Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

Before any great moments flash by there should always be a period of silence. A moment of calm. A moment to reflect. Ruth Sellers needed that moment like she needed oxygen. Every board meeting she’d ever attended, hell every poker game with generals she’d shuffled at; she’d take that moment.

When she was very young, back before the world took over and she could be a child (something Rick was certain had never actually been true) she had been a gymnast. Not an Olympic gymnast or anything like that but she attended after school classes and competed in a few local competitions. Up until the age of fourteen when her growing breasts made her too top-heavy and she’d been forced to turn to other pursuits.

Thankfully those wild days were caught short by meeting a certain John Sellers and helping him out on his dad’s market stall on a Saturday turned her from a top-heavy gymnast to a world-class businesswoman. Admittedly via a few other steps.

While she was still in her glory gymnast days, before every competition, before every class, she would make sure to arrive early and be the first one there. Usually, she would arrive before the teacher and be changed into her leotard before anyone else even contemplated being there. She would take some time in the gymnasium, taking in the vastness of the space as though she were standing on the craterous surface of the moon. She would close her eyes and she would breathe slowly, clearing her mind of thoughts and her being of preconceptions (a word she thought of only on reflection and not at the time).

She would take time to simply be. Present and aware. She would open her eyes and see the landscape for what it was not what she wanted it to be. Reality. Grounded.

It was if anything could be said to be, the secret to her success. Every moment she knew she was about to head into a whole new situation, somewhere where she needed to be at her best or some crucial negotiation she needed to navigate with aplomb. Hell, any meeting where she’d had to learn about the Shadow and the Temple. Before each of these, she would close her eyes and take her breath, calm her mind. Think rationally.

There was only one moment when that had failed her; when the crushing weight of hopelessness had filled her. No amount of breath had helped. She had screamed out for serenity and found only blankness in that place of dirt and darkness where hope had died. When thoughts of that time came she pushed them firmly away, not even realising her hand reflexively rubbed the small of her back each time she did.

By her mental calculations, their latest complication would be arriving any minute. She steeled herself for it, sat in her chair in what she still thought of as her new office – though she’d been there now for nearly two years since they’d purchased the building on Baxter Street. The place Rick now had everyone calling Home Base like they were some Metal Gear mercenary group rather than a bunch of idiot scientists with enhanced abilities.

She hated thinking about those kinds of sentences.

When Rick had first seen the news report he’d been on his way to the airport right away. His first call had been to her, though until she’d turned on World News she’d not believed it. There was no denying the picture before her though was the man she’d known as Ben Ramirez, an employee for all of about three weeks before his death. The man whose wedding she’d attended despite knowing full well how it would end – in tears staining the bride’s white dress. It had been Allison’s invitation. She’d not seen her since either, her employment self-terminated slightly before Ben’s was ripped away by their Horseman.

The company private jet had been fuelled and waiting for him when he’d arrived. Since then he’d reported back only that it was definitely Ben and that he’d agreed to return to the UK. She’d had the jet refuelled and ready to depart, which she’d heard it had three hours ago. She’d also then had a phone call from Marcus, who quite plainly had asked her what the hell was going on. Since she’d needed his connections to cover up everything that had happened before and after the Blackout, she only needed to be honest with him – and explained none of them knew yet.

It was true, none of them knew what Ben’s return meant. The first time they had seen someone come back from the dead it had been Stacey. Through means unknown, the First Horseman had raised her from her grave, activated her internal junk DNA which appeared to be control of electricity – and sent her after them like a banshee from hell. And whether Janet had died down in the Temple or whether she’d been shielded by the demonic force which she’d allied herself with, she was the second person who had seemingly come back from the dead.

The only time in which they hadn’t seen trauma and trouble was when Rick was revived by Angel, whose powers seemed to transcend anything they’d come across so far and give him a healing ability that made Louise afraid she was redundant. They soon learned that his gift was limited and took its toll on him, so since then, they’d healed up the old fashioned way – with time and a lot of medical-grade super-glue.

Two out of three went bad. She didn’t like those odds – so Ben’s return was at the top of her threat assessment list. Coming as it did straight after the capture of Cyvus and every hackle on her body was raised to maximum alert.

The buzz on her desk announced the arrival of Rick and Ben. It was a full five minutes later when the lift requested access and Rick, Andrew, Sandy and Angel filed out into her office. Rick and Sandy slouched in her chairs, while Andrew and Angel preferred to stand. After a moment’s silence, she broke the silence.

“So where is he?”

“Who?” Rick asked, sarcastically, “Oh, you mean short, dark and kind of hot for a dead guy? Yeah, Louise is getting her probes out right now to figure out the medical angle. Not that she’ll be able to do anything they couldn’t do at the hospital in Los Something-or-other.”

“We do have cutting edge technology here, Rick,” Sandy reminded him.

