“Okay. Let’s make Zeus whimper,” I agreed.
44
I’d taken the time to sneak into the healing hot tub and clean off. Aphrodite’s paint still decorated my chest, but it had stopped glowing upon leaving Niflheim. I washed it off anyway, just to be safe. The brief soak had felt marvelous, washing away the small aches and pains of my body and somewhat helping to clear my jumbled thoughts.
It did nothing for my heart, but two out of three was better than nothing.
I found Kára waiting for me on the couch. She had her armor on and held my satchel in her lap. I’d stowed Pandora’s Box inside, already updating her on my modified plans.
She stood, holding out my satchel with a warm, hesitant smile. “How was the hot tub?”
“Tepid and unsatisfying,” I grumbled, accepting the satchel. “She totally oversold it.”
Kára laughed, resting a hand on my shoulder as we made our way out of the Armory. “Mine as well. Technically, we didn’t follow her directions,” she said.
I smiled, nodding silently. Kára had been giving me mixed signals since our walk to the Armory, so I wasn’t about to tempt my fate.
As we left the Armory and headed back towards the secret passageways, I glared up at the walls of my mansion. “Don’t think you’re off the hook, Falco. I have a lot of questions,” I said, thinking back on the Underground Railroad, Ignus, Kai, and all the Beastlore I’d learned.
I’m pretty sure the responding groan was an amused chuckle. Kára glanced down at her phone—which had its own little pocket in her armor, believe it or not—and pursed her lips. “We have three abductions before lunch. That’s ambitious for six hours.”
I nodded. “Maybe Carl and Yahn have already taken care of theirs. Have they called?”
Kára shook her head. “I still can’t believe it’s only been an hour since we left Niflheim.”
I nodded absently, hoping Carl and Yahn were okay. “You get used to it.” Before we reached the spot where the secret tunnel had dumped us out, I paused, turning to Kára. “How sneaky can you be?” I asked, placing my hand on the wall. The section of stone swung open silently—Falco reading my mind and responding to my need through physical contact alone.
Kára smiled. “I’d conservatively estimate that I’m the best in the world. Why?”
I nodded, hiding my frown at her strange answer. “We’re here, and our hostages are likely here. It would be a good time for reconnaissance.” Considering our time restraints, I made a decision. “Chateau Falco is huge. We should split up so we can cover more ground. Meet back here in one hour. See what you can learn. Hopefully Alucard and Gunnar are here, making our job easier.”
She nodded, barely hiding her suspicion about us splitting up. “I do not know your home as well as you, so my movements will be limited.”
I glanced upwards at the ceiling. “Mind helping us spy on my people? Help her stay hidden?”
Falco purred approvingly, and the walls of the secret passageway began to glow.
“Looks like she likes you,” I said.
With a final, somewhat tense, look, we dipped our heads and Kára slipped into the tunnel, the stone closing shut behind her. I let out a sigh of relief as I continued on down the hall. I wanted to head to my office. See if I could learn anything on the Grimm Tech situation or how their manhunt for Peter was going.
Othello had pretty much taken over my office, and if anyone had answers about Grimm Tech, it would be her.
Falco knew more than one secret passageway. She knew magical corridors so recondite that the ones I had been so proud of for years might as well have sported illuminated exit signs.
I crept up to the wall of the new tunnel she had shown me and, I shit you not, peered through two shaded holes. One look, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this exact spot on the other side of the wall held a painting of my father.
I was totally staring through the eyes of a portrait.
Bucket list item, checked.
And it had a direct view of my desk. Well, Othello’s desk. Where my father had stored his camel bone chests of Gurkha Black Dragon cigars, the world’s most notorious hacker had upgraded to an array of curved monitors that dominated the wide antique desk.
I noticed the screens because they emitted light.
But I noticed Othello because she was the light. My breath caught and I stared, resting my palms against the wall. It warmed beneath my touch but I didn’t really notice.
Othello was…stunning. Seeing her this close—even with a wall between us—brought back a montage of our past relationship, starting off with how we’d originally met in an advanced Russian class in college.
She’d been quicker to learn than me, and had agreed to be my tutor when it became obvious that I was falling behind. I invited her to Chateau Falco and she immediately decreed that we set a one-hour timer where neither of us had been allowed to use English. Those hours had been long and silent at first, full of playful teasing and stilted, abrupt phrases and comments. With her my superior—not by all that much—I’d been forced to watch and listen to her attempt to babble at me in complete gibberish.
We resorted to charades, pantomiming and laughing more than we actually spoke. We wore the silly fur hats and played their National Anthem, marching somberly before falling onto the couch in fits of laughter.
My parents had thought me insane or a possible Russian sleeper agent, although not a very good one.
We didn’t care. Everything outside those hours of study simply ceased to exist for me, and I realized that I was slowly falling for her, one perfectly rolled R at a time.
Forced to stare at each other for hours each week, we found ways to encourage one another with non-verbal cues and a lot of heavy, supportive eye contact as we struggled to master the vocabulary and conjugations. We celebrated the simplest achievements together—every word a well-earned triumph in our war against the oppressive hour of near silence. We also learned not to be cruel with our teasing—pruning a tree helped it flourish but hacking the trunk with an axe was not conducive to growth.
