by Dina Given
Anticipating it, my team and I had shut our eyes tight and looked away. The soldiers, however, had all been focused on Alex and were now grunting in pain as they frantically tore off their shorted out goggles.
With a few precious seconds bought, we rushed the hospital, opening fire on the soldiers before they were able to recover their vision.
If I had commanded a trained team, it would have been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but elves weren’t exactly experts with human firearms. In fact, the first time any of them had ever handled a gun was the previous afternoon when I had given them their first shooting lesson. Most of their shots had gone far afield, hitting trees and dirt instead of the targets I had set up. What was going on at that point was more of the same. They were able to hit only four of the thirty soldiers before our highly-trained adversaries regrouped and returned fire.
Five of the elves went down immediately in a spray of blood.
“Alex!” I screamed.
“On it,” he responded without need for further explanation. The runes in his staff illuminated, and he brought up a shield as he ran back to our position to protect the remaining members of our party. Bullets slammed into the shield. The force of that much high-powered ammunition knocked Alex back a few feet and dropped him to his knees.
“Therran, Alex won’t be able to hold that shield for more than a few minutes. If it falls, we’re all dead. I need to get in that building now,” I said.
Therran turned to his son. “Lockien, I’ll create a distraction, and you get Emma into the building and keep her safe. Do everything in your power to make sure Sharur is recovered.”
Without waiting for acknowledgements, Therran knelt and placed his hands flat on the ground, chanting under his breath. I could feel a presence, immense and old, stirring awake. Goose bumps ran down my arms, despite the clinging heat.
Seeing movement in my peripheral vision, I turned toward it. The tangles of roots, vines, and overgrown plant life rustled and swayed, yet not even a gentle breeze disturbed them. Roots of oak trees dislodged themselves from the ground, and untamed wisteria vines slithered through undergrowth toward the unsuspecting soldiers. Plant life wrapped around ankles, torsos, and arms, squeezing and pulling. Screams filled the air as limbs were torn from their sockets with the popping of bones and gushing of blood.
I frantically looked at the ground around me, eyes wide, poised to run for my life. I could hear dry hissing sounds moving around me as the animated plants slid past my feet. I spun in a circle, frantic to see if any were about to attack, but they ignored me, uninterested in targeting anyone other than the soldiers.
The soldiers who hadn’t been grabbed initially were smart enough to move to clearer areas where they couldn’t be easily reached by the plants, and they targeted their weapons on the new threat.
“Alex, Daniel, Lockien, with me. Move!”
We kept to the forest and skirted the building until we reached a clearing that would take us the final fifty feet to the front entrance. With the guards otherwise occupied or in pieces, my small group then sprinted to the entrance of the hospital without anyone attempting to stop us.
I pulled the handle on the front doors and found them locked. “Daniel, get these open.”
Daniel tore the door’s security keypad off the wall, exposing the wires behind it. I was not very technically savvy, beyond being very talented with online shopping; as a result, I mostly ignored him while he disconnected and reconnected wires, fiddled with the digital keypad, and overall looked quite pleased with himself when the lock clicked open. The kid could break into a high security military installation as easily as he could hack my email, which I had also seen him do.
We slipped into the building and were confronted by a crumbling lobby. Sections of ceiling had given way, dumping plaster and debris over the concrete floors. Paint was peeling off walls, and broken remnants of chairs and tables were scattered about. At the rear of the lobby, behind a decrepit welcome desk, there was a door. It appeared cracked and weakened with time, but upon closer inspection, it was a facade covering an impenetrable steel door.
“Daniel, I don’t see any control panels or locking mechanisms. How do we get this thing opened?” I asked.
Daniel gave me a confident smile and sauntered up to the lobby desk. He dropped to his knees, peering under the counter until he found what he was looking for. With the push of a hidden button, the steel door silently swung open.
Drawing my gun, I made sure the way was clear and ushered the group through. We were deposited into a sterile white corridor with smooth walls and fluorescent overhead lights. I signaled for quiet as we moved cautiously forward. If anyone or anything came at us now, we had nowhere to hide.
A few hundred feet farther down, doors began to appear, lining either side of the hallway. Each door was fitted with a small glass window, giving us a view into professional looking offices. They were neat and orderly as well as clearly in current use, with solid wood desks, computer monitors, file cabinets, and even potted trees. I tried a few handles, and all were locked. At the end of the hall, we came upon a set of elevators.
As the elevator descended, I had a hard time ignoring the nagging feeling that finding this building empty of security or even a janitor was a little too convenient.
When the elevator reached the basement, the doors slid open. A barrage of gunfire filled every square inch of the small space, but thankfully, it was empty of passengers.
From my perch on top of the elevator car, I peered through the trap door in the ceiling, waiting until the gunmen realized the elevator was empty and stopped firing. When all was quiet, I lobbed a grenade through the trap door. It bounced down the hall, rolling to a stop at the feet of the soldiers.
The explosion was deafening in the small space. Heat and smoke flooded the hallway and elevator, setting off the fire suppression system. The combination of smoke and spraying water reduced the odds of me being spotted when I dropped through the trap door to the elevator’s floor; however, I still opened fire on any soldiers that might have survived the grenade blast. I wasn’t taking any chances.
