Scorched Shadows (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 7)

by Steve McHugh

  Mordred moved his fingers slightly, and the water froze in place, pinning the werewolf’s legs to the floor. He roared in anger and clawed at the ice, ripping off huge chunks that, with no magic controlling them, quickly vanished. Mordred sprinted forward, wrapping thick ice around his fist and driving it into the side of the werewolf’s head.

  The werewolf swiped back at Mordred, who blocked the blow with a shield of air and quickly countered by slamming a blade of ice into the werewolf’s leg, pinning him to the ground. Mordred dodged a swipe and pinned the werewolf’s arm to the wall with another blade of ice.

  “Does that not hurt?” Mordred asked.

  “Gut you,” the werewolf said, frothing at the mouth.

  “You’re on something. Some sort of suppressant to stop pain? It’ll wear off soon—that’s one of the problems with having a healing ability as fast as yours. Also, those ice blades will stay there until I remove the magic, so you’re not going anywhere.” Mordred stepped around the werewolf, keeping his distance, and saw that both Fiona and Diana had killed their werewolves.

  “You’re all alone,” Mordred said, and the werewolf turned as best as it could to look at him. “I’m going to be honest with you.” Mordred raised his arm, and red glyphs ignited across his arms, moving over the blue ones for his water elemental magic. “This is mind magic. Do you know what that does?”

  The werewolf said nothing but continued to stare at Mordred’s arm.

  “Right, well, basically it means I can turn your brain into a big puddle of mush. I can reach in there, grab everything I can, and shake it like there’s no tomorrow, or I could . . .” Mordred paused, thinking for a second, before a smile spread across his lips and he clapped his hands together. “I’m going to make you think you’re a poodle. No, a miniature poodle—that’s perfect. I’ve never done this before, but if it works you’re going to look lovely at next year’s Crufts dog show. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll end up someone who really likes drooling while staring into space.”

  “What do you want?” the werewolf asked as Diana leaned up against the wall beside it, still in her werebear beast form.

  “How’d you get up here?”

  “There’s a hidden door right inside the coatroom. There’s a stairwell behind it.”

  “How many down there?”

  “Four or five.”

  “Viktor?”

  The werewolf nodded.

  “What’s your kill number?”

  The werewolf paused, glancing between the three people watching him. “I forget.”

  “Bullshit. How many have you killed?”

  “Forty-one.”

  Mordred drew the silver blade and slit the werewolf’s throat in one smooth motion. “And that’s where it ends.”

  The sounds of more gunfire came through the nearby door. “We need to go,” Mordred said.

  “Can you really do that?” Fiona asked, her anxiety still evident, but joined with more than a little fear. “Melt someone’s brain?”

  Mordred shook his head. “My mind magic is purely defensive. No telepathy, or telekinesis, or anything else that allows me to manipulate others. It’s purely so that no one can mess with my mind or make me do anything I don’t want to do. Magic isn’t exactly an easy thing to research, but sometimes I think that the omega magic allows you to only do the things you really need to be able to do at the time of its activation.”

  The three ran back into the main area of the club, where several more werewolves were dead on the floor, with a couple more seriously wounded. Polina’s men had taken casualties, too, with more than one unmoving on the floor.

  Morgan and several of her golems threw two werewolves around as if they were bags of sugar while Nabu drove a sword into the heart of a werewolf, pulling the blade out and using it to remove the hand of another nearby attacker.

  “We’ve got this,” Diana said. “Go find Viktor.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Fiona said.

  “No, you can’t,” Mordred told her. “You’re too close to this. Too emotional.”

  “My husband might be down there,” she snapped.

  “And if you go down there like this, what happens to you?” Mordred asked, keeping calm.

  Fiona got in Mordred’s face. “He’s my husband.”

  “And that’s why you’re staying here.”

  “Mordred’s right,” Diana said. “You can’t go down there. You won’t be helping anyone. If Alan is there, Mordred will find him.”

  “If he’s there, you’d best get him out alive,” Fiona said.

  Mordred ignored the threat in her voice and ran across the dance floor, using his air magic to fling one of the werewolves aside so that he could leap over the counter of the cloakroom and through the open door inside it. He took the stairs two at a time until he reached a door several dozen feet beneath the club area. He blasted the door apart with a gust of air magic, stepping through the remains and into a gray corridor that led off to the right and left. There were several doors down either side, and Mordred cursed the fact that it was going to take him forever to search everything.

  He walked to the nearest door—a white door identical to all the others Mordred could see on the floor—and found it unlocked. He pushed it open and discovered three doors inside the dark-gray-tiled room. He went to each door in turn and found that two of them led into new, albeit identical, rooms, while the third door took him out into the opposite side of the hallway from where he’d started.

  “They made a maze,” Mordred said to himself. “Great, they’re psychotic werewolf architects.”

  “Hello, Mordred,” a voice sounded from hidden speakers around the floor. “You’re probably wondering what’s happening.”

  “I’m wondering why I don’t just tear through this place like it’s made of paper.”

  “We can hear you, just so you know.”

  “Good. Go fuck yourselves.”

