Dead Waters - Anton Strout [116]
Mason looked around him as we spread out to block any escape path he might try to take, all except the one down to the water below. If he wanted to try that hoping to survive the fall, he could be my guest.
“Everyone stop,” Mason shouted. “Now!”
Everyone on our side of the bridge stopped, but Aidan continued creeping forward on him, fangs bared.
“I said stop,” Mason repeated, and then cocked his head at Aidan as he noticed his teeth. “I’ve got something to stop you as well.” He reached into the collar of his shirt and brought out a wide assortment of chains, all of them with dangling pendants bearing different marks on them. Some of them were definitely religious, some absolutely foreign to me, but they were enough to stop Aidan in his tracks.
“Ever resourceful,” the Inspectre called out to him over the wind.
“It pays to be prepared,” Mason said. “I’m living proof.”
Aidan’s face twisted to its monster form. “What do you want me to do, little brother?” Aidan asked Connor. “I can still probably stop him . . .”
“Don’t,” I shouted. “I’m not going to risk Jane’s life on your ‘probably.’”
“Why are you doing this, Mason?” the Inspectre shouted.
“Why?” he asked. “I turned away from the Department years ago because the dark and secret horrors of this life were too much to bear. Only through teaching film did I revisit my love for all things horrifying, only in fictional form. Thanks to it, I learned why people love seeing scary movies. It’s a thrill, controlled fear without the actual chaos of it being real. Over time that morphed into something more, a darker fascination. . . I turned to the world of the documentary trying to capture the horrors of real life—in this case, the hundreds of deaths at the Hell Gate Bridge.”
“But why?” the Inspectre asked again. “Back in our day, you had everything in control. You were powerful. We were going to fight the good fight side by side.”
“You don’t understand,” Mason said. “Do you even remember the day I told you I was leaving the Department?”
The Inspectre paused in recall, but I stepped forward.
“I do,” I said. “That was the day you almost died, yes? There was a fissure in the earth of a graveyard, ghouls pouring out it—”
“Exactly,” Mason said, giving me a look of suspicion, “but how do you know that?”
I held my hands up and wiggled my fingers. “Psychometrist,” I said. “I let my fingers do the walking.”
“Fascinating,” he said. A spark of interest lit up on his face, the same spark of fascinated curiosity I had seen on it from the vision.
“Look,” I said. “I get it. I really do. For the Inspectre here, that day is but a distant memory, but for me? My powers made it seem like only yesterday. I’ve even felt how you feel. I know the panic you felt that day when you were nearly dragged down into the earth. I understand why you walked away from that life of risk. Hell, I have days in the office where I want to just throw the towel in, too.”
Mason was paying attention to me now. He stared at me like I was stupid. “So, why don’t you, then?” he asked
I shrugged. I wasn’t quite sure of the answer myself
“It’s not in his nature,” Jane said, speaking up in my defense.
Mason Redfield laughed at that. “Not yet, anyway,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“How old are you?” Mason asked. “In your twenties still, yes?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said, darkness thick in his voice. “I almost died that day you saw, and every day after that I wondered when the other shoe was going to drop. When was the grim reaper going to show up at my door? Over time it built, festered. . . and the years slipped by, age creeping up on me, robbing me of my strength, and I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe there was a way to cheat death. There had to be.”
The Inspectre shook his head at his old friend. “So you struck a bargain,” he said, “with that woman in green. Tell me, Mason, how did you manifest her? You haven’t practiced arcana in years.”
“Actually,” Mason said, “finding her was purely accidental.