Preternatural: Carter Bailey Book 1 Read online

  PRETERNATURAL

  by

  Matt Hilton

  PRETERNATURAL

  by

  MATT HILTON

  Published by Sempre Vigile Press

  Copyright © 2014 Matt Hilton

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image © 2009 used under standard license from freedigitalphotos.net/Simon Howden

  Cover design © 2014 Matt Hilton

  Also by Matt Hilton

  Dead Men’s Dust

  Judgement and Wrath

  Slash and Burn

  Cut and Run

  Blood and Ashes

  Dead Men’s Harvest

  No Going Back

  Rules of Honour

  The Lawless Kind

  Six of the Best (E-book)

  Dead Fall (E-book)

  Red Stripes (E-book)

  Instant Justice (E-book)

  Dominion

  Darkest Hour

  Mark Darrow and the Stealer of Souls

  Preternatural

  Contents:

  Start

  Acknowledgements and Thanks

  About the author

  Other books by Matt Hilton

  ONE

  Within

  “Conventional wisdom dictates that my skin should be sloughing off by now. Am I supposed to thank you for the mild day, Carter, or was that simply a mistake on your part?”

  “Shut up, Cash. I’m in no mood for any of your rubbish talk today.” I scanned the distant mountains; they were lavender in the coruscating heat haze. Beneath my boots, sand as white and fine as talcum powder swirled on the ghosts of eddies kicked up by my approach. Without looking I knew that the sky would be stark brightness, the sun an infernal ball of fire against cobalt blue. “If you’d rather, I’ll crank up the heat if you think it’ll make you more amenable.”

  Cash lifted his manacled hands, shook the chains that stretched off into a haze of their own. “No, I’m quite comfortable as it is. But, hey, thanks for the offer.” Feigning satisfaction, he placed both palms behind his neck and lay back as if catching rays on a Mediterranean beach. “Mind rubbing me down with some oil? I may as well make the most of my time here, huh?”

  I folded my arms, eyeing him with disdain. “Sit up, Cash.”

  Cash glanced down the length of his naked body, seemed particularly impressed with the tangle of ginger pubic hair, as unruly as an academic’s hairstyle. His mouth quirked downwards in what passed as a smile in his repertoire of five expressions. “Would you just take a look at that? Goddamnit if I ain’t naked again!”

  I snorted. “Sit up.”

  “Y’know something, Carter? I’m beginning to gain the impression that you enjoy seeing me like this.” Cash raised an eyebrow. Expression number two. “Hot, naked and sweaty…you sure this ain’t some sort of latent homosexuality thing you’ve got going on?”

  “I told you I’m in no mood for your nonsense.”

  “Actually, I think the word you used was ‘rubbish’. You know, I don’t like to contradict, but what I think you were really getting at was trash talk. That’s the happening slang these days, ain’t it, dawg?”

  Exhaling my impatience, I snapped up my chin. And, marionette-like, Cash followed the gesture, folding up from reclined to seated with no hint of volition from one position to the other. Again he hit me with expression number one, his lips down turned. “Christ Almighty, Carter,” he said. “You could have given me whiplash there.”

  “I could do a whole lot worse than give you a stiff neck, believe me,” I snapped. “Now shut the hell up and listen to me.”

  Eyebrow up, lips down, didn’t count; it was a blending of expressions one and two. Cash opened his palms, creating emphasis. The manacles were making his wrists raw: one of the minor details I hadn’t neglected.

  “I have to tell you, Carter, when I found out where you’d brought us this time, it got me thinking.” He squinted up at the sun and for good measure I made sure that it seared his eyes. He grunted, searched the horizon behind me. “For the first time it made me wonder about you.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  He shrugged. “Carter, call me a captive audience. I’ve no option but to sit and listen to you jabber on. The least you can do is hear me out for once.”

  “I’ve told you…”

  “You’re in no mood for any of my nonsense. I know. I know. But I think this is important…for both of us.”

  I lifted a hand. Cash’s mouth snapped shut. Around him flames the colour of the sky broke from the magnesium earth, encircling him with heat that would burn this time. I allowed him to squirm back from the blaze, to tuck his feet beneath his haunches in an effort to escape a roasting. After half-a-dozen racing beats of my heart, I blinked. The flames went out and with them the heat. The sand was as titanium white as before.

  “Next time I’ll start the fire between your legs, Cash. See how your dick looks when it’s all shrivelled up and flaking ash.”

  “Whoa! Latent homosexuality I can understand, but Carter, sado-fetishism?” He folded his hands in his lap. “You surprise me.”

  I ignored him. I turned my back and walked away. I suspected that in that instant that he’d be straining at the shackles like a manic beast, slavering and jerking in animal-like ferocity. I snapped my gaze over my shoulder. He was sitting swami fashion, as if lost in meditative-tranquillity on a mountain top perch. He didn’t fool me for a second.

  “I told you that I wanted you to listen. Are you ready to do that, yet? I’m warning you Cash…one more word of bullshit and I leave you here.” I reached my fingers to the heavens, plucked at an invisible cord as if pulling on a bathroom light. The sun became Saharan hot. “A couple of hours should do it.”

