Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

She had made a stupid decision. It would not be the first in her life and likely would never be the last. She knew this – but when it came to matters of the heart and particularly matters of family, Ruth knew you were sometimes bound by forces outside of your conscious control.

After leaving the flat she had asked the driver to take her back to Sale. Back to the home she and John shared for years. The three-story old Victorian building in a small leafy cul-de-sac behind walls and fences. The home in which Mary had grown up in and in which she had not stepped foot since the night of the Blackout, since moving into Home Base. But it was not there where she wished to go.

She was dropped off outside, asked her driver to return in about an hour. She sat briefly, perhaps for five minutes or more, looking up at the old home. The empty windows and lifeless feel. An unoccupied home seems somehow so obvious, as though the soul departs with the people who lived there. At least it had not yet begun to rot.

After her contemplative moment of silence, she turned to the left and began to wheel slowly down the street. It was the dead of night and she was alone in a darkened suburb, but she felt safe. In all the time she had lived on that little cul-de-sac she felt safe and that would not change now, not for she who wandered into Iranian prisons.

At the end of the street, she turned again, this time travelling for only two minutes before she finally came to the large single-storied building, wide floor to ceiling windows on two sides. The local Sale Community Library. She wheeled up the fire exit ramp, knowing expectantly that it would be open for her – and it was, it swung open with relative ease and allowed her to gain entry into the empty building.

Only it wasn’t empty, of that she was sure.

The fire exit was at the far side of the building so she immediately found herself surrounded by the stacks of books. Trashy fiction section by the looks of it, she rolled forward in the dark, the streetlight floating through the windows her only guide. It was enough to see through some of the shadows and make sure she didn’t bump into either side of the stacks.

The clue she had seen had been the top of the stack of books and was relatively simple. The majority of the stack of books had been loaned from the local Eccles Community Library, one or two from the university library – no doubt for class. But the top book, the inner flap read Sale Community Library. The last stamped loan date had been yesterday. She knew immediately that even if she were feeling nostalgic, there was no way in hell Mary would have travelled back to her childhood library, the one she had spent so many summers in with her dad while Ruth worked – just for a book.

As if that had not been enough the title had been the giveaway – Atlantis Rising.

She didn’t know why she assumed the message had come from Mary and not some sick New Order joke. She also didn’t know why she didn’t trust DCI Mercer with the information and the possibility of accompanying her. She just acted upon the instinct and the feeling she had at the moment – which told her quite plainly to keep it to herself. Instinct told her that it was a personal enough connection that only Mary would know the significance. That somehow, even if the night were to go extremely wrong, the one thing she had to do – that she owed to her daughter – was to try to see it through herself.

She stopped when she reached the first small seating area, three tables collected together with hard plastic chairs for individuals to sit on. Nowhere near as nice as the children’s area she’d collected Mary from once or twice.

“Mary, are you here?” she called out, feeling foolish like one of those madmen on the ghost programmes Rick insisted on watching. “It’s me, your mother.”

She heard a scoff, a familiar sound but one she’d not heard in…well, say two years.

“You still call yourself that?” her child asked from the darkness. She heard, and felt, movement around her. Behind her, to the left. “You stopped being that long before my dad died.”

“Mary, where are you?” she called out again, this time feeling a whisper of movement to her left. There was no one, only darkness and shadows that remained motionless. Finally, streetlight dappled over a familiar form emerging from the other side of the seating area, from the stacks. Her heart dropped further.

Mary Sellers, her daughter, twenty years old was very different. No longer a bit on the heavier side, her hair now very short. Her usual soft features hardened beyond that which even she’d seen on her face when John had died. Somehow the feature which chilled her to the core more than any other was the jet black BioSuit, the design different and yet echoingly familiar.

“You know, I thought it would be quicker than this,” Mary seemed to admit, “I thought that the moment my supervisor called the police about the ‘disturbance’ – you’d come running through.” She smirked, “Sorry, no offence. But you didn’t come straight away, did you? The moment we heard your little police friend was poking around, it seemed pretty easy to set up. He had to be the one to bring you, didn’t he? That’s why I’ve been waiting here this long.”

“Are you with them?” Ruth asked simply, though it was a foregone conclusion.

“They know everything about you, you know,” Mary replied, ignoring the question, her voice beginning to shake a little with anger. “And about me. They knew what I was going through, they said they could help me. At first, I thought they meant help me to heal – you know all that Oprah crap about pulling yourself back together after trauma. But that wasn’t what they showed me. Instead, they showed me what power was. What anger could do. And what hate was for.”

Mary disappeared from where she stood, the plumes of thick black smoke seemed to emanate from where she had been. Seconds later she appeared, face to face, nose to nose with her mother. Her eyes blazing with fury, the scent of thick smog invading her nostrils. Both hands clamped painfully around her wrist.

“You might hate me Mary,” Ruth admitted, the admission sticking in her throat hard, “You might want to hurt me. But you do not know what you’re getting involved in.”

She only smirked wider, ignoring everything Ruth said. Looking in her daughter’s eyes she thought her lost.

“I’d agree with her,” the voice came from behind.

Mary straightened, confused and angered by the intrusion. This was clearly not an ally, not part of whatever plan she’d cooked up. She let go of her mother’s wrists and seemed to snarl at the intruder.

“Who the hell are you?”

Two bright red dots appeared on her daughter’s forehead.

“A bitch who’d shoot you in the face,” her saviour commented, the voice becoming more familiar. Mary appeared to weigh up her options and smartly disappeared in the same cloud of the hideous black smog.

Her saviour came around to the front, though Ruth had by this point guessed her identity. The suit was the same as before, the Taser was new. Drake of MOO looked down at her and sighed.

“I suppose we need to talk.”