Chapter 9
The Gray Man did not like knives. Or, well, he liked them as much as anyone could like a deadly weapon/kitchen utensil, but as a method of murder, he preferred small, efficient, easy-to-conceal handguns. They were fast, they usually saved the party unlucky enough to be shot a lot of pain when he had good aim (and he had very good aim), and perhaps least importantly, they simply looked cooler.
But in a situation where no guns were to be found, knives were the next best thing. He had no idea why there were no guns to be found, seeing as he had put no less than three in his car. One under hise seat
He looked over to Scarlet, who was sitting in the passenger seat, arms behind her head, eyes closed, a soft, easy smile on her red-painted lips. The picture of relaxation. She was not asleep.
“Scarlet,”
“Yeah, Gray?” She asked, eyes still closed.
“Why are there no guns in my car?”
“Aesthetic,”
“Scarlet,”
“Fine fine, Mr. I-want-information. God, you should have gone into interrogation,” she stretched her hands out in the air, just managing to miss the roof of the car
“I did,”
“Oh yeah, right, but you remember where we’re going right? If we bring guns, they’re gonna see through that shit in two seconds,”
“If we hide them well-.”
“No, Gray, they’re literally going to see through that shit , like with magic, they do not however, search for knives,”
“Well that seems an impractical use of magic,”
“Well if all their members use only knives, then it ain’t so impractical. Pull over, we’re almost there, we need to switch seats,”
The Gray Man pulled over.
Scarlet looked over and said “And you need to tie your hands again. Something complicated-looking but easy to get out of, none of them study their knots,”
She slid into the driver’s seat while the Gray Man “You’re familiar with the plan, yes? A if they’re hostile, B, if they’re happy to see me,”
“How did you know where to find the guns?”
“You’re predictable,”
They continued driving until they came across a large complex of office buildings. It was the middle of the night, so the abundance of cars were surprising, but it was a dream corporation. People here were trained to get what they wanted. Trained with absolute loyalty. Trained to kill. That was not a daytime operation.
Scarlet grabbed the Gray Man by the rope around his wrists and gave it a sharp tug. Her face had settled into something between cool indifference and gentle disdain. Her fight face.
She tugged him all the way to the front of the tallest building.
In front of the building was a glass booth with a panel covered in buttons. A pale man with dyed white hair stood inside, he wore white clothes. The only dark things about him were his dark brown eyebrows and a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
“Nightingale! Long time no see! Finally back from the job I see, is this him?” said the tall, light man in a security guard’s outfit.
“Just get me an interrogation room ready, okay Snow?”
“Right-o,” ‘Snow’ pushed a button on his panel and Scarlet headed inside, pulling the Gray Man along with her. It was a large, ornate hall. Sparsely decorated, and full of people, but rich all the same. It was the kind of place you tried to be quiet in, but that didn’t stop Scarlet. Her heels clacked on the floor like a metronome. Along the hall, heads turned to smile at her.
“Nightingale!”
“You’re back,”
“Give us a tune sweetheart,”
The voices all seemed to know her, they came from darkened corners and shady back rooms. Some, the Gray Man had heard before, however, Scarlet promised that he wouldn’t be recognized. Then again, blind faith wasn’t something the Gray Man went on very often.
“Whiskers!” Scarlet said suddenly. A mousy woman with ratty brown hair and an impressively sized pair of front teeth skittered up to them.
“Y-yes agent N-N-Night-t-tingale,” she chattered in a high-pitched voice.
“If you’re not doing anything right now, take him to floor 3, room two. My stuff is still there?” She asked. When the girl nodded, Scarlet whispered “Plan A” into the Gray Man’s ear
They were hostile.
The Gray Man let himself be led down the hall and to the right. The floor sloped sharply upward. He tried to be wary of the girl, but it was hard to see her as a real threat when she kept making such careless mistakes. For one, she didn’t look back at the Gray Man once.
They had walked up what felt like two stories when Whiskers began to chuckle.
“S-so, p-p-prison-ner of war, eh?” Whiskers said, her grip on his arms tightened.
“I don’t know,” he remarked “Is this a war?”
