The Man Who Fell Read online

  “But we do know one thing,” the man continued. “The name Osgood mean anything to you?”

  “Osgood?” He thought for a minute. And actually the name was familiar to him, though it took him a moment or two to place it. “Benjamin Osgood?”

  “He's dead,” the dark haired detective told him bluntly.

  “Oh.” Dale struggled to think of something to say. He didn't know the man. “I'm sorry to hear that. I think I met him once. He was old from memory. Had a young wife. The Osgoods were friends of my ex-wife's family, the Darrens. Property development or something I think.”

  “Athena?”

  “Ah … yes. That's the wife … I think.” He wasn't completely sure. It had been a while. “Pretty. Long, dark hair.” He couldn't really remember a lot more about her than that.

  “Sounds about right,” the other detective replied. “Matches the woman in the cells, currently busy destroying them.”

  “In the cells?” For a moment that didn't make sense. Until he put it together with everything else that had happened. “Athena Osgood attacked me?” But that made no sense at all. Why would she come all this way to attack him? He doubted they were friends, especially not now with all the terrible things Celeste was saying about him. But she didn't hate him as far as he knew. They didn't even know each other.

  “And how could she be so strong?” he added. “I don't remember anything about her being a body builder! More like a Martini sipper at the club she and the rest of her billionaire friends frequented!”

  “A body builder couldn't do what she did!” the fair haired detective told him.

  “I'm not so sure about that,” Dale replied. “I've had a man pick me up and toss me through a wall before. Just not a woman and not one handed.”

  “Oh I wasn't talking about that,” the detective replied. “I was talking about what she did to the police car.”

  “The police car?” Things were becoming more confusing by the second. Though he suddenly remembered the flashing blue and red lights.

  “She ripped the door right off it and swatted an officer with it. Sent him flying. He's in here in the next room. Then she attacked the other officer with the bumper. He's down the hall. Then she threw a car at them.”

  “Threw a car?!” Dale stared at the cop. The man couldn't have said that – could he?

  “Honestly if it hadn't have been for the taser I don't think either of those officers would be alive now.”

  “A taser?” This was getting worse. Now one of Manhattan's social elite was being brought down by the police? That was shocking. She was worth tens of millions at least. Maybe billions. She spent her days sipping cocktails at the club. She didn't attack police officers! Then again his wife didn't sleep around with tattooed brutes – or at least he hadn't thought she did. So what did he know?

  “And they barely held her. Each one knocked her down for maybe a few minutes. But she kept getting back up. She also tore handcuffs off her wrists like they were made of day old spaghetti instead of high tensile steel. Then back up arrived with a shot gun, and she still didn't go down. They had to taser her repeatedly, until she finally couldn't get up, then use a dozen different sets of handcuffs and finally a straitjacket.”

  Dale stared at the officer, wondering if he was kidding. Because even though he seemed completely serious, what he was saying couldn't be right. But he still remembered the impossible strength of the man who'd attacked him years ago. And one thing more.

  “You know that the man who attacked me three and a half years ago took four bullets to the chest. He wasn't even slowed down by them. Hurt several officers. Threw a piano at them.” And then he wondered – did they even know about that? But they said nothing, asked no questions. So he carried on.

  “And that girl who was on my property this … morning?” He suddenly realised he didn't know what time it was or if it was even the same day. He didn't know the girl's name either. “She said he'd used the soldier drug.”

  “What's that?”

  “Not a clue.” He did his best to shrug, but that wasn't very successful and he had to stifle a groan. This might not have been as bad as the last time he'd ended up in hospital, but it still hurt. “You should ask her.” And then another thought crossed his mind. “Maybe she's the woman that Athena Osgood was looking for?” Though he still couldn't work out why the woman would have thought she was in the house let alone in his cupboards.

  Still the detectives wrote it all down, and he had to assume that that meant they would check it out. Maybe even work out what was going on. But there was one more thing he should tell them he realised.

  “Somewhere while I was lying on the floor, there was a buzzer that went off. It was dark and I wasn't seeing much very clearly by then but I'm sure I saw her take a pill from a ring on her finger when it did.” That was enough he figured. The rest, the stuff about the wolf skull and his ex-wife having a similar ring, they could work out for themselves. And maybe that was the drug she was on. The thing that gave her incredible strength. The soldier drug?

  After that he really couldn't tell them a lot. He answered their questions as best he could, but the sorry truth was that he really didn't know anything. He hadn't had much of a chance to see anything and she hadn't said a lot. She'd mostly just been destroying his home while he'd lain there, hurting. And it had been dark.

  So in time they went away and not long after that he started to go back to sleep. In the morning he hoped, things would start to make more sense. Or at least hurt less. Maybe. But if not he could at least go home and start repairing things, again.

