Chapter 28

Driving into the city had gone about the same way as you would expect driving into the blasted, destroyed, rubble-reduced ruins of a city filled with enemy soldiers to go. It was slow going. For every street we had found that was technically navigable, we had passed more than a dozen that weren’t. On a few separate occasions, we’d been forced to reverse down the section we had come after finding a road blocked with rubble, cratered beyond use, or obstructed by the burned-out shell of a Russian tank.

Technically, it would have been easier and quicker to walk, but considering the number of landmines we drove over, the amount of bullets that pinged off the windshield, and the amount of soldiers on both sides who hadn’t gotten the message that we were allowed to be there, it was certainly safer to stay in the car.

To be fair, the shield I had put around the car was strong enough for an extended stay inside the core of the sun. No amount of RPG rockets, armor-piercing rounds, or hastily thrown grenades were even going to scratch the paintwork, but they still made Bob feel uneasy.

The rest of our escorts were still acting like this was just another day at the office.

The routine became painfully predictable, and it was the “not pretty” part of the plan that had gotten us here. Col. Toptonov had followed his orders to the letter and had halted the artillery bombardment of the city; he had also contacted as many of the local ground forces as possible to tell them that we would be in the area, too. Those people let us pass with little more than a curious glance. It was the people who didn’t have radios that were the problem. Judging from the sheer number of them, it was safe to say that the Russian army was having a severe radio communication problem.

Soldiers would pop their heads out from upper floor windows, see us coming, and - with no information to the contrary - would assume we were hostile and open up on us. After the two hundredth time, I gave up counting how many minds I had infiltrated to convince our attackers that we were friendly. In the end, I got sick of it and just pulsed out a single blanket statement that all human minds would be affected by. The SUV and the people inside it were not to be attacked.

Yes, it was a risk. There was a distinct possibility that the same message being used to ease our passage was also alerting any local Inquisitors or Evos to our location as well. We were still operating on the assumption that those sorts of powers could be tracked. But that had to be measured against the fact that all of the gunfire, explosions, and calls to arms were very quickly being silenced in a very un-combat-like manner. That on its own would have been more than enough to pique the interest of the people able to track us, not to mention that doing hundreds of those small manipulations had to be no different than a single large one.

Either way, the rest of our journey was ... well, it wasn’t really any different. We were still trying to drive around shell holes and the crumbled remains of once-proud buildings; we were just doing it without being shot at.

I clamped down hard on the growl in my stomach. Fiona was still with Charlotte and was very much under suspicion. Jerry was no different, but at least he was out of the fight for a short time. Still, my suspicion wasn’t letting me see his fairly explainable observation as anything other than an attempt to lure me into another trap.

“Tell you what, see what you can find out about his contact. Olena, he said her name was. We will use whatever you find when I get back.” I was trying to stay calm, but Jerry was saying all the right things. It was the perfect way to lure me into a trap if he really was against me or a genuinely good reason to go looking for Uri if he wasn’t, and there was simply no way to tell which one was true. Guilt by association was a shitty reason to mark someone for death at the best of times, and it was entirely possible for him to be as innocent as Uri was guilty. Or at least that was what the rational part of my mind was saying. The more instinctive part of me was just itching to get my hands on him and find out the truth ... through blood, if necessary

“Will do, but I can be in Av ... at the town in two hours if you need me. Don’t hesitate to ask if you do.”

“Got it. I will see you soon.”

If there was ever a reason to completely disregard what the bible says, it is when it discusses the subject of Hell. You see, the threat of some meta-physical place where it’s always burning, and you are subjected to some form of torture by a sadistic former angel with long horns and wearing too much blush only really works when there is no real-world equivalent. I would challenge anyone to take a look around the genuine, non-fictional hellscape of a city under siege and not see the gall in saying that it could get worse if you don’t behave.

There was nothing left. Just pure desolation. Shattered lives that once inhabited the crumbling buildings were now piles of rubble and death in the street. Wide open boulevards and tree-lined plazas were now almost completely filled in with broken masonry and pot-marked by still-burning shell holes. The burned or burning shells of people’s cars lined the streets, the smell of smoke, cordite, and brick dust hung in the air, and the rattle of gunfire and the odd explosion echoed off the shells of buildings, the only things still standing. Streetlights lay decapitated across the street. More than a few of them had clearly been mowed over by the tanks and armored vehicles whose remains we had passed on the way in. Baggage, suitcases, people’s lives hastily packed away lay abandoned on the sidewalk, and clothing of every description tumbled along the ground in the soft, calm, chilling breeze. A little girl’s white shoe lay alone in the middle of the street. Blood stains were everywhere.

A dog, once a beloved family bet, lay crushed beneath a slab of concrete. Its entrails spilling out of its stomach and its name tag hanging loosely against its lifeless neck... “Ivan”

Everything smelled of death.

Death and cordite.

The metallic scent of blood and the acrid taste of burning plastics.

