Prison of Hope (40 page)

We were underground in the cellar of a house that belonged to a rich merchant who had worked for Avalon over the years. There was a wooden table beside where I sat, and on it were a collection
of bladed instruments of various shapes and sizes. On the opposite
side, on an identical table, were two bowls. One held clean water, with a towel beside it, but the other’s liquid was now dark red. I doubted it could truly even be described as water any more.

I picked up the bowl filled with bloody water and poured it over Deimos, who was strapped to a chair before me. The blood and water mix saturated him, doing little to clean the grime from his naked body. I refilled the bowl with fresh water from a large jug on the floor and then sat back as Deimos gasped while the bloody water ran into the grooves in the floor and out under the wall behind him.

“Why can’t I see?” Deimos demanded. “What have you done to me?”

“Calm down,” I said. “I wrapped a cloth over your eyes. I’ll take it off in a minute.”

“Where am I?”

I explained about the castle and merchant. “The man who murdered my wife was called Henry. He was in the King’s army. You’re currently occupying his place in my memory. You sort of look like an amalgamation of Henry with your body shape. It’s a weird thing. Anyway, I kept Henry down here for some time. Basically, you’re going to go through the exact same things that Henry did.”

“Fuck you!”
he screamed, bucking against the chair, but it was no use.

“Henry couldn’t break free. He was human, and so in here you are too. You never should have forced me to do this. But you’re about to live out the worst few weeks of anyone’s life. I won’t make you do it over and over; once should be enough.

“When we’re done here, you’re going to remember the kind of man I am, the kind of man you threatened and tried to break. I want you to remember what happens to those who cross
me. I wan
t you to tell people. Tell everyone what happens when Hellequin is pushed too far.”

“You’re Hellequin?” he asked, his voice full of fear.

“You didn’t know?” I was a little surprised. “Well, now
you do.” I walke
d over and removed the damp cloth from
his head.

“It’s so dark in here,” Deimos said after a few seconds.

“Oh, I should have mentioned. By this point, Henry had already been here a few days.” I removed items from the small jar on the table and placed them in Deimos’s hand, and then I whispered into his ear, “I’d already taken his eyes.”

Deimos screamed himself hoarse while I picked up a short, sharp blade from the table. I turned to him. “Shall we begin?”

CHAPTER
40

I
t took me a few blinks of my eyes to realize I was back in Earls Court. Deimos was in the fetal position on the floor beside me, half-hiding under a table. His bowels and bladder had both
forsaken
him.

“Remember what happened here,” I demanded.

He started to gaze up at me and stopped, refusing to look any further than my knees, before nodding furiously.

He’d lived a week of the worst things I’d ever done to a person. He’d felt all of Henry’s pain and suffering as if it were his own, but with the added bonus of being unable to actually die. When I finally put Henry out of his misery, we’d come back to reality. The emotions I’d felt during the episode had been real, and it took me awhile to realize it was just a memory.

I walked past Deimos as the humans around him began to remember I was prey once again. They hadn’t moved from the time Deimos had forced me to relive my memories, and I doubted more than a few seconds of time had passed in the real world.

I changed from walking to sprinting within a few steps, and used air magic to tear to pieces the door that Pandora had gone through, flinging them aside as I ran through the doorway and up the stairs.

The corridors above were mazelike, and I had no idea exactly where Aphrodite was having her meeting.

I took a moment and calmed myself, trying to listen for any sign of where Pandora had escaped. I heard nothing for a few
seconds
, and then a gunshot rang out. I ran toward the sound, and although I couldn’t pick out the exact place, due to the
confines
of the corridors, I at least had a rough direction.

A second gunshot rang out after a few steps, and I followed the noise down one hallway, toward a blue door. It was easy to spot Pandora through the glass panel on the front of the d
oor, b
ut as I got closer, I noticed it wasn’t Pandora holding the gun, b
ut Selen
e, who had transformed into her dragon-kin appearance.

“Selene,
no
!” I shouted as I barged through the door. She glanced at me, a glazed expression on her face. Pandora was in control of her.

