The man who fell, p.11
The Man Who Fell, page 11
But he held it back, stepped back inside and closed and locked the damned front door. Maybe they'd got the message. Finally someone should!
Chapter Twelve
Things were quiet in the car. But not peaceful. They were both sitting there, drinking their coffee and saying nothing – at least not to each other. But both of them were still shaking. Pale as hell. Covered in leaves and crap from running madly through the trees. Shit only knew what the girl in the all night place had thought when she'd served them their drinks from the window. That a couple of zombies had just dug themselves out of the ground and driven in?
But he had seemed like a reasonable man, she thought. Soft, even pathetic. Maybe bitter. Definitely bitter. Also a bloody boozer. And suddenly he turns into this homicidal maniac? So maybe accosting him in his bathroom hadn't been a clever idea. Rand had thought it would help to intimidate him. Instead it had just flipped some sort of switch in his brain and turned him into a madman. Shit – he was as crazy as Athena!
But a bloody shotgun! No matter how she tried to block it out, Lara couldn't get the image of that huge damned weapon out of her head. Or the roar as it had taken out the floor just in front of them. It was damned cannon! And it might have been a warning shot he'd fired, but it had nearly taken out her toes!
“Well that went well!” Rand finally announced as he sipped at his coffee, doing his best to sound calm. “We gained absolutely nothing except another enemy!”
He wasn't calm she knew. Inside her friend was shaking as badly as she was. Which was wrong since he was normally unflappable. Considered in everything he said and did. In fact he'd been her tutor in languages when she'd been a child – that was how they'd met and first become friends – and in all that time he'd never shown anything but a picture of perfect calm. And she'd never seen Rand Matthews run.
“I didn't know he had a shotgun,” Lara replied, her voice still shaking. “He seemed so … pliable.” But he wasn't now. Now she knew he was never going to do anything she asked him to do again. He had been pushed too far.
“And I have to tell the elders,” Rand continued, ignoring her. “He's immune to our family gift. And no one's immune to the awe!”
“I mean he seemed to be cooperating! And then he goes all rogue with the army like!” She stared out of the window into the darkness, still trying to make sense of Dale Fall. “I mean why'd he do that? He should have just stayed down. Hidden like I told him to.” But he hadn't been doing anything he should have.
“Great Uncle Vic always said we'd one day come across someone who couldn't be awed,” Rand continued with his own train of thought. “But no one believed him. It had never happened before! Not in three thousand years!”
“And then he's shooting, standing his ground like he's some damned cowboy! Against a bloody Ilan!” Lara still couldn't believe that that was the same man she'd been watching for over a week. That man standing in front of the police station had been a stone cold machine. Terrifying in his own way. And the weapons! She'd never seen anyone go toe to toe with an angry Ilan before. And he'd blown her apart! The woman had flown through the air like a sky-rocket! Even before that soldier had killed her, Athena had been a near basket case. Lying on the ground, twitching, smoking a little. She might not have recovered from that blast. So what the hell had happened to him?!
“That's three houses! Three lineages!” Rand continued. “The Ilans – but we knew that already – he was a husband. The Domani – but you'd already said that and it's happened before. And now the Vans!” He turned to her. “Three of the oldest and most powerful Houses.”
“He's not right in the head!” She replied. “I mean who shoots at people with a shotgun?!” Then she turned back to her coffee and took another swig. It seemed to make more sense.
After that she just sat there, and fairly much forgot what Rand was saying even as it came out of his mouth. All she could see was that damned shotgun pointed at her!
But in time other thoughts began to take over. Like her parents, and what they were going to say when they arrived. They were going to be upset. They'd already lost a son. They'd lost Danny. The thought of losing her was going to upset them a lot. And her mother was high in the Domani Family. Practically a leader. She could trace her lineage right back to the first of the baba-yaga's. As such she would worry more about the other part of it. The man's immunity. Whenever someone had arisen who could resist the family gift they'd taken note of it. They'd tracked those people. Followed their offspring down the generations too, just in case it was passed on.
The Vans did the same. Rand's people could trace their ancestry back three thousand or more years to somewhere in the Mongolian hinterlands. So far back that their family name hadn't been written down, just spoken. A legend. The terror as they had been called.
Their gift overwhelmed. A kaleidoscopic storm of light and a feeling of utter awe. A mixture of light and thought that left people practically frozen. Unable to comprehend anything. Stunned and helpless. And as far as she knew, no one had ever been immune to their gift. Even the blind were somewhat susceptible.
A hand on her shoulder, shaking her, snapped her out of her shock for a moment and made her look at her companion.
“Why did he shoot?” Rand asked her. “Was that you?”
“What? Who? Fall? Isn't it obvious – he's bloody insane!” She was confused.
