The Mute Swan: A Thriller Read online

  “Colo-what?” Kopke had moved closer to Sailor so he could decipher his words.

  “The feds called,” Wolfe came back. “We have only minutes before they arrive.”

  Sailor didn’t even hear Wolfe. “Who is Kate?” he stood up and dialed his phone. Mother’s private number.

  “Maybe Kate is Hannah’s friend or something?” Kopke said.

  “Don’t bother, kiddo,” Wolfe said. “This whole thing is too big for small fish like us. I want this night to be over.”

  Mother picked up.

  “Did Hannah have friends?” Sailor asked, walking around frantically.

  “Come again?”

  “Kate?” Sailor had no time to explain. “Does the name Kate ring a bell?”

  “Where did you get this name, Sailor?”

  His eyes moistened. He wasn’t going to mess it up again. “A puzzle. It says Hannah And Kate, or something similar.’

  “Sailor,” Mother said. “Take a deep breath. What puzzle?”

  “Just answer the question,”

  “Are you alone?”

  “I am alone,” he lied. “The line is secured.” He lied again.

  “Hannah Ann Kate, you mean,” she said.

  His face twitched. Did Mother know?

  “Hannah, Ann, and Kate,” she elaborated. “Three girls. They live miles and miles apart. They never met, but they know each other through secured means online. We should have never let them find each other, but they were curious. They wanted to know more about their past. We let them. The girls were going crazy. They were lonely. They needed to comfort each other—“

  “No, no, no,” he ran toward the museum’s door.

  “Sailor! I need you to calm down and tell me everything,” she said. “Neither you nor the Colonnade should be able to connect the dots. How did you know about Ann and Kate?”

  He was already out, his trembling hands trying to fit the keys into the vehicle’s door, “I need the two girls addresses, Mother.”

  “I can’t, Sailor. I can’t. Tell me what happened.”

  He opened the door and sat in the driver's seat, “I can fix this,” he breathed heavily as the car roared to life. “Just give me the addresses.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Sailor,” Mother had to scream back. “I can’t because they’re miles apart.”

  “I’ll drive fast,” he pushed the pedal. “I’ll take a plane.”

  “Please, take a deep breath, Sailor, because you can’t save them,” Mother said. “Kate lives in Colmar, France.”

  Sailor winced, losing grip of the wheel for a moment, realizing he can’t be in France before the Colonnade. “And Ann? Give me Ann’s address.”

  “She is in Hamelin, Sailor. That’s a three hour drive, all the way across the Fairy Tale Road.”

  That was when Sailor contemplated taking his hand off of everything and let the wheel decide his fate.

  “I will hang up with you and warn them,” Mother said.

  “Eight, you’re late, ” Sailor recited the words, his voice low and fractured.

  “Come again?”

  “Mute Swans,” he said as he crossed paths with the federal police’s car driving the opposite direction. “They killed them already, and will probably kill more.”

  “This can’t be, Sailor.”

  “The Colonnade found a loophole, something that connected the families through the years, and they are muting the swans,” he was in a haze, driving up the highway, going nowhere fast. “That’s why the puzzles were overly complicated. It was their last.”

  “Nothing is over. Swans will keep screaming, Sailor,” Mother said. “Don’t let them break you. You know they would love that. It wasn’t your fault.’

  “I fucked up again, like I did with Sarah,” he said, as his car swerved off the road.

  Chapter 18

  The Bayer Watchtower, Lohr, Bavaria, Germany

  The man with the gloves tucked the rifle back in its case. Now that Sailor passed the feds, there was no danger. He still wondered if Sailor would survive the cliff.

  None of that actually mattered. What mattered was the look on Sailor’s face. Priceless. It had always been a pleasure to see him suffer, so he decided to let his noble Gods decide his fate. Message was sent anyway. Man’s soul had been shattered — again. Girls were dead. Secret preserved. All good.

  Oh, boy, what a night. What a future to come for the Blue Bloods of the Colonnade.

  He sent Lollipop a message:

  Done?

  Lollipop replied:

  Yeah.

  He sent back:

  How about our friend in France?

  Lollipop wrote:

  Haven’t heard from him yet.

  Epilogue

  The Holle House, Donkey Trail, Lohr, Bavaria, Germany,

  Two months later

  “What did you say your name was again?” Angie Holle asked with absent eyes.

  Her body was present but her mind and soul were somewhere in the ethereal world chasing shadows of her Hannah.

  “Codename Sailor, ma’am. John Sailor.” He said, putting the music box on the table. It was considerably larger than the box he opened in the museum two months earlier.

  “The Six Swans wouldn’t let you say your real name?” She stood by the boiler, making cinnamon flavored tea.

  “Yup.”

  “Same way like me and Hannah. We both hated that we had to memorize our new names whenever we moved to a new city,” she glanced at the rain outside her window. “I remember hearing her remind herself of her real name in her prayers sometimes.”

