by Steve McHugh
“Anything else?” I asked sarcastically, fully aware I wasn’t going to get a reply, but needing to say something.
Francis leaned toward the camera as if to switch it off, then paused, sitting back in his chair instead. “One thing before I go. I know you were friends with Arthur, before he got hurt by Mordred. I know that you consider him a good man, a good friend, and a good king. But over the years I’ve heard things—mostly rumors and innuendo—but these are things that people would never say to someone who works for Avalon. I’m not saying you’re wrong about him; I’ve never met him. But if any of these things are true, then you need to be careful of those who consider him an ally. He might not be as spotless and perfect as history makes him out to be. Just a thought. I’m not sure you’d sit and let me bad-mouth him, but if you want to talk about what I heard, let me know.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had said something negative about Arthur, about those who were closest to him, but I was one of those people and I saw nothing at the time. I wondered how much of it was just Francis buying into people letting off steam, and how much of it was down to Merlin and the way he went about keeping Arthur alive. Taking the souls of the innocent to feed to his comatose body.
“Hopefully, you’ll come and help. I think something bad is going to happen in this city, and frankly I’d rather you were there to help stop it.” Francis ended the video and I remained seated, staring at the blank screen. It looked like I had more questions than answers, but now that Francis was dead, those answers had died with him. And as for Jerry, I hadn’t seen any evidence of him, but if he was still alive, he might be able to tell me more about Francis’s murder.
As for Brutus and the possible attack on his position, I wasn’t convinced that anyone would be that brazen or insane. Brutus had Avalon’s backing, and trying to oust him could cause a civil war if Avalon wasn’t happy with his replacement. It was something else to talk to Diane about.
As if on cue, my phone rang, the screen showing Diane’s name.
“I’ve spoken to my people, and they’re waiting for you.”
“Thanks. Where are your guys stationed?”
“A house across the street. Green door, number sixteen. Go introduce yourself.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”
“Tommy is here. He’s not happy.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
“Kasey, Chloe, and Remy aren’t happy either. I’m thinking you’re going to get kicked in the ass. A lot.”
“You sound a lot happier about that than you should be.”
Diane laughed. “Oh, you have no idea!”
I thought about asking Diane about Brutus, but figured that could wait until we were face-to-face, just in case someone was listening in to the calls on her end. Instead, we ended the call and I prepared to—hopefully—get some answers.
CHAPTER 5
I took a taxi to Le Tre Donne, the small bookstore owned by the Fates. I got out of the cab just as the sun was beginning to set. It had been an incredibly long day, but I doubted it was going to be over any time soon.
The Fates had moved the shop after my initial meeting with them several years ago to a small cul-de-sac, which consisted of the shop and three other houses. I wondered how much business they actually did, and realized they probably didn’t care too much. They hadn’t seemed that interested in actually selling any of the books they’d owned when I’d last seen them.
The rest of the street was made up of chain-link fencing, and the promise of work starting “soon.” I wondered if that was Diane’s doing. Build a few houses, make them look authentic, and have no intention to build more.
I had half an hour until Diane was due to show up, but if she had hand-picked the security team—which, knowing her, was a dead cert—the Fates were probably the safest people in the entire city.
The lights were on inside the shop, but as Diane had asked me to introduce myself to her team, I walked over the road to the house directly opposite. It was three stories tall and probably worth a million quid, based on the area and the size of the place. If Brutus ever wanted to finish completing these buildings, he could probably make a nice profit.
I walked up the driveway, past the double garage, and knocked on the green door. There was no answer, so I tried the handle and pushed the unlocked door open, calling out once again into the massive hallway and staircase that greeted me.
“Back here,” someone called out from the rear of the property.
I closed the door behind me and walked through the barren home. There was nothing to suggest it was occupied at all, which I guessed was the point. I walked under an archway into a huge open-plan room, which contained an old couch pointed at a massive TV set that hung from the wall. An old, tatty chair sat in front of a set of patio doors. In the chair sat Jerry.
“Jerry?” I asked, the realization that I’d been set up quickly flicking to the front of my mind. “You’re working for Kay?”
Jerry nodded. “You were meant to follow him to a place of our choosing. The fact that you wanted to come here wasn’t a problem for us—considering we’ve been in control of the whole area for a week.”
“Diane just spoke to her people. Are they all still in one piece? I assume she’s not working with you and Kay. She’d rather tear Kay in half.”
“Diane’s people were never here. And no, Diane hasn’t been invited to work with us. As for why she thinks her people were here—” He picked up a phone and showed it to me as if I’d never seen one before. “—all the calls route to this number.”
“So, someone in Brutus’s operation is involved too. Feel like telling me who?”
“Not really. You’re going to be dead before you need to find out.”
“Jerry, you’re a one-armed vampire. I’m going to tear the other arm off and beat you to death with it.” I took a step forward.
