Scorched Shadows (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 7)

by Steve McHugh

  “There’s always time,” Fiona said. “It has to be a trap. Someone could have easily removed the device and be using it to bring people in.”

  “No one else knew,” Viktor said, almost shouting. “No one but me even knew she wore one. Not even her bodyguards knew—she told me that herself.”

  “So why have it?” Fiona asked. “Why wear a tracking device that no one can find unless you get the USB stick, find Viktor, and use it here?”

  “She was going to plant it on someone,” Viktor said, and then regretted it.

  “Who?”

  Viktor shook his head. “Don’t know. I just know she needed to get close to someone to do it, but she vanished before she could.”

  “So, that building—it’s the same psychotic werewolf pack you mentioned earlier?” Remy asked.

  Viktor smiled. “The very same, and if Elaine is in there, you’re going to need a mop and bucket.”

  Fiona moved, and in an instant a blade was pressed against Viktor’s throat. “Did you send her in there?”

  His eyes widened as a thin line of blood began to trickle down toward his neck. “I just told you I didn’t. They’re fucking animals in there. I hate Avalon—they abandoned me—but Elaine had promised me everything I ever wanted. I’d never jeopardize that just to get petty revenge.”

  Fiona removed the knife and stepped back. “I’m going upstairs for a drink.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Morgan said.

  “Why don’t the rest of you go get a drink, too?” Mordred asked. “I’d like to have a little chat with Viktor.”

  “Don’t kill him,” Nabu said.

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Mordred told him.

  That appeared to be enough for Nabu, who left with the others.

  “So, you’re having a shit day,” Mordred said, taking a seat on a nearby dark-brown leather chair. “I’m in your home, your only way out of all of this is in the den of a group of psychopaths, and you’re coming with us to help find Elaine.”

  “The hell I am!” Viktor shouted. “If they find out I was working with Elaine, I’d need to be moved tonight. “

  “Viktor, you’re coming with us. That’s not open to negotiation. You don’t have to step foot in the club until it’s safe, but you are coming. Because I don’t trust you not to.”

  “Trust? You want to talk about trust?” Viktor laughed, a cruel, unpleasant sound. “What’s your angle here?”

  “My angle?”

  “Yeah, you know what I mean. You hate Avalon; you hate the people who work for it. You’ve spent the better part of your life trying to kill everyone and anyone who works there. So, what are you doing here? You expect me to believe that you’ve turned over a new leaf and now you’re friends with Avalon? I call bullshit on that. So, what’s your angle? What are you really after? Are you using those upstairs to get close to Merlin, or is it Arthur? Are you after the big man himself? You want to finish the job after you missed last time?”

  “Wow, you just keep talking, don’t you?” Mordred yawned. “Sorry, you’re one boring man. My angle is nothing. I’m helping people I care about. I’ve had a . . . I guess you could call it a change of perspective on those I used to call my enemies. I’m not here to kill Merlin, or Arthur, or anyone else except for those involved with Elaine’s kidnapping. I’m also not here to be friends with you. You know why I took your arm, you know why I burned your house down, and you know why I killed your friend. You know exactly what you used to be, and I’m not entirely sure that Avalon would be as forgiving about your past exploits as I currently need to be. Honestly, it if were up to me, I’d tell Diana and Fiona and watch them turn you into a man-sized piñata. But we need you in one piece.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” he snapped. “I’m your shot at finding Elaine. Remember that. She trusted me.”

  “No, she didn’t. She needed you—that’s not the same thing.” Mordred watched Viktor for several seconds until the Russian got to his feet and exited the safe room, leaving the computer running so that Mordred could watch the percentage of encryption that had been broken.

  “Did you know I was here?” Fiona asked from the other side of the room.

  “No,” Mordred said, trying not to show his surprise at her suddenly appearing from nowhere.

  “I can make fairly powerful illusions.”

  “You left and came back, I assume.”

  Fiona nodded. “Needed to check you were on the level with us.”

  “You happy now?”

  Fiona shook her head. “What are you keeping from us about Viktor?”

  “Let me ask you a question, Fiona,” Mordred said, getting to his feet and stretching his arms above his head. “Will it ever be enough? If I tell you everything, if I prove to you time and time again that I’m not the man I used to be, will it ever be enough?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest. Viktor was a very bad man, who did very bad things. I was an amoral psychopath who wanted to butcher his way through Avalon, but I had my limits, I guess. Here’s the thing, though: if I tell you, you’re going to want to kill him. And doing that is certainly going to put this mission in jeopardy.”

  “You should still tell us,” Diana said from the entrance to the safe room.

  “She makes a point,” Remy said from beside her. “We wondered where Fiona had walked off to. Wanted to make sure she wasn’t trying to kill you. Which is a sentence I probably should never really have to say about an ally.”

  “Hey, any reason why Viktor was muttering about trust and then ran off out of the front door?” Morgan asked as she joined Remy and Diana at the front of the safe room. She looked around at everyone as they stared at Mordred. “This a standoff or something?”

  “Fucking hell,” Mordred whispered. “Where’s Nabu?”

