The Relentless Warrior (23 page)

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.

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.

Terletov had taken another one of my friends.

Gabriel looked at me, the light in his flaming eyes flickering as his body weakened.
He looked directly into my eyes and with a rasping, barely audible voice he said,
“Protect the two. She is key. Citadel… get out of the Citadel…” And then he fell forward
at an awkward but limp angle.

That was it. He was gone.

I scrambled to collect my senses and raise my weapon. But as I was gathering my courage
again, I saw the black box fly through the air. I abandoned my plan and dove for Olivia
instead. She was standing behind me, protected by my aggression; nobody could get
to her while I had been fighting so wildly. I tucked her into my body and twisted
in the air so that she would absorb our fall, but I would take the brunt of the blast.

Just before the bomb went off, time slowed way down- a trick of one of Terletov’s
men. They would escape this way, they would get out.

But hopefully we were all Immortal enough to survive this particular blast.

Just before the explosion hit us like a blazing hot train at full speed, I heard Terletov’s
last words ring out through the air, “You have two of my possessions now, General.
I want your Queen and I want my soldier. We will meet again very soon Jericho Bentley
. Be ready, or your regrets will be stacked as high as your priests and your fate
just as pretty.”

I felt a little surprised that he knew my name just a second before the blast took
my hearing and sight; the earth quaked and crumbled beneath me.

I could do nothing more than wrap my Magic around Olivia and hold her as tightly to
me as possible.

But that was all I wanted to do.

All I needed to do.

Chapter Eighteen

Olivia

I couldn’t move. My entire body felt weighted down like a house had fallen on me.
My feet stuck out from whatever lay on top of me and I could wiggle my toes. In the
weird, dreamlike place I floated, I imagined myself as the Wicked Witch from the East
with my sister cackling over my dead body.

Only that couldn’t be right because my sister was in a coma in some random Romanian
castle and despite my penchant for all things sarcastic and pessimistic, I was not
actually a witch.

Or was I?

Besides, in this dream, if I was going to be anybody it would be Dorothy.

As reality came crashing back around me, I tried the whole “There’s no place like
home, there’s no place like home,” thing, but unsurprisingly it didn’t work.

I didn’t have a wizard; I had a Gypsy Queen that could see the future. And I didn’t
have a cowardly lion or a brainless scarecrow; I had very smart, very dangerous warriors
around me that risked their lives to save their friends and mine.

And I didn’t have Toto… I had Titus, who I just recently learned could apparently
turn into a bear.

What. The.
World?

But most of all, I had Jericho, whose arms were cemented around my torso, protecting
me from the still-falling debris. He had tucked me against his towering frame and
protected me from an explosion that rocked this place, literally.

When I was able to lift my head I took in the singed fringes of the jungle: charred,
scorching stumps of some exotic trees I couldn’t name, blackened ground that still
burned with intermittent fires, a vehicle seared down to the metal frame.

This wasn’t just an explosion. It was a freaking big one!

We should definitely be dead right now.

I marveled at my mostly unharmed body. This had to be the protection of Magic and
all things Immortal that I didn’t understand yet.

How could it be possible to live through something like that? How could it be possible
to stand up and walk away?

“Are you alright?” Jericho’s voice grated like rough sandpaper across my skin, pulling
my small arm hairs to stand straight and reaching beyond my skin to some metaphysical
part of me that arched and bent to lean as close to him as I could.

“I’m fine,” I answered, but my voice was weak and shaking. Physically my body felt
strong and able, but my brain screamed that I’d just lived through not only an attack
where the sadistic monster that instigated it was particularly interested in me, but
that I’d also just lived through an
explosion
. To say I was having some trouble coping would be a slight understatement-
said the girl slipping into catatonic shock
.

Jericho maneuvered my body so that he hovered above me and held me up by a strong
grip on my shoulders. “You’re too brave not to be fine,” he whispered.

Strengthened by his words, I struggled to sit up. I sat on the hard, blackened ground
with my legs outstretched and my hands numbly limp at my sides. I looked around at
the savaged beauty that once seemed so lush and green and couldn’t believe my life
had evolved into this.

Not six months ago I had been in Chicago learning to perfect my Scallop and Leeks
Risotto. Now… this? I couldn’t reconcile the two lives.

