“Now, if you’re done playing alpha male politics, will you put the ring on so we can go see your daughter before something happens to her?”
He turned his hand over and examined the ring in his palm for a quiet moment, then he tossed it at my feet. It clinked against the concrete floor, bouncing into one of the cells behind me.
“I decline your offer, Hellspawn but, rest assured, I will see my daughter soon.”
His energies rippled and I realized at the last second how powerful he was—all relative, mind you—only it was too late to shut him down before he teleported away, the dampeners no longer holding him in the prison. A heartbeat later, I was alone with the remnants of Mr. Piggy stinking up the place.
I hadn’t expected Noah to be capable of teleporting on his own, thinking him trapped. Nothing in Maximus’s intel had prepared me for him being a true blood angel. I wouldn’t have imagined Shaw being capable of taking him down, but there he was. His escape made me think of Grace. Noah was out in the world now, with no way for me to hunt him down and bring him in line before the shit hit the fan and he revealed himself to his daughter.
Would he go straight to her and announce himself? Did it really matter?
I suspected it did, seeing how I needed her onboard still. Besides, if Grace learned her father were free, it would only be a matter of seconds before the rest of the team knew they could bail, their families no longer in danger. Then I’d be all alone, trying to hunt down Mike and Rala without the benefit of the DSI. Normally I wouldn’t give a damn, but the greatest asset of the organization was its people. They were who I needed most.
Not that I’d ever let them hear me say that.
Their heads might explode from the praise.
That thought circling the crapper of my mind, I drew upon my magic and teleported myself back to Lance’s church before the rest of the leverage went storming off. I had to be sure they were contained.
The chaos I expected was nowhere to be found.
The church not smoldering or burnt to the ground, I made my way to chapel to find several folding tables set up near the stairs and gobs of food and drink set out across them. Everyone was seated around the tables, smiles on their faces and expressions that told me they were already slipping into food comas despite it having only been a few minutes since I’d last seen them.
I could only imagine what it must have been like, being locked up for no real reason other than they were related somehow to the team. No longer imprisoned, Father Lance had plied them with the true comforts of home before they could fully comprehend it, distracting them from their need to find the rest of their families. It was a brilliant move.
Lance came over as they ate and chatted in the background, freedom having loosened their guard. They didn’t have a clue they were still essentially hostages. The accommodations were nicer, no doubt about that, but they weren’t exactly free to wander off. Not just yet.
“I don’t feel right about this, Frank.”
“Neither do I, but it won’t be for much longer.” I glanced over his shoulder at everyone easing back in their seats and reveling in aftermath of their rescue. “My hope is to shut everything down before they even start to get restless.”
“That’s unlikely,” he told me with a shake of his head.
“Way to kill my optimism before it even had a chance to take root, buddy.”
“You and I both know Shaw has been a step ahead of you since Maximus clued you in to her scent. These people,” he gestured toward the tables with his chin, “are going to become a liability long before they are an asset, your time wasted having freed them, even if it was the moral choice. They are Maximus’s leverage, not Shaw’s, and I suspect they have little value to her.”
I’d kind of thought the same thing but, regardless who used them, these folks were potential threats to my own goals, and I couldn’t allow them to be leveraged against me. In the prison, Maximus’s masters could easily snuff them out or put pressure on the team to turn on me to reveal the location of their mouthpiece.
“Shaw has found a way to hide herself and, unless you track her down quickly, she’ll find a way to accomplish her goals,” Lance said, pulling me out of my head.
I nodded, thinking about Maximus in his hole and what I was gonna do with him. “I’m working on a solution for all that.”
