CHAPTER 33
Nate Garrett
Ares took my rage and hate and twisted it inside my head. He didn’t change any of my memories like his son had so long ago; he knew that Erebus would react negatively to his presence. He was well versed in exactly what I could and couldn’t do and used it to his advantage.
He pointed my hate at the people I loved, stripping away my feelings for them, and tried to replace those feelings with something ugly, something cruel and vicious. He tried to make me believe that Gawain, Abaddon, Arthur, and Merlin were the only people I could truly trust, the only people who would allow me to achieve everything I ever wanted.
Hours turned into days, and I soon lost all track of time. Occasionally Ares would stop and beat me or have one of the elves do it. They didn’t break any bones. Without my magic I wouldn’t have been able to heal, but my ribs had already been busted and every bit of extra damage further hastened the mess that Ares was making out of my mind.
I hung from the ceiling for hours at a time, only occasionally allowed down when Ares decided I’d taken too much punishment, and I was allowed to sleep. But then it began again. At one point Erebus tried to step in, to get me to concentrate on him, but Ares was so powerful his empath abilities brushed Erebus aside. Ares knew what Erebus had attempted, and had anticipated it, returning to cause me more anguish as soon as he felt it safe to do so.
“Is that nightmare back yet?” Ares asked after days or weeks of not seeing Erebus.
Sweat dripped from my face, running down my bare chest to where Lucie’s blood had dried on my stomach. Even after all this time, they hadn’t let me wash. I looked down at where her body had been. They hadn’t bothered removing it for a considerable amount of time after her murder. They’d used her to weaken me, and I’d helped them by allowing my hate to take over. My need for vengeance had been my downfall.
“No, it’s just me and you,” Ares said after moving my face so he could stare me in the eyes. “You’re stronger than I expected. I see why Deimos was unable to break you.”
“He’s a coward,” I said.
Ares smiled. “Yes, he is. I beat him when he came back to me after you broke his mind. I beat him over and over until he realized what a waste he was. And then he wanted to destroy your name. He thought it would elevate him in my eyes.”
“I’m going to kill him when I get out of here.”
“Are you trying to anger me?” Ares asked. “That’s not a very good way of dealing with this. You should be angry with Tommy and Olivia, with Elaine and the rest of them. Angry that they left you here, angry that they’re not going to save you. They let Lucie die. They let Galahad die. They didn’t help you fight us. They’ve done nothing.”
I nodded. “They abandoned me.”
Ares smiled. “That they did. You know who’s there for you, don’t you?”
“Gawain. He wants me to stand beside Arthur. To make this world better. For us to have our rightful place.”
“Do you want that?”
I nodded weakly. My body hurt, and I had trouble keeping my eyes open. “More than anything. I want to work for Arthur. I want to change the world in his image. Please, let me.”
“I think we’re not quite there yet. There was a little pause. You’re still thinking you can escape from this.”
I shook my head.
Ares continued with the punishment once again. Showing Tommy, Olivia dead, showing me standing over their bodies, making me feel good about it, making me feel like that was the right way to move forward. He showed me hunting down the others, skewering Elaine with a spear, decapitating Morgan, burning Zamek alive, torturing Mordred until he wept and begged to be let go. Everything I saw, Ares made me feel good about. Made me want. Made me need.
Eventually the images stopped for a second time. Ares lifted my head, which sagged against my chest. “I think we can have a break here,” he said. “Keep him company. I’ll be back soon.”
I heard Ares walk out of the room, closing the door behind him. I watched the blood elf who had been left behind as he walked over to the chair and took a seat.
“Nate,” Erebus said.
“Leave me,” I said in my mind. “Now is not the time.”
“Nate, you can’t possibly think that your friends are people who should be killed.”
“Erebus,” I snapped out loud. “Leave me.”
The blood elf laughed and walked over to me, standing in front of me and pushing me in the stomach so I swayed back and forth. They’d taken the chair long ago, and my arms felt sore again.
