by Alex Gates
“Beautiful,” I said, admiring the M4A1 carbine I’d picked up.
From inside the hangar, I noticed a dozen more men filing outside toward the source of the noise—and me. Taking a step, I staggered, nearly falling. I caught my balance at the last second, as the world spun around me. I had no energy at all. The boost my power had provided had taken more than the reserves I had left. Forcing another lurching step, a bullet whizzed past my ear with a high-pitched whistle.
The men had reached me. One of them punched me in the shoulder, though no one stood within twenty yards of me. How was that possible? Another one punched me in the stomach, doubling me over. I dropped to my knees and saw blood dripping onto the asphalt through holes in my shirt. They hadn’t punched me, they’d shot me. My body—numb from the accumulated pain and probably going into shock from overexerting myself—failed to fully register the bullet wounds.
Hot metal pressed against my head. I didn’t have the strength to lift my gaze and meet my destroyer. So, I just allowed my head to lull against my chest. Before I had the chance to say something witty, a heavy, palpable darkness overcame me.
And I knew nothing more.
I awoke to a rank odor shoved up my nostrils. I coughed and gagged, struggling to orient myself in the swaying room. At first, my vision only picked up hazy images, but as I came to, I picked out details—most importantly, I was upside down, hanging by a rope or chain tied tight around my ankles. The room shifted back and forth, glowing with bright light, drowning every possible shadow. On the ground below me pooled a puddle of dark blood. Upon seeing it, the familiar pains returned to me, and I remembered the two gunshot wounds I’d suffered.
An itch burned my nose, and I moved my left hand to scratch it—to eradicate at least one small discomfort—but my hands were tied together behind me back. That singular itch bothered me more than any of the injuries.
Glancing up—or was it down?—I confirmed that they had chained me to the ceiling by my feet, and the line slowly twisted, turning me along with it. As I spun, my surroundings changed. A half-dozen men wearing black uniforms stood in a cluster, holding assault rifles against their chest as if awaiting orders. Xander was stripped to his boxer briefs, tied to a column. He had a gag shoved in his mouth, his left eye was completely shut, and blood beaded his body like sweat. Twisting around further, I saw Gladas holding Annabel’s hand. They were speaking with a tall, skinny woman. She had raven-colored hair and eyes so dark, they could have been black. She held open the white lab coat she wore, exposing a collection of vials and potions. Allowing the fold to close, she opened the other side, showing a similar, if not more vast, assortment. I twisted away from her, returning to my first position, staring at cement walls.
Footsteps clacked against the ground as someone approached. A melodic voice—one half-stuck in song—said, “Joseph Hunter.” The woman wearing the lab coat circled around me, following my slow twirl. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
My mouth was sandpaper, my tongue a desert sponge. Still, I managed to say, “Nothing from Medea, I bet.”
That comment earned me nothing from her. The soft smile remained glued to her face. Her hands remained stuffed in her lab coat pockets. Her eyes remained hard and fixed on me—showing no emotion at all. “We can discuss Medea at a later time,” she said. “For now, let’s get acquainted. I’m Circe, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. You’re the infamous Joseph Hunter—hunter of monsters, oath-breaker, Arkos.” She spat down at me after the last name, the same one Medea had called me. “You’re unnatural. An obscenity. Though, like cancer, you still serve a purpose.”
“W. T. F,” I said. “Like cancer? And I thought I was dark.” My mind reeled though. I’d understood the intent behind hunter of monsters and oath-breaker… but Arkos? What did that mean? And why had she called me unnatural?
“Your purpose was a great one, my child. Through your blood—and your blood alone—we possess the key to unlock the thirty sealed gates. The Nephilim Council will fall, as will their universities and monopoly on power.”
I coughed. “Medea already went through all this. But can I get some… water?”
Circe opened her lab coat and fingered a few vials before removing one and popping the cork. “This is a potion of vitality,” she said. “It will restore you to a semblance of health. Do you wish to partake?”
I cleared my dry throat and shook my head. I preferred not to drink anything this lady offered to me. “Gladas,” I said, “it’s good to know I read you right. Did she offer you the cure when you handed Xander over to her?”
