Lies Ripped Open (33 page)

“Kelly said you’d be here.”

“Is she dead?”

“She wasn’t when I left.”

“I do hate to waste talented individuals. So, how are things? You look well.”

“You’ve been Kay’s Faceless all this time?”

“Everyone needs a job.”

“Does Kay know who you are?”

“Of course, I do,” Kay said from behind me.

I spun to face him and blocked a punch to my jaw,
countering
with a kick that hit Kay in the chest and sent him back out of the room. I tried to take a step forward, but couldn’t. Kay walked off down the hallways as my body felt heavy, slow. I dropped to my knees as Enfield came into view, red glyphs adorning h
is arms.

“I couldn’t do this back in the nineteenth century, but do you remember when I did this to you back in Tartarus. Knocked you silly and you didn’t even know who I was.”

My eyes felt heavy, but just before I could pitch forward, Alan tackled Enfield out of the room. The fight was brutal and quick, as Enfield gained the upper hand, before breaking Alan’s arm and smashing his head into the wall. He followed up with a kick to Alan’s head before a blast of air from my hands separated them, and I had to listen as Enfield’s footsteps faded as he ran off,
presumably
with Kay in tow.

I got back to my feet, feeling groggy but otherwise uninjured. “You okay, Alan?” I shouted.

“Fucking dandy,” he said. “You going after them, or what?”

“Just getting my bearings again.”

Alan winced as he cradled his arm. “Check on Fiona for me.”

I knelt beside her and lifted her chin.

“Nate,” she whispered. She sounded weak and exhausted. “Kay is behind it all. That’s why he attacked me.”

“He attacked you?”

“Him and some woman. Don’t know her though.”

“Was it Kelly Jensen?”

Fiona shook her head and then slumped forward. I caught her and put her back on the bed.

“You need to stop Kay and his Faceless,” she said weakly. “They’re going to try and kill Elaine.”

“I promise I’ll stop them.”

“Is my husband all right?”

I glanced behind me as Alan got back to his feet, which involved a lot of swearing. “He’ll be fine. Are you okay?”

Fiona nodded. “Just go get them.”

I turned and ran out of the room, reaching the end of the corridor when Alan shouted me back.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“Nate, Enfield used his magic to tear into Fiona’s mind while she was dying.”

“I’ll get him, don’t worry.” I turned and continued running through the hospital, finding each of the security checkpoints empty. It wasn’t until I reached the lobby that I discovered why, when a squad of heavily armed men were all waiting for me as the lift doors opened.

I was wrestled to the ground and pinned there, while guns were pointed at my head. There was no point in arguing, it would have just made it worse. I only hoped I could sort it out before Kay and Enfield tried to kill Elaine, resulting in even more deaths.

CHAPTER
33

D
oes someone want to let him go?” Lucie asked as she entered the hospital reception.

“We’ve been given orders by Kay, ma’am,” one of the SOA agents who’d tackled me to the ground said. “He said this man here tried to attack him.”

“This man here is Hellequin. Now let him go or I’ll make your life a lot less pleasant in future years.” Lucie’s tone
practically
begged anyone to piss her off more than she already was.

The agent removed the bonds from my hands.

“Fiona is awake,” I told Lucie. “Kay and his Faceless attacked both her and Alan. Oh, and his Faceless is Enfield.”

“The guy who led a group of Reavers who were Jack the
Ripper
?”

“The very same asshole. As I tried to explain to these gentlemen several times, they’re going to try and kill Elaine. You need to get people over there.”

“Already done. Alan grabbed one of the emergency phones upstairs and used it to contact me. I always knew that Kay was crooked, but to go against Avalon.” She paused. “That’s
unexpected
.”

“You okay?” I asked.

“No. I’m angry. Really, really angry. I’ve locked down the entire realm, no one is getting in or out. We’re going to find these sons of bitches, and then I’m going to take great pleasure in
kicking
them both in their ballsack.” She rubbed her forehead. “But anger later, first let’s find them both.”

“His Faceless . . . sorry, Enfield, told me that he was the sorcerer who attacked me at Hades’s compound last year. Kay was involved in breaking out Cronus if that’s the case. He was
working
with the Vanguard.”

“The Vanguard and Reavers working together. That can’t
possibly
be good news. But what’s his end game? Hera was the one who wanted Cronus free, it was her plan. Is Kay working for her? Or are they both working for someone else?”

“Questions for later, maybe. First thing is to find Kay and Enfield.”

“I can have people looking into it.”

“Good, I’m going to have a look around his office in the SOA building. If he’s into something stupid, he’ll have left evidence there.”

“You can’t possibly think going alone is a good idea.”

“If you have a better one, I’m all ears.”

“I’ve got one,” Tommy said from behind me.

