Courageous Read online

“What? I’ve never seen you before today. Why do you want to kill me?”

  “You killed Rachna Dabash.” His voice had gone icy cold.

  Rachna Dabash was an inquisitor that I’d met shortly after Ulysses Pendleton escaped Ashgate Penitentiary. Pendleton had kidnapped Dabash and transformed her into a shadow creature. Of course, no one knew that until after I’d stabbed the shadow creature to death with my switchblade, and she reverted back to human form.

  “Look, Sojin, I’m sorry about that. Dabash’s death was a terrible accident. I never meant to—”

  “I am not wanting your apologies! I hated that woman. I wanted to kill her myself.” Sojin’s face twisted in an expression of pure loathing. “She was always just a little better than I was.” He held up his thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “One point higher on the test scores. One second faster in the foot races. One percent more efficient with arcane energy. She took a position in the Inquisitors that should have been mine.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is too bad. I liked Dabash. If you’d been a bit faster or more efficient, I would have killed you instead.”

  “I would not have allowed myself to be taken by one such as you,” Sojin spat. His eyes went distant as he continued. “I had everything planned out. I would meet her in one of the archives in Dublin, just one floor above the prison level. There is a forgotten shaft there that connects directly with the arcane well that powers the building. I would overpower her and then throw her down the shaft. Her body would be completely destroyed, and the arcane energy consuming her soul would make it impossible for the diviners to determine what happened to her. She was due to return to Dublin in just a week when you killed her, stealing my greatest joy.”

  He flashed me a wicked grin. “But Treggen, he is giving me a second chance. If I help him, he will give me Dabash’s soul to torment for all eternity.”

  “Do you really expect him to keep his word?”

  “Treggen has proved himself an honorable man to me. He has kept his word so far, giving me the tools I need, like my wand.” He produced my switchblade from his jacket. “Though I think this will make a better tool for future assassinations. I scanned it while you slept. Am I correct in believing this is Olympian steel?”

  “No,” I said. “I found that in a box of Cracker Jack.”

  Sojin threw back his head and laughed, way harder than was warranted by my lame attempt at humor. “Treggen’s files were right. You are completely full of the bad humor. While I cannot kill you, as I will not take that from Treggen, I will be taking much pleasure in watching your demise.”

  “And that will be when?” I asked.

  “As soon as Treggen returns,” Sojin replied. “I have alerted him to your presence, and he is confident that these wards will keep you in place until he returns.”

  I got to my feet, took a few steps toward the glass, and smiled the coldest, craziest smile I could manage. “Let me tell you something, Sojin,” I said. “I escaped from Hell itself, from the darkest part of the Pit where guys like you are little more than chew toys to monstrosities that would turn your hair white. Do you really think that some wards and concrete are going to stop me? When I get out of here—not if, when—I am going to find you. And when I do, you will regret the day you ever threw in with Treggen.”

  As I’d been speaking, the smile had faded from Sojin’s face, and he took an involuntary step back. He swallowed, then gave himself a shake and laughed again, a bit higher this time. “You are overconfident to the point of having the delusions of grandeur. Enjoy your last few hours, Corinthos.” He folded my knife, tucked it into his pocket, and walked back down the hall.

  I wanted to pound the glass in frustration, but didn’t want to deal with another blast from the repulsion runes. I put my head in my hands, trying to think.

  “Finally. I thought he’d never leave,” said a voice from across the hall.

  My head snapped up. “Gears!”

  The gremlin was standing at the door of his own cell, barely eighteen inches tall, looking more like an out-of-place Jim Henson creation than anything else. His blue coveralls sporting a few gremlin-hand-shaped grease stains, and he flashed me a sharp-toothed grin. “Hi, Vinnie. Why is it the bad guys always talk so much?” His ears flopped a bit as he shook his head. “You’d think they’d realize that if they just killed the good guys instead of gloating, they’d win more.” Gears had his three-fingered hand pressed against the glass of his cell as he spoke, and his yellow eyes suddenly became filled with purple static. “I mean, the Evil Overlord List has been on the internet for what, twenty, twenty-five years now? And still they do stuff like this? And Sojin forgot to reactivate the silence wards on your cell? That’s just sloppy.”