The gun looked awkward and silly in her hand, her talons barely able to hold the weapon and manage the trigger.

I turned to look at Pandora who was standing in front of a window looking down on the floor of Earls Court. “Stop her,” I demanded.

“Fuck, you Nate,” Pandora snapped. “Look at them—look at Hera and her cohorts.”

I glanced over at the far end of the room, where Hera, Ares, Demeter, and Aphrodite all stood, all of them with the same glazed expression on their faces. There were three other middle-aged men, all in suits, who were cowering in the corner. None of them appeared to be under Pandora’s power.

“Why control them?” I asked.

“Can’t risk them fighting back,” Pandora said. “Selene here is going to kill all but Hera. Then I’ll release her and let her see what she’s wrought. And then I’m going to kill her myself.”

“Why Selene? You don’t need to use her.”

“She can die knowing what she did.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Pandora snapped. “She’s just as bad as them. She joined them, and she hurt you. You should want h
er dead.”

“I can’t let you kill anyone here,” I informed her. “And I’m certainly not going to let you use Selene to do it.”

Pandora stared at me. “You still love her.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the anger and hurt, I still love her. Now let her go.”

Pandora appeared to consider it for a second. “No. Say ’bye to Ares.”

I blasted Pandora with a gust of air that threw her out of the window with a crash. Then something unexpected happened: all the people regained their minds.

Selene blinked twice as I took the gun from her, emptying the magazine and the bullet in the chamber and dropping them in a bin. “You okay?” I asked.

She nodded, and her body returned to her human ap
pearance.

“I’m going to fucking kill her,” Hera roared.

“You’re all too groggy. Just stay here.” I jumped out of the window, my air magic letting me glide the thirty feet to the ground.

A lot of the humans were back to their normal selves but appeared confused and shaken as an apparently uninjured
Pandora
got back to her feet.

“You knew,” Pandora accused.

“I guessed,” I said. “Enthralling all of these people must have taken a lot of concentration on your part. Falling thirty feet onto hard ground probably knocked your power out for a second or two, just long enough for everyone to recover.”

“I can just as easily take them again.”

“Not without going through them all one at a time. How did you manage to enthrall Hera and the others upstairs, anyway?”

“Selene was in the corridor and Ares, standing guard outside. After that it was just a case of overwhelming force. Hera almost got me, but she wasn’t quick enough to realize what I was doing.”

“You’re coming with me now,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so.” She turned and sprinted off into the crowd, and I followed without getting too close. She touched a few people as she went by, but when we reached the center of the convention room, Tommy appeared out of nowhere, subduing the newly enthralled humans. She could enthrall Tommy, but by the time she could have gotten past the throng of people and done it, I’d have caught up to her. She changed course.

Another aisle had Sky at the end and a third held Hades.
Pandora
took a fourth, and I slowed to a walk after she discovered Persephone waiting for her. I let her take a fifth, but s
he cam
e back to the center after spotting Olivia. There was nowhere to go, no path she could take that would lead to her escape before I caught up to her.

“We’re done here,” I said.

“No!”
she screamed. But most of the humans had been evacuated from the building, and none of those that were left were close to enough for her to grab and enthrall.

I glanced over at my friends and nodded. Each of them turned and walked away. Once everyone had gone—leaving just Pandora and me staring at one another—I offered her my hand. “Give it up,” I said.

“No,” she repeated and swatted my hand aside. “If I go, I’m going to grab someone and use them. There’s no one you can trust near me. And this time, I’m not letting you bring me in.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Spare me your pity. If you want to take me out of here, you’re going to have to kill me to do it.” She snapped her fist toward my face, which I pushed aside before giving her a shove and allowing her momentum to carry her beyond me.

She snapped one leg up toward me, catching me on the chest, which made me stagger, and she followed up by planting that foot, spinning around and hitting me in the face with her opposite foot.

