Moscow Mule: Phantom Queen Book 5 - A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries)

by Shayne Silvers

  Lisandra spotted me and waved, casually.

  Rasputin, for the first time since I’d met him, looked well and truly pissed to have been interrupted yet again, as if everything we’d done up until now had been frivolous in comparison. “That I will agree to. Kill them all.”

  Chapter 42

  I rushed the nearby soldiers before they could act on Rasputin’s command, though that didn’t stop either of them from shooting at me. In the end, I barely had enough time to marvel at the fact that their silver bullets bounced harmlessly off my body before my momentum carried me into the two men. I used that momentum to pinball off one and to shove the other, forcing both momentarily off-balance. Of course, it helped that they’d expected to gun me down; their confusion made them slow. Sloppy, even. If I’d been so inclined, I might have filled them in on what it meant to be Fae—including the fact that they’d have had better odds of damaging me with regular bullets than silver ones, but I simply wasn’t in the sharing mood.

  Big surprise.

  Instead, I pivoted, rotating my hips, then used all that built-up kinetic energy to fire off a vicious left cross. I visualized punching—not the soldier’s face—but the open air behind it, putting everything I had into the blow. Of course, I hadn’t punched anyone with everything I had since learning I had Faeling blood in me, which is likely why even I was astounded by the result: the soldier rocked back on his heels, his lower jaw hanging loose, attached only by thin flaps of skin, blood running down his shattered face to soak his uniform. He fell to his knees, the light in his eyes fading so quickly it was like I could see his soul leaving his body before he toppled over. I stared at my fist, covered in the soldier’s blood, and felt a wave of nausea roll through my gut.

  Thankfully, before I could dwell too long on what I’d just done, the soldier I’d shoved clambered to his feet and fired at me—as if that strategy would prove more effective the second time around. I reached out without thinking, grabbed the rifle, and bent the barrel. It exploded almost instantly in his hands, forcing me to duck and cover my eyes. When I looked up, the soldier was trying to pry a six-inch shard of metal from his own throat. It wasn’t silver, so it probably wouldn’t kill him right away, but it did look remarkably uncomfortable. If he shifted, it might have been dislodged quicker, but there’s a certain degree of panic that sets in when you can’t breathe that stops people from thinking. Even trained soldiers have a hard time staying calm when there’s a foreign object lodged in their esophagus. “Here,” I said, “let me get that for ye.” I wrapped a hand around the shard, yanked it free, and then shoved it into the soldier’s face, aiming directly for his eyes.

  He screamed in agony, and I realized I felt nothing.

  Nothing, that is, except dim satisfaction.

  The nausea from earlier had disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by the knowledge that these men worked for the person responsible for Felix and Felicia’s deaths, that—if we let them—they would have executed all of us at the behest of a fucking psychopath, and that—several months ago—they’d come to kidnap Christoff and murder his children.

  At that moment, I realized that ever since I’d found out that I wasn’t entirely human, I’d been worried about my humanity. Hell, I’d lost sleep wondering if what I’d given up to do what I did—my compassion, my faith in people—had ever really been there at all. But, at that moment, staring down the would-be child killer as he tore the shard from his eyes, revealing a hideously mangled face, I realized I wasn’t the monster I feared I might be.

  I was the one who slew the monsters.

  I drew the pistol with the silver ammo, aimed, and put three rounds into the soldier’s chest. His screams died abruptly, leaving an almost peaceful silence behind. Peaceful, that is, until I realized that the silence was more due to the fact that I’d been exposed to too many gunshots in too short a span in too close a proximity to hear as well as I should have. I fidgeted with my ears and turned, only to find Dimitri finishing off the second soldier who’d held him at gunpoint, his arm inside the man’s stomach, angled upward. I knew an instant before Dimitri acted what he was intending to do and managed to look away before he took the soldier’s heart.

  That wasn’t a vision I needed tucked away inside my head.

  I slew the monsters, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have nightmares.