  He was good at that. Putting the pieces of his life back together. Not perhaps quite the same as they had been. Not quite as good. But still he could do it. He'd had practice. And in time what had happened would be nothing more than a bad memory he told himself. Just another one to add to his collection. And until that happened he had beer.

  Chapter Five

  Lara stared at the shocking scene in front of her, and hated herself for it. It wasn't the shock of seeing such a disaster. She'd witnessed things that were far worse when it came to the Ilans. Horrible things. Her family, torn apart – literally. The sightless eyes of her little brother, Danny, staring up at her. Rather it was the much more terrible understanding that she'd arrived too late that ripped at her this time.

  She'd missed it! Everything had been perfect. All she'd had to do was be there when Athena struck, with the police, and she could have struck a decisive blow. One that would devastate the Ilans for centuries to come. Maybe end their entire family. And yet she'd missed it! All because the victim was immune! Not just immune to the Ilans – immune to her! That was annoying. More than annoying. Frustrating.

  It was so rare for the Ilans to announce their moves. To tell anyone what they were doing or who their next victim would be. They were discreet. And on those rare occasions when something slipped out, the ones she followed were in Manhattan. A place where they more or less owned the police. She couldn't get near to them. So to finally have the chance to catch one in the act, even to have the police there in advance, properly armed was a miracle. Now, it was a disaster.

  They should have killed her! That had been the plan. The police should have brought her down in a hail of bullets and after that her team of pathologists should have taken the body away and started doing the most thorough autopsy in history. And some time after that they should have had both the drug that the Ilans produced in their bodies, and the antidote. After that there wouldn't have been many of the Ilans left and the world would be a better place. It was a simple plan. Destroy them.

  Now her chance was gone. The damned woman was alive and even if she dragged her out of her prison cell, it was hard to do an autopsy on a living woman. People seemed to object to the idea. Even one of the leaders of the House would have a hard time convincing a doctor to start cutting into a living, screaming woman. And even if someone could do that, she doubted Athena Osgood would be a willing subject. It would be
dangerous. She really needed to be dead.

  Lara cursed her rotten luck. If only she'd got back to the city sooner instead of having to spend hours trying to hitch a ride on a rural back road that no one ever drove on. And then if she'd been able to find Athena straight away. But by the time she'd made it back the woman had been long gone. As it turned out she'd found Dale Fall by some other means. So even as Lara had been searching for her, Athena had been heading for Dale Fall's home. They'd quite possibly crossed paths.

  But was that just bad luck, she had to wonder? Or was there more at work? Could there be an Ng around? Busy manipulating the threads of fate and fortune to produce another outcome? She'd never understood the Ngs. No one did really. They talked about the natural order, the pattern or the weave and balance, and then they brought about strikingly unlikely events. Good and bad and sometimes just simply weird. Some called them miracles. Strange miracles. Sometimes terrible ones. And it had occurred to her that a man surviving a thirty story fall was exactly the sort of weirdness they would engineer.

  She hadn't seen one of their family about though – not that she knew all of them. They were a small lineage but still there had to be thousands of them, spread right across the world. And it wasn't as though they all looked the same or all wore badges. That would be too damned useful!

  Though the Ngs weren't the only family out there that could bring about havoc. And she couldn't help but notice that a couple of the forensics guys had extremely long hair. That always worried her. Men with long hair, women with short hair. Because hair length was one of the give-aways of the Dayli's. They had a strange gift, shape-shifting. But not into a wolf or anything like that. They changed faces, builds, skin colour and even height to an extent, and sometimes, when they were experienced, sexes. A Dayli could literally walk into a room as a man and walk out seconds later as a completely different woman. And they had a terrible habit of using their gift to cause chaos. They also made excellent assassins, thieves and spies. But hair length and colour was the one thing they couldn't change.

  Lara checked them all carefully, looking for any sign that they weren't who they were pretending to be. But all of them had their thoughts on their work and seemed to know exactly what they were doing. That was a relief. The Dayli's weren't friends of her House. They weren't enemies either. It was just that the Domani House and the Dayli Dynasty often had agendas that clashed.

  The only other House she knew of that could create such havoc and make it look like luck gone wild were the Xans. But for them it actuall was luck gone wild. But it really wasn't intentional on their part. They didn't have a gift they could control. They were just unnaturally lucky. Though of course it all had to balance out. So they could walk into a casino, win the jackpot by pulling a lever on a one armed bandit, and all around them chaos and misfortune would ensue. And the higher the stakes, the worse the chaos. By and large they stayed away from Casinos. Not to mention race tracks, bookies shops, poker games and anywhere else where luck and money were involved.

  But why would a Xan be anywhere near any of this? Usually their preferred lifestyle involved winning a huge jackpot somewhere, then buying a mansion and living in luxury on some tropical island. They didn't want to be associated with the various catastrophes that surrounded them. So they limited themselves to settings where luck didn't play a huge issue in their lives.

