Hellequin Chronicles 4: Prison of Hope

by Steve McHugh

  “Be careful,” Tommy said.

  “Why do people always tell me to do that?” I asked.

  “Because you always do something stupid,” Tommy answered. “And by stupid, I mean reckless and dangerous.”

  “Thanks, Tommy, it’s good to know who believes in me.”

  “I believe in you, Nate,” Tommy said with a faint smile. “I believe in your ability to find trouble like a bloodhound searching for an escaped prisoner.” And with that he burst into laughter as the doors closed.

  Although there was something to be said for Tommy and Persephone’s warning, I had no intention of facing anything that had managed to get out of Tartarus. The Titans were well above my ability to fight if I wanted to maintain all of my limbs.

  Hopefully, whatever was going on down there could be stalled, or stopped altogether. I knew that Hades had a squad of highly trained soldiers down there, so with any luck they were already dealing with the problem. The thought didn’t manage to make me feel better, though.

  There had been precisely one escape from Tartarus in its entire several thousand-year existence. Pandora. A second breakout within a hundred years was something I was sure Hades and his staff would take personally, but it did raise questions about the security in Tartarus.

  The trip down was quick, and I expected to find people running around and dealing with whatever had happened. Instead, as the lift doors opened, there was nothing. I might have been okay with gunfire or shouting, but silence caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up.

  There were no guards on either side of the lift doors. I stepped out of the lift, removing the gun from its holster as I moved into a hallway that had paintings of various Titans on the walls. I followed the hallway around the nearest corner, to a small reception area. There was no one manning the desk, nor any more guards in the vicinity. There should have been two guards by the lift and two more at the reception. I crossed the floor to the desk, but there was no one behind it.

  There were three doors that led off from the reception area. Behind one lay the realm gate, and the other two were holding areas for anyone coming through the gate. I opened the first door. The dark tiled floor was a stark contrast to the white in the reception area, but apart from a few chairs, a water cooler, and a small TV that sat atop a table, it was empty. The second room was across from the first, and the interior was identical except for the bodies it contained.

  Three male guards, one female guard, and the female receptionist were all lying on the cold floor. I moved around the room and felt for any signs of life. All were alive, their pulses strong. They were unconscious but otherwise unharmed. Whoever had attacked them had also removed their wristbands, meaning if they woke up, it would be impossible for them to reach the floors above. I searched the guards for weapons but found none. I did, however, find two more of the concussion grenades like the ones that Tommy and I had discovered on the floor above.

  I left the room and cautiously made my way to the third and final door, which was behind the receptionist’s desk. It was the entrance to the realm gate, a place usually containing half a dozen people—a mixture of guardians and guards.

  I saw the first body before I’d even taken a step inside. His uniform suggested that he belonged to the squad of guards for the realm gate. He wasn’t dead, and his sidearm had been left holstered on him. I easily discovered the rest of the squad with just a quick check of the room. There was nothing to suggest that they had been aware of any kind of impending attack; they’d fallen where they’d been standing, and none of them had even drawn a weapon.

  I doubted they’d been attacked before the security feed had been disrupted, or the whole place would have been notified of the attack. The likelihood was that the comms being taken offline and the attack on the guards had been done at exactly the same moment, to minimize discovery. Whoever had done this wasn’t an amateur.

  It was only as I finished my search of the room, noticing the two guardians and guards that lay on the floor, that I discovered two more chrome spheres sitting on the floor. They’d rolled all the way to the base of the four steps that led to the realm gate. I dropped the grenades back to the ground; they were of no use to me once they’d been exhausted.

  As I turned toward the door, there was a cough from the far side of the room. I quickly made my way over there and found a man trying to get back to his knees.

  “You okay?” I asked and offered him my hand, which he took and pulled himself to his feet.

  “What happened?” he asked me, shaking his head slightly, his long blond hair flicking across his face.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.” I helped him to a nearby chair next to a still-unconscious soldier.

  The man noticed my glance. “Everyone else still out?”

  “Looks that way. It’s lucky no one was seriously hurt.”

  He nodded and continued looking around, as if searching for something.

  “Do you remember anything?” I asked.

  He stopped glancing around and looked up at me. “I was working, and the next thing I know, there’s a bang and I wake up here. How long before anyone else wakes up?”

  “You must have been the farthest away from the concussion grenades when they came in. It’s hard to say how long everyone else will be out.”

  He nodded again as if absorbing the information.

  “What do you do here?”

  “I’m a guardian,” he said. “One of two down here.” He looked over toward the realm gate. Realm gate guardians went through a ritual to bond themselves with a realm gate, making them the only people who could operate the gate.

  “Was the realm gate activated?” I asked, and at that his glance shot toward me.

  “You heard the alarm?” He sounded angry at the information.

  It was my turn to nod. “Not for the gate, no. Just the one for the intruder. The gate was activated then?”

  “Goddamn it,” he snapped. “Do you know who came out?”

