Page 2 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

Chapter two

John

S ometimes, I run in the dark.

When sleep evades me even into the early hours, and I can't bear to watch the moonlight track slowly across the bare wall of my room any longer, the night air beckons.

So, I run. If I were to take a wrong turn and step out over the invisible edge, well, I wouldn't be the first on White Rock Island to do that.

Working out is one of the few things that clears my mind.

The only outlet that lets me have blissful blankness for just a while.

The path forks off after cutting inland away from the western promontory, one way meandering down through rolling moors and into the village, the other jutting downwards in a series of rough-hewn stone steps and sharp turns.

Since I do still have a survival instinct, I usually take the former; especially in the dark.

I pass Kidswal, jogging up to the bluff and taking the long way into town, instead.

The sun is rising; cresting the jutting headland where it reaches into the sea and provides the bay with calmer waters.

The ground slopes away from my feet, sinking into a pebbly beach which stretches back to the docks that the low village has been built around.

As I reach Kidswal's main street—a stretch of unlined black tarmac, with shops on one side and dock warehousing on the other—the town is as busy as it ever gets. The fishermen are bringing in their first catch, and the morning market is going up along the front of the warehouses.

A few spare me a glance—I must look strange in only a sweat-soaked singlet and sweats, steam puffing from my mouth as I catch my breath, while they’re bundled up in their jackets and hoods against the chill. I don't let myself stop long enough to get cold.

This place is like stepping back into the dark ages.

Many of the women opt for heavy woollen skirts and a kind of hat-bonnet to weather against the wind.

The people have a mistrustful eye, which is fair enough given what presides over the western side of their island.

Eternal Light might be a respectable establishment now, but any paying customer, like me, can come and stay as long as they have the means.

No questions asked. People are there for everything from rehabilitation, avoidance, or mere hermitage.

Or something darker. Whichever we are, the townsfolk tar us all as though we are that something darker.

Which, again, is fair enough.

How can I afford to stay? Well, it would surprise many, myself included, to find that crime of my type did pay. In gifts, and in the help I’d received after Crennick burned. Well-off family members of the lost mainly, who felt I'd brought them justice where the law failed.

I should have been too proud to accept their gifts. I didn't want to take their jewels, their gold and bundles of cash. But, after Crennick burned, after… everything, there was little that I did think about.

I'd killed my sister, but that was considered just another of my kindnesses. Who to talk to in order to reach me was an open secret in the following two years. A network built for me, one I was largely unaware of it; the broken man that I was.

Was . I'm still a broken man now. I'm under no illusion about that.

Tregam was cleaning itself up. Plants growing in dirt thought to be toxic for decades, purified by fire.

But I wasn't purified. I tried to co-exist, quiet and unknown. I’d retired anyway, or so I've been telling myself.

The urge for final, and usually easy, solutions to people who don't deserve to be alive, has embedded itself in me.

So, I took these plied gifts, and came here.

A place where there’s no temptation. Where few heard enough about Needler to remember the grainy photos of the man who came before him, the man I haven’t been for a very long time.

Any photos taken after my arrest haven’t seen the light of day.

I can only assume I've got Eleanor to thank for that.

Knowing her, she probably set my mugshot on fire and called it an accident.

I let myself see her once before I left Tregam. I waited, unseen on the edges of a memorial, one I knew she'd come to on this particular day of the year. Not for Caleb anymore, but for the women of the force who became his victims.

Eleanor had looked happy; hand in hand with her husband, resting her head on his shoulder throughout the long ceremony.

I have only goodwill towards her, and even Dirk.

I'd not lied to her about that. I blame them for nothing.

Cassandra's fate may as well have been written in stone.

She was going to meet it, one way or another.

Someone had to stop her. And maybe that someone was always going to be me.

Much as I tried, and failed, to avoid it.

My arms are starting to rise with goosebumps.

The misty rain is turning to sleet, the wet combined with cold quickly sapping any warmth the run had built up.

I grab a newspaper from the stand—there are none delivered to the asylum—roll it up and shove it into my waistband.

It'll be damp by the time I get back, but I don't care. I might not even read it anyway.

I consider continuing on to the far eastern end of the island, where the black ruin of what used to be an orphanage—long since burned down—lingers. But the rain sweeps down heavier in that moment, warning me off.

I jog back up the difficult way, taking the rocky stairs.

By the time I reach the gatehouse to the asylum, I'm panting, feeling more awake than when I left an hour ago. This pervading dullness that’s been with me since I pulled that trigger stays with me always, but at least I'm not feeling the lack of sleep right at this moment.

Taking the long way back to the ward—through the bailey courtyard, and over the open battlements—I tug the newspaper out of my waistband, and let it unfurl.

The front page is a picture of the new mayor Tregam, and therefore of White Rock.

He's a young man I recognise. The sight of the dark-skinned man with curly hair almost makes me chuckle.

Apparently, even raiding the police precinct doesn't bar one from being elected in Tregam.

It might even help. I flick through the crumpled pages as I walk until one article stops me.

Why wasn't this on the front page instead of Tregam's new mayor swearing to clean the streets? They all swear that.

Another Dead, the headline declares.

Has the Wraith of White Rock struck again?

The picture is of a woman. Old, in that neat way of professional grandmothers, if the small thumbnail of her face is anything to go by.

She was found strangled—garrotted—behind a shop in Feston; the small rich neighbourhood up on the northern, higher side of the island.

Feston is only two perpendicular streets of clustered boutiques and three overpriced cafes, since few rich types choose White Rock.

The article goes into the murdered woman's achievements; her children, who are now in politics, how she herself was freshly retired after a career as a matron, and her thirty years on the island council.

Then, the interesting part.

The other deaths attributed to this Wraith.

Three so far. The other two were men—both around sixty—found in their homes. Authorities conjecture the killer might be someone who had been a resident at the asylum in the past. Escaped, maybe, and maddened, hunting anyone vulnerable.

I've stopped walking, the wind tugging at the paper and making me shiver. I realise I've read the entire article—like some kind of addict stumbling upon a hit. I crumple the paper into my fists.

No

Tossing it in the bin, I hug my arms across my now cold body, and make for the sanctuary of inside.

***

I try not to spend much time in my room.

I prefer to be out on the moors, or walking one of the island’s many rocky paths.

You can cross all the way to the east edge in a matter of hours, or traipse off the thin tarmac road that circles the island and take most of a day to cut over the mountains and ridges instead.

But today, the rain has set in heavily enough to deter even me from leaving.

My quarters are simple; a single bed against the far wall, a grey jute rug underneath it, and a small desk beside the door.

A potted plant on the other side of the doorframe gets its only light from the small, locked window beside my bed.

This room is identical to the other thirty on this side of the castle.

The ceiling is low. Low enough for me to have stood on the bed when I first arrived, and fixed a bar between two metal supports that cross the ceiling.

The building closed up against the sleet, and the old heating system retrofitted to this building runs sometimes too cold, and sometimes—like today—too hot. In the resulting mugginess, I've taken my shirt off to do chin-ups with my back half-turned to the entrance. I don't hear the door.

"Oh!"

I drop to my feet on the cement floor and turn to face the now-open door, and the woman who made that noise.

“Sorry!” She gasps out, caught between staring fixedly at the floor, and backing out of the room completely. I look at her for a beat before I recall that I'm still shirtless. I grab a singlet off the bed and pull it on.

I haven’t thought about sex in a long time. Thinking about it would lead to wanting it. The desire to have a woman beneath me, all heavy breaths and gasps. Which is impossible, because I don't like to fuck strangers, so they'd need to know me, and they can't know me.