Free Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller by Darren Stapleton Page B

that is not why you are here is it?’
    ‘You know why I am here. The staff have gone home. The transport is ready. It's time. We have at least an hour before the world awakens.’
    She loathed it, but it was a necessary evil.
    'Practice makes perfect,' she said. She grabbed her kit and sighed. She was good at learning new things.
    She just wished she did not have to learn them so far up in the air, in the dark.

Conversations are like dogs, lead them where you want them to go, but sooner or later you will just have to watch when they turn to shit.
    One Side to Every Story
    Biography of a Mudhead

CHAPTER 15
     
    Using the night vision goggles, I watched the guard’s eyes flutter open, his pupils broad and black in the perfect darkness. He tried to move, maybe to inspect his flattened nose and looked surprised to find his hands tied behind his back with thick carbonised wire I had found in the surveillance room. He was laid out on the cell floor, staring up at the ceiling, I suppose looking for answers or me. Prostrate in this way, it would be very difficult for him to rise from his position, and if he did, his legs would be stiff and his arms tied, numb and useless.
    I could see him looking left and right, panic starting to spread across his face.
    The time was right to talk. It would not take long to learn what I wanted.
    It never did.
    ‘Boo.’
    He flinched as if I’d slapped him.
    ‘Remember me?’
    He said nothing and looked at me, or at least in my general direction.
    ‘This is what is going to happen. We are going to have a conversation and you are going to tell me everything you know and then I am going to leave you here: alive or dying, I do not care.’
    He shifted his weight slightly.
    ‘If you try to get up I am going to have to remove one of your hands or feet, but feel free to try. You’ll bleed out and die where you lay. Eventually. As I said, alive or dying, either way, I don’t care.’
    He froze.
    Lit as he was to me through the one good lens of the night vision goggles, he looked like an ancient, green, petrified lump of stone; a toppled statue that once stood as a testament to desperation and despair.
    ‘I know who you are. What you are capable of. You’re that Slayer. The press conference.’
    I said nothing.
    ‘Swear I won’t come to harm and I’ll tell you everything I know.’ He coughed and a dark bubble of blood and snot grew and then popped from his concave left nostril.
    ‘You are in a strange position to be bargaining,’ I said.
    ‘Give me your word and I will tell you everything I know.’
    I paused giving him time to fidget and sniff and doubt his future.
    ‘OK. You have my word.’
    It was his turn to pause, probably analysing the syntax for loopholes.
    I took control of the conversation.
    ‘Now start talking before I change my mind. What am I… we doing here?’
    ‘We were told to grab you from the fight. Were given your seat numbers. Told you were muscle-bound, six foot one, dark hair, green eyes, mean looking. Told you would be with the slut too,' he looked around in the darkness, unsure if Pan was in the room, then decided it made no difference anyway. 'You both fit the bill.’
    I stepped in closer. 'Be respectful,' I said
    He closed his eyes. Scared.
    ‘How did you know I would be there? Who told you?’
    ‘At the Arena? It was in the press.’
    'Our descriptions were not. Or that Pan would be there. You said you were 'told', so come on, who did the telling?'
    He said nothing.
    I did not ask another question, just left it open to see what he would say next, but he was not telling me anything helpful. His answers were terse and perfunctory, devoid of elaboration, withholding information.
    Economically truthful.
    I let my questions take on a similar format, deciding to fire closed questions at him, an archaic but ultimately extremely reliable form of interrogation. Though I had been trained in both giving and receiving torture in a series of corps exercises