Hand of the God

by Sonya Bateman

  “Watch out!” a female voice shouted almost immediately. I had time to process impressions of a large space destroyed by a fierce battle, a heap of strange-looking corpses to my left, and a figure dressed in black riot gear with a full face shield lurching up from behind the bodies to point a machine gun at me.

  A shot rang out. Just as I realized it hadn’t hit me, the figure dropped out of sight with a meaty thud.

  Silence chased the sound of the body hitting the floor.

  I caught a breath and took in a little more. The space, about the size of a college lecture hall minus the stadium seating, was littered with black-clad bodies in various gruesome death poses — most of them dressed in the same riot gear as the one who’d almost shot me. The big heap of corpses he’d been hiding behind was actually a bunch of life-sized dummies. About halfway across the room and off to the right was something that looked like a boxing ring tipped up on its side, riddled with bullet holes. There was a shooting range with pop-up metal people-shaped targets beyond the practice dummies on the left, and toward the back of the room, a jumbled heap of barbells, weight stations, and exercise machines. So this must’ve been some kind of training area.

  Another figure in riot gear rushed out from behind the upended boxing platform. I raised the gun fast, my finger on the trigger.

  “Hey, don’t shoot. I’m a friendly,” the same voice that told me to watch out said, and this time I recognized it before Calla reached up and pulled the head gear off. She looked exhausted and smeared liberally with dirt, but otherwise unharmed. “We were just coming to rescue you,” she said, the relief in her tone matching the deep, shuddering release in my core at seeing her alive.

  I grinned. “Guess I’m meeting you halfway, then,” I said as she reached me and threw her arms around me. I hugged her hard, and rubbed her back with a hand that only trembled a little. “You kicked some serious ass in here. Thanks for saving me … that was a damned good shot.”

  “I didn’t exactly save you.” She pulled back and gave me a jittery smile. “I mean, you would’ve lived if he shot you. Probably.”

  I was starting to think ‘probably’ wasn’t good enough this time. These guys were a lot better than any other Milus Dei group we’d faced. But I kept that thought to myself — I didn’t want to rattle her any more than she already was. Instead I asked, “So where’s the rest of we?”

  “Right here,” another voice said.

  I looked across the room to see two more dressed as soldiers coming toward us. Rex, who’d been somewhere near the shooting range, had already removed the face shield. And the seven-foot figure in the uniform that didn’t even come close to covering his limbs had to be Taeral. Both of them were just as filthy as Calla, and just as alive.

  Even though Taeral had been further away, he got there first and practically jerked me into an embrace, hard enough to make me wince. “Gideon, thank the gods,” he breathed. “You’ve no idea how hard it was to leave you with that treacherous creature. If I’d not known …” He trailed off, and I wasn’t sure if he meant to say he knew that they wouldn’t kill me, or that the rest of them wouldn’t have survived without him.

  But it didn’t matter which one he meant, because they were both true.

  “You did the right thing,” I said when he stepped back. “The only thing, really.”

  “Aye, but I did not enjoy it.”

  I gripped his forearm and nodded. “I know. Looks like everything managed to work out, though. You seem okay now,” I said, and turned to Rex with a raised brow. “What about you?”

  He gave a deliberate cough. “Er, I’m not really a hugger. But I’ll shake your hand,” he said, and held his out.

  I laughed and shook it. “I was just asking if you’re okay.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Not a scratch on me. Well, maybe a couple of scratches. But nothing serious.”

  “Sadie and Chester?” I said, looking at Taeral.

  A shadow passed over his face. For a second I thought we’d lost someone after all, but he said, “They’ve gone in search of some kind of room that Chester claimed was crucial to our victory.”

  “The command center,” Rex put in. “Every evil villain lair has one, you know. And this whole place being inside a mountain, they’ll have all kinds of systems routed through there. Like the cameras.” He pointed to a slick-looking security camera mounted in the corner of the room. “We take the command center, we win.”

  Taeral’s face stated that he disagreed with the idea of victory by computer. I knew it wasn’t so much the strategy as having to let Sadie out of his sight. But again, it was the right call to send her with Chester. A bunch of armed soldiers didn’t stand much of a chance against a werewolf.