“Your nightmare trying to help you?” the blood elf said with a smile. “Ares will be pleased that you banished it. We’ll break you yet, sorcerer. We’ll break that nightmare and force it out of your body if need be.”
“Going to have to kill me for that,” I said.
“That’s the plan,” the blood elf said. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know why Gawain has you kept alive.”
“Enlighten me,” I said.
“Because he knew that if you died, all of your marks would disappear. Your nightmare would take control. He told Ares about it. He wants your mind broken before you die so that when your last mark goes and your nightmare takes control, you’ll be reborn loyal to whoever they need you to be loyal to.”
“That’s how the last mark goes? With my death?”
“Apparently so. Got to break you first, though.”
“Have you ever seen Lethal Weapon?”
The blood elf looked confused. “What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a film from the nineteen eighties. It hasn’t aged that well, if I’m honest, but there was one bit in that, and if you haven’t seen it, this will all be new to you.”
“What will?”
I kicked the blood elf in the face, then wrapped my legs around his neck and used it as a lever to push myself up and pull the chain from the ceiling hook. I let my weight fall onto the neck and shoulders of the blood elf, and we collapsed to the floor. I broke his neck a second after, then removed his sword and decapitated him.
He didn’t wear a bracelet, so I still had no access to my magic, but he did have some keys. I unlocked my shackles and dropped them to the floor next to where Lucie’s body had been before putting the keys in my pocket.
Images of me murdering my friends flickered into my mind, making me feel like I needed to hunt them, to end their lives so that Arthur would accept me, would allow me to stand beside him. I pushed the thoughts away—I would deal with them later.
I left the cell and found myself in a corridor with dozens of identical doors along either side. A gate sat at one end, a stone wall at the other, which made the choice easy.
I unlocked the gate and pushed it open, making more noise than I was happy with, and paused at the bottom of a stone staircase to wait for anyone who might investigate what they’d heard. After ten seconds, and with no one seemingly interested in the sound of the gate opening, I slowly crept up the stairs, making sure to keep low. I was close to the top when I realized that the room beyond was empty.
A long table sat in the middle of the room, with several wooden chairs around it. It was littered with scraps of food and bottles of drink—it looked like they’d had a real party here. A small fireplace was close to the table, next to an ancient-looking wardrobe. A large wooden door at the far end of the room appeared to be the only exit other than the stairs to the cells, and I had no intention of going back down there.
I walked to the door and turned the massive handle, pulling it toward me, and I heard voices on the other side. I peered through the crack I’d created between the door and its frame and saw two blood elves. They were in a long hallway with dark-blue carpet and normal house doors along one side. The other side had windows overlooking the courtyard I’d been brought through when I’d first arrived. From the angle I was at, I couldn’t make out much in the courtyard except for its size and the several guards that were patrolling it. One problem at a time.
One of the blood elves in the hallway was only a few feet in front of me. He was leaning up against the wall, talking to his comrade, who was looking out of the window in front of him. They spoke in blood elvish. “You think they’ll break him?” the one closest to me asked.
“We’ve broken better,” his friend said.
“You think we’ll be able to get our brethren out of that horrific dwarf realm? I’d like to think that we could help Gawain destroy his enemies.”
“What if we’re not like them? What if we changed in different ways?”
“They’re still blood elves. We were meant to be there when they slaughtered the dwarves. Instead, we got to spend a thousand years buried in a mountain. On Earth realm. Just the word ‘Earth’ makes me feel ill.”
“Humans are worse than dwarves. At least dwarves taste nice.”
I opened the door and stepped out, driving the blood elf sword I’d taken into the back of the closest elf, piercing his heart. The second elf turned toward me and was about to scream something when I charged toward him, knocking him off his feet and dumping him on his head. He tried to push me off, but I smashed my forearm into his face, breaking his cheekbone, and ripped out his throat. Rage and hate filled me again, and I forced myself to drop the lump of flesh in my hand and stagger away.
