He stopped abruptly, to look at Molly. She’d hardly touched her food or her wine, which wasn’t like her, and now she was leaning forward, scowling, and rubbing at her forehead as though bothered by some intrusive new pain. Or memory.
“Are you all right, Molly?” said Coll. “Is something bothering you?”
“I remember being here, before,” said Molly. Her voice sounded odd, strangely detached. “At this table. With the old White Horse Faction. Everyone was here, including my parents. And you, Hadrian. I can see them all, as clearly as I see you . . . sitting around this table. Talking, planning . . . something big. I’m here, excited to be included in their plans. I see my mother and my father, smiling at me. They don’t look that much older than I am now. Oh, God . . . it’s been such a long time, since I saw them smile at me . . . but now everyone’s talking at once, raising their voices, shouting at each other. Something’s changed. My parents aren’t smiling any more. No. No! They’re gone. . . . They’re all gone.”
She raised her head, to look sharply at Coll. “What were they planning here, Hadrian? It was something much bigger, and far more dangerous, than they were usually involved in. Why did my parents look so sad then, at the end? And why did you look so worried?”
“This isn’t what you really want to talk about,” said Coll. “You want to know how your parents died. All right, you’ve waited long enough. Look at this.”
He produced something from his pocket, and held it up for all of us to see: a single brightly glowing jewel. Smooth and polished as a pearl, shining fiercely with some intense inner light. Almost too bright to look at directly. Like staring into the sun. Coll rolled the thing back and forth between his fingers, splashing unnatural light around the length of the dining hall. Enjoying the way he was holding everyone’s attention.
“This . . . is a memory crystal. Supersaturated with condensed information. Future technology, of course . . . fell off the back of a Timeslip, in the Nightside. It contains a complete recording of what happened here, in this room, at the very last meeting of the original White Horse Faction. The night everybody died.”
“What?” Molly sat bolt upright, glaring at him. “My parents died here? In Monkton Manse? Why didn’t I remember that?”
“Because you were here when it happened,” said Coll. “Now hush. And watch.”
He murmured some activating words over the memory crystal, and just like that a vision appeared, floating on the air before us. A deep and distinct image from the Past, showing exactly what happened, in this dining hall, ten years earlier.
Some twenty-odd people sat around the long table, talking heatedly with each other. We couldn’t hear their voices, couldn’t hear what they were saying, but none of them looked happy. Hadrian Coll was there, looking a lot more than ten years younger. He wasn’t talking. Just sat there, watching the others. Beside him sat a man and a woman I immediately recognised as Molly’s parents. A good-looking pair, strong and noble, arguing with passion and intensity. And sitting beside them a teenage Molly Metcalf. Obviously upset by all the raised voices and arguments. She looked so young, so vulnerable. Unmarked by all the harsh pain and anger to come, that would scar her so deeply. I wanted to reach out to her, to hold her and protect her; to save her from what I knew was coming. But I couldn’t.
All I could do was watch.
Everyone at the table looked round, startled, as the door at the far end of the dining hall slammed open, to reveal a dark and shadowy figure. And before anyone at the table could properly react, the shadowy figure produced a gun and opened fire. Those nearest him died first, blood flying from gaping wounds and shattered heads. Bodies crashed to the floor. People started to their feet, reaching for weapons or magical protections, but bullets found them first. They all died, one after another; the entire White Horse Faction wiped out, in just a few moments.
Molly’s mother and father were among the last to die. Jake Metcalf put himself between his wife and his daughter and the bullets of the shadowy gunman, trying to push his wife away from the line of fire. A row of bullets stitched across his chest, throwing him backwards into his wife’s arms. And then a bullet hit her, in the side of the head, blasting half her face away. The blood splashed across Molly’s face as she stood there at the table, horrified. She screamed and screamed, silently, like she would never stop.
The last few remaining members of the White Horse Faction opened up on the shadowy gunman with everything they had. Energy guns, enhanced weapons, shaped curses and pointing bones. But none of it had any effect. The shadowy man stood his ground in the doorway, and nothing touched him. Molly turned and ran for the door nearest her. By the time she reached it, everyone else who’d been sitting at the table was dead.
The vision snapped off, and Coll put the memory crystal down on the table. Molly was on her feet, staring down the long table at the far door, where the gunman had been. Her eyes were wide, wild, lost. I was on my feet beside her, but she didn’t even know I was there. The next generation stared at Coll as though seeing him for the first time, and not liking what they saw. He sat calmly in his chair, giving all his attention to the wine in his glass. I glared at him.
“You didn’t have to show her everything at once! You didn’t have to throw her in the deep end like that, you bastard!”
Coll shrugged, entirely unmoved by the anger in my voice, or Molly’s condition.
“Watch your mouth, Shaman. I gave her what she wanted. Sometimes you have to just rip the scab right off. Less painful, that way.”
I leaned in close to Molly, careful not to touch her, just yet. “Is that . . . how it was, Molly? Is that how it really was? Do you remember now?”
“Yes,” said Molly. “My mum and dad died right here, in this room, right in front of me. I only remembered flashes before, and it never occurred to me to look too closely. People told me it happened somewhere else, so often, that I believed them. And forgot all this . . . I was so sure it was a Drood who killed them, like everyone said . . .” She turned her head slowly to look at Coll. “Why was the killer just a shadow, when everything else was so clear?”
“Because you’re not ready to see who it was, just yet,” said Coll. “And because I feel the need . . . to keep a little something in reserve. In case I need something to bargain with.”
“This, all of this, is why I became the wild witch,” said Molly. “Why I made so many deals, with so many Courts, for power. So I’d never be helpless again.”
“And to avenge your parents,” I said. I looked at Coll, and he stirred uncomfortably in his chair, at something he saw in my face. “That shadowy figure,” I said. “He definitely wasn’t wearing Drood armour, despite his . . . untouchability. So he wasn’t a Drood. You’ve known that, all these years, but you never said anything to Molly. Why?”
Molly looked at me. “You thought the killer was a Drood . . .”
“Because that’s what it says in the Drood files,” I said.
“What?” said Troy. “How would you know something like that?”
“Because I’m Shaman Bond!” I snapped. “I get around, everyone knows that. I know things I’m not supposed to know. Take it from me: the original White Horse Faction was quite definitely wiped out on the orders of the Droods, supposedly to prevent them from doing something quite extraordinarily dangerous. I always believed it was a Drood field agent who did the job; but now it’s starting to look like the Droods contracted out for the hit. I have to wonder why . . .”
“Talk to me, Hadrian,” said Molly, and she didn’t sound like an old friend, any more. “Explain to me what happened here. What did you talk the Faction into? What did you get my parents involved in that was so bad they all had to be murdered on Drood orders?”