A Flicker of Steel (The Avalon Chronicles Book 2)

by Steve McHugh

6

  Kristin had been happy working for Nergal. She’d been happy doing as she was told, going on missions for Avalon and removing threats as needed. Right up until she’d discovered something awful: that someone who was meant to be dead, wasn’t.

  She’d come across the information by accident. The woman in question was living under a new name, in a part of the country that Kristin had never been to. But by complete chance, a news channel had been interviewing a man about a recent storm when the woman had walked behind him. Kristin’s first reaction had been surprise. Then doubt. But after making a few calls, she discovered that the woman on the TV and the woman who was meant to be dead were one and the same, and Kristin’s reaction had changed to pure rage.

  Unfortunately, Nergal was not one to allow his employees time to deal with their own problems, so it took several months for Kristin to slowly and surely arrange what needed to be done.

  She found herself parked in a black BMW X5, watching a woman who was meant to be dead, now called Madison Grace, walk down her driveway to her silver C Class Mercedes and drive away.

  “Madison,” Kristin said. “Madison. Do you think she chose that name? I remember her as Ava. Pretty little Ava with the fake smile. It’s quite late in the evening to be working, but she was wearing a suit. I wonder where she’s going.”

  Kristin had intended to watch the woman for several days before doing anything, but the urge to kill her was too great, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep it together for that long.

  “Nergal cannot know,” said the voice in her head.

  “He won’t,” Kristin assured them. “She deserves to die. She should have stayed dead.”

  “Make it right.”

  The voice stopped, and Kristin smiled. She looked in the rearview mirror and noticed her bright green eyes. They’d never been green before. “Weird,” she said.

  She had considered killing the woman’s family—after all, she’d been responsible for ensuring that Kristin never got her happy ever after—but she had decided against it: too messy, too many variables that could go wrong. Better to make it look like a random act of violence, to leave her family to grieve, just like Kristin had been forced to do all those years ago.

  “I can’t believe she changed her name,” Kristin said, setting off after the Mercedes.

  “She was given help by the government,” the voice said. “New name, new identity.”

  Kristin pulled up at a red light and watched the Mercedes make a right down the next road toward the center of town. Kristin beamed as the light turned green, and she set off again. “He deserved to die. Him and his bitch.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “The whole family hid their relationship from us. Hid what they were doing. They all deserved to die.”

  “And they did. And once Madison is dead, the world can go back to being complete.”

  Kristin forced herself to remain calm. “She’s still pretty.”

  “She is. She’s lived years longer than she was meant to. Release will be our gift to her. It is almost her birthday, after all. Do you have any ideas about how you’re going to accomplish your task?”

  “I was going to kill her on the street, but I’ll see how I feel. I brought guns. However I do it, there will be nothing to trace it back to us, back to Nergal.”

  “Excellent. Contact me when it’s finished.”

  Kristin felt the voice switch off for the second time, leaving her alone in the car. She watched as Madison parked her Mercedes outside of an Italian restaurant and went inside. Kristin pulled the BMW into a nearby alley and switched off the engine. Out of the rear window she could see Madison being taken to a table where five other people already sat—four men and another woman—all wearing suits, all with alcoholic drinks in their hands. They raised them toward Madison when she came over.

  “Celebration time,” Kristin said. She got out of the BMW as a young policeman came over to her.

  “You can’t park here,” he said, his expression stern. “You need to move.”

  “Sorry, officer,” Kristin said, walking around to the front of the car, away from anyone passing by on the sidewalk outside of the alley. “I’m just a little lost and wanted to take a look at my sat nav without driving. Do you happen to know where Bene Italia is?”

  The officer walked over to Kristin. “It’s just there,” he said, pointing to the restaurant where Madison currently sat. Kristin darted forward, stabbing her dagger under his chin. She held the policeman tightly while he died, before dragging him over to a dumpster and throwing him in. Being an umbra meant having more strength than a normal human; it was one of the most fun things about it.