  Cash’s eyelids drooped. Finally, expression number three: resignation.

  “Good,” I said. I didn’t bother with the theatrics this time, merely allowed the heat to subside.

  But he wasn’t finished yet. “All I was gonna ask was if you’d finally found religion.”

  It set me back on my heels. Against my better judgement, I asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. Something that’s important to the two of us.”

  I shook my head. “Where are you going with this, Cash?”

  “Well. All you gotta do is look around yourself.”

  I didn’t bother looking. I knew the landscape intimately.

  “Straight out of the Bible, no?”

  “No,” I said. “Straight out of Lethal Weapon. You know that scene where the bad guys have Murtaugh’s daughter in the back of the Limo? Riggs is about half-a-mile away with a sniper rifle, about to blast them all to hell.”

  Cash glanced skyward, head shaking. “In that scene the bad guys had a helicopter, didn’t they? Well, I don’t see a helicopter. You can say what you want, Carter. You’ve fed off another subconscious influence here. This is the scene from the Bible where Jesus is alone in the wilderness and is being tempted by the devil.”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Lethal Weapon. Believe me.”

/>   “You can’t fool me, Carter. This is the temptation of Christ. Only thing is, I can’t get it straight in my head what part you’re playing in this scenario.” He lifted his manacles. “A little role reversal going on, no? I mean, hey? Who’s looking like Old Nick these days?”

  I spat on the sand. “There’s only one devil here, Cash. And it sure as hell isn’t me.”

  He jangled his manacles.

  I shook my head. “Whatever you think, it isn’t torture for torture’s sake. You know that.”

  “So what do you call it, Carter? Justice? Punishment? What?”

  “I don’t call it anything. The chains are a means to an end. Anyway, nothing I could do to you would be punishment enough.”

  Cash showed the tip of an eyetooth. It was neither smirk nor smile, but disdain. “And here was me thinking you were about to go all Christian on me. I thought that…well, perhaps you were ready to forgive and forget.”

  “Never.”

  “Never is an awfully long time.”

  “Not long enough.”

  Cash fully smiled this time. His eyes were like collapsed stars in the void of deepest space. “You’ll die one day, Carter.”

  “Not for a long time, arsehole.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  He laughed. I allowed him his little moment.

  “But it will happen one day. What do you suppose will happen then?” In defiance, he cupped his neck and lay back. Instead of forcing him upright as before, I decided he should be clothed. An orange prison jumpsuit was the most fitting garment I could imagine. He grunted. “At least it matches my complexion.”

  “Cash…shut the fuck up. I want you to listen to me.”

  Perplexed, he actually sat up of his own accord. Something in my tone perhaps, or maybe he knew me better than I realised. He crinkled his nose as though he’d stood in something foul and tracked it indoors.

  Hollow-eyed, I stood over him. Admittedly, it was perhaps a weakness on my part. But I knew I had little option. “Cassius,” I said, giving him his full name. “I need your help.”

  TWO

  Connor’s Island, Shetland Isles.

  Bethany and James crouched over the bird, watching as it fluttered in a broken circle, one wing at an unnatural angle. Its head was tilted to one side, its single visible black eye accusing.

  James poked at the bird with a finger that was striped red with ink from a marker pen, his bony knees flanking his equally bony elbows.

  As though giving the bird voice, Bethany squawked, “Leave it be, Wee Jimmy.”

  “A cat must have got it,” James said. “Look!” He poked the bird again, attempting to flick it over on its back. “There’s blood all over it.”

  “Leave it be. You ken what Ma said about touching dead birds.”

  James gave her the look. The one reserved for older brothers disdaining their siblings. Especially when the sibling was his little sister. “It’s no’ dead, you Muppet.”

  “Ma said you’ll catch the bird flu, and you’re no’ to touch.”

  James rose up to his full height: all four-feet ten-inches of it. He fisted his hands on his hips, frowned down at the bird. He could see its heart beating in frenzy against its chest. “Does that look like the bird flu to you, idiot?”

  “Poor wee thing,” Bethany offered. “Do you think its wing is broken, Jimmy?”

  “I don’t ken, do I?” James nudged it with a scuffed shoe. The bird made another futile circle in the grass. A bead of scarlet edged between its open beak. “We should put it out of its misery,” he said. By the flat planes his features took on there was little thought of mercy in his adolescent mind. Bethany recognised that face all too well.

  “Don’t you dare harm it!” She pushed by him, interjecting her small frame into the space between Jimmy and the bird.

  “Hey! Get out of it!” James grasped the strap of her schoolbag, tugged her and watched as she sprawled on her backside, an ignominious bundle of grey school uniform, white socks and straw-coloured pigtails. “Do that again, Beth, an’ it’ll be you who’ll have something broken.”

  “I’m telling Ma on you!” was Bethany’s answer, that universal cry of all wronged youngsters.

  James rounded on her. Skinny, pale, chewing a lip scarred with a week old cold sore, he was still the dominant figure in this picture. Bethany scurried backwards. Not quickly enough to avoid the nasty intent of the jab James aimed at her with his shoe.