I turned around as my friend strolled into the hospital. A lot of the SOA agents nodded their greetings. Tommy was a bit of a legend among the SOA; the fact that he’d quit when Kay took control didn’t appear to have diminished people’s opinion of him.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Can’t let you get killed just before you’re meant to be at Kasey’s naming ceremony.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I protested.

“Yeah, I do. Kay was the reason I quit working here. He’s a nasty little shit and if I can help bring him down, I’m all for it. Besides, you need the help. And I can track them to where they went, saves wandering the city looking for them.”

“Thanks.”

“We’ll keep an eye on Fiona and Alan,” Lucie told us. “But I can’t put a citywide announcement out for Kay’s arrest. If he has SOA people under his control, it could turn into a war out there. The LOA have taken charge of the investigation, and apart from those in the SOA I know are loyal to me, I’m not taking any chances. The rest of the SOA are still under lockdown. No
matter
what Kay’s plan is, I’d rather you managed to get him before other options need to be discussed.”

In other words, we were on our own for now.

“Kelly knows of a second realm gate in Albion,” I told her. “I don’t know where it is though.”

“A second gate?” Lucie asked, surprised. “Shit. We’ll get her to talk, don’t worry.”

We told Lucie we’d be in touch and Tommy and I left the building, where he immediately took a deep breath. “They went this way.”

“How do you know that’s Kay’s smell?” I asked as we walked through the hospital grounds to the nearby car park.

“He smells like blood,” he said. “Always has.”

“Like blood?”

“When a sorcerer uses magic they smell different, it’s like they smell of power, or death, depending on the person. But very few smell of blood.” He paused and glanced back at me. “You know what that means don’t you?”

Kay always did like to use his blood magic to hurt people. Blood magic is addictive and scary stuff, but is usually only used by sorcerers for healing or increasing the power of their spells. I’d lost my ability to use it when my necromancy activated, but I’d used blood magic just as much as anyone else when it was available. For a sorcerer to smell of blood, that would indicate that Kay was using blood magic a lot . . . that he was possibly a blood leech. And that would be very, very bad, because that means he could be involved with blood curses and sacrifices. Basically all the bad stuff that blood magic allows.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“That about sums it up,” Tommy agreed and continued walking, before stopping once again in front of an empty parking space. “They got into a car.”

“Well, they could be anywhere then.”

“Car fifteen,” he said, pointing to the number plate on the car beside it. “The cars all park themselves in numerical order. So car fifteen is the one they took.”

“How does that help?”

“Get in,” he told me and opened the front door of car sixteen.

I opened what would have been the passenger-side door—if the car had been fitted with a steering wheel—and waited for Tommy to explain what he was going to do.

One of his fingers grew long, the nail forming a claw. “You see the road out there?” he said while he prized off the
center
console of the car, just above the destination indicator, and flung it onto the back seats. “Well those little sensors take a sort of fingerprint for every single car that goes along the road,
feeding
all of that data into a central processor in a building about a mile away.”

“Why can’t we just contact that building and have them tell us where car fifteen went?”

“Because in the century since you were last here, the ability to gain information has gotten slower, not quicker. By the time we’ve contacted them, and they’ve contacted their higher-ups to see if they can share that information, Kay would have enough time to get a nap in before his murderous plan.”

“Okay, so what are you doing?”

“Like I said, each of these cars leaves a fingerprint when they go over the surface.” He held down one of the buttons beneath the screen until it turned completely blank. “It’s a little-known trick, but you can program any of these cars to think that they’re another car. They all store the last half a dozen routes in their memory. You just need to find the one you want.”

The screen came back to life and a few taps later, the car’s engine started. “Now it thinks we’re car fifteen,” Tommy said with just the right amount of smugness.

“How do you know about this?” I asked.

“Some of Olivia’s people were the ones involved in the
creation
of this system. They told her, she told me.”

The car began moving off as Tommy reaffixed the center
console
to appear that nothing had happened.

It didn’t take long before we knew the car was headed to the city limits. A few minutes later it stopped behind car fifteen, which had been abandoned.

I glanced across the open fields that sat between us and a massive home in the distance.

“Kay’s mansion,” I said as I climbed out of the car.

“We’d best hurry then,” Tommy said and we both set off at a jog, although mine was considerably wearier than his. There was nowhere an ambush could logistically be arranged, the entire area was one flat plain, but a forest began directly behind Kay’s home, with thick trees stretching up as high as any redwood could manage. It was a good spot for a sniper, but we made it to the imposing front gate of the property without incident.

The gate opened with no more than a slight push, and Tommy and I walked through the immaculate garden to the front door, which was ajar.

“This feel weird to you?” I asked.

“More than a little,” he agreed and took a big sniff. “Kay was here, and recently too.”

“What about Enfield?”

“The Faceless? I can’t get anyone else’s scent, just Kay’s. You think he’s waiting for us?”

“I assume so, yes. Can’t imagine why though.”

