‘Whatever it is, it sounds big, and we need to find out a lot more about it,’ William insisted.
Zakaria clenched his right hand into a fist and snarled wordlessly in a gesture of sudden frustration.
‘If only the Eastern Council still lived!’ he growled. ‘They were by far the greatest of our kind that the world has ever known. They would have known exactly what to do.’ He paused to sigh and shake his head sadly, and his voice dropped to a gravelly whisper when he resumed speaking. ‘We cannot dwell on what has been lost. May the Great Mother rest the souls of our fallen teachers, our sources of light.’ He then transfixed William with a piercing stare. ‘You are the last who carries the fire of their full wisdom and knowledge, brother. And Parvati, of course, but … she is what she is. Perhaps someday she will be able to piece together the fragments of her shattered mind and regain the powers she once had, but we cannot cling to possibilities. We must trust only in certainties.’
William sighed; the mention of his former mentors always churned a tumult of emotion deep within his core, as did talk of Parvati and her tragic fate, for while she had escaped the massacre of the Eastern Council with her life, neither her mind nor her body had remained intact. Intense feelings that fermented and festered in a bitter percolation of sadness, regret, anger, and crushing grief sent their tapeworm tendrils slithering through his every vein, artery and capillary.
‘May God rest their immortal souls indeed,’ he murmured. ‘But now is not the time for grief,’ he continued, his whisper morphing into a raspy snarl, ‘for sorrow, for dwelling on what has been lost. Now is the time for anger. For vengeance.’
‘Looks like we got to you at just the right time,’ Njinga remarked.
‘Just in time to save my life, yes,’ William said. ‘A rather fortunate piece of timing for me.’
‘That was no coincidence, William,’ Zakaria said. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while, waiting for the right time to move. We’ve been organising something really big, you see, and we need you with us for this.’
William stared for a few moments at the three of them, moving his glance from person to person, temporarily dumbfounded.
‘Well why the hell did you wait until they almost killed me? Christ, that was cutting it a bit bloody fine, wasn’t it?’
‘We couldn’t have moved any sooner than we did,’ Njinga answered. ‘In fact, we were planning on waiting a few more days, but your killing of Hernández, and the subsequent attention that that lil’ act of foolishness drew from the Huntsmen, well that forced our hand.’
‘Wait, what? You consider my elimination of Hernández to have been an act of stupidity?’
‘I don’t mean to put it like that, but—’
‘He was one of the most powerful members of the Alliance, and what’s more, he was pure scum!’ William spat, his hackles raised. ‘His existence has been a blight on the face of the earth for five hundred years! The man was a human trafficker, a slaver, a rapist, and someone who helped engineer a genocide, for God’s sake! I do not revel in violence, my friends, and I do not celebrate anyone’s death, but I do believe the world is a better place without him in it. And I can’t bloody well believe that you lot would label my getting rid of him as “foolish”!’
‘It wasn’t the getting rid a’ him that was foolish, William, it was the timing of it, an’ the way you did it,’ Njinga countered. ‘You attacked him in an alley in New York City! In public, where there could have been witnesses! C’mon William, where’s the foresight an’ planning in that shit?! An’ you know what? There were witnesses; someone called the cops, an’ someone reported the sounds a’ big cats roaring. They thought some animals had broken out of the zoo! An’ there’s at least one photo, grainy as hell, thank goodness, that someone took with a phone camera, a’ you in your tiger form! Thankfully most online sceptics are calling it a fake. Still, the mangled bodies a’ the two skinheads that Hernández killed, they were found by the police, an’ there was no mistaking that their deaths had been at the hand a’ a wild animal. Now Hernández, he’s killed thousands of mortals over the years, an’ he knows all about avoiding attention an’ disposing of bodies … but you attacked him before he was even able to do that! An’, after killing him, you took his phone with you to your apartment! How could you have been so careless, William? Was it any surprise that the Huntsmen came for you as quickly as they did? You’re lucky that we’d been watching you. Very, very lucky.’
William turned away with a scowl, looking sullen after Njinga had delivered this somewhat scathing lecture.
‘Hernández was hunting me,’ he grumbled, the fire taken out of his voice by the sting of defeat, of guilt, of shame. ‘I was just defending myself.’
‘Hernández wasn’t hunting you. He was sent to track you, yes, but not to kill you,’ Zakaria said.
‘And how do you know this?’
‘You’ve been away from us for too long, my brother,’ Zakaria answered, his voice softening. ‘You don’t know how expansive our intelligence sources have become. We need you back in the fold, William. You’ve been flying solo for too many years.’
William turned his face away from Zakaria and stared out of the window for a while before he replied.
‘Aye … I ran,’ he murmured. ‘I chose the path of fear, rather than that of courage.’
‘Even though you did run,’ Zakaria said, ‘I know you were always there, in the background, doing what you could for the survival of our kind. I know that you have spent at least some time in recent years infiltrating Huntsmen intelligence on your own, and warning various beastwalkers across
