by Steve McHugh
“Anything else?” Irkalla asked as she joined us, along with Nabu.
“I saw Siris. She was on the Black Hawk. She’s with Gilgamesh. He’s helping her.”
“Son-of-a . . .” Irkalla started and walked off muttering to herself.
“We’ll be there soon. Stay safe,” I told him and ended the chat. “So that whole hunting Siris down thing that Gilgamesh said he was doing?”
“I had no idea he’d be working with her,” Nabu said. He looked genuinely shocked by the news, and judging from Irkalla’s punching of a car window, she wasn’t pleased, either.
“How do we stop them?” Diane asked. “Gilgamesh is a walking powder keg, and Siris isn’t far off Baldr in terms of power, and easily his equal if you’re talking ruthlessness.”
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly, “but we’ll figure it out on the way.”
“Well, this couldn’t be worse then,” Nabu said. “They are going to use a tablet to open a portal. They could be bringing anything or anyone through that gate.”
“Use the Mercedes G-Class at the end of the street,” Licinius said. He fished some keys from his pocket, tossing them over to me.
“Nate, this is bad news,” Remy whispered as we went to the Mercedes. The others went over to the car they’d arrived in.
I climbed into the driver’s seat and breathed out slowly. Driving angry wouldn’t do me any good.
“How are we meant to get to Brutus with Gilgamesh, Siris, and who knows who else helping them?” Remy asked. “I don’t have a nuke. Can I get a nuke?”
“Remy, I barely trust you with the weapons you do have,” I pointed out.
“Spoilsport.” He chuckled. “We’re so screwed, aren’t we?”
I looked at my fox friend. “We’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s only a small army. You managed to get through one in the dwarf realm.”
“We managed to avoid most of the army, though,” Remy told me. “It’s a bit harder when you have to go through the army to get to the thing you want.” His face became solemn. “You’ve got a plan, though, right?”
I nodded, but all I could think about was how useful Remy’s nuke would be right now.
CHAPTER 40
We stopped the car a few blocks over from the museum and ran through deserted streets to where Tommy said he’d meet us.
“The police have told people to stay off the streets,” Tommy explained after he dropped down from the balcony of the building he’d been using to spy on the museum. He was back in his human form, although I didn’t want to know where he’d picked up the jeans and T-shirt he was wearing.
Diane, Irkalla, and Nabu arrived soon after.
“What’s the plan?” Diane asked.
Tommy led us into the building and up the stairs to a door that led to a roof terrace. It would have been a lovely view, if it wasn’t for the fact that you could see the collection of people outside the British Museum behind the closed gates and high walls.
“We don’t have a plan, do we?” Diane said.
“Not so much, no,” Tommy said. “Brutus is in there, but I have no idea how to get to him.”
“Are they human?” Nabu asked.
“No,” Diane and Irkalla said in unison.
“Vampires,” Tommy said. “I can smell the death on them. Where did a few hundred vampires come from?”
“Jerry,” I said. “He told me he’d turned a bunch of people. Jerry was no master, though, so none of them there will have that kind of power. But they’re still going to be stronger and faster than humans. And they outnumber us ten to one.”
“Not the worst odds ever,” Irkalla said. “And there are no giant snakes this time.”
I looked her way. “Don’t jinx it.”
She smiled.
“To make this even worse,” Tommy said, and pointed to toward the museum, “you see that there?”
I followed his direction and my heart sank when I saw what he was pointing at. “That’s an M134 Minigun.”
“Where?” Remy asked, sounding a lot happier about it than I would have.
“Between the columns. It’s slightly hidden by darkness, and under a roof. It fires 7.62 NATO rounds—lots of them. As in several thousand per minute. We need to figure out a way to get past that without being shot.”
“If we rush them, we’re going to get cut to shreds,” Diane said.
“I have a plan,” Tommy said, “but Nate isn’t going to like it.”
