Scorched Shadows (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 7)

by Steve McHugh

  “I saw,” I said. “So, how am I meant to join you?”

  Gawain stood. “You’ve seen Mordred. You know how we broke him. I just wanted to talk to you before we started.”

  “Very nice of you.”

  Gawain shrugged. “You’re going to join me. You’re going to stand at my right hand. And we’re going to make sure that you have total loyalty to me.”

  “By beating me up?”

  “The process will take some time,” Gawain said. “It would have worked on Mordred if he hadn’t escaped.”

  “It took you a century. I don’t think you have that long.”

  “No, that’s true.” He nodded toward Abaddon, who left the room without a word. “Your mind almost broke with Galahad’s death. Your rage and grief—that’s something we can use. That’s a state we need to start you in.”

  “If you hurt anyone else, I’ll kill you, Gawain.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The door opened, and Abaddon dragged in a badly beaten Lucie.

  “Don’t do this,” I said.

  “Lucie, tell Nate what you told me,” Gawain said, ignoring me.

  “Fuck you, pretty boy,” Lucie said, and spat in his face.

  Gawain attacked her with a furious rage, beating her down onto the floor, as I yelled at him to stop. He grabbed Lucie by the hair and dragged her over to me.

  “Tell him,” Gawain snapped. “Tell him what you told me.”

  “I don’t like Nate,” Lucie said, staring at me. “I don’t trust him. I don’t trust anyone with that level of power.”

  “This is the kind of person you call a friend,” Gawain said.

  “Go to hell, Gawain.”

  Gawain passed Lucie over to Abaddon.

  “Kill them all,” Lucie whispered before Abaddon slit her throat and pushed her toward me. Lucie died leaning up against me, her blood drenching me from the stomach down.

  “Now that’s the sort of mood we need you in,” Gawain said, opening the door and revealing Ares, who had a cruel smile on his face. “You know what to do.”

  Ares came into the room. “It will be my pleasure.”

  “Don’t kill him,” Abaddon said.

  Ares pulled Lucie off me, shoving her to the floor. “Oh, he won’t die,” he said. “But he’s going to wish he had.”

  Rage and hate filled me until I felt nothing else. “Bring it on.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Nate Garrett

  Ares took my rage and hate and twisted it inside my head. He didn’t change any of my memories like his son had so long ago; he knew that Erebus would react negatively to his presence. He was well versed in exactly what I could and couldn’t do and used it to his advantage.

  He pointed my hate at the people I loved, stripping away my feelings for them, and tried to replace those feelings with something ugly, something cruel and vicious. He tried to make me believe that Gawain, Abaddon, Arthur, and Merlin were the only people I could truly trust, the only people who would allow me to achieve everything I ever wanted.

  Hours turned into days, and I soon lost all track of time. Occasionally Ares would stop and beat me or have one of the elves do it. They didn’t break any bones. Without my magic I wouldn’t have been able to heal, but my ribs had already been busted and every bit of extra damage further hastened the mess that Ares was making out of my mind.

  I hung from the ceiling for hours at a time, only occasionally allowed down when Ares decided I’d taken too much punishment, and I was allowed to sleep. But then it began again. At one point Erebus tried to step in, to get me to concentrate on him, but Ares was so powerful his empath abilities brushed Erebus aside. Ares knew what Erebus had attempted, and had anticipated it, returning to cause me more anguish as soon as he felt it safe to do so.

  “Is that nightmare back yet?” Ares asked after days or weeks of not seeing Erebus.

  Sweat dripped from my face, running down my bare chest to where Lucie’s blood had dried on my stomach. Even after all this time, they hadn’t let me wash. I looked down at where her body had been. They hadn’t bothered removing it for a considerable amount of time after her murder. They’d used her to weaken me, and I’d helped them by allowing my hate to take over. My need for vengeance had been my downfall.

  “No, it’s just me and you,” Ares said after moving my face so he could stare me in the eyes. “You’re stronger than I expected. I see why Deimos was unable to break you.”

