I opened my mouth to argue and immediately closed it again. There was no point, when Galahad was right.
“So, what does he ask about?” I enquired instead.
“Where you are, what you’re doing,” Martin told me. “The usual idea is to tell me how he’s going to find and hurt you. He really doesn’t like you very much.”
“He can join a very long queue,” I told him. “So, where is the psychotic little prick?”
“Back there,” Galahad said and pointed to a wall that had no obvious door, but did have a huge silver sheet attached to it. A small window with a flap on it sat to one side.
“Okay, how do I get in there?”
One of the guards walked over to the sheet and placed his hands on it. The silver slid aside like liquid, revealing the solid brick wall behind, which also began to move, creating an archway.
“What’s the silver for?” I asked.
“Show them,” Galahad said and the guard nodded before continuing his demonstration. The silver slid up onto the ceiling, where it transformed into dozens of deadly spikes.
“If the guard takes his hand from that wall, those spikes come down,” Matthew said. “It doesn’t have to be spikes, but it’s an interesting version of a dead man’s switch and a little extra protection when the guards have to bring Simon his food and water.”
“I want to go alone,” I said, while the guard moved the silver back onto the wall, where it stayed. “And before anyone argues, clearly he’s got some vested interest in me. Let’s just see if I can’t push his buttons.”
“You okay with that?” Galahad asked Caitlin who nodded.
“Don’t kill him,” she said to me.
“We have very specialized runes in this office that are linked to the cell,” Martin said. “We’ll be able to hear everything you say, but not vice versa. He has no weapons, but that’s not going to mean he won’t try. He killed two guards the first year and has maimed another three in the years since. He’s dangerous.”
“Nate, get what you need and leave,” Galahad said. “Every second you spend in there is more time he’s in control. He’s different than when he went in, more unpredictable. He’s had a long time to work on using his mouth to hurt you. He’ll relish the chance to get you to lose control and attack him.”
“Just remember, his runes will ignite if any part of him leaves that cell,” Martin told me. “It would be bad for you if that happened while he was holding you.”
“Is that how he killed one of the guards?” I asked.
Martin nodded. “Gave himself burns over sixty percent of his body, and we had to increase the runes’ power by several times to ensure it didn’t happen again.”
“I get it,” I told him. “Dangerous psycho in a cell, willing to hurt himself to hurt others.”
Galahad nodded to one of the guards, who unlocked the cell by using alchemy to push the lock to the middle of the door and turn it ninety degrees before pushing the door open.
I stepped through the door and into the crystal-lit corridor beyond. There were small windows, just large enough to get an arm through, every few yards, but the amount of light they let in was minimal at best. The guard led me down the corridor and around the corner before stopping outside the only cell. He used alchemy to push the metal bars aside, creating an entrance. “Good luck,” he whispered before moving away as quickly as possible without running.
Simon sat behind a metal table, staring at his hands. He glanced up at me, his hair long enough to cover his face. The shadow in the room did its best to cover any part that was visible. He wore a sleeveless shirt and had put on a serious amount of muscle in the thirty years since I’d last seen him.
He leaned forward, allowing the blue light to do its job and I saw the beard, probably several months old.
“You look good,” he said, his voice low and full of menace.
“You look like a hobo,” I told him and removed the chair from opposite him, sitting down as I tried to ignore the fact that he could have easily pounced at me. Killing him in his cell wouldn’t do me any favors.
“I don’t get to shave very often. They don’t like to give me sharp things. Apparently it makes them nervous.” He leaned further into the light and pushed his hair back over his shoulders, showing me the scar that ran from under one eye to just above his mouth. But it was his eyes that caught my attention. They were devoid of anything even resembling a spark of humanity. Any ideas of threatening him vanished in that second; there was nothing I could do to hurt him that he hadn’t already stopped caring about.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come say hello,” he said and clicked his fingers, turning the lights off. “Welcome to the party.”
CHAPTER 29
When the lights returned, after about ten seconds of darkness, I held Simon by the throat, pinning him to the ground.
“Were you nervous?” he asked with a slight grin.
“How’d you manage that?” I asked, letting go of him and stepping back.
“The lights go out every few hours. I’m guessing the runes interfere with the crystals.”
I picked my chair up from the ground and sat back on it opposite Simon, who moved slowly, making me want to wait.
“How’d you know about the crystals?” I asked.
“Ah, is that still confidential?” Simon replied as he finally sat down. “I have a lot of spare time on my hands these days, the sheep out there probably don’t sit and stare at one of them for hours on end. I’ll have to ask Galahad to bring the Italian here so I can find out how they work. Maybe I’ll ask him myself when I get out.”
“You don’t think you’re ever getting out, do you?”
“What’s Galahad going to do, keep me here for thousands of years? His options are kill me or eventually let me out. Unless I escape first, of course, but clearly that’s impossible.”
