Scorched Shadows (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 7)

by Steve McHugh

  The sound of the blasts had been deafening, but Mordred’s magic allowed him to heal much quicker than anything human. Within seconds he was back on his feet, wishing his hearing was still broken. Screams and cries permeated the air, people begging for help, people weeping. Mordred ignored them—forced himself to ignore them—and entered the coffee shop through what remained of the front door.

  The inside of the shop was littered with the charred and broken bodies of innocent victims. The closer Mordred got to where the detonations had been, the more the bodies had been turned into piles of ash. Chairs and tables had been vaporized, and the previously blue-and-white-tiled wall had been partially melted by the magical inferno. The ceiling had been destroyed in places, with a portion of the above floor collapsing, merging the bodies and destruction into one giant mess. Mordred looked up at the holes in the ceiling and noticed that part of the roof was missing.

  Both magical explosions had been superheated, but they’d been unlike any fire magic Mordred had ever seen. It was almost as if it were just pure energy. He stepped over remains, hoping to find someone alive, but the devastation had been total.

  Mordred used his air magic to put out any fires, smothering them until they were no longer a threat, before he walked up the nearly destroyed staircase to the floor above. More dead littered the floor, and near where Mordred had sat was the body of the man who had caused it. He was dead, which was a shame, because Mordred had wanted to kill him. The skin on the man’s chest, where Mordred had seen the glyphs, was nothing but ash. Mordred wondered how the man had managed to stay mostly intact when everything around him was destroyed. Maybe the magic that allowed him to create such devastation had been designed to keep him relatively intact, despite killing him. Mordred turned in a circle as he surveyed the building. The magic had pushed out from the murderer to everything surrounding him. Maybe whoever sent him wanted people to know who had been the killer, or maybe whatever had allowed him to commit such a horrific act hadn’t worked properly. Too many questions, not enough answers.

  Mordred hadn’t been able to find a second body on the floor below in any kind of state to prove conclusively that there had been two attackers, but he assumed whatever had allowed the body of the attacker above to remain intact had in fact incinerated the attacker below. Either that, or they were buried under mounds of innocent victims and pieces of the building. Either way, Mordred had no desire to go digging around for answers. One killer or two didn’t matter in the scheme of things. Mordred sighed out of a combination of sadness and frustration. He walked back down the stairs, leaving the coffee shop, where strangers hurried to help the injured.

  A young boy of no more than five or six lay on the ground, his leg twisted and badly broken. Apart from the leg and a small cut on his forehead, he appeared to be okay. Mordred could use his magic to heal him. Could use his magic to do a lot of things, but then Avalon would be angry that he’d done so. Magic was not allowed to be shown to humans. Oh, humans could discover Avalon on their own—the Internet had made sure of that—but it wasn’t considered good form to use magic on humans to heal them. Or kill them.

  Fuck it.

  “I can help,” Mordred told the woman beside the boy, who he guessed was his mother.

  “You’re a doctor?” she asked, hopeful.

  Mordred just nodded and placed his hands on the boy’s leg, and yellow glyphs lit up over his arms. The boy cried out in pain for an instant before he realized the pain was gone.

  “How’d you do that?” a familiar voice asked from behind Mordred.

  Mordred knew who the voice belonged to, and knew that his actions would cause more questions than he was comfortable answering. “Hi, Cass.”

  “I came back for my wallet. I saw what happened. I don’t understand what happened here. I don’t understand why you can heal people. What’s going on?”

  Mordred stood, ignoring the look of disbelief from the boy’s mother beside him.

  “An angel,” the woman said.

  Mordred snapped around to the mother, anger in his eyes. “Don’t be so fucking stupid. Get your son somewhere safe. Preferably to a hospital. I healed the leg, but they’d best check for anything else.”

  The mother nodded hurriedly, picked up her son, and ran toward an ambulance that had pulled up just down the street.

  “I’m not human,” Mordred told Cass. “The people who did this are not human. I will find who is responsible, and I will bring them to justice.”

  Cass stood, mouth open, and then cracked a slight smile. “You can heal these people.”

  Mordred stared at Cass for a heartbeat, unsure if she was mocking him. Unsure if she was human, after all. He nodded anyway. Whether she was human or not, it didn’t matter at that moment. “Some, but not all. I’m not a damn angel, or anything else like one. My kind has been confused with gods and goddesses for long enough—we don’t need to add angels to the bloody mix.”

  Mordred expected questions, or at least some disbelief, but instead all Cass said was “Can I help?”

  Mordred wanted to find out if Cass was human, but now wasn’t the time. “Find those in desperate need of healing. I’ll see what I can do.”

  For the next hour, Cass and Mordred went around the wounded, under the guise of Mordred being a doctor, and he helped heal a dozen people who would have otherwise died. Eventually, though, he’d used so much magic that exhaustion was beginning to set in, and he was unable to continue. He walked away from the scene, merging with the onlookers to duck down an alley.

  “Just going to run off?” Cass said from behind him.

  Mordred patted his pockets and removed Cass’s wallet. “Sorry, I forgot. This is yours.”

  “What are you?”

  “A sorcerer.”

