Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

Andrew moved quickly from the back of the black car and into the lobby of the Marionette Hotel before the rains could get to him. He was in a rush and knew if he did not arrive looking at least somewhat presentable then he’d have two women pissed at him. Honestly, between facing the Boss’ fury or Louise’s he didn’t know who was more terrifying.

Ruth may have once been able to extract him from illegal detention in an Iranian prison after eleven months by simply a click of her fingers (metaphorically speaking) but Louise was a next level of crazy. Though she had taken an oath to ‘do no harm’, that didn’t stop her from recruiting people who could – like Ruth.

The lobby was the epitome of decadence, plush carpeting and golden finish gleamed at him from every decoration. He could see his reflection in the thick gilded lift doors as he waited for his ride to arrive. It was everything he’d expect for the place chosen to hold the two-year memorial ball in remembrance of those lost during the Biogenesis Building collapse and Blackout. Over the top, probably way more expensive than it needed to be and not one for understatement. It was everything he was not.

Andrew had been raised an army brat, bouncing around from base to base with his mother while his father took to each station with the regimented authority of a General. He’d gotten used to packing light and not getting attached, even more so following his path into the army and eventually into Special Forces training.

It was ultimately a life that didn’t agree with him, so he turned back to his first love of archaeology and plunged himself deep into it. He didn’t need Rick’s level of psychological insight to know he was portraying classic rebellion – enough to piss off his father more than he’d bargained for and start a rift. Still, unlike others, that rift had been healed long ago after his time in the prison, arrested for crimes which he still to this day had never been charged with. He’d been thrown into a hole, a dark hole of despair that had sapped everything from him and brought him to the brink of breaking.

Then a woman in a suit had walked into the prison and changed his life forever.

Since then he’d seen a lot of hotel lobbies just like the Marionette. And while he was never one to turn down free champagne and a bit of Tchaikovsky – he still remembered back to those prefab bungalows and making recipes with his mum from her hometown in India. Or the way his dad’s severe authoritarian expression would soften when he arrived home, blinking himself into a grin as he asked what spices they were trying to mace him with this time. He smiled at the memory but had little time to continue down the same lane, as the doors to the lift opened and several glamorous ladies in evening gowns swept out. He took their place, pressed for the floor and made a note to call his folks the next day.

He couldn’t help but notice he caught the eye of one of the ladies as the doors slid closed and grinned again to himself. He still remembered back to those first few weeks, recovering in the Black Ops site Ruth had somehow managed to arrange for him to stay in. He’d been a fragment of a man, only part of him made it out of the prison, the rest was lost in time. He’d weighed several stone lighter, his ribs painfully sticking out against his skin. His eyes had been sunken into his face, the skin beneath his eyes almost coal.

He’d regained much of his former muscle mass since then and although not to bodybuilder levels, he’d returned to his former toned physique – even if his mother’s cooking had put on a couple more pounds than he would have liked. His skin had returned to its smooth caramel colour. There were scars but they were hidden by his clothing which at that moment was his clean pressed suit which had been left waiting for him back at home. No doubt chose by Louise and approved by Ruth for the evening’s events.

His ‘other’ suit had gone into their collective wash as he was pretty sure it was a UN disaster zone following his time in the rubbish bags.

As he regarded himself in the polished doors of the lift he suddenly realised he’d left his tie in the taxi. Time took the situation out of his hands as the doors pinged open and spilt him out onto the third floor, where, from the sounds of the string quartet emanating from the nearby ballroom proceeds were already well underway. As if by fate, she was already waiting for him, her warm and natural smile spreading when she saw him.

Dr Louise Bryan. His girlfriend, his love. Following Janet’s death, he’d been in a dark place. It was her friendship, her warmth and admittedly some of her sandwiches that made him get through it. The previous two years of getting to know her deeply and intimately had cemented their love. She radiated it back at him in spades. Except it quickly turned to a half-serious annoyance.

“You’re late!” she snapped at him, “I know you like to go off fighting good and evil with your friends but I am your date and I’m officially offended.”

“You look astonishing in that dress.”

She smiled a little leaning towards him. It was a nice dress, accentuating her lithe figure and complementing her pale lightly freckled skin. She’d tied her sunshine gold hair up into swathes of construction that exposed the delicate curve of her neckline.

“Rick told you to say that didn’t he?” Unfortunately, he had to nod, “My God a gay guy knows a woman better.” She stepped back and glanced at his open neck, “You left your tie in the taxi? I should never let you go off fighting without giving you a backup pack. Do I have to dress you next time?”

“If you think I’m going to be turned away because of my lack of tie, I’ll bugger off and get it,” he pointed out. She shook her head and in one swift motion produced a spare tie from that mysterious place between her bosom. “I get that you have no faith in me but what else do you have down there?”

