"I still don't think Vicki did this," Olivia told me.
"Doctor, can you give us a minute?" I asked.
Grayson walked away, leaving Olivia and me alone. "The truth," I said. "You know about those old injuries. Where did they come from?"
"No idea what-"
I slammed my hand onto the metal table, causing Olivia to look down at Amber's body. "If you want my help, then you'd better be damn honest with me."
"Vicki had a temper. About five months ago, she punched Amber in the mouth, busting her jaw and breaking her nose. I forced Vicki to take counselling and they seemed to be back on track."
"So Amber's girlfriend, Vicki, was violent and she's nowhere to be found. Not exactly the best impression. But I agree with you, I don't think she did this. There’s no reason why she take the time and effort to do the enchantments if she wanted to inflict pain on her. And if someone else had put the runes there, Vicki would have known."
"Which means Vicki is still out there, somewhere."
"Were the subsequent victims raped?"
Olivia shook her head. "No sexual injuries, nor did they have the level of torture used here."
I was silent for a moment as thoughts and ideas bubbled away inside me.
"You care to share?" Olivia asked.
"This was personal," I said. "Amber was targeted for a reason and, as Vicki is still missing, I'm almost certain that it has something to do with her. Did those other victims have a link with Amber?"
"We're looking into that now."
"Okay, I'll leave that to you all. You got anyone at Vicki's place?"
Olivia shook her head. "We've had no need."
"Then that's my next port of call. I'll wait for you upstairs."
I thanked the doctor on my way out, passing Tommy as he re-entered the room. "Sara's waiting upstairs," he said.
"I think it'd be best to keep her out of it from now on."
"I've already told her to go back to the office,” Tommy said. “Where you off to?"
"I'll check on Sara, and then I'm going to take a look at Vicki's place."
"Wait for me, I'll join you. I'm certain that some of Olivia's people won't want me hanging around."
I told him I would and left to go back to the ground floor. I was glad that Tommy had offered his help. A bad feeling about where everything was going had begun to settle in my mind, but for the life of me I couldn't dig it free.
Chapter 12
"How're you feeling?" I asked Sara who was stood outside the LOA headquarters drinking a coke.
"I was fine until he started talking about what had been done to her," Sara said and took a long swig of her drink. "That fucked with my head a little."
"Can't say I blame you," I said, and sat on the low wall beside her, staring down the drive to the heavily guarded entrance.
"Your world is amazing," she said after a few heartbeats of silence. "The magic, the wonder and awe I feel just knowing that I'm in the company of a sorcerer and a werewolf. That King Arthur, Merlin and the Olympians are all real is something I don't think my brain has quite managed to process. But alongside all of that, I've seen and heard of violence that I'd never been subjected to before I started working for Tommy."
"It's a violent world," I said. "You get enough species with enough power, a lot of whom consider humans to be little more than a nuisance at best, and at worst prey, and bad things are bound to start happening. Power corrupts."
"It hasn't corrupted you."
I couldn't help but laugh which, from the expression on Sara's face, wasn't what she'd expected. "Power corrupts everyone who wields it. Those who realise this are the same ones who try to use it to help. The trick is realising it before it's too late."
"So it corrupted you?"
"It corrupts everyone," I repeated, with no wish to elaborate.
Sara took the hint and changed the conversation. "What was it like when you saw your first dead body?"
"I was eight," I said, my voice soft as I remembered the day. Sorcerers were blessed, and cursed, with fantastic recall. I could pick out events with ease, but sometimes names and faces didn’t come so easily. So, even though the day was over sixteen-hundred years earlier, I pulled the memory back to the present. It was as if I'd selected a book from a huge library in my mind, each one containing a different year, and then found the correct page. My memories started at the age of eight when I found myself waking up in a field in the south-west of England. Before then… nothing but an empty void.
"Eight! Seriously?"
"Yeah. And to answer your question, I'd been in Camelot for about six months, and used to sneak out of the castle and into the town itself." I smiled at the memory. I'd loved the bustle of the streets, the fact that I could become anonymous and not just Merlin's protege, which was how many in the castle saw me.
"One time there was an argument between two men, something to do with one sleeping with the other man's wife." My memory might be perfect, but it was only in the context of what my eight-year-old self had seen and heard. "A guard decided the best way to deal with it was to let the two of them fight. The man whose wife had cheated defeated his opponent quite easily, but as he turned to celebrate, the first man stabbed him in the heart with a blade passed by one of the crowd.
"I remember the man staring at his chest as the blade was removed. He fell backwards, dying before he hit the ground. There were cheers from some of the crowd, and silence from others. The guards rounded up the killer and his friends and Arthur had them executed a few days later." I stopped there, not willing to talk about how I'd felt at the time. I wasn't angry with the killer for cheating, one look at him and I'd known that he would. I was angry with the dead man for allowing himself to be killed by such deceitful bastard.
Later that day, Merlin had spoken to me about what had happened and asked how I'd have handled it differently if it had been my wife. A t night, sneak into the house of the man who had cheated with my wife, and kill him in his sleep. If my answer had upset Merlin, he'd showed no outward signs and within the week I was learning the ways of silent death.
"I thought Arthur was a benevolent man," Sara said, after hearing that he had people put to death.
"To people who deserved it, he was benevolent. But not to cowards who thought they could flaunt the rules as they liked. If the man had decided on armed combat, the end result would have probably been the same, but it would have been just. Arthur saw things in black and white. You were either right or wrong."
"You don't sound like you agreed with him."
"No, I saw things differently, more pragmatic. Still do for the most part. But Arthur was stubborn and incapable of being flexible when it came to honour. It caused a few arguments between the knights."
"The knights?" Sara asked, eyes wide. "As in, the round table?"
"I don't remember a round table. Merlin made that up to make Arthur seem more impressive. But they were still knights, and all of equal rank, so in that regard the stories are right. Not the knights you think of today, though, with their suits of armour. This was a few centuries before plate armour. They were more along the lines elite warriors. And not all of them got on with Arthur. In fact, most argued on a regular basis."
"Were you a knight?"
"No, I was never afforded that privilege."
"Why?"
Because I had to be kept separate to ensure that whatever Merlin had me do would never tarnish Arthur's name or legend. But more than anything, because I was never knight material and never wished to be. But I kept that to myself, instead going with, "Many reasons."
Sara seemed to accept my answer and finished her drink, throwing the can into a nearby wooden bin, before sitting next to me, her fingers brushing against mine. "Why did that girl have so many horrible things done to her? What did the killer gain from it?"