  Before I could reply to that, Gears tipped his head to one side, and the static brightened in his eyes as he said, “Nope, hang on, shift that last bit to the left. There you go.” His door popped open, and his eyes returned to normal. “Sorry about that, Vinnie. I had to direct the cybernetic bacteria to eat away a bit of the wards on my cell. I’ll get yours next.” He scurried across the hall and placed his hands on the glass.

  “Gears, Jesus, there have to be security cameras down here. Get out and go find Jake or Mrs. Rita.”

  Gears looked at me incredulously. “Do you really think I’d pull a stunt like this if I didn’t have the cameras covered, Vinnie? Please. My cyberium have already altered the video feeds.”

  “Cyberium?”

  “Saying ‘cybernetic bacteria’ over and over again gets a bit tedious, you know? Besides, cyberium just sounds cool.” He put up a finger. “And I know, technically, it should be “cyberia,” plural, but then it sounds like I’m talking about a place in Russia.”

  Yesterday, Gears had been injected with cybernetic bacteria that was supposed to convert his genome into an alien life form. Unfortunately for the bacteria, Gears’s system is designed to understand and control technology, and he wound up taking them over instead. From what I was seeing now, it looked like the bacteria gave him more powers than we’d initially thought.

  A line of blue light raced across the surface of the glass. “Wards are down,” he said and opened my door.

  “How do we get out of here?” I asked.

  “There was a spot in the basement where the enchanters had a lot of trouble establishing extradimensional wards. I think you might be able to create a portal there. But first, we need to get Jake and Cynthia. They’re down here. Come on.” We hurried a few cells down and found Jake and Cynthia in cells on opposite sides of the hall.

  Jake was lying face down on the floor, his arms akimbo. The big man’s clothes were shredded and covered with scorch marks, and the skin on the back of his hands looked like it had suffered third-degree burns. Jake’s actually a construct, an amazingly lifelike golem created by Leonardo da Vinci. Powered by an alchemical vapor called the Breath of Life, I’d seen Jake go toe to toe with some of the meanest, baddest creatures out there, and I knew it took a lot to take him down. Sojin and the others were playing for keeps. All the more reason to get out of here as fast as possible.

  I took a quick look at the security panel next to the door. The wards surrounding his cell were different from the ones on mine; no doubt, Treggen’s pals had customized the security features of each cell for its occupant. I placed my hand against the door and Opened it. Gears scrambled in and gently turned Jake’s head, trying to get the big man to wake up.

  “Jake, Jake, you in there? Come on, big fella, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Jacob has not moved for over nineteen hours,” came Cynthia’s voice. I turned to see the Electrical Woman in the cell across the hall, sitting with her back to the wall, her glowing blue eyes distant. Dressed in a blue sweat suit, the parts of Cynthia’s silvery skin that were exposed gleamed under the florescent light. “The a
gents struck him with cattle prods when he tried to resist them. I killed two of their number, but they threatened to kill Jake if I didn’t stop.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Physically, I am well, Vincent Corinthos. In other matters…” She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

  “Hang in there, Cynthia,” I said. “I’ll have you out of there in no time.” I pressed my hands against her cell door, which popped open. Cynthia wearily got to her feet and came forward. Was it my imagination, or was she a few inches shorter than the last time I’d seen her? When I’d left Cynthia with Psyke, she’d been about my height, but now, the top of her head just reached the tip of my nose. I wondered what the goddess of the soul had done to her, but now wasn’t the time for those sorts of questions. Cynthia brushed past me and went to Jake, easily hefting the big man over her shoulder, despite the fact that Jake must’ve outweighed her by a hundred pounds.

  “C’mon,” Gears said, his eyes filling with silver static. “I’m watching the monitors, and no one’s in the halls ahead.”

