Prison of Hope (30 page)

I ran over as Helios was struggling back to his feet, their crash having left a small crater in the concrete, and knocked him away with a column of air that sent him spiraling into a nearby wall. It wouldn’t stop him forever, but hopefully it would be l
ong enough.

Lucie made a soft moaning noise as she moved toward me; she was covered in cuts that drenched her in blood. She managed to get to her knees, then pitched forward, although not before I saw the five puncture wounds just above her waist on the right side. Thick blood poured from the holes, and her blood stained my arms and chest as I lifted her up and carried her back into the warehouse, stopping only to pick up Helios’s discarded jacket on the way. Mine was a charred mess and of zero use to anyone.

I laid her down near the rear of the building and checked for a pulse, which was slow but steady.

“Is he dead?” she asked, almost making me jump; she’d been limp since I’d picked her up, and I’d assumed she was
unconscious
.

“I doubt it. Stay here. You’ll be fine.”

“I know.” She moved slightly and winced with pain.

I tore a strip off the jacket, using it to wrap around Lucie’s abdomen. “You need to press hard here,” I explained.

She pressed one hand against the makeshift bandage before I laid the rest of the jacket over her. “I’ll be back soon.”

I walked out of the warehouse, watching Helios as he leaned against a wall. He smiled, which infuriated me more than him trying to breathe fire on me.

Blood magic allows me to use not only my blood, but also the blood of others to power me. In this instance, that meant Lucie’s blood. My blood magic flared to life, the black glyphs running along my palm and arms, and immediately mixing with the air magic I threw at Helios. The power was incredible, certainly more than I’d ever managed to feel from using the blood of an enchanter before. It coursed through me. It was as if Lucie’s blood contained an almost endless supply of power. Lucie was no mere enchanter; there was obviously more to her than she first appeared to possess.

Helios tried to dodge the blast, but with one broken wing he wasn’t fast enough and had to settle for using his working wing as a shield. But even then he was thrown back into the building behind him.

I walked toward him while using my air magic to pin him in place. The nightmare inside me made its presence known for the first time. I felt a need to use more and more magic, to push myself further. I ignored it, hoping it would stay quiet while I ensured that Helios felt the full brunt of my fury, and after a second it fell silent.

I increased the pressure of the air magic as I walked toward Helios, causing him to cry out in pain. I took another step forward, and he roared fire directly at me, causing me to drop the air magic to use it to protect myself. It was all Helios needed, and pain shot through my arm, swiftly followed by the burning sensation of silver. I turned to see a small blade protruding from my shoulder. I grabbed hold of it, but the entire shaft was just one giant blade, and it sliced into my fingers and palm.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Helios quipped while he walked toward me, carrying more blades in his hand. “You didn’t think I’d come unprepared, did you? I know your power, Nathan. I know what you can and can’t do. And you can’t pull that blade out without causing even more pain to yourself.”

He threw the second blade and it struck my thigh. I dropped to my knees. “Lucky you,” I said with a grimace.

I started using my air magic, forcing myself to ignore the pain as I wrapped hardened air around the dagger in my shoulder in an effort to pull it free, but Helios made a tut-tutting noise. “Now, don’t do that. I can see you using your magic. Just stay there like a good boy. Maybe Selene won’t have to mourn you after all.”

As he walked off, I used my blood magic to push the blades out of my body. It was incredibly painful and caused me to shout out, but by the time Helios had realized what I was doing, the blades had already clattered to the ground.

I turned as he sprinted back toward me, his mouth agape, ready for another blast of flame, but I threw air at his face, which he had to move to avoid, putting him right in the path of my blade of air. It caught him under the rib cage, between the scales that protected his body, and he sagged forward as I twisted the blade before extinguishing it.

He crashed to his knees, blood pouring from the wound. “Selene will never forgive you,” he almost hissed.

I paused for a nanosecond—not even long enough for a humming bird’s wings to beat once, but that split second was all he needed as he pushed himself up toward me, pinning my arms behind me in an astonishing display of speed for someone with his injuries. He used his good wing to encircle me and keep me still. I ignored the searing pain of my injured ribs being crushed, and head-butted him on his nose, again and again with a crunch, but he still refused to release me.

I inhaled, heating the air up inside my lungs and then breathed it directly into his reptilian eyes. The contact made Helios roar in pain. He released me, and I fell to the ground, my ribs screaming at me to stop making things worse. Helios began pawing at his eyes, rubbing them with the heel of his palm in a desperate attempt to stop the burning.

I scrambled away as Helios started flailing around, trying to keep himself from being attacked again, although my entire focus was now on learning how to breathe again. After a few seconds, my magic began to heal me, and I was soon getting back to my feet, but Helios had stopped moving and was looking right at me, despite his injured eyes.

