Scorched Shadows (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 7)

by Steve McHugh

  Galahad sighed with relief. “That’s something at least.”

  “Any damage to the realm gate?” I asked.

  “None of them got close enough,” Rebecca said. “If that was their intention, I’m not sure why they’d have even bothered trying. But I think they were after Arthur. That masked Hellequin guy bundled him into a car. They opened fire on us. Two cars, both black SUVs, and enough firepower to make us pause.”

  “I’m thinking Galahad was their aim, too. They waited until almost the exact moment Arthur left the building to launch an attack, and there’s no way it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. They’d been waiting for their chance for a while.”

  “That’s my thought, too,” Rebecca said.

  “We need to get back to Shadow Falls,” Galahad said.

  The three of us ran through the remains of The Mill without stopping until we reached the realm gate. “Stay safe,” Galahad told Rebecca. “Thank you for all you’ve done here.”

  “You, too,” she told him, and we stepped through the realm gate back into Shadow Falls, where we were greeted by Harrison and several of his people.

  “King Galahad, we heard you’d been attacked,” Harrison said, clearly unnerved by what he’d been told.

  “This Hellequin and his cohorts decided to kidnap Arthur and try to kill me,” Galahad quickly explained. “Thankfully Nate was there to keep the building from falling on me. What’s been happening here?”

  “Lee escaped custody,” Harrison said. “He attacked one of the guards who got too close, and tore his throat out. We’d used a huge amount of sedatives on him and thought it was safe to keep him in a locked room, but he managed to use some sort of shadow magic, and when the guard went to investigate, Lee killed him.”

  “Do you know where he’s gone?” I asked.

  “We had eyes on him as he ran back toward the ruins, but with the information that you’d been attacked, I didn’t want to send a contingent of guards to retrieve him.”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I never did figure out why those ruins were so damn important, and it gives me a chance to finally kill the bastard. No screwing around this time.”

  “Anything else?” Galahad asked.

  “No, my lord,” Harrison said. “Apart from that, it’s been quiet. We followed security protocols and had both realm gates shut down until they were activated on the other end by a known ally. No one coming or going.”

  Galahad set off through the temple, with me and Harrison behind. “Thank you,” Harrison said. “You saved his life again.”

  “He’d have saved himself if I hadn’t been there. I didn’t do anything special, I assure you.”

  “Even so. Thank you.”

  We reached the mouth of the temple and looked down over the city of Solomon. “Avalon will hear of Arthur’s kidnapping, and they will come for us,” Galahad said. “They will not listen to reason; they will want retribution.”

  “So, what are you going to do with a million people?” I asked.

  Before Galahad could answer, explosions rocked the city, causing several buildings on the outskirts to topple. Clouds of smoke and dust were thrown into the air.

  “What the hell was that?” Harrison asked as the temple shook so violently parts of it collapsed.

  “We need to get down there, quickly,” I said, and ran down to one of the closest three-coach trams that ferried people around the city. “Can you make this go faster?”

  Harrison prized a panel off the front of the tram and flicked a few switches, causing the tram to speed up and throwing me onto the floor. The bullet-train-shaped tram now officially did bullet-train speed.

  “Little warning!” I shouted out as we sped past the scenery far below.

  “These can only be modified in an emergency,” Harrison said. “I think this counts.”

  The trams followed the same pattern as the aqueducts that had been built around the town, meaning it took a little close to ninety minutes to get from the temple to the palace at normal speed. At the speed we went, it took us a little over twenty agonizing minutes, and in that time more explosions had gone off across the city.

  “What is that?” one of the dozen guards who had accompanied us onto the tram asked as he pointed out the window.

  I watched in horror as hundreds of blood elves attacked the people of Solomon, the plague of them crawling out of craters in the ground. “My Liege has made his move,” I said. “Get your people ready, Harrison. You’re about to go to war.”

  As the doors opened and we all piled out onto the platform, Harrison and his men sprinted off to fight the blood elves. “I’m going with them,” Galahad said. “You’re going after Lee still.”

  “Those blood elves came from the ground. Someone said there were mazes of tunnels under the city. If that’s where Lee is, maybe My Liege is using it as a staging area.”

  “Go to the palace, get a horse—it’ll be quicker than running. You armed?”

  “Not yet.”

  He passed me his sword. “Just humor me,” he said when I suggested he keep it. “I can always grab another one. If you use magic down there, you could bring the tunnels down, and probably most of whatever is above us. I’d rather not have a street vanish because you decided to throw some power around.”

  I took the sword harness and strapped it on my back. “I’ll behave. Promise.”

  Galahad took off toward the trouble, taking a sword from an injured guard on the way.

  I ran toward the palace, ignoring the sounds of fighting, and paused. The buildings had started to collapse nowhere near the ruins. I turned to the closest collapsed building and ran toward it, noticing the ragged tear in the ground that led down to darkness below. I looked around for anyone who might need medical attention but found no one. I grabbed some sturdy rope that I found on the street and anchored myself to a nearby metal post before abseiling into the dark chasm.