  “Well, I hope they found it,” I said. “For now, we need to—”

  “Gideon, you are hurt,” Taeral broke in with a pointed stare, but his barely restrained rage wasn’t directed at me. “What have they done to you?”

  It took me a minute to figure out what set him off. There was still a bit of blood leaking from my nose, an aftershock of the mental pounding I’d taken from the Fabulous Singing Dead Soldiers. I shrugged and swiped at it with a sleeve. “What they always do,” I said simply, not wanting to offer the gruesome details. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m free, you’re alive.”

  “It does matter. Let me heal you,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m okay, really. Save your spark,” I said. “We still have to find the sword, and it’s probably with Yusef. We’re going to need every advantage we can get.”

  He looked extremely unhappy, but he didn’t press the issue.

  “All right,” I said. “I think we should check in with Sadie and Chester before we do anything else. Any idea how to find them?”

  “Got you covered.” Rex went for a pocket and produced a CB unit like the one I’d taken from the lab. “I grabbed a pair of these on the way in, switched the channel to one they weren’t using. Iceman’s got the other one.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “The way in from where?”

  “Outside,” he said, nodding at Taeral. “Your boy there figured we shouldn’t go back through the mine tunnels, so once we were down the hatch, he dug us out to the surface. Then we found the front door and let ourselves in.” He clapped Taeral on the back and grinned. “They had a fancy-ass lock, but Iceman cracked it. Opened the whole damned mountain. Then there’s a hangar full of jeeps and choppers and a bunch of these assholes. The she-wolf rushed in and took most of ’em out. And putting on the riot gear was your woman’s idea, after we mopped up the rest in the hangar.”

  I smirked and glanced at ‘my woman.’ She restrained herself admirably.

  “At least now I know what happened while I was gone,” I said. “Can you just—”

  The walkie in Rex’s hand crackled and squelched. “T-Rex, this is Iceman,” Chester’s static-laced voice said from the speaker. “You copy? Over.”

  Rex held the unit up and thumbed the side button. “We read you, Iceman. Go ahead. Over.”

  “We have the command center,” Chester said after a beat. “What’s your status? Over.”

  “Area secured and assholes wiped. Over.”

  “Roger that, T-Rex.” I could hear the grin in Chester’s voice. “You moving out to pursue the objective? Over.”

  Rex looked at me and smiled. “The objective came to us. Over.”

  “You’ve got the boss? Is he okay?” Chester said, and I heard another voice in the background. “Sadie says if he’s not, she’s going to kick his ass.” A long pause. “Er, over.”

  “Tell her I’m fine, and I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I will tell her. Give me that device.” Taeral glowered at Rex for a few seconds, and then slumped into a sigh. “Please,” he added reluctantly.

  “No problem, buddy.” Rex held the button down. “Iceman, can you put She-Wolf on the line? Grim Reaper wants to talk to her. Over.”

  Unexpectedly, Taeral failed to
take offense to his new nickname.

  “Sure thing. Iceman, over and out.”

  Rex handed the CB to Taeral. “I’ll need Iceman back when you’re done, okay?”

  “Fine,” Taeral said absently, staring at the walkie as he started to move away. I heard Sadie’s voice briefly, and then he was out of range.

  I’d let them have their semi-privacy while they could get it.

  Calla smiled at Rex. “So, do I get a cool code name too?” she said.

  “Hell yeah, you do. Bullseye,” he said, pointing a finger gun at her and pulling the trigger. “Because you never miss. And your man, he’s Wildcat. One savage motherfucker with nine lives.” Rex tipped me a wink. “Let’s just hope you haven’t used them all up yet.”

  I laughed. “I’ve probably got at least two left. Maybe three.”

  “You might need ’em before this night’s over,” he said.

  I hoped I wouldn’t. I’d already come damned close to losing one in the lab.

  It wasn’t long before Taeral returned with the CB and handed it to Rex. “Chester—” He broke off, and his mouth twitched slightly toward a smirk. “Iceman wishes to speak with you,” he said.