“No. Not him. The soldier. Why did he shoot Athena when she was restrained and half dead? Did you tell him to?”
“No.” Lara shook her head as she tried to collect her thoughts. “I wondered about that too. But I had too much else to do at the time to find out what happened. Getting the body to my people.” And even now it was being dissected more thoroughly than any other corpse in history. Every chemical residue was being tested. Every bit of brain that wasn't destroyed was being scanned. In a few days there wouldn't be a single piece of that woman left that wasn't on a microscope slide or in a beaker of chemicals. And in time they would have the Ilans' chemical cocktail that gave them their power.
“So we all know the Ilans have been growing unstable these last years,” Rand continued. “Their drugs aren't holding them. Their husbands aren't either. They've attacked other Houses. Maybe someone else has got involved.”
“The Ngs?” she suggested.
“Who knows?” He shrugged. “How would we know with them? How would anybody know? But for the moment it looks like the soldier chose for whatever reason, to fire the weapon. That doesn't seem like them. With them we'd be looking for some strange cause and effect. A spark from an electric charge, somehow getting into the gun barrel causing it to fire. Something almost impossible.”
“Dale Fall did survive a thirty story fall by landing on an awning on a building on the opposite side of the street! If that's not freakishly unlikely, I don't know what is.” She thought she should mention that.
“I had noticed. So maybe they are around. But there's a lot of other houses the Ilans have upset lately.”
“And they did go after the Xans,” he added.
“I remember. But that was nothing like this.” And from the reports it had been utter chaos. And entire force of the Ilans' soldiers had turned up at one of the Xan's tropical island resorts. But from the start it had gone wrong. They had accidentally started shooting one another. Guns had jammed left and right. Gone off accidentally shooting their own people, and probably twenty soldiers had ended up dying of so called friendly fire. More had slipped and tripped and fallen down banks and off buildings. Cars had driven off roads straight into their midst. Fuel tanks had exploded and more than a few of the Ilans' lovers had burnt to death. And in all that insanity she knew that not a single Xan had been hurt. Their resort hadn't even been damaged. Maybe they couldn't control their gift, but it was powerful.
“There are others. Maybe even others we don't know.”
It was possible, Lara knew. There were a lot of lineages out there. A lot of gifts. And they didn't know them all. Not everyone shared. Maybe there was another one that could suggest as the Domani did. Make a man pull a trigger. But then she had to wonder, why would someone do that? Did they know what her plan was and want to help it along? And if so, how? Or could it be simple revenge? All she knew was that she hadn't done it.
Regardless it reminded her that she needed to check on the team's progress and so she quickly grabbed her phone and started hunting for messages. She got hourly updates. And as she'd expected, the team were making good progress. They'd already completed the full analysis of the pineal gland, found a whole bunch of morphological changes as they'd expected, and were now creating tissue cultures from every cell they could find and running every chemical analysis they could think of. Things were going well. Though the way things had been going lately, she worried that that might all be about to change.
“Your science project?” Rand asked.
“Going well.” She nodded. He knew her plan. He didn't approve of it – there was too great a chance that the Ilans would find out about it and then there would be hell to pay – but naturally he wasn't going to say anything. Those others that knew, were in the same situation. But there weren't many of them. She'd kept things very close to her chest.
“You know it's not going to work?” He asked. “Not as you want?”
“Why not?”
“Because when Athena died so did all her servants. That's not chemical. The Ilans' gift may be chemical in part, but not completely. The bond they make is of the mental.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. But she'd always known that the Ilan gift was only part of the physical world and part something else. “But the strength and toughness is physical. And without it …” She let him finish the thought for himself.
The annoying thing for her was that the Ilans themselves could tell them most of what the doctors in her team were now having to learn for themselves. The Ilans had their own research facilities dedicated to uncovering the secrets of their gift. Trying to make it work better for them. But naturally they weren't sharing what they knew. This was about power, and not just physical. The House wanted to rule.
For three thousand years they had been working at it. Marrying the right husbands. Advancing their careers. Amassing fortunes and political power. Killing anyone who got in their way. And anyone who might get in their way like a rival house. And mostly what had stopped them had been the horrid nature of normals. They seemed to like war and rebellion even more than the Ilans loved power and it upset their plans.
Then again, was it different for any of the others? Her own House sought power. Financial mostly but also political. And the fortunes they had amassed over the centuries and the members they had in the ruling classes made them a formidable force in the world. The Domani were no longer the humble gypsies and witch women they had been centuries and millennia before. They didn't tell fortunes, they made them.
And the Vans weren't that different themselves. Their gift wasn't one that leant itself so easily to the acquisition of power in the world. It was more of a spiritual weapon. Which fitted the fact that they considered themselves a more spiritual lineage. They called their gift awe instead of terror for a reason and chose to wear conservative clothing like that of priests. But for all that they weren't poor or without influence in the corridors of power.
