Night terrors hound of h.., p.1
Night Terrors (Hound of Hades Book 4), page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Up Next: Hell Bent
More Books by Zoe Cannon
About the Author
Night Terrors
Hound of Hades: Book 4
Zoe Cannon
© 2020 Zoe Cannon
http://www.zoecannon.com
All rights reserved
Cover by Fiona Jayde Media
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
If the man in front of me were an animal, he would be a rabid possum, big-eyed and jumpy, startling at every noise and movement. I tapped my pen idly against my notebook as I studied him. He had the look of someone who used to maintain a muscular physique but had gradually decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. His hair hung in greasy strands over his ears, and his dark eyes glinted sharply at me for seconds at a time before continuing their nervous circuit around the room.
If there was any physical resemblance between the two of us, I didn’t see it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see it.
I ordered the lump in my stomach to get lost. Ditto with the matching lump in my throat. It wasn’t as if I had gone into this with any expectations, after all.
The man stared at the tapping pen as if it had hypnotized him. “Tell me again who sent you.”
“I’m with…” I searched my suddenly-empty brain for the name I had given him in my email. Normally I didn’t have this kind of problem remembering my cover stories. “New York Uncensored. We’re a new online political blog, trying to bring the fun back into politics.” I smiled too brightly, even as I cringed at myself. That definitely hadn’t sounded canned or anything. But it wasn’t my fault if I couldn’t make the idea of mixing fun and politics sound believable. After growing up with a senator for a mother, I knew better.
But he didn’t look suspicious—or at least, not any more suspicious than before—so I kept going. “What can you tell me about your affair with Senator Karen Keyne?”
There were two ways for a reporter to ask about something an interview subject might not want to talk about, and one tended to work as well as the other. At least that was the lesson I had learned from being on the receiving end of too many interviews as a child, and seeing my mother subjected to even more. The first was to ease into it slowly, lulling the subject into a false sense of complacency before touching on anything difficult. The second was to jump right in, and startle the answer out of them. But even if the shock method normally worked, it didn’t look like it was going to this time. The man was already shaking his head before I got the last word out. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but you’ve got it wrong.” The bell over the cafe door chimed as it opened, and he startled in his seat, the force of his movement shaking the table in front of him.
I forged onward. “We already know about the affair. We heard about it from Karen Keyne herself.” In all fairness, that was actually true. The fact that I had heard about it in a memory that an agent of a hostile goddess had dug out of my head didn’t need to be part of the equation. Neither did the fact that Karen Keyne was my mother, and that in that particular memory, I hadn’t even been out of diapers.
My words had an impact on him, albeit not the one I had been hoping for. He sat up ramrod straight, his eyes—if possible—going even wider. “She’s talking about me?” he demanded. “Karen’s been saying things about me?”
“It’s not like that,” I assured him hastily. If he rushed out of here, I didn’t know how to get him back—although a growing part of me was already not at all sure about the wisdom of continuing this conversation. But the last thing I needed was for him to call up my mother and demand to know why she was talking about him with reporters from a nonexistent blog. Especially if he described me, given that I was supposed to have died ten years ago.
Well, technically, I had died. It wasn’t my fault it hadn’t stuck.
“It was a single comment in an unrelated interview,” I continued. Normally, useful lies came as easily to me as breathing, after how much practice I’d gotten at using them to save my life on short notice. But now I found myself scrambling for things to say. “I’m sure she didn’t mean any—”
But he didn’t seem to care what else I said. He shook his head again. “Damned vultures. I’m not telling you a thing.”
Usually, when I was trying to get information, I had a lot more tools at my disposal. None of which had anything to do with reporter tactics. I took a deep breath that did nothing to help slow my pounding heart. “I’ll be straight with you,” I said, managing to keep the tension out of my voice. “We’re new on the scene, and we’re starting late in the game. If we want to compete with the big guys, it’s not enough for us to report the same stories as everyone else. We need to do more. And this story, right here, is our chance. Ideally, we want to be as accurate as possible, but my boss cares more about numbers than about facts. And I do what the boss tells me. So either you can tell your story your way, or I’ll tell it mine, and that’s going to be whatever will get us the most clicks.”
Even as I spoke, a part of me stood back, listening, wondering why I was going to all this trouble. Why did I care what he had to say about something that happened more than thirty years ago? It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Certainly not enough to warrant me threatening to write a false story about him and post it for the entire internet to see.