  “Are you really Mordred? Like the Mordred?”

  Mordred nodded. “King Arthur and all that? Yep, that’s me.”

  Cass took her wallet and stared at Mordred for several seconds. She opened her mouth, and Mordred thought she was going to say something, but instead she turned around and walked away, soon vanishing into the sea of people.

  Probably for the best.

  Mordred removed his mobile phone from his pocket and dialed a number.

  “You’re in New York, aren’t you?” Olivia Green said the moment she answered. Pleasantries could be done some other time.

  “I was in a coffee shop that blew up,” Mordred told her. “Now I’m about a half a mile away from that shop. He said ‘For My Liege’ before he killed himself.”

  “Just the one attacker?”

  “Two, I think. I assume the glyphs were meant to turn them into ash, but for some reason they didn’t quite do the job to the guy who attacked me.”

  “The news is saying that thirty-six people are dead.”

  “At least. This is the start, Olivia.”

  “You need to come back to England, Mordred.”

  “Not yet. There’s something I need to do first.”

  “You’re a target, Mordred. Things have gotten worse since you left.”

  “I’ve always been a target. You get used to it. Worse how?”

  “It’s Elaine Garlot. She’s missing, has been for a few weeks now, from what I can tell.”

  “Define ‘missing.’ She contacted me a month ago and told me to meet her here in New York today.”

  “Have you heard from her since?”

  “No, I didn’t expect to, though.”

  “Avalon are saying she’s just taking some time to herself. But that’s bullshit. I know Elaine; she’s not the type. And she would return her calls. I need you to go find her.”

  “Does Nate know?”

  “Not yet. He’ll run off after her without a second thought.”

  “Where was she last seen?”

  “At her place in Scotland. We sent a team after her, and they vanished. Manannán mac Lir was a part of that team.”

  “Mac? Damn it. I’ll be at Elaine’s tomorrow. I need a team, people y
ou trust. We’ll find Elaine, Mac, and anyone else with her. And once we’re done, we’ll find out who this My Liege is and make him eat his own fucking hands.”

  Olivia paused for a second before continuing. “You okay?”

  “No, Olivia. I just saw innocent people die. I am the exact fucking opposite of okay.” Mordred hung up. The fact that he’d had a meeting with Elaine about the prophecy just before she’d vanished was far more of a coincidence than Mordred liked. Even if Elaine hadn’t been his aunt, finding her was now at the top of his list of things to do. He glanced back at the end of the alleyway before continuing on. Whoever the people behind My Liege were, they were now happy to kill humans by the dozen, and do it in the open, in a busy city. Mordred could be certain of one thing: things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.

  CHAPTER 2

  Nate Garrett

  New Forest, England

  I woke to the smell of cooking and smiled. It was rare that someone cooked for me, rarer still that it was breakfast. I pushed the quilt aside and stood, stretching and making various parts of me click with the effort. The blackout curtains allowed almost zero light into the room, but the clock on the bedside table told me it was just after 8:00 a.m. I’d slept for five hours, which for a sorcerer was about as long as we ever needed, and for me practically a blasted miracle.

  I opened the dark-blue curtains, letting in the gloomy sunshine. December in the UK is a mixture of cold, wet, and those weird days when it’s sunny but it feels like the weather is just trying to lull you into a false sense of security. Today was apparently going to be overcast and drizzly. A combination either you got used to, or that made you move.

  My bedroom window overlooked the large garden at the rear of my four-bedroom house in the middle of New Forest. At a point a few hundred feet from my bedroom window, my garden became New Forest, and then there were hundreds of square miles of woodland, heathland, and grassland. It was a beautiful place to live, and more importantly a quiet one.

  My house was built in the late eighteenth century, although it has been modified and modernized over the years. A new two-story addition was built onto the side of the property, and I’d made a few arrangements to the interior so that I could call it home. One of the four bedrooms housed an extensive collection of weaponry and armor I’d acquired over my sixteen hundred years of life, and I’d made sure to install security detectors that covered the multiacre property.

  I felt safe there. Secure. Somewhere in the distance, under the darkness of the forest, I built a small one-bedroom building. It was new and housed Remy—a good friend of mine who happened to be a fox-human hybrid. Turned out pissing off witches was a bad idea. Something he probably should have known before they used a ritual to turn him into said fox. Fortunately for Remy, they were also incompetent and ended up killing themselves and giving him their life force. Hence the fox-human hybrid. He did well with what life had dealt him, and it was nice to see a friendly face when I went outside.

  A memory of Remy’s friendly way with people flashed into my head. Well, usually friendly . . . Okay, sometimes friendly.

  I grabbed a black dressing gown from the en suite bathroom door and put it on, covering the fact that I was only wearing black boxer shorts. I might have been able to conjure magical fire to warm myself, but sometimes it was just easier and safer to add an extra layer of clothing.

  I walked downstairs, my mouth watering at the smell of cooking meat, and eventually entered the kitchen.

  “Morning,” Selene said from in front of the oven. Several pans were on top, all of which contained some type of food. “English breakfast okay with you?”

