by Steve McHugh
Selene took a deep breath and stepped toward me.
“Don’t,” I told her. “When you left me, when you just walked out without explanation, except from what I managed to piece together from rumors and hearsay, it fucking broke me.”
Selene stopped and her eyes became moist.
“So don’t,” I continued, the words just spilling out of me whether I wanted them to or not. “Don’t come back here and try to reclaim something between us, because I can’t do halves with you. I can’t think I have you, only to watch you walk back to a man I refuse to believe you even tolerate let alone feel any kind of affection for.”
Selene took another step, tears beginning to fall.
I shook my head. “Don’t, Selene. My feelings aren’t something you get to toy with. This isn’t something you can start up without consequence.”
She reached me and placed a hand on my chest, making it feel as if my heart were about to burst free from it, before taking my hand and placing it against her own.
“I want you,” Selene whispered and kissed me softly on the lips. She tasted like peach.
“You’re married,” I whispered back.
“Why should that matter?”
“Because it’s you.” I pushed her back slightly, although I still lingered for far too long before doing so.
“Are you sure?” she asked and stepped toward me once again. “I know we shouldn’t. But I don’t care about that. I just want to be with you.”
Selene kissed me again, and whatever resolve I had shattered. I held her against me as emotions and memories swirled through my head.
She kicked off her shoes and led me barefoot through the grass to the large guesthouse that she’d been using at the bottom of the garden. I’d like to say I put up a fight—hell, I’d like to say I had thoughts in my mind other than being with her again, but I didn’t. As she led me through the front door and we stumbled up the stairs to her bed, there was only one thing on my mind: Selene.
CHAPTER 29
Dresden, Germany. 1936.
The sex was, as it always had been between the two of us, amazing. Selene brought out the best in me in a lot of different ways, and I knew it. But once we’d finally succumbed to sleep, my dreams were fitful, full of betrayal and anger. Full of death.
I woke with the nagging doubt that our actions had been wrong. Not because she was cheating on her husband: when push came to shove, he was a nasty little asshole, but because I wished I could believe that Selene would leave Deimos, but I didn’t. I expected her to go running back to him for whatever reason she’d left me for in the first place. Generally, I’m neither naïve nor stupid, although I’ll admit that those qualities wavered whenever Selene was concerned. So, though the doubts were there, I wanted to believe otherwise.
By the time we were both up, washed, and dressed, it was getting on to early afternoon. Selene was acting as if no one would ever come between us, as if we really were newly in love. She kissed and touched me, but we didn’t talk much. There was no discussion of the past or future; only the present existed. It made me even more wary.
Once we were dressed, her in leather armor and me in combat fatigues belonging to the German army, we left the guesthouse and walked back into the main house, only to be greeted by Petra, Lucie, and Kurt, who were making preparations to leave.
“Glad you could join us,” Kurt said to us both. “Hope you got that out of your system.”
Selene smiled and walked off, leaving Kurt and me alone.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” he whispered.
I shook my head.
“I hope it works out for you, my friend,” he said and clasped me on the shoulder, passing me a silver dagger. “No guns.”
“I think I’ll manage,” I said and attached the dagger’s sheath to one of the loops on my belt.
A few minutes later, everyone was ready. Kurt went over the plan once more, and then we left the house. Lucie and I climbed into a newly stolen 1935 black and red Audi Front. Lucie wore a military officer’s uniform, while I was meant to be her driver, something I think she enjoyed a lot more than was probably considered normal. Every time we passed soldiers at a checkpoint, she handed over fake identification that someone Kurt knew had created, and took great delight in telling them how much of an idiot I was, which, if I’m honest, probably helped us. More than once I got a glance of sympathetic understanding and was let through before they’d even seen her papers.
We reached Berlin and noticed the excitement in the air and the sheer number of people on the streets. It was obvious that any attack from Helios and his helpers would cause nothing short of a massacre.
I took the car along the city roads, getting closer and closer to the warehouse and wondering just how accurate Kurt’s information was. But as I pulled the car down a dark side road and entered the group of buildings that held our target, it became apparent that there were no guards. Not even the booth and checkpoint to allow people onto the site was manned.
“Looks like Kurt’s information was right,” Lucie said, as I did a lap of the entire complex, which contained six more much smaller buildings. Then I returned to our target and stopped the car. Lucie got out, and I followed suit, noticing that the sun was just beginning to dip down, the day moving toward dusk.
“This is odd,” I said. “I’d have expected someone to be here.”
“Surely that just makes our job easier.”
I shrugged and walked over to the closest building, a one-story structure with blacked-out windows that stood out against the white-painted walls. I tried the door, which was locked, but a swift kick to the lock ended that barrier. The building was about fifty feet long and contained chairs and tables, along with several mountains of paperwork. I walked over to the nearest pile and picked up the top piece, a delivery note. It was dated the day the photos had been taken, although it said nothing about the contents of the delivery other than “Ordinance.”
I left the building and found Lucie standing, arms crossed, beside the car. “You’re supposed to be helping me,” she said.
