by Mel Odom
He stared into the glass of tea he sipped from. It was strong and black, and he knew not to drink too much or it would make him sick. He needed to keep the food down to get his strength back. As he stared into the dark depths, he saw Lilith’s eyes, then her face became more clear.
“You must not tarry there long,” she told him.
“I’m not. Where are you?”
“I’ve gone on ahead.” Lilith appeared distracted. “There were things I needed to check on.”
“Did you see any more demons?”
She hesitated.
Warren knew that she would lie to him if she thought she had to. He hadn’t met anyone who wouldn’t lie when they felt it was necessary to get what they needed or wanted.
“I didn’t,” she replied. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t more out here.”
“That lot that found us,” Warren said. “Did they come looking for me? Or did they come looking for you?”
“I don’t know.” She maintained eye contact with him from the dark depths of the tea.
Warren knew at once that she lied. He felt good about that. Getting to know how to tell someone was lying was almost as good as keeping them honest.
“I think they came after you,” he said.
“Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter. You and I, we’re after the same thing.”
“I want to be safe. I don’t think that’s anything you have to worry about.”
“No one is safe now that the Hellgate has opened. We’ve all been put at risk. The only thing we can do is grab enough power for ourselves that we can put the demons at risk.” She paused. “I can help you do that.”
Warren let that go without comment. It might have been true. And even if it wasn’t, it wasn’t worth fighting over.
“When are you going to leave?” she asked.
“I’d rather stay the night.”
“Doing that would be a mistake. The villagers will only grow more bold with you among them. Familiarity breeds contempt.”
Personally, Warren felt certain the zombies bred contempt even faster.
“Finish what you need to do there,” Lilith said, “then I’ll join you outside the village.” Her image disappeared from the tea.
Warren finished his drink, then sat and waited.
Less than an hour later, with only a few hours left before nightfall, Warren changed into the fresh clothes Naomi asked for and received. He shouldered one of the packs Naomi gave him. She kept the other for herself.
No brass band waited to see him off. The armed villagers stood and watched without saying a word. Warren didn’t speak, either. They blamed him for bringing the demons to them, and maybe they were right.
But what he was about to do next would cause them to hate him forever. And fear him.
The dead had been laid out in the street. Some of the men worked across the street to dig a mass grave for those that had fallen in battle against the zombies. The imps had rated only a petrol-soaked pyre at the end of town, and only then to keep away the predators.
Warren stopped before the dead. He counted twenty-three whole bodies. It was twice as many zombies as he currently had.
“What are you doing?” Naomi asked.
Warren didn’t answer. She knew what he planned to do.
“You can’t do this.” Naomi came and stood at his side. “This is wrong.”
Gazing into her eyes, Warren asked, “Do you want to wander around out there without protection?”
Naomi cursed, but she didn’t tell him to stop. However, she did step away from him.
Summoning his power, surprised at how quickly his strength had come back, Warren held his metal hand out toward the corpses.
“Rise,” he commanded them.
Immediately, the corpses twitched and jerked. A wave of horrified cries and curses sounded behind Warren. He ignored them because working the spell took all of his concentration, and he hoped that no one decided to shoot him in the back of the head.
“Kill him!” someone shouted.
“Don’t let him do this!” a woman cried out. “Merciful God, don’t let him turn my son into a soulless monster!”
From the corner of his eye, Warren saw a man taking aim at him with a rifle.
“Don’t,” Naomi said, holding a hand out to the man.
He ignored her and set himself. Before he pulled the trigger, Naomi waved her arm at him. An invisible wall of force struck the man and knocked him backward nearly thirty feet. When he came to a rest, he was unconscious or dead.
None of the other villagers tried anything.
Warren watched the zombies stand and turn toward him. He didn’t know how many zombies he’d raised in the past four years, but the number had to be staggering. Yet, no matter how many times he’d done it, he’d never lost his fascination with what he was able to do.
He looked at the zombies. Covered in garish wounds and their eyes glazed over, they were walking nightmares. Most of the zombies Warren had left London with were in stages of advanced rot and decay. Many of them carried the dead husks of maggots that had hatched inside them in the warmer area of London and frozen in the winter cold.
“Come,” he told them, and he led them out of town without a backward look. The pained cries of the villagers followed him into the snowy outlands.
SEVENTEEN
A re you in pain?”
Leah gritted her teeth against the violent agony that twisted through her thoughts. She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t.
“No,” she answered. She tried to raise her arms and couldn’t. After a moment, she felt the straps around her wrist, elbow, and across her chest that kept her secured to the bed.
She was in a hospital. She knew that from the medicinal smells and the chronic beeping of the machines around her. The last thing she remembered was passing out in the river.
“You’re in pain,” a man’s voice said.
“I can handle it. Why can’t I move my arm? What’s wrong with my arm?”
“You need to calm down,” the man said. “It will only make the pain worse.”