  “Funny little sorcerer. This is my playpen. I bring humans down here and force them to run the maze. If they can get through it to where you stand, they can use the door you came through to escape. Want to guess how many escape?”

  “They’re just opening doors, so I’m going to guess all of them. Unless you pick people who are unable to open doors, but that’s a really small population. Maybe you put key emblems on the doors like Resident Evil. You know if you do that, I’m going to find those keys and make you eat them. I hate those bloody puzzles.”

  “Do you ever shut up? I assure you it’s not so easy to escape when one of my pack is chasing them.”

  “Ah, Daria, it is you. And you are in charge. You know I’m going to find you, and I’m going to be really annoyed if I have to run around this stupid maze. Just give me Viktor, and tell me where Elaine is, and I’m almost certain I’ll let you live.”

  Daria laughed. “I’ve left you a surprise in the maze. Think you can find it?”

  “I hate it when psychopaths think they’re funny.” Mordred opened a nearby door and walked into the room beyond. Another identical room, and another three doors. Mordred really wanted to punch someone.

  He did this for a few minutes, leaving the doors he’d gone through open as he made his way into the maze, finding himself in a dead end on more than one occasion. He got fed up at one point and tried to destroy the walls and doors with air magic, but the air harmlessly dissipated. There were splatters of blood in more than one room, and claw marks in a few. The werewolves hunted in here. Mordred wondered if the enclosed fear that the victims must have been going through somehow made the hunt all the sweeter. The thought made Mordred feel even more anger toward the pack.

  He eventually opened a door that led to a room identical to all the others, except for the man tied to a chair in the middle. He was bathed in blood, with dozens of cuts and wounds over his naked body. He whimpered slightly at the sound of the door opening.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Mordred said. “I’m going to try and get you out of here.”
Mordred moved around the man and used his air magic to cut through the plastic ties holding the man’s limbs to the chair.

  The man pulled up the blindfold and stared at Mordred.

  Mordred had seen that expression more than once on people who just realized who he was. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Gareth Borne. I came to Moscow with Elaine. I was one of her security team.”

  “Where’s Elaine?”

  “They took her. The tracking device was on her earring, and one of the werewolves tore it off her and threw it on the floor. I picked it up and . . . and took it.”

  “You swallowed it, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Not at first. At first they just left me in my cell, so I just held it in my mouth. It needs contact with a living person to work.”

  “They tortured you, you swallowed it, and now I’m here.”

  “Elaine said you’d come for her. She was going to use the tracking device to watch someone else.”

  “Yep, that’s me, the happy guy who just traipsed across a continent to find someone who happened to be you. Where did they take Elaine?”

  “Siberia.”

  Mordred put his head in his hands. “Are you shitting me? Siberia is a damn big place. Want to narrow it down a little?”

  Gareth shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Okay, what are you?”

  “I’m a fire elemental. I’m four hundred years old, so I know what I’m doing.”

  “Why didn’t you break free?”

  “They forced me to swallow a small stone. It had a glyph on it. It was only about the size of a Tylenol tablet, but I can’t access my power at all. They’ve forced me to take a new one every day for the week I’ve been here.”

  “Great, so you’re useless until you take a shit. I’m not sure we have that long. You got any idea where the exit is?”

  “No, but there’s something you should know.”

  “And that is?”

  The door behind Mordred slammed shut, followed by a hissing noise as the room became sealed. A second later a noise from above sounded like someone switching on the central heating, and soon Gareth started choking. Mordred immediately mixed his water and air magical glyphs, just before Gareth dropped to his knees. A second later he was unconscious on the floor.

  “That’s not going to work,” Mordred called out. “Daria, this is pointless.” He waited for a few seconds before raising his arms. “You don’t know much about sorcerers, I assume. No? Well, a few of us can mix our elements. It’s very exciting; fire and air makes lightning, water and earth makes these awesome little golem things, and earth and fire does magma. Amazing stuff really, but it’s all very flashy. Air and water is a little less flashy, but sort of more useful in my current circumstances. It lets me breathe. Anywhere. In any situation. A gas-filled room, in water, in a vacuum—I can breathe and talk just like normal. Funny when you think about it. I’m sure you didn’t know I could do that, but now you do, so you might want to forgo the gas, as it’s basically just wasting money for you at this point.”

  Mordred glanced down at an unmoving Gareth. He took his pulse and found nothing. “You didn’t need to do that,” Mordred said.

  “Funny, though, isn’t it,” Daria said. “Angry yet, Mordred?”

  Mordred walked over to the far door and placed a hand on it. The dwarven runes on the door made it impossible for his magic to open it, but that just made him angrier. “Open the fucking door.”

  “Let’s wait, shall we.”

  Mordred closed his eyes and resigned himself to what was going to happen next. He walked back to Gareth and placed his hand on his chest, allowing his light magic to try and heal him, but nothing happened. Mordred needed to be sure; he needed to be totally certain that Gareth was already dead.

  “Isn’t that just wasting your time?” Daria asked.

  Mordred removed the dagger he’d kept with him and slit Gareth’s throat, cutting through the artery and placing his hands on the fresh blood that spilled from it. Gareth was dead, so it didn’t pump freely, but there was enough for it to meet his needs. He’d considered using his own blood, but using someone else’s was more potent, and he didn’t want to exhaust himself by using his own energy to power his magic.