Still, she’d often tease me by asking if I wanted to play Russian Tourettes since I had about a one-in-six chance of belting out a Russian curse word when I failed to wrangle a complete sentence together.
I’d quickly capitalized on the fact that Othello had no problem rolling her R’s.
But I did.
With the criminal genius of a con artist…I’d milked it, feigning incompetence and annoyance to get her to teach me her impressive tongue work. It turned out that I was much better with my tongue than I’d portrayed and, because I had already performed one crime in my con scheme, I added another to my criminal resume.
I stole my first kiss.
And that’s when our spark kindled to a flame.
Our Russian improved rather swiftly once we were both properly motivated to get through our hour of classwork.
Soon, she shared her love of computers—both the good and the bad—with me. She was a hacker by trade. Never having been a fan of authority, it fascinated me.
I watched her work from my vantage behind the wall. She typed furiously on her keyboard, biting her lower lip absently as my memories sped faster: cool silk sheets, long talks over bottles of wine under the starry night sky in the gardens of Chateau Falco, purposely getting lost together in the labyrinth—for hours, listening to the cicadas chirp outside the open window as we stared up at the ceiling, simply enjoying the feeling of bare flesh against bare flesh.
How she always fell asleep on movie night, and how I always woke her up by tickling her. How I knew she faked half of those moments, because she knew I would tickle her and we would then find something more fun to occupy our evenings.
Finding the seediest bars in town. Hopping in the car at a moment’s notice to travel halfway across the country on an impromptu road trip—only to end up staying in a simple hotel nowhere near our intended destination, distracted by some billboard for some random l
ocal touristy destination in wherever-the-hell, America.
Waking up before her in the mornings but pretending to be asleep because I knew she’d use the most…creative ways to wake me up—and I’d taken a page out of her movie night scam.
I sighed, the montage slowly fading.
We’d gotten to know each other through silence, and that had birthed a spark that neither of us noticed at first. We would later discover that neither of us could extinguish it. One of us would try, but I was now realizing that I was a terrible fireman. This fire had only gone to ground, smoldering deep below the surface. For years.
I’d fucked up. We hadn’t ended on a bad note—not at all. But I hadn’t fought as hard as I should have to keep her close when an opportunity arose for her overseas. And then, much as silence had conceived us, time destroyed us. We’d grown apart, living two very different lives, staying in touch sporadically and warmly—but neither of us willing to give up our own personal adventures or careers.
I closed my eyes for a moment, knowing I would punch something if I didn’t get a grip.
Alice’s life was on the line, and I had a lot of work to do.
45
Othello sat behind the screens, typing furiously on a keyboard and chugging from a bright can of digestible jet fuel—an energy drink of some type. Knowing her, probably an illegal one.
Although beautiful, Othello looked tired and haggard—as if she hadn’t slept in days. She wore a black tank top and had her hair tied back in a ponytail. Loose strands had escaped their confines and hung down her sharp jawline; I found myself staring longingly. I firmly closed my eyes and leaned away from the visual, silently chastising myself. I didn’t dare speak in case the sound traveled through the pinprick holes in the painting’s eyes. Thankfully, the holes seemed to be covered with a type of dark mesh so I didn’t fear her seeing my shifting eyeballs from her side.
Marginally composed and hormones somewhat in check, I took another gander of my office.
And I almost jumped to see a second figure looming only a few feet away from me. Luckily, he had his back to me. Unluckily, it was Hemingway—the unwitting cock-blocker supreme.
Or, as he was more widely known, the Horseman of Death. The Pale Rider.
I controlled my breathing, chastising myself all over again. That wasn’t fair of me. I had been involved with Indie—regrettably—when Othello wandered back into my life years later. After a tense few days with my old flame helping me fight the Academy Justices, I’d made the conscious decision to leave the past in the past and focus on my future with Indie. Death had swooped in like a specter, stealing her heart, body, and soul.
Literally, as it were.
Granted, his package had been impossible to turn down—his benefits package, to be clear—because he’d brought her back to life after my fight with the Justices had resulted in her dying. Well, Death had officialized my unsanctioned act of bringing her back to life, because I’d borrowed his Horseman’s Mask to do it. Apparently, I’d forgotten some of the paperwork.
With my sudden recap of our old relationship on my mind, it was very easy for me to find someone to hate. Someone else to blame.
That, and my continuing torture with Aphrodite—and now Kára—wasn’t helping my chill.
Upon stumbling back into my life during the Justices fiasco, Othello had made it abundantly clear that she hadn’t forgotten about me. The only obstacle had been Indie, my lover at the time.
Had I known Indie would get corrupted by foreign magic and go batshit insane years later, my response to Othello’s invitation would have been drastically different. Hindsight could suck a big one.
Regulars, I was beginning to realize, did not handle power all that well. Freaks didn’t either, to be fair, but it almost seemed like Regulars were genetically disposed to epically worse outcomes when they got their grubby meat hooks on magic that hadn’t been given to them upon birth. Like the universe was putting the smack down on the have-nots.
Although that seemed unfair, the results were undeniable.