“You won’t break me,” I whispered, staring at the black blood on my hands. “You won’t.” I remained where I was until I calmed, by which point the elf with no throat was still making noise. Blood elves were hard to kill if you didn’t take the head or destroy the brain or heart. I raised the elf’s blade and stabbed him through the skull, pinning his head to the floor, killing him.
I fought back the anger as I searched both elves and took a belt with two sheathed daggers. For some reason it had taken me this long to realize I still had no shoes. I thought of Tommy making a joke about Die Hard and chuckled before the image of his death at my hands tore itself into my head.
“No,” I said. “I will not kill my friends. How do I stop this?”
“Kill Ares,” Erebus said from beside me. “The change he tried to implement isn’t complete. You kill him, and hopefully you’ll break free from his grasp.”
“Kill Ares? Is there another way?”
“You find someone with mind magic and get them to fix your brain.”
“Okay, so both ways suck.” I looked down at the blood elf. “For now I can use this hate Ares has filled me with.”
“Just make sure not to get too used to it. An empath like Ares controls people in part because he makes them believe that the emotions he forced into them, and the memories he created, are something to revel in. Something to enjoy. He’ll make you think that without those memories, you are nothing but a shell of yourself.”
“I’m going to kill Ares for this at some point. Gawain, Abaddon, any other fucker who happens to be involved. I’m going to pile those bastards up behind me.”
“That’s Ares talking.”
I shook my head. “No. It really isn’t.”
Erebus disappeared, leaving me alone in the hallway. I decided it was best to hurry and continued along the hallway, taking a set of stairs down one level. I stopped at the bottom and took a quick glance along each direction of hallway. The left side had eight blood elves, all standing around a door. The windows on the side of the hallway gave me a clear view of the stairs and courtyard that the door led to, but being quiet and fighting eight blood elves did not go hand in hand.
I looked to my right, and apart from a set of double doors, the area was void of anyone that I could see. I crept around the corner of the stairs and ran the length of the hallway, making sure to keep on the rug to muffle my steps. I reached the double doors and pushed one of them open a fraction of an inch to look inside and, when I was satisfied the room beyond was empty, pushed the door open and slipped inside.
I’d entered a huge ballroom filled with a dozen tables, all with chairs around them, but the tables were bare. Large red-and-gold curtains hung from one side of the room. I ran over to peer behind one, but the window behind just showed a large number of blood elves running training exercises. I spotted Atlas and put the curtain back; he was close to the last person I wanted to run into.
I tried a second set of double doors at the end of the ballroom, but they were locked, and the sounds of laughter from behind me made me sigh. I placed my head against a metal strip on one of the doors and controlled my breathing before turning around to face Ares.
“You got somewhere to be?” he asked me with a slight chuckle.
“I just thought I’d come and make sure you got my food order right. I would hate to think you’d bring me something I didn’t like.”
“You humiliated my son all those years ago. You beat him like a drum.”
I nodded. “He’s a piece of shit just like you. You must be proud.”
Ares shook his head. “Can’t stand the sniveling little bastard. But he is my son.”
“So, what happens now? You kill me, tell Gawain I died trying to escape?”
“I thought about it. But you know what? I think I’d prefer to just beat you into a coma and screw around with your brain some more.” He removed the bracelet that allowed him to use his abilities and placed it on a nearby table. “Now you can’t bitch and moan about it not being fair.”
“You had an advantage with your powers. You’ll really wish you’d kept it.”
“I prefer to fight without my powers. I’ve seen people like yourself rely on them, allow them to be the best you have. I saw what you did to Helios, though—that was impressive. Pissed off Gawain a little, as Helios was in charge of murdering all those humans, although I guess you saved him the job of removing him from our organization when he eventually fucked up.”
“You really don’t like many people, do you?”
“I like Aphrodite, but only for about an hour at a time.”
“An hour? Aren’t you kind of exaggerating?”
Ares’s eyes narrowed with anger. “I am all man. I should show your woman that. I should have shown her when she was married to my son. Maybe if she’d got some, she wouldn’t have betrayed us by running off with you the first chance she got.”
