Gabriel’s fiery eyes stayed firmly fixed on his friend. He didn’t even acknowledge the rest of us.
“Is that my little brother writhing around in the back of your car?” Terletov asked casually.
“Care to trade?” I sounded equally nonchalant but nothing could have been further from the truth.
Terletov shrugged, “Keep him.” His eyes narrowed and a sick grin twisted his expression. “Or didn’t he tell you about our little falling out?”
“I’ll take back my friends one way or another, Terletov. I’m just trying to make this easy on you.” My words were all bravado. I tried to imagine the point of Alexi bringing us here while his brother still sold him out. None of this made sense to me.
“This is boring to me,” Terletov announced suddenly. His dark hair hung limp around his crisp collar and his razor thin mustache had a thin line of sweat beading his upper lip. He was a sick man- and not just in the head.
The rest of his mean, while strong and capable soldiers, let off a rotting smell that could only be likened to death. These men were not natural, not even a little bit. Whatever games Terletov was playing with science and nature, he was losing. Even if it seemed like success in some messed-up way, this was not right.
They could not last like this.
“Here are my terms,” Terletov continued. “You can have these… men. I will give them to you. But I want your Queen. She has what is mine. So, if you give her to me, I will give you what is yours.”
“No,” Talbott snarled immediately. I felt punched in the gut at Talbott’s insistence. As much as he wanted Lilly, as much as he would do anything to get to her, his loyalty to the Crown came first. Eden and the rest of our Monarchy would always be his first obligation- by blood oath. And that killed me for him.
“Not a chance,” Sebastian echoed.
“Then they die.” Terletov glanced over his shoulder and then back at us. “And so do you.”
“Wrong,” I told him. “It’s you who dies today.”
He looked at me like he just noticed me for the first time. His thick eyebrows raised high into his wrinkled forehead and his emaciated frame became cartoonishly animated. “I was hoping for a good…” His sentence trailed off when his eyes flickered behind me. Instinctively I moved in front of his focus, blocking his view from what had to be Olivia. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Why do you look so familiar? Step forward, I need to look at you better.”
“No.” I stepped forward instead.
Terletov lowered his sword so the tip rested in the hollow of Silas’s throat. The message was made perfectly clear; but I would be damned before I would let this sick bastard’s attention focus completely on Olivia.
“I want to see the girl.” As sadistic as this man was, this was the first time I’d actually heard him sound angry. Usually, he held casual tones and spoke with a kind of elegant but condescending amusement. He was born and raised an aristocrat in a world where malicious politics ruled. Despite the kind of criminal he’d become, he didn’t lose the old style of evil that Lucan and his father and his father’s father had instilled into this Kingdom.
“No,” I repeated.
Terletov put some weight behind his sword and Silas’s neck began to bleed. Silas lay there, choking and wriggling beneath the tip of the blade while I protected a girl that was so much more to me than a friend or attraction. Her eyes had changed. Her eyes were purple.
She possessed all four kinds of Magic, without a doubt. She had to. I had started to put a puzzle together in my head and Olivia was filling in missing pieces for me.
But beyond that, beyond this conflict, we were bonding. Our Magic was even now entwined. And I doubted she even realized it. I’d removed my Magic from hers earlier, after Sebastian started insinuating, well, the truth- that we were connecting, that our Magic was combining. I’d tried to keep myself separate from her since I realized our connection could have terrible consequences, but now, in the middle of this, I couldn’t bring myself to distance myself from her. I needed her, and I needed to know she was alright.
But this only strengthened our bond- a bond I had never believed could exist until now.
I had loved Eden. Loved her.
But we’d never shared this; we’d never even shared a percentage of this.
I’d sort all that out later though- as long as there was a later.
The tip of the sword pushed into Silas’s flesh further and our standstill had only moments left. It was time to act. Time to finish the chitchat and accomplish something.
“I’m going to kill him then,” Terletov shrugged.