“We need to get going,” Jericho pulled me to my feet; I surveyed the stumbling, coughing
figures of the rest of our team.

It seemed we’d all made it.

Except the two men I didn’t know.

And not possessing any more Magic, their bodies were now ashes picked up by the humid
breeze, scattering across the changed scenery like the after effects of a nuclear
explosion.

I stared helplessly as the cindered bodies drifted through the air. I felt like I
should do something, stop them from floating away… stop their physical remains from
escaping their earthly confines without a proper goodbye.

Jericho watched the same horrific scene with pinched brows and tight muscles. “This
should not have happened,” he growled more to himself than anyone else. “I should
never have let this happen.”

“You didn’t,” I said quickly. His self-hate pulled me out of whatever isolated place
I’d gone in my head. I rushed to reassure him, “You didn’t do this. Terletov did.
You can’t blame yourself for fighting against his evil. This is not your fault; this
is
his
fault. It will always be his fault. You can’t feel guilty for fighting against a
criminal when you asked for none of this, didn’t want to be part of any of it. He
did this.
Not you
.”

He turned so that we were facing each other and one of his hands lifted to press against
my jaw. It wasn’t a gentle touch, it was rough and aggressive… it was primitively
possessive. His mouth opened to say something, but no words came out. His eyes darkened
until they were almost black and I knew he would have kissed me then, would have
consumed me
if we hadn’t been interrupted.

“Jericho, we have to go!” Sebastian called. He stood where the first man that died
had been. Leaning down he picked something out of the wreckage and palmed it before
I could see what it was.

Talbott also leaned over the remnants of the second man and came up with a black-beaded
rosary. The religious memento looked wholly untouched by the explosion. He pocketed
the necklace and finished the circle of survivors that gathered around us.

“We have three minutes to make a plan,” Talbott said with his thick accent that sounded
just like the Guards from the palace.

“Orion,” I blurted out immediately. Thoughts, vague memories, confusion began to come
together inside my muddled head. I had this distant image of my brother and Terletov.
It wasn’t much, mostly flashing images like déjà vu. The memory was there, or the
thought or vision or whatever, but I couldn’t grab it. It slipped from my mental fingers
as psychological hands reached out to grab at it over and over but missed. “The Gypsy
Queen…
The man that will hunt the hunter
,” I quoted. I looked up and met Talbott’s dark, hopeless eyes by accident. I flinched
at the utter despair staring back at me and when my words came out I feared they echoed
the hollowness that seemed to be consuming him. “My brother’s name is Orion, like
the constellation. It means hunter.” The Immortals around me waved impatient hands
as if those were obvious facts and I was wasting time. So I hurried on, “When I met
the Gypsy Queen, she told me Terletov would hunt the hunter, meaning my brother. I
asked her if Rion was in danger, but she said not yet because Terletov didn’t know
what he had done yet. To me. Terletov didn’t know what he had done to me. And today
he figured it out.”

“He must think it’s in your blood,” Sebastian deduced with perfectly clipped words.
“All we’ve been finding are dead bodies. Heaps and heaps of dead bodies. What if all
of his experiments have been for nothing? What if he hasn’t been able to get them
to work yet?”

“But he has,” Jericho argued. “In some way. The Immortals that fight with him are
changed. There is something distinctively different about their strength, but also
about the way they die.”

“True,” Sebastian answered. “But those are Immortals. We’ve found dead Immortals too,
but they tend to be Shifters. What about all the humans we’ve found? Olivia and Ophelia
are the only humans we’ve found that have survived his experiments.”

“Is that his plan then? To create Immortals out of humans?” Titus sounded absolutely
disgusted and I couldn’t help but share the feeling.

Sebastian snapped his finger and pointed at me excitedly, “Jericho, she’s all four.
She’s true. That’s why she survived. And whether he hasn’t figured that out yet, or
her changing was different, he knows how to make it work now.”

“And he’s going to go to her brother first,” Jericho deduced.

Cold, crippling fear exploded in my body, and my lungs felt as though they turned
to ice in my chest. Jericho’s arm went around me again and his Magic seemed to take
a tighter hold on my own. He was warmth when I had none; he was courage when I had
little.

“We know where he’s going,” Jericho announced slyly.