“What a surprise, Ares is a misogynistic prick. Who could possibly have seen that coming?”
“I just know what women really want.”
“You know, I should have just let you kill me instead of listening to your inane drivel.”
Ares shrugged off his coat and carefully unbuttoned his dark-blue silk shirt, laying both over the back of a nearby chair.
His body looked like it had been carved out of solid granite. He rolled his shoulder and flexed his biceps, making the veins in his neck pop a little.
“You done?” I asked. “Or do you need some oil to really seal the image?”
He ignored me and removed his shoes and socks, spending time to ensure that each shoe had one sock in it.
“If you take any longer, I’m going to kill myself just for something to do,” I told him.
“I don’t want to hear excuses after I beat you, Nate. I want you to understand that I am the better man, that you are beneath me. You need to understand your place.”
“Like Hephaestus did with you?”
“He cheated,” Ares snapped. “We were to fight fair, and he used his ability to trip me. Humiliated me in front of his wife. I murdered his friend to make us even.”
“Yeah, you’re a real stand-up guy. In case you haven’t noticed, I have no powers right now.”
Ares’s smile was wicked and cruel. “Oh, I know.” He bounced from foot to foot while I sighed with impatience. If his game was to keep me here until Gawain arrived, he was doing a good job. I considered just starting the fight, but I needed to keep my head. Allowing my emotions to get the better of me would get me killed. Ares was too dangerous for me to think it would end any other way. I didn’t even know how I was going to beat him when I didn’t have any power. Several thousand extra years of experience of fighting was not something I could take lightly.
Eventually he moved toward me, keeping his hands up and bouncing from foot to foot as he moved. I moved my head from side to side and waited for him. I wasn’t going to go to him; I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making me impatient.
When he was close enough, he threw a jab, which I knocked aside. I moved around him, either avoiding his punches or slapping them away, making him smile every time I had to back away. He feinted with a jab toward my kidney that I just managed to avoid, but I couldn’t avoid the blow to my jaw that knocked me over one of the tables.
“Not so good, after all,” Ares said with a laugh.
I felt like saying, “You see how good you are after someone tortures you for hours on end,” but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Instead, I got back to my feet and blocked a kick to my side, and then another one to my stomach. I brought my elbow down on his knee and punched him in the side. He pushed me away and began to bounce up and down again, shaking his knee as he moved.
“Nice,” he said. “You’ve got some power in your punches. Didn’t expect that.”
I remained silent and breathed out slowly before placing myself in a fighting stance.
“I haven’t seen that style before,” Ares said. “Where did you learn it?”
I remained quiet, and his irrational hatred of being ignored got the better of him. He snapped forward with a hard punch, which I ducked under, and I smashed my elbow into his exposed ribs and slammed my palms into his stomach. He stepped back but grabbed hold of me as he did, lifting me off the ground and flinging me over his head and across the table behind him.
“Finesse is over,” Ares said, throwing the table aside. I pushed up from the floor, kicking at Ares’s head as I spun past him. I stood and smiled as blood trickled down his lip. He licked it and charged me. I moved aside, but he was too fast, and he grabbed my arm, using his momentum to wrench it out of its socket. He kicked me in the chest, and I staggered back against the wall. His fist slammed into the side of my head, knocking me to one knee as stars swam in front of me. I blocked a knee to the head, but he kicked me in the ribs, doing more damage to my earlier injury.
I dropped to all fours, and Ares kicked me in the ribs like he was kicking a football. More of them broke from the impact, and I rolled against the wall, gasping for breath.
Ares reached down, grabbed me by the throat, and lifted me off the ground before slamming the back of my head into the wall.