“Sure, but all the cutting edge technology we have couldn’t explain why your last ingrowing toenail looked suspiciously like David Dickinson. I’ll put my faith outside of science, thanks,” Rick answered back, before asking her, “I’d like to know what Professor X thinks.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped at him more out of reflex than taking genuine offence and instead sighed, wondering how honest to be in her assessment. “I think we need more information. What are your impressions?”

“If we go off our history with dead people we don’t tend to do well,” Sandy voiced concerns she echoed out loud, “Stacey – tried to kill me, Rick and Louise. Janet – all of us and the world with it.”

“To be fair Janet only tried to kill us,” Rick reminded them, “She just didn’t care who she killed incidentally in her plan to conquer the world. And technically the only person either of them killed directly seems to have gotten better.”

“And you also did return from the dead, did you not, Rick?” Angel interjected. “Twice? Would you say you are a threat?”

“Only to people’s masculinity during rugby matches.”

“What is your point, Angel?” she asked him, curious.

“Only that perhaps we should take this person, whoever he may turn out to be at face value,” Angel explained, “After all, does not your own history tell you that if you try to determine the way someone should be, one way or another, you inevitably push them into becoming the very thing you are fighting against?”

“How many times do we have to tell you Supernatural is not a documentary?” Sandy asked, before snapping at Rick, “You should not have told him that.”

“Well around here some days it’s hard to tell,” Rick threw back, “Besides his point is valid.” He sat up, a sign he was becoming serious for a change, “Look, the man that I spoke to in that hospital seemed...blank. Completely. Lost and a little scared but no more than anyone would be waking up without knowing who they are. Not all people have the powers of the Vulcan over there to see the world logically.”

“He was not Ben. Not mentally anyway. He was just a confused man, unsure of what the hell was going on. When we started talking he seemed nice, receptive to what I had to say. Just glad someone was giving him some answers.”

Something began to tingle at the back of Ruth’s mind, she straightened up herself and looked sternly in Rick’s direction.

“What answers did you give him?”

Now all eyes were on Rick as he shrugged sheepishly.

“I had to tell him something to get him back here,” Rick defended.

“For fuck’s sake…”

“Look, half of that bloody country is stone, so it was only a matter of time before he mind-melded with a balcony and freaked the hell out,” he continued, “So I may have told him some things about what was going on when he died.”

“How much?” she snapped.

“So the highlights, the Horseman, the brutal murder…” he explained, “…okay to be fair pretty much everything except for dumping his fiancé at the altar and shagging me on and off for eight years. I figured he can learn about bisexual love triangles the same way I did – through the medium of soap opera.”

“Rick!” she and Sandy both snapped at him at the same time.

“I am surprised he believed such an outlandish story,” Angel commented as he ruffled his feathers.

“Would make a good trashy paperback,” Rick agreed, “not that any conventional publishing house would take it but you can self-publish any old shit online these days. Just look at all the werewolf porn on Kindle.” He caught the glares from Ruth and Sandy – though none surprisingly from Andrew who remained distant and staring out of the window. “Off-topic, I get it. At the end of the day, he’s fine, I’m fine and despite having to do a little display of ‘I bless the rains down in Murcia’ to prove we have super-powers, no snowflakes have been harmed in the retrieval of this dead guy. So can we get off my back and maybe give this thing some time to play out?”

Reluctantly, she had to agree.

“Fine, it’s been a long day,” she answered, “We should all get some sleep and come back to it in the morning.” She didn’t need to dismiss them, most of them headed out simply from the statement. She made sure to catch Rick’s eye, so he’d hang around a little longer and allow the others to leave first.

“Are you okay?” she asked him, the one question which from her would cut through the bluster.

“Messed up, travel tired, but I’ll be fine,” he answered honestly.

“I know that this seems like a miracle,” she reminded him, or voiced to herself – she wasn’t quite sure. “But until we know exactly how he came back and what’s going on in his head, we just need to be careful – and I’ll make sure we keep eyes on him.”

“Okay, if you want to tell me not to have sex with him, please just say it because, with this booty, cameras aren’t a threat, they’re an enticement.”

“Fuck you,” despite the words she found herself genuinely laughing.

“Apparently not.”

* * *

Ruth awoke hours later in the crushing dark with a start. It surrounded her, enveloped her in an embrace without form. The distinct screams, a hopeless cry. Any minute the slightest shift, the minutest movement and the house of cards she once dealt with would flutter softly down. Then the dark would be eternal, her rest made permanent.

Only it wasn’t. The dark was not truly dark; the peppering of the streetlight, occasionally broken by the odd night bus passing by stories below, displayed across her ceiling. The distinct screams the shriek of brakes or the far-off wailing of some emergency service. Even the crushing feeling across her torso was only a slightly hairy arm errantly flung by her still sleeping companion. She was not buried or entombed, in a basement on the edge of never. She was not alone with the dead.