“Oh, d-d-don’t play d-dumb,” She growled. “You know e-exact-tly why you’re here. Now, you’re g-going to sit d-d-down in the met-t-tal ch-chair, and you’re going t-to be q-q-quiet, and th-then, I’m g-g-g-going-g t-t-to k-kill her, and then you, loose ends and all,”
“Well, I’m not gagged, and my feet aren’t tied, I could run, or scream,” He pointed out.
She shot him an unimpressed look, removed a small knife from a sheath in her boot, and held it menacingly close to his neck.
“Okay,” he said “Well played,”. It wasn’t, not really, he could have escaped his bindings in the time it took her to reach down into her boot. He could have swept her legs out from under her right at that moment. But making her feel secure in her superiority was of the essence.
They came to a metal door. It had no handles, the only reason the Gray Man knew it was a door was because of the strange hinges.
Whiskers drew a complicated pattern on the door with her index finger. It flew inward as if it had been hit with a gust of wind. Magic.
Whiskers forced him into the room and slammed him into a chair. The Gray Man could sense that this girl really though she had the upper hand.
“St-st-stay,”
They waited in silence for a few more moments until they heard a telltale clicking on the floor. Scarlet.
There were three types of fights. Practice fights (playfighting, sparring matches, tournaments), Ghost fights (verbal fights, wars, fights with yourself), and there were real, honest-to-god, punches-to-the-gut, biting-and-scratching fights.
The Gray Man had alway hated the words “like watching a trainwreck in slow motion”, it was an ugly little phrase his father used to say that meant something bad that you could see coming. This being said, the Gray Man figured that there was a split second before every real fight that was just pure calm. The second that people decided to shed any pretense that they just wanted to be friends. The second that the situation registered. Mean words, or the first blow, or in his case, the moment when he folded his humanity up and put it away for a while. The second where time slowed down. It was like, well, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Scarlet came into view. A knife clattered to the floor, and Whiskers lunged.
The split second before Whiskers hit was pure calm. Time slowed. Nothing changed, well, nothing much. The Gray Man knew what the outcome of the fight could be when he saw the slightest movement.
When he saw Scarlet smirk.
The fight was a short, messy thing. Blood was drawn within two seconds and if Scarlet knew anything, it was how to egg people on to the point where they were more anger than control.
After a particularly sharp scratch, the Gray Man got up to help, but scarlet hissed.
“Sitthe fuck down, Gray,”
The Gray Man sat down.
She called out taunts in a different language between blows, french , the Gray Man thought. He only knew a little, enough to get by, but from what the Gray Man could pick out, what Scarlet was saying was filthy . Whiskers was getting increasingly sloppy, but increasingly vicious, she grabbed Scarlet’s kneecap and pulled hard. Scarlet slid to the floor, her head thudding painfully against the floor. Whiskers took advantage of her momentary distraction and straddled Scarlet’s waist.
“This is why I lo-l-love hand t-to hand c-co-c-c-co-com-,” Scarlet had grabbed a fistful of Whiskers’s hair and tugged at it relentlessly,
“Combat?” Scarlet finished. Whiskers growled. Scarlet rolled so that Whiskers was on her back. “Ironically,” started Scarlet, avoiding a punch, “I learned that one in the bedroom,”.
Scarlet soon maneuvered her way into a standing position and shoved the mousy girl against the wall.
Her stance was off. Whiskers took advantage of the weakness (It seemed like she was quite good at doing that, and took the opportunity to flip the situation around, literally.
“So I g-g-get to k-kill you up c-c-c-close and per-person-nal? Whiskers hissed into Scarlet’s ear, hysterical and sweating.
“The thing about getting up close and personal is,” Scarlet started, before shooting a wink at the Gray Man. “You can’t see what the other person is doing with their hands,” It was then that the Gray Man saw the spot of blood spreading from the knife tip in Whisker’s back.
Scarlet pushed Whiskers back, Whiskers’s legs buckled.
“Next time, don’t drop your knife,” Scarlet said.
“Fu-fuck you,”
“Gray, let’s go,”
“Wha-what’s he g-g-going to do? He’s use-l-l-less.” Whiskers coughed, clutching her stomach.