  After about a minute I realized the gap I’d entered was deeper than I expected. I stopped and glanced down into the darkness. I couldn’t use my fire magic, not even to give me night vision. Instead, I continued. I had no idea just how far beneath the ground I was when I finally touched the bottom, and I tried not to think about it. I didn’t need distractions when I was hunting a powerful vampire.

  The tunnel I found myself in was lit by dozens of purple crystals, giving my surroundings a strange, unearthly glow. After a few minutes of running, I found myself in a cavern. There was only one other tunnel leading from it, and after I had taken a few steps inside, there was an explosion behind me and several tons of rock fell into the tunnel mouth, blocking my escape.

  “Those crystals are so volatile,” Lee said from somewhere further up the tunnel, although I couldn’t see him, even with the light of the crystals illuminating the darkness.

  “You came down here to make this place a realm gate, didn’t you?”

  “I came here to make sure my allies could do what they needed to do. Thousands of blood elves are currently rampaging across the city, and even more will be coming up through the ruins as we speak. Attacking the enemy on two fronts.”

  “You can’t possibly have enough people,” I said, drawing my sword and moving forward, hoping to keep him talking.

  “Not to take the realm, no,” Lee admitted. “But to cause devastation and fear? We have more than enough for that. These tunnels link up to the mountain.”

  “Asmodeus’s prison.” A thought crossed my mind. “They’ve been bringing people down here for months, haven’t they? They go into the elven realm gate and then climb down by the prison. That chasm takes you down here.”

  “Good guess,” Lee said with a chuckle. “You burned me alive. I’m going to feast on you for that. All of your power will make me whole again. It’ll feel so good.”

  “You talk a lot. Has anyone ever told you that?” I stopped by a large cluster of crystals. “You blew up the crystals down here to get the blood elves out. Dangerous gamble.”

  “Smart,” h
e snapped.

  I continued until I reached a second cavern, and in the center sat Lee, bathed in purple light. His face and arms were still a mass of burned flesh, although he looked considerably less horrific than before.

  “Take me in for questioning again, Nate? Is that the idea?” He glanced at my sword. “Or are you here to kill me? That little pointy stick isn’t going to get the job done.”

  Lee charged forward, and I moved as if to bring the sword down, which he anticipated, and moved to the side. I stepped away, bringing the sword down in an arc toward where Lee would end up. It caught him just above the hip, splattering blood against the stone wall.

  Lee screamed in pain and turned into vapor, moving away from me. I held the sword with one hand, the point of the blade aimed at the floor, and stepped toward Lee.

  “That hurt,” he seethed after he re-formed.

  “Come get some more, then,” I told him, darting forward and bringing the sword up toward Lee’s chest.

  He moved quicker than I’d anticipated, turning into vapor and then re-forming around my arm so that he held my wrist in his hands. A second later the sword clattered across the tunnel as he broke my wrist and punched me in the ribs hard enough for me to feel at least one of them buckle.

  Lee was on me in an instant, a snarling rage with nothing close to humanity behind it. His clawlike fingers raked across my cheek as he tried to force my head to the side, exposing my neck.

  “I think I might turn you,” he said, licking the side of my neck with his elongated tongue. My neck numbed in an instant.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I told him, and drove a blade of lightning up into his chest, kicking him away from me.

  Lee staggered back, his white shirt turned black from the wound on his chest. He used the crystal-lined tunnel wall to keep upright as lightning magic continued to flicker over him. I looked down at the blade, which was considerably larger than I’d been trying to form, and attempted to shut it off. Even this far underground, and this close to so many crystals, the particles in the air made my magic even more unpredictable and dangerous.

  I concentrated on the magic until it finally vanished, but as the last remnants of it extinguished, a small spark leapt uncontrolled from my hand to a nearby crystal, causing it to explode. I wrapped myself in dense air as the blast tore through the tunnel, flinging me down it like a rag doll. Every blast ignited more crystals, until I was a hundred feet from the original blast. I was covered in dust and dirt and remained on my hands and knees in the center of another cavern as I tried to shut off my magical shield of air before I lost control of it.

  Thankfully I remembered that the destruction of the crystals meant that the particles in the air were no longer volatile, and shutting it off became easier after the noise of the explosions stopped ringing in my ears. I wiped my face, finding it covered in blood, and tried to get back to my feet, but my ribs felt as if they were on fire. My wrist was broken, but even with the agony I was in, there was no time to use my magic to heal. I forced myself back to my feet just in time for Lee to barrel into me, smashing me against the nearest wall.

  Thick black blood oozed from the dozens of cuts across his face. “It’s not that easy,” he snarled. “You don’t get to win.”

  “There’s no win or lose, Lee,” I told him, and drove another blade of lightning into his chest. I removed the magic and watched him slump to the ground, blood pouring from the new wound.

  “Your body can’t keep up with all the healing,” I said. The shadows around Lee moved up over him as he scrambled to try and escape. They wrapped themselves around his limbs and began to drag him into the shadow as Lee screamed in defiance, trying to change into a mist form, but the shadows blocked his escape, forming a dense shield around his body as he vanished down into the shadow realm with a final, muffled scream.