Now that I thought about it, Death had been behind bringing Indie back, too. He’d had to make her into a Grimm to do it, and that had been the beginning of the end for Indie—setting her on a path that would ultimately end in me being forced to kill her to save my best friends, Gunnar and Ashley. The same night Aphrodite and Hermes—and who knew who else—had watched me kill their sister, Athena, on Mount Olympus.
I hesitated, my tinfoil hat’s antenna vibrating ominously.
Here I was, confronted by the Olympians and Death—who had apparently been making more shady deals than Donald Trump and Rumpelstiltskin combined.
I hesitated, dampening my suspicion somewhat. I couldn’t blame Hemingway. It was his freaking job to meet the dead. He wasn’t the one who killed the people. He was the one who took them to their next bus stop.
Still…I had questions. Pertinent ones. Because he was leaving messes behind that were causing me all kinds of grief. Then again…he’d warned me about that. A few times.
Point a finger at someone and at least three more point back at you, or whatever the saying was. Some flowery motivational poster garbage.
“No one has seen Peter since the break-in at Grimm Tech?” Death asked Othello in a clipped, frustrated tone, snapping me out of my reverie.
Othello shook her head angrily. “Nothing. And we know for a fact that Alaric Slate is dead.”
“Twice dead, to be more precise,” Death clarified. “I never met this Peter fellow.” I rolled my eyes. Because Peter never actually died, I thought to myself. Death continued. “What do you know about him?”
Othello threw her hands up, glaring at her screens. “Nothing!”
Death shook his head. “Yes, you do. Check the memory shard,” he said, pointing at her amulet. My eyes latched onto the prominent jewelry. I’d almost forgotten about that. Death had given it to her after she came back from the dead. I’d seen it block a magical attack, so I knew it was powerful, but Othello hadn’t been able to answer my questions when I’d asked her about it.
I’d never heard it called a memory shard before. What was this all about?
Othello looked embarrassed for not thinking of it herself. She touched the amulet and her eyes closed, flicking beneath her lids as if she was dreaming.
A moment later, she opened her eyes and let out a breath. “Peter was his best friend, but he betrayed Nate for power to partner up with Alaric Slate,” she said, as if reading a report on her computer screen. “It didn’t end well for either of them.”
Death nodded thoughtfully. What the hell was going on here? Did Othello have amnesia or something? Had she forgotten about Peter? She had met him a few times. How could she have forgotten—
I winced at a sudden thought. Had Othello lost some of her memories when I brought her back to life? Was that what her amulet was for? To help her remember? It had multiple purposes, obviously—defensive and restorative. Was that why she’d been cagey about explaining the amulet to me? Out of embarrassment for her foggy memories?
“This has to be some kind of illusion—at least with Alaric—but the security feeds at Grimm Tech are above reproach,” Death muttered nervously, pacing back and forth. I understood his anxiety. This was an epic job failure if Death was screwing up…well, death. He was also coming alarmingly close to the truth, and that was not good. If he thought I was in danger, he might take action and doom my friends. My plan to kidnap their loved ones was now a necessity. Anything to keep my Horsemen far away from a friend with good intentions.
Othello fingered her amulet, glaring at her computer screen. “I can’t fucking find Nate either. Anywhere!” she snapped. “If he really is back like Hermes said, then he’s gone analog.”
Death sighed, calmly drifting closer to rest a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, my love. You’ll find him.”
Othello snarled, scooped up a jar of pens, and then hurled it across the room. It shattered out of my view. “She would have
found him by now,” she muttered. “I’m only the second-best hacker in the world.” She released her amulet with a bitter smile. “Although, pulling off this lie for so long with none the wiser technically makes me the best—”
Death’s grip on her shoulder abruptly tightened and she cut off with a short whimper.
46
He instantly released her, taking a step back and looking sick to his stomach as he apologized profusely. But even as he spoke, his eyes darted about wildly, eyeing the rafters warily.
I frowned in confusion. What had she been talking about? What lie had she pulled off? Was there another hacker out there who had finally bested Othello?
“You mustn’t speak of such things,” he said urgently. “It mustn’t be said out loud—at all—even in private. You know this. Even I cannot stop the consequences.”
What the hell were they talking about?
Othello nodded guiltily. “I know.” She leaned back in her chair, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“And I am sorry for hurting you,” he replied, sounding just as guilty. It was obvious the poor bastard cared for her more than he should. He’d lived a long, lonely life. Othello had been the best thing to happen to him in thousands of years. And, looking at her now, it was undeniable how she felt about him. He’d given her what I never had. A future. I had no right to feel bitter.
Othello sighed, sagging her shoulders. “It’s fine, my love. It just gets overwhelming sometimes. I wish we could just—”
Death cleared his throat. “Never,” he repeated firmly.
She grunted, kicking her feet up on the desk. She wore yoga pants and no shoes, and she’d painted her toenails a vivid green. “I don’t understand why Peter took Yahn. Or what the hell he was doing at Grimm Tech—let alone how he got in,” she added with a low growl. “Alucard and Tory are frantic, not to mention the Reds.”
Carnage: Nate Temple Series Book 14 Page 30
