The Judas Line (37 page)

“It was at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church near the river where I heard my calling for the first time,” I mused, mind skipping and jumping like droplets of water on a hot griddle. “Tuesday. Yes, a Tuesday when the traffic was light and the sun was bright. I was fixing to head to Council Bluffs, but I saw that old building and it sang to me.” The memory moved sluggishly through the cotton that shrouded my mind. “I just parked the car and walked in, lost in a world of emotions and thoughts I couldn’t articulate. Pews, the carpet of the nave, nothing registered except the altar and the image of Christ on the cross.” My voice grew thick. “I think that before I even made it to the altar I knew. I knew—the way I knew the feel of desert sand in the palms of my hands—that service to the Lord was my calling, my truth … and I was no longer lost.”

“I like that Sergeant. I really do.” Ben was now dressed in denim shorts, a green t and Converse sneakers.

“Am I dying?”

“Didn’t you just ask me that?”

“No, earlier I asked you if I was dead. Dying is a whole different deck of cards.”

“True, true.” He snagged a cola-drink from a passing waitress, who ignored him just as everyone else did. “No, Sergeant, you’re not dying.”

“Then what is all this?” I gestured to the bar, the people, to the band that was playing “Pour Some Sugar on Me
.”

“I don’t know. This is your place, your construct, not mine. For some reason this place holds significance for you.”

“Hmm. Strange.”

“Listen, Sergeant, I’m here to tell you something. Something important.”

“Is it urgent?”

“Nothing is urgent in this place. Here we are between tick and tock of the clock.”

“Good. Good.” I took a long pull from the still-cold mug. “I want to listen to the music.”

“Sounds good, Sergeant. Sounds good.”

So we listened to classic ’80s rock while drinking cold ones, feet tapping to the beat. The band did a credible job and the crowd was relatively well behaved. It was nice, standing there amid a sea of people who just wanted to have a good time and relax. As for myself, the thought of the real world didn’t intrude on my consciousness, almost as if it couldn’t. There was no urgency, no pain, no Boris.

The house lights came on, the band left the stage and the bartenders hollered out “last call.” A momentary spike of pain, like a flash headache, ran from temple to temple and I knew my brief moment of piece was at an end.

Ben tapped my shoulder. “Ready, Sergeant?”

My heart sank. It was time, I guessed. “Yes, Corporal.”

“Scream, Sergeant. Scream loud and long.”

Scream? “What d—“

Pain, blinding and harsh in my side, a digging, slicing, and hot sear that brought me full out of whatever la-la land I had been in.

Boris’ nasty face was inches from mine and he smiled into the teeth of my agony, enjoying every nerve-twitching moment. “I give you pain you don’t believe, God-man.”

I looked down and nearly gagged. Hands bound behind my back, I was once again in that damn ugly chair placed in the center of the exercise mat that dominated the main floor of the suite. Cold air from the broken window froze the sweat on my naked skin and my Danzinger’s shirt had been torn from my body so I was naked from the waist up. The capper to this whole situation was my left side. Boris had sliced me open a treat and had jammed a pair of pliers into the wound, grasping a rib with the filthy metal. I could
feel
the ragged ridges of the gripping appliance tearing at the bone.

Boris laughed at the horrified look on my face.

“What you say, God-man? What you say now?”

A voice of a comrade came through the fog of pain in my side.
Scream, Sergeant. Scream loud and long.

My eye rolled to meet Boris’ mad gaze and I screamed.

Loud and long.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Morgan

Alan fired, but Maggie’s head wasn’t where it had been just a moment before. From the corner of her eye she’d seen the sick greed on Alan’s face, had seen the pistol come up, barrel aimed straight at her head.

Head rocking back, she felt the bullet whisper past her nose, the heat of it making her skin tingle.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” she spat, making a grab for the pistol.

Both apprentices uttered Strength at that same moment. To Maggie, it smelled of oatmeal raisin cookies, to Alan clove cigarettes. Each glared at the other with raw hatred, knowing that only one would leave that elevator alive.

“Why?” grated Maggie, a big hand gripping the barrel of Alan’s weapon, the metal hot against her palm.

Face red, a pulsing vein showing large in his forehead, he answered, “W-what the Valhalla League offered … couldn’t pass it up …”

Instead of responding, Maggie shouted Vigor, inhaling the sweet odor of strawberries and Alan yelled Grace, releasing the musky smell of a great cat.

He let go of the weapon and immediately Maggie took swing, trying to punch the butt of the pistol through her opponent’s skull, but missed. She tried again and again, but Alan was always just out of reach, ducking and weaving with uncommon fluidity.

Back and forth, back and forth they danced in the elevator’s confined space, Maggie striking with unflagging stamina and Alan dodging with preternatural elegance.

The elevator doors opened.

More blood and gore was smeared about the hallway, marking the remaining golems’ movements. Alan, leaping over a sweeping leg, made for the opening. He almost made it.

No matter how graceful he might have been, once his back was turned in flight, Maggie had her chance and she made the most of it.

One muscular hand clamped down like a vise on the calf of the fleeing man and Maggie, standing a good six foot two, weighing 190 pounds, a one-woman battalion, fell on him like the wrath of God.

Maggie had been a champion in the League of Valhalla for two years running, fighting men much bigger and stronger than her to the delight of the Asgardians and their noisome crowd. One of her opponents described her as “the she-wolf from hell.” She won so many fights that she’d become the darling of the Asgardians, that is until she had used magic in one of her bouts. That had landed her hard into trouble and a concrete cell under a League warehouse.