“I’d stay there if I was you.” He picked up a remote and clicked it on. The TV flickered to life, showing the three Fates sitting on the floor in a room somewhere. The background was some sort of blue cloth, obscuring any details of where they might be hidden. None of the women looked as if they’d been beaten, although they all had bags under their eyes. Jerry had said they’d been in control of the area for a week. A week under Kay’s company before I’d arrived. I really wanted to hurt someone.
“They’re safe,” Jerry told me. “For now. But if you come toward me in any way, those who are with them have orders to kill.”
I buried the anger I was feeling; it wouldn’t do a lot of good. “So, what are we meant to do? Have a chat?”
“Sure. Why not? How’s things, Nate?”
“Well, I’m in a spartanly decorated room with a gaping piss-hole of a man, trying very hard not to tear his head off and use it as a football. You?”
“I get that you’re angry, but this is all your fault.”
“Let me get this right. You betrayed me, helped Kay murder Francis, kidnapped the Fates, and somehow this is all my doing? That’s some really impressive way of twisting the facts to your own ends going on. By the way, did you kill Laurel? You remember her: the woman you professed to love?”
“Laurel isn’t dead, Nate. I love her. She’s nice and safe, far away from everything that’s happening. I hadn’t wanted to kill Francis, but he left me no choice. He was plotting against me, talking to Laurel about my change in personality, asking her if she’d thought about leaving me. I couldn’t let that slide. She’s mine. You understand why I did what I did, as a man, right?”
“That you helped murder someone just to keep your girlfriend? No, I don’t really understand that. I’m pretty certain that most men would think you’re fucking insane. You murdered one friend and betrayed how many more?” I wondered if I could get to Jerry before . . . I stopped and looked out of the windows behind him. There was a one-story annex building at the bottom of the garden. It had glass doors, although from this distance there was no way to see through them.
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br /> “The Fates are in the annex building at the bottom of the garden, aren’t they?” I asked. “And there’s someone watching us through the windows.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not your concern. Your concern is our conversation.”
“Really, we’re still doing that? You’re a psychopath, working with psychopaths to do psychopath things. Pretty certain that’s the end of the conversation.”
“You made a promise. You promised me that if I started to do evil things, you’d come kill me. But you didn’t, and I just kept on down that dark path. I killed so many people before Laurel found out. She tried to help me, but that didn’t work out too well for her. And it certainly didn’t work well for poor Francis. He was so surprised when I turned up with Kay.”
I opened my mouth to speak and found I just didn’t quite grasp the words I needed. Eventually they came, spilling out of my mouth like water from a cracked dam. “Fuck you, you prolapsed badger rectum!” It wasn’t exactly poetic, but it got the point across. “You’re blaming me for your deeds—for your need to hurt people. That’s nothing to do with me; that’s all on you and your complete lack of self-control. No one forced you to murder people, no one forced you to kill and betray your friends. So take that statement and shove it right up your ass, you utter coward!”
Anger flared behind Jerry’s well-maintained mask, but it was gone an instant later. “Do you want to know why we went after the Fates?”
“I couldn’t give a rat’s ass,” I snapped. “Either kill me or shut up, because we’re done here. And if you’ve hurt them, in any way, I’m going to snap your fingers one by one, which, as you only have one arm, won’t take long. Bonus for you, I guess.”
Anger flickered once again, and Jerry almost sprang up from the chair.
“You want to come at me, boy?” I mocked. “You want to see what you can do? Go for it: let’s see how well a one-armed, cowardly vampire fares against a sorcerer. I’m excited about finding out.”
“A little gentle persuasion is hardly hurting them.” Jerry’s voice couldn’t have been more controlled if he’d tried. “Kay wanted to cut their fingers off, but I suggested killing innocent people in front of them. Turns out it works. And it only took one innocent death.”
“What do you get from this?”
“Power. Money. Respect. Things people like you and Francis never gave me, always keeping me down, always making sure I knew my place, never allowing me to become what I deserve.”
“You deserve to have your entire insides scooped out, replaced with straw, and plonked in a field as the world’s best scarecrow.”
“I will have your respect!” Jerry shouted, the mask collapsing as the demon inside of him changed his face to show the vampire replacing the man.
“Come get it,” I told him, taking a step forward. “You and Kay wanted me angry, wanted me to rush to London, to stop him without thinking. I’ll admit, it was a good plan; almost worked. But I’m not rushing into things, needing to show everyone how strong Hellequin is. I’m done. I’ll admit, I didn’t expect you to be here, but you’re clearly working with people inside Brutus’s organization, and there’s no way Kay is the head of that, so why don’t you tell me: who’s in charge here?”
The vampire vanished once again and Jerry lowered himself into the chair, a smile plastered on his face. “You were meant to follow Kay. You were meant to die in some little shit-hole of a building where you’d never be found. You weren’t meant to be here.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“Not really. It just meant we had to be creative. And I had to stall.”
The ceiling above me cracked and exploded as a dozen rock monsters fell through it onto me. I managed to blast several of them away, but more than enough grabbed hold of me, dragging me to the floor, as the remainder of the ceiling above my head was torn apart when Asag dropped through it, destroying the floor beneath him as he landed.
