Cole's Haunting Melody (The Gods' Executioner Series) (26 page)

“Can I just pull this thing out?” I ask as I remember the dagger sticking out of my chest.

(Yes)

I pull the dagger out with my left hand, stopping the light flow of blood running down my chest.

“What should I do with it?”

(Smash it against the rock wall)

Trusting Airi’s judgment, I do as she says. I slam the dagger against the rock wall repeatedly, which becomes increasingly difficult with only one lung. The Void dagger finally breaks like glass and all of the shards stick into my blackened left hand. An intense burning sensation in my left arm brings me to my knees as the shards seem to melt into my hand.

“
AHHH!” I scream in a panic as the burning sensation envelopes my body.

This pain is so
intense; I’d give anything for it to stop… anything to dowse the flames… I suddenly feel very wet. I open my eyes and see that a bubble of water is swirling around me. I quickly hold my breath, only to realize that I didn’t need to before. Inhale… Holy shit! I can breathe underwater! The pain fades while I’m in awe; I gesture away with my left hand, and the water bubble flows off of me, back to the ocean.

This is pretty fucking sweet! I hold my left hand out and think of the elec
tric-hydro cannon that Hades hit me with. A purple lightning bolt appears on the back of my left hand as a torrent of water and electricity shoots out of my palm like a fire hose. That’s the same bolt that was on Jupiter’s hand when I first met him! So the water control comes from Neptune? I suppose that makes sense… wasn’t Neptune/Poseidon the god of earthquakes too? I lightly stomp the sand with my right leg and I feel the ground softly rumble; okay, that’s enough of that! Don’t want to accidentally cause a tsunami.

(Focus, Master! Jason is still fighting)

Right! I grab Hades’s husk and sprint up the stairs, my wet jeans feeling really heavy and chaffing my skin. I touch my jeans with my left hand and imagine them being dry as the water just flows out of the fabric. I reach the top to find a broken and beaten Jason on the right wall, roughly thirty feet from the girls, with Byron holding the claymore over his head.

“I’m sorry I have to do this
, Jason.” Byron says right before a blast of water forces his body to go flying into the back wall.

While d
ropping Hades’s husk, I flash forward, cover Byron’s mouth with my left hand, and pump my blood down his throat, which isn’t hard because he starts lapping at my hand like a cat once my blood hit his tongue, unable to help himself. I knock him out before passing out beside him.

It’s time to get some answers.

****

Chapter 26: Explanations

The scan skips the ‘floating through darkness’ part and goes straight to Byron’s memories.
I find that I am/ Byron is sitting in a dark room, next to a lit wood fireplace.

“Damn that azeman bitch!” Byron exclaims, his voice emanating from my throat.

“First she tries to take power away from me by using Feros to hold my court hostage, and then she survives my assassination attempt! Something needs to be done about this!” Byron says before taking a drink of scotch from a crystal glass that he holds in front of his face, watching the dancing fire light reflect off of it as he thinks.

“Indeed, something does need to be done.” A familiar voice says from the corner of the room.

“Who’s there!?” Byron demands.

“A friend.”
Jack Evari says as he steps out of the shadows, wearing an all-black suit with a maroon tie.

“Who are you!?
How did you get in here!?” Byron frantically asks.

“That is unimportant…
what is important, is eliminating the Azeman Queen.” Jack Evari states.

“And how do you propose I go about that?” Byron asks in a curious
, but cautious, fashion.

“When is the best time to wage a war?
When the leader is mentally and emotionally compromised. So the question becomes, how can you mentally and emotionally compromise someone? By taking away something that is dear to them…
someone
that is dear to them.” Jack Evari answers.

“You are suggesting that I kill the Duchess Reyna before attacking the Azeman Queen.” Byron clarifies.

“Yes, but you cannot kill her outright; that only accomplishes the fueling of rage, giving a cause to fight. No, you must take away the cause for fighting, take away a mother’s cause for living, by taking away the Duchess Reyna in a way that doesn’t implicate yourself.” Jack Evari replies.

“How am I supposed to do that?” Byron inquires, somewhat enthralled by this mysterious man.

“All in due time… the first thing you must do is get yourself closer to the Queen by getting yourself closer to Feros. Prince Jason is getting married to Duchess Reyna; you should offer to plan his bachelor party by way of apology for the assassination plot that you ‘allowed to slip by unnoticed’.” Jack Evari says while using air quotes.

