“I have more than guns in my arsenal.”
Wren gasped, “Is that…hellfire?”
Lily nodded and turned her hand palm up. She nodded once at Wren, who slowly reached for her with her bad hand. Fischer and I watched as her hand dipped into the flames without reaction.
Wren touched her fingers to Lily’s palm. The fire crawled up her fingers onto the back of her hand and slowly wrapped around it. Once she pulled her hand away, the hellfire glimmered over her skin.
“Holy shit,” Fischer breathed.
“Can you feel it?” Lily asked.
“Yes…” Wren turned her hand in the air, watching the cool flames on her skin. “It’s familiar. Comfortable. It would like to stay… Goddamn, it’s intelligent.”
“Not really,” Lily said. “It clings to things it knows won’t extinguish it. Like a lichen grows on rocks that won’t kill it. Instinct.”
“Will it stay?”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t know I don’t have time to teach you to call it. But you know what it feels like now, and if you feel that, you need to get gone. Get me?”
“You’re going to burn the compound,” I mumbled, watching the fire.
“This hellfire is small. Friendly. Almost harmless. But you know what it feels like now. When we have the kids out, I’m going pull out the Tartarian. The stuff that can’t be put out with Earthly means. The kind that consumes everything before returning to Hell. Hellfire will burn even the Created. So, when you sense that small friendly fire dancing on your fingers right now, I want you to get the fuck out.”
Wren
The fire danced on my skin, unhappy, displeased with my broken and destroyed hand. It didn’t hurt—it was oddly gentle and soothing. It was just not good with me, especially me, have a deformed and not completely usable hand.
The three of them turned and looked down the road at the compound. It was strange, but we all seemed to know that Ben was there. With a crap ton of other kids they wanted to put in the Pipeline.
Just as I was about to get Lily’s attention to take the fire back, it flickered and flared and suddenly inverted. It was burning down into my skin instead of out.
But there was no pain. There was a tickle, a prick that traveled through my muscles, through my nerves and up into my wrist.
Then, there was a lightning bolt that shot through my arm and up into my brain. I stiffened and gasped—it hadn’t hurt, but it had shocked me and caught me off guard.
Lily, Fischer, and Bastian spun back to me.
I held my hand up, and Lily rushed forward. I was pretty sure that she was trying to take the flame back, so I held my other hand out to stop her.
“No, wait,” I managed.
The flames licked in my veins as well as my nerves. I could feel them in my muscles and my bones, all sending signals to my brain and back. There were pin pricks all up and down my arms, in my brain, in my fingers.
A warm sensation filled me, and then the fire, pleased, reverted to its original flickering position and merrily extinguished itself.
Staring at my hand, I couldn’t think for what I saw there. Fischer grabbed my wrist and lowered my arm, studying the skin.
“Bend it, little bird. Make a fist.”
I could feel my lips trembling in fear. I hadn’t been able to make a fist with my left hand since I was sixteen. Since I’d felt that voltage fly through me and wreck the nerves. Closing my eyes, I remembered how to make a fist, and curled my fingers closed.
Fischer exhaled. “Oh, my God…”
I snapped my eyes open.
My hand was in a tight fist. My thumb had curled around and held my fingers fast. I pulled the fist even tighter and watch my knuckles go white. I unfurled the fingers and looked at the tiny crescents in my palm where my nails had dug in.
I could feel those. They were a fading pain.
Lily ran her fingers over my palm, then turned my hand over and traced lines on it. “Feel that?”
“Yes…”
“It healed you,” she whispered. “Fucking shit, Wren, if I had known, I would have done that…”
Holding a finger to her lips, I shook my head. “No. You wouldn’t have. You couldn’t have. There’s a veil we’re lifting and everything has to be done in sequence. This was meant to happen now and you know what? Fucking hell, I have my hand back.”
Flexing and stretching my fingers a few more times, it felt a little sore, a little unused, a tad weak—nothing I couldn’t deal with after having nothing but pain in the movement for sixteen years.
“You’re waking,” Lily whispered with a smile.
I didn’t know what she meant, but her tone made me smile too.
The place was empty.
There was no furniture, no rugs, no lamps, no art. Even the front door had been conspicuously unlocked.
There were a few curtains on the windows, but those all faced the front. It was a complete contradiction to what the perfectly manicured grounds led us to believe.
“Where are they?” Fischer asked, his voice almost a crack of thunder in the hall even though he’d kept it quiet.
“Don’t know,” Lily said.
“Are we sure that it was a good idea to leave Bastian out there?” I asked.
“He’s a sniper. Anyone who walks out the front gate is dead,” Lily said. She looked around the hall and then back at me. “You pick really good companions, little star.”
“Why thank you,” Fischer preened.
I elbowed him unable to keep the smirk off my face, but we kept walking forward into the house.
“We need some kind of plan here. Some idea of where to go and what to look for,” Fisher said.
“If they had cargo, they have to offload the cargo,” I said. “My bet is that they don’t have an attached garage and have to figure something out so people don’t see them.”
“Under cover,” Fischer said.
Lily lifted an eyebrow. “Under ground We need to find out how to get down.”
