Chapter Five
Colter
“Do you…” Tom Henderson sputters and coughs, fighting to hold on and stay alive. “Do you know who we are?” His voice is wispy and weak. Very similar to how the girl under him sounded when she pleaded for mercy.
No. Not like this.
Four words are all she could get out. Four words ensured five deaths.
Still, I recognize and appreciate Tom’s bravado while he’s teetering on the edge of eternal slumber.
It might be a result of the sheer and relentless panic of having three feet of steel sticking out of your chest, but he didn’t immediately cower and beg.
He used his last breaths to challenge me. To threaten me.
Very few would do the same.
“Practice,” I answer flatly, and twist my blade to dig a hole he won’t recover from.
He screams in agony. Adrenaline made my first blow less impactful, but it can’t do much when your insides are turned to mulch by a katana. What a way to go… hunkered over a sleeping beauty, cock flopping in the wind, surrounded by your best buds.
The comedic tragedy writes itself.
But there’s no time to bask in amusement. I cut it close enough with the girl already. Drugged and downed, she almost fell victim to their assault. It’s time to get serious and finish this.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the others says. “He’s killed Tom.”
It’s easy to forget that the remaining four aren’t hardened bastards.
I was sloppy in dealing with Tom. I savored the execution instead of staying focused and dealing with the other threats.
If it were anywhere else, and if they weren’t merely oversized children, I’d have been in a lot of trouble.
Then again, I would have known to stay focused under those circumstances.
This is more of a sport than a mission. Their inability to fend for themselves, when faced with a real threat, proves that.
“And you’re next.” I slowly draw the blade out of the cavern in Tom’s chest.
I fired two shots toward the ocean to announce my presence. No one had noticed my arrival until it was too late, lost as they were in their daze and not wanting to fuck up the bullshit ritual they’d concocted.
I’d say this is the perfect time for them to learn a lesson, but one of them would have to survive for it to stick.
I turn the gun on the guy to my left. He stares down the barrel, his eyes wide behind the cheap knock-off of the true Ghost’s mask. It makes my blood boil, seeing them wearing it. They’re disgracing the honor I’ve spent my entire life trying to attain.
“Wait, you don’t have to do this,” he says, flailing his arms in surrender.
I let him plead his case and draw my second pistol, training the sight on the man to my right, squarely in the chest.
“Perhaps. But I want to.”
“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 his breath 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. My mask. My face. 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 them for—”
“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.
“The Eye respects you. Wants to be you. Our organization has called out to you for generations. Sought your wisdom and guidance to usher in our future.”
“By raping the innocent and chanting in Latin?” I’m not sure what compels me, but my hand shoots up from my side and rips the mask off his face.
I don’t recognize the face behind it.
But whoever started this cult of fanatics and lunatics is long dead now.
“Nothing to say?” I’ve given him enough time to think of an answer.
He simply shakes his head.
“Then we’re done here,” I say.
“I can go?”
No. His answer was unsatisfactory.
Tonight, the Eye and its legacy will join him in eternal slumber.
I jam the suppressor against his chest and fire two rounds. I briefly considered pushing him over the edge rather than shooting him. I could watch him fall and disappear into the inky black waters below and I would bask in the pure cinematic triumph of everything tonight has brought me.
But doing that comes with the risk of his surviving. It’s a low chance, I’m sure, but enough for me to worry he may come back and cause trouble for me somewhere down the road.
The best part is that I still get to watch him fall.
The bullets shred through his chest and knock him back just enough that his feet topple over the edge.
If the shots don’t kill him, which would take divine intervention of biblical proportions with both aimed at his heart, the fall will finish the job.
After his body disappears into the thrashing waters below, a strange emptiness tightens my chest. It’s not disappointment, but somewhat akin to it.
I am sad that this sorry affair is my first assignment as the Ghost. Sure, they’re college kids and not hardened criminals, but I expected more.
Some fight, at least. Perhaps that is harder to do when you’re squaring up against a man with swords and guns, who knows how to use them, but they also had nothing to lose.
They had to know their time had come after they saw Tom Henderson die…
Pathetic.
I head back to the altar and stop next to the girl.
She looks peaceful. Worryingly peaceful.
I reach for her neck to check for a pulse.
I remove the rope from her wrists and ankles and hoist her into my arms, starting out in the direction from which I came.
She doesn’t wake or stir on our journey.
Whatever Tom gave her must’ve packed a mighty punch.
With the quiet come thoughts I’d rather not be having. Mainly, of the conversation I had with my predecessor.
I believe the Head has a way to rectify the problems this will bring. He wouldn’t have sanctioned this betrayal if he hadn’t. However, come tomorrow, the world will discover what transpired here tonight. If not because of the four bodies rotting on the overlook, then from her mouth directly.
Keeping her alive is a terrible mistake.
But as I gaze at her quiet, tranquil stillness, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m glad we did.