Darren Shan - Hell's Horizon

“You think it might turn my head?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never heard of a tyrant ruling with a kind hand. You need a heart of stone to run a city. I can’t see you operating on a par with The Cardinal. You’re too human.”

“Would you take it?” I asked.

“Not for anything,” he answered bluntly. “I’ve only ruined a handful of lives, yet the guilt is unbearable. I’d be lost within a week if I controlled the destinies of millions.”

“Of course it doesn’t matter what I decide, does it? With things poised the way they are”—I nodded at his clenched hand—“it’s purely academic.”

“No,” he said. “If you choose to go with them, I won’t stop you.”

“You mean that?”

“I was never in this to destroy you. It was always and only Wami. I like the idea of hitting the heavens with you. It would be nice, in spite of all I’ve done, if you made up your mind to die with me, as my friend. But if you want to go with them, I won’t stand in your way.”

“Maybe we could both stick around. I could give Wami to you.”

He smiled sadly. “You wouldn’t. He’s a monster but you won’t bring him down. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s true what they say, and blood is thicker than water.”

“It looks to me like Wami’s going to come out of this considerably better off,” I noted. “An enemy dead, his son in control of the city. He’ll laugh at you, Bill.”

Bill’s face twitched. “He won’t be laughing long,” he muttered, then chuckled. “Death can’t keep a good man down. Maybe I’ll get even with him yet.”

I faced the translator. “What if I reject you?”

“We will turn to one of Paucar Wami’s other sons if we must,” he sighed. “We hope to avoid such complications. You are the firstborn, and have been blessed by Inti — your healing powers are a sign that he has a high regard for you. But alternative measures exist should we have need of them. We cannot force you.”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing these last few months? Forcing my hand?”

“No. We have been cleansing you of your past, leading you to a point where you had to choose. But your cooperation must be volunteered, not commandeered. That is not to say we’ll accept a refusal — we’ll keep after you, harry you, destroy those who come close to you, interfere in your affairs, deprive you of happiness. But we won’t — can’t — openly force you to pledge yourself to our cause.”

“Thank heavens for small mercies,” I commented drily, then considered what it would be like to have the villacs on my back for the rest of my life. Suddenly my choice was clear. Welcome, even, since I had nothing to lose and no life to go back to. If they’d come to me before Priscilla and Nicola, before killing Ellen, I might have accepted their offer of power. But by pushing so hard, they’d taken all that I would have wanted power for . They’d misjudged me entirely, or had been led to misjudge me by Bill. They thought they had me in the palm of their hand, but Bill was calling the shots, and he had a card up his sleeve that would wipe the smiles off their faces and place me beyond their reach forever.

I sat back and gripped the arms of the chair. “It would’ve been an interesting life,” I said to Bill.

“It sure would,” he agreed, reading my intentions.

“Do you think I’d have made a good leader?”

“No,” he laughed.

“Don’t make any hasty decisions,” the translator warned, sensing something amiss. “It does not pay to—”

But I wasn’t interested in his words any longer and cut him short with a curt command. “Let’s blow this joint.”

Bill’s fist unclenched. There was a tiny click. The face of the villac with the mole creased and he started talking rapidly, blind eyes filling with doubt. The translator darted forward, looking for the concealed object in Bill’s palm. He tried to shout a question. But before he could say anything, the world exploded. There was a roar of undiluted rage. Bill, the villac and his translator were lost to jagged shards of red and white. I flew into black.

I awoke in the hospital, suffering from pain the like of which I’d never dreamed of. I was on a drip for weeks, bedridden much longer. It was almost three months before I was fit to release myself, and even then it was against the advice of the doctors.

I caught the force of the explosion straight on, but rather than obliterate me, it sent me flying, chair and all, through the huge front window. The neighbors found me spread-eagled on the lawn, a burned chunk of flesh, barely alive.

Later, the investigators discovered three corpses among the ashes and debris, too charred for definitive identification, teeth melted, flesh burned away to nothing, bones shattered and scattered. When I was able to respond to their questions, I told them about Bill and the Incan descendants, and that cleared up the mystery of the bodies.

Bill left a note for Howard Kett, clearing my name and confessing to his part in the murders of Nic Hornyak, Ellen Fraser and Valerie Thomas, to whom he’d slipped the rope she’d hanged herself with. He even took credit for Priscilla’s death, swearing that he’d shot her. Kett knew better — he’d been to my apartment while I was recovering in the hospital and found the gun with my prints all over it — but he went along with the lie and “lost” the evidence.

If I wished to be ungracious, I could say it was because he feared my dragging him into the public arena if I was put on trial. But that would be doing him a disservice. I think he did it because he felt sorry for me. He called in to see me when I was able to accept visitors. Told me he was quitting the city. Warned me to keep my mouth shut about his relationship with Nick, then wished me well.

While I recuperated, paranoid inner voices mocked me. “Bill isn’t dead,” they whispered. “He could have gotten his hands on a corpse as easily as a bottle of milk. He was an explosives expert who could have arranged it so you’d go out the window and the Incas to hell, while he walked away untouched.” And so on, day and night without pause.

I didn’t believe the voices but I couldn’t rid myself of them. I knew I was only torturing myself, that I’d grown accustomed to betrayal and was seeing it where it didn’t exist, but part of me was convinced that Bill was out there, waiting to finish me off, and I often woke screaming from nightmares of him.

When I could think straight, I spent days and nights wondering about Bill and my father. What did Wami do to him? What could drive a man to seek revenge on his tormentor through his own loved ones? Wami must have killed somebody close to Bill, but that only accounted for Bill’s motive. It didn’t shed light on why he was so intent on working through me, why he devoted his life to manipulating mine. No matter how I looked at it, it didn’t make sense. I had a horrible feeling it never would.

As for the villacs , my father and his fellow Ayuamarcans…

They’d disappeared. The priests, I presumed, were keeping their heads down, but the Ayuamarcans had vanished from the face of the Earth, as predicted by The Cardinal. Nobody — myself excluded — recognized Leonora Shankar’s name or Ama Situwa’s, or that of any of the others on the list. They’d been erased from records and the minds of the city’s populace. Nobody remembered them, not even Ama’s supposed father, Cafran Reed, who swore when I interrogated him that he had no daughter of that name or description.

There was one exception — Paucar Wami. His name lived on. People’s memories of him were sketchy — when I questioned Fabio, he recalled a vague rumor about a killer — but some small part of his legend had survived.