I blasted the small creatures away with air magic, creating a sphere of lightning and plunging it into the ground beneath my feet, tearing the floor apart and throwing everyone away from me, giving me room to think.
I was surrounded on all sides. The rock monsters were more than capable of causing devastation in quick measure, and a vampire is always dangerous, no matter how little I thought of him, but Asag was in another league. And was meant to be dead.
“Remember me?” Asag asked as the small creatures scurried around him, waiting for his order to attack.
“Yeah, I remember. I remember the last time we met, it didn’t go so well for you.”
“Got better.”
“Well, that’s going to be short-lived.” I threw a bolt of lightning at Asag, but several of his creatures leapt in the way, sacrificing themselves for their master as they exploded from the force.
As pieces of rock filled the air, I darted forward, a second sphere in my hand, ready to take the fight to Asag, when an unseen rock creature dropped from the ceiling onto my shoulders. There was a stabbing pain in my neck and the creature jumped off before I could stop it.
My vision went blurry for a second and I dropped to one knee. I reached around to the back of my neck and found a syringe there. I pulled it out and tossed it aside.
“How are you feeling?” Kay asked as he entered the room, walking over to Asag and touching him on the shoulder. The large rock creature nodded and left the room, walking through the glass doors to the garden as the glass continued to drop and smash on the floor.
“That man just does not care,” Kay said, glancing up at the massive hole in the ceiling, before punching me in the jaw, knocking me to the ruined floor.
“What was in it?” I asked, knowing Kay must have been dying to reveal his diabolical plan to me.
“Tranquilizer. A lot of it. Enough to knock out a rhino, I imagine. We figured it wouldn’t quite knock you out, just make you a lot easier to deal with.” Kay looked over at Jerry. “You got anything you want to say?”
“Enjoy death, Nate. We’ll be right here making the world a better place without you in it.” He punted me in the ribs, and left through the broken glass door.
“A lot of people hate you, Nate,” Kay told me, removing his jacket and tossing it onto the chair that Jerry had occupied. “When we found out you were coming here, I had to rush across the city to get here in time. I had the tranquilizer all ready for you—just had to wait for Asag to create enough of those little bastards. Had to wait for the sun to be completely down. Man, Jerry sure can talk.”
“Get on with it,” I told him. “I’d rather die than listen to you.”
Kay’s smile faded and he kicked me in the ribs, breaking at least one when he started stamping on them. “That was fun,” he told me as I spat up blood onto the floor.
The tranquilizer made everything swim in front of me, made me sleepy and feel like my whole body was made of lead. It was an effort just to keep my eyes open, although the pain shooting through my torso helped in that regard. I wondered how long I had before Diane arrived, and whether she’d be able to help in the face of Kay and Asag.
Kay stood over me and placed his foot on my chest, pushing down. “How does it feel to know you’re beaten? How does it feel to be a hundred percent aware that you’re not going to survive this?”
I used every ounce of necromancy power at my disposal, every tiny bit of any souls I’d claimed and not used to try to remove the toxins in my body. It caused me to feel the pain in my side more, but I was able to concentrate on what was happening.
“No smart-assed answer?” Kay demanded as he pushed down harder with his boot-covered foot.
I grabbed hold of his trouser leg, which caused him to laugh, until I punched him in the side of his ankle with every piece of strength I possessed. I couldn’t risk using my magic until the tranquilizer was gone from my system. I didn’t want to exhaust myself by doing too much.
Kay fell away, and I got back to my feet. He looked over at me and then stared out of the door, hoping to se
e his allies.
“They’re gone, Kay. You should have used more tranquilizer.” My head was feeling clearer, and I hoped I’d managed to stop the drug from going any further through my body, but it took a maintained level of concentration to ensure it didn’t return.
Kay stood up. “I’m still going to kill you.”
I dove toward him, any pretense of a well-fought battle replaced with a need to tear his face off. I wrapped my arms around his chest and lifted him up off the ground, over my head, planting him headfirst into the floor behind me.
You can have access to all the magic in the world, but if you get picked up and violently dumped on your head and neck, you’re going to need a few seconds to no longer see double. And a few seconds was all I needed.
I turned and kicked Kay’s head, snapping it back with incredible force, but he rolled with a second blow and the floor beneath my feet tore apart, flying up toward me. I activated a shield of air magic, deflecting the barrage of wood and stone, but it gave Kay enough time to put some distance between us.
I followed him, creating a sphere of air, spinning it over and over until it was a blur. The second I was close enough, I drove the sphere toward Kay, who blocked it with a hastily created shield of rock. The sphere hit the rock and exploded, the magic tearing it apart, and threw Kay back toward the far wall. He impacted with a crunch, bringing plaster down with him as he fell to the floor.
But Kay was nothing if not tenacious, and was soon back on his feet as I closed the distance between us. The glyphs on his arms vanished, replaced with ones of darkness, and a tendril of blood magic whipped up toward me, lacing across my chest despite my shield of air, causing me brief but unimaginable pain.