“Then there are the others, lest you’ve forgotten,” he said, throwing a wrench into my brain gears. “Nergal is no puppet; at least not under Shaw’s control. And neither is Morgan. Whatever those two are plotting, you can be certain it is more than some simple revenge play, orchestrated by Shaw. She might well be working with them for the moment, but I’m certain that won’t be the case for long.” He met my eyes to make sure I understood the magnitude of his words. “Now would be a good time to find them—all of them—before they scatter to the four winds. A plague god and an evil sorceress on the loose, I’m not envisioning rainbows and kittens being unleashed upon the world.” The Bronies will be so disappointed.
I started thinking about what he said and realized he was right. Nergal was a god, however that word was being defined. He wasn’t gonna throw in with Shaw without some end game of his own coming from it. Morgan wasn’t much different. She was easily the match for Shaw’s power, especially now that she’d lost control of the DSI and its resources. Yet, there they were, still all buddy-buddy.
And that’s when it hit me, a hard coldness settling in my guts. Shaw had kidnapped Rala so they could return to the Interstice, that much was obvious. But why? Because, there, hidden inside the mountain that had housed Marduk, were more of the Babylonian pantheon just waiting to be unfrozen and unleashed upon the world, looking to reclaim it after their long, and entirely involuntary, hiatus.
That cheery thought seeing me out the door, I wondered, for the first time, if God’s army was recruiting. Anything had to be better than this bullshit.
Thirteen
Back at DSI headquarters, I rushed into the conference room, glad to see Kit and Grace there, holding the place down. For once, they looked almost happy to see me.
“I was just about to call you,” Kit told me as I stormed in.
“Yeah?” I plopped in the chair beside her. “Please tell me it’s good news.”
“Depends on how you define good,” she answered, offering up a shrug that didn’t bode well for the revelation ahead.
“This is the DSI, Trigg. We don’t do good,” Grace added with a chuckle.
“Preach it, sister.” Kit raised her hand, clenched into a fist, and Grace returned the gesture.
“Okay, ladies, if you’re done passing the Bechdel Test, can we get to the news?”
Kit shook her head at me, sniggering, but went on anyway. “Sergeant Morrill has checked in. And I quote: ‘After interrogating the locals, it’s clear that Shaw and her companions were in the Interstice recently, but they are no longer there and haven’t been seen in several days.’”
“Well, that certainly does not qualify as good, for future reference. And since I’m being bent over a barrel, you have any other good news to shove in there?”
She nodded. “He reported finding the ice prisons you told him about. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?” Kit had clearly been a student at the William Shatner…School…of Dramatic…Pauses. Her gift for dragging shit out was strong. “You’re killing me, woman. Please, just take a breath and tell me everything all at once.”
“I live to please,” she answered, looking ready to implode as she held her laughter in check. “So, long story short, the sergeant didn’t actually find the blocks of ice, but puddles of water, the occupants of all the frozen prisons nowhere to be found. Some of his men remained behind and are still there looking though, and he said he’d reach out if he heard anything more from them”
I slumped into my seat, wondering if the thrumming in my chest was a harbinger of the doom to come or whether I was having a stroke.
I was kind of hoping for the lat
ter. One good pop and it would all be over and someone else could deal with all this shit.
“So what now?” Grace asked.
I really didn’t know. With Shaw and Morgan having freed the pantheon, which included Inanna, one of the most powerful of the group outside of Marduk, and the same god who’d created the chalice Lucifer had used to imbue me with his memories.
Speaking of which, I dug into those real quick, learning more about Inanna than I really wanted to. While some scholars considered her a goddess of love, her true passion lay in war. Daddy Lou’s memories played out across the screen of my mind and, while he hadn’t seen her exploits firsthand, he’d studied the fallout and seemed far too impressed by them. And now she was free to roam the Earth, her powers fully restored after having fled the Interstice.
And she wasn’t alone.
According to Lucifer, almost the entire pantheon had been entombed there, images of the various gods and goddesses flitted through my head, each one only bolstering my doubts that I’d be able to handle what was coming even with the help of the team.
Kit’s fingers snapping in front of my face brought me back to the present with a start.
“Earth to Frank. You in there?”