  A few moments later I felt a surge of power the likes of which I’d never received from a single person, healing my injuries in an instant. I switched off my magic and looked down the nearby tunnel. I just hoped I could get back aboveground before whatever Abaddon and her people had planned for Shadow Falls could come to fruition.

  After running down several tunnels—and spending what felt like hours of desperately wasted time—I found explosives that had been drilled into a portion of the tunnel wall. With no detonators in sight, I stepped back as far as I could and threw a tiny ball of flame at the crystal closest to the explosives. A large part of the wall vanished in a plume of smoke and dust, igniting several other crystals.

  Worried that the tunnel would cave in, I wrapped myself in a shield of air and sprinted toward the hole in the tunnel wall, throwing myself through it just before another explosion sounded from inside the tunnel. Thankfully the explosions of the crystals allowed me to control my magic with relative ease.

  I found myself in a corridor. But instead of the jagged stone and natural appearance of the underground tunnels, this new corridor had smooth walls. I followed it around a corner and ignored several doors until I came to some stairs, which I quickly ascended, and then I opened the door at the top.

  I exited the stairs and found myself in a room with an open door in front of me, with the sights and sounds of fighting just beyond it.

  I sprinted through the open door and collided with a blood elf. I quickly disarmed it, driving its own sword into its skull. I parried the blow from a second blood elf, thrusting the blade up through his throat, then pushed the body aside and killed a third and fourth, who thought they had a shot at killing me.

  Dozens of blood elves lay on the floor amongst just as many of Galahad’s guards. “Where am I?” I shouted to a nearby guard as the fighting in the courtyard ended. He held his arm as blood flowed out of his armor and onto the floor.

  “The realm gate,” he told me as a medic helped him out of his armor to tend to his wound. “The one you helped discover.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Nate Garrett, yes, I know you. You saved my life when we had the troubles here a few years ago.”

  “What’s happened in the two hours since I went under the palace? I’ve been mostly trying to find a way out of the tunnels.”

  “The blood elves swarmed out of the mountain.” He winced as the medic went to work.

  The alchemist’s own ability would heal him, but that could take hours, and frankly, when you’re wounded in battle, you take all the help you can get.

  “Thousands of them,” the medic said. “They flooded out of the mountain like a wave. They destroyed a portion of the outer rim of the city until the guard got it under control and managed to push the majority of them over to the plains.”

  “Which means you guys were in the middle of a battlefield,” I said.

  “That about sums it up. A hundred guards were here. Now we number sixty. They hit us like a hammer. And that woman with them . . . she tore through us.”

  “A necromancer?” I asked.

  The medic nodded.

  “Abaddon. If you see her again, avoid her.”

  “She ran off toward the forest.”

  “Thanks for the info,” I said. “Any chance you have a horse I can borrow?”

  The guard pointed to a stable just outside the ruined portion of the fort wall. Large boulders were visible in the grassland outside of the fort, the work of alchemists. If the blood elves thought this would be an easy fight—even after an ambush—they were about to learn otherwise.

  “Best wishes to you,” the medic said. “There’s a chestnut mare. She’s the fastest, not easily spooked, either.”

  “Yeah, you, too.” I ran out of the fort, leaving the surviving guards to their rebuilding and defense of the second realm gate. The stables weren’t large, with only a dozen horses in residence, and I picked the chestnut mare as the medic suggested. He’d been right, too. She ignored the bodies that littered the ground and the sounds of battle that hung in the air as we raced back toward the city of Solomon.

  CHAPTER 29

 
Nate Garrett

  The flames could be seen well before I reached the outskirts of the town, with thick, black smoke billowing up into the sky at an alarming rate. The smell of acrid smoke and death mingled together, creating something that I had to force myself to ignore. More dead lay where they’d fallen, and I continued past them without stopping to check. There was nothing I could do except avenge them.

  As I got closer to the palace, the fighting intensified, with thousands of blood elves going up against the guard, while in the distance civilians were evacuated to safer parts of the city. I really hoped that Harrison and his men would be able to stop the blood elves before too many lives were lost.

  I rammed the horse into two blood elves, sending them spiraling. She kicked out, catching a third in the breastplate, sending him sprawling to the ground, unmoving. I climbed down and gave the reins to a nearby guard, whose leg was bleeding.

  “Can you ride?” I asked.

  She nodded and swung up onto the horse. “My king is inside. He battles many of these creatures.”

  “Go wherever you can get help. I assume Harrison is waist deep in blood elves.”

  “He fights closer to the mountain. We managed to contain most of the blood elves, but some slipped through, and others still are coming from the forest.”

  “There won’t be any more blood elves coming up through the tunnels under the city, but we’re in for a fight. Heal as best you can.”

  She nodded and rode off as I ran into the palace, killing two blood elves with the sword I’d taken from the elf I’d killed earlier. It stuck fast in the chest of the second elf, so I left it be and kicked the elf aside.

  A guard lay against a nearby pillar; blood soaked his belly and legs. He moved slightly and groaned in pain. I ran over and knelt beside him.

  “They flooded the palace so quickly,” he said, spitting blood onto the floor beside him. “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Galahad, Leonardo, Antonio, Selene, Zamek—have you seen any of them?”