  Kristin went back to the car and took a Glock .22 from a bag under the passenger seat. She removed the holster and put it on, before placing the gun inside. Two daggers then went into a knife belt that she put around her waist. She grabbed her coat and put that on, too, concealing the weapons.

  When she’d first discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her and made the decision to punish not only him, but also the woman in question and her family for hiding it, Kristin had used two revolvers and a dagger hammer. She’d wielded the hammer to great effect and wished she’d kept it as a memento of the occasion. She would have liked to use it now, to finish the job she’d started so long ago, but she needed this to be quick. If not quiet.

  “I want her to know it’s me,” Kristin said in her head.

  “What do you have planned?”

  “She’s in a restaurant. I’m considering waiting, but I’m not feeling awfully patient.” Kristin opened the huge car boot and climbed inside, sitting up against the rear seats to watch the restaurant through the window. “I should have brought a rifle,” she said to herself.

  After a few hours of observing Madison and her friends eating and drinking their way through the restaurant’s menu, Kristin noticed that the number of people inside had dropped. It was getting late, and she saw that few people remained in the establishment. She opened the trunk of the BMW and stepped out into the crisp night air. The weight of the gun under her jacket made her feel a level of contentment she hadn’t experienced since before she discovered that Madison—Ava—hadn’t died on that fateful day.

  Despite being shot in the chest and hit with a hammer, the woman had still managed to survive. The one survivor out of the fourteen Kristin had killed over the space of two days. “The Christmas Day Massacre,” the media had called it. She’d hated that headline at the time, as most of the deaths had actually happened on Christmas Eve. The police had found her on Christmas Day, and that hadn’t been fun at all. Kristin hadn’t liked being tasered, or the way that they’d dragged her semiconscious form out of the house after she’d attacked one of the responding officers with her bloody hammer.

  Kristin crossed the road, feeling the beat of her heart as she prepared herself for what was to follow. She opened the door of the restaurant and savored the aroma that greeted her. A man in his early twenties walked over to her. “Table for one?”

  “Please,” Kristin said, and glanced over at Madison, feeling an almost overwhelming urge to kill her.

  The young man took Kristin to a table at the opposite end of the restaurant to where Madison and her friends sat. She declined to remove her coat and ordered some coffee and a pepperoni pizza for one.

  Kristin drank the coffee and continued to watch her target as the pizza arrived. She took her time eating, although she didn’t really care what the food was like. She wasn’t there for the cuisine. She didn’t want to finish before Madison was ready to go.

  Three cups of coffee later, Madison got up from her seat and went to the bathroom. Kristin followed her, her heart almost skipping a beat as she opened the door and stepped into the large room. Only one stall was occupied, so she entered a cubicle near to it and waited.

  A flush of the toilet, the sound of a stall door opening, and Kristin pushed open her door and walked up behind the woman at the wash basin.
/>   “Hello, Madison,” Kristin said.

  The woman turned around, her eyes wide and fear spreading across her face as she realized who she was in the bathroom with.

  “Kristin?” Madison asked, a mixture of shock and panic on her face. “I thought you were in jail.”

  “I’ve been out for a while now. I thought you were dead.”

  “You don’t have to do this.” Madison then paused. “Why do you have green eyes?”

  “Long story,” Kristin said. “Long, beautiful story. That was marked like the pox when I discovered you weren’t where you belonged. You betrayed me.”

  “None of us betrayed you.”

  “You kept his cheating a secret. You liked her better than me.”

  “That’s not what happened,” Madison said. “Mia was our sister. You’re my sister. I would never betray you. He broke up with you a year before he got together with her. A year. You went to hospital because you had a break down.”

  “You all sent me there so he could have his way with that bitch,” Kristin snapped.

  “He dated you for three weeks in college. It wasn’t even a relationship.”

  “You all betrayed me,” Kristin snapped again. “I loved you all, and you help him cheat on me. Helped him cheat on me with our sister.”