And yet here I was, still talking.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Was that a threat? Are you threatening me?” He slammed his hand down on the table. The look in his eyes didn’t suggest stability—not that it had before. He started to push himself to his feet.
I sent out a silent thank-you to my friend Ciara, who had been the one to suggest that line about clicks. If this guy forced me to kick his ass in the middle of this quiet little French cafe, I intended to lay all the blame at her feet.
I fixed him with a glare that never failed to get people’s attention. “Sit. Down.” I let a little of my other self come out in my voice, the part of myself I normally tried to hide in front of the civilians. I wasn’t speaking as the fake journalist anymore. He was seeing the person I was when I was on Hades’s business.
He sat down.
My threat, explicit or not, hadn’t improved his jumpiness any. He was practically vibrating in his seat as he twisted his fingers together. “Karen is a good person,” he said defiantly, like he was daring me to believe it. “Don’t do this to her. Don’t make it look… cheap.”
So Ciara’s line had worked after all. I had just needed a little of my own touch to help it along. I sent a second thank-you to Ciara, this one genuine.
But looking at him, part of me couldn’t help but squirm a little. He clearly wasn’t having an easy time of it to begin with, and then I had come in and tried to strong-arm him into giving me answers—and for what? It wasn’t as if I actually needed an article about my mother’s sex life for some political blog. Even with the dire state of my job search, and my even more disastrous finances, I would starve in the street before I ever took that particular assignment. No, my reasons for being here were purely selfish. And it was nothing worth scaring the daylights out of this man, even if he wasn’t what I had hoped he would be. I wished I had found some other pretext for contacting him.
But this was the story I had gone with, and I couldn’t exactly change it now. I hovered my pen over my paper and pretended his reaction to me didn’t bother me at all. “So then tell me what it was really like.”
He gave me a shaky nod. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Let’s start simple. Your name is Richard Walker?”
Another nod. “My friends call me Ricky.”
“And you met Karen…” I prompted.
“At a bar.”
“A bar,” I repeated disbelievingly, letting the mask slip for a second. I couldn’t help it. Despite the fear in his eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was lying to me.
But his face held nothing but nervous sincerity as he nodded. “That’s what I said.”
“While she was in the middle of her very first Senate campaign.”
“It was the pressure. That’s what she told me. The stress was getting to her. She needed something that was as far from her normal life as p
I was glad I had decided not to order coffee, because I would either have choked on it or sprayed it across the table. “Leather?” I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t elaborate. I was already getting images in my head that I would never be able to get rid of.
This cover story was turning out to be a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. Maybe I didn’t want to hear any of this after all. But it was too late to walk away now.
“She clearly didn’t know what she was getting into,” he continued. “Half the guys in the place were hitting on her, maybe more—all in good fun, you know, but I could see she wasn’t used to that kind of attention. You know bikers, a bit more rough around the edges than her usual crowd.”
It turned out I didn’t need a mouthful of coffee in order to choke. “You met my—” I swallowed back the word “mother” just in time. “You met Karen Keyne in a biker bar?”
“I felt a little sorry for her. It wasn’t her fault she had gotten in over her head. So I stepped in, made the guys give her some space. I suggested she might want to find somewhere else to blow off steam, somewhere a little more private.”
I choked again. Nope, I definitely didn’t want to know any of this. “You hadn’t even known her for five minutes.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought someplace with a little more breathing room might be more what she was looking for. In the end, I took her to the shooting range.”
In my clearest memories of my mother, she was standing in front of the cameras with flawless makeup and a tailored suit, giving a practiced smile with just the right amount of warmth, while simultaneously managing to send out a warning glare to anyone who might be considering asking her a question she didn’t want to answer. Poise—that was the word that came to mind when I thought of her. Poise and polish. She was every bit the elegant lady Ricky had seen in her under the—ugh—leather, with a core of steel underneath. It was slightly easier to imagine her at a shooting range than at a biker bar, but only slightly.
“When I finally realized who she was,” he said, “I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. Not just because of where I had met her, but because I couldn’t believe she had managed to hide it for hours like that, even after all the times I had seen her in those ads. I thought I had to be wrong, but when I asked her, she admitted it easily enough. I think she knew the game was up at that point. It all spilled out of her then—the stress of the campaign, how she wondered whether she was even doing the right thing by running, and so on. I’m no shrink, but it was easy enough to see that she had only come out that night in the first place because some part of her wanted somebody to see her. She wanted to burn the whole campaign to the ground, become a laughingstock in the press, and get crushed in the election, because that would be easier than getting the job and then figuring out she wasn’t good enough. We talked all night—”
I made a face before I realized I was doing it. I really wasn’t pulling off the professional-journalist thing here.
