Getting Wilde (15 page)

“No games.” The man in the Templar robe smiled. “I’m not foolish enough to believe anything you might say now. Not until you’re broken. But then!” He spread his hands. “Delivering you twice will elevate me to the highest levels of trust.”
 

“You had
our
trust.”
 

“I did!” Barnabus crowed. “And I used it to my advantage. Why do you think I was so eager to help you find your missing Connected in Hungary? And now, once again. The words of the Sator Square burn, do they not? It is not just an old superstition after all.” He paused, grinning down at Kreios. “And you will be very useful to us…eventually.”  
 

Kreios moaned something then, but it was too low for me to hear. Barnabus still seemed pleased.
 

“We no longer need your help in that manner. Your order is lost, Kreios. There is only one order to follow now. One path to ultimate divinity. You will see this more quickly than most. You will see everything soon.”
 

“Who?” The word was anguished now, and I tightened my hands into fists.
 

“Always so persistent in your pursuit of the knowledge. That was in your file too. Your file from before your fall.” He spoke as if he savored the word. “They know everything about you, Aleksander Kreios. They have always known about you. Your abilities were clear even when you were nothing more than another poor stiff working the docks for a day’s ration of bread, laughing in the very face of the war that was brewing atop the sea you loved so much.” The man’s face twisted. “You should never have joined the council. The death of your mentor was unavoidable. Yours was a choice.”
 

That seemed to affect Kreios more than the pain. He went deadly still. “Don’t speak of him.”
 

“Still burns, does it? Seeing him gutted, then shut up in that reliquary, buried alive before your own eyes? The lore of that day has been etched into our history.” He shook his head. “But now, it will be different. Now the Devil of the Arcana Council will be laid to rest, and he will not be replaced.”
 

“Fool!” Kreios’s eyes snapped open, and he glared at the robed man with enough ferocity that his tormenter stepped back, his hands stealing to the heavy cross that hung around his next. A Templar cross, I realized. “The path you follow will betray you even as you betray the watchful gods of old. Balance will be kept, Barnabus. It has always been kept.”
 

“Do not deceive me, Prince of Lies.” The man made a sharp, cutting motion with his hand, and I felt rather than heard the surge of volume in the device. Pain wrenched through me. Max’s hands now gripped my shoulders, whether for my benefit or his, I didn’t know. “Who else now sits on the council?” the man demanded. “Is it truly reassembling?”
 

Kreios’s response was also in Greek, but Max didn’t bother to translate it. Another turn of the dial, and I felt the tears on my face before I realized I had shed them.
 

“Who?”
 

“All of them,” Kreios spit the words. “The Fool. Magician. The Emperor and High Priestess and our very own pope. You want me to continue? You know the roster as well as I.”
 

“You’re lying,” the man shot back. “You could never find all the stones to rebuild your unholy church.”
 

“And you are led from darkness to greater darkness, scrabbling with your bones, your beads, and your unfounded hopes, desperate for a savior who is
not coming
.” Kreios practically pulsed with an internal fire, and I scowled down at him, remembering the golden reliquary into which he had been forced. Now, under this pain, with his focus so fixed on his tormenter, he almost seemed to be disintegrating. “He will never come, Barnabus.
We will not let him
.”
 

“You will stand in his way?” Barnabus stepped forward with new excitement. This apparently was something he hadn’t expected. “None of you have the strength.”
 

“Is that what you believe?” Kreios’s voice had taken on an air of slippery danger, as if he were luring the robed man toward an open pit full of spikes. And, like the fool that he was, Barnabus took a step closer. Still, he wasn’t a complete loss. With his right hand, he made a twisting motion, and the stooge at the dials twisted the notch again, once more making Kreios rigid.
 

“Tell me, Aleksander. For the family you have sacrificed, whose cries torment you at night. For the children you have lost to perdition. Tell me and absolve yourself of all your many sins.”
 

