by Ronie Kendig
“Then you must get ready,” Rutger said, conviction in his bones. “The final confrontation is upon us.”
EIGHT
REAPER HEADQUARTERS, MARYLAND
It wasn’t the same. Never would be. Not until Leif was back, giving attitude and telling lame jokes. But Cell wasn’t sure that day would come. Worse, he wasn’t sure he wanted that day to come. Not after Taiwan. So many things had gone wrong: Peyton shot by an enemy sniper, they’d targeted the wrong Neiothen, and Leif had gone all Jason Bourne on them.
“Two weeks,” Cell muttered to no one in particular as he glanced around the hub. Fourteen days since the fiasco at Durrani International in London when Reaper narrowly escaped, thanks to Mercy activating the fire alarm. With emergency personnel swarming, they had the ruse needed to slip into the chaos, which had also sent the super soldiers running back into whatever hole they’d scurried out from in the first place. “Are we seriously not going to talk about the Terminators that came after us?”
“They were some serious slag,” Saito agreed from his station. “But so are we. Am I right?”
“Not so serious! Baddar and Culver are injured.”
“Baddar held off multiple assailants while you sat in a bunker,” Mercy bit out.
“I’m just saying those men”—Cell grimaced—“were animals. Like, no remorse. At all. Just slice and dice and move on. It was terrifying, watching the feed!”
“Imagine how we felt being in the actual fight,” Culver growled, touching his shoulder were he’d been shot.
“Think they’re more of the Neiothen? Is Leif with them?” Cell asked.
“Shut up, man,” Culver barked, then answered his ringing phone.
Whatever. It’d been like this since they’d returned. The point was that they had exactly bubkes. Half the team wanted to race off to save Leif from himself, the other half felt betrayed and wanted to strangle him for abandoning them.
“Aw, man, that’s great to hear about Peyton.” Culver’s Southern drawl twanged through the dimly lit bunker as he talked into a phone. He shifted in his chair, nodding. “Sure thing. I’ll let them know. We’re here for you when—yeah. I hear you.”
Guessing Culver was talking to Adam Lawe, Cell was on his feet. Reaper seemed to be of the same mind. Baddar, Mercy, and Saito also huddled nearby, hoping for good news.
Culver finally hung up and swiveled to them with not-quite-a-smile. “Peyton’s still in a coma, but she’s finally stable enough to fly her home. They start back in the a.m.”
“Is it smart to move her while she’s still in a coma?” Cell asked.
Saito nodded. “If her vitals are stable, she’s safe to fly. She could stay in a coma for an extended period, so what they’re facing is long-term care. However, if she comes out—”
“When she comes out,” Mercy corrected.
With a slower nod, Saito continued. “When she comes out of it, she’s going to have a lot of rehab, and that’s when they can determine the extent of the permanent damage, if any.”
Though nobody would say it, the possibility existed that Peyton might not wake up. And if she did, whether she’d be able to walk and talk was another ball game.
“Lawe sounded good, relieved,” Culver said.
“He had me worried,” Cell admitted. “He’s not usually a downer . . .”
“It’s not every day you see a high-velocity round eat the chest of the woman you love,” Culver growled.
“Fair enough. I didn’t mean—”
“We’re all on edge,” Mercy said calmly. “And more than a little concerned about our situation and about our absent friends.”
Baddar touched her shoulder, and surprisingly, she kind of leaned into it. Not much, but she definitely didn’t shift away. Was something happening between those two? Why did that leave a bitter taste in Cell’s mouth?
Because all the good ones choose the other guy.
“I take it you heard Devine is being prepped for transport back here,” Iliescu said as he and Braun joined them in the hub. “She’s not out of the woods, but Landstuhl can’t do much else for her.”
Had the director really come out here just to tell them that? His expression seemed to hint at more.
“Something going on?” Saito asked, glancing between the director and his DoD counterpart.