  “Now you’re getting it. That’s a big ten-four, Grim.” He grinned and grabbed the walkie. “This is T-Rex, come back. Over.”

  “Reading you Lima Charlie, T-Rex,” Chester said through the speaker. “I’ve pulled up some schematics of the place, but I’m not seeing anything we haven’t already cleared. Please advise. Over.”

  “Roger that. Hold the line, over.” Rex looked at me. “We’re looking for the big guy, right? That son of a bitch I flew in here,” he said. “Iceman’s saying it looks like we’ve been through most of the place already, and we didn’t see him.”

  I frowned. He had to be here somewhere. “Just a second,” I said, thinking back to Holdrun’s conversation with Cavanaugh. “The guy that was — er, some asshole who works here said he was upstairs. Maybe that’ll help Chester find something?”

  As Rex nodded and conveyed the message, Taeral gave me a look. He knew what I’d been about to say.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The asshole’s dead.”

  Taeral snorted. “I’d rather he were alive, so I could kill him slowly.”

  “Why? What happened?” Calla said, looking from Taeral to me. “Gideon, what did he do to you?”

  I gave her a quick one-armed hug. “Nothing I can’t fix.”

  She started to say something else, but then the CB crackled and Chester’s voice broke in. “Okay, looks like we’ve got three floors and a subfloor here,” he said, and I could hear him tapping on a keyboard. Sadie was probably holding the walkie for him. “We know what’s below — that short bastard’s lair. This floor’s the training room, lab, offices, and command center. Second floor, barracks, cafeteria, rec room. And there’s only one room on the third. Says here, ‘sanctum.’ Over.”

  “Sanctum. That has to be it,” I said. “How do we get there?”

  Of course, Chester didn’t answer. I wasn’t the one with the walkie.

  Rex clicked through and repeated the question, and Chester said the stairs were on the other side of the lab and went up to both floors, but he had no idea what was on the third. “No cameras up there,” he said. “But I’m picking up a handful of hostiles holed up in the cafeteria, maybe trying to regroup. Got a few headed for the hangar, too. We need to disable those vehicles so they can’t go for help, and mop up the stragglers. Over.”

  “All right,” I sighed, raking a hand through my hair. “Maybe we should—”

  A squelch from the CB interrupted. “She-Wolf wants the chow hall. Says she’s hungry. Over.”

  I bit back a laugh, since Taeral did not look amused. But hell, I thought it was funny. “Okay, that’s one problem down.”

  “Rex and I can deal with the hangar,” Calla said.

  I looked at her. “You sure?”

  “Sure we can take it? Yeah.” She reached out and took my hand. “Sure I want to let you and Taeral go face the man upstairs alone? Absolutely not. But I know that’s going to happen anyway. It’s … the right move.”

  Maybe it was. But I didn’t like any of the right moves we’d had to make since we started this thing.

  “What do you think, Taeral?” I said.

  He grimaced. “I think we’ve no other choice.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I pulled Calla close, and kissed her like I’d never see her again. “Don’t die, okay?”

  “I won’t if you don’t,” she said.

  “Deal.”

  I couldn’t promise anything. But if we actually pulled this off, at least we’d really have something to celebrate.

  Chapter 27

  Rex had changed my stolen CB to the channel he and Chester were using, and I’d handed it off to a protesting Taeral who didn’t want anything to do with the contraption. Until I reminded him that he could talk to Sadie. We found the stairs easily enough, and as we headed up them slowly, I gave Taeral a glossed-over version of what happened with Holdrun, and how he’d sort of saved me in the end.

  “That is not nearly enough to redeem him, after what he’s done,” Taeral growled when I finished. “Last of his kind or not, I would still destroy him if I could.”

  “Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to put him on my Christmas card list or anything,” I said. “I’m only saying that he wasn’t actively trying to kill any of us. Just himself, by proxy.”

  Taeral made a disgusted sound. “There is no honor in such an act of cowardice. His ancestors would be ashamed.”

  “I thought you said dwarves had no honor.”

