Hellgate: Goetia

by Mel Odom

  Naomi looked at him for a moment, then said, “You don’t lie very well.”

  “I’ll get better at it,” he replied.

  NINE

  L eah came to with a start. Almost immediately a headache throbbed between her temples. The bright light shining down into her eyes didn’t help. Something bound her above her breasts, at her midsection, and across her knees.

  When she tilted her head up and opened her eyes, she discovered she was lying on a hospital bed in a sterile white room. Thick leather bands held her against the bed. She was still clad in her black armored one-piece.

  She attempted to gain leverage against her bonds and either break them or slither out through them. Either was possible. Her one-piece, besides being bullet-and impact-resistant, also accentuated her strength and speed. It was nowhere near what the Templar armor did, but she was a lot lighter on her feet and could hide easier.

  The door opened and a young woman in scrubs walked through. She was pretty and demure, with short dark hair and freckles across her nose.

  “Easy there, miss.” The young woman’s tone was officious but nonthreatening. “I’ll have you loose in a minute. If you’ll give it to me.”

  Leah powered up a taser charge in her right glove. One slight flick would send an electrified dart winging across the distance and deliver a fifty-thousand-volt charge that would drop the woman in her tracks.

  “Where am I?” Leah demanded. Her voice sounded muffled through her mask.

  “Simon Cross brought you in, miss.” The woman unfastened the belt across Leah’s chest. “We only belted you in so you wouldn’t fall off the bed and injure yourself further.”

  Leah made herself lie still and take calm breaths. Her throat was sore and her lungs ached. “You didn’t say where I was.”

  “You’re in the retreat. Outside of London.” The woman unfastened the last belt. “Do you need help sitting up?”

  “No. I can manage.” Leah felt incredibly weak. If her strength hadn’t been boosted by her suit, she knew she wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to a sitting position on the bed. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” The woman stood nearby.

  Leah tried to get off the bed and fell. Enhanced strength didn’t help her sense of balance, and accelerated reflexes only meant she could grab for the bed twice and miss both times.

  The woman caught her. “Easy does it, now.” Gently, she eased her back onto the bed. “Maybe you’ll want to go slowly for a minute.”

  As she sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her head to stop spinning, Leah chafed to be up and moving. She’d been gone too long. Her supervisor was going to have a proper fit. She couldn’t blame him.

  “Maybe you could remove the mask, miss,” the nurse suggested. “We weren’t able to do that. It made getting you enough oxygen troublesome.”

  “Not yet. I want to see Simon.”

  The young woman nodded. “All right. He’d asked to be notified as soon as you’d regained your senses.” She started to turn away, then turned back. “I’d like to suggest that you allow us to check you over before you get too active. We weren’t able to x-ray you through your uniform.”

  Leah nodded. She wanted to make sure she was physically fit as well. “As soon as I talk to Simon.”

  The nurse left.

  As she sat up straighter, Leah tried to draw breath deeply into her lungs and breathe it out. She remembered being on fire, and trying to breathe the acrid smoke. Nightmares had haunted her while she’d been out.

  “Time,” she said.

  Her ocular flipped into place and brought up the current time. It was 3:43 p.m. She was long past check-in time. Anxiety thrummed through her. The increased blood pressure intensified the pain in her head and the pounding in various bruises scattered around her body.

  The armor held an inner layer of HardShel nanobots that worked together like fluid. They were a step up—a big step up—from the liquid body armor that had been brought out twenty years ago for military forces. Those garments had weighed in the neighborhood of four pounds apiece. The one-piece she wore weighed ounces more than the normal clothing would have.

  The nanobots were designed to keep a constant flow around the body of the wearer. Any sudden shock, such as a bullet impacting against the one-piece or someone stabbing the one-piece, would be absorbed.

  Leah kept breathing slowly. Smoke had to have gotten down into her lungs and she had to work to breathe it out.

  “GPS location,” Leah said.

  The ocular flashed almost immediately. Tiny letters printed out on the screen but she could read them.

  UNABLE TO ACCESS

  Great, Leah thought, irritated. GPS is blocked. She had no idea where she was, other than at Simon Cross’s hide-away. In the last few years, he’d gotten better at being hidden. She had no idea where she was.

  “Simon.”

  Waking instantly at the touch, Simon briefly touched the sword sharing his bed. He gazed up at the belled underside of the hammock above him.

  Space was at a premium in the redoubt. This particular bunker hadn’t been built with long-term occupancy in mind.

  When he’d set up general quarters, he’d devoted most of the room to women and children who were noncombatants and support staff. In the Templar Underground, everyone had lived with cramped space because room was at a premium.

  In addition, the Templar Underground had had hundreds of years to make bigger places and train all their people to use space efficiently. Simon had to balance everything carefully in a camp that held both refugees and soldiers, where disciplined Spartans ate and slept side-by-side with frightened civilians.

  “Simon.”

  “I’m awake,” he said, and pushed himself out of sleep to a sitting position on the side of the hammock. The concrete floor was cold against his feet.