“Go to
Niflheim’s palace tomorrow; you will find both the Azeman Queen and Prince Jason there. Once that meeting is complete, meet me in San Francisco at 2pm; the Golden Gate will take you directly there. I’ll meet you at the nearby Fisherman’s Wharf.” Jack Evari finishes and turns back towards the shadows.

“Wait, how should I address you?” Byron asks; Jack
Evari turns around with a beaming grin.

“Just call me Jack…
Jack Evari.” Jack says and steps backwards into the shadows, his white teeth reflecting the fire light before disappearing with a coinciding blink from Byron.

The stream of memories fast forwards, past
my meeting with Byron, and slows to a stop after he walks through the Golden Gate in Niflheim and appears underneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Byron walks along the waterfront until he comes across the giant pier that is impossible to miss, mainly because of the high decibels of noise that all of the sea lions are making. Byron walks to the end of the wharf, unable to find Jack Evari. He turns around and Jack Evari appears from the side of a booth, wearing his signature all-black suit and maroon tie.

“I
apologize; another meeting of mine ran late. How did the bachelor party offer go?” Jack asks.

“They accepted.” Byron replies.

“Good; now it is your job to throw a bachelor party and become chummy with Prince Jason and Feros; Feros just lost his three year old daughter so this might be a good way to relate to him. This is all in effort to create something of a character alibi; making the very notion that you had something to do with Duchess Reyna’s demise seem asinine. The overall plan is to kidnap Duchess Reyna in a way that doesn’t appear to be a kidnapping. The way to do this is to make it look like she ran off with one Natasha Holmstrom: a friend of Feros and ex-girlfriend of the Duchess.” Jack explains.

“So we write a goodbye letter to Prince Jason, kidnap the Duchess and the ex-girlfriend, and mak
e it look like a lesbian murder-suicide.” Byron adds.

“No, that’s not good enough. If there is no indication of their relationship advancing, the two of them su
ddenly running off together won’t make sense, which in turn will arouse suspicion. What we need to do is trick the family and friends into thinking that the Duchess and the other woman might be getting back together. Drugging them with Spanish Fly or another aphrodisiac would be most effective.” Jack says.

“Well a bachelorette party is most likely being planned; I can have my people keep an eye on reservations, find out what club they are going to, and bribe the bartender into dosing the two girls’ drinks with
Mandy, powdered ecstasy; nature should take over from there, leading them to show their sexual proclivities towards one another.” Byron suggests.

“You are smarter than I gave you credit for.
Follow through with that while I decide when the best time to take them will be. I’ll be in touch.” Jack Evari replies, rounds a corner behind a small booth, and presumably disappears.

The memories speed onward
, passing by a conversation about a delivery of enhancements from Jack Evari for Byron’s vampire military, before resuming their normal playback speed a few weeks later, after the bachelor party. Byron is in the room with the fireplace, accompanied by Hades and Jack Evari.

“King Byron, this is Hades, Lord of the Underworld. Hades will be assisting in your plot.” Jack introduces.

“Why? What’s his motivation for helping?” Byron questions with a suspecting tone.

“It’
s partially at my request; he owes me several favors after I gave him a dagger that allowed him to take total control of the Greek/Roman pantheon; and it’s partially because Prince Jason seduced Persephone whenever she was in the Underworld.” Jack explains. He’s the one that gave Hades the Void dagger!?

“Airi, do you have any thoughts on this?”

(…)

“Airi?”

(Hmm?)

“What’s up? You’ve been unusually quiet lately.”

(It’s nothing, Master…)

“
I’ve discovered that Reyna and Natasha will be alone in the women’s dressing room before the wedding tomorrow. Hades will port in a camera and pay off a random person to take pictures in front of the personnel that will be guarding the hallway leading to the dressing room, and to take the subsequent beating. With the hallway momentarily unguarded, Hades will make his way into the dressing room, grab the women, drop off the goodbye letter to Jason, and port them to a house in Syracuse that he has generously loaned us. You will be waiting there to help bind the girls and hold them in the basement while Hades ports you two to the wedding to make sure that you don’t draw attention with your absence. After that, it’s just a matter of leaving a suicide pact and drowning them using Hades new powers over water.” Jack explains with a bright smirk as everything fades away.

****

I regain consciousness on the concrete floor of the basement to the sound Reyna’s sobbing as Jason holds her.

“How long have I been out?” I ask
as I notice that my arm and leg are back to their regular silver color and my helmet has disengaged.

“About fifteen minutes.” Natasha
somberly informs me while I look at Reyna as she cries and holds her stomach with both hands.

