CHAPTER 16
Mordred
Mordred spent a few minutes going through Alexi’s desk drawers but found nothing of any importance. He moved into the bedroom and almost stepped on the TV remote. He picked it up and threw it onto the bed, which caused the TV screen to come to life.
He was half expecting to see something unpleasant paused on there, ready for Alexi’s return, but instead it was much worse. The picture was of a room with a concrete floor, and what appeared to be a drain close to the center. A short distance from it was a man in a chair with a blindfold on. The picture was in color, and Mordred could easily make out the wounds that covered the man’s naked body. He was shivering, and Mordred was certain that it was as much as a by-product of the cold as of the horror he’d clearly endured.
“What did you find?” Nabu asked from the doorway.
“Torture porn,” Mordred said, pointing to the TV.
“Is that live?”
“I assume so. There’s nothing indicating otherwise.” He picked up the remote and pressed the button to fast forward, but nothing happened. “Must be live.”
“I’ve been hearing horror stories about what some of the people went through as captives here. A lot are never found again. Or at least not in their original state.”
“Alexi isn’t that strong. There’s no way he’s in charge of all this.”
“You think the woman . . . Daria is in charge?”
Mordred nodded. “The whole pack alpha thing is something weres came up with as an easy way to say ‘leader.’ I get the feeling that Alexi was the leader because he had a good look, but he’s not even on the scale of people like Tommy. If this werewolf pack is so scary, it isn’t because of Alexi or those bouncers I kicked the shit out of. They were human. Where’s the rest of the pack?”
“Waiting for us?”
“Or out hunting. Either way, Alexi is a figurehead, not the alpha, or whatever name they’re using for it today.”
“We have a werewolf pack of considerable power still active within this building.”
“And they know we’re here.”
“That’s not great news.”
“Nothing about the last few days has been great news. Viktor is still here, too. I’d really like to find him before these werewolves cut their losses and remove his head for him.”
“You think he knows where Elaine is?”
Mordred shrugged as he walked toward the door. “No idea, I just want to punch him in the face.”
He left Nabu in the bedroom as Polina, Morgan, and Remy all entered the office.
“You really did a number on Alexi,” Polina said.
“Did you know he wasn’t the man in charge?” Mordred asked.
Polina licked her lips and looked irritated at the question, but her expression soon softened. “We suspected. No one we sent in was able to get word out about how the hierarchy in the pack works.”
“You still think that Alexi created Daria?”
“Yes,” Polina said without hesitation. “The power of a werewolf has no effect on the power of those they’ll change. They’re completely separate entities. There’s every possibility that he still bit Daria and she just became more powerful than he is.”
“That wouldn’t be difficult.”
“Nice bounce, by the way,” Remy said from the hole where several windows used to be. “You got some really good air on crashing him through a reinforced window.”
“My power is a little bit more impressive than it was before I regained my faculties,” Mordred said. “We need to make sure this club is empty.”
“The others are on it,” Morgan told him. “We thought we’d best come and see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine. Annoyed that I wasted a perfectly excellent vodka by drinking it with that asshole. Who, by the way, I’d like to see stick around for a bit.”
“Why?” Polina asked. “We can take him in for questioning.”
“Or you can leave him here, and he can watch as we dismantle the rest of his pack. I’ve seen it work before. Trust me on this. He’s the type to fold when he has no option.” Mordred looked out over the nightclub. “Any idea where the entrance to this underground complex is?”
“There’s a lift in a hallway behind the level you entered on,” Polina said. “Nice job not killing those two outside, by the way.”
“I’m not an assassin,” Mordred said. “Had Alexi just given me what I’d asked for, he’d still be sitting on his nice chair, drinking excellent vodka and pretending he was important.”
“You know your demeanor changes when we do stuff like this,” Remy said to Mordred. “You’re less . . . flighty.”
“Anger focuses me. Gives me something to consider and work toward. And after seeing the footage in his bedroom, and after him trying to kill me, I’m plenty angry. Daria seems to consider herself some kind of torture genius. I intend to show her otherwise.”
Nabu left the bedroom. “There’s a lot of older stuff in there, too. A USB stick was plugged into the TV. Alexi got his excitement from watching people get hurt—at least that’s my guess.”
“Hopefully the amount of pain he’s in at the moment will have to suffice,” Mordred said. “I assume you placed a sorcerer’s band on him?”
Polina looked offended. “I know how to do my job, Mordred.”
“I know, I just like to check these things. I mean no offense by it.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Yes, we put a sorcerer’s band on him. It’s not specifically designed for him, but it’ll do. He won’t be going anywhere, or hurting anyone else. Silver-laced cuffs, too, after he changed back into his human form. He won’t be changing out of it while he’s in them.”