“Couple things,” Iliescu said with a nod. “Charlie Harden’s on his way down to talk about the third war mentioned in the Book of the Wars.” He paused for only a fraction, then seemed to steel himself. “Analysts have been poring over SATINT, SIGINT—you name it—to locate Leif.”
Cell straightened. “They found something?”
Dru pointed to the round table, then aimed a remote at the wall screen. “This was at a private airstrip about a hundred klicks from the Taiwan safe house. SATINT logs this as 23 June at 2359 hours.”
On the footage, a silver SUV with blacked-out windows pulled up to a Learjet, which had its stairs extended and waiting. Two men exited the SUV and stalked into the jet, but their faces weren’t visible.
“Height and gait comparisons give a ninety-percent likelihood that the second man to enter the jet was Leif,” Braun said, as she acknowledged Harden, who entered the hub.
Heavy quiet draped the team as they studied the looping footage, hoping it would tell them more.
“With Andrew,” Mercy sneered. “Right?”
“That’s our belief,” Dru agreed.
Cell wanted to provide plausible explanations for Leif being with ArC associates, but he didn’t have it in him to reach that far. Not this time.
“So he . . .” Mercy’s glossy gaze was locked on the screen.
“We stick with facts,” Dru stated firmly. “Leif is with Andreas Krestyanov. That’s all we’ve confirmed.”
“Dude, if we acted only on confirmed intel, we’d be in pretty sorry shape,” Cell argued.
“You never liked him,” Culver said quietly.
“Reverse that,” Cell countered. “He didn’t like me.”
“You called him Usurper,” Saito challenged.
“Yeah,” Cell sniffed, “and you all called me a coward for taking a promotion that put me here and has saved your sorry carcasses more than once.”
“Why didn’t you come clean with what you knew about him?” Culver’s question crossed into accusation territory.
Cell balked. “What, so it’s my fault Leif is now rogue and possibly colluding with the enemy? Which—in case anyone here forgot—is called treason.” A thundering pulse wouldn’t help him calm down. “And before you lay into me about that, let’s remember we have a timetable. The U.S. is notoriously swift in dealing with traitors, because the longer they are alive to—”
A blurred fist came from his left.
An explosion of pain shot through Cell’s jaw. Air swirled. The room spun. Cell found himself on the ground, pinned by a two-twenty weight named Culver Brown.
* * *
It always happened. No superhero team was immune. They all fell.
Hand to her mouth, Mercy stepped back as Baddar and Saito drew a raging Culver off Cell, who now had a split cheek and lip. The injuries from their failed London mission must be aggravating their common sense. It had definitely grounded them for a while, and maybe that was part of what was eating at the fabric of this team.
Dru shoved Cell backward. One hand on Cell’s chest, he pointed in his face. “Stand down. Hear me?”
“Me? Who’s the one—”
“Enough! What’s more important?” Dru shouted, looking between the men. “Being right or ending this?”
Like a dog licking his wounds, Cell shifted aside, head down.
A still-scowling Culver shrugged free of Saito.
The whole thing reminded Mercy of Tox and Ram and their falling out—not to mention how that ended. She was sick of this. Sick of superheroes falling. And she wouldn’t believe that of Leif.
“Leif is our friend,” she said, imploring them. “We have to put aside offe
nses and—”
“If the final prophecy is any indication,” Harden spoke from the table, where he stood before his opened attaché case, “he may not be your friend.”
Lips tight, she pivoted toward the analyst. “Tell you what—”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean that the way it came out,” Dru said.
“I meant it just like it sounds. Take a look.” Harden pressed a button on the remote, and words splashed over the wall screen. “This is what the Book of the Wars states regarding the third and final war before the coalition completes their agenda, which”—he glanced at Dru and Braun—“experts agree is control of the economy in key countries.”
As Harden started reading, Mercy allowed her gaze to wander the excerpt, the black words glowering at them from the wall.