  “He’s a coward,” I said.

  Ares smiled. “Yes, he is. I beat him when he came back to me after you broke his mind. I beat him over and over until he realized what a waste he was. And then he wanted to destroy your name. He thought it would elevate him in my eyes.”

  “I’m going to kill him when I get out of here.”

  “Are you trying to anger me?” Ares asked. “That’s not a very good way of dealing with this. You should be angry with Tommy and Olivia, with Elaine and the rest of them. Angry that they left you here, angry that they’re not going to save you. They let Lucie die. They let Galahad die. They didn’t help you fight us. They’ve done nothing.”

  I nodded. “They abandoned me.”

  Ares smiled. “That they did. You know who’s there for you, don’t you?”

  “Gawain. He wants me to stand beside Arthur. To make this world better. For us to have our rightful place.”

  “Do you want that?”

  I nodded weakly. My body hurt, and I had trouble keeping my eyes open. “More than anything. I want to work for Arthur. I want to change the world in his image. Please, let me.”

  “I think we’re not quite there yet. There was a little pause. You’re still thinking you can escape from this.”

  I shook my head.

  Ares continued with the punishment once again. Showing Tommy, Olivia dead, showing me standing over their bodies, making me feel good about it, making me feel like that was the right way to move forward. He showed me hunting down the others, skewering Elaine with a spear, decapitating Morgan, burning Zamek alive, torturing Mordred until he wept and begged to be let go. Everything I saw, Ares made me feel good about. Made me want. Made me need.

  Eventually the images stopped for a second time. Ares lifted my head, which sagged against my chest. “I think we can have a break here,” he said. “Keep him company. I’ll be back soon.”

  I heard Ares walk out of the room, closing the door behind him. I watched the blood elf who had been left behind as he walked over to the chair and took a seat.

  “Nate,” Erebus said.

  “Leave me,” I said in my mind. “Now is not the time.”

  “Nate, you can’t possibly think that your friends are people who should be killed.”

  “Erebus,” I snapped out loud. “Leave me.”

  The blood elf laughed and walked over to me, standing in front of me and pushing me in the stomach so I swayed back and forth. They’d taken the chair long ago, and my arms felt sore again.

  “Your nightmare trying to help you?” the blood elf said with a smile. “Ares will be pleased that you banished it. We’ll break you yet, sorcerer. We’ll break that nightmare and force it out of your body if need be.”

  “Going to have to kill me for that,” I said.

  “That’s the plan,” the blood elf said. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know why Gawain has you kept alive.”

  “Enlighten me,” I said.

  “Because he knew that if you died, all of your marks would disappear. Your nightmare would take control. He told Ares about it. He wants your mind broken before you die so that when your last mark goes and your nightmare takes control, you’ll be reborn loyal to whoever they need you to be loyal to.”

  “That’s how the last mark goes? With my death?”

  “Apparently so. Got to break you first, though.”

  “Have you ever seen Lethal Weapon?”

  The blood elf looked confused. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s a film from the nineteen eigh
ties. It hasn’t aged that well, if I’m honest, but there was one bit in that, and if you haven’t seen it, this will all be new to you.”

  “What will?”

  I kicked the blood elf in the face, then wrapped my legs around his neck and used it as a lever to push myself up and pull the chain from the ceiling hook. I let my weight fall onto the neck and shoulders of the blood elf, and we collapsed to the floor. I broke his neck a second after, then removed his sword and decapitated him.

  He didn’t wear a bracelet, so I still had no access to my magic, but he did have some keys. I unlocked my shackles and dropped them to the floor next to where Lucie’s body had been before putting the keys in my pocket.

  Images of me murdering my friends flickered into my mind, making me feel like I needed to hunt them, to end their lives so that Arthur would accept me, would allow me to stand beside him. I pushed the thoughts away—I would deal with them later.

  I left the cell and found myself in a corridor with dozens of identical doors along either side. A gate sat at one end, a stone wall at the other, which made the choice easy.

