Cold Warriors (15 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Levene

Tags: #Horror

BOOK: Cold Warriors
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"Why did you care?" That was Belle, speaking with a slight lisp as she bit through the end of the thread.

Tomas pulled his sleeve down before Anya could see the way his flesh was already beginning to knit together around the tiny black stitches.

Morgan's fingers played around his mouth, as if he wanted to filter his words before they came out. "Because I don't know why the hell I was sent on this mission. And I don't know why..." He looked at Tomas, then away. "Either the world's gone crazy, or I have. This book is the only thing we've got that might have an explanation in it, and you wanted to just give it away."

"I want to know what Nicholson's book was doing in Karamov's hands, too," Tomas said. "And what it's got to do with the Ragnarok artefacts."

"How very democratic the Hermetic Division must be," Anya said. "All its agents questioning their orders all the time." The sun was setting outside the train window, a blood-red glow on the horizon that accentuated the scarlet of her hair and brought a blush of life to her pale cheeks. "You had a mission, and you fucked it up. Both of you. If you want to side with him, Tomas, that's fine, but don't expect me to carry on working with either of you."

"Please don't argue," Belle said. Her small face looked pinched and tired. "When you get angry I can feel
him
inside me, smiling and enjoying it. I think it makes him stronger. What's done is done - can't we leave it behind?"

"Leave behind the fact that Morgan nearly lost us the book? I don't think so. You need to give it to me, then we can all be sure it's safe." She reached an imperious hand to Morgan from her perch on the narrow bunk.

"I didn't give it to Raphael, did I? And I'm sure as hell not giving it to you."

Anya's reaching hand clenched into a fist. "How can we possibly trust you after what you did?"

"Don't trust me! I don't trust you. I don't trust anybody. Nobody's said a straight word to me since I started on this fucking mission!"

Anya frowned and cast a disapproving glance from Morgan to Belle. Morgan clamped his mouth shut, but his expression remained mulish.

Tomas sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Let Morgan keep it. We can talk about this tomorrow morning when we've all had some sleep."

 

There wasn't as much to do on a train as Morgan had imagined when he'd watched
Murder on the Orient Express
one Sunday afternoon and thought that travelling this way must be pretty glamorous. The other passengers seemed disappointingly ordinary, a succession of smartly dressed businessmen and one big, blond-haired family with a collection of children so similar they looked like a set of Russian dolls.

Whenever Morgan leaned against the wall to watch them pass, the rectangular lump of his father's book dug into his back. It made him feel itchy and uncomfortable when he remembered how Tomas had defended him earlier. He tried to convince himself that he hadn't actually lied to his partner, but he knew he hadn't told him the whole truth either.

Morgan's stomach gurgled, loud enough for a passing guard to stifle a smile, and he realised he was starving. When had he last eaten, anyway?

The dining car was in the centre of the train, sparkling with glass and polished silver, exactly the kind of place he'd imagined as a child. But they'd stopped serving long ago, and the attendants looked round when Morgan stepped in, faces hardening in disapproval at his blood-stained t-shirt and army boots. He took a moment to stare them down, then backed out and away.

In another carriage there was a small canteen and he bought himself a ham roll and, after a moment's thought, a cheese sandwich for Tomas. After that there wasn't much else to do but head back to the sleeper cabin they were sharing.

It was dark when he pushed open the door, with only the pale light of the moon to illuminate the outlines of the bed and the small washbasin tucked against one wall. There was the humped shape of a body on the bottom bunk, and Morgan assumed Tomas must have drifted off to sleep already. But when he switched on the overhead light, he found the other man's eyes looking straight at him.

Morgan jerked back, breath catching in his throat. "Shit!"

"I don't need to sleep any more," Tomas said. "Not since..."

"Right. I brought you a sandwich, if you want to eat."

Tomas smiled crookedly. "I don't do that either."

Morgan ate both sandwiches in silence, spreading crumbs over the rectangle of old red carpet. When he'd finished, he wiped his mouth clean with his sleeve, then splashed water on his face from the cold tap.

"What haven't you told us?" Tomas said when Morgan turned back to face him.

