Hellequin Chronicles 4: Prison of Hope

by Steve McHugh

  Time shifted, moving in fast forward. It was only a few seconds, but it was enough.

  Jenny touched my cheek, a tender moment between two people who had been lovers. Who could have been more. “I want you to know something,” she told me. “I really liked our time together. It made me feel normal.”

  Another fast forward as I screamed in rage at what Deimos was making me relive. Jenny kissed me gently on the mouth. A grating sound started, coming from the side of the table, but it didn’t last for long as the kiss intensified and she grasped the sides of my head in her hands. I returned the passion, and suddenly, without warning, memories exploded in my head.

  I tried to yell out. I knew what was happening, what had happened to me. I knew what Jenny had done, as more and more memories came into the forefront of my mind. But the kiss intensified once more, unlocking chunks of my past with every heartbeat. Deimos was making me relive all of those unlocked memories for a second time, all of the pain and rage and heartbreak that they brought with them.

  I moved my head slightly, noticing dark marks on Jenny’s wrist and forearm. Another memory exploded, giving me instant knowledge of what it meant. She was killing herself so that I might live. She was giving me back my memories, my abilities; she was remaking the man I used to be before Mordred tore my mind asunder, before I spent a decade playing games and pretending that nothing bothered me.

  Outwardly, I followed through the memory, feeling the wetness of Jenny’s tears as they fell onto my cheeks, mixing with my own.

  Deimos touched my hand and everything faded, only to be replaced with me in the house I shared with Selene. We’d lived in New York for four years. I’d quit Avalon decades earlier, and for the first time in a long time I was happy. And then I walked through that door and found our house empty, found the note on the dining room table. Smelled Selene’s scent as I read it, and felt the pit of despair as the realization of its contents hit me. She’d left me. I wasn’t to contact her, I wasn’t to try to find her; she was going to marry Deimos and her mind was made up.

  “There’s not enough terror or horror here,” Deimos said from beside me. “I just always wanted to see the moment, you know? I expected more crying. Maybe we should just change your memory so that you cry. I think I’d like that.”

  I dropped the yellow paper onto the table and my heart felt as if it were ready to burst.

  “Oh, I’ve got a better idea—how about this?” Deimos taunted.

  I was walking toward a house, a two-story building made from wood and brick. There was a porch on the front, and the door was banging open in the wind. The ground beneath my leather-booted feet was wet and soggy. It had been raining heavily for some time and had turned the grass into something resembling a swamp.

  I took a step and fear lanced my heart. “Please don’t,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re gaining some control,” Deimos said from beside me. “That’s actually quite impressive. It’s not going to stop me. Nice clothes, by the way.”

  I wore a set of black leather armor, similar to that worn by the Faceless. I had one of their cloaks, which billowed out behind me in the wind despite the strip of metal placed in the bottom of it. I took another step, the mud making horrific noises that even the wind couldn’t mask.

  “That’s it—keep going.”

  I walked on as if nothing were bothering me, stopping at the banging door. “Jane, I’m home,” I bellowed into the house.

  There was no response.

  I stepped inside and shook my cloak, removing it and draping it over the back of a chair, leaving it to drip water onto the floor.

  “Jane,” I called again. I doubted she’d be out in the weather we were having, but maybe she’d gone to town and decided that she’d rather stay with people during a storm.

  I took the first step on the staircase and froze. The smell of death careened into me like a runaway carriage. I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and crashed into our bedroom door, removing it from one hinge.

  The horror before me was almost too much for my eyes to bear witness to. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Jane was on the bed. She was naked, except for a sheet that covered part of her torso and one leg. The sheet had, at one time, been a cream color, a present for our wedding day. It was now dark red. A huge pool of my wife’s blood formed under the bed, cascading out around its legs and seeping into the crevices in the floor.

  I walked toward her, my hand to my mouth, stifling screams of terror and pain that would not come. There was no sound that could temper what I was feeling, no noise that would do justice to the sight of what used to be my wife.

  Jane’s throat had been slit, her torso stabbed repeatedly. Her hands were tied to the top of the bed with thick rope. I reached out slowly to her face, and tears fell freely from my eyes as I climbed onto the bed. I rubbed her stained cheeks with my fingers, as if anything I did could make it better.

  I howled in pain. Lightning struck a tree outside, and it burst into flames, but even the elements couldn’t make me so much as glance up from Jane’s face for long. Her beautiful face. Her natural red hair was now crusted and stained, her eyes still open. Looking at me, as if pleading for my help.

  I used fire magic to cut through her bonds, and she sagged against me. “I’m here,” I cried out. “I’m so sorry. Please, please don’t go. I’m here.” Words fell as tears, tumbling out of my mouth. I pleaded and begged with anyone and anything that might have been listening. All the while I cradled her dead body against me. I offered my own life countless times, but no one was listening or no one cared—I didn’t know which.

  “Now this is more like it,” Deimos said with a slight clap. “You know, I’ve wanted to do this for so long. You had everything. People who feared you, people who loved you. Selene. Do you know how long I used to just watch her? To wish she’d take notice of me.