“Will he think that we’re dead?” I looked around at everything else that was dead
around us and wondered. Had he intended to kill us all?

“No,” Sebastian snorted. “This happens to be his favorite farewell. I know he believes
it’s rather amusing, but I can’t help but find it a bit obnoxious.”

I couldn’t help but smile at Sebastian’s flippant attitude. He always seemed so unfazed
by everything. I knew he cared for his friends and his Kingdom, but truthfully I couldn’t
imagine him dating the girl from back at the castle. She seemed completely opposite
of him.

“So we’ll be racing to the same place,” I said.

“But hopefully we can get there first,” Jericho said. “We’ll leave now.”

“How?” I pressed.

“Our car is untouched,” Titus spoke up. “We parked far enough away.”

“And ours is drivable,” Xander said.

Jericho took command again, “Alright, we’ll split up. I’ll take the palace plane and
Sebastian can lead in Amory’s old Cessna. Sebastian you’ll have to return the beads
to the Citadel along with the news. They’ll want to hold some kind of memorial for
both men.” His voice broke a bit and I reached down for his hand.

“And what about Alexi?” Sebastian asked.

All of our heads swiveled to a sedan that sat just on the outside of the blast range.
Alexi stared at us with wide eyes, mouth gagged, hands bound beneath where I could
see. He looked like he’d fallen into shock too.

“Take him back with you,” Jericho ordered. “I know it’s inconvenient with the dungeon
going through the remodeling and what not, but we have to hold him someplace.”

His comment met snickers and a lot of amusement for the aftermath of what we just
went through, but I had to assume that was stress manifesting itself in all of us.
We’d just been through hell; all those emotions and fears had to come out some way.

“I need people with me then,” Sebastian said.

“Xander, Xavier, Roxie go with him.”

“Do you want us to have them hold the ceremonies?” Xander asked in a more subdued
voice.

Jericho looked at Talbott and had some kind of silent conversation before shaking
his head. “No, it’s alright. Avalon won’t want to wait anyway. Silas might not mean
something to the Kingdom at large, but Gabriel will. The people need to feel Terletov’s
menace on a large scale.”

“Right,” the men confirmed together.

And then we parted ways.

Before I climbed into Talbott’s sedan, Sebastian grabbed me and pulled me into a crushing
hug. His lips pressed into my ear and he whispered words that sent a chill down my
already frigid spine. “If you let him get any closer and find a way to escape your
Magic, you will kill him, Olivia.
Kill him
. Do you understand?” I nodded robotically, but he wasn’t finished. “He might already
be in too deep. And he is one of my best friends. If there is a danger to his life,
I will make sure that you never lose your Magic. I will hunt you worse than Terletov.
I will be more of a monster than he could ever be. I have lost too much already. I
will not
lose my friend.” He released me abruptly and I almost fell over.

I was shaken to the core at his words. Suddenly the conversation in the car made perfect
sense. Jericho’s Magic was uniting with mine and the more time we spent together,
the worse the danger became. Sebastian had blamed Jericho for my eyes turning colors,
as if our closeness was somehow cementing my changes into place.

And to some extent that made sense to me.

Not in the part of my brain that held steadfastly to reality, rather the imaginative
side that at some bizarre level accepted all of these impossible things.

If I understood them correctly, then coming to terms with true Immortality had happened
in stages. The first step seemed to be sensing the other Magics around me; this was
the Titan characteristic. Then I’d been able to manifest the Magic- Witch. Last night
had brought about the Medium step and I could have sworn the images of Terletov and
my brother had been some kind of vision.

The only thing left to do was shift into an animal and finalize the process.

Or apparently get closer to Jericho.

One or the other would cement my Immortality

Terletov had sworn there wasn’t a reversal.

So if there wasn’t a reversal then my complete change was inevitable. And then the
only thing left to decide was whether or not I let Jericho complete the process. Which
would mean choosing him. As in forever.

I liked Jericho. A lot.

I could admit that.

But did I want to marry him? Or whatever the Immortal equivalent of that was? Because,
in truth, my human idea of marriage was something entirely different than spending
the rest of literal eternity with the same man. How could I even begin to decide whether
I was ready for that kind of relationship? Or whether Jericho was that person or not?