“The pain is nothing,” Leah lied. “Help me out of this bed.” She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t. “Is something wrong with my eyes?”
The machines beeped into the ensuing silence.
“Did you hear me?” Leah demanded.
“She has a high pain threshold,” the calm man’s voice stated. “But as you can see from this readout, she’s in indescribable pain.”
“I see that, Doctor,” a woman’s voice replied. “Thank you.”
Leah thought she recognized the voice, but with the noisy machines and the agony she was in, she couldn’t be certain.
“Can you increase the Demerol?”
Demerol? No wonder Leah’s nose itched. She always had that reaction to that particular anesthetic.
“If we increase the drugs in her system, she’s going to be unconscious or so out of it that she may not understand you.”
“That won’t do,” the woman said. “Can’t you give her something that will keep her awake?”
“And pain-free? No.”
The woman sighed. “Then put her back out.”
“No.” Leah struggled against her bonds. She deserved some control. She wasn’t a child. Panic filled her. She desperately wanted to see what kind of shape she was in. One of her greatest fears was that she might not come back whole from one of her missions. “Talk to me. Let me decide—”
Warmth flooded her arm and she knew they’d injected more anesthetic. She fought against it, cursing and willing herself not to surrender to the effects.
Blackness closed over her.
When Leah came awake again, the dark room waited for her. Her head was clearer and most of the pain was gone, but a fierce throbbing continued to reside in her skull. She tried to lift her arm and couldn’t.
She turned her head to look at her arm and it felt as if her brain smashed against that side of her skull. Her vision rolled, t
hen finally cleared. Straps held both her arms down.
Both her arms.
She was ecstatic. She also had both her legs. And everything else in between seemed to be mostly together. That was always a good sign.
If it weren’t for all the bandages around her head and over her right eye, she would have thought nothing out of the ordinary was wrong with her. It’s nothing they can’t fix, she told herself.
Then she slept again.
“Awake, are we?”
Dully, Leah turned her head to look at the speaker. In her middle thirties, the blonde had shoulder-length hair and green eyes. She was trim and athletic, and if she hadn’t been, the form-fitting black armored suit she wore would have revealed that. A webbing of scar tissue showed at her right temple and cheek.
Her name was Lyra Darius. She’d been the one at the agency who had ferreted out the truth about Lord Patrick Sumerisle. In addition to being a heavy player in the Home Office ministry’s Internal Affairs division, Lord Sumerisle was also the leader of the Templar.
“I’m awake,” Leah agreed.
“Good. I thought you might be. You roused earlier. Excited the hospital staff enough that they called me.”
“Sorry. Don’t mean to be a bother.” Leah intended her response to be subtly sarcastic. Lyra Darius held a lot of power in the organization. After all, she’d been the one who had proved the Templar existed while MI-6 and other intelligence agencies had searched for them.
“You’re no bother,” Lyra said. “I’m just glad that you made it back. A lot of those men and women didn’t.”
For a moment, memory of all the death and destruction claimed Leah’s thoughts. The sights and sounds promised to haunt her for the rest of her life.
Lyra got up from the chair and put away the book she held. She stood at the side of the bed and gazed down with what looked like genuine compassion. It was hard to tell. Compassion was one of the first emotions they’d all been trained to fake.
“I had water brought in,” Lyra said. “And I got permission that, if you felt you were up to it, you could drink it.”
“I’m thirsty,” Leah said.
Lyra poured a glass of water from a carafe and added a bendy straw. She held the cup low for Leah to sip from the straw if she wanted.
“If you would unfasten the straps from my arms,” Leah said, “I could tend to myself. I don’t much care for being treated like a mewling brat.”
After a brief hesitation, Lyra nodded. “All right, but you’re going to have to go slow. The doctors aren’t yet sure how much you’ll be affected.”
“Affected by what?”
Lyra released the restraints. “You lost your right eye, Leah. You also suffered some slight brain damage that may affect motor control.”
Adrenaline dumped an overload into her system. “My eye?”
Lyra looked at her sympathetically. “Yes.”
If the world were a normal place and not stuck in a demon-infested nightmare, Leah would have sworn that she would have been seriously freaking at about that time. She also thought that part of her calm was because she had control over her body now.
Unfettered, she sat in the middle of the bed and sipped water through the straw. Her head still maintained a dulled pulse beneath the bandages. Having the wires and sensors connected to her body made her feel weak and fragile.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Lyra said.
“It’s better than being dead.” But not much. Losing an eye meant losing more than 50 percent of her vision. It was actually closer to 60 percent. And her depth perception would be gone as well. Better than being dead was going to be her mantra for a time.
“It is better,” Lyra said.
Leah put the cup on the small table by the bed. “Is there anything else wrong?” She asked herself if losing an eye and potential brain damage weren’t enough of a laundry list of problems.