  Madison’s expression hardened. “I always wanted to tell you this, Kristin: you’re a monster. A vindictive, evil little parasite, who never should have been allowed to live with people like our family. Mom and Dad should have had you locked away when you were a child. You even killed someone in college; can you remember that? Do you remember why you had to go away?”

  “She deserved it. She stole from me.”

  “She stole nothing. You’re just a monster. You always were. You hurt people, you hurt innocent people, and you like it. You enjoyed killing the people I love. You even enjoyed thinking you’d killed me. I always wondered what I’d say if I saw you again, what I’d do if you were to stand before me.”

  The door to the bathroom opened, and Madison screamed a warning at the woman who stepped inside. Kristin drew one of the guns from her hip holster, aimed at the newcomer, and fired twice, catching her both times in the chest. Madison hit Kristin around the head, shoving her off balance, and ran for the bathroom door.

  Kristin fired at her sister, but missed and took out a piece of the door instead. “Damn it,” she snapped.

  “Get after her already,” said the voice in her head.

  She ran toward the door, barreling through it, and shot a man on the other side who’d come to investigate the commotion. He fell back onto the nearest table with a loud crash as other people inside the restaurant either hid under their tables or fled.

  Kristin looked over at the table where Madison had been and saw the woman she had eaten with scramble to her feet. Kristin shot her in the shoulder, spinning her around and dropping her to the floor. She walked over to the woman as she began to crawl away. “Where’s Madison?”

  “She ran out,” the woman said.

  Kristin put two rounds into the back of her head and ran out of the restaurant to see Madison’s car pull away as quickly as possible. She fired twice, ignoring the screams of bystanders, and only hit the rear of the car, but she had a pretty good idea where Madison was going.

  Kristin jogged across the road, got into her BMW, and drove out of the alley, joining the traffic on the other side. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance, but she was soon on her way back to Madison’s house. If Madison wasn’t there, Kristin would make sure whoever was there got her back. She wondered if Madison would care, especially when she didn’t even give a shit about her own sister.

  Kristin ejected the Glock’s magazine and loaded a fresh one as she drove. She neared the house and spotted Madison’s Mercedes parked half in the road. Kristin stopped the BMW a few houses away and got out, keeping her Glock ready by her side.

  She stood by a large tree just outside of Madison’s house and looked at the two-story building to try to figure out where there might be people. The front door was closed, and she saw no lights on.

  Kristin hurried across the perfectly manicured lawn and placed a hand against the door handle, twisting it slightly. She pushed open the unlocked door. Big mistake, sister, Kristin thought to herself. She stepped into the hardwood hallway and felt the force of the shotgun blast hit her in the chest. Kristin looked down at her top as it rapidly turned red, before dropping to her knees.

  “You should have stayed away,” Madison said, walking out of the darkness with a shotgun in her hands.

  Kristin tried to lift her Glock, but a second blast from the shotgun ended her life.

  Several hundred miles away another Kristin sat up with a gasp. She’d been lying down, hoping to hear the good news of her sister’s demise, but instead had been powerless to stop her own murder. Or, at least, the murder of her clone: Kristin was an umbra, with the ability to make up to nine clones. Whether she made them all at once, one at a time, or several together was entirely up to her, although she had to deal with the amount of energy it took to do so. It had taken a long time to send one across the country to kill her sister.

  “Damn it,” she snapped, rubbing the spot on her chest where she’d felt the shotgun pellets hit. Kristin swung her legs out of bed and took a moment to compose herself. The clone had failed. They were no more durable than a human, but Kristin hadn’t been able to deal with Madison personally. It was a choice she now regretted.

  She went into the bathroom of her suite in Nergal’s Texas compound and splashed water on her face. Kristin looked at her normal brown eyes in the mirror. No clone was perfect, and while she could imbue them with a fraction of her power, each clone would be changed from the original in a small way. Eye color, hair color or length, height, weight, the list went on. They possessed a percentage of autonomy and were able to live separate lives, but Kristin had final control. Should she want them to do something, they would do it without pause.

