Chapter 30: Will

Chapter 30: Will

There was no point standing so far away from Fred. If he had intended to shoot me, he would have shot me from that far away. Back when he was young, he was pretty handy with a firearm, and I didn’t think that aging would take away his muscle memory of aiming and pulling the trigger at a target.

But this didn’t seem to be what Fred wanted to do. He wanted an audience. He needed me to listen. Fred had planned everything down to a tee. He had anticipated that I would turn up. I had to give him credit where credit was due. As sick and perverted as he was in the head, he was a mastermind when it came to committing to his schemes. It had only dawned on me now when he had revealed that he had been the architect of my misery, all the while, how malevolently brilliant my brother was.

“You cannot stall me forever. This night, like all nights, must end, and before it does, I intend to see everything you hold dear razed to the ground,” Fred said, fiddling with the button but not pressing it.

“I held you dear once,” I said.

“And I remain true to my statement. Before your very eyes, you see your beloved brother turn into a monster you never thought he could be. You were always such a pragmatist, thinking that there would be some way you could redeem me. There is no point in redeeming me, Will. I was already redeemed back in Germany when you rooted me out with the rest of the pack and brought me to this shithole. In a way, all that terrible stuff that happened to you, you are to blame for it,” Fred said.

“I will not deny it,” I said. “I made mistakes. I have never been the perfect Alpha. I was thrust into leadership at a very young age. Making mistakes is the domain of all men who are put in charge of something. But that doesn’t mean that I am a villain. Everything that I did, I did for the better of the pack. For you.”

“Spare me the melodrama. You did things because you wanted to. Admit it and relieve yourself of the lie you’ve been telling all of us all this time. You had always wanted to come to America, even before the war. The land of opportunity, you called it. You just saw an opportunity and took it, never minding once how the rest of the pack must have felt. There were others in the pack who voiced discontent against your decisions, but only I was the one who was capable enough to do something about it. I thought that by taking you out of the equation, I would get control of the pack and help them go back to Germany or, at the very least, allow them to build the lives they wanted in this new place,” Fred said. “But they always saw you as a hero after you disappeared. A legend who saved the pack. They forgot that they were discontented to begin with. Only I remembered that.”

“You sought my doom. How long did you plan that for?” I knew the only way to stop him from pressing that button was to engage him in this conversation long enough for Alexis and the rest of the pack to do something. I also understood that I couldn’t stall him forever. But I was playing into his egocentric desire to show off, to reveal his master plan, and to have an audience. He had been waiting for this for a long time, and in his heart, he needed me to know why he had done it. It was the only reason he hadn’t pressed the button and was still talking to me. Fred was vain.

“When you first landed us in this miserable pit of horrors that you so loved, I made it my job to find out about all the people who lived here so that I could get started implementing a strategy that would eliminate you from our lives. You had already done so much damage, removing us from our hometown, forcing us to build a new commune from the ground up, and robbing us of our ancestral wealth. If we had stayed in Germany, stayed put after the war, that country would have been ours to rule. We would have regained our lands, and we would have been millionaires. But that was nothing compared to your principles, was it? You couldn’t risk staying there for a little while longer. How utterly pathetic was that? Imagine, if you will if we had stayed there once the war was over. Do you know what would have happened?” Fred asked.

I could see that he had grown tired of sitting on his chair, a lifetime of feigning lameness hadn’t taken away the impulse to get out of his wheelchair and move around a little bit. Now that his jig was up, he got out of the chair without hesitation and walked around. He took a packet of cigarettes out from his pocket and lit one.

“I can tell you what would have happened. We would have died when the Allies rushed Germany and took away control from the Nazis. When everyone was thrown into prison after the Second World War, we would have rotted in some jail while the new government figured out what they’d do to the country. You never knew this, but they reallocated all land back to the masses. We wouldn’t have gotten back our ancestral land. Never. They distributed it to the people equally to reduce post-war poverty,” I said. I knew this to be true, having read accounts of what happened to Germany after the war.

“If we had stayed put, they would have never taken our lands from us. There were hundreds of us. We would have laid claim to our property. But you didn’t want to wait. You wanted a fresh start for the pack,” Fred said. “I loathed that.”

“So you sicced Edward on me?”