“Right, let’s get the rest of the pack sorted, then,” Mordred said. He left the room and jogged down the stairs, where he spotted several of Polina’s people carrying out a search of the premises.
After making his way down to the bottom floor and through a set of double doors, he found himself in the corridor with the lift at one end. Diana stood in front of it, her arms crossed, while Fiona stood beside her. Fiona had acquired a rapier at some point, and it sat sheathed against her hip. Because she was a conjurer, her ability was based on creating traps and illusions. If she found herself in a fight, it was best done with weaponry.
“What’s wrong?” Mordred asked.
“There’s silver in the lift doors,” Diana explained. “We can’t open them. I try to pry them open and it burns my fingers.”
“And we don’t know the code for the numerical pad, either,” Fiona said.
Mordred placed a hand against the lift doors and used his air magic to wedge it in between them. He slowly forced the doors apart, but the strain was too great and after only an inch the locking mechanism refused to budge and Mordred was forced to release it.
“You got any other ideas?” Fiona asked, her voice full of anxiety.
“One, yes,” Mordred said, and placed his hand over the number pad. A cone of razor-sharp ice left Mordred’s palm, smashing into the pad with incredible force, tearing it apart and causing several sparks. An alarm sounded all around him, and the lift doors remained closed.
“Good job,” Diana said. “I could have just broken it myself.”
The lights went off inside the club, bathing everyone in darkness for a short time before emergency lighting flickered on.
Diana sniffed the air. “Wolves.”
“Go fight,” Mordred said. “I’ll figure out how to get down to the levels below. There has to be more entrances if they can get up here.”
Gunfire could be heard from the main club area, and two wolves burst into the hallway from the door at the far end. They eyed Mordred, Diana, and Fiona before howling and charging.
Diana had changed into her werebear form before she took a step, charging into one of the werewolves, taking the massive beast off its feet and smashing it into the wall. Fiona removed a pistol from a holster and fired at the second wolf, who avoided the bullets with ease. She drew her rapier and moved to confront it, parrying the werewolf’s claw strikes and catching it with a vicious cut across one eye, which burned as the silver content in the sword went to work.
A third werewolf appeared at the end of the hallway. His appearance caused Mordred to sigh, and he walked past Fiona and her opponent. The new werewolf growled and walked toward Mordred, who shot a two-foot-long blade of ice from his palm, which the werewolf smashed with a swipe of one huge paw.
Mordred cracked his knuckles and threw two more blades, which the werewolf destroyed once again as he got closer and closer. Mordred smiled and waited until the werewolf was close enough before unleashing a torrent of water from his hands. It crashed into the werewolf, who couldn’t avoid it and was thrown back several feet.
Mordred moved his fingers slightly, and the water froze in place, pinning the werewolf’s legs to the floor. He roared in anger and clawed at the ice, ripping off huge chunks that, with no magic controlling them, quickly vanished. Mordred sprinted forward, wrapping thick ice around his fist and driving it into the side of the werewolf’s head.
The werewolf swiped back at Mordred, who blocked the blow with a shield of air and quickly countered by slamming a blade of ice into the werewolf’s leg, pinning him to the ground. Mordred dodged a swipe and pinned the werewolf’s arm to the wall with another blade of ice.
“Does that not hurt?” Mordred asked.
“Gut you,” the werewolf said, frothing at the mouth.
“You’re on something. Some sort of suppressant to stop pain? It’ll wear off soon—that’s one of the problems with having a healing ability as fast as yours. Also, those ice blades will stay there until I remove the magic, so you’re not going anywhere.” Mordred stepped around the werewolf, keeping his distance, and saw that both Fiona and Diana had killed their werewolves.
“You’re all alone,” Mordred said, and the werewolf turned as best as it could to look at him. “I’m going to be honest with you.” Mordred raised his arm, and red glyphs ignited across his arms, moving over the blue ones for his water elemental magic. “This is mind magic. Do you know what that does?”
The werewolf said nothing but continued to stare at Mordred’s arm.
“Right, well, basically it means I can turn your brain into a big puddle of mush. I can reach in there, grab everything I can, and shake it like there’s no tomorrow, or I could . . .” Mordred paused, thinking for a second, before a smile spread across his lips and he clapped his hands together. “I’m going to make you think you’re a poodle. No, a miniature poodle—that’s perfect. I’ve never done this before, but if it works you’re going to look lovely at next year’s Crufts dog show. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll end up someone who really likes drooling while staring into space.”
“What do you want?” the werewolf asked as Diana leaned up against the wall beside it, still in her werebear beast form.
“How’d you get up here?”
“There’s a hidden door right inside the coatroom. There’s a stairwell behind it.”
“How many down there?”
“Four or five.”
“Viktor?”
The werewolf nodded.
“What’s your kill number?”
The werewolf paused, glancing between the three people watching him. “I forget.”