A third angel appeared and took me into the bowels of the earth, where those from below writhe in the agony of their own doing while the great storms boast of his slaughter. Hatred pierces the heart of a warrior, then friend turns against friend, lost in their fears and anguish. So it was, the angel went out as a sacrifice. He went, to death, to victory, ready to confront the darkness that had rallied yet again to victory as those from below slumbered in ignorance. To rout their complacency, the final paladin seeks conquest. In his hands are blood and violence, dripping with vengeance and might; he cannot be stopped. None can stand against him, though to their death they try. Friends numbering zero and enemies in the thousands, he wars in the dark hour, his wrath relentless against those who oppose him. Man will know his fury but not his loyalty, which alone belongs to the one who built him. His hour has come. In this, he will not fail.
“That . . .” A wad of guilt and fear clogged Mercy’s throat. “Is that ‘final paladin’ Leif?”
Harden gripped the back of a chair and bent forward. “That’s my—our guess.”
“To be clear,” Dru spoke up, “we cannot know definitively that everything in the text refers to this paladin, to Leif.”
“But Cell said Leif is the Ossi who got called out in the park,” Saito said, “and that text says, ‘those from below slumber in ignorance.’ Does slumber mean dead? Because the Neiothen we went after are all dead, save Leif and Andrew. Tell me I’m right. I mean, they don’t come back to life, right?”
“To the best of our very limited knowledge,” Dru conceded. “We have to understand that interpreting prophecy is not our area of expertise. At best, these are educated guesses. Slumber could be sleeping, or it could be death. We can’t know for sure what it means.”
Mercy probed the text, desperate for some word or phrase to turn this away from Leif being evil incarnate, driven to brutality by a raging soul. What angered her was how easily she could believe it after what he’d done to Cell. How he’d abandoned them without a word. She recalled Iskra’s chastisement over shifting loyalty.
“That’s pretty muffed,” Saito said, as the revelatory weight seemed to push him into his seat. “If that’s Leif—if all this is him . . .”
“Then it means he’s on a rampage, friendless, and”—Admiral Braun let out a heavy sigh—“unstoppable.”
“No way!” Culver flung a hand at the wall. “You and that thing are wrong, because it says ‘friends numbering zero,’ and I count at least four right here. So either it’s wrong or we are.”
“Agreed. So what’re we doing? Anything?” Cell asked, his expression contorted. “We just let him—”
“It says those who oppose him will know his wrath,” Braun said. “I’ve seen Runt’s wrath. Have you? It isn’t pretty.”
“True.” Saito threaded his fingers together. “The more we go up against Leif, the uglier it’s going to get. He ditched us to take care of this for a reason, so . . . we let him.”
“Okay, so maybe three friends,” Culver snarled at Saito. “I can’t believe you, man. What about the rest of y’all? You with Saito, too?”
“No.” Mercy felt sick. “I will not believe this! I will not be that to him, an enemy. Supers stick together—always. Leif will always have me as a friend.”
“Easy words, like the wind,” Dru challenged. “What Leif is doing?” He met each team member’s gaze. “It can’t happen. We have to stop him, and with everything we have.”
“Dude.” The laughter was missing from Cell’s voice. “You saw the words—his fury—”
“It says we meet his fury. It doesn’t say lose to his fury.”
“Isn’t that splitting hairs?” Saito ran a hand over his closely shorn scalp. “I’d like to keep the few I have.”
“No, we help him. He needs us,” Culver gritted out. “That is, those of us who are loyal.”
“Maybe,” Dru conceded, hesitating for a second that allowed Mercy to see something in his expression that unsettled her. “However, this could be the only chance we have to stop this, to stop Leif.”
“We—you know him. You’ve worked with him.” Determination cut a hard line through Braun’s words. “That gives us a leg up.”
Not liking the gleam in the rear admiral’s eyes nor the direction of this conversation, Mercy clenched her jaw. Her stomach churned at the thought of hunting down Leif. Doing it as friends was one thing, but as his enemy . . .
“It gives us the chance to dance in his reticle,” Saito countered, his brows drawn together. “We need to be on alert. Remember—he does not have a light trigger finger.”
Braun lifted her chin. “Neither do we.”
