The Reluctant King

by Rachel Higginson

Page 20

 

  We pushed our way across the platform, the greetings and shouts of hello could be heard everywhere in the station, I was positive. So much for inconspicuous…. But at the moment I could care less. I pulled Roxie to me immediately, crushing her into a bear hug. She wiggled a little, not a huge fan of touching, but eventually she gave in and hugged me back. I kept her tucked into me while I greeted the other guys, until Xander tried to bow to me, then I had to let Roxie go so I could punch him in the arm.

  “Don’t’ even start with me,” I tried to sound angry, but I laughed instead.

  “Listen to this guy!” Xander announced to everyone. “He’s already started to use his King powers to boss us around!”

  “King powers?” I laughed, glad these guys took my position less serious than even I did.

  “What?” Xavier chimed in, jumping on his brother’s joke. “That’s what I would call them. Hell, I would get all the ladies with my King powers…. ” He finished provocatively, making very suggestive movements with his body.

  “Oh yeah, except Avalon’s apparently doing the exact opposite of that with his King powers,” Jericho laughed and he was lucky there were several people in between us.

  That was echoed by a chorus of taunting from everyone including Roxie.

  Psht.

  “So what are you doing with your King powers then, Avalon?” Roxie teased.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with them,” I announced, giving them each a more serious, and in my opinion a more mature, look.

  “What’s that?” Titus asked.

  “I’m going to kill this son of a bitch that thinks he can do what we did,” I growled and was met with exactly what I wanted: a chorus of agreement. This was why I chose these people; they were as blood thirsty as I was and willing to sacrifice everything for the safety of our Kingdom.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I expected something. I expected really anything…. something telling, something…. revealing. I expected to feel magic from miles away, a facility full of rogue Immortals conducting God knows what kind of experiments.

  I didn’t expect nothing.

  I was prepared for it. But to feel nothing felt…. off.

  Which is what I felt as we approached the remote facility used for training Titans once upon a time.

  We surrounded the place. It was completely isolated in the middle of the Siberian tundra. A camouflaged outpost of buildings built to blend in with their surroundings. We paired off and attacked from every direction, with the mission to meet in the middle. We had been prepared to fight tooth and nail to get there, but when we all met in the center of an empty courtyard completely untouched and without conflict, it was…. a bit disappointing.

  Not to mention confusing.

  Our breath puffed out in front of us in hazy clouds, the ground frozen and covered in snow even now, at the end of September. The courtyard we stood in was the center of several warehouses and training facilities that now appeared empty.

  They were empty.

  I would have felt something if they weren’t.

  “One by one? Or each one together?” I asked the group quietly. There were four buildings altogether and we would attack them in pairs if we went separately: Xander and Xavier together, Titus and Jericho and Roxie and me.

  “Together,” Jericho answered for the group.

  I motioned with my fingers which building we would enter first, a dormitory of sorts that had housed the Titans Kiran spoke with only two years ago. Kiran and I went over the layout of this place in details for hours before Jericho and I left this morning.

  I walked up to the entrance and searched the area again for some sign of magic, but still there was nothing. I jiggled the handle and found that it was unlocked, so I pushed it completely open and walked through. My body, magic and mind were on high alert and I waited for the ambush I was positive was still coming.

  What had once been an open room setting was now blocked off into separate apartments. Dry wall had been filled in to separate the room into six isolated living spaces, although I couldn’t imagine the dividing walls really provided that much privacy. I walked to the first room and stuck my head in the first apartment. There was a small, makeshift kitchen with a refrigerator and stove in one corner and a counter space with bar stools that blocked it off as the eating area, a worn couch and old box TV set and then a single bed shoved to the other side of the room. There was no bathroom, but I supposed they still used the communal bathrooms down the hall.

  The room was empty, even of clothing or signs that someone had lived here at all and so we moved to the next room, which was also empty. Each room had been cleared out and left deserted without even a runaway sock left behind. The bathrooms were also empty, but seemed to be in enough working order that I could tell people had been here not that long ago.

  We exited the dorms through the back door which led us to a shoveled out, concrete path to the next building’s back entrance. This room was just as much of a dead end. It was a training facility with an open floor plan. Heavy black mats lay littered across the floor and various weapons’ equipment was scattered throughout. Unlike the dorms, this room had not been used recently, and every surface was covered with a thick layer of dust. It was also freezing, ice plastered the inside of the windows and there was not much difference between inside and outside.

  I realized then that the dorms had felt much warmer.

  Clearly recently lived in.

  We exited the training building out of the front exit so we could walk across the courtyard to the cafeteria. This building was a bit of a mixture of the last two, where the kitchen and a few tables had been obviously used and cleaned recently, the majority of the tables set up in the cafeteria were covered in dust, as were the bathrooms and half of the storage facilities behind the stoves.

