Broken

by Zara Novak

  I followed her.

  In a minute or so we were almost completely across the large body of water, and as we came around another natural corner the lake properly came into view. We both came to a stop at seeing the large black wooden cathedral looming high above us.

  “What in the ever-loving fuck…” I whispered.

  A hundred lanterns illuminated the dark building and its eerie gothic spires. In the lake surrounding the island there had to be a thousand small boats, all with lanterns too, waiting in the water, all packed together, looking like rays coming from a sun.

  There were people everywhere.

  Standing in boats, standing on the island and looking up at the church. They were all statues, eerily silent, their attention fixed on a balcony halfway up the church’s front. A woman was standing there.

  Her eyes were whiter than bone. The untamable black hair on her head reminded me of a snake nest. She wore a long black dress with blood red flowers upon it. Intricate cords of bone jewelry hung loose around her throat. Empty white eyes were glaring right at us, whiter only than the teeth shining in her impossibly wide grin.

  Nalinth.

  On the balcony behind her a topless man beat his arm against a giant drum. The drum made no sound when it played, but Rachel seemed to hear it.

  “Hunter,” Nalinth said, her voice cutting across the still darkness like a knife. “I warned you what would happen if you came back here. You will die at my hand.”

  “I assume you know why we’re here,” I shouted back to her. I couldn’t get over how quiet things were. There wasn’t a leaf out of place, or even the choral chirp of the cicadas. Just deathly silence, and glassy black water.

  The dark witch nodded. “You have the amulet again,” she said, her white eyes now boring into Rachel. “Will you kill this keeper too?”

  “Please,” Rachel said, interrupting the witch. “We need your help. Can you tell me how to use the amulet? If we don’t find the tomb in time, the sun won’t come back out again.”

  Nalinth laughed slowly. It was a twisted sound, unearthly and unnatural, it sent more chills down my spine.

  “Did Hunter explain who I am?” Nalinth said to Rachel. “Why he won’t kill me, even though he so easily could?”

  Rachel looked at me and back at Nalinth. “No?”

  “She’s a necromancer,” I explained to Rachel. “Her power comes from obtaining followers. Once they are in her thrall, she can command them to do whatever she likes. All these people are under her control.”

  “You missed out the best part, Hunter,” she said, looking at Rachel. “If I die, then they all die. You see, I know Hunter can never condemn a group of innocents to death like that, so he can do nothing to stop me.”

  “Normally you’d be right, Nalinth,” I said. “But if I don’t get the answers we need then the whole planet dies. The numbers alone make sense.”

  “You helped last time,” Rachel pleaded. “Why not help again?”

  “I was weak last time,” Nalinth said. “This time I am not. I will take the amulet for myself and give myself the ultimate power that I so rightly deserve. I give you a choice now. Give me the amulet or I will take it.”

  “You’re not the keeper,” I said to the dark witch. “It’s not meant for you.”

  Nalinth cackled. “Don’t waste my time, Hunter. We both know I’m strong enough to handle this. Now… hand it over, or you both die.”

  “I know there’s still good inside of you,” I said to the dark witch. “See reason here. Don’t let this dark magic control you. Think of Davian. What would he think to see you like this?”

  “Don’t you dare mention his name here!” Nalinth roared, her face contorting in an expression of demonic fury. As she did her followers all turned to face us.

  “Ah, fuck,” I whispered.

  “You have wasted too much time now!” she said. “No longer! Seize them. Kill them both and get the—”

  Nalinth paused as Rachel dropped to the ground. She was breathing loudly, her hands stretched out on the dirt. “Legba!” Rachel shouted. “Legba! Legba!”

  “Rachel?” I said, moving forward to help her.

  “Stop!” Rachel shouted. “He has me! Legba has me! He commands me! He says to go to her! To Nalinth! To Mambo! The black witch must have the amulet!”

  For a moment Nalinth and I were joined in our mutual confusion. Rachel looked at me from the side of her eye, and I heard the faintest whisper of suggestion in my mind.