“You are not my equal!” he shouted in my face. He head-butted me and flung me across the destroyed table, where I hit a chair, gouging my forearm. Blood was soon trickling down toward my hand, and I spotted the bracelet that Ares had been wearing. It was on the floor under a nearby table. I was beaten, hurt, and had been tortured for hours. I couldn’t beat Ares. It wasn’t a matter of how good he was—he was fresh, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure I’d have been able to beat him if I’d been at 100 percent, but I knew in my current state, it would only be a matter of time before he killed me or, worse, knocked me out so that he could finish the job on my mind. Sending me out to kill those people I loved the most.
“You still on the floor, little man?” Ares asked. “I can’t believe how weak Helios must have been to have lost at your hands.”
“I thought this was going to be equal,” I said, using the table to pull myself upright before slamming my shoulder into the wall, putting the dislocated joint back in place. I cried out in pain. “You’re still much stronger than me.”
Ares shrugged. “Can’t do much about that, now can I?”
I shrugged, too. “Guess not. So are we fighting, or are we going to drink tea and eat cake?”
Ares laughed and walked toward me. I blocked a kick and drove my knee into his stomach. I kicked out at his leg, causing it to buckle, and punched him in the jaw, knocking him to the side. As he moved he kicked out, and despite my blocking it, the power behind it lifted me off my feet and dumped me on the nearest table. I rolled over it and crashed to the floor, grabbing the bracelet and clicking it into place a second later. Power flowed through me, but I stayed where I was on the floor, allowing my magic to heal me.
Ares threw the table above me aside and kicked my newly healed ribs. “Is that it? Are you spent?”
He kicked again, and I rolled with it, throwing up shadows all around Ares that dragged him to his knees, pinning him in place.
“Cheat!” Ares screamed at me as he tried to fight against the shadows.
“Yeah, you just caught on to that?” I asked, and wrapped air around my fist, bringing it down onto his jaw and snapping his head aside with incredible force.
Blood splattered across the floor from Ares’s ruined mouth, and I kicked him in the chest, using my shadows to drag him down onto his back.
“You’re undeserving of calling yourself a man,” Ares said.
I rained down punch after punch on his helpless body, allowing the rage and anger to fuel me, until his face was a ruined mess.
“You shouldn’t have put all that hate in me,” I whispered to him. “Maybe I’d have fought fair if you’d just left me alone.”
I placed the tip of my finger against his temple as he muttered something.
“I hope this hurts,” I said, and shot a finger width of lightning magic into his temple.
He screamed in pain and bucked against the shadows. Then I stood up, created a blade of lightning, and slammed it into Ares’s neck over and over again until his head rolled along the floor. The shadows vanished, and I dropped to my knees at the sound of clapping. I turned around to see Deimos and Gawain standing in front of the now-opened door.
Deimos grinned at me. “My turn.”
I motioned for him to come on over, and he drew a gun, firing at me while my shield of air kept me alive. After the fifth bullet hit the shield, I pushed it forward, smashing into Deimos and throwing him through the door to the outside of the building.
I walked past a still-smiling Gawain and wanted to smash his face in as much as I did Deimos’s, but something stopped me, and I continued down the steps to the muddy courtyard outside.
Deimos was back on his feet, cracking his knuckles and rolling his head. “You murdered my father.”
I nodded. “Don’t be sad—you’ll go see him soon.”
“Even if you kill me, you don’t think that it’ll be over, do you? Hera will flay you for killing us.”
I shrugged and threw a ball of lightning at Deimos, who flung himself aside, avoiding it. I felt pain in my side as one of Deimos’s throwing daggers connected with my stomach. The pain quickly turned into burning agony as the silver from the blade went to work, forcing me to pull it out, giving Deimos time to close the gap between us and strike with another blade, slashing me across the chest. He darted away, throwing two more blades, which I managed to avoid, but a third entered my leg just above the knee, and I crashed to the muddy ground.
“You cheated against my father,” Deimos said.
“We both know that after our last encounter, you’re not going to be able to use your power to hurt me,” I said.
Deimos nodded. “It happened so many years ago, but it still feels like only yesterday. I guess these blades will have to do.”
“I don’t need magic to kill you,” I said, pulling out the throwing blade.
