Prison of Hope (39 page)

One of the LOA agents, wearing plain clothes, came over to us. “She’s gone down the middle aisle.”

“Thanks,” I said and began to walk in the direction the LOA agent had pointed.

The hall contained dozens of stands of various sizes, all advertising a different publisher. Some small publishers had tiny stands with only one or two people there, but the larger companies had huge stands, with dozens of people all talking or
looking
at the books that were sitting on shelves.

“The meeting rooms are upstairs,” Olivia said. “If Aphrodite has business to take care of, I imagine she’ll want privacy. The entrance is over there.” She pointed off toward one side, several hundred meters away.

The six of us spread out as we got farther down the spoke-like aisle, while more agents took the other aisles. We’d made it about halfway down when I spotted Pandora at the bottom. She was watching us advance, with a wicked smile on her
face. Sh
e said something that we were too far away to hear, but then abruptly everyone down the aisle fell silent. There was no gradual drop in noise—it went from loud to quiet in an instant.

“Apparently, I can do more than I thought,” she said. “Enthrall
ing a few thousand was quite hard work, although it got easier when
I volunteered to be the one stamping everyone’s hand as they entered.”

I looked around at the statue-like group that surrounded us. They all had their eyes on us.

“You’ve been here awhile then?” I asked.

“Broke in last night. Prepared myself until I was ready for you, then used the corridors under the building to get out to the street above. It was simple really.”

There was a bang behind us as the doors were closed,
followed
by a jangle of chains as they were locked shut.

“You plan on killing us?” Sky asked. “It didn’t work so well for your men last night.”

Pandora shrugged. “I assumed they were all dead. Nice to know for sure, though. So, I’m now left without my Vanguard helpers. Come get me, Nate. I dare you.”

She turned and ran off, and I took a step after her only to be clouted in the head with a laptop wielded by a middle-aged woman in a suit. I grabbed the erstwhile weapon and threw it aside while she tried to claw at my face. A second later she went limp and then fell to the floor, as all around us those controlled by Pandora woke up to do her bidding.

“Don’t kill any of them,” I shouted.

“Just go,” Tommy replied as he threw one man into a group of others, knocking them all to the floor.

A few hundred people blocked the way forward, but before I could ready any magic, they all stopped moving and collapsed to the ground in unison.

“Go,” Hades told me. “I’ll keep them still for long enough.”

I wondered how long he could keep the souls of hundreds of people tampered with. Probably not long enough to be able to help subdue anyone else. As much as I wanted to stay and help, I left everyone and sprinted after Pandora, dodging anyone who got too close or tried to stop me, and blasting a few with air to make sure they left me alone.

I rounded a corner, watched Pandora run through a door
at t
he far end, and hurried after her. I was about a hundred feet from the door, with several dozen controlled people in front of me and an unknown number behind, when someone shouted, “
Stop!
”

Everyone did as they were told.

“He’s mine. Go find someone else.”

The people did as they were told, walking away as Deimos stepped out from behind a pillar.

“I don’t have time for this,” I explained. Fighting anyone would take time I didn’t have, but especially fighting an empath as powerful as Deimos.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “Pandora made sure that all of these people would obey my commands. She’s going to kill my bitch of a grandmother and everyone else with her while I make sure no one stops her.”

I took another step.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that,” he said, and suddenly terror crept up inside me.

I took another step, determined not to let Deimos affect me, but the emotion overcame me, and I crashed to my knees.

“Now we get to have some fun,” he said and kicked me in the head.

CHAPTER
39

I
woke up unable to move. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was, but it didn’t take me long to realize that I was tied to something. I pulled at my arms, but there was no give in the straps. I glanced down and saw Deimos sitting at my feet.

“We’re going to play a game,” he said. “It’s called ‘Let’s Make Nate Relive His Worst Fears and Memories.’ It’s not a catchy title, I’ll admit, but it’s pretty accurate.”

Somewhere inside me I knew what had happened. Deimos had used his empathic ability on me from the moment I’d stepped toward him in the hallway, and he’d started to raise my level of terror. The moment he’d touched me, he was able to invade my memories, finding the ones to use against me. But knowing what he was up to and being able to do something about it were two different things. Deimos was easily powerful enough to force me to relive whatever he chose, and there was nothing I could do but continue to try to fight it in the hope that he screwed up.

I glanced over at the door and saw Jenny walk toward me, as if she’d just appeared out of nowhere. Jenny had worked for Mordred, but at some point she’d decided she didn’t want to work for a monster anymore and had tried to save the lives of two young girls who were essential to Mordred’s future plans. She’d been key to me recovering the memories that Mordred had stolen from me. I knew what was coming, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

She was exactly how I remembered her—bruises on her exposed shoulders, running up her neck. There was a cut just above one eye. Stitches had been applied to close the wound. All of this was so familiar. The anger and pain at seeing her that way, the fear at what was going to happen to her, to me. I’d lost all of my memories, I didn’t even know who I was. I had no power, no nothing. I’d played the fool, jumping from beautiful woman to beautiful woman, playing thief while I tried in vain to block out the fact that I was just scared. Scared of who I was, of what I might become if my memories ever returned, but more scared about never getting them back.