He poked his head over but she playfully smacked him away. Seizing him by the collar she began to wrap the tie around his neck with the practised skill of a good mother. Though she was childless the skills were still there.

“I love you, you know that,” he said suddenly, causing her to halt near the end of her knot-tying and smile up at him.

“I love you too,” she replied, tightening the knot, bringing it up to his collar, “But you even nearly stand me up again, I’ll strangle you with this same tie.” She dusted off his shoulders and stepped back, “Now come on, they have champagne.”

She led him by the hand back through the double doors and into the large ballroom that housed nearly a hundred people. Most were milling about, some hung around in groups, some stood near the buffet table with a drink and a canapé, smiling at acquaintances that passed by without courtesy to stop. He’d never been a social butterfly but even this seemed to blow compared to most parties he’d attended.

“You know they had better music at the gay club,” he muttered into her ear.

“We’ll talk about that comment later,” she replied under-her-breath, smiling at one of the women from accounting who walked past with her orange tanned boyfriend. Louise sighed and led him deeper into the crowd. He was banged into by that many people he began to wonder if some of it was on purpose until they arrived near the buffet table where Louise grabbed herself a plate.

“Okay with buffets like these you really wanna work the table and know your enemy,” Louise explained, “Normally you want to jump on the popular things – nuts, Pringles, the expensive shit – first, then quickly go for your favourites before the ravenous vultures descend on the leftovers.” From the corner of her eye she caught him opening his mouth to speak but like a smart boy he quickly snapped it shut, “But I have it on good authority that our friend Mike from accounting like those little mini quiches – the ones that make you all horny – so I’d snap them up damn fast. Momma needs her sugah, you know what I’m sayin’?”

She cocked an eyebrow as she turned back to his dolefully bewildered face. Her look fell a little. Even two years on she was still worried he would see the inner hair-pulling-florist-like crazy woman and either leave or somehow maddeningly worse, pity her. Still, he hadn’t so far so all was well in the world.

“I love you,” he told her in a sing-song voice a little too sickly sweet for his normal outpour of admonition.

“You think I’m crazy don’t you?” she asked him, her almost heart-broken sweet face caught between the heap of food mounded upon a paper plate in one hand and the solitary, somehow noble, crab puff pastry in her other.

“Yes, and I love you,” he reiterated. She smiled hopefully up at him and he laid one reassuring hand on her lightly freckled cheek. It made her feel light inside as if all the tired bits of her were softly yet acutely awoken. When he stepped back she was dazed but once recovered, if only slightly, she explained,

“You should probably find Ruth, she said she wanted to speak to you before the ceremony. She should be here any minute.”

“Did she say what it was about?”

“Not to me. Something personal.”

She leaned up onto her tiptoes and quickly kissed him on the lips. Then she disappeared once more into the crowd to allow him to begin his hunt. He slipped quietly through the chattering crowds and back out towards the corridor outside the ballroom. The elevators were right there so he decided to hang around and wait. His eyes caught the star and streetlight coming in through the nearby window and he deigned to peek through the curtains out to the city beyond.

In many ways, he’d not expected to remain in Manchester. Much of time before the prison and the Blackout was spent at various dig sites around the world, uncovering everything from ancient tombs to a whole hell of a lot of bottle caps. When Janet had come into his life he’d begun to think about settling down but again not in Manchester. The city – he wasn’t a fan of it. Not just Manchester – any city was just too goddamn urbanised for his likes.

He’d not gotten around to discussing it with Janet before...well...before she’d died. Both times. Yet somehow he’d found himself trapped within the walls of the city, whether through destiny or his love for Louise. But he didn’t feel trapped instead he felt willed. Fates winds were keeping him in place...and the more time he spent there the more he began to realize it would probably be where he’d end up. You didn’t have to love somewhere to not be comfortable living anywhere else.

“Andrew.”

Ruth’s soft but commanding voice floated over to him from behind, breaking him free from his nostalgic thoughts. He turned to face her and smiled.

The past two years had changed her in ways he couldn’t define. Perhaps it was the realization of the extent of the fight they had on their hands, the places it reached. Perhaps it was the burden of the deaths that happened whilst on her watch. Only she knew. Her features were sharp, her dark brunette hair usually tied now was allowed to flow elegantly behind her. She kept it shorter these days, easier to manage.

When he’d first worked under her she’d been a powerful and imposing figure. She didn’t display brute strength, all in all, her body was rather petite. But she oozed a radiance of control and calm power so much so that most people who met her knew automatically who was boss. She’d been humbled a bit since those days, though she still held her air of dignity.