“Don’t get squeamish.” His words came out a shade too sharp for a friendly lecture. “You came here for the sordid details, didn’t you? You want something to take back to your vulture friends.” Something in his face shifted, and when he spoke again, the bite was gone from his voice. “But that night, all we did was talk. Really. I convinced her to go back, and not to do anything else to sabotage her chances. Even promised to vote for her—and I’d never voted in my life.” He laughed. “I gave her my number—I don’t even know why—but I just about fell over in shock when she actually called me a week later.”
“And?” I prompted, when he didn’t say anything else—although I won’t lie, a part of me was tempted to walk away right then and there. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t. It wasn’t like this information was going to get me anything besides an up-close view of a side of my mother I had less than no desire to see. I certainly wasn’t going to find whatever Ciara had thought I would when she had told me how excited she was for me. In response to her, I had glared and told her this wouldn’t change anything. It looked like I was right.
But I still didn’t leave.
“Look, what do you want me to tell you?” The harsh note was back in his voice again. “I tried to keep my distance. I knew I didn’t mean anything to her, no matter what she thought at the time. She acted like a high school girl with a crush, but I could see what was going on. She was having trouble dealing with everything else in her life—no matter that she was the one who had signed up for all of it—and I was her escape. I told myself that every time I heard her voice on the other end of the line.” He looked down at the table, his eyes finally ceasing their restless journey. “It didn’t help though,” he said softly. “Didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I still wound up falling for her.”
Then, as his gaze moved up to my face, his voice hardened. “But none of that matters to you, does it? All you want to do is hurt her. Should have known better than to trust anyone in this city. Everyone here is a thief or a liar, and they all think they can get something from me. Well, not you. Not this time.” He jerked up from the table so quickly that his knees knocked against the edge.
“Please.” The word leapt from my mouth before I knew I was going to speak. My own tone surprised me as much as his had. I hadn’t meant to sound so intense. I hadn’t thought this actually mattered to me. Why would it, when I had known from the start that it would probably end badly? This meeting had been a might-as-well kind of thing—I had happened across his name, and decided indulging my curiosity a little couldn’t hurt.
Right. Happened across his name. Looked through thirty-five-year-old phone records from my mother’s campaign like a creeper until I had narrowed it down to one possibility, was more like it. I wouldn’t even get into how many hours of coffee and snacks and mind-numbing boredom had gone into that search.
And here I had thought I wasn’t any good at lying to myself.
His lip curled. “That’s right. If I don’t tell you the truth, you hurt her worse. Wasn’t that the deal?”
It was hardly the worst threat I’d made in my life—or even this week—but shame washed over me like a bucket of cold water. “I didn’t mean…”
“Justify it however you want,” he said. “But threats or no threats, I’ve got nothing else to tell you. You got it all. I hope you’re happy. I met her, I fell in love, she broke my heart. It’s not like I didn’t know she would walk away. Even without the pregnancy, she never would have chosen me over her husband.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I wasn’t the kind of guy you could take to a state dinner, back then.”
I wondered if that meant he thought he would fit in at a state dinner now. If so, his self-image needed some serious updating. But that wasn’t the part of his speech that had caused my heart rate to double. “The pregnancy,” I repeated carefully.
“I turned on the news one morning, and there it was. Hell of a way to find out. But then, I’ve always suspected she wasn’t the one to put the information out there. It was probably someone like you, looking to make a quick buck off someone else’s private life.” He braced himself against the table to stick his face much too close to mine, his eyes glittering with manic intensity. “Do you know who did it? That boss of yours, maybe, over at your little blog?”
I stayed where I was, refusing to let myself be intimidated. It wasn’t hard. I faced down scarier things than him every day. But most of them didn’t make my heart want to shrivel up into a tiny little ball and slink out of my body when they looked at me like that. I took a deep breath and ordered my voice to behave, to reveal nothing that I didn’t want it to reveal. “Was the baby…” I let the sentence go unfinished.
“Mine?” He shook his head. “Of course not. She would have gotten rid of it otherwise. No, that baby belonged to him. Her fairy-tale husband swimming in his piles of money. They had two perfect fairy-tale children when I met them, and then they had a third, and she was done with me. I never heard from her again after that.”
