When I reached my father’s office, I stood in the open doorway watching him shuffle through papers, making notes here and there. I studied him, wondering what my mother had ever seen in this man to make her want to marry him. Had there ever been a time when he was warm and vibrant? A time when he hadn’t been motivated by politics and greed?
“Abigail, I told you before that it’s annoying when you lurk,” he said without looking up from the papers on his desk. “Did you want something?”
“Yes, actually, there is something I wanted,” I said, walking into the room. “Did you ever get a chance to look into the pension fund statement I showed you?”
“I did.” He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair as I made my way towards his desk. “It was just a mistake on the form. Samantha should be receiving a corrected statement tomorrow.”
“Well, I really want to thank you for clearing that up for me. Maybe you can help me sort these out as well,” I said as I carefully placed a print out of the attachment from Nemesis on his desk, making sure that the page showing all of the cash withdrawals was on top. He looked at the top sheet, even leafed through the other pages.
“You’ve been busy,” he said when he finally looked up.
“That’s it? All you have to say is ‘You’ve been busy’?”
“What do you want me to say? That I have no idea what is going on? That I don’t know what you are showing me?” he asked as he got more comfortable in his chair, leaning back and crossing his ankle over his knee. “We both know that would be a lie.”
“What I want is an explanation.”
“I had a cash flow problem after the last election and I borrowed from the pension fund,” he said, shrugging. “All of the money is back now, so there is no real problem.” He made it all sound so reasonable, like he hadn’t committed a crime at all.
“Just a little borrowing, huh?” I said sarcastically. “If we ever get audited, the Attorney General’s office is going to crucify us! The company will be done and you will end up in jail.”
“I can assure you, that is not going to happen. The money is back in the account and the statements will all be corrected,” he said, splaying his hands in front of him on the desk. “If an auditor comes, everything will appear correct.”
“How are you going to explain the move to Jamison Financial?” my eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are they even a real company?”
“We simply tried a different firm and it didn’t work out. That’s the truth in a roundabout way. All the money is already scheduled to be moved back to Ferris Investments next week.” He ignored my question about Jamison Financial being a real company. That seemed to be an answer in itself.
“And, let me guess, you expect me to just go along and help you cover all this up, right?”
“I had hoped you would never know,” he said.
“I’ll bet you didn’t,” I muttered.
“But now that you do,” he continued as if I hadn’t interrupted. “Yes, I do expect you to stand behind the family business and keep your mouth shut. I mean really Abigail, all of the money is back now and all of the employees have their pensions intact. No one was hurt by this.” I looked at him askance, sure I was missing something important.
“Where did you get the money to replace what you borrowed?”
“Well isn’t that a good question Quentin,” Liam McCallister asked from where he stood framed in the doorway. I hadn’t even heard him approach. “One I would really like to hear you answer.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“The same as you Abigail, I came to ask some questions and clear a few things up,” he said to me before turning back to my father. “So Quentin, I believe your daughter asked a very good question. Where did the money come from to replace what you stole from the pension fund?”
“Stole?” my father sputtered. “I didn’t steal anything? How can I steal from my own company?” My father’s composure seemed to have completely slipped now that McCallister had arrived.
Liam laughed softly and shook his finger at my father like he was an errant child.
“Oh Quentin, I think you stole many things from many people,” he said. “But, if the semantics bother you, I’ll ask it as Abigail did. Where did the money come from to replace what you borrowed?”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” my father said, rising to his feet behind the massive desk.
“When people steal from me, they do need to explain,” McCallister growled. The office lights dimmed in response to his anger. Darkness coalesced around him, creating a menacing nimbus that moved with him as he glided into the room. He stood between my father and the door, his eyes two glowing embers looking out from the gloom.
“Steal from you?” I said in confusion before my world tilted. “Oh my God,” I whispered, turning to my father in disbelief. “You stole the Sapphire out from under Jason to pay back the money you embezzled from the retirement fund?”
“Oh, it’s a bit worse than that,” McCallister said.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” my father said at the same time.
“Oh really, then where did the money come from?” I said, my anger building. “It had to come from somewhere.” The street value of the Sapphire had to have been at least two or three times the 1.2 million McCallister originally paid for it. Conservatively, that would be 2.4 million, aggressively 3.6. Plenty of buffer there for everyone to get their cut and dear ole’ dad still have enough to settle up with the pension fund.
“And you!” I said rounding on McCallister. “You killed Jason for something he didn’t even do!” I yelled, before pointing at my father. “You should have gutted him!”
“I keep telling you that I did not kill Jason,” the darkness shrouding McCallister shifted with him as he walked towards me. He stopped when he was a scant two feet away. “To be honest; before we met in my office at River Walk I thought you had killed him.”
What? Me?
“That’s crazy.” Why would anyone consider for a minute that I had killed Jason?
“You have to admit that you seemed the most likely candidate, especially to someone who knew about the Sapphire shipment as I did.” Some of the murky darkness clinging to him thinned as he spoke. “You and your brother worked very closely together, so it seemed likely you knew what he was up to. I made the logical jump and assumed that you tried to reap the profits from his new business venture. Then, when I questioned you, Lok confirmed that you had no idea about Jason’s agreement with me.”
