The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 2) (28 page)

Oh, he liked this. I witnessed a smile creep to his cold face. Running the entire world, I think that was Elish Dekker’s plan.

“Another thing...” Elish said casually. “Are you aware of what day today is?”

I thought for a minute trying to count the days. “Friday?”

Elish quietly rose and walked past me; he turned his head and nodded me forward. Then in an easy almost kind tone he said, “Today is your birthday, Reaver. You’re twenty years old.”

Gah
. I felt like I swallowed a knot.

“I’m not a teenager anymore,” I sighed. My eyes lifted though when I saw Elish staring at me. I stared back before I started to chuckle, Elish smirked; the irony wasn’t lost on him.

“Right, I’m immortal. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore does it?”

“For another couple years it will, your papers in Kreig will say for certain but I was under the impression you would stop aging at the same time as Silas did, twenty-four for both Silas and Sky.”

I blinked, almost not understanding what I was seeing. With only a brush of his hand Elish pushed a bookcase aside revealing another door behind it. He opened the door which led to a white hallway. Elish walked into it, and with my mind full of questions I followed him.

“I took it upon myself to get you a birthday present,” Elish said casually.

I stopped and looked at him for a second, not hiding the bewildered look on my face. Elish didn’t stop though. I jogged forward to catch up.

“You...?”

Elish didn’t answer; he continued to take me deeper down the hallway before finally stopping in front of a steel, unpainted door. He had led us to an almost storage-type area. The halls were bare, the floor was pocked steel and there were security cameras visible, not hidden like they were upstairs.

“I think you will be quite pleased.” The hair on my neck prickled at the frost in his voice, his facial expression only cemented in the reality that there was something huge through that door.

“Just delivered today, fresh.” With a turn of a handle he opened the door and stepped back.

I eyed him curiously and put my hand on my pistol more out of habit than feeling like I was in danger.

I took a step into the dimly lit room.

My body went cold; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Strapped to two chairs, gagged, bound, and to top it off a Christmas bow on top of each of their heads…

I let out a low laugh, but on my lips it could’ve passed for a growl.

… Hollis and Redmond.

“Happy Birthday, Reaver.” I looked behind me and saw the most eerie foreboding smile on Elish’s lips. His eyes were hard amethyst, and his tone held such a sinister foreshadowing it aroused my bloodlust in a way I had never experienced.

“I can kill them?”

To my surprise Elish took a step back, where there was another door. He pressed the keypad and opened it and I was immediately blinded by daylight.

Though a moment later it closed.

“Free them, kill them, starve them in here. They are yours to do as you wish. My gift comes with no limitations. Jade will clean whatever mess you make.”

Elish tapped a small intercom on the corner. “The door will lock behind you; you will need the code I gave you and Killian to access it and the door outside. If you need to contact upstairs the intercom is available.”

If he was trying to get me to like him he was certainly doing a good job. Or perhaps he wanted to see just what the clone of Silas would do to them. Maybe he wanted to see for himself just how like his king I was.

He was about to find out, and something told me he would have a different reaction to it than Leo and Greyson would’ve.

When the door shut behind him, I turned around with a large smile on my face.

“Well... well... well...” I walked up to each of them and removed the sock gags in their mouths.

Redmond spat; Hollis started panting behind him. I realized his nose was broken and stuffed with blood. He must’ve had trouble breathing.

“What would you have done, Reaver?” Hollis’s voice was strangled and hoarse. I thought I’d have a chance to taunt him before he got to that level of hysteria. “Tell me? King Silas himself was demanding them. You don’t just fucking say no to him!”

“Save your fucking breath,” Redmond sneered at Hollis, his eyes burned when they locked on mine. “Just die with some fucking dignity. You know as well as I do, we’re walking corpses.”

“Who shot Reno?” I yanked the thin nylon rope that had been holding Redmond’s gag in and started twisting it around my fingers. “And who beat Killian?”

“Carson, and Carson’s dead. Your deacons killed –” I punched Redmond in the face with my rope-bound hand. His head snapped back and a spray of blood spewed from his lips and onto Hollis. The former warden stared at Redmond with a look of horror; his mouth moving up and down as if his tongue was glued into the roof.

I unwound the rope from my hands and looked around the room. A small table was off in a corner, metal and sterile like the dim room we were in.

I walked over to it and picked up a screwdriver. I started wrapping the thin rope around it in a crisscross pattern. “Carson would’ve never shot his nephew.”

“The only reason the mob didn’t rip those two to shreds was because of me,” Redmond sniffed, his nose congested with blood and mucus. “Silas didn’t leave us a fucking choice! He would’ve burned Aras.”

“You didn’t even fucking wait for their bodies to go cold before you betrayed them and me. As soon as he shot Greyson you dropped your fucking guns. You were the ones that fucked over Aras.”

“Aras is surviving.” I heard Redmond spit more blood behind me. “But you know as well as I do...” he spat again. I heard a plink noise behind me; I believe that was a tooth. “That we are the only people that can run Aras with Greyson and Leo dead. If you care for your town, you’ll let us go. Not let it be run by Legion fucks.”

I wrapped the second screwdriver as Redmond continued to plead; he tried to crane his neck over to see what I was doing. “Reaver, I’ve known you since you were a boy. I did what had to be done to protect our fucking town!”

I started to whistle, tightening the two pieces of rope until I had two separate weapons. I walked back to the two and, still whistling, I picked up the first screwdriver.

“Did you two see Leo before they shot him in the head?”

Redmond shook his head, Hollis though swallowed hard and nodded. “I saw him.”