With the way now clear, I pulled open the stairwell door next to the elevator and ushered out Alex, Daniel, and Lockien. We picked our way over prone bodies, careful not to slip on the blood-soaked floors. This hallway looked identical to the one above.
As we came upon the first door, I peered through the small window into a room lined with shelves. Each shelf contained various-sized glass jars filled with liquid, and floating inside were objects that looked to be body parts. I recognized hearts, lungs, eyes, livers, and other less recognizable organs.
I moved on to the next room, which was similar to the first, though this one held large glass tanks. Inside each tank was a body suspended in a viscous liquid. Some looked human, but most did not. The largest tank was almost twelve feet tall and held a giant muscle-bound creature with skin the color and texture of stone. The smallest tank was no more than two feet tall, and inside was a lithe creature that looked like a cross between a human and a dragonfly with luminescent wings and a delicate, child-like face. In other tanks, I recognized ghouls and shadow demons like the ones that had attacked me. I certainly had no love for any of those creatures, but I couldn’t help wondering how they had died and what they had been through before the end had come.
I tore myself from the window, feeling a bit queasy as I approached the next door. I didn’t want to look, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop myself. I wished I had.
The next room looked like a standard hospital operating room with computerized monitoring equipment, overhead lights and carts containing trays of surgical instruments. The room had been recently used, not yet cleaned. The instruments were covered in blood and pieces of tissue taken from the poor creature still lying on the stainless steel table.
It took me a moment to realize why it reminded me of Eddie. When I figured it out, I had to look away and swallow down the bile that threatened to com
e up. I could hear Daniel behind me heaving up his dinner while Lockien sputtered furiously in a language I could only assume was elven. Only Alex was silent, but when I looked at him, his expression held all the rage and disgust that the rest of us were feeling.
On the steel table was the body of a shape shifter who had been killed mid-transformation. It looked as though he had possibly been trying to transfigure into a dragon. He still looked humanoid with arms and legs, but his body was covered in a tough, scaly hide. His face was that of a lizard with a snout full of sharp teeth and a forked tongue lolling out through slack jaws. A long, thick tail protruded from the bottom of his spine.
He was in the process of being autopsied, his rib cage spread and his abdomen pulled open. Much of his skin had been flayed off, revealing the raw pink muscles and tendons beneath. The top of his skull had been removed, the brain sitting in a liquid-filled jar nearby, likely destined for the room we had passed earlier. A neat pile of intestines sat on the table next to him, and one clawed hand had been cut off, as had his manhood. The worst part was the creature’s arms, legs, and torso were bound by leather straps. Restraints weren’t necessary for the deceased or even the unconscious. I couldn’t even allow myself to consider it.
I forcibly compartmentalized what I had seen and locked it away. Thinking about what was happening in that place was not going to help me complete the mission.
“Let’s move,” I commanded the others. “Don’t look in the windows.”
I led us more quickly down the hallway, almost feeling the palpable effort everyone made to stay focused on the task at hand. Eyeing the room numbers etched onto placards above each door, we stopped when we came to B13.
This door had no window in it, and only a retinal scan could open the locked door. I doubted any of the soldiers behind us had been given access to the room, or I would have started digging out eyeballs. I looked to Daniel for help.
“Our only option here is to go in the old-fashioned way,” he said, pulling a brick of C-4 from his pack and sticking it to the retinal scan reader.
Once he had everything set up, we all moved farther down the hallway and covered our ears. The blast shorted out the security panel, and we made our way into the room.
It was small, only about fourteen square feet, and completely empty except for a pedestal in the dead center of the room. The white granite structure was polished to a high shine. A niche had been carved into it, and within that space hung the object coveted by so many. To me, it looked like any other medieval battle axe that could be found in a museum. It was a work of art, to be sure; however, it had seen better days.
It had a double axe head with curving blades on both sides of a staff made of some material I couldn’t immediately recognize. It looked like wood, but it must have been incredibly durable not to have rotted away over time. The bottom of the staff was tipped with a wicked-looking spike, allowing its wielder to slice, hack and stab with the weapon. The metal was dull and lifeless, the blade chipped and scarred. Intricate scrollwork was etched into the blade face that must have been stunning at one time yet was now fading and difficult to see. This weapon must have seen countless battles, but it didn’t look like it was in a condition to see any more. I was less than impressed.
How could this possibly be the weapon that had been created by gods, wielded by a fae prince, and held the power to rip apart worlds? Yet, even as I eyed it skeptically, I noticed something about it that grabbed my attention. Before I could act, Lockien pushed past me and grabbed the axe with greedy hands. I gasped, expecting laser beams, explosions, toxic gas, or some other kind of security response, but nothing happened. He lifted it out of the display, hands shaking and knuckles turning white as he clutched the axe with veneration and vindication.
“Lockien, what are you doing?” Alex asked, like he was trying to reason with a two-year-old.
Lockien looked up as if he had forgotten we were all standing there. “Sharur doesn’t belong to any of you. Even with the best of intentions, you will eventually become corrupted by its power. You aren’t pure enough to resist the temptation, and it will eventually lead to the downfall of both of our worlds.”