  “I didn’t even know it had been activated,” I explained again. “But if it was, finding out who exited is now on my list of things to learn. I haven’t seen anyone, though.” I was about to ask more questions when the distinct hum came from the realm gate, signaling its opening. The black space in the center of the gate shimmered as someone on the other side activated it.

  “You need to get down,” I instructed the guardian, and grabbed a Tesla rod from the belt of the nearest soldier. The rods consist of coils wrapped around a carbon fiber, nightstick-like weapon. It emitted a blue hue as thousands of volts of electricity contained within whirled to life. I passed it to the guardian, who gripped it firmly as we both crouched behind the nearest desk, stacked high with computer monitors and equipment.

  “I’m not much of a fighter,” he whispered.

  “That’s okay. Just stay there, and only use the Tesla rod if you have to.”

  Twenty feet away, the dark green runes on the realm gate flared to life, the shimmering mass changing to one of swirling colors, eventually transmuting to show the hills of Tartarus. Two figures, both clad in dark clothes and black masks that covered all but their eyes and forehead, stepped into view. A second later they’d walked into the gate, immediately vanishing from sight. Another moment and they appeared in the control room, allowing me to get a good look at them both for the first time.

  They were both clearly male, one a head taller than me, although much more narrow, while his companion was about my size. They both had a dark rune drawn or painted on the back of their bare hands. Although I couldn’t tell exactly what the rune was for, it looked incredibly familiar, evoking a shadow of memory somewhere in the back of my mind.

  “Where the fuck is he?” the larger of the two men asked. His accent was English, but I couldn’t have placed it to one specific place.

  “He was meant to meet us here.”

  “I’m here,” the guardian beside me said, and he stood up, holding the tip of the Tesla rod to my throat.
“They sent someone down here.”

  He removed the gun from my hand and tossed it aside before motioning for me to stand. I complied with his order silently, following the guardian to the empty aisle at the end of the computer-laden desk.

  The larger masked man watched me intently as I walked, one of his hands balled into a tight fist.

  “You picked a really bad day to do this, guys,” I told them.

  The guardian glanced down for the briefest of moments, but I took the opportunity to knock the rod aside with one hand and punch him in the side of the head hard enough to send him sprawling to the ground. You can’t kill guardians when they’re near their realm gate, but you can still hurt them.

  I turned back to the two masked men and immediately noticed the red glyphs that adorned the forehead and eyes of the larger man.

  “How?” I managed before he raised his hand, and the room began spinning until I crashed to my knees.

  The sorcerer crouched in front of me. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood.”

  And then, with another wave of his hand, I collapsed forward to the ground and everything went dark.

  CHAPTER 10

  You do realize you should probably get up off the grass?” said a voice that sounded suspiciously like my own.

  I opened my eyes and found myself no longer in the control room of Hades’s compound, but lying beside a small circular wooden table next to a lake. The sun was shining, and I heard birds chirping. It was both serene and singularly bizarre.

  “Um . . . where am I?” I asked aloud without getting up from the grass. The grass was wet. It was at that point that I decided I’d broken my brain.

  “Get off the ground,” my voice said again.

  I did as I was told and sat up. Seated at the table, drinking from a china cup, was me. Except this me had a darkness spilling out from his eyes that covered his entire face.

  “You’re the nightmare,” I proclaimed. The magic inside every sorcerer is alive and wants to be used, but using too much at once makes it easier for the magic to take control and use the sorcerer as it sees fit. There isn’t an official name, but they’re called nightmares. Mine currently sat across from me, drinking tea. It was a slightly surreal situation.

  I looked around the landscape. “And this is . . . different.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t call me that,” the nightmare said.

  “What would you like me to call you? Dave?”

  The nightmare’s eyes sort of narrowed, maybe. It was hard to tell with the darkness concealing most of his face. “You can call me . . . Erebus,” he said.

  “The Greek primordial deity of darkness personified¸” I clarified. “Isn’t Erebus dead? I’m almost certain he was killed long before I was born.”

  “He won’t mind me using his name, then. Besides, if you insist on giving me a name you can use something more appropriate than ‘nightmare.’ ”

  “So is this some kind of weird dream?”

  The nightmare, . . . or Erebus, offered me a drink. I accepted, and he poured me a cup of tea from an ornate china teapot, black with swirls of color that changed from orange to white, to purple, and finally to a deep gray color before starting over again.

  He poured in a small amount of milk from a jug that matched the teapot and stirred it with a spoon that resembled a tiny battle-axe.

  “You’re not dreaming,” he told me as he passed me the cup.

  “So what is this?” I asked, feeling bewildered by what was happening.

  “Since you gained more power, I cannot be part of your conscious mind, and your unconscious mind is impenetrable to me, so I exist only here in your subconscious. A place you can’t easily traverse. When I was first pushed here, it was a mess. I’ve tidied it up somewhat.”

  I drank some of the tea, which turned out to be delicious. Or maybe it wasn’t; I wasn’t really sure how this worked. “So how am I here now?”

