Vice(52)

Soon, we’re almost upon the house. I can hear loud shouts and jeers from the front lawn, as well as a good amount of snarling. I’m about to burst through the trees, out onto the lawn, when Natalia grabs me by the arm and pulls me back.

“No, please. Don’t. Let’s go around the back. Everyone will see us.”

I could give two shits about everybody seeing me at this point. But she looks like she’s about to have a heart attack, and I just can’t put her through anymore. I let her lead me to the right, then, skirting around the side of the building. I can see people through the trees—so much movement. People running? People fighting? I can’t make out much. Natalia leads the way. She guides me on an unseen path that she seems to know well, and then we’re standing at a doorway, a side entrance to the house, and she’s punching a code into a keypad that’s affixed to the wall.

“Why are we going inside? We have to f*cking stop this.”

“And we will. Just trust me. Please.” She’s so desperate for me to do what she’s asking of me that I go against everything that makes any sense to me. I do it. I follow her inside the house. The heavy steel door slams closed behind us, and I feel like I’ve just made a terrible, terrible decision. The house is deserted. Not a soul in sight. Our footsteps echo like gunshots as we race down the marble floored hallway, and my heart sounds like a crazed metronome, marking out a frenzied tattoo in my chest.

Natalia runs through the corridors of the lower ground floor, and with every step we take the sound of the commotion outside grows louder. She’s true to her word; she leads me to a wall of French doors that I haven’t seen before, in a wing of the house that seems more relaxed than the austere white marble and obscenely large vases of the foyer. She rushes to the middle set of French doors and yanks them open, running out onto a deserted terrace, three or four feet higher than the lawn. There must be a hundred or so people gathered out there on the lawn. The air smells green, fresh, like recently cut grass, mixed in with something more sinister. Something metallic, like copper.

It takes me a moment to figure out what I’m looking at.

I see Harrison first. His arms are wrapped around himself, but not in a defensive way. He’s cackling, his face a mask of mirth, and he looks like he’s clutching at his stomach because he’s laughing too hard. His body rocks forward, revealing a line of men with guns, standing off to one side, just as Natalia predicted. Just like a few days ago, when William’s body was fed to the wolves, Fernando’s permanent guests are huddled together on the lawn, every last one of them dressed in white robes. I scan the crowd, looking for Plato, but he’s nowhere to be seen. I’m immediately worried. Why isn’t he there with the other Servicio? Seems like an ill omen. There’s no way Fernando would have allowed him to miss this spectacle, which can mean only one thing: he is the person who tried to escape. I don’t know the man well enough to decide if this is the case or not, but it’s a possibility. A bolt of guilt fires through me. The guy saved me. He risked his own life to try and save mine. And no good deed goes unpunished, as my father always likes to say.

“There are so many men,” Natalia says, pointing out into the darkness. “I’ve never seen so many players here at once. My father…he would normally have told me if we were expecting so many.”

She’s right. There must be fifty or sixty guys, all dressed in black, talking quietly amongst themselves to one side. They’re all young. They’re all handsome. And they all have a faint tarnished look to them that the Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce and Gabbana just can’t hide. Worse, they’re all Caucasian. They all look like they’re American, as far as looks can tell you such a thing, and I feel sick to my stomach. My countrymen. The people that I fought to defend. God, they make me ashamed.

It doesn’t bode well that Natalia didn’t know there were going to be so many. I have no idea why Fernando would be keeping his daughter in the dark, holding her at arm’s length, but damn. Does it mean he knows that she’s been talking to me? Telling me things?

At the very far end of the huge, sprawling lawn, I catch sight of the man. Fernando looks like he’s eight feet tall. He seems to be glowing with pride as he looks down on a confusion of color and fur, just ten feet away from him. I can’t see what’s happening at first. Then, I make out the still form of a body in the center of the pack of wolves. Still, at first, I should say, and then jerking, twitching, dancing almost, as the wolves rip and tear and claw and bite.

They’re feeding.

They’re frenzied.

Their muzzles are covered in blood and gore.

And they are nearly done with their meal.

Natalia covers her mouth with one hand, supressing a horrified sob. “We’re too late. Oh god, we’re too late.”

Even if we’d arrived twenty minutes ago, we would have been too late. “Who is it? Do you know who it is?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I can’t see.” It’s no real surprise that she can’t; her eyes are filled with tears. She buckles at the knees, sinking to the floor. I try to catch her, but she wrestles free from my grip, crawling forward on all fours, watching the nightmare unfold before us through the gaps in the marble balustrade.

I’m at a loss. I arrived fired up to help. To stop this somehow, and now that it’s too late, the adrenalin that has been coursing through my body for the past half an hour has no purpose to serve. My muscles are jumping, demanding me into action, and yet there is no course to take. Nothing that will help, now that the lifeless body out there on the lawn has been reduced to sinew and bone. I haven’t felt this useless in a very, very long time.