“Bullshit. How many have you killed?”
“Forty-one.”
Mordred drew the silver blade and slit the werewolf’s throat in one smooth motion. “And that’s where it ends.”
The sounds of more gunfire came through the nearby door. “We need to go,” Mordred said.
“Can you really do that?” Fiona asked, her anxiety still evident, but joined with more than a little fear. “Melt someone’s brain?”
Mordred shook his head. “My mind magic is purely defensive. No telepathy, or telekinesis, or anything else that allows me to manipulate others. It’s purely so that no one can mess with my mind or make me do anything I don’t want to do. Magic isn’t exactly an easy thing to research, but sometimes I think that the omega magic allows you to only do the things you really need to be able to do at the time of its activation.”
The three ran back into the main area of the club, where several more werewolves were dead on the floor, with a couple more seriously wounded. Polina’s men had taken casualties, too, with more than one unmoving on the floor.
Morgan and several of her golems threw two werewolves around as if they were bags of sugar while Nabu drove a sword into the heart of a werewolf, pulling the blade out and using it to remove the hand of another nearby attacker.
“We’ve got this,” Diana said. “Go find Viktor.”
“I’m coming with you,” Fiona said.
“No, you can’t,” Mordred told her. “You’re too close to this. Too emotional.”
“My husband might be down there,” she snapped.
“And if you go down there like this, what happens to you?” Mordred asked, keeping calm.
Fiona got in Mordred’s face. “He’s my husband.”
“And that’s why you’re staying here.”
“Mordred’s right,” Diana said. “You can’t go down there. You won’t be helping anyone. If Alan is there, Mordred will find him.”
“If he’s there, you’d best get him out alive,” Fiona said.
Mordred ignored the threat in her voice and ran across the dance floor, using his air magic to fling one of the werewolves aside so that he could leap over the counter of the cloakroom and through the open door inside it. He took the stairs two at a time until he reached a door several dozen feet beneath the club area. He blasted the door apart with a gust of air magic, stepping through the remains and into a gray corridor that led off to the right and left. There were several doors down either side, and Mordred cursed the fact that it was going to take him forever to search everything.
He walked to the nearest door—a white door identical to all the others Mordred could see on the floor—and found it unlocked. He pushed it open and discovered three doors inside the dark-gray-tiled room. He went to each door in turn and found that two of them led into new, albeit identical, rooms, while the third door took him out into the opposite side of the hallway from where he’d started.
“They made a maze,” Mordred said to himself. “Great, they’re psychotic werewolf architects.”
“Hello, Mordred,” a voice sounded from hidden speakers around the floor. “You’re probably wondering what’s happening.”
“I’m wondering why I don’t just tear through this place like it’s made of paper.”
“We can hear you, just so you know.”
“Good. Go fuck yourselves.”
“Funny little sorcerer. This is my playpen. I bring humans down here and force them to run the maze. If they can get through it to where you stand, they can use the door you came through to escape. Want to guess how many escape?”
“They’re just opening doors, so I’m going to guess all of them. Unless you pick people who are unable to open doors, but that’s a really small population. Maybe you put key emblems on the doors like Resident Evil. You know if you do that, I’m going to find those keys and make you eat them. I hate those bloody puzzles.”
“Do you ever shut up? I assure you it’s not so easy to escape when one of my pack is chasing them.”
“Ah, Daria, it is you. And you are in charge. You know I’m going to find you, and I’m going to be really annoyed if I have to run around this stupid maze. Just give me Viktor, and tell me where Elaine is, and I’m almost certain I’ll let you live.”
Daria laughed. “I’ve left you a surprise in the maze. Think you can find it?”
“I hate it when psychopaths think they’re funny.” Mordred opened a nearby door and walked into the room beyond. Another identical room, and another three doors. Mordred really wanted to punch someone.
He did this for a few minutes, leaving the doors he’d gone through open as he made his way into the maze, finding himself in a dead end on more than one occasion. He got fed up at one point and tried to destroy the walls and doors with air magic, but the air harmlessly dissipated. There were splatters of blood in more than one room, and claw marks in a few. The werewolves hunted in here. Mordred wondered if the enclosed fear that the victims must have been going through somehow made the hunt all the sweeter. The thought made Mordred feel even more anger toward the pack.
He eventually opened a door that led to a room identical to all the others, except for the man tied to a chair in the middle. He was bathed in blood, with dozens of cuts and wounds over his naked body. He whimpered slightly at the sound of the door opening.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Mordred said. “I’m going to try and get you out of here.” Mordred moved around the man and used his air magic to cut through the plastic ties holding the man’s limbs to the chair.
The man pulled up the blindfold and stared at Mordred.
Mordred had seen that expression more than once on people who just realized who he was. “Who are you?”
“My name is Gareth Borne. I came to Moscow with Elaine. I was one of her security team.”