I moved slowly into the mansion, with Tommy right behind me. The foyer was both gigantic and full of light, which came in from the floor-to-ceiling windows along the front of the building. The room was full of artwork and artifacts like vases. It was the kind of room someone would have if they wanted everyone to know how cultured and important they were.

We moved through the house, using Tommy’s nose to distinguish between old scents and new ones, until we came to the rear of the building. The doors that led to the woodland behind the house were open.

“He’s out there,” Tommy said with a low growl. “This feels like a trap.”

“Yes, yes it does.” I stepped outside and scanned the tree line. “Any chance you can smell anyone other than Kay?”

“No, not from here.”

We crossed the open land between the trees and the house, and stopped a few hundred feet short when Kay stepped out of the shadows. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, with a wave of his hands.

“You’re going to come with us, Kay,” I told him. “You and Enfield.”

“Ah, but Enfield isn’t here. I’m sorry about that, but he’s gone off to do his job. And I’m about leave this little realm and relocate somewhere else until Elaine’s successor can be chosen; hopefully they’ll be a little more open to doing things the proper way.”

“You mean by making people fear you?” Tommy said, his words dripping contempt.

“Is there a better way to get what you want?” It wasn’t just a flippant mark, Kay genuinely believed that fear was the best way to get results.

“Kay, you come with us, or we’re going to take you,” I told him. “You don’t really want to fight me, do you?”

Kay stared at me for what felt like a long time. “No, I can’t say I do, Nathan. You were always more than you appeared. The revelation that you are Hellequin was a shock, I won’t lie. I heard you killed Mordred too. That was an even bigger shock.

“But I can’t stand here all day, I have important work to do. I need to prepare for what’s coming. So, no, I don’t think I want to fight you, but I’m not going to go with you either.”

I took a step toward Kay and readied my magic. “Then we’re going to take you.”

Kay stepped back into the shadows of the trees. “Then come get me.”

By the time we’d reached the trees, Kay had vanished into the darkness beyond. Tommy took a step forward and then stopped as if frozen in place. “Death,” he whispered. “So much death. Nate, something is wrong here. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. But I’ve smelled it before.”

I created a blade of flame in my hand and overtook Tommy as I entered the woods.

There were grunts of pain from behind me as Tommy shifted into his wolfbeast form.

“Definitely something I’ve smelled before,” he said, his voice now deeper and more menacing. “Something very bad.”

“Can you smell Kay?” I asked.

“He went that way,” he told me, bounding off in front. His wolfbeast form wasn’t as fast or agile as his pure wolf, but it was stronger. A lot stronger.

A few hundred meters into the woods they opened out a bit, allowing more room to move. Another hundred and the trees stopped when we arrived at a clearing. There were half a dozen dead Avalon guards all around the entrance to a cave.

“Second realm gate,” I said. “It’s got to be down there.”

“So is Kay,” Tommy said with a sniff. “And something else is watching us from the trees above.”

It wasn’t often that Tommy sounded genuinely concerned, and his tone made me search the treetops for some evidence of his worry. “There’s nothing there,” I told him.

“There is, trust me on this.”

I used my magic to change my vision, allowing me to see in thermal vision, or as close as magic could get to it. I couldn’t see anything for a while, and then something scurried around the trunk of a massive tree. I switched off the thermal vision just as strands of web hit me in the wrist. I used my free hand to cut through the web with my blade of fire, but more strands shot out toward Tommy and me. We dodged them all, diving behind nearby trees.

“What is it?” Tommy shouted.

“Jorōgumo,” I said, and noticed that my hand was cut where the web had hit me. I raised my hand to Tommy, showing him the wounds. “Although her web couldn’t do that the last time I encountered one.”

“Hello, Nathaniel. Although I guess you go by Nate now,” a woman said, accompanied by the rustle of leaves as she made her way through the bushes. “It’s been a long time.”

Tommy risked a glance around the tree trunk. “It’s a giant fucking spider woman thing. Wait, is that the female we let live back when we were trying to find Mordred before he killed those two princes?”

“I assume so, yes,” I told him.

“Oh shit.”

“I’ve waited centuries, Natha . . . Nate,” the jorōgumo said. “You let me live, and after I dragged my useless husband back into
th
e forest, I mated and then ate him. It was only then I learned the true horror of what you’d done to me. I can’t have children anymore. All of my babies that you killed that day, they were my last.”

“You killed her babies?” Tommy questioned.

“Hundreds of venomous spiders,” I corrected.

“Good.”

“How’d you end up here?” I shouted.

“Kay found me. Brought me here and gave me prey in exchange for my venom. When he told me that you were chasing him, I offered to stay and remove you. And I get your wolf friend into the bargain.”

“Ummm . . . hate to break this to you, lady,” Tommy said. “But there’s no hope in hell you can take me and Nate all by yourself.”

“Oh, I never said I was alone.”

There was a low roar that came from above, before a crash signified that whatever it was had landed beside the jorōgumo. I glanced around the tree and really wished I hadn’t.