“His mission was to bring you to me. And he failed at that,” Circe said, recapping the vial and placing it back in her coat. “Before you die, Joseph Hunter, I want you to know how important your life was—that way, you know that you lived for something.”
“Wow,” I choked out, “you’re incredibly… kind.”
“With your blood shed into the Holy Chalice and over the Tetradrachms, we now have the key to open the thirty sealed gates.”
“You said that already.”
“Because I want you to understand something before you die. You started the Apocalypse, and you can do nothing to stop it.”
I had no idea what she meant by that, but I would be damned if I allowed her to kill me while I dangled upside down. “Gladas!” I called, forcing my voice to rise over my dried tongue. “You heard her. She… she’s not planning to”—I paused to swish saliva around my mouth, a feeble attempt—“to give you the fucking cure. You want her dead, yeah?”
Circe, as quick as a blink and as powerful as a baseball bat, kicked me in the mouth to shut me up. Blood rushed over my tongue and lips, providing moisture to the drought.
I chuckled with glee—the idea of pain had long ago faded from my mind. “You stupid bitch,” I said. Circe stiffened. I’d gotten to her. “Not you. Sorry. I meant Gladas. He’s a stupid bitch. You’re—you’re a dirty asshole full of burst hemorrhoids.”
Before she could reward me with another kick, my fantasy boyfriend sprinted across the warehouse and speared her to the ground. I saw Annabel’s slight frame run and hide behind a column, probably unable to shift at will. She would be of zero use. Turning my shoulders, I spun on the chain and faced Xander. The armed men had circled him, training their weapons on him.
Circe muttered a curse under her breath, eliciting a spell that lifted Gladas and threw him into a cement wall twenty feet away, sending a spiderweb of cracks outward from his impact. Slowly, he stood and fumed at Circe. Dashing toward him, she shot a bolt of red energy from her palm and it pierced through Gladas’s body like a spear, pinning him to the wall.
“You stupid man,” she said, her voice thick with emotion—it sounded like she might cry. Then I remembered that she loved him, she’d sacrificed her Nephil power so that they could be together. “Why must you continue to hurt me? Over and over again.”
Blood spilled from Gladas’s mouth. His jaw was set tight to his face. He had no intention of responding. She must have understood—she drew a dagger from the folds of her lab coat and drew it across his stomach, opening him so his innards splashed onto the floor.
Annie screamed and rushed toward him. She held his ashen face in her small hands and spoke between sobs. I couldn’t make our her words. After a second, she whirled around and faced Circe. “Kill me!” she screamed. “Kill me, too!” She pounded Circe’s chest with her fists.
The Demi woman grinned. “No. You’ll continue to live with the pain I have felt every day for the past ten years—a pain that exists from a life without him.”
Knowing she couldn’t harm Circe, Annie fell to the ground and wailed.
The Demi returned her attention to me. “Now, it’s your turn to die.”
“Wait,” I said, feeling a heavy headache forming from dangling upside down all this time. My tongue felt good with all the free blood to wet it, though. “If I asked you some questions, would you answer them? Seeing that I’m going to die and all, and
you already spilled the beans about the Apocalypse. It’s just meaningless stuff I’ve never been able to find answers to.”
“You get three questions,” Circe said.
“That’s not fair.” I cleared my throat, knowing she wouldn’t change her mind. “Question one, where could a guy like me find Hecate? I mean, just pretend I lived after this incident, and I wanted to kill her for orchestrating the murder of my wife and daughter. Where would I find her?”
Circe fiddled with the chain that held me up. It loosened, and I fell hard on my head. Stars exploded behind my eyes as I rolled over, lying on my back and staring at the beaming fluorescent lights.
“I’ve never enjoyed killing trapped prey,” she said, circling me like a lioness. “‘Anywhere’ is the answer to your first question. She has a key that allows her to travel from Olympus to this world to the Underworld to wherever else she desires. Though, she spends most of her time in the realm of Hades.”