* * *
STUTTGART, GERMANY
Tic-tacking up the corner of the warehouse, Leif fought to harness his thoughts. The steel pipe was cold as he scaled higher. From there, he launched out to a low-hanging truss. He caught it and swung with nothing but thirty feet of unfriendly German air between him and the concrete floor. He arced his legs up and slipped onto the catwalk. Righted, feet dangling over the emptiness, he hooked his arms over a metal support. No panting. Barely a drip of sweat.
The belowground hideaway fed into this warehouse gymnasium, which was arranged into a dozen different training areas—obstacle course, weights, pool, firing range in the far right with ballistic barriers that kept the bullets and most of the sound inside. To the far right, a sealed medical bay was off limits for the protection of those in recovery. And to the left—that conference room where they’d given him the origin story of the Neiothen. Of Katrin and her team, of how it had grown from a well-intentioned program to a bad sci-fi novel under the direction of Veratti. And now? Now there was a worse breed. Yeah, cue the cheese and bad FX.
The only problem was the Gen2s were real, along with the technology. He’d seen articles and news pieces on bills going before Congress to get funding for enhancements for troops. But to find out he’d already been part of that? Whack.
He and the others had the ability to ignore pain and endure more for longer periods. Their bodies healed faster. It scared him to think about what the newer models could do. Machines.
And it worried him for Reaper. For Iskra.
What nagged his thoughts was the first scene in the two-paneled painting he had stolen from Rutger—six kings around one man. It hadn’t made sense before, but now . . . with seven Neiothen left . . . He’d hidden the diptych painting, convinced it was a piece of him, an arrow to his past, and that he had to follow it. Why he thought that, what had convinced him—he couldn’t say. Gut instinct. Like Fuji’s bunk room in Djibouti City, with that Buddha tapestry—he had just known it was significant. Same with the panel. Saw it. Knew it. Stole it.
No doubt Reaper saw him as a traitor. Iskra had been furious when he’d gone on a fact-finding mission in Egypt last month and hadn’t told her. So this? It’d be unforgiveable.
Just as well. It meant she was farther from him, farther from danger.
Was this worth it? He’d gotten answers but hadn’t expected or anticipated what they’d mean. To learn he was one of the demons he’d been hunting. Which meant he had to be hunted, too. Right? It was a natural thought progression—if Reaper had hunte
d the other men in this warehouse, wouldn’t they now hunt Leif?
And the book. The painting. Wouldn’t it be better if he removed himself from the equation? He wasn’t looking for the coward’s way out—he just wanted closure. Reaper, under his direction, had failed miserably in the first and second wars the book mentioned. The third was about him, wasn’t it? That wasn’t good. In fact, it was pretty freakin’ bad.
“In his hands are blood and violence.” That was what the book said, blood and violence. He didn’t want to be that. He was a fighter, a warrior, but not a . . . demon.
He stared at the concrete forty feet below him. Sudden impact—would it be enough to kill him? End it fast? Save everyone the pain he’d cause?
A whistle seared the air and snapped his attention to Andreas, who stood with the other guys. Their gazes swept suddenly up to Leif. A strange and startling revelation hit him—he was more like these guys than Reaper. The thought angered him. He hated that he was one of them. These men had acted as assassins for ArC, had been activated, then murdered people.
Andreas motioned for him to join them.
He hesitated, then figured why not. Using a steel pipe riveted to the crossbeams, he headed down. As he crossed the warehouse, he took his time, assessing the moods and postures of the men. Tense. Irritated.
Two more things they had in common.
“What do you remember?” Vega asked.
“About what?”
“The Sahara,” Huber said.
Leif drew up at the memory. The danger of opening this vault when it had been hermetically sealed to prevent it from leaking into his life . . .
“Trust us,” Andreas said. “There’s a point.”
Like it or not, he was one of them. Time to accept it.
“Fragments are all I remember.” Leif met Krieger’s—Huber’s—gaze. “You, groaning as you lay beneath Zhanshi after the crash. And the drop-off that nearly took—”