“They removed his eye while they tor –”

Then Hollis started to plead loudly with me. I had to raise my voice. “
While they brutally fucking tortured him
.” His whining lit a flame in my gut. I wanted more of it. I felt like a drug addict needing a fix. In the height of his pleading and panicking I put a hand on his face.

“An eye for an eye but I require double restitution.” I pursed his eye between my thumb and middle finger. It spun around frightened in its socket. I raised the screwdriver. “I’d stay still, lest I shove this through the socket and into your brain.”

Hollis’s mouth made a wheezing noise, like the air being let out of a balloon, as I dug the screwdriver deep into his eye socket. It never broke its gaze.

I jerked the screwdriver head towards me, popping the eye out of his socket. I grabbed it with my fingers and pulled the sinewy mess of veins with it. I cleanly sliced it from his body with my combat knife.

Warden Hollis groaned, his eyelid closing loosely like a curtain. He moved his head away as I released him; his eyes tightly shut and his tongue continuously licking his lips.

I turned to Redmond. His face was white as bone and his mouth open in shock.

“Do you really think this is what Greyson wanted for you?” he asked quietly.

His words bounced off of me like twigs on a tank. I put my hand on his face and repeated the procedure. When I had sliced it off too I looked at both the eyeballs in my hand.

I walked over and put them on the metal table, so they could see everything that was going on, and picked up the second screwdriver and rope I had made.

Then with another whistled song, I started to untie them.

They both stared at me in disbelief, neither of them brave enough to make the first move. Their remaining eyes stayed glued to my body, their heartbeats two steady pounding drums. Drips of sweat mixing with blood, running down the foreheads of both men; both with receding brown hair, one terrified the other desperate.

“Did you hear that I am immortal?” I said to them, testing the weight of each piece of rope.

They both slowly nodded, though I was suspecting Hollis to go into shock at any moment. “The Legion knows you were the Raven all along as well.”

I smiled and handed one rope to Redmond and one to Hollis. “Player One, to your left. Player Two, to your right. On the go.... we fight.”

They stared at me. Their now singular eyes almost matching to make a pair. I spread my hands to both of them. “The rules are simple: only two will survive. You can both try to over power me, but you’ll need to trust the fact you’ll be able to torture the code to get outside. Or... you can turn on one another. The dead one loses and the living one won’t get killed by me. Take your places.”

Redmond and Hollis kept staring. The former Warden Hollis blinked his good eye, and turned the screwdriver around in his hand. “F-fight? Each other?”

The malice that burned inside my chest flared at the growing fear in their eyes. I nodded with a smile and took a step back; I crossed my arms and craned my neck. “Who wants to stab me first? Or... are you going to go the more promising route?”

Redmond clenched his hand and at the same time bared his teeth at me. “I’m not playing your fucking game, Reaver. I’m not your puppet.” He looked over at Hollis before dropping his screwdriver and its rope leash to the ground. The chief crossed his arms and glared at me.

He didn’t even see Hollis coming.

With a lightning quick flick of his arm Hollis swung the screwdriver like a knife, Redmond ducked but not soon enough, the screwdriver grazed the side of his head, opening up his scalp like an overripe fruit. The force of the blow knocked Redmond off his feet, though as soon as he hit the ground his hand shot for the rope. As Hollis raised his hand to stab him again he forced the screwdriver up and got him right in the gut.

I suppressed a shudder but I let the cold electricity in my chest flow throughout my body. I leaned up against the metal walls with my arms still crossed enjoying the show in front of me.

The two men wrestled with each other, the screwdrivers exchanging blows that drew out trickles of blood, making the floor slick under their boots. They were my puppets, their strings wrapped around my hands.

I felt like myself in that moment, I felt like Reaver. I had lost parts of myself since leaving Aras. I had lost my home, my family, even my smell, but now...

My lungs swelled as I inhaled deeply, the smell of blood so thick in the air I could taste the coppery metal. Their muffled swearing, groaning and even the electricity in the room aroused my senses and quenched my thirst for revenge and for carnage. The beast inside me was satisfied, but I wanted more. I wanted to push it. Redmond and Hollis were just a taste; my real feast would come when I stepped back onto Aras soil.

There was a loud scream from Hollis, I watched as Redmond lost his slippery grip on the screwdriver, the blue plastic handle sticking out of Hollis’s neck.

As Redmond tried to yank it out Hollis swung his and tore a strip off of Redmond’s cheek. As it hung loosely like hanging moss, I picked up Hollis’s eye and popped it into my mouth.

Pop
. My teeth bit down on the ocular; I always liked that sound.

They both stood, their chests heaving and their boots slipping back and forth on the floor, blood slicking the surface like ice, leaving a mosaic of painted steel.

Redmond stood with his screwdriver back in his hand, Hollis’s legs buckling from the blood loss. The warden was bleeding heavily from several severe wounds. He was panting and wheezing, foamy blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

“It’s been a pleasure, Hollis. It’s nothing personal.”

Redmond clasped the screwdriver with both hands and swung it at Hollis’s head.

It went all the way in, right up to the handle.

The warden’s neck snapped back and he fell to the floor; his remaining eye rolling into the back of his head. Hollis started seizing, the foam spraying in choking coughs like an erupting volcano; a moment later he was still.

I popped Redmond’s eye into my mouth and bit down, I started a slow clap as the former chief stood over his friend; his shoulders shaking and his chest expanding with every ragged inhale. I swallowed the bitter tangy meat and spat out the lens, those were always so tough to chew.

I walked past Redmond and put my finger on the intercom button. “Send down Killian.”

“I want to leave!” Redmond’s voice was strained and hoarse. He turned to me, his eye was ablaze in its socket, the other one had blood dripping down its closed lid. “Open the door.”

I gave him a look of both disbelief and amusement. “Leave? But you’re my prisoner? Whatever for?”