  I unlocked the gate and pushed it open, making more noise than I was happy with, and paused at the bottom of a stone staircase to wait for anyone who might investigate what they’d heard. After ten seconds, and with no one seemingly interested in the sound of the gate opening, I slowly crept up the stairs, making sure to keep low. I was close to the top when I realized that the room beyond was empty.

  A long table sat in the middle of the room, with several wooden chairs around it. It was littered with scraps of food and bottles of drink—it looked like they’d had a real party here. A small fireplace was close to the table, next to an ancient-looking wardrobe. A large wooden door at the far end of the room appeared to be the only exit other than the stairs to the cells, and I had no intention of going back down there.

  I walked to the door and turned the massive handle, pulling it toward me, and I heard voices on the other side. I peered through the crack I’d created between the door and its frame and saw two blood elves. They were in a long hallway with dark-blue carpet and normal house doors along one side. The other side had windows overlooking the courtyard I’d been brought through when I’d first arrived. From the angle I was at, I couldn’t make out much in the courtyard except for its size and the several guards that were patrolling it. One problem at a time.

  One of the blood elves in the hallway was only a few feet in front of me. He was leaning up against the wall, talking to his comrade, who was looking out of the window in front of him. They spoke in blood elvish. “You think they’ll break him?” the one closest to me asked.

  “We’ve broken better,” his friend said.

  “You think we’ll be able to get our brethren out of that horrific dwarf realm? I’d like to think that we could help Gawain destroy his enemies.”

  “What if we’re not like them? What if we changed in different ways?”

  “They’re still blood elves. We were meant to be there when they slaughtered the dwarves. Instead, we got to spend a thousand years buried in a mountain. On Earth realm. Just the word ‘Earth’ makes me feel ill.”

  “Humans are worse than dwarves. At least dwarves taste nice.”

  I opened the door and stepped out, driving the blood elf sword I’d taken into the back of the closest elf, piercing his heart. The second elf turned toward me and was about to scream something when I charged toward him, knocking him off his feet and dumping him on his head. He tried to push me off, but I smashed my forearm into his face, breaking his cheekbone, and ripped out his throat. Rage and hate filled me again, and I forced myself to drop the lump of flesh in my hand and stagger away.

  “You won’t break me,” I whispered, staring at the black blood on my hands. “You won’t.” I remained where I was until I calmed, by which point the elf with no throat was still making noise. Blood elves were hard to kill if you didn’t take the head or destroy the brain or heart. I raised the elf’s blade and stabbed him through the skull, pinning his head to the floor, killing him.

  I fought back the anger as I searched both elves and took a belt with two sheathed daggers. For some reason it had taken me this long to realize I still had no shoes. I thought of Tommy making a joke about Die Hard and chuckled before the image of his death at my hands tore itself into my head.

  “No,” I said. “I will not kill my friends. How do I stop this?”

  “Kill Ares,” Erebus said from beside me. “The change he tried to implement isn’t complete. You kill him, and hopefully you’ll break free from his grasp.”

  “Kill Ares? Is there another way?”

  “You find someone with mind magic and get them to fix your brain.”

  “Okay, so both ways suck.” I looked down at the blood elf. “For now I can use this hate Ares has filled me with.”

  “Just make sure not to get too used to it. An empath like Ares controls people in part because he makes them believe that the emotions he forced into them, and the memories he created, are something to revel in. Something to enjoy. He’ll make you think that without those memories, you are nothing but a shell of yourself.”

  “I’m going to kill Ares for this at some point. Gawain, Abaddon, any other fucker who happens to be involved. I’m going to pile those bastards up behind me.”

  “That’s Ares talking.”

  I shook my head. “No. It really isn’t.”

  Erebus disappeared, leaving me alone in the hallway. I decided it was best to hurry and continued along the hallway, taking a set of stairs down one level. I stopped at the bottom and took a quick glance along each direction of hallway. The left side had eight blood elves, all standing around a door. The windows on the side of the hallway gave me a clear view of the stairs and courtyard that the door led to, but being quiet and fighting eight blood elves did not go hand in hand.