She had changed, that much was painfully clear. The effects of being trapped in the basement during the collapse of the Biogenesis Tower had left their mark on her – a private penance she shared with no other. A thin scar almost undetectable to people who didn’t know her ran along the right side of her jaw. Perhaps the harder cross she had to bear was the crippling injury to her lower back which had now confined her to a wheelchair.

Still, even looking down at her, she was the Boss.

“Evening Ruth. Louise told me you were looking for me,” he opened. She smiled a smile which didn’t touch the corners of her eyes. It was a fake smile but with Ruth that only meant it was bad news. “What is it?”

“We’re going to have to talk about this reading me like a book thing you all think you have going on,” she chided him gently. “Don’t worry, we don’t have another apocalypse on our hands. Although I do have to speak to you.” She hesitated, a very un-Ruth-like thing to do.

“It’s about Janet,” she explained. She spoke of her in a clipped tone, evoking tenses long since passed. As if the dealing was done. As though Janet were truly dead. As though neither of them awoke in the darkest stretches of the night, with the grinning tableau of her innocent face burning in their retinas. Andrew could envy Ruth for she had never seen in person the hatred and madness in Janet’s eyes before she died. No that wasn’t quite right – before Rick had killed her.

“You want to know whether I think she should have her name put on the memorial?” Andrew deduced. He had been waiting for her to pose such a question since he’d first heard news of it. Even so, he’d barely thought about how he felt about it. It had been a hypothetical question, a signpost along the road of ‘dealing with it’. One he’d just as soon ignore.

“Marcus and I have been discussing it,” she offered. Marcus Dixon was the semi-reclusive billionaire who had founded Biogenesis and still took quite an active role in its workings, even if only directly through Ruth herself. “We won’t put her name on without your say-so of course. But to not do so may arouse suspicion.”

He thought briefly but hard. Only Rick, Sandy, himself, Louise, Angel, Ruth and Dixon knew of all the events surrounding those final few weeks before the blast. Even with all of her sizeable influence, Ruth could not have hoped to cover up half of what happened. Thanks to Dixon the Blackout had become a ‘catastrophic power failure’ (the investigation was still ongoing last time they checked). All in all, a crappy but far less complicated day.

A part of him wished that there was no conspiracy. They lost some good people that day. Stu Williams from Engineering for one and their tech geek Mark for another. Ruth had been particularly closed-lipped about Mark, there were some things it seemed she wished she couldn’t remember. Some things about which she didn’t seem able to speak.

“In the end, it comes down to the question I keep asking myself of whether the real Janet died down in that Temple, or whether she was the person that tried to kill us all,” he said.

“And?” Gently, not pushing.

“And it was her alright,” he explained. “I can’t kid myself about that. As filled with grief, rage and hopped up on power as she was, it was still Janet. But then I remember back to when we first started seeing one another. It was maybe two weeks into the relationship. She was doing a tour of duty in the ER for a week. Normally it would have been a week of cuts and broken bones but there was a gas explosion at that law firm on the Deansgate and all the patients were rushed to the ER.”

“She told me about a little girl who had come in. She had internal bleeding, burns over ninety per cent of her body. She was dead, no matter what Janet did. But she was in incredible pain and Janet found she had a choice – to pump her full of morphine so that she didn’t feel the pain and rob her family of maybe the last twenty minutes she had left, or to leave her to die in agony.”

“She gave her the morphine?” Less of a question, really, more of a statement.

“Yes,” Andrew admitted. He paused for a moment later and finally told her, quite firmly, “I don’t think that your whole life should be about the worst thing you ever did. Towards the end, she went through something and was touched by something I don’t think any of us will ever understand and hope never have to. But that doesn’t negate the rest of her existence. And I think the wonderful woman we all loved should be remembered as such.”

“Good,” Ruth agreed and smiled at him. All her smiles seemed tinged with sadness these days, especially conversations about people lost. She of all of them had already lost so much – her husband to cancer, her daughter to family conflict and her ability to walk thanks to an explosion by a former employee and friend. He didn’t know how she could remain so calm. In a way it made him feel ashamed of the way he acted in the wake of Janet’s death the first time. The blinding rage taking over him.

His phone jingled in his pocket and he quickly excused himself. He moved further down the corridor and answered,

“Dr Wells, its DCI Mercer,” came the recognisable voice on the other end of the phone.

“Detective, it’s Andrew,” he reminded him. “What can I do for you? If you’re looking for Ruth, she’s just...”

“It’s you I called to speak to actually,” the detective interrupted him, “There’s been a homicide and the victim had your number on him, card as well as a matter of fact. I was wondering if you could come down to the crime scene to give an identification.”

“Who’s died?” Andrew asked him.

“A doctor of marine archaeology with the Museum of Manchester,” he explained, “Dr Nate Steele, is he an associate of yours?”