I blinked my thoughts away, leaning back to avoid her hand, which was just inches from my nose.
“Thought we’d lost you there for a minute. Need us to call the paramedics?” she asked, chuckling at what must have been a witty expression plastered across my face.
I pushed her hand aside, frowning. “Sorry. Was just picturing how fucked we are. Even my twisted imagination can’t make it sound fun.” Head spinning, I stood and walked over to the windows, hoping to catch my breath. Things had escalated from Shaw’s petty vendetta with Maximus and the DSI masters to an all-out jihad of pissed off deities that God usurped and locked away for all eternity.
My eyes roamed the cityscape, searching for an answer amidst the rush hour chaos running amok below like cockroaches. Then that’s when I saw it, a light gleaming in the glass above my head.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an idea forming.
Shit!
“Incoming,” I screamed, turning and bolting for the women, wrapping them in a shield and pulling them close. They grunted and cursed at my rough handling of them, but there wasn’t time to apologize or play nice. Poe! Duck and cover! Inform everyone. Unknown projectile inbound.
I had to hope my warning was enough because, whatever the thing was, it crashed into the base of the building right after I’d delivered my telepathic shout.
Everything went white and my bowels threatened to give way as the world exploded outside our protective bubble and we were suddenly in freefall. I’m sure the ladies appreciated my restraint given our close quarters, all of us jumbled against one another. Kit’s computer bounced about and ricocheted off my skull a few times before she used her power and absorbed it, drawing it back into her, tendrils of techno-energy merging with her flesh.
I reached out and pulled them both to me, willing my magic to nudge the gleaming ball of my shield to the side rather than just riding the crumbling building down. It worked. Well, kind of.
The ground came up way faster than I expected, the swirls of black and gray clouds limiting my vision, and we hit, bouncing away like a football punted toward the uprights, tumbling end over end. Debris rained down on us, sparks flaring as the shield deflected them, but we were still getting the shit beat out of us inside its confines. My brain swam inside my skull and, if the tinge of green on Kit’s and Grace’s faces was any indication, they were feeling just nauseous as I was. They looked ready to spew.
As much as I would have enjoyed swapping fluids with either of them, that particular one wasn’t anywhere on the list.
Just as I began to fear our bouncy journey would end with me being vomited on, we crashed to a stop in the gathering wreckage. Kit and Shaw slumped in my arms, and I slumped right along with them, all of us ending up in a heap inside the shield, grateful it kept the maelstrom of dust on the outside. We took a moment to catch our breaths before I waved my magic away, all of us staring the billowing haze that used to be our headquarters.
“Poe says he and Thud are okay, but there are casualties. The staff…they…” Grace’s voice faded away, her upper lip peeled into a sneer. “Fucking Shaw. They’re all dead.”
While Stinky Barnes and I got off to a rocky start, his breath an impediment to any real relationship, I still felt bad that he and the others had been killed, their deaths on me. The body count on my shoulders was starting to add up.
No time to think about that though, I lifted both women to their feet, and then got to my own, letting my senses loose. There was no way the missile, or whatever it had been, was all Shaw had in store for us. And I was right. My senses rang back hard after just a second.
“We’ve got company, ladies,” I called out, spinning in the direction of the approaching essences I’d pinged. “A bunch of it.”
It wasn’t Shaw, but her lackeys. I recognized the biker couple from earlier as they barreled toward us, as well as Venai, followed by a few other people I couldn’t make out or recognize. And, apparently, they weren’t gonna stop and offer introductions.
Biker girl burst from the miasma and punched me dead in the face. I made ready to laugh at her, her skinny little chicken arms looking like a branch ready to snap in the breeze, but I was wrong.
So very wrong.