For the first time since he’d stepped out of wherever they had been hiding him, Gabriel spoke. They’d pulled out his clerical collar and his tattered robes were filthy and bloody, but he still held the air of authority and conviction that always surrounded him. When he spoke, his Spanish accent was thick and his voice beyond pained, but his words rang out clearly. “You’ve already killed him. There is nothing left of him but agony.”
Terletov immediately bounced back to the happy politician then. Grinning like a crocodile he said, “As usual, the priest speaks the truth. I did do that, didn’t I? Ah well, then he probably won’t mind if I do this.” A collective gasp resounded the moment Terletov’s magically-enhanced sword pushed through Silas’s neck. Crimson red Magic drifted into the air, blinding, bright and free.
Agony clawed at my throat and disbelief and despair simultaneously clenched in my chest over and over again. Silas.
Silas.
If Eden were here she could save him, but she wasn’t. And maybe he didn’t want to be saved. Maybe he had hoped for death for far too long now.
Peace softened his features as his face finally relaxed. A small smile played at the corner of his mouth and finally, finally his body stopped writhing.
I knew that Gabriel was right, that whatever Terletov had done to him had killed him way before now. At this point, Terletov was granting him a favor by ending his suffering. But it was the image of one of my old friends and great mentors that spurred me into action.
A small hand pressed against my shoulder blade and I realized Olivia was trying to get my attention. I snapped out of my hypnotic state, watching Silas’s Magic leak into the atmosphere around his dying body and realized the rest of my team had gone to work on these guys.
It was time to join them.
“Do not leave my side,” I told Olivia. “Stay next to me and use everything we worked on before.” I handed her the gun. “Do you know how to use this?” With wide eyes full of fear and anxiety, she nodded. I clicked the safety off for her, just in case she was too panicked to remember the little things and pulled a dagger from my boot with the same magical properties as the swords these men carried.
I probably should have brought a sword. I was certainly trained with them, but they were cumbersome outside of fighting. I much preferred the easy handling of a long-blade knife.
I wanted Terletov, but I wouldn’t risk getting close to him while I had Olivia next to me. Besides, it looked like Talbott had already called dibs.
I decided I needed to get to Gabriel first and foremost. He was a wild man at the back of the conflict. His hands were bound but his feet were not. He kicked and threw his body around. He used his forehead to connect blow after blow, seeming uncaring of the blood dripping from his various wounds into his eyes and over his face.
He looked savage and out of his mind.
And I absolutely understood why.
If that had been Avalon… or even Sebastian. Talbott. Xander. Xavier. Titus. Roxie. Amelia. Eden. Even Kiran… If that had been any of my friends, I would have lost my mind in vindictive rage.
As it were, I still had the pounding retribution pulsing through me so loud and demanding, my hearing felt muffled and my vision narrowed into a tunnel of this fight and only this fight.
I struck out at the first of Terletov’s men I came into contact with. I let the pent up Magic explode from my
palm and strike out at his feet. He blocked me, expecting my tactic. I adjusted my methods and went to strike out again when a secondary blast of Magic burst forward and succeeded in knocking him over where I had failed.
Olivia.
She’d taken the opportunity while his attention was on me and used some initiative.
Nice.
I lunged forward and had my knife through his heart before his body had even fully taken the impact of his fall. His green, putrid Magic immediately released from his chest while his entire body seemed to decompress like a punctured balloon.
The thing about these guys was they were super strong, even for Immortals. They seemed to be powerful beyond anything else. But they were also incredibly easy to kill. If you could get a blade into them, they just deflated. It was bizarre. But I suspected it had something to do with however Terletov had enhanced their Magic and the consequences of tampering with the natural order of things.
I was back on my feet and fighting again before I could even thank Olivia for helping me. She stayed close to me, just like I asked. It was easy to do until the hand-to-hand combat. But most of my fighting was Magic blast versus Magic blast.