My feet and arms were still shackled, so I rolled back on my stomach. “You should take these restraints off me… I mean, since you hate killing trapped prey and all. Technically, I’m still trapped. Also, that wasn’t a question.”
Circe knelt over me and unclasped my restraints, moving away to continue her circling.
I sat upright and rotated my wrists to stretch them out. “Question two. Why did Gladas keep saying I have the power of a demon? I’m no scholar, but even I know that the Demon Princes and their Fallen Angels were destroyed thousands of years ago, which led to the Nephil controlling magic and creating pacts and blah, blah, blah.”
Circe smirked. “You have demonic power, Joseph Hunter, because you have the blood of a Fallen Angel flowing through your veins. Did Medea not tell you?”
Huh. Medea had mentioned something similar. Circe’s confirmation added a little more weight to the claim. These batty women wouldn’t go through the trouble of making up such a ridiculous thing, capturing Callie, Mel, and me, and using my blood if it wasn’t true.
I stood on weak legs, struggling to stay upright for a second. When I found my balance, I said, “Question three.” I paused, glancing at Annabel sobbing beside Gladas’s pinned corpse. If I asked for a recipe to cure the Scylla curse, would she offer it? What would that solve? I bit my lip, severing that question from leaking forth. If anyone could find a cure for her, it would be MIS and their rehabilitation program. “How would a person stop the apocalypse from happening? For example—hypothetically—if I lived through this ordeal, how would I stop the world from ending?” I bet on her Nephil pride to answer my question. She’d labelled me dead, so in her mind, dead I was. What would spilling a few beans hurt beyond a bad odor?
“Hypothetically,” she said, stepping toward me and inspecting her dagger’s blade, “if you were to live, you’d have to find a way into the Underworld. While there, you’d not only have to kill Hecate, Persephone, and Hades,” Circe grinned with as much pride as a proud mother, “but Melanie, too. You see, Joseph Hunter, she no longer belongs to this world.” Circe cackled laughter as she repeated Medea’s words to me before murdering Mel.
I grinned right back at her, shifting my attention to Xander. He stared at me with knowing eyes and nodded.
The side of Circe’s head exploded into a mist of blood and bone fragment. She staggered sideways, righted herself, and collapsed.
The half-dozen men surrounding Xander at gunpoint became hamburger meat as a hail of bullets ripped them apart. Cement chips and dust and blood slowly cleared the air, revealing an unharmed Xander, his crazed eyes a pure white among the dark red that coated his face. He burst out laughing like a maniac.
Standing near Gladas’s car, Dakota held a smoking assault rifle—most likely looted from one of the fallen guards I’d killed earlier. I fell onto my back and joined in Xander’s raucous chorus. Or maybe we cried. It was really just the same, in the end.
17
I struggled my way to Annabel as Dakota worked on the chains that bound Xander to the cement column.
After Dakota had used my charged Henrietta to blow a hole through Circe’s head, the Demi’s concentration had snapped, and the magical spike holding Gladas’s corpse to the concrete wall dispersed. The Demi slumped down into his own gore. Annie had crawled on top of him, weeping onto his pallid face, wetting his sticky blood with her tears.
“Hey,” I said, touching her shoulder. A massive shudder ran through my body, chilling my bones. But at the same time, I felt hot all over—like I was about to vomit. Not from the mess that Circe had made of Gladas. I’d seen war and death plenty in my lifetime, and guts bothered me about as much as a lazy Sunday. The nausea and chills came from my complete lack of energy and will to continue forward. The small adrenaline spike had faded, leaving me emptier than ever, and my injuries had taken a massive toll. Unfortunately, I still had a job to do. Get Annie away from Gladas and figure out a way to drag myself to Dakota’s car parked a block away. “Annie.”
She continued to tremble as she lay atop Gladas’s body. “Not him, too. Not him,” she said. “I promised him… I said I’d marry him after my curse was lifted. I loved him. He saved me from becoming a true monster. He saved me and loved me despite my curse.”
“Annie,” I said, my tone soft. We’ll say my voice had weakened from compassion and empathy rather than exhaustion, because that makes me sound like a nicer guy. “We have to get out of here. If Hecate feels any sense of Circe’s passing, she’ll come and kill us all.”