“They said you could go free,” I found myself telling her. I wanted to scream at her to run, to leave and never come back, but that wasn’t how it really happened. That wasn’t how Deimos was going to play the game.

Jenny nodded. “Death
is
their version of setting me free. They only let me talk to you because they want to watch you suffer.”

Time shifted, moving in fast forward. It was only a few
seconds
, but it was enough.

Jenny touched my cheek, a tender moment between two people who had been lovers. Who could have been more. “I want you to know something,” she told me. “I really liked our time together. It made me feel normal.”

Another fast forward as I screamed in rage at what Deimos was making me relive. Jenny kissed me gently
on the mo
uth. A grating sound started, coming from the side of the table, but it didn’t last for long as the kiss intensified and she grasped the sides of my head in her hands. I returned the passion, and suddenly, without warning, memories exploded in my head.

I tried to yell out. I knew what was happening, what
had
happened to me. I knew what Jenny had done, as more and more memories came into the forefront of my mind. But the kiss intensified once more, unlocking chunks of my past with every heartbeat. Deimos was making me relive all of those unlocked memories for a second time, all of the pain and rage and heartbreak that they brought with them.

I moved my head slightly, noticing dark marks on Jenny’s wrist and forearm. Another memory exploded, giving me instant knowledge of what it meant. She was killing herself so that I might live. She was giving me back my memories, my abilities; she was remaking the man I used to be before Mordred tore my mind asunder, before I spent a decade playing games and
pretending
that nothing bothered me.

Outwardly, I followed through the memory, feeling the
wetness
of Jenny’s tears as they fell onto my cheeks, mixing with m
y own.

Deimos touched my hand and everything faded, only to be replaced with me in the house I shared with Selene. We’d lived in New York for four years. I’d quit Avalon decades earlier, a
nd for
the first time in a long time I was happy. And then I walked through that door and found our house empty, found the note on the dining room table. Smelled Selene’s scent as I read it, and
felt th
e pit of despair as the realization of its contents hit me. She’d left me. I wasn’t to contact her, I wasn’t to try to find her; she was going to marry Deimos and her mind was made up.

“There’s not enough terror or horror here,” Deimos said from beside me. “I just always wanted to see the moment, you know? I expected more crying. Maybe we should just change your memory so that you cry. I think I’d like that.”

I dropped the yellow paper onto the table and my heart felt as if it were ready to burst.

“Oh, I’ve got a better idea—how about this?” Deimos taunted.

I was walking toward a house, a two-story building made from wood and brick. There was a porch on the front, and the door was banging open in the wind. The ground beneath my leather-booted feet was wet and soggy. It had been raining heavily for some time and had turned the grass into something resembling a swamp.

I took a step and fear lanced my heart. “Please don’t,” I said.

“Oh, you’re gaining some control,” Deimos said from beside me. “That’s actually quite impressive. It’s not going to stop me. Nice clothes, by the way.”

I wore a set of black leather armor, similar to that worn by the Faceless. I had one of their cloaks, which billowed out behind me in the wind despite the strip of metal placed in the bottom of it. I took another step, the mud making horrific noises that even the wind couldn’t mask.

“That’s it—keep going.”

I walked on as if nothing were bothering me, stopping at the banging door. “Jane, I’m home,” I bellowed into the house.

There was no response.

I stepped inside and shook my cloak, removing it and draping it over the back of a chair, leaving it to drip water onto t
he floor.

“Jane,” I called again. I doubted she’d be out in the weather we were having, but maybe she’d gone to town and decided that she’d rather stay with people during a storm.

I took the first step on the staircase and froze. The smell of death careened into me like a runaway carriage. I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and crashed into our bedroom door, removing it from one hinge.

The horror before me was almost too much for my eyes to bear witness to. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Jane was on the bed. She was naked, except for a sheet that covered part of her torso and one leg. The sheet had, at one time, been a cream color, a present for our wedding day. It was now dark red. A huge pool of my wife’s blood formed under the bed, cascading out around its legs and seeping into the crevices in the floor.

I walked toward her, my hand to my mouth, stifling screams of terror and pain that would not come. There was no sound that could temper what I was feeling, no noise that would do justice to the sight of what used to be my wife.

Jane’s throat had been slit, her torso stabbed repeatedly. Her hands were tied to the top of the bed with thick rope. I reached out slowly to her face, and tears fell freely from my eyes as I climbed onto the bed. I rubbed her stained cheeks with my fingers, as if anything I did could make it better.

I howled in pain. Lightning struck a tree outside, and it burst into flames, but even the elements couldn’t make me so much as glance up from Jane’s face for long. Her beautiful face. Her natural red hair was now crusted and stained, her eyes still open. Looking at me, as if pleading for my help.

I used fire magic to cut through her bonds, and she sagged against me. “I’m here,” I cried out. “I’m so sorry. Please, please don’t go. I’m here.” Words fell as tears, tumbling out of my mouth. I pleaded and begged with anyone and anything that might have been listening. All the while I cradled her dead body against me. I offered my own life countless times, but no one was listening or no one cared—I didn’t know which.