Morgan stared at him. "About what?"

"I don't know, Morgan - whatever it was you didn't want to say in front of Anya and Belle."

Morgan took a deep breath, then let it out again. "Raphael brought one of the corpses to life, while I was locked in the morgue. Used it to speak to me."

Tomas nodded calmly.

Morgan perched on the end of the bed, beside the messy outline of Tomas's feet. "So that's normal then, is it? That's just run of the mill. Nothing to get too excited about."

Tomas studied him a moment, and seemed to decide there was a genuine question buried in there. "In a way. There's only one real source of magic. We all end up using it in the end."

"Death, you mean?"

"Life. Everything, every molecule on Earth, used to be part of something living once. The secret is finding a way to remind it. That's the source of all magic, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.'"

"You know quoting poetry doesn't make it any less of a heap of shit, right?"

Tomas laughed. "That's all I know. I was just an operative, Morgan. I used the tools they gave me and I found the things they wanted. I left the philosophy to people higher up the food chain."

"People like Nicholson?"

"Yes. Nicholson ran the Hermetic Division. I was his first recruit - his only recruit for two years." He smiled a little, looking for once like he was lost in a pleasant memory. "We'd travel the world together, chasing rumours - a werewolf in Greece, the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. Most of them turned out to be nonsense, of course. The people at MI6 talked about shutting us down all the time, but we discovered just enough to keep them interested. And then Nicholson found out about the Ragnarok artefacts, and suddenly everything changed."

There was a long silence, Tomas staring blankly at the sagging mattress above him. Finally, he said, "They're supposed to be unspeakably powerful. Powerful enough to end the world. It was researching the artefacts that taught Nicholson how to conquer death, to bring someone back from the other side. And once the government knew about that, we got all the funding and all the agents we wanted." Tomas shrugged, as if it was no big deal.

"Raphael said he knew Nicholson," Morgan blurted, startled into confession by Tomas's honesty. "He said they used to be friends."

"Did he? Yes, I suppose that's possible. A contact gone bad - it would explain how he knew about the book."

But not, Morgan thought, how Raphael knew Nicholson was his father. For a second he thought about saying this to Tomas, then the other man carried on talking and the moment was lost.

"Nicholson trusted too much," Tomas said. "He wanted to believe anything was possible, and he listened to anyone who told him it was."

"But bringing people back to life - that
is
possible?"

"Oh yes," Tomas said bitterly, "that turned out to be a walk in the park."

Morgan looked at Tomas, and wondered how it felt to know you were dead. Was he glad they'd brought him back? He didn't seem it. "How did it happen?" he asked. "To you, I mean?"

"How did I die?"

Morgan nodded.

Tomas's expression twisted into outright pain. "I was buried alive."

"Jesus! That's... Fuck, that is not good."

"You don't have to feel sorry for me. It was my choice. It was part of the ritual to turn me into what I am. They put me in the ground while I was still breathing, and I let it happen. Of course, they were supposed to bring me back in three days, not twenty years."

"Giles told me I emit mortality," Morgan said, a non sequitur. Or maybe not.

"And do you?"

"Everyone around me dies, I know that."

"Your former partners," Tomas said, and at Morgan's frown, "They did tell me a little about you before they assigned us to work together."

"So do you think it's possible? Is it my fault they died?"

Tomas shook his head. "I don't know. There is such a thing as plain bad luck."

Morgan swallowed painfully. "But it wasn't just them. When I was twelve I got sent on a summer camp. Troubled kids, countryside, teach them the real meaning of life, some shit like that. It was me and Leon, my best mate, and late one night we were pissing around, climbing trees in the dark. We'd nicked some beer from the local offie, and we were fighting. You know, just having a laugh. I didn't mean to push him that hard, but one second he was sitting on the branch next to me. And then..."

Tomas's eyes glittered in the moonlight. "Were there other deaths?"

Morgan nodded, but his throat closed tight over the next words. He stood up, filled with a sudden restless energy that the small cabin left him no room to pace off. He peered in the mirror instead, at the dim shape of his reflection.