  Sailor looked like he had a lot to say, but said nothing.

  She shook a single tear off by jerking her neck, as if waking herself up, “So,” she faked a smile, “You always smell of fish, Codename Sailor?

  Sailor tittered, looking like a man with a toothache. “It’s my wife’s coat. She loved to fish. It keeps me sane.”

  “Yellow is the color of madness,” Angie said. “Hannah once told me that Alice in Wonderland’s original dress was yellow.”

  She had lost Sailor with her remark, but he wasn’t one to judge. Grief was a brutal demon. One way to exorcise it was to spit it out in some form of melancholy.

  “Mother said you’re an assassin,” Angie changed the subject.

  “Part time,” he tried to stretch his frozen shoulder since the accident, but couldn’t.

  “Why part time?”

  “Unstable career,” he said. “Insurance policy is not the best, you know.”

  She didn’t smile, though she liked him. True, her daughter was dead, but at least she had died for something. Not everyone can achieve that in life.

  “So you go to the sea to wash blood off your hands?” She poured the water into the cup.

  “I don’t go to sea, ma’am. I go back.”

  She put the cup in front of him and sat sideways. “You think of my daughter when you go back?”

  He nodded without speaking. Without looking her in the eyes.

  “I believe you, actually,” she said. “Is it lonely at sea?”

  “It’s lonely on the mainland.”

  “I see,” she nodded. “You do anything else when you’re not killing fish and people?”

  “I’m writing a book.”

  “Oh? I wonder what it’s about.”

  “About a man who catches fish and kills bad people.”

  She suppressed a smile, though she needed it. It felt wrong at this time, “So why are you here, Codename Sailor, to tell me you survived a car accident?”

  “To…”

  “Did Mother send you? Because if she did, I don’t accept pity.”

  “She didn’t,” he shrugged. “I’m here to comfort you.“

  “Yeah? How do you plan on achieving that?”

  He touched the rim of the cup with the tip of his fingers. “See if you needed anything.”

  “I need my daughter. Can you bring her back?”

  “No,”
it came out fast. Sailor may not have been good with people, but he was good with blunt facts.

  “That’s all you got?”

  “That’s all there is,” he sipped his tea.

  “I like you,” she said.

  “I like some sugar in my tea,”

  It took her a moment to register his request. She would have liked a man like that in her younger years. Not that she would have known why, but she had always been the worst judge of character in men.

  “Hannah devoured sugar,” she passed him a package of diet sugar.

  “I don’t diet,” he said.

  She chuckled, actually glad she had his sort of company today. She only wished he looked her in the eyes or laughed. “Then you’ll have to share my whiskey.” She tapped the half-empty bottle on the table.

  Sailor stared at it for a little longer than she had expected then said, “I’m not killing anyone today. Whiskey will do.”

  She pulled over the small glass nearby and poured them both drinks. “Do you have a toast in mind?”

  “Nah. I’m a bad liar.”

  She handed him his glass and raised hers.

  He raised his.

  “You have to look me in the eye if we’re going to do this.” She said.

  “Aye,” he said, and looked at her.

  She knew immediately he wasn’t the shy type. He just wanted to be left alone. Glasses in the air, she said, “I want the members of the Six Swans to celebrate Hannah’s birthday every year.”

  “Doable,” he said. “We’ll celebrate Ann’s birthday, too.”

  “And Kate?”

  “Nah, Kate escaped,” he said. “We can’t find her though. She doesn’t trust anyone. She is my only hope to tell the truth. I’ll find her.”

  “You do that,” she said. “I also want them to know that she didn’t bail out, that she did her prayers every night.”

  “They know that already.”

  A tear began to form in her eyes. This was why he didn’t want to look her in the eyes. He was sparing her the emotional impact of meeting him.

  Then she asked him a question he had expected, “Why didn’t they kill me instead? I know a few parts of the secret, too.”

  “The younger the soul, the deeper the cut,” Sailor said. “My arm hurts by the way.”

  She chuckled again, whiskey messing up the table.

  They clicked glasses without making a toast. She gulped three shots after. One was about right for him. He was high already.

  “Her death is my fault,” she clasped her hands.

  “Wow, you’re not going that route, are you?” He reached for the glass.

  “I insisted we come back to our roots in Lohr,” she said. “I thought they hadn’t found us for years and they had given up.”

  “You fucked up big time,” he gulped the whiskey down his throat.

  “And you? Who’d you fuck up with?”

  Sailor stretched his neck and avoided her eyes.

  “You lost someone, didn’t you?” She said.

  Sailor’s lips twitched. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Wife?”

  Sailor blinked for an answer.

  “Did you also make her do something that led to her death?”

  “Yup,” he gulped his third shot.

  “Did someone come and ‘comfort you’?”

  He shook his head no.

  “They think you don’t need comforting, huh?” She said.

  He wasn’t going to answer that. Another shot down the drain.

  “So it was in your wife’s bloodline, not yours.”