“The last time you had a plan, I ended up jumping out of a helicopter.”
“Funny you should say that.”
“I’m not jumping out of a helicopter, Tommy. Besides, do you see one that we could get in?”
Tommy told me his plan. It was stupid. It was dangerous. And it wasn’t like our options were overly brilliant without it. Charging through the front gate would be insane, time-consuming, and result in the injury or death of people I cared about. Neither of those was acceptable. We needed to make our mark, and do it quickly. We needed to crush the opposition without giving them time to regroup, but more importantly, we needed to get that machine gun out of commission. We needed our equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
Me, apparently.
“We’ll be ready,” Tommy said. “Just be careful.”
“I hate you,” I told him. “I’d like that on record. I hate you so much.”
“You love me and you know it. Just get those gates open, stop the machine gun, and don’t die.”
“Fuck their shit right up,” Remy said, patting me on the arm.
I climbed back into the Mercedes, and drove as fast as possible back toward the building we’d landed on when first arriving. I sprinted up the stairs and found the pilot waiting for me, the rotors already spinning.
“Tommy called; said you needed me,” she told me as I climbed in and put my earpiece in, before fastening my harness.
“My best friend is an asshole,” I told her, as the helicopter lifted.
“You ready?” the pilot asked, and we quickly accelerated off the rooftop and up into the night sky. “I heard a rumor you don’t like heights. That true?” she asked.
“No, my eyes are closed because I really enjoy hanging out of helicopters that are high in the air,” I muttered.
“How high do you need to be?”
“A hundred feet should do it,” I said. “I’m not sure just how much impact I’ll be able to stop. I’ve managed to slow myself from a fall of about sixty or seventy feet before, but even so, this isn’t going to feel great.”
“If you don’t think you can do this, say now. Because I can’t hang around. This needs to look like a passing flight—not anything stopping.”
“I can do it,” I said, unsure if I was convincing her or me. “I just don’t want to do it.”
“Get into position,” she said.
I pushed open the helicopter door and lowered myself onto the grab rail. This was a bad idea. “When you get back to Avalon, please feel free to punch Tommy in his stupid face.”
The pilot smiled. “Go. Destroy.” She winked, making me smile, and I pushed myself off.
I knew I needed to slow myself down so that I didn’t pancake into the ground at high speed, but that wasn’t going to be enough. I held my hands out in front of me and created a sphere of air, pouring more and more magic into it, growing it larger and larger until it was the size of my torso. Only when I’d stabilized it, when the lightning, fire, and wind inside were no longer in danger of exploding before I hit the ground, did I remove one hand from the sphere and use it to wrap myself in air magic. Slowing down would have been a mistake, a mistake I didn’t realize fully until I was maybe fifty feet from impact.
Some of the vampires looked up. Several pointed or shouted, although I couldn’t hear their words, and it was too late to stop me anyway. I couldn’t see the machine gunner under the roof of the museum, but it didn’t really matter. I was moving faster than the vampires could have possibly reacted.
I detonated the mag
ic at the exact moment it touched the concrete. The power softened the landing, but only a little, as the explosion tore into the vampires all around me. I tried to direct the blast out in front of me, but the shockwave of magic smashed into everything unlucky enough to be within ten feet and continued spreading through the crowd of vampires, tearing apart those who were too close to the initial detonation and flinging away those further back.
The machine gunner fired once before the magic hit him like a truck, smashing him back into the wall with a crunch, and turning the machine gun into scrap metal.
After the noise in my ears had died down, and my body had decided that I was capable of movement again, I got back to my feet as the surviving vampires swarmed toward me, only to be met by my friends, which gave me time to recover.
“That was crazy,” Irkalla said. “Utterly crazy.”
“I ache,” I told her, as the fighting raged around us.
“Get to Brutus!” Tommy shouted, in his werewolf beast form once again, as he tore the arm from one vampire and threw it at another one.