I could hold my own even if these guys were stronger than me. I’d been doing this a long time and I didn’t give up, not ever. They were seasoned as well, so it wasn’t like I had an advantage, but I didn’t have a disadvantage either.
Olivia helped out when she could. Her blasts of Magic weren’t the strongest I’d seen, but they were surprisingly accurate. She had good aim. And she wasn’t afraid to push her body and her abilities to the limit. She used the gun as well. Her aim was worse with that, but a few times she knocked them on their asses and prevented them from reaching us.
The second guy we took down, took some work. But eventually my knife connected with his thigh and I ripped it upwards, using my Immortal strength to cut through flesh, tissue and muscle. He collapsed to the ground while his sickly Magic poured out of his gaping wound.
I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. Not until I knew he was dead.
Retracting my knife from his leg, I plunged it into his heart and twisted. I yanked my knife back and kicked him backwards. He was toast.
I whirled around to find another target when Terletov appeared before us. I glanced around for Talbott but he was currently engaged with two others. I knew he could hold his own, but I hoped he would get free soon so he could help with this takedown.
He needed to feel the success of gutting this guy.
He deserved that much after going through what he had.
“You were one of mine,” Terletov declared. His eyes were transfixed on Olivia, not me. I crouched in front of her, knife in hand, Magic at the ready. “You belong to me.”
“I don’t belong to anybody,” she snapped.
“I made you like this,” he persisted. “I created you. You owe me. You belong to me.”
“Actually, you owe me,” she hissed at him. “You owe me the cure for this! I don’t belong to you and I don’t belong to this crazy world. I want the cure. I want to go home.”
Terletov shook his head like he thought he’d heard her wrong. His caterpillar-like eyebrows dipped over his eyes and his lips pressed into a confused frown. “There is no cure.” I swallowed. I didn’t trust Terletov, but he sounded more outraged than deceitful right now, like he was appalled Olivia would even think of wanting to go back to human. “There’s no cure for this! I gave you immortality! I gave you a better existence than you even knew existed. And it worked! Look at you! And you’re mine, you know. I took your pathetic humanity and turned you into something beautiful and lasting. You should thank me, not demand that I retract my good will.”
“You tortured me,” Olivia argued with as much vehemence as I’d ever heard. “You ruined my life. My sister’s in a coma because of you! You just killed a man; an innocent man! You’re cruel and delusional. I want nothing to do with you except to get rid of this sickness inside me.”
Her words made even my gut twist.
Is that really how she viewed her Magic?
Is that how she saw me?
“It’s not a sickness!” Terletov screamed. “It’s a gift! I’ve made you into a soldier. I’ve made you the strongest soldier that’s ever lived. Did they take you back to the Castle? Did they try to fix you but failed? That’s because you cannot be fixed! There is no cure. They can’t even take your Magic. It’s bonded to your blood so tight you’d have to die first. But you can’t die. You can’t. I made sure you couldn’t.” His eyes were maniacal and his pitch heightened with his excitement.
I wanted to ask him a million more questions, but I wanted to kill him more.
Gabriel had managed to get his hands free, and suddenly he was flying through the air with a long sword raised overhead. His orange eyes flashed and burned like lava from a recently erupted volcano. His robes flapped in the air as he descended on Terletov from above.
But Terletov was ready.
I struck out with my own Magic at the same time Terletov turned and spun through the air like a freaking ninja. His Magic left his hands and shot through the air, connecting with Gabriel before he could land on the ground. The shot pierced straight to Gabriel’s chest and pushed him back, triggering him to land on his back with a cloud of dirt puffing up around him.
I shot more Magic at Terletov, constant bursts of deadly energy in an effort to destabilize him. He floundered as each shot hit a part of his body, but he was determined to ignore me. I held my Magic in, letting it build pressure so that with each new burst, I would more than annoy him, I would wound him.