  “You could say that.”

  “You have kids?”

  Sailors closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. “You talk too much, woman” he poured her a drink.

  She gulped it.

  He poured her another.

  She squinted.

  He nodded.

  She gulped it.

  “Was a pleasure drinking with you,” Sailor stood up.

  “Leaving so soon?”

  “I’m not ready for Alcoholics Anonymous,” Sailor rubbed wet hands on his coat and pointed at the music box. “I brought you a present.”

  “This is for me?”

  “It took me two months to make it, but it should bring a little comfort for you,”

  “It’s not a cliched photo album of my daughter, is it?”

  “Stop talking,” he waved goodbye and walked out through the kitchen door.

  “Wait,” Angie jumped out of her chair and followed him.

  Sailor slowly turned, deliberately avoiding her eyes. She was one hell of a smart woman. She touched his face. He leaned back against the apartment’s door.

  “It wasn’t just your wife, was it?” Angie said and pointed at the name carved on his fish whistle: Sarah.

  Five letters for five holes for five musical notes. Sarah had gifted him that whistle for his birthday, right after a session of finger painting with red paint on the class’ walls. The killers knew him too well.

  Sailor said nothing, involuntarily locking eyes with her.

  “Oh God in heavens,” she said. “That’s why Mother says you volunteered to inspect all the deaths of younger girls. I’m so sorry.”

  Sailor spoke no words. His eyes were ice cold. She could not read through anymore.

  “They killed your daughter, too…”

  For a moment his stare scared her. She saw the assassin in him. The wrath and darkness. She had tapped into a tabooed place inside, one she should have not explored.

  And before she knew it, John Sailor was gone.

  Angie stood perplexed.

  Part of her was strangely comforted by the misery of another man and the fact that he actually understood how it felt to lose a daughter. And part of her hated herself for pushing him to heal her own pain.

  She trotted back to the kitchen and saw the music box.

  A chill slithered down her spine. Slowly, she approached the table and opened the oversized musical machine. A ballerina popped up in a swan dress and music began to play.

  It wasn’t Swan Lake.

  This time it was "Angie" by the Rolling Stones.

  Angie, Angie. When will those dark clouds all disappear.

  Inside the box, she found splotches of blood and black gloves.

  The End

  Afterword

  Thank you for having read the first prequel to the upcoming novel, Screaming Swans. The Mute Swan is only an introduction to John Sailor, preparing you for main novel Screaming Swans.

  But before that, we have another short story coming, A Killer’s Game , about the female protagonist, Olivia Wilde — you can read it HERE .

  Olivia is a folklorist. She is as tough as John, with an even darker past. Only she is an academic. Her analysis is based upon her life-long studies of the origins of folklore and fairy tales.

  The end of her story connects her to John and sends them both on a quest larger-than-life across the globe. A quest where they will have to expose history’s darkest secret to save the future of mankind in Screaming Swans.

  Amazon US links for A Killer’s Game:

  A Killer’s Game

  Amazon UK links for A Killer’s Game:

  A Killer’s Game

  Also by Nick Twist

  The Last Girl: A Thriller

  US

  UK

  Also by Cameron Jace

  The Insanity Series ( 9 Books )

  The Insanity Series Boxset (9 books )

  The Grimm Prequels ( 5 books )

  The Grimm Diaries Series ( 4 Books)

  Contact Me

  Cameron here,

  If you would like to contact me or follow me on social media:

  Facebook Fan Page:

  http:// www. facebook. com/ camjace/

  Facebook Group (discussions and secrets)

  https:// www. facebook. com/ groups/ storykiller/

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  Email:

  Email: [email protected]

  Also you can join our mailing list HERE: MAILING LIST

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  Interested in more news, releases, behind scenes, maps, and a short book with pictures and articles about the Fairy Tale Road where Lohr is located — which will be meticulously explored in the series, please join our

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  About the Author

  My name is Cameron Jace. Most of the time I live in San Fransisco, but lately I’ve been traveling all over Europe.

  I wrote a series of bestselling fantasy books with great interest in the origins of folklore, fairytales, and storytelling. Not from a fantastical point of view but rather asking who wrote them, why, and can these stories actually reflect history or just figments of someone’s imagination.

  I’m originally an architect who stumbled upon scriptures and out of print books in European forgotten towns and cities while traveling for work. It turned into an addiction and I couldn’t stop writing.

  Last year, I wrote a thriller called The Last Girl under the pen name Nick Twist, and it’s been a success. So I’m both guys.

  The Screaming Swans series merges my favorite two genres, Thrillers & Folklore in a real life, action and travel packed, no-fantasy storyline. This is only a beginning of a journey to two conclusions I believe you’ve never heard of before, because in a most humble way, I discovered them.

  Please email me or messages me. I answer within a day or two. I love feedback and discussion. They help write better books.

 

 

  Jace, Cameron, The Mute Swan: A Thriller

 

 

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