“Edward and I were each other’s solutions to longstanding problems that we were both facing. I wanted you out, and he wanted to research werewolves, what with him being a crazy occultist. We made a deal. I would give him a werewolf, and in return, he would leave the rest of us alone.”

“And how did that deal work out for you?”

“Oh, we prospered for those seventy years. I gained control of the town by investing myself in its politics. I planted my son as the mayor. There were other avenues of business to explore, which I did as well. Knowing what I knew about the sea, ships, and the merchant navy, I propositioned the vampires to work with me so they could smuggle their goods through the sea instead of whatever primitive way they were resorting to back then. I brokered peace between two species that had always been at each other’s throats for as far back as any of us can remember,” Fred said. I could see that he was feeling proud of himself, the way his chest was popping out, and his eyes were glinting. He saw himself as the hero of this tale, even after all that he had done.

“You never brokered peace. The vampires encroached on the town and made life miserable for every single person living there. They ruled through fear. The wolves were compromised by your actions,” I said. Even though there was little hope for him, I had to make him see how things were instead of how he was assuming them to be. “You were no hero for these people either. You had their Alpha kidnapped, you went behind their backs to deal with the vampires, and you used corruption to plant your son as the mayor.”

“I was there for them. That’s what mattered. Where were you?” Fred scoffed, then burst into maniacal laughter.

“You knew where I was. I suspect you knew that I was alive all that time. Maybe you and Edward Beckett were friends by then, and he showed you what he had been doing to me,” I said, grasping for straws. I didn’t know if this part was true, but if it were, Fred would bite and give me a few more minutes before pushing the button.

“Ah, I knew Edward. He and I became quite close after some time. He would request things from me, and I’d provide him. I was, after all, operating a smuggling ring in the town, wasn’t I? He’d give me updates on what he was doing to you. His experiments…I knew what they were. I begged him not to let you live. I implored him to kill you, and I’d provide him with a newer wolf to experiment upon, but he had grown attached to you all the way until his death,” Fred said.

“Is that all? Are you done? Don’t you want to push that button and blow the town to hell?” I asked, trying to stall him some more.

“Now, now, patience is a virtue.”

“You do realize that I’m going to take you to trial for all of this in front of the tribunal.”

“If there is no tribunal left alive, there won’t be a trial. I am afraid, brother, you and I will have to end this here and now. Only one of us is leaving this place alive, and even that is not a guarantee.”

Alexis. Please tell me some good news, I called out to her.

“You cannot do that right now. That would be cheating. I know what you’re doing. You’re reaching out to your mate. Tsk. Tsk. I thought we were airing our dirty laundry. Or are you bored already?” Fred smirked.

“You never told me how you and Blair started working together,” I said, feeling resigned when Alexis did not respond. I hoped that she was doing all right. I had given her a monumental task. It would be miraculous if she’d achieve it. I needed to have some faith.

“Blair came to me after his father’s death, informing me that you had killed his father. He wanted revenge. I set him out on a warpath, told him of Wolf’s Bane, and even nudged him in the right direction quite a few times. I made him work with Ralph and Maurice so that he’d have some backing in the city. People never suspect the old and withered guy to be capable of doing such things. They never knew that everything happening in the city only happened because I deemed it to happen. For the first time in my life, I had control. And then you came and took it back in a second, and things were back to being how they were,” Fred said.

“You sought to reduce my name to ashes, to kill me, but in doing so, you only made me stronger. It was because of you that I was imprisoned by Edward. He experimented on my body and morphed me into a stronger version of myself. My lifespan increased, my body retained its vigor, and thankfully I look every bit as young as I did seventy years ago while you look like, well, death. I found my mate thanks to you. I fell in love. Life suddenly became very colorful for me. So, in trying to take me down, you gave me everything that I had ever wanted. If you weren’t about to blow all these people up, I’d consider forgiving you and thanking you for what you’ve done,” I said.

And there it was. I could see in his eyes that he had fallen into the trap I had laid for him. His grip on the button loosened as his facial expressions became vacant. He struggled to get words out of his mouth. Two tears rolled down his eyes and streamed down his cheeks.

“You would forgive me after all I’ve done to you?” he asked.

I wouldn’t. Of course, I wouldn’t. But he didn’t need to know that. “I would. You made my life better, even though you never intended for that to happen. I have a new lease on life. I’m young and thriving in the twenty-first century. I may end up getting married. I can let bygones be bygones if you can just put down that button and stop this madness.”