  Trust me.

  “Papa Legba,” Nalinth gasped. “He has taken control of her. Come to me at once, girl! Bring the amulet. Your goddess wills it!”

  Rachel dropped to the ground and rolled onto her back. She clawed at the air and gasped for breath, acting like she was possessed by a powerful voodoo spirit. I had to give it to her, the display was impressive. If the whole historian thing hadn’t worked out, she could have been a convincing actor.

  “Take me to her!” she said in a deep and gravelly voice. She pointed at me, curling her fingers like her hands were plagued with arthritis. I scooped her up from the ground and whispered in her ear.

  “This better be a damned good plan.”

  “To the priestess!” she shouted. “Legba commands it!”

  I held Rachel in my arms and walked across the final bridge to the main island. Nalinth’s army of thralls all stared back at me, their white eyes glistening in the torchlight. I’d seen some unnerving things in my time, but this was definitely up there.

  Silence smothered me like a lead cloak.

  As I stepped onto the island the crowds all parted at once, stepping aside to make a clear path towards the church. I really didn’t want to step inside the church, every instinct in my body was telling me not to.

  Thankfully I didn’t have to. Nalinth had come downstairs and met us just as we got to the front door. Physically she wasn’t a threat at all, but with the snap of her fingers she could have her followers tear me to shreds. I might have been a guardian, but even I didn’t fancy my chances against a thousand possessed humans.

  “Put her down and stay back,” Nalinth said. I prayed to myself that Rachel had a plan here. Nalinth was not someone to mess around with. I set Rachel down on the dirt outside the front door and she held the amulet up in one hand.

  “For you, Priestess Mambo!” Rachel said. She had rolled her eyes back in her head for effect. “Legba commands me to give it to you!”

  Nalinth smiled, her white eyes glinting with the promise of great and terrible power. If I moved quickly enough, I could snatch the amulet out of Rachel’s hand, grab her off the floor and get out of here before things got really bad.

  No. I had to trust Rachel. Her brain had got us out of trouble once before. It was time I started listening to her.

  Nalinth reached her hand out slowly and took the amulet from Rachel. I felt my stomach drop then. Giving an artifact so powerful to a dark creature like Nalinth was basically game over. I hoped Rachel had something good.

  “Finally,” Nalinth said, her voice breaking with excitement. “It is mine. Do you realize how long I’ve waited? What I had to do to get this? The years I’ve waited?”

  “You could have easily taken it off us last time,” I said to her. “Nothing stopped you then.”

  “Oh, but it did,” the dark witch said. “I consulted the threads of time. Taking the amulet for myself then, it never would have worked. That’s why I had to poison your friend’s mind. I infected his soul with my dark energy and had him kill his mate. If I could wait, and see the amulet again, it would be mine, and here we are…”

  I felt my world shattering in two.

  “Wait. You’re the one that warped Trey. Not the amulet?”

  Nalinth just cackled. “A small price to pay for victory,” she said. “And now you will die too, Hunter. The voice of Legba has blessed your mate’s ear. She is in my control now, you have—”

  “Actually,” Rachel said, sitting up from the floor, “I didn’t he
ar the voice of Papa Legba. I just made all that stuff up.”

  Nalinth froze. “You, you what?!”

  “Yeah, you see, I did a term on religious iconography, and I learned quite a lot about voodoo during that time. I figured if I threw out some basic terminology, I could gain your trust and get close.”

  “But I have the amulet, you stupid bitch!” Nalinth laughed to herself. “I got exactly what I wanted!”

  “And… so did I. Or Halo at least. Yeah, you see, I’ve been hearing her voice ever since I got the amulet, and she told me to give it to you. So, here we are. She hasn’t steered me wrong so far. I’m guessing there had to be a pretty good reason.”

  And then I saw what the reason was.

  The chain from the amulet had wrapped itself around Nalinth’s wrist like a snake. The stone started glowing, until the light shining from it was brighter than a blinding star.