Satan could take some serious lessons in what hell really looked like with just an hour-long stroll around here with a notepad and a strong stomach because, compared to this, the inferno he reigned over would seem like a summer camp.

It took hours to find the place where the meeting was supposed to take place. A journey that could have been made on foot in about forty-five minutes was endlessly delayed by one blocked thoroughfare after another. But in that time, I finally released my block on the rest of our escort. They were able to feel suspicion and question the mission and their surroundings as well as anybody else was, although they were still both oblivious and uninterested in how, exactly, we had managed to get into the city at all. I left that part vague in their minds, and they didn’t question it. We were here, and we had a mission to carry out.

A collective sigh of relief was released by all of them when I passed on the good news about Henry, but the relief of stress was short-lived. “We’re here,” Gabriel announced, seemingly unfazed by the dozens of landmines he had driven over, each of them usually more than capable of turning our SUV into a fiery wreckage and tossing it effortlessly into the air, killing us all in the blink of an eye. The question of how we could possibly still be alive was one that his mind was simply incapable of asking.

I had been so preoccupied with my thoughts about Jerry that I hadn’t really been paying attention to how close we were getting. Not that I would have been able to tell anyway. One devastated street lined with the ruins of obliterated buildings started to look like any other after a few hours of it.

“Where are we meeting her?” I asked, peering out of the front windscreen.

“We aren’t meeting her at all. You are.” Bob answered, his own gaze looking up at the towering remains of what used to be a highrise. “Turns out that this contact is well aware of Evos and Inquisitors and is also under the impression that we are still at war. We have been told to wait with the vehicle if possible, or on the ground floor of the hotel if it’s too risky to be out in the open, while you go up and meet her alone.”

“It is definitely too risky,” Jakob added, his tone making it clear that this was in no way a recommendation.

“Okay...” I nodded, my eyes sweeping the carnage around us. “ ... and which building is ... was ... the hotel?”

“That one, I think,” Bob answered after a few moments of silence, all of us looking out at the buildings and all of the buildings stubbornly refusing to look like anything other than precariously standing walls and dubiously suspended floors.

I squinted at it. “How can you tell?”

“It’s the only one with more than three floors still intact,” he answered with a shrug. “And it has ‘Hotel’ written on it.”

“Does it? Where?”

“There, on the south wall.”

“I can’t see the south wall.”

“I guess that would be why you missed it, then.”

I rolled my eyes with something approaching a chuckle and took a deep breath. “Okay, gentlemen, game time?”

“Game time,” Jakob nodded before directing his orders to his men. “Dismount, maintain defensive postures, check for snipers. Stay low, stay quiet, and move to cover!”

The men of our escort had barked out their affirmatives, opened their doors, and clambered out in the same amount of time it took me to take off my seat belt and ready my weapon. I hopped out, too, as Antoni flicked the seat folding release to let Bob and Jakob out of the back; I joined the rest of the men in dropping to a crouch and scanning the upper floors of the buildings around us for any signs of hostile soldiers.

I nudged my knee against something. That something moved. I looked down and found myself staring at a severed hand.

“Fuck me!” I sighed quietly to myself, the full weight of where I - a damned 20-year-old kid - was currently kneeling.

“Move to cover!” Jakob’s order snapped me away from the gruesome distraction, and I looked up in time to watch the rest of the men - Bob bringing up the rear - Roadie rushing toward the ground floor of the hotel.

Get your fucking head in the game, Pete!

I shook myself off and ran after them. I was distracted. I knew I was distracted. My mind was pulling itself in a hundred different directions at once. Uri was in the city somewhere, Jesus; he could have been within earshot of me right now, and I wouldn’t know it. Jerry may have been out of play for the time being, but Fiona - no less under suspicion - was currently “keeping an eye” on Charlotte and Evie. I had no way of warning either of them. My link to the computer was haphazard at best. Bob was still more than a little preoccupied with the whereabouts and welfare of his missing people, and that coiling anger in my chest, that machiavellian urge to just fucking kill something, wasn’t shutting the hell up ... I needed to concentrate, and I was failing miserably.

But somewhere in this building was a woman who may hold some answers. Both for me and for Bob, and yet, I couldn’t sense her. I could hear her footprints, I could hear her breathing. I knew she was there, a few dozen meters above my head, but I couldn’t see her mind.

It wasn’t a void like an Inquisitor.

It wasn’t a muted presence like an Evo.

It was almost exactly like the mind of Reinard Montreux, the High-Inquisitor who had attacked the party, just invisible. Holy shit, could this contact be a member of Inquisitor Royalty? How the hell had Isabelle not known about that when she had set up the meeting? No wonder the contact hadn’t wanted other Inquisitors to see her. They would have recognized her immediately ... right?

But wait ... if the woman was a High Inquisitor, how the hell did she end up being a contact of Uri’s?

I groaned loudly to myself as the answer dropped into place as well. If Uri was working with the Rogue Inquisitors, then this wouldn’t be a royal associated with the Real Inquisition. This would be one of the bad guys!