“You dare!” Kreios’s eyes blazed with rage and something else, something not right. They burned too brightly not to eventually explode.
 

I did a recon of the chamber, because show time was clearly close.
 

Two men guarded the reliquary, both of them masked. Another pair of guards stood at the second entrance to the room, and I assumed a final guard stood at the bottom of the stairs to this
gallery. Six men against Max and myself, and the Devil who even now was starting to look a little too incorporeal for comfort.
 

I couldn’t afford for him to up and disappear on me. I didn’t know if he’d get sucked back into his box or go poof for good. Or for bad, as it happened.
 

I reached into my jacket. Beside me, Max already had his gun out. Neither of us had silencers. Hopefully the tours above had moved along.
 

Wait,
I mouthed, as Max’s eyes were trained on my face.
Wait.
 

Barnabus gestured another time.
 

Kreios cried out in fury one final time and I shoved myself half over the banister of the gallery, picking off the guards at the far wall before dropping all the way through. I hit the ground and rolled, a shot skittering off the floor as I ducked behind Kreios’s pallet.
 

“Finish it!” Barnabus snapped the order, and the man at the controls dived forward. I launched myself at the cart, shoving it out of the way as I took him down at the knees. I coldcocked him with my pistol once, twice, before looking up to see Max at the bottom of the stairs. He cracked the soldier’s neck against the stone, the skull crunching into the rock, then let the man fall. Barnabus was already running, and I gestured Max after him while I turned to Kreios.
 

The Devil was barely breathing. The screech of noise from his helmet reverberated through the room, and I pulled a knife out of my pocket, ripping at the wires that held the helmet affixed to the sprawling cart. It seemed permanently attached to the platform, so they had to have somehow gotten Kreios into it without protest. Which would have meant he’d been knocked out. But how?
 

With the severing of the last wire, a spray of sparks flew across the room, and merciful silence blanketed us. I slumped forward over Kreios’s body, my ears ringing, the abrupt cessation
of pain like a benediction. Beneath me, the Devil’s chest was slick with sweat, his own lungs heaving beneath his thickly corded pecs.
 

As I steadied myself against him, soft words floated down around my ears.
 

“As pleasant as I’m sure this experience would be for both of us, we may want to wait until we are completely alone, Sara Wilde.”
 

I jerked back upright as Max appeared in the doorway again, his face grim.
 

“Gone?” I asked.
 

“Dead.” He shook his head at my startled expression. “Some sort of suicide pill, frothing at the mouth before I got to him. Stuck in some sort of oubliette, no way out.” Max tossed me a set of keys. “These might be helpful.”
 

“Don’t count on him being dead,” Kreios gritted out as I grabbed the ring, turning first to the ankle manacles until I found the right one. “Go back for him. Guard the body.”  
 

“Go,” I nodded. I had the second ankle manacle off and was on the left wrist when the chest bar snapped. I narrowed my eyes at Kreios. “You could do that the whole time?”
 

“Not all of them. And not with that infernal noise. Besides, I rather enjoy you doing it.” He reached up with his right hand as soon as I freed it and used the leverage to push himself down, out of the fixed helmet. I blinked—his head had been shaved bald. It gave him a savage ferocity that, combined with his glittering eyes, made me wonder if he was fully sane any longer. “Accursed Sator Square. Knew this place had one, but shaped like a wheel…” He shook his head like a bear coming out of hibernation. “Wasn’t prepared for that.”
 

Max’s curse floated back to us, and Kreios hauled himself off his platform. A quick step, and he collapsed against me heavily. I groaned at the weight, which was several times more than what I’d expected. “What in God’s name did you have for breakfast?”
 

Kreios ignored me. “Where’s Barnabus?” he asked instead. “The body.”
 

“He’s gone.” Max came back through the doorway and willingly took Kreios’s weight as I moved to the side of the room for the reliquary. After snapping it shut, I shoved it inside my jacket and zipped the pocked closed, then returned to Kreios’s side.
 