“Now this is more like it,” Deimos said with a slight clap. “You know, I’ve wanted to do this for so long. You had everything. People who feared you, people who loved you. Selene. Do you know how long I used to just watch her? To wish she’d take notice of me.

“And now she’s my wife and she won’t even touch me. She hates me and loves you. But by the time I’m done, there’ll be nothing left of you but a gibbering wreck. Let’s see how much she can love you then.”

“I’m so sorry, Jane,” I said, ignoring him. “I’m so sorry.”

In an instant, I was crouched beside Deimos, watching myself weep for the woman I’d loved. Watching my own heart break with grief. The rage would come, and there would be a reckoning the likes of which few had ever seen, but for the hours I stayed, holding my wife in my arms while the storm continued outside, it felt as if nature itself was grieving with me.

“Take two,” Deimos said, and he made me relive it over and over again. Each time, it was either first person or I was forced to stand beside Deimos while I watched with horror while my younger self went through one of the worst experiences of
my life.

“What are we at now, six?” Deimos asked as I watched myself hold Jane yet again.

“Let’s change things around a bit.” He paced up and down through the pool of blood that had crossed my bedroom floor. “Oh! How about we show you what you imagined happened when they came for your wife. Shall I show you that?”

I would have pleaded for him to stop right there. I would have begged a million times, if it could have made him stop
forcing
me to see Jane. I’d relived it in my memories a thousand times, but nothing could compare to that first time. And Deimos had constructed a way to make every time feel like that first time. He was breaking me. I knew it, and so did he. And soon there would be no point of return.

The picture faded, replaced with my wife running toward a man, dagger in hand. The man—I’d later come to know him as Henry—punched her in the face, and the dagger clattered to the floor. I had no idea if that was how it had happened, but there had been a dagger there, and again and again I’d gone over in my mind what must have happened to Jane. Reliving the horror that I couldn’t be there to stop.

Jane tried to crawl toward the dagger, and Henry laughed, removing his belt and throwing it on the floor.

“Now, I bet this gets good,” Deimos said to me.

Everything froze.

“Well, that’s odd,” Deimos said. “I don’t remember
hitting pause.”

“I did,” said my voice, and Erebus appeared beside him. “You, Deimos, are a selfish, cruel little man who should have left well enough alone.”

The vision disappeared, replaced with everything exactly as it was when I found Jane.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Erebus,” he said. “And you tried to make Nathan see an altered memory. If you’d made him relive the actual thing over and over again, you’d have broken him. But you decided that wasn’t enough. You wanted him to suffer more. You tried to change the moment from what actually happened to what he imagined happened. And now I’m here, because although I can’t interfere with his memories as they are, I sure as hell can interfere with those that are made up.”

Deimos grabbed Erebus’s arm, but nothing happened.

“Good try. My turn.” Erebus placed a hand on Deimos’s chest, and the entire wall behind him exploded outward, taking him with it. I turned to watch as Deimos and most of my house hit the mud outside. He bounced along until a large tree stopped him.

“Make him suffer for this. Make him know real fear.” Erebus’s words were said to me with a cold detachment, but his eyes revealed the fury within. He touched me on my head, and the fear and pain that had been coursing through me vanished, replaced with something else. Something much more terrifying. The need to hurt the one who had wronged me.

I stood up and shook Erebus’s hand. “Thank you.”

“This meeting between you and me—this one you’ll remember. I’ll make sure of it. Just because this is your memory, that doesn’t mean you can’t change it to suit the moment. The imaginary and the real aren’t so different. One doesn’t erase the other. You’re in charge now. When you want to leave this place, kill him. He’s the anchor holding you both here.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. Had we spoken before and I couldn’t remember? But I pushed it aside and stepped through the remains of the door and into the howling winds
outside
.

As I made my way toward a motionless Deimos, the house itself moved to create steps for me, those parts of the ruined structure vanishing once they had finished with their usefulness. There was no magic here—just Erebus allowing me control over my own mind once more.

Planks of wood covered the mud until I was standing above Deimos, who was bleeding slightly from his nose.

“How’d you do that?” he demanded. “This is my domain.”

He grabbed my hand. And fear awoke in him as he realized there was nothing he could do.

“This is my mind,” I told him as Deimos released me and scrambled away. “You wanted to fuck around in here so badly—let me show you the sights.”

I moved quickly and grabbed his hand, crushing it by wrapping it in air and squeezing while I ignored his screams. I released it and the limb was whole once more. I gripped his collar and dragged him to his feet, head-butting him and then slamming the back of his skull against the tree.

“You should not have done this,” I said as he slumped to the ground. “You should not have shown me these things. No one should be forced to relive the worst moments of their life. No one.” I looked back at my house. “But maybe you should be forced to live someone else’s.” I clicked my fingers, and the world changed. We were no longer outside; there was no longer a storm or mud, or anything I’d loved.