“I would have never hurt him,” I said vehemently. He was trying to distract me. It had to have been him. “You on the other hand thought you had at least three million reasons to kill him.”
“Since that night at River Walk,” he said, ignoring my comment, “I have had my people digging up everything they could find out about Jason’s friends and associates, including their financials. In the process I found some interesting things out about you Quentin,” he said turning his glowing eyes on my father.
“You cannot believe anything this creature says,” my father interjected. “He is dead for Christ sake!” He looked half crazed, the tick in his right eye going wild.
“I’m not sure what my Transformation has to do with anything, but it is a nice attempt at misdirection and prejudice. I think Abigail can see beyond all that to the truth. You and I both know I did not have Jason killed.”
“How could he possibly know for sure that you didn’t kill Jason?” I asked, looking back a forth between my twitching father and the menacing presence of McCallister.
“Why?” McCallister never turned from me as he pointed a long, elegant finger at my father. “Because he killed him, of course.”
“What are you are talking about McCallister?” my father sputtered. “You are crazy if you think I killed my own son!”
“I don’t understand…” I was mentally trying to steer around what he was saying. I reached out to steady myself on a chair.
The possibility that suddenly presented itself was staggering. Really… it was too horrible to even contemplate. He had to be lying.
“Open your eyes Abigail and look at the truth staring you in the face,” McCallister said. “Jason trusted the wrong man when he went to Harvey looking for assistance getting the shipment through the port scan. And we all know that Jason had a knack for trusting the wrong person.” Now there was an understatement.
“It was common knowledge that Harvey was always sniffing around looking for a way into Jason’s circle. I can only assume that is why Jason approached him in the first place.” That part made sense. Jason probably thought Harvey would jump at the chance to be in on the deal. “But you made Harvey a better deal, didn’t you Quentin?”
“You are out of your mind!” my father yelled as he pulled open one of his desk drawers. “You are trying to poison my daughter with your lies.”
“No,” Liam said, shaking his head. “Jason made the mistake of bragging to you that he had a little money making scheme going, didn’t he? That is the only way I could imagine you knew to approach Harvey.” Another of Jason’s flaws – flouting his plans, especially to our father, always confident in the knowledge that he had a sure thing in the works.
My mind started working in overdrive. Was it possible? If my father knew what Jason was up to he could have easily been involved. That didn’t make it a reality though. I looked at my father shouting denials from behind his desk, sweat beading his forehead, as Liam continued to lay out his theory. My eyes narrowed as I took it all in.
“You paid Harvey to give you the specifics of the shipment, so you could steal the Sapphire out from under Jason. He was the perfect scapegoat since he was known for embarking on foolish ventures. But Jason figured it out didn’t he? You had to have Andrei and Luca silence him, which had the added bonus of implicating me in Jason’s death. Once Abigail started asking questions, you decided Harvey needed to go too. Have I got that about right Quentin?”
My God, was it conceivable Liam was telling the truth? My berserker seemed to think so. My eyes began to burn and the edges of my vision bled to red. Clawing, pounding, she was going crazy. I lost focus for a second as her scream of rage reverberated inside my skull.
“Stay with me Abigail,” came McCallister’s voice through the din as I clutched my head in my hands.
I was trying to process the information from this new angle McCallister had presented. It all made perfect sense – scary, ugly, incomprehensible sense. If my father hadn’t gotten the pension money back his political career would have been over, Lassiter Enterprise Holdings would be dead in the water, literally, and he would be facing significant jail time. But the real conceptual hurdle for me centered wholly on the question I didn’t want to ask myself. I had to stop shying away from it. I squared my mental shoulders. Did I think my father was capable of killing Jason to save his own skin? I didn’t have to think long as I watched him twitching and obviously struggling with his own berserker. Yes, sadly I thought he was and the pieces all fit.
“You are going to pay for this,” I snarled.
“No. I’m not,” he said, pulling a gun from his desk drawer. Well, if there had been any lingering doubts about his guilt, they disintegrated as I looked down the barrel of his gun.
“I’m not sure how you think you are going to get away with shooting us both,” I ground out. “It’s going to be hard to explain the two of us dead on your floor.”
“Oh I think it will be easy,” he said with a smirk. “You and I were here working when Liam came to finish us both off. It was terrifying. I shot him in self-defense and you got caught in the crossfire.”
I’m not sure if it was the smirk or the stress of the last two weeks, but I couldn’t hold her back any longer. My father should have suspected that I was on the brink. I felt crazy, so it stands to reason that I should have looked crazy too, right? But he continued to shout and wave the gun while all the sounds around me faded to silence, and my vision tunneled in on him. All I could see was him, with his gun, superimposed over the image of Jason lying in the pool of his own blood. The intimacy of the betrayal was too much for the berserker to overlook. What kind of father hires thugs to kill his own child?