She had been, but the past was no longer present. A lie but maybe one she had to tell.

It had been nearly two years since that night, yet every morning at 3:30 am she was back there. Suspended in the in-between waking and sleep. Every morning she hung breathless for an eternity as cold reality righted itself and brought her back. The ritual she had developed since then, when sleep had been robbed, brought her further back. If she was not alone she would slowly pluck the arm from around her, careful not to wake him. She would tug the covers from her legs, turn and sit, feeling for the cold arm of the chair kept by her bed.

She had perfected the art of moving across in almost no time. Her determination to remain independent burned fiercest in those moments; the most private and intimate of things she would do herself, she must do herself – or face the possibility that she was no longer herself. She was no longer in charge of her destiny, of her body or her mind. If she could not do something as simple as getting herself out of bed, she was a shell, dashed against the rocks on some pebble beach.

In one practised manoeuvre she glided soundlessly into her chair, fixing the crease in her pyjama bottoms in an old habit of agitation. When she was ready she wheeled herself across the room, the smooth floor picking up no sound from her journey and sidled up to the bookcase across the way. It was a cliché, but one she allowed herself to indulge. She traced one finger along the spine of a particularly unassuming novel, a hardback Danielle Steele and the bookcase slid away to reveal her most private space.

It had originally been built into the building as a panic room – but considering any invasion into their establishment would likely be from individuals who could melt steel as soon as look at it, she had decided to repurpose. Now it was her private office, a room which had turned into something more of a place to indulge her obsession.

Their goal was to track down the new order. Only the leadership – or what she presumed were a rather large proportion of their leadership – had been decimated by the actions of the First Horseman. The networks, the individuals placed throughout all the echelons of society, they were by no means gone. Rather than wither and die she assumed that they began to communicate, began to reconvene and to rally around the remaining members. That they were active – of that she had no doubt – and that they were continuing to plot, she was assured.

The Shadow.

It had been the only time she’d heard a trace of a referral to them. To what they may have considered themselves, reported to her from Rick, supposedly from the lips of one of the more ground-level thug enforcers. It was a name that suited them perfectly, for it was exactly what they were. Society’s shadow, always turning away from the light and blissfully blending into the natural dark with ease.

She knew the problems they would face in trying to convince the world at large of the existence of the Shadow. They were insidious, unseen, unlike anything else. A secret society? Not really, to her mind that created notions of men in robes doing bizarre rituals to pigs in underground halls. They weren’t some Illuminati bogeyman or video-game villains. They weren’t even hiding the existence of the lizard people as the internet community would have sworn. They were an idea. An insipid stain on the collective soul of humanity, quietly but assuredly collecting power in all its forms; making miniature movements to ensure events fell a certain way.

Some things she could prove – scattered remnants of shady business dealings, companies with no name and directors who didn’t exist, that did further deals with far-flung people and far-flung places for purposes unknown. Some to gather property which would later be sold, some to accrue wealth which seemed to slip through the cracks. Some to produce fronts which would later be sacrificed like pawns. A purpose? She couldn’t see, other than to seep into different places, different things.

Other things she couldn’t prove but almost felt without a doubt were deliberate. The building company that was granted the contract to redevelop the underground following the Earthquake two years ago – they were owned by so many other dummy corporations that eventually even their forensic accountants couldn’t tell who owned them. That felt wrong, especially as the ongoing reports of strange activity down at the excavation site of the Temple continued. Tools going missing, strange noises and whispers. The Temple Excavation site was slowly gaining a reputation for being haunted. She didn’t believe in ghosts, despite everything else she had seen, so instead the pit of her stomach told her Shadow.

Things that didn’t sit right drew her attention. Sometimes it led to victories – like the tip-off regarding the club where Cyvus was staying the other night. Sometimes it led to dead ends and in one case a particularly nasty ransom computer virus. Sometimes they said she was mad and sometimes they were right.

She dared not to calculate the hours she had spent in her private room, her small office, surrounded by the snippets of information she had gathered by pulling delicately on so many of the strings she still held. She didn’t because she knew to invite introspection would be the first step to breaking down the barriers she’d built. The walls which guarded her against the memories of the night she spent in the basement, in the dark. She feared if she allowed those to crumble she would not just be dashed against the rocks, she would be swallowed up by the endless surf.

“Are you okay?” the groggy voice of the detective came from behind her.

“Yes,” she answered succinctly without turning around. After a moment she added, “You can leave by the private lift in the back.”

One day she would expect a protest, opening a discussion that would end whatever had developed between them. Part of the reason she allowed it to develop was that for the moment, the detective was still clever enough to simply do as she asked. That night, however, for the first time there was hesitation. A consideration, an internal questioning. Then silently he did as she asked and once more she was alone in the dark.