  He held a finger up. “I said they have no integrity. They’ve no morals, no issues with lying and cheating and bending the truth, twisting the words of a bargain, to get what they want. But they are said to be honorable. Loyal to those who’ve proven worthy of respect, by deed or in battle.” A slight frown creased his face. “Even if Valhalla exists, that one will not be welcome.”

  And here I thought I was bluffing. Maybe I’d accidentally told Holdrun the truth.

  But at this point, it probably didn’t matter.

  We reached the second-floor landing and stopped short at what waited there. The body of a Milus Dei soldier lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs that continued to the third floor — with Holdrun’s bronze hammer buried in the remnants of his skull.

  “Looks like somebody got in his way,” I said, my gaze moving from the bloodied hammer to the stairs. “You think he’s up there? Holdrun, I mean.”

  Taeral gave a careful shrug. “Perhaps Yusef dismissed him, and he took his anger out on this one as he came down.”

  “Maybe.” But I had a feeling that the dwarf was on the third floor, and if Yusef-slash-Dante hadn’t kept his promise to kill him yet, we’d have to deal with both of them. Somehow.

  And I was pretty sure we’d lose that fight.

  “Taeral … let’s just get out of here,” I said, my blood suddenly running cold. “I never should’ve talked you guys into coming in the first place. Now everyone’s looking at me to lead, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I just keep fucking things up. I wanted to actually hurt these guys, strike a real blow, but I couldn’t even —”

  “Brother, stop,” Taeral said with gentle conviction. “You’ve made the right decision. It is not that we should take Fragarach from them, but that we must.”

  I swallowed bitterly. “Why? It’s just a damned sword.”

  “Aye, a sword that can kill you, or me, with a single blow,” he said. “A weapon they’ll surely find a way to reproduce. Holdrun claims he will refuse, but you know these people. These evil, twisted, inhuman scum. They will force him to comply. And when he does …” Taeral shook his head slowly. “With such weapons, and their great number of soldiers, and their protections from Fae magic, they could take Arcadia and exterminate our people.”

  I didn’t want to believe that. “How would they even get there?” I said
, and then shuddered as I answered my own questions. “They’d just grab a couple of Fae to torture, and make them open the Veil.”

  “Or they could simply use Holdrun,” he said. “Dwarves are creatures of Arcadia — at least they were, before the Great War.”

  Damn it. I guessed we did have to go through with this.

  Before we headed up, I grabbed the solid metal hammer and wrenched it out of the soldier’s skull. It was heavy, but manageable. “Think I’ll take this along,” I said, shaking as much of the blood and bits of bone off the weapon as I could. “I’m not sure how much of that dream was real, but he shattered the moon sword into dust with that thing in it. Maybe this’ll work better.”

  Taeral nodded. “Perhaps it will.”

  We walked the second flight of stairs without talking. As we neared the top, voices drifted down the stairwell — one furious and bellowing, the other calm and too soft to make out. The loud one belonged to Holdrun, and I guessed the other one was Yusef. Or possibly Dante.

  Well, at least they weren’t getting along. Maybe that was a point in our favor.

  “—done what ye asked of me!” Holdrun’s raw shout clarified as we crept closer. “Yer master swore to uphold the bargain, and I’ll have my payment!”

  Now we were close enough to see a landing, and a red door trimmed with fancy, gilt-edged molding that was cracked open a few inches.

  “Yes, of course. And you’ll have it, Master Sootbrow,” the slightly accented voice from my dream answered, faint compared to the dwarf’s enraged sputtering. So it was Yusef. “Just as soon as you fulfill the rest of your end.”

  “I never promised ye I’d duplicate the sword. I only said that I could.”

  Yusef made a tut-tut sound. “Twist your words all you’d like, but you’ll still deliver what you promised. One way or another.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” A long string of jingling, clanking metal followed the shout. “Let me down, ye bloody puppet,” Holdrun gritted. “Or I’ll make ye.”

  There was a soft chuckle. “I’m afraid you can’t do anything, as long as your feet don’t touch the ground. Dwarf.”