The Thirteen Hallows (3 page)

It was so much more than just sex.

They had practiced the ancient ritual until it was perfect. Their damp, naked bodies teasing and arousing each other by any means possible until they would each tremble on the brink of orgasm.

And then stop.

She enjoyed intense pain, while he thrived on hedonistic pleasure, and each knew the exact buttons to push to propel the other to the edge of ecstasy. Then the lithe, athletic young woman, known as Vyvienne, would lie with her toned arms and long legs spread-eagled atop an ancient stone altar stolen from a desecrated church. The man, known as Ahriman, would enter her, male and female becoming one, power flowing together, unstoppable.

They enacted the ancient ritual, generating the most powerful of the magical elements to aid them in their quest, to seek out and find the location of the spirits of the Keepers. And when they discovered them, they went forth to do battle with them.

And destroy them.

Decades ago, it would have been inconceivable to go up against the Keepers of the Thirteen Hallows, but times had radically changed. Now the Keepers were nothing more than tired old senior citizens, untrained and unskilled, most of them blissfully unaware of the treasures they possessed. Although it took much of the sport from the hunt, there was still the kill to be relished. But now with All Hallows’ Eve fast approaching, they had recently hired others to help them complete the rest of the butchery.

Nine Hallowed Keepers were dead. Four to go.

Vyvienne watched the man carefully, gauging the tension of his well-defined muscles and the pulsating rhythm of his shallow breathing. Her powerful legs locked around his taut buttocks, keeping him deep inside her but initiating no move that would bring on his orgasm.

That would be disastrous.

In that instant, the moment of power would escape. It would then take them three days of bodily purification—no red meat, no alcohol, no sex—to reach this critical point again.

“The chessboard.” She whispered the words into his open mouth.

He swallowed her words. “The chessboard,” he repeated, sweat curling down his stubbled cheeks, dripping onto his hairless chest.

They were close now, so close.

Vyvienne closed her eyes and concentrated, every sense heightened, alerted to the possible smells and sounds that would lead them to their treasure. The sensations in her groin were almost too much to bear as she repeated the next object of their quest—“The Chessboard of Gwenddolau”—forcing him to concentrate, to visualize the next Hallowed object.

Ahriman squeezed his dark eyes tightly shut, moisture gathering in the corners like tears, which rolled down his face and splashed onto her belly and heavy breasts. She felt their liquid touch and gasped, and the sudden involuntary ripple of stomach muscles brought him to a shocking, shuddering climax. He cried aloud, passion and anguish inextricably entwined.

Vyvienne stroked his hair. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

When he raised his head, his smile was savage…and triumphant. “No need. I saw it. I saw the crystal pieces, the gold-and-silver board. I know exactly where they are.”

Vyvienne then drew him deep into her body, hands and muscles locking him in place, in order to satisfy her own desire. She whispered wickedly into his ear, “Then let us do this for pleasure.”

Sarah Miller had never done anything extraordinary in her life.

At twenty-two, Sarah still had dreams of greatness. They had been instilled in her by her father despite the fact that her overbearing mother had done everything in her power to make sure that those dreams would never reach fruition. The oldest of three children, Sarah had been ushered into a job the day she finished her A levels. “To support your family,” Ruth Miller had snarled, guilting her eldest child into an unsatisfying job in the same London bank where her father had worked for thirty years. Rather than pursuing her dream of going to university, she had taken the job and put on the regulation blue blazer and khaki skirt every day for the last four years. It was a dead-end job without prospects, and she realized she would probably be stuck there for the rest of her life. Or laid off in the next round of job cuts. Her father had spent his entire life in the bank as a midlevel clerk. Forced out by compulsory early retirement and unable to spend any length of time in the house with his overbearing wife, he’d taken to gardening. Six weeks after he’d left the job, he was found dead in her mother’s prized flower bed. Heart attack, the coroner’s report said. Sarah thought her mother was more upset by the flowers he’d destroyed when he’d fallen into them than by her husband’s death.

