabe moved toward her, as quick as a striking snake Amara jammed the syringe into his arm and rammed the plunger home, then shoved him across the room, pulling out an ugly snub-nosed handgun. Then she put a bullet between Michael’s eyes, which stared open, wide with surprise.

  Hannah’s ears rang from the deafening sound of the gunshot. Amara’s gun was now trained on Gabe, who was on his feet, hand on his own weapon. He froze, unsure, looking at the syringe wobbling up and down where it protruded from his arm.

  Amara looked over her shoulder at Hannah. “You see now, don’t you, Hannah, or haven’t you worked it all out? There was a reason for Michael’s exceptional quality. He thought he was creating eternal life, when all this time he was creating his own death, over and over again. A little bit of your blood when he tried to off you when you were a baby and he started aging like a normal man. I wonder how long it took for him to notice. The first gray hair? A little wrinkle? At some point he figured it out and needed to track you down rather more urgently. He was desperate enough to think that if you could undo him, maybe you could put him back the way he was.” She cocked her head to where he still sat. “Guess we’ll never know.” />
  His head fell back. He was dead, but not gone. Dead for good.

  “Men. All he had to do was keep it in his pants and he could’ve lived forever.” Amara’s arm swung toward the movement on her right. “Drop it, Gabriel, or we’ll find out right now if she’s a one-hit wonder.”

  Hannah heard a gun clatter to the ground and felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder. The minute Amara’s eyes shifted, Gabriel moved, not content to await his now-uncertain fate. Instead of attacking, he turned and threw himself out the window in a crash of glass. Amara’s arm whipped out and she fired three quick shots into his back, and a rush of cold air hit them the same time as the thud of Gabriel’s body hitting the ground outside.

  “Guess we’ll see what happens,” Amara said. “If he follows in your father’s footsteps, you and I are going to be spending some quality time together, culling the herd. We are going to make me one of a kind.”

  She pulled another syringe from her pocket. “Just in case my brother makes an appearance.”

  Suddenly, Gabriel came flying back through the broken window. He crashed into the table, bouncing off it and sliding to the floor in a pile, not moving. He hadn’t come back in of his own volition. Amara’s gun was still trained on his limp form when another body appeared in the opening. She whipped her weapon toward it with her usual blinding speed and opened fire. A man in a helmet and flak jacket tumbled inside, taking almost the same route as the last body, sliding to a halt on top of the still-present, unmoving Gabriel.

  Gunfire erupted outside, and Hannah cringed, an easy target strapped to the chair. She swung her head wildly back and forth, pushing off with her good leg, trying to gain enough momentum to rock the heavy chair and tip herself out of the line of fire.

  Amara’s gun was trained at the broken window. It shifted when something slammed against the single door into the room. Amara cursed. Another crash, and the door gave. A second black-clad form was hurled through it, slumping to the ground. It could only be Asher, Hannah thought. Hoped. She continued to thrash in the chair, rocking it side to side, trying to tip it over. Maybe she could free herself while Amara was occupied.