Relic: Mask (A Kane Arkwright Supernatural Thriller) (Relics Book 7)

by Ben Zackheim

  Its legs jittered, powered by a hunting instinct that felt bigger than me, more powerful than me.

  I felt doomed before the fight even began.

  But Rebel needed me.

  I rolled to the left. It was a guess. The beast’s blow struck the ground where I’d been a second before.

  I scrambled to my feet, spotted a gun in the dim glow of my portal, and scooped it up. I aimed at a huge, hairy leg reaching from the blackness. It knocked the Glock from my hand again.

  The spider stood between me and my portal now. She mocked me with her silence, and stillness, daring me to go for it.

  I looked around for a blunt object. A hiding place. Anything.

  Nothing.

  I was in the temple against a spider five times my size, and no weapon to defend me.

  She got ready to charge.

  I crouched and got ready to die.

  If I’d been up against something with two legs and arms, I would have been confident. I had the ability to spot action and reaction. I could anticipate an attacker’s trajectory pretty damn well. Rebel thought it was a spell, but we all knew I was no Magicist. I just had a really good sense of my environment. But when you have eight huge, hairy legs and a poisonous fang scurrying at you, well, that trick of mine didn’t have the same zing to it.

  She scurried toward me, slow at first, and then gaining speed.

  I ran at her, starting fast, and then slowing down.

  With no time to think, I just followed my body where it went. I rolled on my shoulder. I didn’t have a clue what the plan was. Spider bowling, maybe?

  I rolled under the spider’s massive torso.

  It would have been a great plan if she’d been a few feet smaller. But I found myself at a dead-stop, directly under her belly. It was a furry belly, with a pattern that looked like the head of a horned demon.

  Appropriate.

  I waited for the sensation of flesh torn asunder by arachnid rage. So I was surprised when the thing screeched.

  She was annoyed.

  Her legs slapped the ground, occasionally slipping and stumbling.

  She couldn’t reach me.

  I knew what to do. I needed to make a run for the vault when her fang was least dangerous. Sure, she could take me out with one of those hairy legs. But I had to pick my battles.

  I turned in circles with her, trying to stay out of reach.

  Finally, her ass-side faced the portal.

  I ran for the glowing hole in the air and reached in.

  The brightening light made the bitch hiss. Her legs jerked around until she fell backwards and scurried into the shadows. She let out a whine that was as disarming as the hiss.

  The new brightness revealed something else. I was in the room where Skyler had brought me. There was no doubt about it now. I spotted the tall, thin cabinet against one of the walls where he’d hidden the scroll piece.

  The spider was waiting for the glow to disappear, then she would strike.

  So I had to make sure the glow didn’t go anywhere.

  I needed to find a weapon in the vault. My first thought was the Sceptre. But something in me hesitated. I didn’t know how to use it yet. So far, it had responded to me well. And quickly. But I wasn’t going to bet my life on five minutes of experience.

  I needed to find something that I knew how to use.

  My brain went right to Excalibur.

  The sword could destroy the spider. No question about that. But it would also try to take me over again. I didn’t know if I had the strength to fight its power. If I touched it, it would make me its own. Like a jealous lover with enough magic to make its mate loyal.

  I didn’t want to feel that way ever again.

  Of course, I didn’t want to feel a fang in my neck again, either.

  As usual, just thinking about the relic put it within reach. I felt the sword’s hilt fall into my palm, and immediately sensed its power.

  The power it had over me.

  The power it gave me.

  It told me everything would be okay. I had nothing to fear from a spider. Excalibur would crush it.

  Excalibur would make everything better.

  Maybe it could even save the world.

  I lifted the weapon, and its fiery sheen made the room even brighter. The spider smacked her legs on the ground like she was having a fit. She didn’t know what to do.

  She was cornered.

  I approached her.

  I felt a rage growing in me. She wanted the sword. She wanted to take it from me. I wouldn’t let her. I gritted my teeth and screamed as I ran toward her vibrating form. Her poison tip flailed around, barely missing me as the sword took control and sliced the sharp end of her ass right off. She shrieked in pain, and fell onto her back.

  I lifted the sword for the killing blow.

  The spider’s face, only seconds before a collection of small black eyes, was now Feifei’s.

  The sword had lost its effect on me in an instant.

  “Feifei?”

  “Don’t hesitate,” she whispered back. “You promised me.”

  I placed the tip of the sword below her chin, and slid it in as deep as it would go.

  Her beautiful eyes went wide for a moment, then her mouth curled in a small smile.

  One last exhale, and the spider was dead.

  Feifei was gone.

  I felt an emptiness in me. As if a part of me was taken with her last breath. I knew that it was the spell she had over me lifting. I should have been relieved. Instead I felt like sobbing.

  I started to feel dizzy. The adrenaline had helped me fight. But the smack against the wall was concussion material.

  The darkness around me got darker. I passed out.

  “Good job, Kane,” Rebel said.