  Erebus shrugged. “No idea. You don’t know the inner workings of the brain, so I certainly don’t. I am you, after all. I contain all of your knowledge, including that which you’ve forgotten or decided to ignore, but I can’t know things you never discovered in the first place.”

  “Okay, why am I here?”

  “That’s easier to explain. When that sorcerer used mind magic on you, he meant to knock you clean out, but I managed to grab you as you slipped from consciousness to unconsciousness and bring you here. I felt it was time for a chat.”

  “About what?”

  “About your stupidity.”

  “In what way have I been stupid?”

  Erebus raised his hand and started to count on his fingers. “During that whole mess with Simon Olson and his insane friends several months ago in Maine, you behaved . . . unusually. You were beaten in a fight by someone who doesn’t have half the experience you do. You let a vampire take your blood and screw you on the floor after what could charitably be considered a short argument. You knew her power would wear off, but instead of waiting for it, you managed to collapse in front of two policemen after behaving oddly enough to get yourself arrested. You were jumped by that little asshole of a man, Simon Olson, who almost bested you because you were too damn arrogant to realize he might be setting you up. You told a werewolf pack you were Hellequin and then dropped the same information to your friend Galahad, and you have done precisely fuck all about it since then.

  “We appear to have run out of fingers.” Erebus raised his other hand and started anew. “You got beat up by a witch and some humans. And now you’re traipsing around Hades’s compound like a fucking bull, getting knocked out by a two-bit sorcerer whom you should have torn in half and then stuck the parts on a flagpole for the world to see.”

  “Are you done?” I asked quietly.

  “You are Hellequin,” Erebus continued. “People are meant to fear you. So what the hell is going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase: I know exactly what’s going on. I’m in your subconscious, but in order for you to sort your shit out, you need to come to the realization consciously. Right now, three men are standing in the control room to Tartarus after knocking you out cold. You’re better than that. Before you lost your memory, you’d never have let a piece of shit like Simon Olson live. You’d have burned any remembrance of him to ash.”

  “Are you saying I don’t kill enough people?”

  “Oh, no, that’s not an issue. But in the last year, I’ve only seen sparks of the man you were for centuries. Now, we both know you’re not an idiot. But something is stopping you from being the person you need to be.”

  “Need to be?” I slammed my palms onto the table. “People know I’m Hellequin. Hell, all of Shadow Falls must know it by now. Isn’t that who I need to be?”

  “Hellequin is more than a name, Nathan. You are defined by your actions. But it’s not just about you. Your friend Roberto gave you information about the man involved in trying to capture Shadow Falls, and you went after him at a nightclub. Not exactly subtle. But then, when you should have killed him outright, you let your prey escape, which could have had dire consequences for Roberto and his family.”

  “It worked out,” I said.

  Erebus nodded. “But it might not have.”

  “I’m Hellequin—isn’t that enough to make sure people are safe?”

  “What use is being Hellequin, if you’re not going to actually be him? It happened after the fight in Winchester, didn’t it? When you fought the lich. If you keep this up, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “That’s doubtful.”

  “How about getting someone else killed? Is that doubtful too?” Erebus’s tone was mocking.

  “I didn’t realize you were my therapist.”

  He threw the china cup at a nearby rock. The small cup exploded into pieces. “Don’t be a fucking ass! Part of your personality is in me, and quite frankly, seeing as how magic strives to be used, and I’m the physical manifestation of that magic, I’d re
ally like to see you continue to live and get more powerful. Enough stalling.”

  I glanced up at the angry embodiment of my magic and sighed. “I lost my blood magic. Having to learn how to heal and increase my power without it made me question a lot of things. It was a magic that maybe I relied on too much.”

  “Withdrawal?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused. “Maybe a little, but it was more the loss.”

  “Let’s see if I can help. You had to prove to yourself that you could manage without it, but at the same time you felt you weren’t quite as good as you had been. You started second-guessing yourself but masked it with arrogance. Something that almost got you killed twice a year ago in Maine and yesterday in a car park. Sound about right?”

  I found myself nodding, although I’d never even considered what Erebus was talking about.

  “You have your necromancy now. Why are you still hung up on the loss of your blood magic?”

  “I had my blood magic for most of my life, and then it was gone. What if one of these marks on my chest vanishes, and I find myself without my necromancy? How do I protect people if I’m not capable of being the man I was?”

  “And you think shrouding yourself in an arrogance that almost got you killed will do that for you? Your necromancy is more potent than any blood magic. You’d know this without the need for an intervention, if you stopped and thought for a moment. I wish I could hold your hand and tell you exactly what you’re capable of, exactly what is inside this stubborn head of yours, but I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  He pointed at my chest. “They stop me. They do more than you realize. More than I can tell you. Once they’ve gone, you’ll know what you were missing.”

  “That doesn’t make me stop worrying.”

  “You’re not capable of protecting everyone. No one is.”