“Where’s Elaine?”
“They took her. The tracking device was on her earring, and one of the werewolves tore it off her and threw it on the floor. I picked it up and . . . and took it.”
“You swallowed it, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Not at first. At first they just left me in my cell, so I just held it in my mouth. It needs contact with a living person to work.”
“They tortured you, you swallowed it, and now I’m here.”
“Elaine said you’d come for her. She was going to use the tracking device to watch someone else.”
“Yep, that’s me, the happy guy who just traipsed across a continent to find someone who happened to be you. Where did they take Elaine?”
“Siberia.”
Mordred put his head in his hands. “Are you shitting me? Siberia is a damn big place. Want to narrow it down a little?”
Gareth shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Okay, what are you?”
“I’m a fire elemental. I’m four hundred years old, so I know what I’m doing.”
“Why didn’t you break free?”
“They forced me to swallow a small stone. It had a glyph on it. It was only about the size of a Tylenol tablet, but I can’t access my power at all. They’ve forced me to take a new one every day for the week I’ve been here.”
“Great, so you’re useless until you take a shit. I’m not sure we have that long. You got any idea where the exit is?”
“No, but there’s something you should know.”
“And that is?”
The door behind Mordred slammed shut, followed by a hissing noise as the room became sealed. A second later a noise from above sounded like someone switching on the central heating, and soon Gareth started choking. Mordred immediately mixed his water and air magical glyphs, just before Gareth dropped to his knees. A second later he was unconscious on the floor.
“That’s not going to work,” Mordred called out. “Daria, this is pointless.” He waited for a few seconds before raising his arms. “You don’t know much about sorcerers, I assume. No? Well, a few of us can mix our elements. It’s very exciting; fire and air makes lightning, water and earth makes these awesome little golem things, and earth and fire does magma. Amazing stuff really, but it’s all very flashy. Air and water is a little less flashy, but sort of more useful in my current circumstances. It lets me breathe. Anywhere. In any situation. A gas-filled room, in water, in a vacuum—I can breathe and talk just like normal. Funny when you think about it. I’m sure you didn’t know I could do that, but now you do, so you might want to forgo the gas, as it’s basically just wasting money for you at this point.”
Mordred glanced down at an unmoving Gareth. He took his pulse and found nothing. “You didn’t need to do that,” Mordred said.
“Funny, though, isn’t it,” Daria said. “Angry yet, Mordred?”
Mordred walked over to the far door and placed a hand on it. The dwarven runes on the door made it impossible for his magic to open it, but that just made him angrier. “Open the fucking door.”
“Let’s wait, shall we.”
Mordred closed his eyes and resigned himself to what was going to happen next. He walked back to Gareth and placed his hand on his chest, allowing his light magic to try and heal him, but nothing happened. Mordred needed to be sure; he needed to be totally certain that Gareth was already dead.
“Isn’t that just wasting your time?” Daria asked.
Mordred removed the dagger he’d kept with him and slit Gareth’s throat, cutting through the artery and placing his hands on the fresh blood that spilled from it. Gareth was dead, so it didn’t pump freely, but there was enough for it to meet his needs. He’d considered using his own blood, but using someone else’s was more potent, and he didn’t want to exhaust himself by using his own energy to power his magic.
When his hands were covered in Gareth’s blood, Mordred walked back over to the door and used the blood to paint a rune on it. “Open it,” he said. “Last chance.”
“Do your worst, Mordred.”
The fact that his magic was useless against the walls and doors suggested that the runes had been placed inside them, which, without knowing exactly where they were, and what rune was used, meant that it would have been impossible to use the correct dwarven rune to counteract whatever Daria and her people had placed there. But Nate had spent some time teaching Mordred some of the more rudimentary original dwarven runes. Specifically one to increase the power of whatever runes were close to it. It was a rune that absorbed magical energy, but pouring too much in caused both the original runes and any rune close to it to explode.
Mordred used the blood on his hands to power his own magic before using the blood to draw the rune on the door. Once done, he poured more and more into the rune he’d drawn until it flashed and exploded. Mordred wrapped himself in a dense shield of air, stopping the explosion as the entire wall and door separating him from the next room vanished. The shock wave picked Mordred off the ground and flung him back over the chair in the center of the room.
“What have you done?” Daria screamed.
The dust settled, and Mordred saw that several rooms beyond were now missing large parts of their walls. He got to his feet and cracked his knuckles, removing the shield and considering using his water magic to wash his hands but deciding against it.
“Daria, I see a metal door in there. Is that an exit from this place?”
“You’ve destroyed it all!” she continued to shriek.
“Daria, can you hear me?”
“Fuck you, Mordred. I’m going to rend the flesh from your bones.”
Mordred smiled. “Excellent, it’ll save me the bother of having to search for you.”