“Nah, just obedient. And also, not tied up anymore,” Scarlet replied, gesturing to the Gray Man like she was presenting a showhorse.
It was true, the Gray Man had untied his bindings and was bundling the rope up.
“Good man, Gray. Come, the reinforcements will be here soon,” She removed a piece of paper that read ‘just in case’ in elegant, looping script.
“Their reinforcements or our reinforcements?” The Gray Man joked, tying the bundle of rope. Whiskers let out a moan of pain. Scarlet kicked the girl with the toe of her shoe.
“Shut up, and drop the rope Gray, we aren’t going to need it, now come on,”
“Why? What part of the plan are we at now?” The Gray Man asked, interested.
Scarlet grinned a wicked grin “The fun part,”
///////////
Allison Reynolds was pretty sure that someone was dancing to Madonna in the Downtown square. She could still be drunk off Henessy.
“ I was beat, incomplete ,” chimed a voice from the speakers.
Allison really hoped that someone was dancing to Madonna in the square because one, it meant she wasn’t deliriously hung-over or somehow still drink on ridiculously expensive cognac, and two, if she recognized the hair (and, she did recognize the hair) the figure was Henry Cheng.
She had never spoken to him, he always seemed too political, too make-a-difference, too improve-the-economy-save-the-planet-live-up-to-your-potential. He was always aiming to impress, to dazzle, Allison had always hated people like him. However, if she had known about this , maybe her mind would have changed. Probably not .
“ Like a vi-i-i-irgin, feel your heartbeat, next to mine ,”
Still, the boy could dance. Allison leaned against a lamppost with her shopping bags, a small crowd was forming around him and he reveled in the attention.
“Did- did he choreograph this?”
“How did he know this song would play,”
“Damn, just… damn,”
Allison smirked at the murmurs from the crowd, the abandoned shopping bags by the fountain told a different story. The boy had really just dropped his bags and started dancing. She caught sight of a guy edging towards him from the crowd. He did not look happy.
“Hey!” he barked at Henry.
Henry looked at him and shot him a glowing smile without skipping a beat. “Why hello, large, angry man, how large and angry you look today! I’d love to continue this talk but the song’s almost done, and I can’t disappoint the crowd, now can I?” he circled around the man “So, sorry, but could you wait a bit longer?”
The man stomped off, probably annoyed by the condescending politeness. Allison picked up her bag and walked off, she had other errands to run and she wasn’t particularly close to Henry Cheng.
He caught sight of her though, and sent her a wave and a smile, before launching into a complicated series of steps without looking to see if she would wave back.
Allison laughed and shook her head. Rich boys.
It wasn’t until long after the song ended that it occurred to Allison that Henry Cheng shouldn’t have been there, he would just be starting college soon and Palmetto state wasn’t likely to be one of his choices. She wondered if she could catch him again, it was getting pretty late, he would probably have left.
No harm in trying.
She made her way back to the fountain, the crowd had long since dispersed. Henry, of course, wasn’t there. The sun was about to set so most of the shoppers had gone home. She started towards the parking lot, resigned that she wouldn’t be getting any answers today.
Something rustled in the corner of her eye. An abandoned shopping bag. Henry hadn’t picked them up after he finished dancing...
Something was wrong.
She heard something, a faint thump. She followed the sound to a back alley where a few men were circled around something- someone , she realized. They were kicking him. The figure, Allison realized, was Henry Cheng.
“Hey, what the hell? Leave him alone!’ She shouted. A few of them saw her and ran away, desperate not to be caught. Only one remained. The angry man from earlier. “I said, leave him alone,”
“I heard what you said, lady, but someone needs to teach this fag a lesson,”
Allison made an understanding face. She walked up to the man slowly, keeping her face neutral and swiftly kicked her knee up between his legs. When he hunched over, she pushed him onto his side. He skidded into a wall in the fetal position.
He would get up in a few seconds, so she grabbed Henry, looped her arms around his, and fled the scene, dragging him along. He felt lighter than he should have felt. Allison hoped that wasn’t a bad thing. She ran for what seemed like hours and stopped once she got what felt like a safe distance away.