  “I need to get to my people,” Dimitri called before taking off towards Natasha and two others who stood back to back, fending off a fully shifted werebear soldier. Everywhere I looked, I saw it was the same; the soldiers had given up all pretense of taking us down in their human forms, preferring instead the size and strength advantage their werebear forms afforded them. I had to admit, it was an impressive display, not to mention a sensible tactic; each of the half-dozen or so soldiers who remained had shifted into Kamchatka bears—gargantuan creatures that could stand up to ten-feet-tall on their hind legs and routinely topped out at 1400 pounds.

  All, that is, except one.

  Mikhail, their Captain, shuffled sideways in a low fighting stance, angling his body away from his opponent—a woman who it took me far too long to recognize. I began running before I could even think about it, tearing past several skirmishes in the process. I saw Leo, Lakota, and a host of other inmates taking on one of the bears, each of them wearing orange jumpsuits and muddy sneakers. They were luring the bear forward, strategically, as if they had some sort of plan in place.

  Jimmy, it seemed, had opted to go to Serge’s rescue; the two squared off against the werebears that had been holding Serge down. Both Jimmy and Serge looked impressive, if not downright dangerous; Serge gnashed his gnarly yellow teeth, his glowing green eyes filled with hate, while Jimmy simply radiated violence, his long, lanky arms covered in dark fur, claws hanging from his fingertips like Bowie knives, standing a foot taller than any man I’d ever met. In fact, while the werebears may have had size and reach advantages on both the skinwalker and the Silver Fox, it seemed as though neither were interested in directly engaging the duo.

  Christoff, I saw, had moved away from the fighting with Warren and Lisandra. The psychic and his leggy girlfriend had the man supported between them, and I could see Lisandra running her hands along the older man’s body, trying to mend wounds I knew I’d never want to see. I wondered, briefly, where his wife was...but—after even the briefest look at the Russian man’s anguished face—I think I had my answer. Othello, meanwhile, had rushed to her cousin’s side, and was even now cradling his body, fishing through her bag as though something inside might save him.

  Which left only one other person who could have been squaring off against Mikhail. Only one other person capable enough to make a seasoned soldier like Mikhail that nervous.

  Hilde.

  The closer I got, the more of her I could see, and the more worried I became. The legendary Valkyrie—one of the mythical warrior women who once claimed the lives of those who died on the battlefield in the name of Odin—looked like complete shit. Her hair, once a vibrant blonde, had dulled to something straw-colored and thin. Her cheeks were sallow, the muscles of her arms present, but so lean I thought I could see her tendons flaring beneath the skin. And yet there was an aura of violence around her so thick it kept me from rushing to save the day, as if I might get caught in the middle of her fight and end up broken by accident.

  “I never thought I would get to see you outside a cage again,” Mikhail was saying.

  “Hoped, you mean,” Hilde replied. She wore the same orange jumpsuit as the others, but she’d torn off the blouse, revealing a white tank top that hugged her too-lean frame. She clutched a thin metal bar in her hand, both ends ragged, as if she’d had to pry it free from both top and bottom. If I had to guess, I’d have said she’d pried one of the bars from her cell out of the wall; it sounded like something she’d do.

  Mikhail grunted. “I broke you once, suka. I will do it again.”

  “You never broke me,” Hilde replied. “Beating is not breakin
g. No one breaks a Valkyrie, least of all a man.” She rushed forward, swinging the metal bar at Mikhail’s head. He deflected it with a blade, but Hilde was already moving into the opening she’d made; she backhanded the Captain with her free hand, sending him back with blood spewing from his nose. Before he could react, she flipped the metal bar in her hand and drove it down, impaling Mikhail’s foot. But the Captain was still a professional and wouldn’t be taken down so easily; he swiped out blindly with his blade even as Hilde delivered her blow, catching her across the chest. The Valkyrie danced backwards, one arm pressed against the wound, cursing in a language I’d never heard before. Mikhail, meanwhile, had withdrawn the metal bar, eyes glinting with hate and the promise of pain.

  He limped forward, swinging the metal bar as if testing the weight. “I will make you pay for that.”

  “You Russian men are all talk,” Hilde said, looking remarkably confident for someone without a weapon, bleeding profusely from a wicked-looking knife wound.