Ruth Miller took full advantage by playing the “poor widow” card. She used every opportunity to remind those around her that she had three children to feed and a mortgage to cover. After exhausting the empathy of neighbors and the sympathy of friends, she began to drink heavily and took in a string of older lovers, all of whom were verbally abusive to Sarah and her little brothers. Eventually, even the lovers left her and Ruth turned her venom on her children. She had never amounted to anything, and she was determined that neither would they. She brought up the boys to be selfish, mistrustful, and fearful. Only Sarah—eight years older than her brothers—escaped the worst of her mother’s malign influence. And sometimes, late at night, she wondered if she would ever escape this house, this life….

NICK JACOBS
started when his cell phone rang.

“She is coming.” The deep, authoritative voice said the three words and then hung up. Jacobs, aka Skinner, looked at the half-eaten scone and the barely touched cup of coffee and knew he wasn’t going to get to finish them. Shoving the scone in the pocket of his scuffed leather jacket, he shifted in the metal chair and turned to look at the entrance of the British Library directly across the courtyard. He was wondering how his employer knew so much—he must have a contact inside the library—when the glass doors slid open and a gray-haired older woman appeared, moving slowly and carefully, her cane assisting each painful step. Pushing mirrored Ray-Ban Aviators up onto his recently shaven head, Skinner nudged his companion with his foot.

The hollow-eyed teenager sitting across the table glanced up quickly, then looked down at the pages spread out before him. He pulled out a crisp, high-resolution photograph and spun it toward Skinner. “Looks like her.”

“It’s her, you idiot,” Skinner snapped. He hated working with junkies; you couldn’t depend on them, and they didn’t give a shit.

“I suppose you’re right,” mumbled Lawrence McFeely, pushing his scratched Ray-Bans up on his nose. He jerked his chin in the direction of the woman, who was now heading down Ossulston Street. “The report said she’d broken her right hip,” McFeely added. “She’s favoring that leg.”

Skinner rolled his eyes. “Listen to you. You’ve been watching too much fucking
CSI
.” He took a deep breath and felt for the blade in his pocket. “Let’s do it, then. Get the car.”

McFeely came slowly to his feet, turned, and ambled away. Skinner ground his teeth at his lack of urgency and swore he was going to give the bastard a good kicking when this job was done. He fell into step behind the old woman, matching his pace to hers. She was moving slowly across the red-and-white-tiled square in the front of the modern library building, balancing a heavy Tesco canvas bag on her shoulder, an array of papers peeking through the top. The skinhead glanced back, looking at the glass-and-redbrick building, and wondered what she had been doing in there. The last library he’d stood in had been the school library, when he was ten, when his teacher Mrs. Geisz helped him research a project about stalactites and stalagmites. Much bloody good it had done him; he still didn’t know which was which. He remembered her saying that “one held on tight” and the other “might reach the ceiling.”

Mrs. Geisz was the first and only adult who had ever been kind to him. Bounced around among several foster homes, Skinner was a textbook case of someone who, following a lifetime of neglect, desperately craved love and attention. At twenty-six, he had only one thing he could boast about: a solid six-pack stomach and freakishly strong muscles, courtesy of working nights at a brewery in Birmingham, where he earned ten quid an hour. To supplement his meager income, he often took on odd jobs here and there. And he wasn’t fussy about the nature of the job. That was how his current employer had found him. Skinner had jumped at the chance of earning easy cash with no questions asked. The fact that he got to hurt some people in the process was an added bonus.

Skinner watched as McFeely’s tan Volvo cruised by him. It picked up speed as it moved past the old woman and pulled into the nearest available space, a hundred yards ahead of her.

Perfect. Skinner grinned, showing uneven teeth. Just perfect. This was going to be the easiest thousand pounds he’d ever earned.

JUDITH WALKER
shifted the heavy bag onto her left shoulder, trying to ease some of the pressure off her sore hip. She hadn’t been conscious of time slipping by as she’d sat in the hushed stillness of the library, and now her hip ached abominably and the muscles in her shoulders had locked into a solid bar of pain. And she still had an hour-and-a-half train ride ahead of her.

Researching source material on the Hallows of Britain was like chasing rainbows. An impossible feat. She’d spent a lifetime researching the ancient objects in libraries across England, Scotland, and Wales. She had mountains of notes, scraps of legends and folktales, but no credible evidence. Lately, she’d begun to extend her research online, but now, entering the word
Hallows
in search engines brought up something like four million hits, most of them, as far as she could see, referencing Harry Potter. She found the odd page that listed the Thirteen Hallows; but there was very little about their individual origins.