I opened my mouth to argue with him then shut it again when I had a hard time coming up with a counter argument. After all, maybe he was right. I had done terrible things in my adult life. Could someone who made a living killing people for personal gain, with no consideration for who I was hurting, be considered pure of heart? How could I be sure I wouldn’t be corrupted if Sharur was placed in my hands? Even if I had good intentions, did I have the right to use the weapon to influence the fate of worlds? Who was I to claim it?
All of my questions and self-doubt meant little though. I had come here to retrieve the axe, and I fully intended to complete my mission. However, what I did with the weapon after I had it was still up for debate.
Lockien clutched the axe close to his chest. “My father never intended to allow you to have it, or he wouldn’t have sent me with you. Sharur belongs to my people, and we are the only ones with the strength and the right to use it.”
“And how do you plan to use it?” I asked, trying to buy some time until I could figure out how to get the weapon back without hurting Lockien. Even though he didn’t want me to have Sharur, he still wasn’t the enemy.
“Now that the axe is in my hands, I will open the rift to bring all my people to Earth along with any others we deem worthy to share this world with us. Urusilim is damaged beyond repair, a frayed husk of what it used to be, yet Earth contains lands where we can settle and thrive. I don’t want to wield Sharur against you, but I will if I have to. Even your mage stands no chance against it. So I ask of you, please hear the wisdom in my words and stand with me, not against me.”
No sooner had he made the request than a crack reverberated through the confines of the small room, and a small red hole appeared in the center of Lockien’s forehead. His face went slack and the axe slid from his hands with the clatter of steel hitting tile. Lilly’s brother followed Sharur to the ground.
We spun to face the doorway where Black Ops soldiers stormed into the room, surrounding us. The sound of their boots pounding the floor drowned out my desperate whisper to Alex. “You have to get out of here. You saw what they’ll do to you.”
I knew Alex was drained from the shield he had generated outside. Besides, if they captured him, he would be filling the next set of jars in the other room. They were experimenting on beings from Urusilim, likely trying to discover the secrets of their biology and magical properties. As much as I feared for Daniel, he was probably the safest of all of us, being a plain vanilla human and just following my orders. Sure, they might interrogate him and toss him in prison, but I didn’t think they would risk harming a genuine U.S. Citizen.
As for me, I was too valuable to kill, although I had no doubt they would use whatever other means were at their disposal to get what they wanted from me. I could handle whatever they threw at me, and maybe, if Alex got out, he could bring help.
He was standing at my back, so close I could feel the heat of him through my bodysuit. It was a comforting feeling, and even though I needed him to be safe, part of me didn’t want him to leave. I knew Alex wouldn’t voluntarily leave us behind; however, he must have reached the same conclusion I had. I suddenly felt the energy pass through me as he gathered it around him. It felt like an electric caress sliding over my skin.
“Miss Hayes. Exactly the person I expected to find here.” The soldiers made way for the man stepping through the doorway.
He had the look of a former athlete whose best days had passed him by. A big man, most of the muscle from his youth was now turning to jelly. He was thick around the middle with the beginnings of a gut hanging over his belt. His cheeks were drooping into jowls, and his thick lips smirked in satisfaction at having cornered me.
“Who are you?” I demanded. I had to buy Alex the time he needed to gather enough energy to get out of here.
“My na
me is Ed Connor. I’m an envoy to the Committee on Superhuman Research, a joint effort between Homeland Security and the National Institute of Health. I have wanted to speak with you, but you have the unfortunate habit of running away.”
“If you had peaceful intentions, you shouldn’t have sent your soldiers after me at Nathan Anshar’s office. Oh, and you just killed my friend,” I spat, gesturing to Lockien’s body without having the desire to look at it.
His cold eyes rested on the body of Lilly’s brother. He leaned down and brushed the hair from Lockien’s ears, revealing the obviously pointed tips. He waved at his team, and two men efficiently ran over, lifting Lockien from the floor and carrying him out of the room.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked, feeling nauseous.
He merely gave me a small half-smile in response. We both knew the answer already.
Then his eyes landed on Alex. “You must be Alex Griffin. Don’t look so surprised. We have files on all of you, albeit some are less complete than others. I would love the opportunity to get to know you better, Mr. Griffin, to find out what makes you tick.”
My heart was pounding in my throat. Get out, get out, I kept screaming at Alex in my head. I didn’t think he could read minds, though I was desperate enough to try. I was not sure when I had started to care about Alex or even if I really did. Maybe what I was feeling was fear at potentially losing someone who had helped keep me alive thus far. Maybe I simply didn’t want to lose an ally, even if he wasn’t exactly a friend.
“How do you know so much about us?” I asked, trying to keep Connor talking.
I was relieved when he refocused his attention on me. “Why, Miss Hayes, I am disappointed you don’t remember me. After all, I was the first person to welcome you to Earth when you arrived. Although, you were quite incoherent and then unconscious during much of the time we spent together, so I don’t suppose I can blame you. Suffice it to say, my team took good care of you and even found you a loving foster home.”