Irkalla and I avoided most of the vampires and reached the museum entrance, where she used an errant vampire as a door knocker. She stepped through the shattered entry, grabbed the vampire and removed his soul, killing him before he could get to his feet.
“So where do we go from here?” I asked as we entered the Great Court. A circular structure sat in the center of the massive main hall showing various signs pointing to exhibits to either side.
“This way,” Irkalla said, pointing to a sign that said Mesopotamia, and I followed her for a few steps before Gilgamesh walked out from a doorway to the left of us. He carried a huge sword in both hands. He wore an oversized red and white tunic that came down to his ankles and looked a little ridiculous.
“I didn’t want it to come to this!” he shouted.
“You betrayed us,” Irkalla said. “How could you?”
“I can’t betray what I don’t believe in. You were all so keen to join Avalon, to become a small cog in that machine, that you never stopped to think about what really needed to happen. Avalon will be rebuilt with true power. You can’t stop that.”
“We can bloody well try!” I snapped.
“You should leave,” he told us. “I don’t want to have to kill you; I never did. Siris was wrong about that. She shouldn’t have sought your deaths back in Acre. But you left me to hunt the woman I love, and I was never going to kill her.”
“You helped her hide?” I shouted.
He nodded. “Took her back to the realm she’d been using as a base of operations. Hid her there for a long time: long enough to start again. Word reached us that we were to do nothing until we received orders.”
“Who do you work for?” Irkalla asked. “Who’s behind all of this?”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re never going to meet them. You either leave, or die. There’s no third option here.”
“Siris has twisted your brain!” Irkalla shouted, her voice echoing around the massive hall.
“Siris is the only one who knows what she’s doing. You can’t turn me against her.”
“Where’s Brutus?” I asked. “Why Brutus, of all people?”
“We’re going to take London,” Gilgamesh said, taking a step toward us. “It’s the first part of the plan. Take London, establish a new, better place for us to show our power, and then move from there. Brutus is a relic: someone who should have been destroyed centuries ago. He revels in his own opulence. He sees himself as leader, but does nothing to help those less fortunate. He only helps himself, and those he deems worthy.”
“And that means he should die?” I asked, drawing the two dwarven swords.
Gilgamesh paused. “He’ll die because the only thing he’s good for is being a symbol: a symbol of the new guard crushing the old. A symbol for the transfer of power.”
“That’s it? There’s nothing personal in all of this?” I asked. “Even though Brutus is the one who helped kill the giants who lived here when he first arrived all those centuries ago?”
“He hunted my kind to extinction in this country. I’ve wanted to kill him for a long time for what he did.” Gilgamesh grew in front of me, going from seven to ten feet tall in seconds. His bulk increased in size, and by the time he was done, the massive claymore he was carrying looked more like a gladius. The tunic no longer appeared oversized, instead fitting his frame perfectly. He reached behind a marble pillar and removed a blue and silver shield. It was the size of a car bonnet.
“Well, shit,” I said.
“Who holds London when this is all done?” Irkalla asked, pulling a dagger from a sheath at the small of her back.
“I don’t care for politics. Hera, Siris, and the others can decide that. Maybe Kay. He likes power.”
“Kay is dead,” I told him.
“He was told to leave you alone. He never did like the fact that he simply wasn’t as powerful as he liked to believe. I guess he won’t be doing much of anything now.” He held the sword out in front of him. “You can’t beat me, Nathan. Not with all your power. And certainly not with a woman like Irkalla as your backup.”
He swung the sword toward me and I threw myself to the ground, rolling under the blow and coming up running as I tried to put some distance between us.
“A woman like me?” Irkalla asked as she stepped toward Gilgamesh. “Let me show you what a woman like me can do.”
She ran toward Gilgamesh. It was the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen. A five-and-a-half foot, 112-pound person against a ten-foot-tall giant, who probably weighed the better part of half a ton.