She heard a soft cough, or maybe a laugh from the figure on her shoulders. “Pretty lady, if I didn’t know any better, I would have said you were an angel,” Henry smiled. Allison didn’t know how someone as hurt as him could smile so brightly.
“Far from it,” she answered. “Come on, we’re near my car, I’ll get you to a doctor,”
“Ms. Reynolds, just take me to Richard Gansey and Blue Sargent, and I’ll be fine. Come now, you wouldn’t refuse a dying man his last wish, would you?” He wasn’t dying, Allison had gotten worse injuries from a bad game, but with the way in which he asked it, broken and trembling, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he was.
“Don’t be a drama queen, you’re not dying. Come on, let’s get you to the dorm then, our nurse, Abby Winfield, can make a house call,”
“You say you’re not an angel, maybe you’re a saint?” He joked.
“Wrong again,” Allison muttered “If you wanted someone holy, you should have talked to Renee,”. They didn’t say any more until they got to the dorms.
As they pulled into the dorm parking lot, Allison let out a sigh.
She couldn’t have one quiet year?
///////////
Ronan Lynch did not remember the first time he had brought something back from a dream. He thought, perhaps it was a flower, or a feather. Ronan did remember, however, the first dream thing he had ever gotten as a gift.
Declan had been bragging about his present all day, a top that never stopped spinning unless you forced it to, Ronan had been too young to know that this shouldn’t be the case, so nothing struck him as strange, but he listened intently to Declan anyway.
Ronan had admired his brother, at one point in time. He would never admit it, to himself or to anyone else, but he still did, just a little.
Ronan didn’t remember what Declan had said, but he did remember being mesmerized by the top, the colorful plastic moving without fail. He remembered reaching for it. He remembered Declan slapping his hand away. It’s not yours Ronan, this one is mine.
But I don’t have one!
That was the moment that Ronan started to envy Declan, and he would never admit it, at least not out loud, but he still did, just a little.
Declan had not let him watch the top after that. So Ronan ran out into the fields, there was always something to do in the fields, he could not remember if he had been crying or not. He had always been a crier as a kid.
He didn’t know how long he had stayed out in that field, playing and pretending to be fine by himself, but knowing that he wasn’t. Ronan was a creature of company after all.
He had finally just lain down in the tall grass and looked up at the sky. It was picture perfect and blue, the kind that he drew pictures of, and his mother always put them on the fridge.
He felt someone lay down next to him. His father. They didn’t look at each other, but Ronan knew it was him, he could feel it. They were silent for what seemed like forever, then he felt his father shift.
“So, Declan’s being a bastard again, is he?” Says Niall.
“Ssssshhh, mom says you aren’t supposed to say that,” Ronan says back, a gap-toothed grin spreading across his face nevertheless.
“What your mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her,”
They were silent again. This time because Niall had fallen asleep, like father like son, so had Ronan.
When Ronan woke up, Niall had been sitting up in the grass. There were smudges of dirt on his cheeks, but there was no way of telling if he had gotten them before or after he fell asleep.
“Well my boy, time for your gift,”
Ronan had sat up, wide awake.
Niall had pushed a tiny red bottle into Ronan’s small hand. Ronan looked at it, crystal clear and red as a sunrise.
“Think of a rule you’d like to break, any rule, and then drink this. Then you can break it,” Niall winked “With no consequences,”.
Ronan remembered thinking that his gift had been nowhere as cool as Declan’s, a mere potion was not as good as a toy. How foolish he had been. Still, he kept it, because his father had given it to him, and Ronan would
Ronan had used the potion not a week later, to sneak a hot cookie straight out of the oven. Ronan did not know what he had lost at the time. He suspected he still didn’t, but every time he could have used it, for Gansey, for Blue, for Adam, he felt a pang of guilt.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to replicate it. But it was always wrong, different, a darker shade of red, a different bottle, and Ronan could feel that it wouldn’t work. He could not test it in the dream, because there was always only one dose, and he didn’t know what it would do to him.
Any rule , he found himself thinking, more and more often these days, if you could break any rule, what would you do?