  The Burn heated London up, but the rest of the world seemed cold these days. The magic reshaping the city had disastrously affected weather patterns. A light frosting of snow covered the ground outside the bomb shelter they were currently holed up in. Normally, there wouldn’t have been snow on the ground for months.

  “The woman you brought in,” Nathan Singh said. “She’s awake. She wants to talk to you.”

  “All right.”

  Nathan extended a flask. “Hot tea, mate. It’ll help get the blood going.”

  “Any cream and sugar?” Simon asked.

  “No,” Nathan quipped, “but I’ve some lovely cabbage rose print china back at my bunk.”

  Simon grinned, took the flask, and drank deeply. The tea was strong and dark, and hot enough to clear his sinuses. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Nathan put the flask back on the hammock above Simon’s.

  Simon abandoned hope of any more sleep for a time. Leah would have a lot of questions. And then he’d have to decide what to do with her. Having her at the camp compromised the camp’s location. He thought he could trust her, but he had over four thousand lives hanging in the balance if he was wrong.

  You can’t be wrong, he told himself. However you handle this, you can’t be wrong.

  He stood and pushed the blankets to the foot of the hammock. He was nude. All Templar slept nude because they couldn’t wear clothing under the armor. It was made to fit exactly without any hindrance.

  The question was whether to see Leah as a Templar, or as himself. As a general rule, he’d ordered every Templar to keep his or her armor at hand no matter where he or she was.

  “Get dressed,” Nathan said. “Street clothes. I’ll bring your armor along in a bit.”

  Simon nodded. During the last three years, Nathan had proven himself to be a good friend and dedicated warrior. He was from the Templar House of Darius, and normally they were at odds with the House of Rorke.

  Ruefully, Simon admitted that the rebelliousness was probably still in order. High Seat Booth was all in favor of the Grand Marshal’s current edict that the Templar remain in hiding for the most
part. Like many of the others that had abandoned the Underground, Nathan hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of staying safe while so many people were hunted by demons every day.

  Nathan was almost six feet in height and bulked up from lifting weights. A black gunslinger mustache he took a lot of kidding about framed a generous mouth. He wore his hair short and had a tattoo of a dragon that covered his left arm from shoulder to elbow. He claimed it was the dragon St. George slew.

  Simon kept a small selection of clothing in a chest under his hammock. He pulled on cargo pants, tennis shoes, and a dark blue T-shirt that fit him like a second skin. He belted a Spike Bolter around his hips.

  Rule #1 was that no one went unarmed in the redoubt.

  When Simon reached the medical bay, he found Leah sitting on the edge of the bed. He entered the room and looked at her.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Alive. That’s pretty surprising.” Although the mask covered Leah’s face, Simon thought he could hear a smile in her voice.

  “It surprised me, too,” he admitted. “I didn’t know if you were going to make it.” He leaned against the wall with his arms folded over his chest. “For a while there I didn’t know if any of us were going to make it.”

  “Did you get the Templar out of there?”

  Simon nodded. “We did.”

  “How are they?”

  “Still unconscious. The medics have worked on them. They don’t know what’s wrong. Their physical health seems all right, but there may be some brain damage.”

  “Did you lose anyone rescuing them?”

  “No. We were lucky.”

  Silence hung in the room for a moment.

  Simon had a hard time guessing what thoughts were going through Leah’s head. He had a hard time figuring that out anyway even without the mask hiding her features.

  There were too many things he didn’t know about her. Why she was down in South Africa looking for him. How she even knew to look for him. How she got as competent at fighting as she was. How she was so familiar with weapons.

  And where she’d gotten the black one-piece uniform she wore.

  “You need to get out of that armor,” Simon said. “The medics haven’t been able to properly examine you. There could be some internal damage or a broken bone. They couldn’t get the uniform off you or x-ray through it.”

  “No, they wouldn’t be able to do that. And it’s a good thing for them they didn’t try too hard.”

  “Who are you with?” Simon asked.

  The blank features of the mask regarded him for a moment. Then Leah lifted her hands to her head and ran her palms over the tight-fitting headpiece. The mask separated and rolled down to her neck.

  Leah hadn’t changed much during the four years that Simon had…been aware of her. He couldn’t say he knew her. She had captivating violet eyes and short-cropped dark hair that hung just past the line of her jaw. Her skin was pale, no longer possessing the tan he’d seen her with on that plane out of Cape Town.

  “I can’t answer that,” Leah said.

  “I may be endangering the lives of everyone here if I let you go,” Simon said. He tried to keep his voice easy and light, but he knew the threat was there all the same.

  “If I decide to leave,” Leah stated quietly, “you won’t stop me without someone getting hurt.”

  “I know. That’s what makes the situation difficult. I shouldn’t have brought you here. But if I’d left you, you might have died.”

  “You couldn’t do that.”

  Simon hesitated. “No.”

  Leah showed him a faint smile. “Do you guys have a code against that?”

  “Yes,” he answered honestly. “It’s part of the Templar charter. We defend the helpless and the weak. Originally it was intended for travelers met on the road.”

  “I’m not exactly helpless and weak.”