  “Oww!” she shrieked, rubbing at the sore spot on her shin. “Stop kicking me, Jimmy.”

  “It’s what I do to squealers,” he said, with all the vitriolic rancour of an eleven-year-old bully. “You dare tell Ma an’ I’ll kick your greetin’ face in.”

  “No you won’t. Ma will tell you off.”

  “I’m no’ afraid of Ma,” James said, his chin jutting. “Not like you, you cry baby.”

  “I’m no’ crying,” Bethany pouted.

  “Aye you are. Cry baby.”

  “No I’m not.” Bethany scrambled up. She was three inches shorter than her brother, and he outweighed her by ten-or-so pounds. She wasn’t afraid of him, though. Not really. Not when she knew his secret and could hold it against him. “I’ll tell everyone at school that you still pee the bed.”

  James shivered as if water had just been dashed in his face. His voice came out as brittle as ice-crystals. “I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. You’re a pee the bed.” She danced away from him. “Pee the bed, pee the bed, one, two, three.”

  Panic. Shame. A thousand raw emotions. James glanced around, his breath short and rasping in his throat. The hillside remained empty of observers. Only the injured bird bore witness to his sister’s lies. He stared at it, reading the accusation in its eye. Knew that look for what it really was. Mockery. Even the bird knew what it was he’d so long tried to hide. If this got out, school would be even more of a hell on earth than it already was. James howled. Not at Bethany. She was beyond his immediate concern. He couldn’t do anything about her. But he sure could do something about the bloody bird.

  One stamp was all it took. Logic, alas, meant little to James. He kept stamping and stamping. Then, for good measure, he kicked the shredded carcass in the air in an explosion of feathers and guts. And if his mother had heard the curses he screamed, she’d have grounded him for a month. Plus, she’d have more than a harsh word to say to the parents of his friends, Rory and Gregor, for, in her wisdom; where else could he have learned such profanity?

  The bird rolled down the hillside, coming to rest by a tuft of couch grass rising from the hillside like the snatching fingers of purgatory. Breathless, James stared at it. He was set to resume his attack if the bird gave even the slightest hint of life. The bird - obviously prudent - remained dead. Finally James could breathe again. He turned to Bethany and his bearing screamed gloating. After all…he was proud. He’d shown her what he could do to those ready to even whisper his secret.

  His features slackened. Bethany’s face was painted with the horror and loathing of the moment. But she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t even looking at the pitiful wreckage of feathers and blood-streaked bones of the blackbird. She stared wide-eyed beyond her brother, towards the summit of the hill beyond which lay their home.

  James couldn’t look. He knew. Ma had seen what he did to the bird. She’d heard him swearing. There was going to be unholy retribution to pay for his sins. He looked back at Bethany, mind tumbling in an effort to find an excuse for his actions, or someone to pin the blame on. Anything. Anybody at all. Bethany shivered. Her schoolbag drooped from her shoulder as if it was the burden of both their sins. She took a faltering strep backwards and the noise she made was more pitiful than the squawks that had originally led them to the injured bird.

  What’s wrong, Beth? The words formed in his mind, but James could not give them voice. He turned, searching for the source of her terror. He saw it immediately. And in that instant, he so, so, begged God that it h
ad been his mother silhouetted against the northern skyline.

  THREE

  Norwegian Sea

  Pain thrummed a beat through my senses. The fistful of paracetamol I’d swallowed did little to dull it. The growling engine, the stench of diesel oil, the shouldering of anxious passengers did little to assuage my discomfort, neither. The faded orange plastic seat I sat on was as uncomfortable as perching on razor wire, yet it was the more alluring prospect than standing at the rusty handrail listening to sweaty-faced landlubbers dry-heaving the remains of their dinners into the murky sea. What should have been a pleasant ferry ride over to Connor’s Island was fast becoming my own private journey into Hades. Not for the first time, I glanced up at the captain jostling with the controls, half-expecting to see Charon at the wheel as he guided us across the turbulent Styx.

  One small grace, there was a roof over my head. Not that it deterred the pummelling weather from soaking me to the core; the window mechanism had long ago given in to the corrosive sea air and remained open come hail, rain or shine. Around me, other passengers huddled together, their exhortations for respite from their discomfort only adding to my misery. I suffered in silence, chewing at the flesh of my inner-cheeks every time the prow of the boat lifted and plunged amid the surging waves. I would have closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at the fear-streaked or nausea-pasted faces of the fellow doomed souls bound with me for Tartaros. I would have, but I resisted. When I closed my eyes I was often transported to worse places than this stretch of the Norwegian Sea in the north Atlantic.

  Through algae-pitted windows I searched out our destination, but Connor’s Island remained an indistinct shape in the murk. Twenty-two miles behind us was the Shetland Isle of Yell, and about ten to the east was Unst, commonly marked on maps as the most northerly of the Shetland chain. Only eight miles in length and two across its middle, Connor’s Island didn’t bear the distinction of being named on too many cartographers’ charts.