Chapter 14 Arwyn
ARWYN
Iremembered the first time I killed my father like it was yesterday.
The memory haunted me, stinging the core of my soul even with the hate that had built between us over the years.
You’d think I would’ve enjoyed taking a knife to his neck and drawing the blade across soft skin, or holding his head beneath the water until the final bubbles of air from his lungs rose to the surface.
The novelty of such an act wore off before he’d revived himself and asked me to do it again.
I was no older than twelve when he first asked me to do it. To kill him, that is.
He’d woken me early, my analogue clock buzzing just shy of three o’clock in the morning.
Sleepy-eyed, and still in the fringes of a dream, he’d taken my hand in his and guided me out of my bedroom.
I remembered asking him what he was doing, but it was his silence that unnerved me, and the soft grace of his hand holding mine.
Because I knew, in the moments of fatherly love, there would always be darkness that followed.
I was right to be anxious.
He took me out into our garden. It must’ve rained because the ground was a bog of mud and my bare feet kept slipping up.
At the end of our garden was an apple tree, all gnarled branches that bore the ripest and sweetest fruits.
Mother used to make apple crumble from them.
“Cooking apples” she’d said, whilst picking them carefully and placing them in a wicker basket.
“Sour and sweet… almost magical in flavour and perfect for pies.”
Since her murder, the tree had never bore fruit again.
“Here, my son, take this.” Father handed me a hunting rifle, the one a farmer used to scare off intruders or shoot foxes that threatened their livestock.
Except I remembered thinking we didn’t have either—intruders or chickens.
Only my father in his slippers and dressing gown, me with my mud-caked bare feet and striped pyjamas that barely kept the cold from invading my small bones.
I remembered the gun feeling heavy in my arms, so much that they trembled as I tried to hold it up. Father helped at first, grasping the barrel with his meaty hand and guiding it until the end pointed at his chest.
That was when he began to cry. I’d never seen my father cry before; that night was the first. I think, in hindsight, that watching tears fall down his usually resilient face was more unsettling than the command he gave me next.
“When I tell you,” he said, “I want you to pull that trigger here… do you see it? That’s it, thread your finger into the loop and hold it steady.”
Of course I’d tried to back away, but I feared the sharp slap of a hand that always followed in the wake of me refusing my father. This wasn’t the first time he’d wanted me to kill someone, but never had he asked me to do it to him.
I didn’t understand, my childish mind not being able to contemplate what he was asking of me to do. “I can’t do it. Please, Daddy. Don’t make me.”
I cried too, furious tears that cascaded down my face.
With the weight of the rifle in my hands, I couldn’t feel the cold anymore.
My toes were numb, and my muscles were as stiff as stone.
The wind ripped around us, the moon heavy as it witnessed the oddity from the sky.
All I remembered was that there seemed to be no stars that night.
“You will do this, Arwyn.” My father winced at his own hateful tone, as if he regretted it, which I knew was not right.
He never showed remorse, not after all the monstrous things he’d done.
“Don’t you hate me, my son? Don’t you wish you could clear me from this hateful world and stop the suffering I put you through? Huh?”
I couldn’t answer. My teeth chattered so viciously it felt like my jaw was going to fall off.
“If you do this for me, you could stop so many more people dying unnecessarily. You know this, don’t you? Your mother, the Briar family. I am giving you the opportunity to avenge them all.”
I’d tried to pull my hands from the rifle again, but Father forced the butt into my chest, bruising my ribs with the force.
“Do it, you pathetic little cunt! Shoot me. Shoot. Me!”
The next time he removed his hands, I kept mine steady.
My lungs burned as I inhaled the frigid air, my eyes refusing to blink and miss a moment. Father backed up until the tree was pressed against his spine, and then he extended his arms up to his sides as if embracing an unseen spirit, and smiled.
Perhaps he believed my further hesitation was weakness, but the truth was I didn’t want to shoot him until he opened his eyes again. I needed him to look into mine as I pulled the trigger.
Time slowed for a moment.
Bang.
Birds flocked from the branches of the trees at the first bullet. It tore through my father’s chest, wedging deep into a bone or organ, I couldn’t be sure. All I remembered was the blood. He smiled as more gore coated his teeth, and dribbled out his mouth.
“Good boy.” His praise cut deep, so I pulled the trigger again, and again. Three times, until the chamber was empty and the bullets littered his chest.
Father dropped to his knees, laughing to the dark sky as death claimed him.
Except, it didn’t. As I stood there, the calmest I’d ever been in my short life, I watched as life returned, wounds spat out bullets and healed up. Then he stood up, walked towards me, patted my shoulder and told me to take myself back to bed.
He didn’t even bother to take me.
That was only the beginning.
Very few of my father’s followers knew of his curse.
I learned, in time, that he viewed it as a sign of weakness.
Whereas the truth proved that my father was invincible.
The greatest strength to anyone but the man plagued with it.
The concept was so odd to me, considering most children would wish their parents would live forever and never die.
Not me. After what he did to my mother, and to the many innocent victims who’d been unfortunate enough to enter his orbit, I wished him to die.
But after being the one to try and murder him, as per his order, too many times to count, I knew now that freeing myself of him would take more than a bullet or noose.