  “Stop!” Nalinth shouted. “Stop it! Take it back! I don’t want it! It burns!”

  I grabbed Rachel and sprinted away from the island, just as the explosion of divine light ripped through the church behind us. This blast seemed far bigger than the one in the restaurant, and probably with good reason. Nalinth was stronger than a pack of vampire bikers, Halo probably had more strength set aside to deal with her.

  A shockwave burst across the clearing, knocking back every thrall standing around the church. It carried on across the dark water as a wave which made boats rock and knock together. When it finally hit the far banks, I noticed the leaves were moving in the trees again. The sounds of the swamp had returned.

  The silence was gone.

  One by one we saw the thralls standing up. They looked a little confused, but the congregation made their way back over the bridge, passing Rachel and I without even looking our way.

  “Where are they going?” Rachel asked. Even the boats were leaving now.

  “It looks like the blast broke Nalinth’s hold over them. Hopefully they go back to their beds and forget all about this.”

  When the last of the flock had left the island Rachel and I went back over the bridge. Nalinth was lying in the doorway to her church, the amulet on the dirt beside her. She saw us approaching and blinked slowly.

  “I couldn’t contain the power.”

  “I tried to warn you,” I said. “The amulet is for the keeper only.”

  “You are the one,” she said to Rachel. “I see that now. I will help you.”

  Rachel crouched down and gathered the amulet off the ground. “Thank you. How do we find Halo?”

  “Do you know what an anthelion is?” Nalinth said, her voice barely higher than a whisper.

  Rachel nodded. “An optical illusion. It looks like there are three suns in the sky.”

  “Correct. Like the anthelion, you need to use the amulet three times to find the tomb. You have already used it twice.”

  “I have?” Rachel asked.

  “Yes,” Nalinth said. “A flare in the restaurant, I can see. And a flare now. You have created two points of light. You need one more and you can triangulate the tomb’s location. The third point will be equidistant to the others, to create a perfect triangle.”

  Rachel looked perplexed. “What does that mean?”

  Nalinth’s eyes rolled back in her skull. “You made a point in New York. The second was here in Louisiana, 1,500 miles away. The third should be 1,500 miles away from both of those, which will make a perfect triangle.”

  I tried to do the mental geography in my head. “Wait a second, that would put the third point somewhere in Minnesota.”

  “Minnesota?” Rachel said. “What’s in Minnesota?”

  That’s when it hit me. I knew exactly what was there. “The headquarters for Harkin corporation. The amulet…”

  “It’s taking us straight to him!” Rachel said.

  “Hunter,” Nalinth wheezed. “My sister warned you that one of us would have to die for you to leave here. I thought it would be you, but I was wrong. It was me, Hunter. I am the one that must die. Tell her I am sorry and tell Davian… tell him that I am sorry too.”

  “He knows,” I said. They were the only words I could offer before the dark witch closed her eyes one last time. As she did Rachel stood up. We stepped back and watched as the witch’s body disappeared on the wind.

  “You heard her,” Rachel said. “One more point and then we can find the tomb.”

  “All we have to do is fly straight into the jaws of death,” I said.

  “We need backup now,” Rachel said. “Hunter, we can’t take Harkin on alone without the rest of the guardians. Fighting together is the only way we’ll survive.”

  She was right.

  Or mostly right anyway.

  The amulet was sending us right into the belly of the beast. Harkin HQ was a fortress in its own right, there was no telling what kind of traps lay in wait for us there.

  Going there of our own volition was almost certainly a death sentence.

  Even with the guardians behind us.

  13

  Rachel

  It wasn’t long before we were leaving the dark skies of Louisiana far behind us. Hunter and I had quickly made our way back to the landing strip and were back in the sky once more, heading towards… Minnesota.

  The amulet was sending us straight into the arms of Harkin, our most dangerous enemy.

  “None of this makes any sense,” I said to Hunter, who had his hands on the joysticks and his eyes on the clouds in front of us. I remember he said the search was different every time. “Is this what the search involved last time? Did you have to use three points then?”

