God of Destruction (3 page)

“Alright! Okay,” he murmured, kissing the top
of her head. “No doctor, I get it. I love you.”

“Love you, too,” she grumbled, falling over
onto her side, though she desperately didn’t want to go back to
sleep. Her father stood, crossing the room quickly. He turned in
the doorway, flipping the light switch.

“Try to get some sleep, sweetheart.”

She curled up, facing the opposite wall.
“You, too.”

The door creaked shut, reminding Claire that
she was alone. She didn’t let her eyes close, staring at the alarm
clock beside her. She could still feel that knife hitting home in
her chest, right in the heart. Three a.m. She’d have to be getting
up for school in four hours. Growling in frustration, and giving up
on any chance of peace for the rest of the night, she forced
herself to her feet and made her way to the bathroom.

She didn’t make sound when she walked down
the hall, but, even if she had, she knew her father wouldn’t care.
He was a deep sleeper. The first thing she caught in the huge
bathroom mirror when she walked in was her haggard appearance. Her
face was sallow and her hair was a wild mess on her head. She noted
dryly that she looked like the bride of Frankenstein. Shivering
with distaste, she turned away from the mirror to turn on the
shower.

Steam quickly filled the room, already
soothing her tense body. She turned back to the mirror and
froze.

A huge stain of red began to mar her white
shirt just over her heart and, as she watched, it deepened. Pain
split her chest like a knife and, horrified, she clawed at her
shirt as it sopped up more precious blood. She screamed, but her
body began to sink limply toward the floor, preparing itself for
inevitable death.

“No!”

Claire’s eyes snapped open to the shrill cry
of her alarm clock her white shirt flawless and her body curled in
the same way she’d fallen asleep. She squinted against the blinding
light coming in through the window and realized that she was late
for school. Again.

Chapter Three

London, England; December
20
^th
, 2011

The timing had been perfect.

Closing had come about an hour before and
only two guards remained in the silent building, awaiting the
replacements that would be relieving them in another half hour.

Harris and Reyes had worked this shift
together every night, excluding weekends, for five years, and the
two had become good friends. Both men had been sitting in the
security room, eyes flickering between the wall of surveillance
feeds and the portable small screen television Harris had brought
from home, when the lights and video monitors concurrently died.
Cursing softly under his breath, Harris stood in the dark and
pulled the small flashlight from his belt, suddenly hyper aware of
the limited space around him.

"The back-up generator'll take care of it,"
Reyes assured him, lazily stretching back in his chair and rifling
through his pockets for batteries. "Just give it a minute."

Henry Harris was the older and much larger
guard, just shy of fifty and well over six feet tall. Despite his
age, he was a burly man with a permanently angry expression on his
face, unless you, by a miracle, got him to laugh. His hair was salt
and pepper, but only where he allowed it to show. In order to beat
impending baldness, he’d shaved his head back in college and had
never gone back. Short stubble covered his head and grew longer
toward his chin, around which he had organized a neat beard. Small,
dark eyes were sunken into his withering face.

Fred Reyes, on the other hand, was
comparatively meek. The younger man had only just celebrated his
twenty ninth birthday the previous week and was still cleaning up
his apartment from the surprise party his brother had thrown him,
one Coors Light bottle at a time. Reyes stood above average height
but resembled more of a toy soldier than a security guard while
standing beside Harris. His long, wiry muscles swam in the extra
material of his black uniform. He wore his hat over his head,
masking his shaggy, dark hair, and allowing only his dull brown
eyes to show. Reyes was clean-shaven, retaining a boyish quality
that Harris lacked.

“Do you have any Double A's?” Reyes
inquired, finally giving up on his pockets with a deep, dramatic
sigh.

“Just take 'em out of the remote,” Harris
grunted back. “The generator should have come on by now.”

“The rain might've blown out the box,” Reyes
shrugged, suddenly pointedly interested in his uniform's broken
belt loop.