(You may wish to tell Reyna that the baby is perfectly healthy, courtesy of your blood
. In fact, your blood is to thank for the relatively lively condition of all of them)

“REALLY!?
THAT’S TERRIFIC!” I shout and everyone looks at me.

“Airi just told me that the ba
by is fine, Reyna!” I announce.

Tears
continue to fall down Reyna’s cheeks, but her expression has brightened significantly. She wraps her arms around Jason and hugs him.

“
Ow! Not so tight!” Jason exclaims, holding onto the right side of his ribcage.

“Take off the jacket.” I
instruct as I walk over to him.

Jason unzips the jacket and holds his t-shirt up with his right hand.
I make an incision in his ribcage with my ring before funneling my blood into his chest from my left hand.

“There; that should help patch you up
.” I look him over and notice that his left arm is bent at an odd angle, most likely because my jacket isn’t armored on the left sleeve anymore; I move over to that side and get to work.

“So why did he do it?” Natasha asks as she kicks Byron and he groans in response, apparently coming to.
I concentrate my blood to Byron’s spine and cut off his spinal cord in his lumbar before forming a silicon carbide disc to stop any possibility of it healing.

“He do
sed you both with ecstasy so you guys would make out at the bachelorette party to corroborate the letter that was left saying that you ran away together. Then he and Hades were going to drown you and make it look like you committed suicide together. Hades was in it for the revenge against Jason and Byron was trying to put Maria in a compromised position so he could kill her and take control of the azeman.” I report, not adding the part about Jack Evari until I know more.

“And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for your meddling blood!” Byron exclaims.

What is it with my life and fucking Scooby-Doo!?

Reyna stands up, grabs one of my Diamond swords off of the floor, and walks over to Byron.
Byron tries to get up to run away, but finds he can’t and starts to panic.

“Reyna wait!” I yell.

“You aren’t stopping me from killing him, Cole.” Reyna maliciously replies.

“If you kill him, won’t you become Queen of the Vampires? Vampire hierarchy works like that, right? Whoever kills the current king becomes the successor?” I question.

“That is generally how it works unless the king steps down.” Reyna replies.

“Is that really what you want?” I ask.

“What I want… is to hurt this fucker for trying to kill my baby!” Reyna viciously exclaims.

“And you can
, but let your mother kill him. She already has the know-how to manage the vampires and you can have a normal life until the time comes when you inherit the throne.” I explain.

“But…” Reyna says.

“Reyna! Do you really want your baby to grow up having spent no time with her mother because you were too busy?” I ask.

“
Her
mother? It’s a girl!?” Reyna asks excitedly; of course she would only hear my slip up.

“Yes…
now, do you want your daughter to grow up like you did?” I inquire, guessing that she probably spent more time with Babette than with Maria.

“No…
but—” Reyna says.

“Go ahead and hack his limbs off if it makes you feel better; I can create an effective enough blood seal to stop the bleeding while we transport him to your mother so she can decapitate him at the wedding.” I interrupt and Reyna’s face lights up with a grim smirk.

Byron starts dragging himself away as quickly as he can with his legs limp behind him. Reyna slowly walks behind him, toying with him like a cat with a mouse before it rips off the mouse’s head. Byron is propped up on his arms, dragging himself away, when Reyna hacks into his left elbow. She doesn’t manage to go all the way through it on the first swing, but she does get it on the second. Byron screams as he collapses on his face. He rolls over and grabs his left nub, opening up his right elbow for Reyna; she slices through his right elbow on the first swing this time. I reallocate my blood to seal off the blood flow to his nubs as Byron screams pleasantly.

“Since I cut off his nervous system in his lumbar, he can’t actually feel that.” I tell Reyna when she starts trying to hack through Byron’s right thigh. Reyna stops and turns to look at me when I’m talking
.

“I know…
but it makes me feel better.” She replies with a shrug and turns back to her work. Ten swings later, she finally gets through the thick femur and moves onto the left thigh, doing the same after a dozen swings.

“Well…
I feel a bit better…” Reyna announces while breathing heavily.

“I’m hungry…
Cole? Do you mind?” Reyna asks.

“Go ahead; I’m not going to die from blood loss anytime soon.” I say as I p
lop down on the concrete floor.

Reyna drops my sword and jumps into my lap before biting into the left side of my neck. She drinks for about five minutes before Jason speaks up.

“Sorry to interrupt, but we do have a wedding to attend.” Jason reminds us.

“That’s still on for today!?” Reyna asks in surprise as she detaches from my neck.

“Yeah, we told Maria and Hel to stall while we rescued you two.” I say.