A flicker of gray spread across her knuckles right before they collided with my jaw. Then, the next thing I knew, I was flying backward, my eyes swimming in their sockets as if I’d made a joke about Mike Tyson’s mama. I crashed into the ruin of the DSI building, the debris gathering behind me and slowing my momentum until I came to an unceremonious halt against a twisted I-beam. I did my best to blink away the planetarium of stars washing out my vision. My skull felt as if it were stuffed full of cotton.
I reached up and grabbed my chin, wincing as the numbness subsided, and a sharp, stinging pain told me the biker chick had fractured my jaw. Lightning bolts of agony radiated into my cheeks, and I swallowed my pride alongside a mouthful of blood. I managed to get back to my feet as she came at me again. Biker dude was at her heels this time.
“Bitch!” I shouted, though it sounded more like, “Ish,” which is probably Swedish for, “Please, kick my ass some more.”
She just laughed and threw another punch. I ducked under it, sidestepping the blow, popping up behind her, ready to elbow her in the back of the skull. Only her partner decided he didn’t like that idea. I caught a shin to my face like a Ronda Rousey – Holly Holm highlight.
And, of course, it landed on my jaw.
I felt the bone shatter, finishing up the damage his girlfriend had done to me, but there was none of the dramatic flying backward shit this time. I crumpled where I stood, the Motel 6 guy whispering in my head, “Sorry, there’s no keeping the lights on for you this time.”
A doughy pretzel, I lay in the wreckage, waiting for someone to pour some cheese on me like a bad Def Leppard cover song. The biker chick obliged.
I saw her fist coming but there was nothing I could do about it. First the right, then the left, followed up by a knee slamming straight into my sternum. I gasped, chasing the air she’d knocked from my lungs, and rolled to my side, covering my head and playing dead. It worked for bear attacks, right?
Bikers obviously didn’t follow the same code of ethics.
The dude stepped into me and drove his boot into my ribs, kicking me again when I rolled to blunt the damage. My ribs creaked beneath the blows but I’d managed to keep the guy from breaking anything. Yet.
I had no clue who—or, more importantly, what—the couple was, but they were whooping the shit out me. My brain was bouncing around the inside of my head as if I were a crash test dummy. I couldn’t put together a cohesive thought if my life depended on it; and it kind of did. My magic flickered at my fingertips but the embers just wouldn’t ignite. There was something weird
about the beat down I couldn’t pinpoint.
My entire life had been one big battle, the worst of the worst using my skull as a tether ball and never had I felt so weak, so battered. The only consolation to all that was that I was gonna die soon. Then it’s be all over.
Hand trembling, I raised it up to ward off another attack, for all the good it’d do. I stared at him through blurry eyes as he pulled his leg back to deliver another shot. That was when the side of his head disappeared in a burst of red and gray.
He shrieked, the wailing, alien pitch of it destined to be the soundtrack to my nightmares for years to come. His face a literal crater, the lower half of the left side a bowl of jagged flesh and bone, he turned and sneered—I think it was a sneer; hard to tell with half his face missing—at Kit, who stood there with a smoldering weapon set on her shoulder. Yet, the dude didn’t fall.
I don’t even think he wobbled.
He stomped toward Kit, trailing blood as it spilled from his face, an overflowing pool of crimson and shattered teeth. His sidekick followed. If looks could kill, she’d have sparked off a zombie apocalypse. Kit just stood there, wide eyes telling me she might well have been in shock, seeing the guy still advancing on her, threatening to rip her apart for the damage she’d done to him.
I couldn’t let that happen.
Back on my feet, the murder twins now a few yards away, I suddenly felt better, less weak. I mean, they’d still kicked the bejesus out of me, but that was pretty much a constant state for me. Now that they weren’t right on top of me, I realized the beating hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as I’d believed just moments before.
Then it hit me.
I swallowed my growl, not wanting to warn them I was back in the fight, and ran them down. As soon as I closed, weakness and terror roiled over me once more, a palpable wave of it. But I’d expected it this time, was prepared for it.
Institutionalized (Demon Squad Book 10) Page 12