  “It was quite different last time,” Hunter said to me. “Even the amulet was different, it didn’t look like it does now.”

  “Different? What do you mean? What was different about it?”

  “Well it was still an amulet,” Hunter said, glancing across the cockpit as I pulled the amulet out and unwrapped it. “It had a stone in the middle, but it also had a dial around the outside. The dial moved depending on our orientation, and as we followed it the stone would start blinking more frequently. It was basically a giant game of hot and cold.”

  “Huh. What did it lead to?”

  “It took us all over. We went to Cairo, Shanghai, Morocco… the damned thing had us running all over the planet. It was leading us to scattered pieces of an ancient necklace. There were nine fragments in all, and the last one was in Ireland, right where Halo’s hiding place was. When we combined the pieces, the tomb revealed itself.”

  “Did this necklace have four main stones, each with lots of little stones around it?”

  Hunter’s face lit up. “Yeah! Do you know it?”

  “That’s the necklace of seasons, Halo is always depicted wearing it. Each stone represents a season of the year, and the smaller stones around it represents the days in those seasons. What happened to it?”

  “Halo took it and thanked us for returning the necklace when we got to the tomb, and then Trey…” Hunter paused momentarily. “That’s when he flipped and attacked Laurelai.”

  “What happened after that?” I said, keen to not make Hunter dwell too long on the dark parts.

  “I pretty much had to use the wish. Halo said the search wouldn’t be the same the next time. She said it changes every time, to stop people from abusing the search.”

  “So, everything we’re doing now, is completely different.”

  “Almost,” Hunter said.

  “Almost?”

  “Yeah, well, this part is similar to the end of the last hunt. There was an anthelion then too. Three points made a perfect triangle, and at the center of that triangle was the location leading to the tomb. That point was at the most southern part of New Zealand.”

  “Wait, what? How did that lead you to Ireland?”

  “Antipodes,” Hunter said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  Hunter grinned. “Have I finally found something you don’t know?”

  My brow fu
rrowed as I slowly tried to figure the word out. “If you were to drill a hole right through the earth from New Zealand…”

  “You’d end up in Southern Ireland. Correct. I guess you do know it all,” he said with a smile.

  “So, we’re forming a triangle now to find its center,” I recapped.

  “Yeah.”

  “And the triangle’s center will be on the exact opposite side of the globe to Halo’s new hiding spot.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “And? So why don’t we just figure it out manually instead of going to Harkin’s HQ?!” I shouted. “Do you have a map in here somewhere?”

  Hunter’s mouth dropped open as he caught up. “The compartment on the dashboard in front of you, there’s a tablet with some digital mapping software!” I pulled the tablet out, unlocked the screen and a second later I had a digital map of the united states under my fingers. “There are tools to put down points and lines—” Hunter began to explain.

  “I’ve figured that out already!” I said. “Let me work in peace!”

  I began throwing down points and lines on the map, making a triangle from the three anthelion points. One in New York, one in Louisiana, and one… somewhere in northwest Minnesota. As I was working a call came in from Rocky.

  Hunter took it.

  “Please tell me you have some good news?” Hunter said to Rocky.

  “Just checking in on my favorite treasure hunters. Couldn’t help noticing that we have two days left and err… you guys haven’t given us any updates.” He laughed nervously. “Hopefully we’re closer to the truth?”

  “Cut it with the fucking manners!” an abrupt voice cut in. I instantly looked up from my work and saw Commander Davian had burst on to the screen. He snatched the camera from Rocky’s hands. “Well if it isn’t princess fucking Hunter and his four-eyes girlfriend.”

  “Good to see he survived the attack on HQ…” I mumbled to myself. Hunter glanced over at me and smiled.

  “Oh Commander, so good to see you’re alive.”

  “We’re all alive dipshit!” Davian barked. He swung the tablet around and revealed a room full of guardians. Hunter’s entire unit was there. “HQ is fucking destroyed, and we’ve gone into hiding. Now give me some good fucking news!”