  “And now she’s my wife and she won’t even touch me. She hates me and loves you. But by the time I’m done, there’ll be nothing left of you but a gibbering wreck. Let’s see how much she can love you then.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jane,” I said, ignoring him. “I’m so sorry.”

  In an instant, I was crouched beside Deimos, watching myself weep for the woman I’d loved. Watching my own heart break with grief. The rage would come, and there would be a reckoning the likes of which few had ever seen, but for the hours I stayed, holding my wife in my arms while the storm continued outside, it felt as if nature itself was grieving with me.

  “Take two,” Deimos said, and he made me relive it over and over again. Each time, it was either first person or I was forced to stand beside Deimos while I watched with horror while my younger self went through one of the worst experiences of my life.

  “What are we at now, six?” Deimos asked as I watched myself hold Jane yet again.

  “Let’s change things around a bit.” He paced up and down through the pool of blood that had crossed my bedroom floor. “Oh! How about we show you what you imagined happened when they came for your wife. Shall I show you that?”

  I would have pleaded for him to stop right there. I would have begged a million times, if it could have made him stop forcing me to see Jane. I’d relived it in my memories a thousand times, but nothing could compare to that first time. And Deimos had constructed a way to make every time feel like that first time. He was breaking me. I knew it, and so did he. And soon there would be no point of return.

  The picture faded, replaced with my wife running toward a man, dagger in hand. The man—I’d later come to know him as Henry—punched her in the face, and the dagger clattered to the floor. I had no idea if that was how it had happened, but there had been a dagger there, and again and again I’d gone over in my mind what must have happened to Jane. Reliving the horror that I couldn’t be there to stop.

  Jane tried to crawl toward the dagger, and Henry laughed, removing his belt and throwing it on the floor.

  “Now, I bet this gets good,” Deimos said to
me.

  Everything froze.

  “Well, that’s odd,” Deimos said. “I don’t remember hitting pause.”

  “I did,” said my voice, and Erebus appeared beside him. “You, Deimos, are a selfish, cruel little man who should have left well enough alone.”

  The vision disappeared, replaced with everything exactly as it was when I found Jane.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My name is Erebus,” he said. “And you tried to make Nathan see an altered memory. If you’d made him relive the actual thing over and over again, you’d have broken him. But you decided that wasn’t enough. You wanted him to suffer more. You tried to change the moment from what actually happened to what he imagined happened. And now I’m here, because although I can’t interfere with his memories as they are, I sure as hell can interfere with those that are made up.”

  Deimos grabbed Erebus’s arm, but nothing happened.

  “Good try. My turn.” Erebus placed a hand on Deimos’s chest, and the entire wall behind him exploded outward, taking him with it. I turned to watch as Deimos and most of my house hit the mud outside. He bounced along until a large tree stopped him.

  “Make him suffer for this. Make him know real fear.” Erebus’s words were said to me with a cold detachment, but his eyes revealed the fury within. He touched me on my head, and the fear and pain that had been coursing through me vanished, replaced with something else. Something much more terrifying. The need to hurt the one who had wronged me.

  I stood up and shook Erebus’s hand. “Thank you.”

  “This meeting between you and me—this one you’ll remember. I’ll make sure of it. Just because this is your memory, that doesn’t mean you can’t change it to suit the moment. The imaginary and the real aren’t so different. One doesn’t erase the other. You’re in charge now. When you want to leave this place, kill him. He’s the anchor holding you both here.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant. Had we spoken before and I couldn’t remember? But I pushed it aside and stepped through the remains of the door and into the howling winds outside.

  As I made my way toward a motionless Deimos, the house itself moved to create steps for me, those parts of the ruined structure vanishing once they had finished with their usefulness. There was no magic here—just Erebus allowing me control over my own mind once more.

  Planks of wood covered the mud until I was standing above Deimos, who was bleeding slightly from his nose.

  “How’d you do that?” he demanded. “This is my domain.”

  He grabbed my hand. And fear awoke in him as he realized there was nothing he could do.

  “This is my mind,” I told him as Deimos released me and scrambled away. “You wanted to fuck around in here so badly—let me show you the sights.”

  I moved quickly and grabbed his hand, crushing it by wrapping it in air and squeezing while I ignored his screams. I released it and the limb was whole once more. I gripped his collar and dragged him to his feet, head-butting him and then slamming the back of his skull against the tree.

  “You should not have done this,” I said as he slumped to the ground. “You should not have shown me these things. No one should be forced to relive the worst moments of their life. No one.” I looked back at my house. “But maybe you should be forced to live someone else’s.” I clicked my fingers, and the world changed. We were no longer outside; there was no longer a storm or mud, or anything I’d loved.

  We were underground in the cellar of a house that belonged to a rich merchant who had worked for Avalon over the years. There was a wooden table beside where I sat, and on it were a collection of bladed instruments of various shapes and sizes. On the opposite side, on an identical table, were two bowls. One held clean water, with a towel beside it, but the other’s liquid was now dark red. I doubted it could truly even be described as water any more.