  “Here,” he said with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a bottle of beer in another. “I was just about to eat something, and everyone vanished.”

  Mordred walked over to the computer and moved the mouse to check that what he was seeing wasn’t a screen saver. “Well, he hasn’t fucked us over and run. He’s just run.”

  “Who is he?” Fiona asked.

  “Elaine trusted Viktor,” Morgan said. “Maybe we should, too.”

  Mordred shook his head. “Elaine promised him she’d keep him safe if he helped her. She used him to run intel; she used him to keep an eye on people. He has a strange moral compass, but I genuinely believe he thinks Elaine was going to stand by him.”

  “Who. Is. Viktor?” Fiona asked without even trying to hide the anger she felt.

  “Viktor was the leader of a small group of people. They lived in a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere, where Avalon personnel could go and rest and get information about new activities in the country. It was a clearinghouse where all of the information from Avalon’s agencies went so it could be given out to their agents. There are a thousand of these small villages in the middle of fucking nowhere all over the world.

  “Viktor used to take that information, which back when I last saw him was via physical mail, or astral projection, or telepathy—you know, the usual. Well, he took that information, and he sold it to the highest bidder, exposing Avalon agents, who they were working for, where they were, and who they answered to. I didn’t really give a shit about this when I first found out, because I didn’t give a shit about much, but two things changed my mind.

  “Firstly, he sold information about me to someone who wanted me dead. Didn’t work out so well, and I was mad about it, but I figured I’d get around to dealing with Viktor sooner or later. The second thing he did was sell information about me to Hera. At the time, I’d been hurt in a fight and was being healed by a young doctor in Finland. He’d just married his wife, and they had two children. They were kind to me when they had no reason to be and believed me when I told them that several Russian soldiers had shot me as I tried to stop them from killing a young boy who stole food.”
<
br />   “It was a lie?” Fiona asked.

  Mordred nodded. “It was. But that small act of kindness was something I hadn’t experienced much of, and considering I was near death, I was in no position to hurt them even if I’d wanted to. Except Hera found out exactly where I was, because the young doctor had spoken to someone in a nearby town about me. I stupidly used my real name when they found me, half-dead, delirious from silver poisoning. Hera sent her people to butcher that family. The things they did to them are not worth repeating, and I was still barely coherent when it happened, but I will always remember their screams. Always. The doctor hid me under a trapdoor in the house, and the men who came for me left empty-handed and decided to destroy the house as they left.

  “I healed alone and in the darkness for a week until I managed to pull myself free from the wreckage. I found the dead family, and I buried them. I dug their graves myself, with shovel and hands, until all four were done. And then I went to Viktor. I threatened him, and he gave me the names of the people Hera sent. After that I killed his friend, burned down his home, and took his arm. I told him if he ever sold intel on people again I’d take one piece for every innocent it killed. And when I was done, I went after Hera’s men.”

  Mordred paused and remembered their screams, their pleas for death as he’d tortured and ripped them to pieces, made them watch as he killed their loved ones, made them dig the graves of people they cared about. “I dealt with my grief and rage by doing the only thing I knew how. I allowed the monster inside of me to have free rein. From there I discovered intel that would later lead me to work for Mars Warfare and Ares. I could use my position to finally kill Hera, but she already knew I was working there and I hear found the whole thing quite entertaining, even if she hadn’t told Ares any of this. In case you didn’t know, Ares is an idiot.”

  When no one spoke for several seconds, Mordred started to hum. The humming relaxed him, and he felt incredibly uncomfortable with the silence that followed his confession.

  “Viktor betrayed Avalon,” Fiona said.

  Mordred nodded. “Elaine knows this, by the way. I told her not long after it happened. I wanted her to know the kinds of people Avalon employed. It didn’t work, because Elaine isn’t a homicidal idiot, and I was. But I hadn’t expected her to use him for her own gain. That was definitely not on the agenda.”

  “So, Viktor’s run off to do what, hide?” Morgan asked.

  “No, my guess is he’s gone to whoever will offer him the best hope of survival,” Mordred replied. “Elaine is missing, and I’m not exactly high on the list of people he trusts, so he’s gone to someone who probably wants information on us.”

  “Hera?” Diana asked.

  “A Hera proxy,” Mordred said.

  “The werewolves,” Morgan said. “He’s gone to tell them we’re coming.”

  “That about sums it up, yes.”

  “We’re still going to that nightclub, though, right?” Remy asked. “Because if so, we’re going to need more weapons, and I’ve searched this house and found sweet fuck all. Unless you like the idea of going into battle with a potato peeler, which I have to admit would be kind of funny for about the first thirty seconds.”

  “Someone like Viktor is going to have weaponry,” Mordred said.

  “Why not screw with the computer before he ran away?” Fiona asked.

  “No time. Either that or he wants to hedge his bets. If we make it through the nightclub, it’s almost a certainty that he’ll say he was helping us out by going to the werewolves as a diversion for us to assault the place.”

  “Doesn’t deal with the lack-of-ordnance problem,” Remy said.

  “What’s in the vault?” Diana asked. “Any chance he has weapons in there?”