However, this morning’s research had not been a complete waste of time. Later, over a nice cup of tea and some of the raisin scones she had picked up at the market, she would add her latest findings to the hundreds of jigsaw pieces she had collected over the years. Maybe when she looked over the material again, she would find some hint to the true nature of the artifacts and put the puzzle together.

Yet somehow she doubted it.

The Hallows had remained hidden down through the centuries. The very fact that there was so little solid information about them made her suspect that their existence had been expunged from the history books. But how…and why?

Now five of the Hallowed Keepers were dead. Five that she knew about. That could not be a coincidence.

But the real question, of course, was what had happened to the artifacts they guarded. She knew that Beatrice had the Pan and the Platter of Rhygenydd. While Judith had carefully hidden her sword over the decades, Bea had displayed her Hallow proudly among the antiques in her sitting room. “Who in their right mind would know its true meaning?” Bea had chuckled. “People only see what they want to see. Tchotchkes collected by a batty old broad.”

But someone had known. And they had killed her for them.

A spasm of pain made her stop suddenly. She felt as if there were ground glass in her hip. Leaning against a lamppost outside the Levita House apartment complex, Judith turned to look back down the street, suddenly deciding that she would take a taxi to the train. From bitter experience, she knew that if she pushed on, she’d spend the rest of the day and most of the night in agony with her hip.

Naturally, there wasn’t a taxi in sight.

Debating whether to turn back and head down into Euston Road, she was abruptly aware of the shaven-headed man in the dirty jeans bearing down on her. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, but she could tell by his fixed expression that he was coming for her.

The old woman was swinging the bag even before the youth reached for her. It caught him on the side of the head, throwing him off balance and driving him to his knees, sending his sunglasses spinning into the gutter.

Judith screamed, her voice high and raw. And in typical fashion, no one listened. A dozen heads turned in her direction, but no one made any attempt to come to the old woman’s aid. Drivers passed, rubbernecking yet not stopping. She turned to run, but there was another youth behind her, blocking her path, his long, greasy blond hair framing a gaunt, hollow-eyed face. He was holding open a car door.

Junkie, she realized as she clutched her bag.

Her bag.

They just wanted to snatch her bag. Ordinarily she would have relinquished its contents; however, its contents were anything but ordinary. She turned back as the shaven-headed youth climbed to his feet, his face fixed in a rigid mask of hate.

She was trapped.

SKINNER WAS
humiliated. He was just knocked down by a woman half his weight and three times his age. Plus he’d torn the knee of his favorite Levi’s, skinned his hands, and broken his new sunglasses. The bitch would pay. His hand dipped into his pocket and pulled out a flat metal bar. His wrist moved sharply back and forth and the butterfly knife clicked open, the blade appearing from between the handles.

“Stupid fucking mistake,” he hissed as he pointed the knife toward her throat, the cold blade jabbing at her leathery skin. The woman hobbled backward, toward the car door.

“Get in,” Skinner hissed.

Judith struck out at him again. She knew if she got into the car, she was dead. She opened her mouth to scream again, but the bald youth punched her in the pit of her stomach, doubling her over. The junkie giggled behind her, the sound high-pitched and almost childlike.

A hand wrapped tightly in her hair, close to her scalp, hauling her upright. The pain was shocking. “Get in the car!”

“Hey—stop that! What do you think you’re doing?”

Through sparkling tears, Judith caught a glimpse of a redheaded young woman moving toward them. She tried to call out to her, to warn her about the knife, but she was having difficulty drawing breath.

Skinner spun around, bringing up the knife. “Why don’t you mind your own f—”

Without breaking stride, the young woman lashed out with the heel of her sensible shoe, catching the skinhead just below the kneecap. There was a distinct popping sound and Skinner crashed to the ground onto his injured knee, his cry high-pitched and feminine. Judith spun around and caught the edge of the car door, slamming it shut. It closed on the junkie’s fingers, tearing skin and snapping bones. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Judith scooped up her fallen bag and hobbled toward the young woman, who reached for her hand and pulled her away without a word. They had taken a dozen steps before the junkie started screaming incoherently. Lying on the ground, whimpering in pain, cradling his injured knee, Skinner pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed dial. His employer was not going to be pleased, and that frightened the skinhead even more than his injured leg.