  I smiled. “That sounds like a plan. Also, wasn’t aware you’d learned to cook.”

  Selene looked back at me, a grin on her face. “I watched some Internet videos. And did some practice runs at home. Black pudding?”

  I nodded. “Only if it’s cooked. Cold black pudding is just weird.”

  Selene was one of the few women in my life I could say with certainty that I had fallen in love with. We’d been together for a few decades back in the early twentieth century, but Hera and her cronies had blackmailed her into leaving me and marrying Ares’s son. A nasty little wankpuffin by the name of Deimos, who was about as pleasant and charming as rabies. The last time we’d met, he’d used his power to get inside my head and make me relive one of my worst days over and over again. It hadn’t gone well for him, and when I’d last seen him, he’d been curled up in a ball on the floor after wetting himself.

  Selene was just over five-four and was frankly the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. The top half of her hair was black, while the bottom, which was currently tied in a ponytail, was silver. Her eyes were an incredible green color and held both amazing warmth and a wicked temper that I’d been the target of several times.

  As she cooked a fried breakfast, she wore one of my old black T-shirts that stretched down to her thighs. She turned back to me and winked. “I hope you’re hungry,” she said, putting down a plate in front of me. It was covered in sausages, bacon, poached eggs, french toast, black pudding, beans, and mushrooms. There were also several slices of regular toast and a full pot of tea. With this much food, there was a good chance I wouldn’t need to eat anything else for a week.

  Selene had even more food than me, with at least an entire pack of bacon and sausages just for herself. Dragon-kin, like most nonhuman species, ate a lot and often. The fact that Selene and I hadn’t left the bedroom except to shower in the better part of a day meant we were both hungry.

  I took a bite of food, and a happy noise left my mouth involuntarily.

  “Nice?”

  “Mmmm,” I managed through a mouthful of bacon and french toast.

  Selene chuckled. It was a beautiful sound.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I told her when I was capable of speech again.

  “Me, too,” she said with a sly grin.

  After Selene left her husband, she’d needed time to herself, to figure out what she wanted to do with her life and the freedom she finally found she had. I told her I’d always be there for her if she decided that she wanted me in that life. Two months ago she had asked me to meet her in Munich. I was in the city a few hours later, and since then we’d gotten together on a regular basis. It wasn’t quite what we had back in the early 1900s, but the best things evolve over time. You can never go back to what you had with someone, and it’s pointless wishing for it.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” Selene said. “I’m thinking of moving to the UK. On a more permanent basis. Tommy offered me a job working at his security firm.”

  Tommy, or Thomas Carpenter, was my best friend, and an exceptionally powerful werewolf. He was also the head of a security firm that had, over the years, become the place to go if you needed help but didn’t want to use Avalon. A lot of people didn’t trust Avalon, often for very good reasons.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, placing a forkful of egg in my mouth to ensure I couldn’t say anything else.

  “Yeah, well, yeah . . .” Selene breathed out. “This shouldn’t be hard. I’m over four thousand years old. I’m the daughter of a Titan.” She sighed. “I want our relationship to move forward.”

  I swallowed the food. “You mean making it public and the like?”

  “Yes . . . no . . . no, not really. I mean move in together.”

  That was unexpected. I put my forkful of bacon back on the plate. “Seriously?”

  Selene nodded. “I love you, Nate. I’ve always loved you, even when I wasn’t allowed to. Even when I was forced to be married to . . . well, you know. I still loved you. If there’s one thing I learned in the last few years since I finally found my freedom from Hera and her people, it’s that I want to be with you. I missed you. I don’t want to miss you anymore. I don’t want to try to make up for all the time we lost; I just want to make new time.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, and ate the food on the
fork.

  Selene stared. “That’s it? I was sort of expecting a little more, you know, excitement.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I repeated, but this time I waved my arms in the air.

  “You’re an asshole, Nathaniel Garrett.”

  I smiled. “I love you, Selene. I’ve probably always loved you. Even when I thought I hated you, I still loved you. If you want to move in with me, then I’m good with that. But are you okay with living here?”

  Selene reached across the table and took my hand, rubbing her thumb over the back of my index finger. “Yes, always.”

  “Then welcome to your new home, Selene.”

  Selene stood and walked around the table, kissing me on the cheek. “I stink,” she whispered. “I need to shower.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” I whispered back. “I didn’t want to sleep on the sofa.”

  Selene laughed, which quickly turned into a weird coughing, choking fit that only stopped after she took a drink of water. “Who knew I’d find love with a man less than half my age.”

  “Does that mean I’m your boy toy?”

  “No, because that’s fucking stupid, and I don’t want to have to hit you when you say it.”

  It was a fair point. I finished off my breakfast as Selene went to shower, and had placed my plate in the dishwasher when the alarm to the motion sensors sounded. I walked over to the screen that was fixed to the kitchen wall, one of three in the house, and pressed the button to activate it. A black BMW 5 Series sedan was driving up the winding road to my house. It looked like there were two people in the front, and the rear windows were blacked out, so it was impossible to say if anyone was in the back. I sighed—the morning had been going so well—and removed a Heckler and Koch VP9 from a nearby drawer.