His face reverted to being a canvas for vileness. He scowled at me and gripped the detonator tightly. “You were leading me on. Very clever. You think that I crave your forgiveness? Fuck that. You should be on your knees in front of me instead, begging me for forgiveness,” Fred snapped.

“I am never going to beg someone like you for forgiveness. Not when I know that I did nothing wrong. And I can tell you that this night is not going to go the way you planned. You take me for some fool. You do not know how powerful I am. I took down your son. Murdered him in cold blood. I killed the leader of the vampires. And after tonight, I will hunt down Blair and rip apart his limbs from his lifeless body. Tonight, I will end your life. Fuck the trial, fuck the jury, fuck the tribunal. You think you can draw breath after you threatened my family? I will end your existence and make sure that you are nothing but a black blot in the history books. Forget that. I will make sure that everyone forgets who you ever were to begin with,” I said, seething with rage.

“Big words from a man who stands to lose everything,” Fred said, coming close to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “I do not want to be remembered. All that legacy bullshit I was spewing earlier, I never meant it. I don’t want to go down in history. I have lived my life and have made peace with the decisions that I made. I didn’t do the things I did out of love. I did them out of duty. Without you, the pack lived on under my supervision, didn’t it? I fulfilled my duty.”

“You aren’t some selfless leader. You wanted glory for yourself. You wanted to rule the pack in my place. That’s why you did everything. Admit it!” I shouted.

“Fine! I admit it. I needed the same worship from the pack that you got all your life. They venerated you. Everyone thought you were a manifestation of some god! I never got that in my life. Never once. Even after you disappeared, the pack remembered you and told tales of your bravery. How that burned me from the inside!”

“The madness fueled by hatred has no end,” I said, pushing Fred back. I didn’t want him to stand so close to me. He might have been my brother a lifetime ago, but the man standing in front of me was every bit my enemy as Ralph or Maurice, or Blair were.

“You started it,” Fred said. “I’m just ending it.”

“Before you end it, tell me where Blair has gone. What good is it going to do me, after all? You’re going to kill the pack and me. So, what’s the harm in letting me know?” I coaxed an answer out of him.

“Blair is operating on his own now. You think that he planted those bombs? I did. Well, I had some help from some enterprising vampires that wanted revenge, but mostly this was my plan. Blair has departed from the city, and I don’t know where he is. Even if I knew, I would never tell you,” Fred said.

“You’re a disappointment, little brother,” I said, taking a few steps back. “And you are going to get disappointed.”

“Oh, how is that?” Fred asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You never had any faith, to begin with. You have always lacked it. If you had only had some faith in me when I brought us to America, you would have seen what I had planned. But you didn’t. You’ve never been a faithful person. Tonight, it’s not about who wins or loses. It’s about faith. You have none. I have all the faith in the world,” I said.

“Let’s put your faith to the test, then,” Fred said, raising his hand in front of me, holding the detonator.

“Do it,” I said. “Let’s put my faith to the test.”

Without saying a word, Fred pushed the button. My heart skipped a beat. To my right, I could see the town. The town, with its many lights, all flickering in the night. Suddenly, all the lights went out. Fear gripped my throat as I realized that Fred had probably succeeded. But when nothing happened for the next few seconds, I looked back at him and smiled.

“What is it? Things did not work out for you as you thought they would?” I asked.

“This cannot be,” Fred said, pushing the button over and over again. “It’s impossible—a hundred bombs. I planted almost a hundred of them. It’s impossible that the pack got them all in time.”

“Or they just disabled the signals that control the detonator,” I said, feeling relieved. In the far corner to my right, fireworks were shooting into the sky, and the lights were coming back into town. I could hear the people cheering. From the looks of it, the new mayor had been voted.

“Tonight heralds new beginnings not just for the town but for the pack as well,” I said. “Sadly, this is as far as you go. By the power bestowed to me by the Grimm pack, I take you my prisoner and order you to stand trial before the tribunal.”

“I will not go quietly into the night,” Fred said, throwing the detonator at me. “The bombs will blow up anyway. They’re rigged to explode with a timer.”

As I advanced toward Fred to subdue him, I hoped that Alexis had done something about the timers.