Alan kicked, thrashed and bucked, but he couldn’t escape her furious grip, not even with Strength. A sledgehammer elbow broke two ribs on his right side, caving them like rotten sticks, puncturing a lung. Alan opened his mouth to scream, but his tortured midsection wouldn’t let him. Maggie’s follow-through once again tore into the damaged ribs and the convulsion that followed threw her clean off.

Alan folded in around himself, blood spraying from his gaping mouth as the life left his body.

“You stinking piece of garbage!” Maggie screamed, rising to her feet and giving the body a swift kick. It flew through the air and splattered against the wall, leaving a red imprint like an all-red Matisse cutout.

Eventually the Strength leeched from her system and she began to calm, staring at the shattered remains of what was once a trusted comrade. “Aw … shit,” she moaned. “Why did you have to go and do that, you bastard?”

Her head came up as a scream of frustration split the air.

It wasn’t Maggie’s scream that filled my head at that moment, but Mike’s, I knew it. It went on and on, a deep roar of pain that shriveled my balls.

“Follow me,” I shouted, not waiting for Cain as I tore off down the hallway.

Everything blurred as my focus became diamond-hard on saving Mike, my friend. How strange was that? A
friend
, a comfort I’d gone the first two decades without, believed I didn’t need. Now, in an effort to save one, I stormed the ramparts of evil with equal parts fear and dread running rampant in my veins.

I rounded a corner in time to see a crash test dummy, most of the chamois flesh stripped from its metal frame, burst through a door as if it were made of tissue paper. The scream came loud through the open doorway.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Mike

I screamed and screamed into Boris’ face, screamed until my lungs burned with the effort, screamed until my throat burned with acid, scouring my vocal cords.

Boris seemed to drink it up, enjoying the spectacle immensely.

Crash!
The door flew off its hinges, barely missing Boris and flying through the open space where one of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been.

We both stared in disbelief as a cross between a crash test dummy and the
Terminator
leaped through the doorway, metal hands outstretched for Boris’ throat.

As a former soldier, I’d had some curiosity about my Soviet counterparts, the Spetsnaz. Highly trained, brutalized until pain was just another feeling to be dismissed, they were the bogeymen of Red Army, the best (or worst) of the best.

Boris proved equal to his calling because there was no hesitation as he met the mechanical monster, grabbing a metal arm and twisting his body to throw the thing over and across his hip. The monster flew through the air, landing near the broken windows.

All I could do was watch, dumbfounded, as Boris charged the dummy. It stood there waiting, arms stretched wide while the Russian leapt. Apparently the creature didn’t have the brains to figure the odds, because the outcome of a two-hundred-fifty-pound man taking on what I took to be a one-hundred-eighty-pound mannequin head-on seemed easy to calculate.

The soles of Boris’ size twelves impacted solidly on the dummy’s midsection, sending the thing sailing out past the broken window and into the night, where it quickly dropped out of sight.

Just as the giant Russian turned back to me, I heard the most wonderful voice in the world say, “Don’t you dare move, Boris.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Morgan

I didn’t pull the trigger. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to. The sight of Mike—battered and bloody, sitting on an ugly steel chair looking like death warmed over, face beaten into shapelessness—froze my blood, but something stayed my finger. Maybe it was the incredibly efficient, graceful way Boris had disposed of the golem, the terrible beauty of his lethality. Whatever it was, I let him live for that moment.

“Don’t you dare move, Boris.” I really, really wanted to shoot him in the worst way. It was like an itch you just had to scratch before it drove you mad. “You okay, Mike?”

My friend laughed, a sad, sick sound. “Depends on your definition, I guess.”

I wasted no time in laying Healing on him, keeping one eye on Boris, who was glaring hot death at me. I could feel Mike grow stronger, but not enough, so I laid on another and another until the bruises on his body faded and his face became recognizable again.

Fatigue pulled at me, but I didn’t care. Mike was alive. A flick of a K-bar and the zip ties holding his wrists together parted.

“So this is the infamous clergyman who causes the Sicarii to quail and quiver in their boots.” Cain stepped into the suite, smiling at Mike with what seemed to be genuine affection. “And I note the figure of a surly Russian who must be the dreaded Boris of whom such tales are spun as to unman ordinary mortals.”

“Interesting turn of phrase,” began Mike, rubbing some life back into his hands. “I vote we delay any further discussion until we are safe. Let’s get out of here
now
.”

“Sit, Boris,” I commanded. The Russian just glared, so I shot the cuff of his expensive slacks. “Sit, or I take out your ankles, like last time.” That put him on his butt right quick. It was then I noted we were standing on several wrestling mats. We had to be in a training suite where the guards kept their skills sharp. That meant Julian was close by.

“Hey, boss. Hey, handsome,” Maggie’s deep but very feminine voice came from behind. “Is this tall drink of cute the priest you were after? Too bad he belongs to God.”

Mike’s expression at seeing Maggie for the first time was worth the price of admission. She was a lot of woman to take in all at once.

Cain gave her a once over. “Alan?”

Her face closed down. “He was on the League’s payroll. Tried to do me in.”

I cast my mind back to the Seeing, the second half of which I had paid scant attention to while searching for Mike, and gave Cain a nod.

Mike cut in before Cain could reply, sounding more than a little frustrated. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we have a psychopathic Russian to deal with. Anyone have a pair of handcuffs or three?”

“Sorry, man,” I said, not taking my eyes off of Boris. “You’re right.”

“Actually, a better idea springs new-formed to mind,” Cain mused. “Mr. Heart should pursue the perilous quest while Michael, Maggie and I provide our overlarge friend here with some much needed containment.” His shades moved my way. “Go. Find the Primal and set it free. Michael will be safe in our august company.”