He crawled along the ground, jolting and jerking every time I hit him, but he clawed at the ground, pulling himself along. Blood dripped from his body where I’d broken skin and his fingers were raw and wounded as they dug into the hard earth. I stepped closer to him, but when another one of his men approached, I had to worry about engaging him first. I alternated shots, making sure to keep myself protected but not wanting Terletov to get any farther.
Gabriel lay on the ground, unmoving. If it weren’t for the shallow rising and falling of his chest I would have assumed he was dead. But somehow he was managing to hold on.
“Cover me,” I told Olivia and then I dove for Terletov.
His henchman tried to intercept and for a few minutes we were a tangle of flying punches and zaps of Magic. The henchman grabbed me around the legs and while I tried to kick him off I reached out for Terletov. I punched him in the kidneys with rage and the breath expelled from his lungs in a satisfying whoosh. But still he struggled on.
“I’m going to kill your priest,” he taunted through a mouth dripping with blood.
I reached for him again, ignoring the excruciating pain the other guy was hitting and zapping into me. I kicked out wildly but his unrelenting strong grip could not be shaken.
Terletov noticed the advantage and continued his taunts. “And then I’m going to take my girl back. She had a sister too, didn’t she? Is she too weak to absorb all that Magic?” I didn’t answer, just kept struggling to get to him. I had his ankle in my own iron grip, preventing him from moving forward, but it was all I could do to hold on to him. He continued provoking me, though, as if I were no challenge for him at all. “Most of them are too weak. Most of them die. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because there are ones that survive. My super soldiers. You can’t even steal their Magic, that’s how strong they are. Our one fatal flaw- our one weakness that anyone stronger than us can just steal what belongs to us, humanize us… kill us. But if we fix that. If we make our Magic permanent, then who can stop us? Who can slow us down?” He grinned that wide, toothy smile that made my skin crawl. His skinny, manicured mustached looked like a line of dust over his thin lips. “Nobody. Nobody can stop us. We will be invincible, with an army of invincible soldiers.”
I realized he spoke about himself in the third person that just cemented in the truth that he was absolutely out of his mind.
&
nbsp; Crazy asshole.
Gabriel moaned as he rolled over, slowly, too slowly for him to have all his wits about him. He started cursing Terletov in Spanish. His words were vile, cutting and nothing but truth. Terletov just kept smiling.
“And what do you have left to live for, Man of God?” he struggled forward and I was momentarily distracted while I fought the man at my legs. But I kept myself focused on Terletov and Gabriel though. Gabriel needed me, if only I could get to him. “I’ve taken your church. I’ve taken your nuns. I’ve taken your friends. You have nothing. I have given you nothing!”
A guttural scream left Gabriel in a deafening roar and I finally found the angle I needed to knee this son of a bitch in the nose; at the same time I blasted him in the face with a full shot of Magic. He flew off me and rolled away. I picked up my dagger and jumped on him, sinking it into his back and ripping the blade through his flesh. It sounded brutal- it was brutal- but the bigger the hole, the faster the Magic left the body. This was important with Immortals who could regenerate and heal quickly. Not that we could regenerate from this kind of blade, but if the cut was small enough we could still inflict damage until the last of our Magic drained. The man’s body collapsed with a gust of disgusting wind and I jumped out of the way of his tainted post-mortem Magic.
I lunged to my feet just in time to watch Terletov’s blade disappear into Gabriel’s stomach. My brain overloaded with a million thoughts at the same time everything rational, coherent and important dropped from my body like a physical weight.
I refused to believe Terletov got to Gabriel. I refused.
And even if I didn’t refuse, I seemed physically incapable of processing what my eyes were taking in. Gabriel fell to his knees with the sword still imbedded in his lower abdomen. His hands gripped the decorative handle and clutched at it desperately. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to push it in further or remove it.
But it didn’t matter. Either way his orange Magic- as bright as his once brilliant eyes- already poured into the air around him. He was gone.