Harris grit his teeth, pulling back his
sleeve to study his watch. Realizing he couldn’t leave the
generator for his replacement, he resolved to go, and by the look
on Reyes’s face, he’d be going alone. Fixing his hat upon his bald
head, he turned on his heel to leave, despite Reyes’s protests.
“Harris!” Reyes called as his friend vanished through the door.
“The night guy’ll get it! Harris!”

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” the officer
vowed with a roll of his eyes. “Find the batteries,” he added.

Navigating through the blackened halls of
the museum was difficult with only a flashlight, but Harris had
memorized every door and crevice so attentively that he could’ve
done it with his eyes closed. The back-up generator existed in the
basement and was only accessible through the ward devoted entirely
to Greek artifacts and literature on its mythology. The basement
was off limits to the public for its dangerous setup, concrete
walls, and the boiler, making it a hell of its own making beneath
the feet of the many patrons each day. It wasn’t a place
necessarily enjoyed by the staff of the museum, but whatever minor
incidence had brought them down to begin with was usually enough to
make them overlook this general distaste for the hot and unkempt
room. Harris was no exception to those who despised the basement,
but he’d never been, and never would be, one to follow orders any
less than perfectly.

The smooth feel of the ring of keys in his
left hand was as familiar to him as the flashlight in his right. He
made to unlock the door but, as he turned the handle, his ears
caught a light sound. From across the room, he heard the small
clink of something small, a binder clip perhaps, or a pen,
skittering across the granite floor. Back going rigid, Harris
froze, flashlight poised over the basement door’s keyhole. He
didn’t dare to breathe as he spun to face the noise.

There was nothing against the wall but a
podium devoted to paintings of the Trojan War. Even as he swung the
flashlight back and forth across the display, nothing appeared to
account for what he’d heard. And so, as anyone in such a situation
would, he passed it off as a fluke and went back to work. Hands
shaking, Harris slipped through the open doorway as quickly as he
could and bounded down the metal staircase toward the concrete
floor below.

Behind him, veiled by the dark, a much
smaller figure, clad entirely in black, slid purposefully through
the doorway, keeping his arms crossed over his chest so the door
slid easily back into place. Black leather gloves shoved the broken
clip he’d dropped on his way into the building back into his
pocket.

The generator was in the furthermost corner
of the room where the wires connecting it to the building’s main
box were bolted to the wall. Wiping the accumulating drops of sweat
from his forehead with the back of his hand, Harris passed the
boiler to find the generator, gasping with the sudden change in
temperature. His loud, clumsy footsteps reverberated through the
cave-like enclosure like a sad metronome, or a quickening reminder
of his impending demise. The fire raging in the boiler cast a red
glow over the room, but that was its only source of light. Harris’s
black shadow stretched out from toe to ceiling, covering every inch
of the floor before him in a shroud of darkness.

The boiler growled with a flicker of the
vengeful flames within, spitting out a small surge of glowing
embers onto the concrete floor. As Harris approached the generator,
everything seemed normal, the large black square, undisturbed. The
building’s central power box screwed into the wall seemed untouched
as well. The thick black cords connecting the box to the generator
were hidden mostly by the shadow of the machine, but one cord was
pushed unceremoniously away from the metal strip bolting it to the
wall. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Harris knelt to its height
and trained his flashlight onto the offending wire.

It was cut through.

“What the hell?” he muttered. He rolled the
wire between his thumb and forefinger thoughtfully before a
movement on the floor caught his attention. His large figure had
cast a much larger shadow onto the floor, but while he was kneeling
to investigate the generator, the light from the fire was able to
illuminate the room much further. His shadow separated, without
cause from him, into another being, moving slowly and silently
around the room. The unmistakable sound of an exhale coiled
Harris’s muscles to spring. He adjusted his grip on the flashlight
as he rose slowly to his feet, skin prickling with the promise of
looming danger.

Giving no warning, the guard spun around,
flashlight outstretched so it would give a satisfying crack against
the intruder’s head upon impact.