“I’m making sure we don’t get any surprises. If you like, you can help check. We’ll be done quicker. Then we can check the warehouse.”
“Fine, let’s get this done.” Lucie walked over to a building, identical to the one I’d just exited from, but to the left of the car, and opened the door.
I didn’t wait around to see what she’d found, but made my way to three more buildings. They contained nothing of interest, although they showed that people had been working here recently. In one, a cup of now stone-cold tea sat on a desk and a half-eaten sandwich on another. People had left in a hell of a hurry.
After flicking through a particularly large file, I discovered that I’d been right about Pandora trying to learn how to take control of Hope’s body. The memory of Pandora using “I’s” roared to the forefront of my mind.
“Nathan,” Lucie shouted, and I ran out of the office as she jogged over toward me. “This whole place was Gestapo.”
I gave her the file I’d been reading. “They were trying to find a way for Pandora to gain total control of Hope’s body, pushing the human soul aside. It looks like they wanted to take Pandora apart to figure out how she worked. That’s probably when she killed all of them at their headquarters. Hades needs to be told about this, and sooner rather than later.”
Lucie read part of what I’d given her. “There’s more in the other office. The Gestapo quite like their paperwork about all the evil shit they’re doing. Any idea who attacked this place?”
“Helios probably. Pandora wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be able to re-create her, I’m sure of that. That leaves the question of why all this research wasn’t destroyed.”
It appeared that neither of us had an answer, so we made our way to the final building. It was a two story, red-bricked office that gave off the smell of death well before we reached the door, and by the time we’d made it there, the stench was ove
rpowering. The door opened on the first try, and I immediately closed it again as the stench of the dead inside threatened to overpower me.
“You okay?” Lucie asked, using a handkerchief to cover her mouth and nose.
I nodded. “Let’s go look at those runes. I want to see how you think you’re going to remove them.”
I followed Lucie back to the warehouse and kept watch while she went and looked at the runes. She knelt before the hand-sized rune on the wall, in between the door and a massive shutter for a loading dock, and concentrated.
“You know I’ve never understood something about enchanters,” I said.
“And what would that be?” she asked without glancing my way.
“If I have to use a rune, I need to know it. I need to have studied it and figured out what it says. But you don’t. I’ve always wondered why that was.”
“Sixteen hundred years old and you never asked before?”
“In case you haven’t met any others of your kind before, they’re not exactly forthcoming about what they can and can’t do.”
“Because sorcerers are so well known for being free and open with their magic?”
“Good point,” I conceded.
After a few seconds of silence passed, I’d come to the conclusion that Lucie had no intention of telling me anything, and I began to wonder how long this day was going to feel.
“We think of the word we want to create, and the effect it will have, and if we have enough power, then the rune is created. The words have to be simple.” Lucie pointed at the rune on the wall. “This says ‘Explode.’ ”
“So how do we remove it?”
“Well, as you pointed out yesterday, I can’t remove any runes created by another enchanter, which I can tell this one was. However, I can add to it, making it far too complex, therefore either collapsing the rune or changing it enough to make it less effective. I’ve just added a second rune to this one to say ‘Explode down.’ In theory it should tear through the wall, but not go back into the warehouse or come out toward us. I could try to add more to it and collapse the rune, but the effects can be unstable, and if there is sarin gas in there, I can’t say it would end well for us.”
“How do we activate it?”
“The easiest way is opening the door.”
I paused. “How powerful is this rune?”
“Someone put enough power into it that anyone opening this door without disabling it would probably be vaporized.”
“You’re not exactly selling the idea of opening the door.”
“You could try to destroy the door with magic. But if you get it wrong and there’s anything behind there that’s going to hurt us, we’d soon know about it.”
“You sure your rune works?” I asked. “If you’re wrong, I’m going to be very upset.”
“Noted.”
I walked up to the door and readied a dense shield of air magic all around me before grabbing hold of the door handle and pulling the door toward me. The runes did their job and exploded down through the wall, gouging a massive hole in the concrete.
I released the shield as Lucie stepped up beside me. “Told you it would work.”
“That you did,” I said. “Sorry I doubted you.”
Lucie paused as if she was going to say something, before deciding against it and walking through the door into the warehouse, which as it turned out, was empty.
“This is unexpected,” she said as I picked up some wiring from the floor near a wooden pallet.
“They cleaned the place out. It was probably used as a staging area.”
“Then why the runes?” I asked.
We walked the length of the warehouse but found nothing of interest until we came to a door about halfway along the hundred-foot side of the building. The door was next to another loading dock. There were no runes, so I opened the door—and immediately wished I hadn’t.
The room wasn’t big—maybe a hundred square feet—but the rear of it was stacked floor to ceiling with pallets, each containing several massive artillery shells. Most of them had been opened and their internal parts removed, but several were still intact. I moved to the closest shell and read the German writing on the red label affixed to the wood beneath it: “Warning! Sarin gas.”