  I picked up the bowl filled with bloody water and poured it over Deimos, who was strapped to a chair before me. The blood and water mix saturated him, doing little to clean the grime from his naked body. I refilled the bowl with fresh water from a large jug on the floor and then sat back as Deimos gasped while the bloody water ran into the grooves in the floor and out under the wall behind him.

  “Why can’t I see?” Deimos demanded. “What have you done to me?”

  “Calm down,” I said. “I wrapped a cloth over your eyes. I’ll take it off in a minute.”

  “Where am I?”

  I explained about the castle and merchant. “The man who murdered my wife was called Henry. He was in the King’s army. You’re currently occupying his place in my memory. You sort of look like an amalgamation of Henry with your body shape. It’s a weird thing. Anyway, I kept Henry down here for some time. Basically, you’re going to go through the exact same things that Henry did.”

  “Fuck you!” he screamed, bucking against the chair, but it was no use.

  “Henry couldn’t break free. He was human, and so in here you are too. You never should have forced me to do this. But you’re about to live out the worst few weeks of anyone’s life. I won’t make you do it over and over; once should be enough.

  “When we’re done here, you’re going to remember the kind of man I am, the kind of man you threatened and tried to break. I want you to remember what happens to those who cross me. I want you to tell people. Tell everyone what happens when Hellequin is pushed too far.”

  “You’re Hellequin?” he asked, his voice full of fear.

  “You didn’t know?” I was a little surprised. “Well, now you do.” I walked over and removed the damp cloth from his head.

  “It’s so dark in here,” Deimos said after a few seconds.

  “Oh, I should have mentioned. By this point, Henry had already been here a few days.” I removed items from the small jar on the table and placed them in Deimos’s hand, and then I whispered into his ear, “I’d already taken his eyes.”

  Deimos screamed himself hoarse while I picked up a short, sharp blade from the table. I turned to him. “Shall we begin?”

  CHAPTER 40

  It took me a few blinks of my eyes to realize I was back in Earls Court. Deimos was in the fetal position on the floor beside me, half-hiding under a table. His bowels and bladder had both forsaken him.

  “Remember what happened here,” I demanded.

  He started to gaze up at me and stopped, refusing to look any further than my knees, before nodding furiously.

  He’d lived a week of the worst things I’d ever done to a person. He’d felt all of Henry’s pain and suffering as if it were his own, but with the added bonus of being unable to actually die. When I finally put Henry out of his misery, we’d come back to reality. The emotions I’d felt during the episode had been real, and it took me awhile to realize it was just a memory.

  I walked past Deimos as the humans around him began to remember I was prey once again. They hadn’t moved from the time Deimos had forced me to relive my memories, and I doubted more than a few seconds of time had passed in the real world.

  I changed from walking to sprinting within a few steps, and used air magic to tear to pieces the door that Pandora had gone through, flinging them aside as I ran through the doorway and up the stairs.

  The corridors above were mazelike, and I had no idea exactly where Aphrodite was having her meeting.

  I took a moment and calmed myself, trying to listen for any sign of where Pandora had escaped. I heard nothing for a few seconds, and then a gunshot rang out. I ran toward the sound, and although I couldn’t pick out the exact place, due to the confines of the corridors, I at least had a rough direction.

  A second gunshot rang out after a few steps, and I followed the noise down one hallway, toward a blue door. It was easy to spot Pandora through the glass panel on the front of the door, but as I got closer, I noticed it wasn’t Pandora holding the gun, but Selene, who had transformed into her dragon-kin appearance.

  “Selene, no!” I shouted as I barged through t
he door. She glanced at me, a glazed expression on her face. Pandora was in control of her.

  The gun looked awkward and silly in her hand, her talons barely able to hold the weapon and manage the trigger.

  I turned to look at Pandora who was standing in front of a window looking down on the floor of Earls Court. “Stop her,” I demanded.

  “Fuck, you Nate,” Pandora snapped. “Look at them—look at Hera and her cohorts.”

  I glanced over at the far end of the room, where Hera, Ares, Demeter, and Aphrodite all stood, all of them with the same glazed expression on their faces. There were three other middle-aged men, all in suits, who were cowering in the corner. None of them appeared to be under Pandora’s power.

  “Why control them?” I asked.

  “Can’t risk them fighting back,” Pandora said. “Selene here is going to kill all but Hera. Then I’ll release her and let her see what she’s wrought. And then I’m going to kill her myself.”

  “Why Selene? You don’t need to use her.”

  “She can die knowing what she did.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Pandora snapped. “She’s just as bad as them. She joined them, and she hurt you. You should want her dead.”

  “I can’t let you kill anyone here,” I informed her. “And I’m certainly not going to let you use Selene to do it.”

  Pandora stared at me. “You still love her.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the anger and hurt, I still love her. Now let her go.”

  Pandora appeared to consider it for a second. “No. Say ’bye to Ares.”

  I blasted Pandora with a gust of air that threw her out of the window with a crash. Then something unexpected happened: all the people regained their minds.

  Selene blinked twice as I took the gun from her, emptying the magazine and the bullet in the chamber and dropping them in a bin. “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, and her body returned to her human appearance.

  “I’m going to fucking kill her,” Hera roared.