  When his hands were covered in Gareth’s blood, Mordred walked back over to the door and used the blood to paint a rune on it. “Open it,” he said. “Last chance.”

  “Do your worst, Mordred.”

  The fact that his magic was useless against the walls and doors suggested that the runes had been placed inside them, which, without knowing exactly where they were, and what rune was used, meant that it would have been impossible to use the correct dwarven rune to counteract whatever Daria and her people had placed there. But Nate had spent some time teaching Mordred some of the more rudimentary original dwarven runes. Specifically one to increase the power of whatever runes were close to it. It was a rune that absorbed magical energy, but pouring too much in caused both the original runes and any rune close to it to explode.

  Mordred used the blood on his hands to power his own magic before using the blood to draw the rune on the door. Once done, he poured more and more into the rune he’d drawn until it flashed and exploded. Mordred wrapped himself in a dense shield of air, stopping the explosion as the entire wall and door separating him from the next room vanished. The shock wave picked Mordred off the ground and flung him back over the chair in the center of the room.

  “What have you done?” Daria screamed.

  The dust settled, and Mordred saw that several rooms beyond were now missing large parts of their walls. He got to his feet and cracked his knuckles, removing the shield and considering using his water magic to wash his hands but deciding against it.

  “Daria, I see a metal door in there. Is that an exit from this place?”

  “You’ve destroyed it all!” she continued to shriek.

  “Daria, can you hear me?”

  “Fuck you, Mordred. I’m going to rend the flesh from your bones.”

  Mordred smiled. “Excellent, it’ll save me the bother of having to search for you.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Mordred

  Mordred kicked the door in and discovered that it led to a long corridor with a set of lift doors at one end, and a door to another stairwell halfway down. He descended the stairs and went through the door at the bottom, into another hallway—although one with black tiles and dark-red walls. It had only two doors along it, so Mordred opened the first, which led into another staircase, presumably one that went around the giant maze above. He wondered if he had time to go back to the club level and kill the werewolf for making him go through the maze but decided it could wait. Someone else needed to feel his ire first.

  He opened the second door and stepped into a massive open room with several couches, and a pool table in the center. A TV larger than any Mordred had seen before hung on the far wall, and there were dozens of beanbag chairs dotted around, along with an even greater number of beer bottles. There were more doors along the wall opposite him, and adjacent to where he stood an open door showed a large kitchen.

  A werewolf already in his beast form left the kitchen and growled.

  “You all live down here, I guess,” Mordred said. “I assume those doors lead to bedrooms and bathrooms, that kind of thing. It strikes me more as a club for parties than anything else.”

  The werewolf pounced but didn’t make it half the distance before a whip of air struck it in the chest, wrapping itself around the werewolf’s torso, crushing it. Mordred removed the air, walked over to him, and punched a blade of ice through the werewolf’s throat, expanding the blade until he’d decapitated it.

  Mordred checked the kitchen but, apart from a particularly vicious-looking potato peeler on the counter, found nothing of note. He tried the door closest to him, which led to another large room, although this one appeared to hold only bookshelves, computers, and large piles of cash. The next door along led to a
nother hallway, while the third and fourth just opened to rooms full of pillows and beds.

  “Because every werewolf pack needs a good orgy room,” Daria said over the loudspeaker.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you still there?” Mordred asked, exasperated from having to put up with the disembodied voice.

  “I want you to know that there’s a gift coming for you. I hope you enjoy it. I know I will.”

  Mordred waited in the middle of the room for whatever was about to appear but after ten seconds wondered if there was anything, or if Daria was just trying to get inside his head. A few seconds later the door to the hallway opened. A young woman walked into the room. She wore leather armor with what appeared to be runes drawn on it. She was close to Mordred’s height, with short gray hair. She carried a pair of daggers that she tapped almost absentmindedly against one another.

  “Hello, Mordred,” Daria said. “Surprise.”

  “So, I assume you’re the boss fight?”

  Daria nodded. “That’s one way of putting it. If we’d met under other circumstances, I might feel bad about what I’m going to do to you.”

  “If we’d met under other circumstances, I’d have killed you already. Whereabouts in Siberia are Elaine and the rest of her people?”

  “You mean those who came looking for her, or the ones she was with when we took her? The ones who were with Elaine when we took her died here. Those who came looking for her—we sent them to Siberia. Do you know how we grabbed her?”

  “Viktor told you, I assume.”

  Daria smiled. “Not Elaine. Those I worked with grabbed her. They brought them all here for safekeeping, until they were ready to take Elaine to Siberia. But the people who came looking for her. Well, that’s a different story, isn’t it? Turns out that money can buy allegiance. At least where Viktor is concerned. And we were so worried that he was working with Elaine.”

  “Elaine was looking for the people who were working with this cabal against her and Avalon. I assume you know who those people are.”

  “I know a little. Elaine thought she was so smart. Her investigation wasn’t as covert as she’d like to believe. She didn’t feel so smart when we started killing her people.”