  Mordred nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

  They all left the safe room and descended the staircase onto the floor below, only to be greeted by a single door with a numerical pad beside it.

  Remy walked up to the door and tapped it with his knuckles, causing it to make a metallic sound. “Anyone know his code? Because I think this might be several inches of reinforced door.”

  Nabu placed his hand against the metal. “Reinforced titanium.”

  “How do you know that?” Fiona asked.

  “My ability is to absorb information and understand it. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be from books; it can also be from items. Things like computers or anything with multiple working parts takes me much longer to understand, but by using items I can figure things out quickly. While there are locks inside this door, the main problem is the runes that are designed to withstand magical force. I sense the number pad is the only way to get inside without serious time and effort on our part. And it’s an eight-digit code, meaning there are millions of combinations.”

  Mordred walked over to the number pad, punched in eight digits, and the door slowly moved open.

  “How’d you know that?” Nabu asked.

  “The most important person in Viktor’s life is Viktor. He used his date of birth.”

  “You know his date of birth?” Morgan asked.

  “I studied people before I worked with them,” Mordred said quickly, not adding that it gave him leverage over them if needed.

  The vault was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, and had rows of glass cabinets on either side. At the far end of the vault were ten metal cases, each one six feet high and three feet wide. Mordred ignored the glass cabinets and walked straight through to the cases, with Remy and Diana beside him.

  “There’s enough cash here to start your own country,” Nabu said after opening one of the glass cabinets and going through the boxes it contained.

  “Diamonds over here,” Fiona said.

  “Gold in this one,” Morgan replied. “There’s millions and millions of pounds’ worth of gems and precious metals here. That’s not including the cash.”

  Mordred pulled open the first case while Diana and Remy did the same with different ones.

  “That’s a lot of weapons,” Remy said. “Rifles, handguns, shotguns.”

  “I’ve got some grenades,” Diana said. “And by some, I mean a lot.”

  Mordred stared at the submachine guns and rifles that had been neatly hung in the case. Below it stacks of ammunition sat in their various calibers, each one in a different-colored box.

  “Take what we need,” Diana said. “Leave the money and gems—we don’t need cash.”

  “No,” Mordred said, and then realized he’d said it more forcefully than he meant to. He turned to Diana. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap, but no. Take everything here, including money and gems, up to the front room of the house. Stack it all there.”

  “Why?” Diana asked.

  “Because we might actually need cash to bribe people with, and diamonds and gold work better for people who don’t like to be traced,” Mordred lied.

  “Anything else?” Fiona asked.

  “Yeah, I really think having all the weapons out in the open gives us a better handle on how much we have and what we can use. And it’s going to be damn funny when Viktor comes home, if he comes home, and finds his vault empty.” That part was at least true.

  When they were about halfway through clearing out Viktor’s vault, Polina and her LOA agents entered the house. After a brief explanation of what was going on, they helped with the relocation effort. Polina in particular seemed to find the whole idea incredibly therapeutic.

  It took a while to move everything out of the vault, up two flights of stairs, and into one of the living rooms, but when it was done, the room was almost completely full of enough riches and weapons to take over a small nation. Mordred had spent the time at the computer waiting for the files to decrypt. He didn’t want to leave the USB drive running while they were away just in case, so despite his better judgment, he removed the drive and placed it in his pocket. Hopefully he’d get a chance to look through it again.

  “So, now we need to go to the club,” Remy said.


  “Take Viktor’s guns,” Polina said. “No magic can be used in the public parts of the club.”

  “So, we need to stop their rune work,” Fiona said.

  “And you’re going to have to fight your way through a lot of bad people,” Polina said.

  “Good,” Mordred said, picking up a silver dagger and placing it in his belt. “I could use the stress relief.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Nate Garrett

  Tartarus wasn’t exactly all fire and brimstone. It was somewhat dark and foreboding when you first entered, as a thick mist rolled over the nearby lake, blocking out a lot of the sunlight. After the mists, and the lake, the realm was quite beautiful, with rolling hills and stunning mountains. Some called it paradise, and some called it a prison—it very much depended on your point of view.

  The inhabitants of Tartarus were guarded by griffins, who walk around on two feet, not the four of the stories, although the top half is still an eagle, and the bottom a lion. They’re one of the few species I’d ever met that could fly, with their wingspan easily the size of two grown men. They’re the top of the food chain in Tartarus, and few things—including the prisoners here—are stupid enough to try and fight them. Not the least because magic has exactly zero effect on them.

  “Shouldn’t there be a guard here?” I asked Sky as she walked through the realm gate.

  “Yes, there should be,” she said. “Let’s go see if we can find Charon.”

  The four of us walked down toward the pier nearby, where Charon would hopefully be waiting with his boat. Unfortunately there was no one there.

  “Okay, this is weird,” I said. “There are a few empty boats there. How many does Charon have?”

  “A few,” Sky said. “We thought keeping one at both ends would be a good idea just in case we needed to get across in a hurry again.”

  “He’s probably on the other side,” Selene said. “Should we just take a boat and row over?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Zamek said, rushing forward, but I put my arm out to stop him.

  “Don’t drink the water. Not even a mouthful—it ages you in seconds.”