  “Are you jacked into the security systems, too?” I asked as we started running down the hall. Cynthia seemed unencumbered by Jake’s bulk, and actually had to slow down to let Gears and me catch up.

  “Yeah,” Gears replied. “I’m preemptively disabling alarms as needed. It’s pretty cool, Vinnie. The cyberium let me connect directly to the building’s Wi-Fi. If Billy were still operational, I could drive him remotely just by thinking about it.” The gremlin’s face darkened. “Unfortunately, that Elsa chick destroyed Billy.”

  “Pretty sure her name was Eva, Gears.”

  “Pff. Eva, Elsa, it doesn’t matter. What matters is now, I’ll never get to use Billy to cosplay and meet Jewel Staite.”

  “Focus, Gears,” I said as we came up on a locked door, which I Opened. One of the perks of my having the domain of doors is that if I Open something connected to a security system, that system doesn’t register that the door was opened. Between that and whatever Gearstripper was doing, our captors wouldn’t have any idea that we weren’t where they’d left us.

  We pushed through the door and down a hallway where the smell of fresh industrial carpet was so strong that my nose wrinkled. “Go through the second door on the right,” Gears said. We got to said door, and all pushed through into a completely dark and rather cramped janitor’s closet. The only light came from Cynthia’s glowing blue eyes, and I reflexively tried to turn on my kobold night vision, which of course did nothing as I’m no longer a god. Since I hadn’t had the kobolds as followers for very long, I didn’t feel the gaping hole in my chest like when I’d lost the Urisk, but there was still a sense of loss. Pushing the thought aside, I asked, “All right, Gears, now what?”

  Scratching and scuffing sounds at my feet told me that Gears was feeling around for something. After about ten seconds, he said, “Something’s not right. I think there’s a light switch on the wall to your left.”

  I fumbled in the dark and hit the switch, the forty-watt bulb dazzling.

  “Rats,” Gears said. “They’ve poured concrete over the hatch.”

  “What?”

  “There was a hatch we found that led down to another floor,” Gears explained, pointing to a gray patch on the floor. “I figured you’d just touch it and presto, we’d be golden, but it looks like it’s completely sealed off.”

  “Is there another way down?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Allow me,” Cynthia said. There was a moment of jostling as Cynthia gently put Jake down in the corner and then moved to Gears. “Gearstripper, you will want to stand back.” That was all the warning she gave before she dropped to one knee, her right fist raised as if she was about to punch the floor. Instead of a fist, though, a blade made of celestial metal burst from Cynthia’s forearm, and she drove it into the concrete. Squeals of metal and the cracking of the concrete filled our ears as Gearstripper’s eyes suddenly shone with static. No doubt he was just as nervous as I was at all the racket Cynthia was causing, and was checking the video camera feeds to see if anyone else had noticed.

  More chunks of concrete crashed down into the tunnel below us as the Electrical Woman continued her work. After a few seconds, Cynthia had slashed a triangular hole in the floor. Gears climbed up on my shoulders as I eased myself down and into a concrete corridor. As soon as my feet hit the ground, the little gremlin scampered off. Lights snapped on a second later, just as Cynthia dropped through the hole, Jake over her shoulder. The Electrical Woman barely needed to bend her knees as she hit, as if carting around an unconscious security guard was the most normal thing in the world.

  “All right,” Gears said. “Down this corridor. Hurry!” Bundles of wire as thick as my wrist ran along the walls, ripples of light passing through them.

  “What are these things?” I asked, motioning to the wires. “Where are we, Gears?”

  “You remember where you and Megan found the sheepsquatch? We’re a level below that now. We didn’t even know about this floor until last night, but it was already wired and powered, so it was probably another of Woof’s secret stashes.”

  Before it was our HQ, the office had been a restaurant called Woof’s, run by a werewolf named Haley Wofestron. We’d learned her restaurant had a few secret rooms and meat lockers, no doubt so she could sell meals that would’ve been frowned upon by certain regulatory agencies. For example, sheepsquatch meat was forbidden to be served in eateries, and yet Woof had a few sheepsquatch on ice that she’d planned to butcher later and serve up as steaks. Those had thawed, woken up hungry, and Megan and I had to dispatch them before they hurt anyone.