Gilgamesh laughed, but raised his shield in defense. I ran back toward the pair, hoping to help Irkalla, but she didn’t need my help. She punched the shield head on, and it just vaporized in front of her. Gilgamesh flew back into a nearby pillar, hitting it with a crunch.
“This is on me!” Irkalla shouted. “Go find Siris!”
I did as she said, just as Gilgamesh charged toward Irkalla, who ducked his attack, and hit him in the stomach hard enough to stagger him as an explosion rocked the building.
CHAPTER 41
I found the stairs and took them two at a time, leaving Irkalla and Gilgamesh to fight. I had no doubts that it would be a close thing, but I was certain that Irkalla would be able to defeat the giant.
I reached the top and a blast of air opened the two doors, allowing me to run through them without stopping just as another tremor shook the building. I followed the signs to the Mesopotamian exhibit, running down a long corridor before barreling into a massive room that overlooked the main hall below. Brutus was tied up against a suit of armor, a sorcerer’s band around his wrist.
The room was adorned with various artifacts from medieval Europe. Swords hung on the walls and I could spot the old coins and pottery in the glass cases along the side of the room. A huge window sat on one side, overlooking where I’d left Gilgamesh and Irkalla.
Siris stood in the center of the room. She was laughing. Several stone tablets sat on the floor in a circle at her feet with one in the center. The center table glowed a brilliant gold. It hovered slightly before flinging itself through the window and vanishing into the main area of the museum where Irkalla and Gilgamesh were still fighting. Trails of golden particles, starting from the remaining tablets and showing the trajectory of the one that had left, hung in the air.
She turned to me. “You will not stop me!” she snapped.
“That’s sort of why I’m here,” I pointed out. “Just give in, let it go, and we’ll get you whatever help you need.”
“Stick me in a cell in The Hole? I don’t think so.”
The Hole was a prison run by Avalon. It was ideally the perfect place for someone like Siris, but I wasn’t sure if even The Hole would be able to contain her anger and hate.
The building shook again, more powerful than before. “What is that?” I asked.
“Ah, it’s the tablets. This requires a lot of powe
r.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“You’ll see.”
I walked over to Brutus, and removed the gag around his mouth. Siris didn’t try to stop me. “She’s not quite all there,” he said.
“I noticed.”
There was another tremor and the glass window beside me exploded as the tablets crashed through it.
“They broke her tablets up,” Siris said, almost giddy. “They broke them up and we found them. It took so long to piece them back together. Now you get to reap the benefits.”
I turned to throw a blast of air at her, but she was already running off, so I unfastened the ties holding Brutus and helped him down from where they’d put him.
“They really did a number on me,” he said after sitting on the floor. “That Gilgamesh can really throw a punch.”
“Yeah, we might need to go help Irkalla. She’s probably still fighting him.”
Brutus nodded. “I killed his ancestors, or relatives—I can’t remember which ones.”
“Pretty much.”
“I thought I was done paying for my actions all those years ago. A different time, and a different man. They wanted me dead, Nate. They want my city for themselves. I can’t let them have it.”
“You won’t. Don’t worry.”
I walked over to the window but could find no trace of Irkalla or Gilgamesh, although there was a lot of blood on the marble floor. I turned back to warn Brutus that Gilgamesh might not be dead, when the tablets on the ground that had been there moments earlier disintegrated. And the tablet outside in the main hall lifted up into the air as a rift opened between our realm and another.
“How do we stop that?” Brutus asked.
I turned back to the window. “I have no idea. Let’s just get you out of here.” I helped Brutus to his feet as Siris reappeared and blasted me in the back with her earth-elemental power, knocking me through the window to the hall below. I managed to slow my descent, and only hit the floor with a slight jolt. But before I could launch myself the fifty feet back up to Brutus, a roar of a creature I’d never heard before came from the rift, which continued to grow, a kaleidoscope of colors bouncing all around the tear in our realm. The creature inside roared again, and it took everything I had not to run as far and fast as possible.