“I can smell you,” he said and grinned horribly, showing bloody teeth and lips. “I’m going to feast on your heart, you little fucker.” He ran right at me, swiping at my chest with his deadly talons. I avoided them in enough time to miss being torn in half, but not enough to avoid the talons from still ripping at my flesh.

He was faster and stronger than me, but he was also really, really angry and not thinking straight. I dodged more blows, using a blast of air to push him off balance with each punch, until I’d backed up against the wall, dropping to my knees to avoid a blow that tore through the brick like it wasn’t even there.

I shot up from the ground, with my fist wrapped in air, and caught Helios under the jaw with a punch that would have killed a human. His head snapped back, and he staggered away, but he kicked out at me, catching me in the chest and driving me through the wall.

I fell to the floor inside the building, covered in dust and bits of brick and wood, pushing part of a table off me and trying to take a moment to ready myself for continuing the fight. Helios dove through the building, almost landing on me in the process. He grabbed me by the throat, and I threw a punch, but he blocked it easily, caught my hand, and before I could do
anything
, he’d crushed the bones in my fingers like they were kindling. This time it was my own screams of pain that filled my ears. There was no use in blocking out the agony, so I took a deep breath and drove one thin blade of air into his eye. Helios cried out and threw me aside with enough force to send me flying back through the wall to the outside. I hit the ground at an awkward angle, with only my magic stopping me from breaking an arm or worse.

I was crippled and exhausted, with a creeping sense of the nightmare’s darkness settling inside me as the dusk turned into night outside. I needed to finish this fight, and quickly. I stood and discovered that Helios’s claws had also raked my stomach, producing a steady stream of blood, which I used to draw a rune on the back of my ruined hand, with only moderate pain. Using my broken hand to draw on my good one, however, was such an incandescent agony that I had to force myself to finish. Finally, I used my blood magic to charge the spell and waited for Helios to reappear, which he did a moment later, destroying the remains of the wall and narrowly missing a large section of roof that crashed down, almost landing on him.

He roared in rage at me. I calmed myself, raised both hands, and said,
“Effete.”
Energy left me in one huge, agonizing rush, and I crashed to my knees. I’d marked Helios before he’d thrown me back through the wall, and while the spell managed to drop him to his knees, he was powerful enough to ensure that it didn’t completely take him out of the fight. He was soon moving back toward me, albeit at a slow stagger.

I forced myself back to my feet. The curse had taken everything I had left, and I knew it, but I was not about to die
kneeling
. Helios was going to win. I was furious with myself as he moved slowly toward me, blood streaming from one ruined eye. The one I’d burned would heal; the other, the one I’d stabbed, probably not so much.

I doubted he had much left either, and I motioned for him to hurry up. I didn’t have long before the effect of the curse would start on me, and I wanted to get this done.

He was six or seven steps away from me when the blast of ice smashed into him, taking him off his feet and propelling him up against the burned-out office. Helios roared in defiance as the stream of ice just kept coming, covering him from his feet up to his neck. The combination of our fight and the time of day had left him with nothing to fight back with, and he soon fell silent.

Selene floated to the ground in front of me, her eyes locked on her brother. Her wings, silver in color and matching her scaly skin, gleamed in the night.

“Do you really think you can kill me, little sister?” Helios demanded to know as he used his incredible strength to begin breaking the ice. Even when the sun had settled for the day, he was still a threat.

“Probably not. But I’m almost certain that
they
can.”

She pointed behind her as a huge werebear, in its beast form, walked toward us, his eyes firmly fixed on the still-frozen Helios. This one was followed by a werewolf in her beast form, only slightly less imposing, but no less capable of tearing flesh from bone.

“Sorry we couldn’t get here sooner,” she said to me.

I raised my good hand and opened my mouth, but no words came out, so I lay down on the ground as the effects of the blood magic curse finally took their toll.

CHAPTER
31

Berlin, Germany. 1936.

O
uch,” I said as I opened my eyes and sat up, finding myself on a gurney in the warehouse. The silver wounds in my arm and leg were still painful. My fingers, once crushed and unusable, were mostly pointing in the right direction, even if they were sore as all hell to move.

“Three hours,” Petra said as she came out of the room that had contained the sarin, and walked over to me. “I wondered how much longer you were going to sleep. You snore, did you know that?”

“Thanks for the information. I’ll get right on not doing it.” I swung my legs over the side of the gurney, and Petra was beside me in a moment, helping me to my feet.

“You need rest,” she cautioned.