“So, what?” I asked. “Fake arsenic pill? I hear they sell those on the Internet now.”
 

“Not fake,” Kreios managed. He kept trying to get his feet under himself, and skidded and slipped instead. “Built up a tolerance. The last in an arsenal of tricks.”
 

“Stop fighting us,” I bit out when he practically horse-collared me again. He was drenched in sweat, but his skin was ice cold. “What the hell was that helmet?”
 

“Variation on an old theme, I’m afraid.” Kreios coughed. Blood dripped from his mouth and he wobbled again before leaning heavily on both of us. “A very effective variation. Someone’s been doing their homework.”
 

“We’re coming up on a door.” Max warned. “It’s open. Gotta be where Barnabus went out.”
 

“Check it,” I said.  “If he’s left us a welcome party, it’s going to get messy.”
 

But he hadn’t. Barnabus was nowhere to be found in the basement. The door at the far end was locked, of course, but I’d been target practicing on locks for a long time. With a few rounds, it swung open easily. Max went forward several steps before giving the all clear.
 

“Looks like the storage room for the abbey gift shop,” he said wryly. “Hope they don’t pick us up for shoplifting.”
 

 I eyed Kreios. “He’s not going to be able to make it all the way to the car.”
 

“Agreed,” Max said. “And he’s going to need some clothes.”
 

Between us, Kreios sighed heavily. “I’ll be all right in another minute. The glamour is not a difficult effect to reconstruct.”
 

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said.
 

Coming up out from the depths of the abbey into the gift shop a few minutes after Max slipped up the stairs, I kept my head bowed, my eyes on the shuffling form that preceded me down the narrow aisle. The irony of the Devil wrapped up in clerical clothes wasn’t lost on me. Fortunately, the woman at the cash register wasn’t paying attention to us but to the elderly couple buying postcards, so we got out into the sunshine without incident.
 

“There’s a bench to the right, three—well, maybe five paces, the way you’re walking now.”
 

“Always so critical.” For all his bravado, though, the Devil wasn’t looking so good. He sank down on the bench like a man fifty years past dead. I perched beside him, arranging his elbows on his knees, lacing his fingers together so that he almost gave the appearance of being lost in contemplative prayer.
 

“Wanna tell me how you ended up in Barnabus’s bed?”
 

His chuckle was his only response for a moment, and I stared diligently at the side of his head, willing his secrets to spring forth.
 

Who is this guy, really?
 

Aleksander Kreios appeared foreign born, just as the Magician was, but their similarities ended there. Well, some of them, anyway. As golden as the Magician was dark, Kreios sported a shock of sandy blond hair drifting over his lightly tanned skin. His large, sensuous eyes were jade green, his body sleekly built. The combination of high cheekbones and sculpted lips looked almost too perfect on a man, but the sexual aggression that lay barely restrained in the guy’s every move transcended everything as his defining characteristic. Even if he was practically dead at this point.
 

Which begged the question, why hadn’t Armaeus warned me that I’d be carrying around canned Master-of-Darkness?
 

I hit him up with the obvious question. “Why’d you come here?”  
 

“That’s not necessary for you to know.”
 

“Uh-huh. You want me to include this little side trip in my report to Armaeus?”
 

“Only if you want to risk my annoyance.”
 

I eyed him. “Not gonna lie, that doesn’t seem like too much of a threat right now.”
 

The laugh seemed dredged up out of Kreios’s stomach, a rasping huff. “I can see why Armaeus never bothered to arrange an introduction between us. Where have you been all of my lives, Sara Wilde?”
 

“Just focus on breathing, big boy.” I squinted down the long cobbled street, praying for Max to hurry it up. “So walk me through this. Who picked you up at the Alfa Romeo dumping ground? Why did you come here?”
 

“Those were my associates.” Full stop.
 

“You’re not very good at this, you know. Where’d they go?”