The way he said that final sentence was a lot smugger than I’d have expected.
“You have a plan to escape then.”
“I have a thousand plans. Sometimes I think, I’ll just run out of the cell and take my chances. And then I think of you, so I stay and wait.”
“You think of me? That’s very sweet of you.”
“I’m going to carve my name in your face,” he said softly. “That’s the memory that sends me to sleep every single night.”
“A soft pillow and the love of a good woman does the same for me. But since you’ve got neither of those, I guess you take when you can get.”
“You didn’t come here to trade witty insults.” Simon leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “I assume you want to know what King Whitehorn is doing.”
“Actually I just want to know why Patricia is killing people back in Stratford.”
“Ah, you figured out who it was. Congrats. Have you met Joshua yet? I assume he’s a true monster by now; the last I heard he was cutting heads off cats. He would have been six or seven at the time.”
“So, people do still get you messages. Good to know.”
“Of course they do, not often, but enough to keep me up-to-date. Unfortunately, Galahad started changing the guard every few years, and that made it more difficult. Still, I get the info I need.”
“Whitehorn wants to take back his throne. I assume you getting released is part of that plan. How does Karl Steiner feel about you taking his job back?”
“No one has told me either of those things. And I don’t give a shit what Karl thinks, I have no opinion of him whatsoever. I’ve never even met him. If my king is happy with his performance, than I won’t question it.”
“Don’t pretend you give a shit about Whitehorn or his throne; you worked for him because he paid well and indulged your…baser needs. You were his fixer, his little Rottweiler, sent after anyone who dared cross him.”
“Like you were to
Merlin.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, it’s exactly the same. You murdered people for fun, innocent people who spoke out. I killed people who had committed the kind of crimes that you would have thought fun. I basically spent fifteen hundred years killing people just like you, over and over again. Removing one little stain at a time.”
“And yet the world is still full of people like me.”
I had a terrible urge to punch him in his smug little face.
“I heard you asked about me,” I said, hoping to change the subject. “You feel like confessing your sins or something?”
“You never figured out why I wanted those tattoos, did you? Did that always bug you?”
I stared at the evil bastard in front of me for a second. “Yeah,” I eventually told him. “That did bother me. I still don’t know why it was so important.”
Simon started laughing. “By the time you find out, it’ll be too late.”
I was about to come back with an obviously witty retort, when a guard’s footsteps sounded behind me. I turned slightly, keeping one eye on Simon as the man who had taken me into the cell re-appeared.
“Sir, King Galahad wishes to speak to you,” he told me before turning and leaving.
I glanced over at Simon, who appeared to be annoyed at the interruption. “I’ll be back in a moment,” I told him and walked after the guard before Simon could say anything to me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as Galahad, Martin, and Caitlin were all waiting for me.
“The tattoos,” Galahad said. “What tattoos are these?”
“The victims back in the seventies were all tattooed, apart from Sally-Ann. How do you not know this?”
“That wasn’t in the file, Nate,” he said. “Not any that I ever saw.”
“Someone removed it,” Caitlin said.
“The mayor,” I said immediately. “If there was anyone back then who could have doctored the report, it was him.”
“But why didn’t they want anyone to know?” Caitlin asked. “What’s so important about tattoos?”
“The guardians have tattoos,” Martin said, almost to himself before realizing we were all staring at him. “Ummm…it’s how they operate the gates. They have to go through a bonding process and then have someone put the tattoo on them. It links one guardian to one gate.”
“How do you know this?” Galahad asked.
“I spent some time with them while we were devising the runes for this prison.”
“So, Simon was looking for a guardian?” I questioned.
Martin shrugged. “No idea, but if he wanted someone with tattoos, then that’s a possibility.”
I turned and walked back into the cell with a little song in my heart.
“That was quick,” Simon said. “Did Galahad tell you to start torturing me?”
“Why were you trying to find a guardian?”
Simon’s smug expression melted from his face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, was that a big secret?” I asked, with a slight smile, which I knew annoyed him.
Simon shrugged. “Does it matter? You know I wanted to find a guardian, but you don’t know why, and you never will.”
A memory of a conversation I had with one of the other captives back in seventy-seven flickered in my mind. “You’re not after a guardian,” I said. “At least, that wasn’t your final aim. You were torturing those people to find out where they’d gotten their tattoos done. Finding a guardian would have led you to whoever did the tattoo. You were after a tattooist, not the wearer.”
For a second I thought Simon was going to launch himself at me, but instead he took a deep breath and laid back in the chair, as if nothing I’d said had bothered him.
“What was it? You wanted to create your own guardians? Was that the plan? To attack the realm gate and install Whitehorn’s own people there before you move through to Shadow Falls?”
Simon looked up at the ceiling as if bored with what I was asking him.