Fischer peered out the window. “Aren’t we too close to the water to have a basement on a place like this?” He glanced at me. “If you want another guy in your harem, could you make him an architect?”
Lily burst out laughing and slapped a hand over her mouth when she realized she had.
I shook my head. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”
Chuckling quietly, Lily headed for the stairs we’d passed on the way in. “Come on, it’s almost always a center column of stairs.”
The entrance to the basement wasn’t in the hall, but circling around to the kitchen just behind it, we found a door. Lily motioned me to stand behind it and open it when she nodded. Taking her position, I yanked the door back, and she cleared the stairwell.
The light was already on.
The stink of filthy human hit all of us like a freight train. I put a hand over my mouth, Fischer gagged, and Lily managed to just clear her throat.
“What is that?” Fischer hissed.
“Unwashed bodies and excrement. And we’ll be lucky if that’s all it is.” Lily started down the stairs.
We followed, pressing against the wall as she was. Neither Fischer nor I were trained for this sort of thing, but we could follow her lead and her body language. She leaned out from behind the wall to look into the room beyond and—
And I could feel a trace of magic.
Fischer turned a worried eye to me when I jerked ever so slightly. I shook my head and went back to watching Lily.
She was using magic to keep herself from being seen as she ducked out from behind the wall to assess the room.
I had never felt magic before. I’d felt tingles and danger signs, but I’d had those all my life. This was something completely different and…
I was pretty sure I could manage it as well.
Lily snapped her head back around and shook it. “No!” she whispered furiously. “Not until you have some training. Just…let me handle it.”
Nodding, I leaned back. Hellfi
re, healing, and now magic. This was not what I was expecting.
Lily stepped out of the stairwell and motioned us to follow. We did, walking as softly as possible. The smell was even worse, and we started to hear whimpering, crying, and noises from activity.
Walls fell away just a few feet later and what we had thought was the back wall of the room was nothing but a decoy. There was a cleverly disguised hallway that went exactly nowhere and showed us what was really down here.
Cages. Rows of cages.
Corrugated metal lined all of them, hiding the children from view and from each other. The whimper of frightened children floated in the air. The stench of waste, the smell of unwashed bodies, the stink of terror all curled around us.
“Lily, this isn’t just about Ben anymore,” Fischer whispered.
“I know We need to find one of those vans and get those kids in it.”
There was the stomp of boots and the sound of a metal door being rolled in the space and it sent Lily, Fischer, and I scrambling.
“Where the fuck is the truck?”
The voice was painfully familiar. I’d heard it somewhere before, but I just couldn’t place it. It wasn’t Barry or Cora, so it had to be one of the others. Sansom?
“They’re late.” That was Barry’s voice. “I don’t know why and don’t ask me to call again.”
“Why are we moving all the goods again?” Cora this time. “No one is going to put two and two together. We can keep our little home away from home off the radar.”
“Not when you fucking go around announcing where we live,” Barry snapped. There was a hard thunk, and strangled sound. “I told you not to say anything, as little as possible. Now he knows, and I’m pretty sure that he’s going to share that information with the people we don’t want here.”
“So, this is precautionary?” The familiar voice.
“Just like you’d move stocks, we need to move our investments,” Barry said. “No thanks to the mouth over here. We have to move to the secondary storage and we have to clean the house.”
“Clean the house?” said the familiar voice, “or clean the house.”
“Insurance money,” he said.
God, these people were horrible.
“Where are the lookouts?” Sansom asked. “They were supposed be back. It was just one car.”
“How long have they been out there?” Cora’s voice was a bit breathless. It sounded like she’d been choked..
“It wasn’t one car,” Barry said. “Another rolled up behind it. That’s why we sent them.”
There was a pause. “A second?”
“Came up on the cameras when they drove down the road,” Barry said.
“Show me!” Sansom snapped “Show me!”
Two sets of shoes walked smartly past where we were hiding and headed to the right. I heard a heavy door open and slam.
“Can we get the other two?” Fischer asked, barely breathing the words.
Lily looked between the two of us, and instead of answering, she pulled out her gun and nodded. I pulled out my own gun and Fischer grabbed the one he was using. She walked us along the wall over to where the voices were coming from. We were all as quiet as we could be, and I was glad I had worn sneakers.
We ducked below the line of the corrugated metal walls and moved slowly. When we peeked up over the walls, we could see Cora and mystery man leaning against a car looking out of the garage door.
Lily was able to sneak up directly behind Cora, and cocked the gun against her head.
“Move, and you’re dead,” she said quietly.
I had my gun up and pointed at the man, who turned to look at us.
Fischer and I gasped at the same time.
“Gutiérrez?” Fischer hissed, pointing his own gun at the man. “What the fuck?”
Grabbing the cuffs off Lily’s belt, I snapped them around Gutiérrez’s wrists. As soon as I was done, Lily pulled out a ziptie and wrapped it around Cora’s wrists, and held the gun on her again.
I stared at the man I knew as a caring, kind doctor who ran the Neurology Ward at CHoP, standing in the middle of a children’s prison, preparing to ship them out as sex slaves.
I punched him right in the nose.
“Whoa!” Fischer pulled me back.