That satisfaction never came, for when
Harris’s eyes eventually adjusted to the quick movements, he
realized that the head of the flashlight had fit itself into the
gloved palm of the phantom’s hand instead of his masked temple. His
brain didn’t get the message fast enough to respond as his opponent
followed this retaliation with a blow to the neck. The tips of his
fingers shot out like a snake, connecting harshly with Harris’s
windpipe, doubling him over. Ignoring the hoarse gurgle of protest
directed at him, the intruder placed his hands on Harris’s lowered
shoulders and forced his knee into the older man’s gut with a force
that knocked him to the concrete ground and sent his hat flying
across the room.

Spitting blood through his teeth, Harris let
his body slump flat against the ground. His eyes opened with some
difficulty and found his much smaller opponent standing mockingly
above him, pulling the black ski mask off his head. The face that
emerged, however, was not a man’s, but a petite woman’s with lank,
strawberry-blonde hair and light blue eyes; she stared down at him
with a taunting smile fixed across her face.

She cracked her knuckles once in reminder of
his crushing loss and shook her head. “I was truly wishing for a
worthier adversary, Mr. Harris. You have disappointed me greatly,”
she murmured smoothly, her voice obviously influenced by a thick,
Czech accent.

She crossed the room leisurely to retrieve
his hat and fixed it onto her head. “It looks better on me, I
think,” she concluded, outwardly blasé. He seemed to be down for
the count, but she’d been tricked by opponents into a false sense
of security before. His accusing eyes had no effect on her, she’d
been doing this far too long to feel anything. “Do not feel bad,
Mr. Harris, you would not be the first man to be bested by me, and
you will most certainly not be the last. It is what I do.”

“W—?” Harris gasped, unable to move, or
speak.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with Mr.
Harris,” she promised, striding back to him with the brim of his
cap pinched between her fingers.

He tried to question her again, but all he
could emit was a breathy moan of pain.

“Goodnight, Mr. Harris,” she sighed in
contentment, stomping on his cheek, eliciting a sharp crack as his
head snapped to the side and his body went slack. The uneven gasps
of breath ended.

The mysterious woman circled her prey twice,
admiring her work. She pushed the hair that had fallen in her face
back behind her ear flirtatiously as she sensed another presence in
the room, watching her. “How long have you been watching?” she
grinned, biting her lip. She was an attractive woman, as she well
knew, and she used it to her advantage, even when her job didn’t
necessarily call for it. She kept her back to the visitor, knowing
he would speak of his own volition soon enough.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to
play with your food?” the weary voice questioned with a deep
sigh.

“I am afraid my mother did not feel any need
to remind me of such trivial things. However this hardly
constitutes your metaphor. I am many things, Kierlan, but a
cannibal does not make the list,” she insisted, eyebrows knit
together.

“Ugh,” he replied. “Let’s just get the book
and go. If I have to deal with anymore of your…interesting
mannerisms tonight, I’ll put a bullet in my head.”

“And then where would we be?” she laughed.
“Silly boy, there is no book, only a page.”

Her partner merely shook his head in
disappointment. He didn’t care if it was an entire library, so long
as he got paid and could go home. “Put on your mask, Natalia,
someone might see you,” he ordered.

“No one who will live to tell about it,” she
chuckled. “Perhaps you should take care of the other guard. We will
need his uniform to leave the building.”

“What happened to the plan, Natalia?” he
snapped, knowing immediately what had happened and wondering
increasingly why he’d agreed to work with someone so incompetent.
Well, he amended reflexively, not completely incompetent.

Natalia Petrov was the best assassin just as
he was the best thief to accomplish this job, and, for the most
part, she did the job better than he could have hoped, aside from
nearly falling into the museum when she broke the clip to her
harness. Her only flaw was theatrics. A lifetime of cold killing
had taken away every ounce of the humanity born to all men and
women, leaving her cruel and frigid. She enjoyed the hunt. She
enjoyed the death. She enjoyed the mockery.