  Finding nothing in the cafeteria we walked over to the last building. Kiran explained this building as another training facility, but whereas the first training facility had been for brute strength, this one would house more of an educational type environment.

  Jericho just happened to be in front at the entrance to the last building so he was the first to walk through. His audible gasp had us rushing into the room behind him only to slam into him since he for some reason did not move forward.

  I stayed irritated with him for two seconds before I lifted my eyes and looked around.

  Holy hell.

  “Holy hell,” I echoed out loud. “What the hell was going on here?”

  We moved silently throughout the open-spaced room that maybe at one time had been a classroom, but more recently had been turned into some kind of testing facility. Tubing and monitors hung from the ceiling over stainless steel medical tables. Standing monitors were located next to each of the twenty stations, along with a prepped instrument table, including all kinds of sharp and serrated knives that I had never seen in a hospital setting before.

  On top of all of that the room smelled sterile; clearly scrubbed and bleached to hide any evidence of the death I imagined happening here. I felt it now…. the magic. It was weak and depressing, disintegrating into thin air even as we stood there. And as I walked through the room I realized the feeling came from the medical instruments and tubing. The rest of my team walked silently through the room, not touching anything but taking it all in.

  I was the first to touch something, but I was also the only one that could feel the current of magic circulating throughout the room. I reached out to touch the tubing, curiosity getting the better of me. It was clear and thick, bigger than something that a human would attach to an IV or vein, but I wasn’t convinced that wasn’t what it was used for. I took a breath before letting my fingers graze over the plastic and I was glad I did.

  Excruciating pain seared my fingers as the effect of the plastic pierced my skin. I flinched backward, sucking in a sharp breath. I was glad I didn’t put my whole hand around the tube, I was
n’t positive I would have been able to let go.

  “Don’t touch anything!” I demanded, fearing for the rest of my team. This was unlike anything I had ever seen before and I after watching Henri die, I wasn’t convinced we would heal right from whatever kind of magic this was.

  I followed the tubing with my eyes until it ended at a sharp needle point that could be injected into a person’s skin. At the other end of the tubing, the one that hung from the ceiling was a glass container that was attached to the ceiling and split down the middle with another pane of glass. It was like absolutely nothing I had seen before, but it was obviously used to either take something out or put something in.

  Or both.

  And that was disturbing.

  “Avalon, Jericho, back here!” Xander called and I recognized that we were the only ones still standing in the operating room. I shuddered when I realized I referred to this place as an “operating room. ”

  I lifted my eyes to Jericho’s and acknowledged that we should go, but not before I saw the terrified expression that flashed across his face. I wondered if he saw the same thing in my eyes, so I turned around and mentally prepared myself for whatever Xander had found. I readied myself for the worst thing imaginable so that when it happened, I could be strong for my team.

  Behind the last row of metal tables were a windowed wall and a hallway. Behind the window was an observation room with a long conference table. Down the hallway were four more doors that opened away from the observation/conference room.

  Xander, Xavier and Titus each stood in the doorway of three of the rooms and Roxie had slunk down to the floor on the outside of the last room, her hands covering her face, her shoulders trembling.

  I approached Xander first, pushing in next to him and then immediately pressing a hand over my nose and mouth. The pungent smell of rotting, bitter flesh met me first and when my eyes adjusted through the painful smell I saw the piles of bodies layered on top of each other, pushed into the corner and left for us to find. I couldn’t look at their faces, or their upper bodies. I knew what I would find. I knew what I would see. And the last thing I was willing to let haunt my thoughts was dozens of ghostly, death-filled faces and the unnatural concave chests of these victims. So I stared at the feet, counting the pairs and then swallowing back the bile when the number went over twenty.

  I forced myself out of the room and into the next one, pushing Xavier out of the way. There were no dead bodies in this room, but by the stunned, horrified look on Xavier’s face I had to believe he came to the same conclusions as me. Tables had been set up in this room covered in boxes that were filled with file folders. On each file folder was a name, printed in typed script. The longer I stood in the room, the more my mind fought to understand what I saw.

  There were five tables altogether and each table had a label, a plain, white sheet of paper, taped to the edge of the table. They read: Witch, Titan, Shape-Shifter, Medium and Hybrid.

  My mind reeled at what Hybrid could mean, not wanting to investigate that further until I finished my sweep of the building. I called Xander and Jericho into this room, demanding that they shut the door to the other for now and then instructed that they start looking through the files to see what they could find out.

  Titus stood in a nearly empty room, hovering over a long table with a huge map of the world pinned to the edges of the table. Little metal pins with red tipped ends were stuck all over the map, covering the globe. Some of the pins were clustered together in large clumps and some were spread farther out as if isolated in that particular part of the world. As I stepped closer to the map, I noticed a handful of green tipped pins that distinguished some of the more important parts of the world to Immortals; Peru, Morocco, London and a few others were marked with green.