  A low growl issued from Mikhail’s throat, and his eyes shifted. His harsh, angular face began to transform, the lower jaw narrowing, nose jutting forward as it turned black, fur sprouting up along his cheeks and forehead like grass growing in a time lapse video. The metal bar hit the ground, forgotten, as Mikhail grew and grew. His clothes were torn from him, even the Kevlar vest snapping free as it reached its limit. This time, when Mikhail moved forward, he did not limp, he lumbered, towering so tall over Hilde she had to crane her neck to look up at him. The Captain roared triumphantly and raised a gigantic paw as if planning to take Hilde out with one swipe. The Valkyrie raised both arms, prepared to defend herself.

  But I was afraid I couldn’t take that chance.

  Mikhail jerked back in pain as the first of my bullets struck, taking the bastard in the shoulder. Not a kill shot. I cursed. The trouble was—since I knew jack shit about bear anatomy—the best I could do was aim for the werebear’s head. Sadly, my aim with a pistol at this distance wasn’t good enough to land a clean headshot. Which meant I had to fire a few more rounds if I wanted to do any real damage.

  So that’s what I did.

  I stepped forward, firing two-handed into Mikhail’s hulking body. Each shot earned a reaction, including a pained scream. Soon, the sound of my gun going off and Mikhail’s cries formed a sort of two-part harmony, synchronizing to become an almost hypnotic melody. Basically, it was music to my fucking ears. So much so, in fact, that before I knew it I was standing level with Hilde, my gun clicking empty. Mikhail lay on his side, still breathing, but otherwise incapacitated. His chest rose and fell, but every breath was labored. Pained. Hilde rested a hand on my forearm.

  “I would have handled it,” she said. “But thank you.”

  “He’s still breathin’,” I replied. I turned to look at that emaciated face, those sunken eyes. Part of me wondered what had happened to Hilde since I’d seen her last, but another part of me—the part of me that still valued my sanity—never wanted to find out. “Handle that,” I suggested.

  Hilde’s eyes widened a bit at whatever she saw in my face, but she nodded. She withdrew her arm, and I saw the flesh of her chest had already begun to heal. Not as quickly as that creature’s had, but enough that I knew she wasn’t in any real danger. She fetched the metal bar from the dirt and crossed over to the injured werebear. The beast looked up at her with mournful, pain-filled eyes, far more pitiable as an animal than he’d ever been as a person. Hilde plunged the bar into the bear’s skull and jimmied it, scrambling the brain, then thrust it through until it sunk into the dirt. The bar wasn’t silver, but—if you included the damage he’d taken from my bullets—I figured it was enough.

  A few seconds later, the bear’s breathing stopped.

  Hilde glanced back at me, a grim smile playing on her lips, but then froze.

  I whirled, warned by her startled expression, but my knee-jerk reaction didn’t save me.

  Not this time.

  Chapter 43

  The creature, the thing, dragged me away by the hair while I kicked and screamed and cursed. Its strength was appalling; no matter how hard I dug in my heels, we never slowed. Hilde had tried to make a grab for me, but the monster had merely swatted her aside. Had she been armed, clad in her incredible armor, things might have been different, but as it was, the blow had knocked the poor, malnourished Valkyrie out cold.

  I drew my last remaining gun—the pistol I’d reserved for any would-be Fae nasty out there who we might have run into—and fired blind, aiming for any part of the creature I could find. At best, I hoped iron bullets might kill the damn thing. But frankly, I would have settled for it letting go of my fucking hair. There’s nothing worse, nothing more degrading, than being pulled around by one’s hair during a fight. Don’t believe me? Try watching two catty women go at it in a bar sometime, and be sure to pay particular attention to how they use each other’s hair like handles to drag and yank and hold each other’s face in place for the next punch. Personally, I preferred arm bars and wrist locks to hair pulling; at least my methods worked like a charm on both genders.

