“But it worked,” he gulps. Loath as I am to admit it, he’s not wrong. This was their way of summoning me, and here I stand. “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re the one we’ve been looking for.”
I respond by squeezing both triggers simultaneously.
That makes three of the five I came to deal with.
Realizing there’s no getting out of this without a fight, the guy hovering above the girl’s right arm curses under hisbreath and decides to challenge me. His misguided sense of courage is a welcome change from the cowering I’ve seen thus far, however charging at me without a weapon isn’t going to do him much good.
He barrels toward me with no real sense of purpose or danger, and I let him get close enough to believe we might actually touch. But at the last second I step to the side, and he flies forward, hurtling to the ground from his missed tackle. I silence him with a round to the back of the head, before his body even touches the ground.
“And then there was one,” I say, pointing both guns at the last man standing.
He stumbles away from me and trips over his own feet before falling flat on his ass. I can almost hear the gears spinning in his head, as he searches for a question or statement that could get him out of this situation and save his life.
Nothing can. I’m going to have some fun with it.
“Why are you so afraid?” I ask and circle the bodies and table, taking long, slow steps in his direction. “Your prize for cowardice and outlasting your brotherhood is standing face-to-face with the man you so desperately wanted to meet.”
“You killed them,” he whispers, more to himself than to me. “You killed all of them.” He speaks louder this time, in some vain attempt to stir emotions inside me.
“I did.” I point both guns at him to foster a sense of how serious a predicament he’s in. Without saying so, I want him to understand that whatever happens here is the last thing he’s ever going to do. The last words he’ll ever speak. I am giving him a platform to share his most thought-provoking ideas with the only man who can hear them.
“Wait a minute. You don’t have to do this. We can work something out.” He’s crawling backward on his ass, nearing the cliff’s edge. It would be a shame if he fell off it so soon in my evening’s revels, but he’s thrown caution to the wind in his panic about what I might do.
“What makes you think I’d want to?” It’s a throwaway question designed to see where his need for survival will take him.
“Because everyone has a price.” His gulp is audible through the mask.Mymask.Myface. I don’t linger on it longer than I have to, feeling my blood boiling hotter by the second.
“What, pray tell, could you offer me?” I stop walking when I’m a few feet away from him.
He takes it as a good sign and stops crawling.
“Money,” he says, reaching for the easiest item in his bag of tricks. “My folks are loaded. I can give you a lot of money.”
“I don’t need money.”
“Weapons? My old man designs themfor—”
“I don’t need weapons.” I take another step closer, cutting him off before he finishes his sentence.
Tom Henderson was enough trouble for the Veil, as it was. I haven’t seen the others’ faces, or heard their names, but they are just as likely to be children born to our society’s members. I’d rather live in ignorance about this.
My duty is bound to the Veil, not one particular person inside it. And if the truth isn’t to my liking, I’d be left with a terrible decision to make.
“What do you need?” He drags his ass back again. His journey is cut short when one wrist slips over the cliff’s edge. He yelps out a whiny utterance of terror, and I nearly burst out laughing.
“An answer,” I say, glaring down at him.
“Anything. If I can give it, you’ll get it. Insider secrets to what Dad’s got going on? New models of the shit he’s working on? Mom’s affair with the gardener,” he spouts a list of information that could come in useful at some point in time.
“None of those, no,” I say, making my way over to him. He can’t crawl any further, not when certain death awaits below. “I want you to tell me why.”
I lower myself to my haunches and slot one pistol into its holster. I raise a gloved hand to his face. He tries to lean away from my hand, but his body refuses to go more than a few inches, given the wet, black void behind him.
“Why?” He refuses to blink. Staring straight into my eyes, while I observe the knock-off on his face. “Why what?”
“Why you thought you could summon me like some dime-store whore and I’d come running.” I retract my hand.
“That’s not what we were doing,” he says. I stand. So does he with both arms raised in surrender.