  I sat up, surprised. I didn’t respond to her. I should have been overjoyed to see that she was okay. Instead, I wanted Excalibur back in my hand.

  I was lying on top of the blade. Rebel hadn’t seen it yet.

  Good. Good.

  I slowly wrapped a hand around the hilt of the weapon.

  It filled the void in me with an anger that must have showed. Rebel backed up a step. That’s not very common, in case you were wondering.

  But she was more powerful than she was the last time we’d fought over Excalibur. This time she just lifted her hand, and Excalibur yanked itself from my grasp. It floated to her.

  “Don’t even think about it, Kane.”

  I was still ready to fight her, but my brain somehow managed to settle down enough to hear her say, “The relic.” She wrapped the sword in her coat, and tossed it into the Vault Portal.

  I closed it. I took a few seconds to collect myself.

  “The relic,” I repeated.

  Chapter 8

  Rebel stood guard over the spider’s corpse.

  Feifei’s face still showed through the flesh. She looked dead, but we weren’t going to take any chances.

  I knew something was wrong the moment I looked at the cabinet up close. There was a small altar in front of it. It had been knocked over in the battle.

  I took a few steps before I noticed the cabinet door was open.

  My breath’s pace quickened as I realized what I was going to see, before I even saw it.

  The cabinet was empty.

  I tapped the inside to look for a hidden compartment, but didn’t find anything.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “That better not mean what I think it means, Arkwright,” Rebel growled.

  “It’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, it’s gone?”

  “As in, it’s not here. Non-existence of the relic stands fucking before me.”

  “Dammit, Kane! Are you sure this is the right temple?”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “So, what do we do now?”

  “We find it.”

  “Great. That sounds easy. I’ll take Europe. You take Asia. We’ll work latitudinally.”

  �
�Funny,” I said. I sat on an overturned crate and rubbed my face, thinking. “I need more information.”

  “Like where to find a new partner.”

  “That would be helpful, yeah. But I also need to know who’s been here.” I pointed my flashlight at the ground, and stood up to explore the room.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Trash, something out of place, anything.”

  Rebel joined me in the hunt. If I wanted her to keep the sass down, I’d have to keep us busy, and that was the only idea I had at the moment. So I was surprised when I found a shoe print in the dirt floor. It didn’t match our boots.

  “Look at this,” I said. I took my phone out and snapped a photo.

  “That’s not yours?”

  “No. There are two more .” I pointed to the cabinet where the scroll had been stowed away by Skyler.

  “The scroll piece could have been taken years ago,” Rebel said.

  “True, but it’s all we have. Except…”

  Something Feifei had told me flashed past my tired brain.

  “Thor,” I said out loud.

  “What about him?”

  “Feifei told me that a god owned the scroll piece. She said he’s thunder with his hammer.”

  “Who the hell is Feifei?”

  I pointed to the face on the spider. Apparently, Rebel hadn’t seen the face yet, because she let out a short screech.

  “You flirted with a spider, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know she was the spider!”

  Rebel shook her hands at me. “Forget it! So we find Thor, we find the prize.”

  “Maybe. But I’d like to take a less dangerous path first. We need to find out who left this print here.”

  “I hate to tell you this, Kane, but we don’t have a database of shoe patterns lying around.”

  “No. We don’t.”

  “Who does?”

  I gave her a look that probably came across as slightly concerned. I was. There was only one place that could help us track down a single shoe print. And Rebel was not going to take it well.

  “You are kidding me,” she said.

  “It’s the only way.”

  “We could ask Lucas to look around. He might have ways to…”

  “Lucas is a demon, Rebel. If it’s not in a book, then he’s not interested.”

  “Dammit, Kane.”

  “Sorry, Rebel.”

  “You will be, if she’s there,” Rebel mumbled as I opened the satellite map on my phone. I zoomed in on the area we’d need to swap to. I didn’t want to use the Swap Portal on any humans, so I had to find a crowd of vampires somewhere near our destination.

  Bingo.

  There was a swarm of activity around a park in San Francisco’s Menlo Park.

  “Found a spot,” I said.

  Rebel sighed and pulled a chocolate bar out of her small supply bag. “Let me charge up.”

  “You still need to do that?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I just haven’t seen you run low on juice since…” Oops. I stopped myself, but not in time.

  “Since when?”

  “Since you know when, Rebel. Stop messing with me.”

  “Since when, Kane?”

  “Since Pandora, okay? Since you trained with that old woman, you’ve been fighting wizards like Merlin, and taking out Leviathans, and saving us from…”

  “Don’t you fucking say it.”

  “Saving us from crashing airplanes! You pulled Dino and I out of a falling plane! You saved our lives, then walked out of a fire without a mark on you!”

  She walked at me like she was going to tear my head off. Her eyes were filled with a rage that was usually reserved for the undead.

  I might have taken a step back. Or two.

  She stuck one of her fingernails in my face. I was about to get a good talking-to, or a good run-through.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she hissed.