  “So, what was down here?” I asked, as we came up on a steel door.

  “Yeah,” Gears said. “About that. One of the work crews said they found another freezer room. It had thawed out by the time they discovered it, and once they looked inside, they left. I’m guessing they’re the ones who sealed the hatch to this level, but I didn’t know they were going to do that.”

  “Gearstripper,” I said firmly. “What did they find?”

  A roar from down the hallway brought all of us to a stop.

  “A chimera,” Gears said quietly.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Chapter 3

  “Gears, why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  “Sorry, Vinnie, it wasn’t showing up on the video feeds. I thought it was sleeping or something, and if we hurried, we could be gone before it woke up.”

  Chimeras are fun critters, one of those bizarre amalgamations of animals that only a drunken god can come up with. It’s essentially a lion that also has a goat head on its back, and a poisonous snake for a tail. I’d only read about them before, but wasn’t surprised that Woof would’ve had them on her menu. And a random part of my mind couldn’t help but wonder what Woof had planned for this creature. Chimera-kabobs? Cajun chimera chops?

  Any other potential culinary combinations vanished from my mind when the chimera rounded the corner. The thing was nearly as big as a car, and its bulk almost filled the corridor. Covered in shaggy golden fur, the chimera looked like an entry from the Monster Manual come to life. The lion head was framed in a bright red mane, and its yellow eyes glowed with predatory intent. Just over its right shoulder, the black-furred goat head bobbed on a thick, nearly serpentine neck. Fire flickered in the goat’s eyes, and its obsidian horns gleamed in the light of the fluorescents. The emerald snake tail was up, a hooded cobra staring at us, its tongue flicking into the air.

  I had no fire, no telekinesis, no portals, no switchblade. Which meant we were going for the fallback option. “Run!” I called, and the group of us took off down the hall. Cynthia was ahead of me, easily outdistancing both Gears and me despite the fact that she had Jake over her shoulder. Gears scampered up my leg and climbed onto
my shoulder, facing the chimera.

  “It’s about thirty feet back,” Gears whimpered. “Pedal to the metal, Vinnie, go faster.”

  We got to the spot where we’d cut into this level, but there was no way I was getting back up there without a rope or a springboard. Sixty feet ahead, Cynthia blurred around a corner. I’d barely gone three steps when she came tearing back around, unencumbered by Jake’s form. “Get down!” she called, her eyes flaring blue. I dove to the ground and watched as she somersaulted over me, blades extending from her arms. As she landed, she drove one blade through the lion head’s eye.

  Her other blade was raised high, and a yellow brown fluid ran along its edge. Before she could strike, the snake snapped forward, fangs biting down on Cynthia’s wrist. There was a crack, and the cobra hissed and recoiled as its teeth shattered against Cynthia’s metal skin. It seemed that each of the chimera’s heads operated independently of the others, because at the same time the snake tried to bite her, the goat head reared back and belched forth a column of fire. The flames struck Cynthia dead in the chest, but instead of burning her, they sprayed all around her. Celestial metal was fireproof, it seemed.

  The chimera wasn’t immune to its own flames, though, and the fire that rebounded off of Cynthia and back onto the chimera filled the air with oily smoke and the scent of burning fur as the chimera roared in pain. And, unfortunately, a few of the stray wisps of flame caught Gears and me. I rolled to the side, smothering the fire before it had a chance to get purchase.

  Gears rolled to the other side, striking the far wall with a clang. Wait, clang? As the afterimages from the fire faded from my eyes, I saw that Gears’s green skin had changed to silver. I couldn’t help but smile. He’d used his cyberium to go all Colossus. Then the silver melted away and absorbed back into his body. He gave me a quick wink, and I returned my attention to Cynthia and the chimera.