  So maybe this was just ordinary bad luck. Bad timing and poor planning on her part. That wasn't good. But it wasn't someone from another of the families working against her.

  And as unfortunate as this turn of events was, it was also a reminder that shit happened, Lara supposed. Every family knew that.

  All of the various lineages, families and houses had certain abilities. Gifts. That was what defined them as families. Gifts that they passed down through the generations. Some of them were very powerful. Some were frightening. Some were pointless. And some were just strange. And of course the various lineages vied with one another in an eternal battle, even as they all strived to make sure no normals ever found out about them. But no matter what their gift was or how much wealth and power they'd amassed over the years none of them were powerful enough to make themselves gods as some seemed to want. Fate, bad luck and the sheer stubbornness and endless stupidity of normal people could always overcome any plans they could come up with.

  Just as it seemed they had here.

  Which left her where? Up a creek without a damned paddle! Her enemy was in jail, safely beyond her reach. Her gift would let her deal with the officers but not the physical barriers that kept her away from Athena. Fall was in hospital, telling his story to the police and recovering from his latest struggle with the Ilans – not that he knew who the Ilans were. And the team of pathologists and geneticists and medical scientists she had on standby, were just twiddling their thumbs in their motel rooms, waiting for a body that would never come.

  And of course things would probably get worse. Athena would get out of jail in time. She had no doubt of that. Maybe her lawyers would arrive and have her freed from her restraints to attend court. That would be a disaster of course. Or maybe her House would have the authorities in the States have Athena extradited to face charges there for the murder of her husband – and of course she would never arrive. Her family would see to that. They'd whisk her away to a private retreat where no one would go looking for her. Or maybe she'd just break free herself without the need for lawyers and laws – and that would undoubtedly be bloody. One way or another she would be gone and Lara's chances to study her dead body would be gone.

  So what was she supposed to do now? That was the question. And as Lara saw the wreckage of the house and the police car in front of her, not to mention the police and the crime scene guys in their little bubble suits everywhere, she realised she didn't know.

  And then she saw something that shocked her. “Are those finger marks?” she asked one of the crime scene guys who was busy photographing the car door from every angle and with lights everywhere.

  “Yeah, freaky isn't it!” he replied without even turning around.

  “Amen!” she agreed. But it was more than freaky. It was scary. The woman had literally crushed the metal of a car door with her bare hands. The Ilans weren't just getting more crazy, they were growing stronger. Athena certainly was.

  She really couldn't go after her enemy directly, Lara realised when she saw that. Not if she was crushing metal with her bare hands. It would just be too damned dangerous! Even though every fibre of her being was screaming at her to hunt the woman down and kill her. Athena was one of the family that had murdered her own family and so many others of her lineage. Murdered her brother. Her control might work with others, but an Ilan who by the looks of things, was lost in her primal rage? No. That was a tall order. The woman wouldn't want to listen to any suggestions. She might not even be able to hear what was said to her. Not over the screaming fury in her heart. The most Athena would be able to do for a while was scream and rant and rave. Nothing else would matter until she calmed down – and there was a very real chance that she wasn't going to do that. That sooner or later her brain would simply pop and she'd enter a catatonic state.

  Clearly the woman was on the edge. Had been for a long time. She would be taking her drugs every few hours. Pacifiers to keep her rage in check. But in the end they hadn't been enough. Nor had her husband. She'd still killed him. The man who anchored her. Ripped his spine out. Now her gift was running out of control. She was throwing cars around and crushing metal not to mention attacking the police. And she probably wasn't able to think rationally anymore.

  Talking to her would be no use – as the police would no doubt already be finding out. Unless they were still busy trying to find a way to restrain her. But if her brain burnt out she still wouldn't be dead – brain dead maybe – so no one would be able to do an autopsy on her. And if her brain didn't pop soon, things might well become deadly in the police lock up. They had no idea what they were dealing with.


  Lara couldn't tell them of course. She couldn't reveal the existence of the houses to the normals. Every family kept that secret to themselves even as they fought one another to the death. And even if she tried, it would compromise her mental invisibility. She was able to walk this scene because she was projecting a sense of familiarity to everyone. They all thought they knew her. That she was meant to be there. But that only worked for as long as she didn't do anything to make them actually notice her. To add to Lara's problems there were press everywhere. And she couldn't persuade a camera not to record her. So maybe it was time to go. She wasn't going to learn anything more here.

  But why were the press here already? Lara suddenly had to wonder. It seemed odd. It was dark, the incident as the police were calling it, was only a few hours old, and this was the middle of nowhere, without even a physical street address. When Dale Fall had run he had truly gone to ground! Yet she could see three camera vans just outside the property, and reporters telling the world everything they knew about the crime – which wasn't much.