  “I know what I saw, partner.” I kept my eyes on hers. If she wouldn’t believe my words, maybe she’d believe my eyes.

  Her hand dropped to her side. She backed away from me, shaking her head.

  She sat on the spider corpse and sighed.

  “Can we at least agree that you fought Merlin and held your own against him?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “We can’t agree on that.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me! You don’t remember that, either?”

  “I remember it fine. I didn’t just ‘hold my own.’ I kicked his mythical ass.”

  “Fine. You kicked his ass. And you remember taking down a couple of Leviathans, too.”

  “I remember taking down five of them, which is more than a couple.”

  “So why does the idea of saving us from the crashing plane freak you out so much?”

  “Because I don’t remember it, Kane!”

  “And why would you not remember it? You’re not telling me something, damn it. Spit it out.”

  “Oh, so I get to share all my secrets while you make plans with my life without telling me. Is that it?”

  My secrecy in Paris still ate at her. And it still made me feel like shit. I crouched down. “I told you, Rebel. I had to be careful. Someone we know is working for Set.”

  She sat and seethed. I needed to break the heavy mood. We had to move past the past, and fast, if we were going to have our shit together for the next round of world-saving. We were a mess. We were distracted and growing apart. Right when everyone needed us, our partnership felt like it was disintegrating.

  “I also said I’m sorry. And I am. Now, can we get out of here?”

  She shot me a look and I met her glare with a softer one. She relaxed. Her shoulders dropped, and she leaned on her knees. She put her face in her hands and rubbed her palms over her eyes. She probably wanted to open her eyes and be anywhere else in the world.

  We would be soon enough.

  But we had to make amends first.

  “I don’t remember casting a spell in the plane. I don’t have the power to pull people out of a fucking crashing plane, Kane.”

  “So you’ve said. But I saw you do it.”

  “And if you’re right, if you actually saw me cast this spell that saved you and Dino, then that means Pandora is in me.”

  Chapter 9

  “Not what I expected to hear,” I said.

  “Get your head out of the gutter.”

  “But it’s the only place I’ve ever known. You mean Pandora possessed you?”

  “When she trained me, she cast a few hundred spells. I… sensed that some of them were not meant for me to learn. It was like… It was like she was preparing the training area for me. Some of the spells made me feel different.”

  “Different, how?”

  “More powerful. More out of control.”

  “You think she has a way to take control of you?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m afraid that’s what’s happening.”

  I’d never heard her say that before. Rebel only feared one thing — running out of vampires to kill. She really was freaked out about this. Her behavior in the last few weeks started to make some sense.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  “How’s that make you feel?”

  “Like you’re getting revenge for Paris.”

  “Maybe I am. Or maybe I don’t want to chit-chat about Pandora.”

  “You think she’s controlling you?” I was surprised how defensive I felt for her. Rebel could take care of herself, but there was something about her composure as she sat across from me. Something unsettling and unfamiliar.

  Delicate, even.

  “How the hell should I know? Fuck, Kane. She probably didn’t do anything. Let’s just drop it, okay? It doesn’t matter.”

  “If it’s making you use magic this much, then it matters. I’ve been wondering why these spells haven’t been draining you dry. You used to need a bacon and peanut
butter burger after every spell. Look. I know what it feels like.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, not exactly. But now that we’re, you know, talking.”

  “You mean being honest with each other.”

  “That, too.”

  I guess I let the silence linger a little too long, because Rebel leaned forward to grab my attention. “What are you trying to tell me, Kane? Is someone in your head?”

  “I’m in theirs.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You remember the kid in Paris?”

  “The boy? Yeah, he seemed to freak you out. Which was kind of weird when the whole world-falling-apart didn’t even hit you that hard.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not every day you realize that you’re not living in your own body.”

  “I’m looking at your body, and you’re in it.”

  “I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think it’s mine.”

  “You’re going to have to elaborate on that one, partner.”

  I gathered my thoughts. I grabbed at clear memories like the rare treasures they were. It was time to come clean with Rebel. Consequences, be damned and damned again.

  “I’ve been losing my memories. You know that. It’s like a spell is lifting slowly and my past is lifting with it. I remember the locations Skyler took me to when he was hiding the scroll pieces. But everything else is slipping away.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not in your body.”

  “Will you let me finish, or would you like to make this even harder?”

  “Sorry, fine. Continue.”

  “The kid’s been visiting me since the Mjölnir job. When we were in Paris he started to speak to me. Just one sentence. He said, ‘Give it back.’”

  “But why do you think he’s referring to his body?”

  “There’s one more memory. It’s a new one. I remember stalking the kid like a mosquito. I followed him, watched him. He was sitting in a windowsill and reading a comic. I saw a chance to take him. Then I was him. With his comic in my hand. The rain outside. The hunger for a sandwich for lunch. I wondered if mom would make it for me.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Then the memory fades again. His memories became mine and I settled in as if I’d been there all along.”