“ ‘Need’ doesn’t really get a say right now,” I explained as we walked together toward the front of the warehouse. Someone had closed the shutter, presumably after repairing the chain I’d destroyed. “Is the sarin gone?”

“They found the stuff in the warehouse as well as in the entrance to the complex beneath here. Looks like the Gestapo was stockpiling the stuff. It’s all gone, setting their chemical
warfare
back a few years. A lot of dead down there too. Helios certainly did a good job of killing everyone involved in the
creation
of sa
rin. Hades is getting rid of it. You should know something, though.”

“Hera’s here?”

“You knew?”

“I knew she was going to tell her mother-in-law about what happened here. Whatever happened between us, it wasn’t enough for her to stay with her
family
.” I almost spat the last word.

“I don’t think that’s it, Nathan,” Petra said as she opened the exit door.

The outside was awash with people, most of whom I recognized as working for Hades. A massive lorry was sitting up against the warehouse loading area.

“How’s Lucie?” I asked.

“Recovering in the ambulance over there,” Hades said as he joined us. “The sarin is being taken to my facility. I assume you’re wondering about it.”

“I trust you,” I said.

“How are you?”

“Sore,” I admitted, “but I’ll live. There’s a lot of information here about Pandora. About how she could take control over Hope’s body on a permanent basis. You need to get that information to Brutus. If Pandora is trying to erase Hope, that could make her more dangerous. There could be stuff about the Gestapo trying to create their very own Pandora too.”

“We found the information after Lucie told us. We got it all cleared away before Hera and her people arrived. No one will be making a second Pandora, and she’s going to be watched very carefully for a long time.”

“Good. What are you going to do with Helios?”

“Helios is not my problem. Hera has claimed him as an enemy combatant. He’s in that black van over there.”

I set off in the direction Hades had indicated, to find out what was happening. No one tried to stop me, although someone probably should have. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do or the reception I was going to receive when I arrived.

Several of Hera’s guards watched me approach, but no one tried to intervene as I walked up to the back of the van. Helios sat in the rear, his head bowed, his hands tied together with what looked like some sort of modified sorcerer’s band.

I wanted to say something but wasn’t really sure what. I wasn’t sorry for what I’d done to him, and I certainly wasn’t sorry that we’d stopped tens of thousands of needless deaths, but as these thoughts drifted through my head, only one question sprang to mind. “Why?”

Helios shifted to look at me, or at least in my direction. O
ne of his eye
s was covered with gauze. “Nathan. You have
disfigured
me.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“I did this to destroy Hera. To gain vengeance for all those lives she’s torn apart.”

“You did this for yourself,” Selene said as she stepped up beside me. “And you’re an idiot for it.” She closed the van doors before turning to me. “Nathan.”

“Cram it, I’m not interested,” I snapped. “I see Deimos and Hera over there, watching us intently.”

“I work for Hera. I couldn’t
not
involve her.”

“You could have done nothing, but you just chose to inv
olve her.”

There was a silence between us. I wanted to ask if she was going back to Deimos, but what I wanted more was for her to admit it to me.

“You want me to say it? That I’m not leaving him?”

“Yes,” I whispered, placing all of my anger into one word.

“I was never going to leave Deimos. I can’t.”

I began to turn away. “Well, you’ve clearly made your choices in life, so good luck with them.”

“Nathan.” She reached out to touch my arm, and I moved aside.

I leaned toward Selene. “Your husband is over there,” I whispered. “You know, the one you cheated on last night? Twice.” Despite my having assumed she was going to go back to her
husband
and his family, the realization that I’d been right hurt. My heart felt heavy. I’d wanted to be wrong so badly I could taste it. Being right made me angry. I knew I wasn’t blameless in what had happened—I knew I was being an asshole, but once I started, I just couldn’t stop. “I wonder, was fucking me part of the plan? Was that your job all along? Because if it was, you should get a bonus; you were excellent.”

Selene slapped me hard enough that I needed to place
my hand agai
nst the rear doors of the van to stop myself from falling over.

“I should never have done that with you. It was a mistake.”

“Lucky me,” I seethed. “Go back to Hera and her friends—to your husband. I don’t care why you left me anymore. I’m just grateful you did.” I walked away, noting Deimos’s anger as he moved to intercept me.

Deimos was like a smaller picture of his father, Ares. He was about my height, but even wider. His long blond hair fell over shoulders that strained to be contained within his gray suit. Everything about him was designed to intimidate. He’d grown a long beard since I’d last seen him, but the same arrogant, malicious, little bastard still oozed out of every part of him.

“She’s mine now,” he said, his accent British, something he’d clearly worked on over the years. “If you ever touch her again, I’ll tear your eyes out.”