“But why Stratford? That’s miles away from Portland; surely it would have been easier to look in Portland for a tattooist? And why is the tattooist so important? Couldn’t you have just gotten anyone to do the tattoo once you found the guardian and realized what their ink looked like? Why go to all that trouble for a specific person?”
Simon continued to stare at the ceiling.
“Is this it?” I mocked with a wave of my hands. “This is the man who wanted to talk to me, who scares the people meant to be guarding him. He gets found out and decides to start sulking like a petulant teenager. You’re pathetic.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Simon said softly. “I’m going to get out of here and then I’m going to hunt you down and kill you. And in the years after you’re gone, I’ll have forgotten all about you. You’ll be nothing but a tiny blip on my life. I wanted to see you to tell you that. I wanted to make you understand how much horror I’m going to put you through. Not because you caught me, I always knew that was going to happen, but because you beat me. You humiliated me and then, instead of killing me and being done with it, you left me broken and bloody on that forest floor and then forgot I ever existed. So I’m going to show you the exact same respect. Then I’m going to kill Galahad and everyone you’ve ever been friends with.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Is that really the best you can do? Sit and threaten me or the people I care about? What am I meant to do, cower in fear? Beg you to leave them alone? Is that meant to scare me? Do you have any idea how many small insignificant people have threatened to kill me? Would you like to take a wild guess at how well that’s worked out for them? About as well as you did back in that forest. So, you can sit there and threaten me all fucking day long, but at the end of the day, you can’t do shit. I’m going to stop Whitehorn and his friends and I’m going to make sure you all rot. You’re a pathetic little man, and if you ever do get out of here, I will kill you. And then I’ll forget you ever existed.”
Simon leaned closer, his hands resting on the table. “When I get out, I’m first going to pay a visit to that girl who used to come here every month. Rebecca. I told Galahad that I’d only speak to him and her, but that’s not really why I asked for her. Do you know why I ask for her? Because when I’m alone at night, I like to think about flaying her. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen her, but it’s soothing.”
“I’m pretty certain whatever shock value you think you have, is lost on me.”
“I heard your friend, Tommy, had himself a pup. Maybe, when I do get out, I should pay her a visit?”
I didn’t even pause, I jumped over the table, grabbing Simon by the throat and slamming his head into the concrete floor. “How do you know about her?” I demanded.
“I know all kinds of things. Things about you, about your friends, and their children. I know whatever I need to know to get the job done. And that got under your skin, didn’t it? Made you think that your friends aren’t as safe as you think they are.”
“They’re safer than you are right now,” I told him. “I could just kill you, here and now, screw Galahad’s plans for you. Screw whatever information you were never going to give up anyway. The world would be better off with you no longer a part of it. What could you possibly know that would change my mind?”
“I know that we’re just a cog in a machine, that you can kill me or King Whitehorn and that won’t change a thing. The machine will keep working, keep going toward our destination.”
“Which is?”
“I have no idea.”
I squeezed his neck tighter, making his eyes bulge slightly.
“No idea,” he wheezed and I released his throat a little. “But when it’s time, you and yours are going to burn. And I’ll be there to piss on the ashes.”
“Burn you say?” I asked and dragged the struggling Simon to within a few inches of the cell’
s boundary. “You did say I didn’t leave an impression last time, should we rectify that mistake?”
I released his throat and then head butted him, hard on the nose as the door open and Galahad came running around the corner. “Don’t,” he shouted.
I stood up and stepped away from Simon, whose hatred of me was written all over his face. “No one to stop me next time,” I said and walked past Galahad and his newly arrived guard to the room beyond.
I was furious with myself as I stormed out of the seventh floor and began the long walk back to get outside. I needed some air. I needed to be away from Simon and the massive temptation to tear him in half.
“Well that could have gone worse,” Galahad said after he found me sitting under a tree, twenty minutes after I’d left the tower.
“I could have killed him,” I said. “I know you didn’t want me to do that. But the temptation.…”
Galahad sat beside me on the soft grass. “Hard, isn’t it? I’ve wanted to kill him every single time I’ve visited. And I know Rebecca did too. I couldn’t keep bringing her along to his insane ramblings.”
“He only wants to get someone there he knows he can make uncomfortable.”
“I know, but she insisted anyway.”
“I need to go talk to her about why the tattooist is so damn important,” I said.
“You think my mom is still looking for someone who does that?” Caitlin asked as she joined us. “None of the victims were professional tattooists.”
“It’s still worth looking into. Maybe one of them was part time, or was starting an apprenticeship with a studio.”
“I’ll make some calls once we’re back,” Caitlin said.
“That man deserved to die up there,” I said. “I really wanted to kill him. Unfortunately, I remembered that I wasn’t meant to be killing your prisoners, so I decided not to.”
“And I thank you for it,” Galahad said. “I’ll come with you to the realm gate and talk to Rebecca. She’ll tell you anything you need to know about guardians and their tattoos.”