  I looked to my right, and apart from a set of double doors, the area was void of anyone that I could see. I crept around the corner of the stairs and ran the length of the hallway, making sure to keep on the rug to muffle my steps. I reached the double doors and pushed one of them open a fraction of an inch to look inside and, when I was satisfied the room beyond was empty, pushed the door open and slipped inside.

  I’d entered a huge ballroom filled with a dozen tables, all with chairs around them, but the tables were bare. Large red-and-gold curtains hung from one side of the room. I ran over to peer behind one, but the window behind just showed a large number of blood elves running training exercises. I spotted Atlas and put the curtain back; he was close to the last person I wanted to run into.

  I tried a second set of double doors at the end of the ballroom, but they were locked, and the sounds of laughter from behind me made me sigh. I placed my head against a metal strip on one of the doors and controlled my breathing before turning around to face Ares.

  “You got somewhere to be?” he asked me with a slight chuckle.

  “I just thought I’d come and make sure you got my food order right. I would hate to think you’d bring me something I didn’t like.”

  “You humiliated my son all those years ago. You beat him like a drum.”

  I nodded. “He’s a piece of shit just like you. You must be proud.”

  Ares shook his head. “Can’t stand the sniveling little bastard. But he is my son.”

  “So, what happens now? You kill me, tell Gawain I died trying to escape?”

  “I thought about it. But you know what? I think I’d prefer to just beat you into a coma and screw around with your brain some more.” He removed the bracelet that allowed him to use his abilities and placed it on a nearby table. “Now you can’t bitch and moan about it not being fair.”

  “You had an advantage with your powers. You’ll really wish you’d kept it.”

  “I prefer to fight without my powers. I’ve seen people like yourself rely on them, allow them to be the best you have. I saw what you did to Helios, though—that was impressive. Pissed
off Gawain a little, as Helios was in charge of murdering all those humans, although I guess you saved him the job of removing him from our organization when he eventually fucked up.”

  “You really don’t like many people, do you?”

  “I like Aphrodite, but only for about an hour at a time.”

  “An hour? Aren’t you kind of exaggerating?”

  Ares’s eyes narrowed with anger. “I am all man. I should show your woman that. I should have shown her when she was married to my son. Maybe if she’d got some, she wouldn’t have betrayed us by running off with you the first chance she got.”

  “What a surprise, Ares is a misogynistic prick. Who could possibly have seen that coming?”

  “I just know what women really want.”

  “You know, I should have just let you kill me instead of listening to your inane drivel.”

  Ares shrugged off his coat and carefully unbuttoned his dark-blue silk shirt, laying both over the back of a nearby chair.

  His body looked like it had been carved out of solid granite. He rolled his shoulder and flexed his biceps, making the veins in his neck pop a little.

  “You done?” I asked. “Or do you need some oil to really seal the image?”

  He ignored me and removed his shoes and socks, spending time to ensure that each shoe had one sock in it.

  “If you take any longer, I’m going to kill myself just for something to do,” I told him.

  “I don’t want to hear excuses after I beat you, Nate. I want you to understand that I am the better man, that you are beneath me. You need to understand your place.”

  “Like Hephaestus did with you?”

  “He cheated,” Ares snapped. “We were to fight fair, and he used his ability to trip me. Humiliated me in front of his wife. I murdered his friend to make us even.”

  “Yeah, you’re a real stand-up guy. In case you haven’t noticed, I have no powers right now.”

  Ares’s smile was wicked and cruel. “Oh, I know.” He bounced from foot to foot while I sighed with impatience. If his game was to keep me here until Gawain arrived, he was doing a good job. I considered just starting the fight, but I needed to keep my head. Allowing my emotions to get the better of me would get me killed. Ares was too dangerous for me to think it would end any other way. I didn’t even know how I was going to beat him when I didn’t have any power. Several thousand extra years of experience of fighting was not something I could take lightly.