It would take the witch who cursed him or the demon that aided her, to free him.
I knew that part of his secret now, for the darkness inside me whispered it to me.
* * *
I stood in the heart of a delicate flat in Oxford, looking around at an untouched memory.
Considering it had been over twenty years since I last stood here, at my father’s side, after I clutched a blood-slick athame in my small hand and looked down at the dead body of Heather Briar, I felt as though I was still that little boy.
The little boy frightened of what his father would do to the people he loved, who was prepared to kill other people just to protect them.
I lifted my attention to the fireplace on the far side of the living room.
The stonework was coated in soot, rotten bits of kindling and wood sitting in the hearth waiting to be lit.
Without thought, my feet guided me towards it until I knelt on the cold tiles before it.
I reached into the gaping mouth of darkness, searching.
This was where Hector hid from us.
My fingers traced the soot-coated grooves, sensing a thrum of dark power left imprinted on the bricks. It was the same dark power that writhed and called out from inside of me.
“You told me he would be here,” I said aloud, speaking to the demon inside of me. “But you lied. I hate liars.”
Bahmet pressed against my skin like a hand trying to break free of a puppet. “I do not lie, Arwyn. You asked me to take you to the place where his presence is most prominent, and that is here. His memory stained the air in his place… it reeks of him.”
Bahmet’s disgust was evident in the bite of his words.
I rocked backwards on my feet, pushing my thighs to stand. “And yet we are alone. And I’m wasting time.”
“This is the room where Hector Briar’s soul broke into far too many pieces to ever collect.
It is not my fault that there is so much of him scattered here that his imprint is strong.
Perhaps it was your guilt that has overridden your desire for him.
Have you come back here to pick up all those pieces and give them back to Hector as a gift? ”
My hands balled to fists, nails pinching into soft flesh and yet the pain was kept at bay. “Quiet.”
“It hurts you for someone to speak the secrets of your broken soul, does it not?” Bahmet taunted, his sickly voice filling my skull as though he was shouting into a barren cave.
“I told you to be quiet,” I snapped, magic cracking out of me in a wave.
The walls around me splintered, the floor cracking like the shell of an egg. Pictures that clung to the walls, showing the faces of a smiling, happy family, fell and smashed. Tables toppled, and windows shattered.
“You forget yourself,” Bahmet sang, “for I am no familiar for you to control. I am Bahmet, Lord of the—”
“Enough!”
I pictured fire beneath my skin, boiling and hissing tongues as they lashed back at the demon inside of me.
Bahmet receded back into the very pits of my body, proving I was the one in control. At least enough to quieten him, not silence the demon entirely.
“Do you not wish for me to take you to him?” Bahmet whispered, so faint now that I had to focus to hear him.
Twice I’d stepped foot into Hector’s home, and both times I’d brought ruin with me. But I had failed him more times than I could count. Starting with what I did to his family, and leading up to the fact that the one person he wished to destroy would never die.
“That is unless you do as your father wants, and lift the curse placed upon him,” Bahmet reminded, a lilt of enjoyment in his ancient voice. “He has asked it of you, and I can do it if you allow me. And yet, you refuse.”
I ground my teeth together, turning away from the suggestion as if it was a physical barrier before me. “My father doesn’t deserve the peace he seeks.”
“And yet you allow him to continue living, knowing all the lives he will end?”
I bristled at the truth, and yet I still wouldn’t do it. “My father will face his judgement, but it will be at the hand of the man who deserves to deal it out.”
“Are you not that man, Arwyn?” A strange weight laid out on my shoulder, as if a hand was rested there.
“Have you not been made to commit heinous crimes? Have you not been worn down by the years of abuse and torture? I have seen into your mind and witnessed all the hurt Tomin has caused you, and yet you are the one being with the capability of lifting that curse I was made to set upon him like a crown, and still you will not do it.”
I pinched my eyes closed, dark and bloody scenes racing through my mind. Even beneath the anxiety gripping my body, I knew this was Bahmet’s doing. He might not have been able to control me like previous Grand Highs, but he was using every trick up his sleeve to taunt me into a malleable position.
“Do you know where Hector is or not?” I asked, forcing out the question as though my mouth was filled with mud.
The echo of Bahmet’s laugh cut me deep, already answering my question. “Of course I do. We are connected, Hector and I.”
“Then why did you bring me here?” I made certain that Bahmet could feel the joy that radiated from me as I added, “My educated guess tells me that Hector frightens you. That’s why you don’t want to go to him, isn’t it?”
The demon’s pause spoke volumes. “No. I brought you here because you were trying to escape the clutches of your father, not return to them.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins, the room swaying as though I stood on the bows of a ship. “What has that got to do with Hector’s location?”
It was Bahmet’s turn to highlight just how he was the one who had won this small battle. “Because your father currently is holding Hector as his captive. I think the correct term he not long ago used was ‘bait’. So, Arwyn, what will your next request be, knowing this information?”
I didn’t even need to speak it aloud before the shadows swallowed me up.
Bahmet might not be in control of me, but without him I would be powerless to save the people I truly loved. Bahmet knew that… I sensed the emotion in him. And the demon was right.
I needed him.