“Other than a rather astonishing collection of cuts, scrapes, and bruises, you’re in fine shape.”
“We did destroy the weapons plant, didn’t we?”
Lyra nodded. “That set the demons back, but they’re already building another plant somewhere else in the city.”
“Do we know where?”
“No. But if we’ve learned anything at all about our adversaries over the past four years, it’s that they’re committed.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Leah said. “I’m not up on how good our medical technology is these days. I’ve been out in the field.”
“They can’t replace your eye.” Lyra’s voice remained soft, but no sympathy sounded in her words, nothing that Leah could attack. It was just a statement of fact. “Our technology hasn’t come that far yet.”
Barely quelling the nausea that twisted her stomach, Leah forced herself to nod. She wanted to tear the bandages from her head and prove that she could see. All she had to do was open her eye.
One of the machines beeped more quickly.
Lyra glanced at it, then said, “I can summon a nurse back to give you something to calm you down.”
“No.” Leah glared at the machine as she worked on taking deep, rhythmic breaths. The beeping slowed and kept slowing. I’m in control. Not my fear or anger. I can just…be.
Lyra smiled a little. “Very good.”
Controlling the body’s reactions was one of the things Leah had learned early in her career. She’d gotten educated in that at about the same time she was shown how to kill an opponent in hundreds of different ways.
“They replaced your arm,” Leah said.
Lyra wore a black glove over her right hand to mask the metallic surface. She hadn’t opted for a cosmetically more appealing hand. She’d chosen something that was as much a weapon as a pistol or a knife.
“An eye is more…complicated,” Lyra replied. “There is a prosthesis that can be wired into your brain. A helmet, if you will, that will cover that side of your face and provide visual feedback in programming uploads that your brain will understand.”
“Doesn’t sound especially chic.”
“It’s not. It’s cumbersome and ugly. But it’s better than being half blind.”
“Nice to hear brutal honesty.”
“If I tried to sugarcoat it, you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“No,” Leah agreed.
“The headpiece also lacks the ability to see in color, which is going to take some getting used to.”
“Different images for the brain to process.”
“Yes. I’m told that the user will, eventually, layer the two images into one. It gets smoother with use.”
Leah didn’t say anything.
“I know this is a lot to take in, Leah,” Lyra said.
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t have a choice.”
“What will I be allowed to do?”
Lyra regarded her seriously. “When you’re released from the hospital—and I said released, not escaped from or arbitrarily decide to forgo medical treatment—you’ll be evaluated.”
“I’m going to be stuck in a bloody desk job, aren’t I?”
“Support positions are as necessary as any other.”
“I wasn’t trained to be a support person,” Leah said vehemently. “I was trained to be a covert operative. A force to be reckoned with.”
Lyra was silent for a moment. “How long do you think you’re going to need to protest the injustice of the universe and feel sorry for yourself?” Her words were blunt and hard.
Leah looked at the woman with new respect. Although she’d met Lyra Darius only once before, it had been during a time of trouble as well.
“You don’t mess about, do you?” Leah asked.
“We don’t have time to.”
“Good to know.”
“You’re still a valuable operative, Leah. You’ve got qualities and connections that I value highly.”
With her one good eye, Leah glared at the woman. “You don’t know me. We’ve met only the one time.”<
br />
“Once was enough.”
Leah studied the woman with more speculation. “Someone like you, someone as high up in the organization as you are, wouldn’t have come down here to offer me a pep talk.”
“Not unless I thought you needed one.”
“I don’t.”
Lyra smiled and the effort pulled a little at the scar tissue on the right side of her face. “Then I’d best get on to the exploitative part of my visit here.”
“What part would that be?”
“You have friends among the Templar.”
Leah didn’t argue. The last time they talked she’d been in trouble for exactly that reason. As much as she dealt with Simon Cross, the organization had believed she’d been compromised.
“I want to exploit the friendship you have with them,” Lyra went on.
“How?”
“Control is wondering how amenable Simon Cross would feel to being sponsored in a bid to put him in charge of all the Templar.”
EIGHTEEN
W arren woke just before the dawn. He’d spent the night with his back to a tree and huddled in a thick quilt he’d gotten from the villagers. An icy glaze from new-fallen snow lay spread over the quilt, but it continued to be warm inside the folds. The heat inside his body was generated by the arcane power he commanded. The quilt helped trap it.
Only a few feet away, wrapped in another quilt and dug into a hillside, Naomi slept with her head covered. Although she’d tried to generate warmth the same way Warren had, she hadn’t been able to maintain it. During the night Warren had lent his strength to hers. He sensed from that connection that she was well.
“You worry about her too much.”
When Warren glanced back up, Lilith stood in front of him. She faced the gray dawn and looked incredibly pale.
“I don’t think I do,” Warren responded.
“Yet you weaken yourself to care for her.”
“She’s an ally.”