  Unfortunately, when the creature finally did stop, it had nothing to do with being shot at; my gun had clicked empty long before that. Before I could react, the monster reached back and drew me forward, raising me under both arms like you might a toddler who’s contaminated her diaper—which put me a few feet above Rasputin’s head. He stared up at me with those too-wide eyes, scraggly beard trailing down the front of his body, hiding his neck from view. He no longer looked angry. Merely curious. “I believe my intelligence regarding you is outdated, Miss MacKenna.”

  I squirmed, trying to free myself from the creature’s grasp to no avail. I briefly considered spitting into the conjuror’s face, on principle, but I didn’t like my odds. I’d seen this thing rip out Felicia’s heart, which meant I couldn’t make a move against Rasputin until I was sure his pet wasn’t a threat. So, for once, I went for the least aggressive option I could think of: I talked. “Why d’ye say that?” I asked.

  “I was under the impression you were able to negate magic, to some degree. A very useful talent, especially for someone in your line of work. But it seems that is not the case.” Rasputin waved a hand, and I realized we were standing next to the body of the soldier I’d killed with my bare hand. Where the hell was everyone, I wondered? Still dealing with their respective werebears? Or had Rasputin delayed them all with something worse than what held me?

  Either way, it seemed I was on my own, for now.

  “T’ings change,” I said. “Why d’ye care?”

  “In some ways, it is immaterial, I will admit. I suppose I could argue that—when you are truly immortal—curiosity becomes a defining principle in one’s existence. But the truth is I had hoped to develop a working relationship with you. Anichka, your Othello, does not appreciate my methods. She always had a strong sense of moral justice. By all accounts, however, you are more pragmatic.”

  “Give me a gun, and I’ll show ye how pragmatic I am,” I said, voice thick with fake charm.

  “I understand that you have come to see me as your enemy,” he replied, nodding sanctimoniously. “And, seeing as how your reputed abilities have been disproven, I doubt there is much else we have to say to each other. But I must admit wishing to know what you are before I am forced to kill you.”

  “Forced?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Yes. I believe it will be necessary if I am to make Anichka hand over the key. She has become a very stubborn woman.”

  An idea struck me, and I knew I had a way to keep Rasputin talking long enough for one of my friends to come to the rescue, if he’d only take the bait. “She’s become immortal,” I said.

  Rasputin frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “I saw her die before ye came. One of Dimitri’s vampires broke her neck, thinkin’ she was workin’ for ye.” I didn’t bother explaining that I had no idea what had really happened when I’d seen Natasha break Othello’s neck,
or whether I’d actually seen Othello die. But I let the truth of what I’d thought I’d seen show, all the same. “She came back, same as ye. No wounds, nothin’.”

  The conjuror studied me, thoughtfully. “You believe this.”

  I nodded.

  “That is...excellent.” Rasputin smiled so wide it made him seem even more manic—more insane—than I’d thought possible.

  “Excellent, how?” I asked, disturbed by his reaction. Honestly, I’d have thought he’d be pissed. I mean, most egomaniacs hate it when you copy their best trick, and here Rasputin was, looking like a child woken up on Christmas morning.

  “Because of the key you have brought, can you not see?” Rasputin asked, reaching out to snatch my arm, his voice fervent, even excited. When he realized I had no idea what he was talking about, he let go. “I will use the key to unlock the Gates of Heaven that God barred so long ago. From then on, all who perish may ascend and claim Heaven as their own, regardless of crime or valor.”

  I gaped at him. “Ye want everyone to go to Heaven? That’s why you’re doin’ this?”

  “Indeed. I have dedicated my life and traded away my soul for this one thing. But to hold the Gates of Heaven open, someone must be willing to stand watch over them for an eternity. Someone living, removed from the afterlife and all its promise. Don’t you see? Together, Anichka and I could hold the gates open wide for all time.”

  “You’re fuckin’ insane,” I whispered.

  Rasputin’s smile dimmed in increments until he looked exactly as he had when we first met: mild-mannered, aside from those alien thoughts flickering behind his eyes. “Perhaps. But when I traded my soul for this power, my path was already chosen. Tell me, Miss MacKenna, what purpose guides your life? What cause would you sacrifice everything for?”