“You really do,” Deimos taunted, and threw another blade, which I avoided, rolling to the side and throwing the blade I’d removed from my leg back at Deimos, who easily dodged it.
My brain swam, and I knew I wasn’t in a state to fight a prolonged battle. I was exhausted, beaten, and about as close to just giving up as I’d ever been in my life, but I was not about to give Deimos the satisfaction of killing me. I pushed myself up off the ground and back to my feet.
“If you use your magic, I’ll kill you,” Abaddon said as she appeared out of the door with Gawain beside her.
I weighed my odds.
“Can you take us all?” Gawain asked.
The answer was no. I had no chance of killing everyone. “Why do you want this piece of shit dead?” I asked, looking at Deimos.
“I don’t,” Gawain called back. “But whichever one of you survives will have a place in our organization.”
Deimos removed two eight-inch daggers, roared in defiance, and charged me. His two blades were a blur as he repeatedly sliced into the flesh on my arms and hands while all I could do was dodge and avoid mortal strikes.
At one point he overreached and I grabbed his arm, smashed my elbow into his nose, and snapped his wrist, grabbing the dagger from his hand. He kicked out at me, forcing me back. We were both covered in blood and mud, and the fight had gone on longer than either of us probably wanted.
Deimos raised his dagger toward me, but I didn’t move. “You are the reason for my downfall!” he screamed at me.
“You murdered innocent people because you’re a petulant child,” I said back. “So desperate for any kind of positive attention. Thousands of years old, and all you really wanted was for your father to be proud of you. And he never was.”
Deimos charged toward me, full of anger and hate. Full of emotion. I waited until the last second, then parried his blade and pushed his arm away. I used the dagger I’d taken from him to cut through the flesh around his ribs, causing him to yell out as blood quickly drenched the side of his body.
He put distance between the two of us, and I watched him without emotion. “You should never have tried to be something you’re not,” I told him.
“You know, after that bitch Lucie was taken, I put out the bounty on your head. I thought it was funny.”
The memory of Lucie’s body spurred my rage, and I had to fight to keep control. I said nothing.
“How’s my wife?” he shouted.
“How’s your left hand?” I asked. “I assume you married it since we last met.”
Gawain laughed, and Deimos’s expression darkened further.
“I’m going to kill you, Nate.”
“Sure, why not, and then you’re going to piss pure silver and sprout wings.”
Deimos’s face twitched slightly. “Once you’re dead, I will claim what is mine.”
“And what is that?”
“Your woman, for one. She should still be mine. She will be again, or she’ll wish she was.”
“She’s not my woman, you conceited little prick. Are you so full of hate simply because you want someone who doesn’t want you back? Is that it?”
“You took her from me.”
“You never had her in the first place, Deimos. Not once. She has her own mind, and she’s long since decided that you’re a nasty piece of crap. It’s something everyone appears to have figured out a long time ago.”
“Well, it won’t matter, will it? You’ll be dead, and I can do whatever I like. I am the son of Ares, so who’s going to stop me? You? Your friends?”
“You’re a spoiled brat. You’re one of those people who think that the world owes them something, simply because you were born to privilege. You expect everyone to behave as if you’re above them. No one has that privilege, no matter how much you want it. The world is not your plaything; the people are not toys for you to destroy or discard as you wish. The fact that you’ve lived for thousands of years and never figured this out is pathetic. You’re an evil little piece of shit, and I won’t let you hurt anyone else. Your days of terrorizing people are done. Let’s get this finished. You bore me.”
Deimos ran toward me like I knew he would and moved quickly, but I avoided the attack and rammed my dagger into his stomach, slicing his belly open as his momentum forced him forward.
He dropped to his knees, trying to hold his stomach in as he looked down at the blood that saturated his hands and the floor around him.
I kicked the dagger he’d been holding away, then crouched before him. “You’re what happens when hate wins.” I drove the blade of the silver dagger up under Deimos’s chin into his brain, killing him instantly.
I looked up at the sound of Gawain clapping. He grinned at me. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”