  She would have to make sure that Nergal didn’t discover her little off-the-books excursion. Now her face would be recognizable in the area, and the police would be involved. The body of the clone would be identified as Kristin’s, and people would think she was dead. Let Madison live her life for a few more months until she’d become accustomed once again to not looking over her shoulder. Then, and only then, would Kristin strike. And next time she wouldn’t use a clone.

  The door to her room opened and one of Nergal’s aides stepped inside. Kristin didn’t know her name and simply called her Sycophant Three.

  “Hello,” Kristin said, drying her face. “I’m not certain, but aren’t you meant to knock?”

  The woman sneered as Kristin walked past her to the bed. “You’re a pet. You don’t get that level of courtesy.”

  Kristin picked up a glass of water on the bedside table and drained it. She sat on the mattress, put on her black boots, and then walked back toward the bathroom, glass in hand, as if to refill it. But as she passed, Kristin smashed the glass into the side of the woman’s head, embedding shards into the aide’s face. Kristin then kicked her opponents’ knee, snapping the joint and forcing the aide to drop to the ground, and stamped on her head over and over until something crunched.

  Kristin looked down at the bloody mess that was the face of Nergal’s aide. She had no idea what species the woman was, but she wore a sorcerer’s band on one wrist, so was incapable of using her powers. “You had a message for me?” Kristin asked.

  The aide made a gurgling noise.

  “No matter,” Kristin said. She knew she couldn’t kill the woman—that wouldn’t be considered polite—but she could hurt her. Nergal didn’t mind that. In fact, he almost encouraged it.

  Kristin picked up the aide’s mobile phone and dialed Nergal, who answered on the first ring. “My lord, your aide said you had a message,” she said.

  “She was to bring you to me,” Nergal replied.

  “Yes, well, she appears to have suffered a cas
e of being rude. She’ll take a few days to heal.”

  Nergal tutted his disapproval. “Do not kill her, Kristin. Good help is hard to find. And, yes, I want to see you. Hades and his people have taken Alfred and disrupted my supplies.”

  “I’ll be there shortly, my lord,” Kristin said, and hung up, dropping the phone onto the aides’ chest. “If you ever speak to me in such a condescending tone again, I’m going to keep you as a play thing and peel the skin off your face. I don’t know, or care, what species you are. This compound isn’t big enough to hide from me. Are we clear?” The woman made a sound that Kristin took to be her agreement, and she stepped over the aide and left her bedroom.

  Pain suddenly laced through her body and brought Kristin to her knees, and she knew that she’d lost the clone on Shoal Point. That meant someone had found the scrolls there, presumably Hades or someone who worked for him. Alfred had talked. Kristin got back to her feet. Nergal would not be happy, but hopefully this would urge him to finally do something about Hades and his little group. Maybe the day wasn’t going to be a complete bust after all.

  7

  Layla, Diana, Chloe, and Remy had been ordered back on the helicopter heading to the base in Greenland about twenty minutes after Kristin killed herself on the beach. Hades and his people had work to do and had decided to stay behind. With the modifications to the Black Hawk, that meant a very long trip, but not one that required stopping for refuelling.

  Everyone fell asleep during the ride, and Layla only woke when the Black Hawk landed and the open doors allowed freezing cold air into the helicopter cabin.

  “Get some rest,” Tommy Carpenter said as he greeted Remy, Layla, Chloe, and Diana.

  They entered the compound, walking past dozens of heavily armed soldiers and more than a few pieces of artillery that Layla hoped would never be used.

  “You did good today.” Tommy wasn’t terribly tall, but he was broad-shouldered and cut an imposing figure as he spoke to them. He had a long, graying beard, pale skin, and short dark hair, and the middle and fourth fingers on his right hand were missing from the knuckles. There was a rumor that he’d lost them during the Hundred Years War, when the French attacked Soissons during 1414. It was thought that Tommy had been an archer for the English army, and when captured had been mutilated by one of the French commanders who thought it entertaining.