“The sarin was in the shells. They extracted it from these open ones to make the bombs. That’s a lot of gas. This is what was unloaded from the truck. I wonder why they’d bring it here. Why not somewhere more secure?”
“I don’t know,” Lucie admitted. “But we need to make sure that those shells don’t go anywhere.”
We closed the door to the storage room and walked back to the front of the warehouse, where we found two chairs and sat. There was little else to do; neither of us was versed in the art of defusing sarin gas–filled military shells.
I wondered how Selene, Kurt, and Petra were doing; hopefully, they’d stop the bombs before anyone got hurt. I glanced over at the room with the sarin. There wasn’t a lot of gas left unused, but what was there made me uncomfortable.
CHAPTER 30
Berlin, Germany. 1936.
Why, Hellequin?” Lucie asked after ten minutes of silence between us as we sat together inside the warehouse.
“What?”
“Hellequin, why? What does it mean? Hades told me you used to go by that name.”
“I buried that a long time ago,” I said, feeling slightly annoyed at my past being discussed.
“Sorry, just making conversation.”
“Merlin came up with it,” I said. “It’s an old dwarven word. It means ‘he who brings death,’ although it was probably a lot less cliché at the time.”
“Nice name to have,” she said dryly.
“Merlin wanted a name that people would sit up and pay attention to. It sort of fits.”
“But isn’t the Hellequin also a French character?”
“Ah, the play? Yes, a few hundred years after I started using it. A French writer, who’d seen me fighting a group of soldiers, wrote a play using the Hellequin name. He dressed the character in black and red with a black mask and wrote that I took the souls of the evil to hell. At some point in the fifteenth century, that changed to become ‘harlequin.’ Which was, I guess, more of a comedic character who flips and flops around the stage.”
“Must have been odd, seeing people dress up as you, in a way.”
“That whole century was weird. Seeing people dressed in a manner that was based on me took some getting used to. Although I didn’t take it personally.”
“So, you’re responsible for one of the most recognizable characters ever.”
“I think I’d rather not see it like that. I don’t think wearing tights and prancing around a stage is something I’d be very good at.”
Lucie’s chuckle was good to hear. “Maybe you’re not the monster I thought you were for so long. But I still want the truth about what happened.”
Any hopes of us getting along vanished. The fact that I’d been the one to kill her brother, whether warranted or not, was always going to be between us. “Your brother killed dozens of people. I caught him in the act, there was a fight, and he died. That’s what happened.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He confessed to killing your family before he died,” I told Lucie, ignoring her disbelief.
“Lies!” she shouted and leaped to her feet, her face full of sudden anger.
“Lucie. I didn’t frame him for murders he didn’t commit. He killed a lot of people. If you want more information, you’ll have to talk to Hades. I’ve told you all I can.” I opened my mouth to say more, but closed it again. She didn’t need to know the rest. Even telling her she should talk to Hades was a slip of the tongue I shouldn’t have made.
Lucie’s hands balled into fists, and she took a step toward me but stopped as she glanced out of the still open warehouse door. I followed her gaze and noticed the hooded figure walking toward us. He stopped by the car and gazed inside the window.
I stood and exited the warehouse. “Sorry,” I said in German. “This is private property.”
The man reached into the car and with a loud crunch removed the radio, dropping it to the ground. He took a few more steps toward me and tossed back his oversized hood, revealing Helios’s smiling face. “Now, Nathan, we both know this property isn’t yours.”
I cracked my wrists; violence was inevitable. And Helios had some payback coming for what he did to me outside of Magali’s house. “You’ve come for the sarin, I assume. I don’t think there’s enough left for you to bother with.”
“Oh, that’s rich. You think that little cupboard in there was where all the sarin was stored? Regardless, it’s mine. I paid for it. Well, technically I paid for the Gestapo to bring it here so I could kill them all in the same place, but it’s still mine.”
“There’s more of that dammed stuff,” I whispered, and glanced at Lucie. “Fantastic.”
I turned back to Helios. “Why’d you leave out everything about Pandora gaining control of Hope’s body?”
“Ah, you found out about that. I was supposed to destroy it all. But I got so tired from killing all of these people that I thought I’d save it until tonight. Now I can burn you all with it.”
“The bombs will never be detonated!” Lucie shouted.
Helios laughed. “Yes, you’re probably right. But they won’t stop me from walking into that stadium and butchering Hera and her friends in front of the world’s eyes. The first live televised massacre. It’ll be quite the eye-opener for those watching. The sarin—well, that’s just the icing on the cake.”
I walked toward Helios, with Lucie following just behind. “This won’t be easy for you,” I informed him. “It’s almost night.” As a dragon-kin powered by the sun, the night would leave him depleted and, in theory, easier to defeat. In theory.
“Then I’d better hurry, hadn’t I?” A roar of fire escaped his mouth, causing me to dive aside, dragging Lucie with me. The fire followed us until we reached the office building, which gave us some cover, although the smell of burning paper inside the office suggested it wasn’t going to be cover for very long.