  “You’re not,” Simon agreed. “You still needed help.”

  “Not all of the Templar believe the way you do, Simon,” she said. “I know they don’t, and you know they don’t.”

  Simon was quiet for a moment. When he’d first taken her into the Templar Underground, he’d thought she was just a young woman in need of protection. But the biggest reason that he’d taken her there was because it didn’t matter. The Templar Underground, at least in the House of Rorke’s area, was easily defensible. More than that, there’d been no reason to believe the demons would talk to any human. Or that humans would betray the Templar.

  “I was told you wanted to talk to me,” he said.

  “I wanted to thank you for bringing me here,” Leah said earnestly. “You probably did save my life. But I needed to talk to you about more than just those two Templar.”

  TEN

  “H ave you heard of a man named Archibald Xavier Macomber?” Leah asked.

  Simon stared into those violet eyes and thought about the name. Something worried at the back of his mind but he couldn’t pin it down.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Macomber’s a linguistics professor,” Leah said. “He was a child prodigy when it came to languages. He traveled the world and worked on old scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, and other things that needed translation. He got quite a bit of fame out of the work he did.”

  “He was on the American History Channel,” Simon said, remembering where he’d heard the name. “There were a series of specials that he did showing the flow of language along trade routes.”

  Leah nodded. “The Silk Road. The Salt Road. The Slave Trade. He covered all those areas.”

  Simon remembered then. Thomas Cross had loved knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge. When he’d been younger, he’d enjoyed watching several of those episodes—especially the ones involving medieval weapons—with his father.

  “As I recall, Macomber seemed to disappear overnight,” Simon said.

  “In most people’s opinions, Macomber started to lose his grasp on reality.”

  “I don’t recall that.”

  “He started insisting that there were demons loose in the world,” Leah said. “He claimed to have uncovered proof.”

  Simon remained quiet. Although the Templar had known of the demons’ existence, even they had been hard pressed to prove their case. In the end their belief had cost them their fortunes. The king of France, Philip the Fair, accused the Templar Order of heresy and had prodded Pope Clement V to declare them to be heretics. As a result, they’d been stripped of their titles and privileges in 1307. Philip drove the Templar into exile and burned Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the stake.

  From that time on, the Templar had operated out of the public eye and away from the royal courts. But they had remained tapped into the aristocratic families and learned all the news they could of far-off lands. When an artifact or proof of the demons came to the surface, Templar were dispatched to recover them.

  “Nobody wanted to hear about demons before the Hellgate opened,” Simon said. “The news broadcasts we’ve watched are still full of stories about aliens from outer space and a global terrorism effort.”

  “I know.” Leah frowned. “The group—” She stopped herself. “The people I’m with are still struggling with the idea of demons. Terrorists, or even aliens from another world, are far easier for most of them to understand. But some of the things Macomber was talking about, some of the writing he showed—which a lot of people thought he’d made up—is like the writing of the demons that are here now.”

  We should have known this, Simon thought. Then he realized that the Templar may have known it and chosen not to act on it.

  “My…friends wanted to talk to Macomber,” Leah said. “They’ve been searching for him.”

  “Did they find Macomber?” Simon asked.

  “We found him. He was in an insane asylum outside of Paris, France.”

  “Why France?”

  “His wife at that time was French. She wanted him sent there for ‘help’ so the French courts would make certa
in she would get his estate.”

  “She divorced him?”

  “Not until the money was all gone.” Leah took a breath. “Macomber spent eight years in the asylum. Four years ago, after the Hellgate opened, the asylums were opened and those people were released. Nineteen months ago, he came to the attention of the group—”

  Simon resisted the impulse to ask what group that was.

  “—and efforts were undertaken to track him down,” Leah continued. “Last week, Macomber was found.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside Paris. He was living in one of the universities and had some of his papers. He was working on the translations when we located him.”

  “Translations of what?”

  Leah shook her head. “No one knows.”

  “What kind of shape is Macomber in?”

  “He’s lucid. Intelligent. And convinced that he’s onto something.”

  “He knows about the Hellgate?”

  “They have one in Paris now, too.”

  Simon was briefly taken aback. There had been rumors of other Hellgates, but this was the first confirmation he had heard of the one in Paris. He imagined the Champs Elysées in ruins, and the Eiffel Tower toppled and smashed like Lord Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

  “What is Macomber saying about the demons?” Simon asked.

  “That’s just it,” Leah said. “He’s not. He’s insisting he’s not going to talk to anyone until he talks to the ‘knights’ first.”

  The knights. Simon let that sink in.

  “Where’s your lady friend, mate?”

  Simon paused the video feed on the old tri-dee that one of the salvage crews had brought in from one of their excursions. The crew had rescued it for the children who stayed with them till they were able to arrange passage out of Great Britain.

  These days no ships or boats ran and such passage was scarce. Simon had heard that most of the vessels had been destroyed, but he’d also heard that there were no safe places to take anyone. The demons were everywhere.

  “Back in the infirmary,” Simon said. He sat in one of the small public gathering places scattered throughout the redoubt.