My sister
, he wanted to say. And as if the unsaid words had summoned her, he saw a shape coalesce in the glass, her face floating above his right shoulder. If he turned around, he'd be looking right at her.

He was halfway through doing just that when the window burst inward in a shower of razor-sharp glass.

For a split second he thought it was an optical illusion, a fragment of the night that had fallen in with the shards of window. By the time it had resolved itself into a figure, swathed in black, it was already past him. And it was only as the door slammed behind it that Morgan registered the feeling of the figure's hand, light-fingered at the waistband of his trousers.

When Morgan fumbled there himself, he found nothing. The book was gone.

CHAPTER NINE

 

Tomas was sluggish with exhaustion. He tumbled out of the bed onto his knees, wincing at the jolt to his bones. By the time he'd scrambled to his feet both Morgan and the thief were gone, the door swinging open onto the dim corridor beyond.

Tomas's chest had been bare beneath the sheets but he didn't stop to dress. The door slammed behind him as he flung himself through it.

He had one second to scan the corridor, night-silent and dim - then, suddenly, window after window along its length smashed open and a swarm of black-clothed figures swung through. He recognised them instantly, or at least what they were: the same assassins who'd attacked him and Morgan when they first arrived in Budapest. The same black cloth concealed their faces.

And they moved with the same whip-like speed. By the time Tomas had fully registered their presence, they'd already gone, half of them to the left, half to the right. And he had absolutely no idea which of the identical figures had taken the book.

He saw Morgan dart though the sliding door to his right. All Tomas could do was turn left. One of them might catch the thief. One of them would have to.

He thumped his fist against the door of Belle and Anya's cabin as he passed, but there was no time to stop and see if it had any effect. Two more paces and he was through the door at the end of the corridor, wrenching it open with his hand when the automatic mechanism slid too slowly.

Three of them were waiting for him. They must have heard something of what he was by now, because they didn't bother trying to shoot him. Two of them grabbed his arms while a third clubbed him over the head with something hard and metal, probably the butt of a gun. Tomas's consciousness began to grey at the edges, and everything was slowing down.

It wasn't a good time to discover that dead men could still pass out.

Tomas was slumped on the floor, back against the wall and one of the assassins with a knife against his throat when his thoughts revved back up to normal speed. The man's wrist cracked audibly as he snapped it, and the knife fell to the carpeted floor with a muffled thump.

One of Tomas's arms was free now. He used its elbow to drive his other assailant's nose through the soft grey matter of his brain, and then he was able to stumble to his feet. The last intruder was already running, but Tomas couldn't follow him yet. He needed to check that neither of the two on the floor had the book.

He searched the dead man first, a cursory glance. His black clothes were tight enough to show they held nothing larger than a shuriken and a silenced revolver. Tomas took the shuriken and left the gun, too dangerous to be caught with.

The other man was harder to search, writhing in pain and moaning with his broken wrist cradled against his chest. Tomas hesitated, then struck him hard at the base of his skull - possibly hard enough to kill, but he didn't have the time to be careful. There was no sign of the book on him, either.

Tomas cursed and sprinted down the corridor in pursuit of the last man.

 

Anya threw the door open, heart pumping with the panic of someone woken suddenly from a deep sleep.

The corridor was entirely empty. She looked to left and right a second time to make sure of it, but there wasn't a soul out there.

It was only when the cold breeze blew into her face that she registered what was wrong. Every single window was broken, the floor littered with fragments of glass. Lights glittered on them from outside the train, an unknown city passing by.

She pushed open Tomas and Morgan's door without knocking, and wasn't surprised to find them gone. It must have been one of them who'd woken her. She had a moment's paralysed indecision, then hurried back into her own cabin and pulled Belle out of bed. "Trouble," she told the little girl curtly.

Belle followed Anya back into the corridor, footsteps padding softly, like a cat's. Anya thought that, if it had been up to the men, they would have left Belle behind. For her own safety, or some nonsense like that. Anya wasn't that stupid - or that sentimental. Belle was the best weapon they had. The
only
weapon Anya had right now.

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