The blow split my lip, but I recovered enough to avoid the rest of her kicks and punches. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to strike back because she was a woman; I’m of the opinion that if someone is trying to kick your ass, you defend yourself no matter the sex of the attacker. I just didn’t want to hurt someone I liked. I’d hoped once the initial flurry of rage she had inside her had been burned out, she’d surrender, but it soon became apparent that wasn’t going to be the case.

She weaved toward me and caused me to block or dodge more blows. The more they continued, the more force I had to use to slow her down. I pushed her away, tripped her, and tried to lock her arm in place in an effort to subdue her with minimal damage, but she was always moving and never stayed down for long.

It made fighting her incredibly difficult, but I refused to be drawn into a full fight with her. Pandora was thousands of years old, but she wasn’t a hand-to-hand fighter. And any training she’d had wasn’t something she’d been able to continue practicing on any sort of regular basis while in a jail cell.

Pandora launched herself up to catch me in the side of my head with a vicious kick, and I decided I’d had enough. I grabbed her thigh and twisted my body, dragging her up and over me before dumping her on the floor with a crack. She kicked out at me with her free leg, but I connected with a blow of my own on her knee, which caused her to roll aside in pain.

I released her leg and stepped back, hoping she’d had enough, but she had other ideas and swept out at my legs. I jumped back, giving her enough time to get to her feet.

“Enough,” I said. “Seriously, you can’t beat me in a fight. Just surrender and we can leave. No one needs to be hurt here today.”

“Never! Now fight me.”

She put up her hands in a fighter’s stance and walked toward me before throwing a punch that I caught in one hand, at the same time driving my other fist into her solar plexus with immense force.

“Breathe,” I said as she collapsed to her knees. “Breathe steadily. You’re okay.”

Tears fell down Pandora’s cheeks, and I wasn’t convinced they were from the pain of the blow. “They deserve to be punished,” she gasped weakly. “Why won’t you let me punish them? Look what they did to me.”

Realization of a previous thought’s accuracy dawned on me. “It’s not Pandora who took charge of the body is it? How long have you been in charge?” I asked. “Hope, how long have you been in charge?” I repeated when she didn’t answer.

Hope glanced up at me through misted eyes. “Since Berlin. Pandora is gone. There’s only Hope now. Once she’d left, all of the knowledge she’d been learning about controlling a person’s soul, not their mind, became mine to use as I wished. It was as if our merging unlocked all of these possibilities. When did you realize?”

“Just now. I thought Pandora was in control, but only you ever described yourself as an individual. Pandora never could. So, I should have known it was your personality taking over, not hers, when I heard you say ‘I.’ ”

“I was trying so hard not to screw it up ever since I saw
you again.”

“Also, Pandora would have actually had people plant bombs in London. She didn’t care about the people if it meant getting her way.”

“I wondered if that was going to reveal the truth,” she said sorrowfully.

“Are you done weeping?” Hera asked from behind me. “Because I’d like to kill the fucking bitch.”

I stood and turned to Hera and her group. “You’re not having her,” I declared.

Hera glanced around. “Everyone appears to have left you. There’s no Hades here to stop me from just taking her and killing you if you get in the way.”

Ares cracked his massive knuckles, and I wondered if he’d discovered what I’d done to his boy.

“You’re not having her,” I said again.

Selene appeared and walked past Hera to stand beside me. “How much noise do you think it would take before Hades came in?” she asked.

Rage erupted onto Hera’s face. “How dare you! Clearly you’ve forgotten why you owe me your allegiance. Maybe I should remind you.”

I was about to say something when Hope launched
herself
past me, toward Hera, her hands outstretched to grab her
creator
. I reacted instinctively, creating a blade of lightning and driving it through Hope’s back, stopping her in her tracks. Hera’s mouth dropped open in shock or horror at either the lightning blade or the expression of agony on Pandora’s face, I didn’t know. I removed the blade and caught Hope before she collapsed toward the floor.

“I’ll remember this,” she said weakly as I laid her down.
Suddenly
, the sounds of doors opening and people running toward us echoed around the room.

“I’m sorry. I had to,” I explained.

“You’ll wish you’d finished the job,” she said before I was ushered away by LOA agents.