The beast inside made one final slam against my already weakened containment wall and it shattered into a thousand useless fragments. I could feel the four massive trees bend in the explosion. I steadied myself on the chair next to me and had a brief moment of wonder that I could still understand my own thoughts. Too brief. In the next instant everything within my field of vision was bathed in crimson and I felt as if I had grown taller by yards. True or not, it seemed to me that I towered over my father, him a mere ant on the sidewalk waiting to be trampled. By. Me.
He faltered in his tirade as the papers on his desk fluttered from the gust created by my berserker’s release. Much like the day of the funeral, he was too late to see the beast on the rise. Now it was before him and he was wide-eyed in his panic. He fired that ridiculously insignificant gun at me. I moved. It was effortless, like the very molecules of air helped to relocate me from one spot to another. I, we, could see the bullet coming in slow motion and we simply stepped out of the way.
“Nice try,” we said and laughed, the sound causing the glasses on my father’s side table to wobble and break. McCallister put his hands over his ears as if in physical pain. We didn’t care about the drinker of blood’s discomfort.
We cared about vengeance. We were united in this thought. Us, me, she, we - it was impossible to precisely distinguish where she and Abigail ended and we began. I laughed out loud at the thought of all those wasted years of yoga and meditation for the sole purpose of preventing this glorious joining. Why? We were never going back behind those walls. Together we were more, plural we were invincible. We were strength and power, rage and vengeance and we had found a focus for our wrath in the wide-eyed man in front of us. We reached out and grabbed him. His head wobbled like a bobble-head on a dash board. Glorious!
“Abigail!” Liam was yelling her name. The sound seemed to be coming from far off. It was insignificant, unimportant. All that mattered was the extermination of the foul bug in our hands. We shook him again. Bobble, bobble, bobble. The scent of fear, thick in the air, was intoxicating. The vampire tried to stop us and we swatted him out of the way like the mosquito he was. The sound of him hitting the wall and sliding to the floor reverberated around the room.
“Abigail! Don’t do this!” The wolf was here now too. The part of us that was Abigail let us know that he was called Jonathan. His lean fingers wrapped around our wrists where they were choking the life out of the insect. This Jonathan’s attempts to stop us were nothing more than a minor annoyance in this magnificent moment.
We focused on the spark of terror in Quentin Lassiter’s eyes. It warmed us like a roaring fire on a cold night. There was an indescribable thrill in capturing an enemy and escorting him directly to Hell’s door. His eyes began to dull, defeat written in his features. Sadness and rage swamped us, it was ending too quickly. We wanted to prolong the moment, savor it. Jason did not die quickly. The bug should suffer as Jason suffered.
“Abigail, think of your mother,” the wolf was yelling.
Mother? We paused a moment before discarding the argument as invalid. Yes, she would be sad but really, this was for the best. Who knows when the insect might try to kill her too? We would not allow it!
“Abigail, you must stop.” Jonathan was still attempting to pry our fingers off the neck of our prey. “If you kill him like this, you will be locked away for the rest of your life because you could not control your berserker.”
Locked away? We were strong, they could never defeat us!
A whisper from Abigail, “They could. Remember the zip ties….”
We hesitated. Could they? The wolf must have noticed our uncertainty because he tried again to deter us.
“I know you can fight it,” Jonathan soothed. “I have faith in you, Abigail. Th
is is not who you are, who you want to be.”
His argument held the echo of Naris’ words from that day in Jason’s office. ‘I have faith in you Abigail Lassiter,’ he had said. He had faith in Abigail to do what? End the existence of the blight upon the world that was Quentin Lassiter? To control the rage? To do what must be done? Even with our fury running loose, the part of us that was Abigail struggled to the surface. She knew the real answer. He had faith in the me that was Abigail, to be true to myself, to be the person I choose to be. Jonathan was right – I would regret killing my father, if for no other reason than I would be locked away for the rest of my life because I was a threat to everyone around me. Just another elf who couldn’t control her berserker.
“How do you know who I want to be?” I said, turning my frustrated red gaze upon him. I tossed my father to the floor in disgust. There was blood running out of his ears but he was still breathing. He would have whiplash and epic bruising but he would live.
“Because through all that rage you still heard me,” Jonathan said as he bent down to inspect my handiwork. “That and the fact that he is still alive.”
I collapsed into one of the chairs in front of my father’s desk and eyed Liam struggling to rise from where I had thrown him against the wall. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you waited to make your big revelation until after I got your shipment through the port, you snake.”
“What can I say,” he shrugged as he stood, straightening his clothes. “I’m a practical man Abigail - merchandise first, family drama second. Besides, I had to wait for you to figure some of this out for yourself, or you would never have believed me.”
Chapter 31
I sat at home watching the evening news the night after my berserker had shaken my father senseless. The Interspecies Bureau had taken my father into custody so that he could be questioned about my brother’s death. Liam hadn’t wanted him blabbing about the Sapphire shipment, so he and Lok had spent a considerable amount of time and energy glamouring him before the agents showed up. His resistance was low because we, I mean I, had shaken him until he was too broken to effectively resist.
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