Movement from the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned slightly, to see Hera watching Deimos and me. She had a slight smirk on her face. I got the feeling she was enjoying this whole show a lot more than her grandson was.

“That’s the difference between you and me, Deimos,” I said, returning my full attention to him. “When Selene was with
me, I nev
er felt the need to tell anyone that she belonged to me.” I walked past the angry man and toward Hades, who had quite probably been watching intently everything that had happened.

“You okay?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Define ‘okay.’ ”

“Well, I’m about to make your day worse. He slipped a
shoebox
-sized box into my hand. “It’s time,” he told me.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, she needs to know the truth.”

“Why now?”

“Petra and Kurt convinced me to let her know the truth. Apparently, her anger at you has gotten the best of her a few times in the last few days. I promised her dad I’d watch over her and keep her safe. Lying to her doesn’t do that. She needs to know the truth. She needs to decide how to deal with it.”

I took a deep breath and walked over to the ambulance where Lucie sat, telling those inside it to give us some time. “What are you?” I asked when I saw that the wounds on her stomach had vanished. “You’re not just an enchanter.”

“My father was a siphon,” she said. “I got his long life and ability to heal and use energy. Without it, I might not be alive.”

I passed her the box that Hades had given me.

“What is this?”

“This is the truth about what really happened with your parents and brother. This is what’s been kept from you.”

I let Lucie look through the contents of the box, and when she looked up at me, there were tears in her eyes. “Is this real?”

I nodded. “The first letter is from your father. He wrote to Hades, asking for his help because someone was turning your brother against him and your family. When I got to the house with Hades’s guards, it was too late. Except your father wasn’t dead yet. He told us that your brother was responsible and that he’d left a tape recording in the house for proof. His last words were to ask that you not know anything about who helped your brother. He knew what your response would be. Everything is in the box.”

I turned to leave the ambulance.

“Tell me. Tell me all of it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to read cold words about what
happened
. I want you to tell me the truth. Please.”

I sat back beside her. “Your brother did murder your
stepmum
and father, but someone else killed the others. Your brother escaped and began doing experiments on people, trying to see how runes affected different people in different ways. When I found your brother, there was no fight; he simply gave up and asked to be executed. The person who had twisted him and shaped him into the man who helped murder your family had set him up. You were that person’s real target. You were the only one to be kept alive; that’s why it was done on a day you weren’t there.”

“Who helped him?”

“Your mother,” I disclosed. “She contacted your brother. The letters about it are in there. But your brother discovered her plan too late. He was killing people with runes in the hope that he could find one that would protect you from her. He just went about it in the most horrific way possible. He wrote a
confession
—that’s in the box too. It explains everything he was doing. The tape from your father asks Hades to keep you safe, to keep the truth from getting out.”

“Where is she?” Lucie asked, her words full of barely contained emotion. “I haven’t seen my mother since I was four years old. Where is she?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. No one does. She vanished soon after the murder of your family, when she realized that your brother wouldn’t give you up. You’re under Hades’s protection, and she’s evil, but not stupid. All we know is that she managed to find a way to extend her life, even though she’s an enchanter. I’m sorry for lying to you all these years, but no one wanted you going after her.”

“I’m going to find her,” Lucie said with iron determination. “Thank you for telling me.”

I left the ambulance and found Hades sitting on the steps to the warehouse, eating an apple. “You think telling her was the right thing to do?” I asked.

“She needs to know. Deserves to know, if nothing else. I’m not sure she’ll forgive me or you or anyone else who was involved in keeping it quiet. She might go work for Avalon. Depends on how much she wants to find her mother.”

“So, this sarin? Where are you taking it?”

“Well, thanks to Kurt, Petra, and Selene, we’ve got all of the sarin and the explosives they used to create the bombs. The warehouse is now empty of the rest of the sarin too. We’ll dispose of it all in a secure facility I run north of here. It’s evil stuff. I’ll be glad to no longer have it near me. You and Lucie did a good thing here today.”

Kurt and Petra walked past, Kurt slapping me on the shoulder before they continued on.

“What about Pandora?” I asked Hades. “Is she settling in to her new accommodation?”

“Pandora’s housing in London is considerably nicer than Helios’s will be.”

“Do you think Pandora will stay this time?”

“She’ll stay put for as long as she needs to, and then she’ll escape and we’ll go through all of this again.”

“Except next time we might not get so lucky as to avert
a war.”

Hades shook his head. “We’ve averted only one war, Nathan. Mark my words: there’s another one coming, and there might well be a day when you think to yourself,
‘What if I’d just let Helios succeed in killing Hera?’
 
”