Annabel lifted her face and stared at me. For the first time that day, I didn’t see the crazy woman I met by the river. I saw the Scylla—the monster. Annie’s pale face was smeared in Gladas’s blood, and her white hair was dyed red. She snarled at me with venom and hate, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she shifted right then and there to kill me. As quickly as the monster appeared, it went away, and Annie melted back onto Gladas.
“Fuck,” I said, dragging myself to the wall, propping against it, surveying the warehouse.
Circe lay dead ten yards from me—her skull nearly split in half, brain matter and bone fragments chunking her blood-stew. Five men lay in a flowered circle around the column that Xander had been chained to. Dakota had an arm wrapped around his waist, and they limped their way toward me and Annabel.
“She’s not listening,” I said.
Xander released his hold from Dakota and hobbled toward the broken woman on the ground. He gently placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her into his chest, allowing her bloody head to rest against him. They both cried, and he apologized to her over and over.
Dakota sat beside me, hugging her knees to her chest. She glanced at me through loose strands of hair. “I thought you were going to die,” she said, quickly adding, “earlier, in the car. It was just an emotional moment. Don’t look too far into it.”
I smirked, chuckling, but keeping the laugh tight in my mouth. “Old Joey does it again,” I muttered. “They say not a chance in hell it will ever happen, then it happens and they love it and they want some more of it because they can’t get enough it. But when the lights come on and their friends are around, they backtrack and make excuses. Guess what, my lady. It’s always the same. I see that hunger in your eyes. When it’s dark again, you’ll come back.” I grinned. “They all come back.”
“Do you even know what you’re saying right now?”
I shook my head in the negative. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about.” Without thinking about how clammy or cold my hand might be, I reached out and grabbed hers. “You did it. You saved us all.”
Dakota didn’t shy her gaze, but she did hold lips together in a timid smile. “Xander saw me enter,” she said. “Without his cue, I don’t think I could have pulled the trigger. I’ve never killed before.”
“That guy has a terrible way of bringing out the worst in people.”
“Circe was a Nephil, wasn’t she? I killed a Nephil.”
“Technically, it was my magic that killed her. You just pulled
off a lucky shot.” I didn’t tell her I’d charged the sights, too, making sure that our one chance wouldn’t fail. Lifting her hand, I ran my finger over the pen-marked sigil she’d drawn on herself in order to fire Henrietta.
“Does that mean other Sorcerers can kill Nephil, too?” she asked. “Was I right? Is that why the Nephilim Council works so hard at locating innate magic-users and offering the strongest a pact—to protect themselves?”
I shrugged, not really caring about Nephil politics. If Circe had spoken the truth—and I didn’t think she had a reason to lie—then the Nephilim Council was the last thing we had to worry about at the moment. “Xander, we have to get out of here,” I said. “Hecate and Circe were close. If the Nephil learns of Circe’s death, she might show up here herself.”
Dakota stood and helped me to my feet. Xander, still clothed in nothing but boxers, grabbed Annabel beneath her armpits and hoisted her up. She kicked and screamed, trying to get away, but Xander had about a hundred pounds on her, rendering her efforts futile.
Slowly, we loaded into Gladas’s car. Dakota drove the short distance to her chaotic vehicle, not once apologizing for the mess as we all transferred over.
And then she drove us home.
Before we filed into Xander’s apartment, I stopped at the door, barring the entrance. “Listen up, folks,” I said. “Xander is a huge ass, but he’s too polite and caring to let anyone know that. So, I’ll be his voice. No one—and that includes you, Annie—is allowed on any furniture or rugs in your bloodied states. You can sit cross-legged on the floor like a kid getting ready for story time as you wait your turn for a shower. Xander, being the lovely servant of God that he is, will serve everyone coffee. Except for me. He’ll serve me an overly-large glass of his good scotch. Once we’re all showered, it’s off to bed. And if any one of you wakes me up for anything other than sex—I’m looking at you, Xander—I will murder your families. We clear?” I stepped to the side and allowed everyone in.