“This fuck has the goddamn balls to be a children’s advocate!” I raised the gun and held it at his head. “Talk fast, Pablo. Convince me you’re not really hear to move children into the Pipeline.”
He just stared at me.
“Fuck,” Fischer whispered.
“I can’t believe this,” Lily said. “You of all the damn people on Earth, Gutiérrez. Of all the people on this planet, you are trafficking children. What the hell is wrong with you?”
He still said nothing.
“Nasty motherfucker,” Fischer growled. “Talk.”
Cora chuckled. “You really think we’re going to say anything to you without a lawyer? Or before Miranda? Or before you two are booked for breaking and entering, and imitating a police officer?”
“Where did I claim I was a police officer?” Fischer asked.
“You come walking in here with a gun—”
I cocked the gun and held it at her head. “Wanna see my concealed carry?”
There was the cock of a gun at my ear and the cold metal of gun on my skull. “I just want to see your brains all over her shirt.”
I didn’t hesitate. I manifested the sword in my hand and stabbed back and up, sliding into his guts just above his dick and up and out his back somewhere around his kidneys. Or that’s what I hoped anyway.
When I turned, Sansom was staring at me, wide eyed and pale. His blood ran out and down onto the blade of the sword, but never dripped off the handle of it, and it never hit the ground.
“What the fuck!” Cora and Barry screamed.
I kind of want to scream that, too.
Barry recovered though and ran. Before any of us could stop him, he was gone out the garage door.
Lily snapped at us, “Hey! Let’s go! Get this van open! Get the kids. Get your sword out of his guts and get going!”
Pulling the sword down and out, several bits of innards followed me, and Sansom choked and fell. I dropped next to him, and grabbed his jaw. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Just a man making millions, and living the high life.”
I whipped my phone out and took his picture, sending it to Lincoln. I waited as he coughed and sputtered, his blood pumping out through the main renal vein. Just a second later it dinged with Lincoln’s answer, and I smirked.
“Renold Polanski, DDM,” I grinned. “Please to meet you. Enjoy the fires of Hell.” Standing, I started to walk away.
He grabbed my ankle. “You can’t let me die. That’s against your moral code. You need to save me!”
Cocking my head, I considered him. Something Fischer had said earlier echoed in my mind. There is no line between good and evil. I knew that killing him, which was what I had basically done, was wrong. But what he had done—stealing, raping, and selling children—was just as wrong. If not more, because of the stolen innocence.
“I can’t save you. Further, I won’t save you. I could go through the chain of events that leads to that, but it’s not worth it. Just die. We’ll save the kids.”
He coughed and tried to say something. I wasn’t interested in hearing it. I pulled my leg away from his grip and stared down at the sword.
The blade was clean.
Handy.
I held it at his neck this time. “Where is Ben?”
“Like I’m going to tell you shit. He’s going to the grave with me.”
“Where is Ben? Tell me.”
“Fuck off.”
“Polanski, you’d better tell her, or things are going to be really, really bad for you,” Lily said.
“Fuck off, both of you,” he snapped.
Fischer was starting the van, and Lily had both Cora and Gutierrez standing back to back at the end of her gun.
> “Lily?”
“Help me tie them up and not to kill them,” she said. “They need to be tied up and left here. I’ll get it out of him in a moment.”
I nodded and grabbed a length rope from the wall above the two of them. I wrapped the rope around them and their hands and once more around them and made sure the knots were far out of their reach.
Fischer pulled the back door open, and nodded at the cages. “I’ll get those. You find out where Ben is and we’ll get him.”
Lily walked over to the now clearly pale and dying man who was in charge of this mess. She knelt and grabbed his collar. “Where’s Ben?”
“I won’t tell you shit,” he gasped.
“Oh, I think you will,” she said.
“Save my life, save me, and I’ll tell you.”
Lily snickered. “You overestimate my give a damn, Renold. You really do.” She reached behind her and pulled out a small blade.
I knew it was anjir, even before I got a good look at it. She held it again his throat, nicking the skin at his collar. “You’re dead, Renold. There’s nothing I can do to stop that. Whether it was by the blade or the fire later, you were dead.”
She leaned in closer and I knelt down next to him avoiding the blood that was pooling.
“Save my life,” he breathed, air becoming harder to suck in. “I’ll pay you.”
“The only thing that remains is how severe your punishment in Hell will be,” Lily said. “Tell me where Ben is. Tell me where you keep the children. Tell me everything you know about the Pipeline and I’ll convince my husband to judge you a little less harshly.”
“Your husband.” He snorted.
The small blade suddenly had Hellfire racing around the edge. I could see her eyes go black and shine with a bright flame that was the same as that on the blade. “Tell me what you know. Tell me where Ben is.”
“What the fuck are you…” He coughed and spit blood.
“I am Hades. I am damnation, and Hell. And I am the only one who stands between eternal damnation and merely a sentence in the pits, of a few centuries. Tell me what I want to know.”
She was terrifying, with Hell shining in her eyes. She had a hot feeling about her that made the blood run absolutely cold, and she pressed the flaming blade a little deeper into his skin.
Filthy Page 20