“So what do we do now?” She asked when the coffee was gone and enough of her thoughts had returned to the mundane. And the one thing she knew for certain was that she was never going in that house again. “Because we can't approach him again!”
“But we should have been able to,” Rand replied. “The awe should have worked. It should have left him compliant. But it just made him angry!”
“He's an angry man. And maybe it wasn't so clever to approach him when he was in the bath!” In hindsight that hadn't been such a brilliant idea either. He hadn't been intimidated by it at all!
“He has anger issues.”
“And then some,” she agreed. Being thrown out of a thirtieth story apartment probably hadn't done a lot to help with that, she thought. But that did give her an idea.
“Suppressed rage? Could that be what's protecting him from our gifts?” And shit, if anyone had to be boiling inside, it was him. He'd been hit so hard, on so many levels – that must have done something to him.
“You would have seen that,” Rand reminded her.
“Maybe not if it was buried deeply enough. Especially under years of alcohol.” Though she didn't actually know that. There were others in the family who might know more about such things. But maybe she'd only seen the surface. And it was the only idea she could come up with to explain him. Other than the thought that he was actually just immune – to everything!
“He should still have been awed. We can bring down even an Ilan in full frenzy.”
Lara didn't reply to that. She didn't know. She wasn't a Van. But what she did know was that she'd had enough. She couldn't just keep going over the details of the night again and again.
“Take me back to the hotel,” she told him. It was clear that there was nothing that they were going to solve tonight – or quite possibly at all. And she needed to rest. As bad as this evening had been, she knew tomorrow would be worse. Her parents were arriving.
Chapter Thirteen
Life in the hotel was quiet. But then it would be. She, her parents and a few other Domani, along with Rand and a couple of his family, were the only guests. And there weren't any staff. Not any more.
They'd bought the hotel – the sale of the Cashmere Arms had yet to be approved by the local overseas investment regulators but it would almost certainly be allowed given the price they'd paid – and were now turning it into a safe house. The former guests had been moved to other accommodations with a full refund and their expenses paid. The excuse given had been that they needed to fumigate, though she couldn't imagine who would believe that. But the guests weren't complaining and neither was the former owner.
Why they'd bought the hotel, she didn't know. Lara didn't know why they needed a new safe house, least of all here in a minor city in a minor country half way around the world from her home. But it wasn't up to her. She had just been informed of the decision after the sale had gone through.
The reason the leaders of the House had given was that they had a long term research project happening in the city, in fact they'd flown in an entire portable lab facility to help with it. Nobody might have approved of what she'd done, and certainly no one was talking about it, but now that they had a body to work with – or at least the remains of one – they were going to mine it for every golden secret it contained.
But that didn't make sense to her. They could have carted the body away to another facility in due course.
At least it was a nice building she thought. An older stone block building four stories high which someone had gone to the trouble to plaster with art-deco motifs. It looked sharp, she thought. And while it wasn't the largest hotel around, it had fifty rooms and a heated swimming pool out the back.
Inside though, things weren't quite so good. It still held to the style of the nineteen twenties, but it hadn't been maintained so well. The deep blue carpets were worn in places. There were cracks in the plaster work which should have been repaired and painted over. There were chips in the black and white tiles of the floor in the dining room and kitchen. And the huge art-deco front desk needed to be sanded back and re-stained – not that they were keeping it. The hotel needed some love.
Still she could be comfortable here. It was just that she hadn't been expecting to stay in Hamilton – or New Zealand for that matter – for any length of time. Just long enough to get an autopsy done. And how long could that take? A week or two?
But her plans had changed. They'd been changed for her by the House and also her parents, who were more than a little upset with her. And so here she was, staying in a run down hotel and trying to look apologetic.
A lot of the time Lara got to sit around in the nearly empty dining room, sip tea she had to make herself – which didn't seem right when this was a hotel – and suffer a parade of disapproving stares from the more senior members of the House. Today though she'd managed to make a change to her day. She'd moved upstairs to the first floor lounge and reading room. But she was still sipping tea she'd had to make herself, and trying to look suitably apologetic from an elegant easy chair!
The least they could do was thank her for getting them a body, she kept thinking. No one else had ever managed that. They'd tried. They'd got samples here and there. The Ilans were a combative family and they got into fights and occasionally bled. Her people were around to gather up the evidence when that happened.
And already the doctors were making progress. There were a range of chemicals they'd found, many of which they were only just beginning to understand the nature of, and they were starting work on the genetics. On the other hand she was sure Rand was right, the Ilan gift wasn't purely chemical. There was a mental, mystical component. Which was why a couple of dozen police officers were now lying in vegetative comas in the city hospital. The bullet wounds would heal, but their brains had basically shut down.