I felt my hands grasp a little tighter around the grip of my rifle, my eyes locked on the invisible spot on the ceiling where the sound of impatiently pacing footsteps was coming from.

Someone was about to die!

“Jakob!” I barked over the comms to the Polish man checking the perimeter on the other side of the room.

“Receiving,” his voice whispered back.

“I need a no-bullshit assessment here. What do you make of our current position?”

There was a pause as he stopped what he was doing, looked slowly around the room, and then out onto the street, and then back to me. “It’s less than ideal, Pete. I mean, it could be worse, but it could be a whole lot better ... Why do you ... wait, what’s wrong?”

“Something isn’t adding up.”

Jakob sighed again and whispered something to Hans, both of them taking a longer, slower, much more careful look around before they whispered amongst themselves again, and Jakob came back on the comms. “If this were another ambush, this would be a good place for it. There is not much in the way of cover, and there is no real means of escape. What are you thinking?”

“That this is another ambush.”

“Shit! Okay, pull out?” he asked

“No, I need this information. It is worth the risk.” I answered back, knowing I could probably take a High Inquisitor alone, and there was nothing a normal human could do to hurt me, even if Jakob didn’t know that part. A quick scan of the area showed that there were literally hundreds of men in every direction. The question was, were they in league with the Rogue upstairs or just normal soldiers who happened to be in the area? Short of delving into every one of their thoughts, I had no way of knowing. “Is there another position close by that you would consider a better option?”

“Yes, actually,” came the reply. “Hans thinks the second or third floor of the building across the street would be a much better option. We still wouldn’t have much means of escape, but we would be nowhere near as exposed. It would also give us much better sight lines. Besides, any escape would involve the use of the SUV, and that is going to be the first thing they hit. Shall we reallocate over there?”

“Do it,” I said simply. “And let’s keep comms open; if you see anyone approaching the building, let me know.”

He didn’t answer. He just nodded his head, tapped Hans on the shoulder, who, in turn, tapped Gabriel, and all the way down the line to Bob, and the men started to cautiously and carefully make their way out of what must have once been a very lavish hotel lobby, and over to the building across the street.

I watched them do so as stoically as I was able.

That coiling, burning anger was starting to unleash itself. If Faye was right, if the traumas of my past had separated my rage from the rest of my psyche, then it was unspeakably close to being released again, with all the devastating force that my anger had proved itself capable of so many times already.

Oh yes, someone was going to fucking die!

I waited until my friends were out of sight before I moved. Slinging my rifle over my shoulder - I was more dangerous without it - and starting to feed that ball of vengeful power into my palms. I turned and stalked toward the stairs.

Four stories, eight flights of stairs, every step leading me higher and closer to the moment I seemed to know would change everything. This woman, being a rogue royal, changed everything. For a start, Uri wouldn’t want her silenced if he was working with her, but at the same time, those doubts were already starting to tick at the back of my mind, the little nagging questions that stopped me from just dropping what was left of this building on her head and being done with it. Why had she agreed to meet me, apparently knowing that I was an Evo? How could that possibly make sense? Why was she helping the partisans against what could only be a concerted effort by the rogues to influence events in Ukraine? Was she breaking ranks and re-aligning her loyalties with the real Inquisition? But if Uri knew that, why was he working with her? Maybe he wasn’t; if she had gone rogue from the rogues, then maybe he really was here to silence her. But if she was a royal, the highest of high inquisitors, then it was unlikely that Uri, on his own, would have much of a chance of doing anything to her. But then the whole idea that we were both here to “meet” the same contact was a pretty big assumption on my part.

By the time I was passing the third floor, the questions had started to temper the ball of fury that was tingling against my palm. Every step brought a new question, and not a single one was providing answers. I was doing it again. I had made this mistake enough times to recognize the pattern now; I was making assumptions, and I was basing my whole approach on what I thought to be true. I needed information, I needed answers, yet that burning ball of anger in the pit of my stomach, that yawning void that had once been filled by my naivety and my heart, was aching to strike back at the people who had struck at me, who had hurt me, who had stolen the few chances of real happiness from my life, was forcing me blindly forward. I would have been happy, I would have stuck to my little corner of the world, I would have left the Inquisition alone - rogue or otherwise - and I would have been happy with Faye, with Becky, with Jimmy, with my life. I never had any desire for power, nor really a massive desire for wealth; I had no wish to control the lives of others. I was a threat to nobody.

Yet, even as those thoughts raced through my mind, I had to admit that I didn’t even know if I had been the target at all. The attack on the party that started all of this still didn’t have a clear motive. Nobody really knew I was going to be there, so how could it have been targeting me? I had deduced that it must have been targeting Uri, but how could that be the case if he was working for the rogues? He would have been the one who instigated the attack, but why? Why that party? Why that night?

Why? Why? Why?

I was blind. I was fumbling around in the dark, and not only did I not have any answers, I wasn’t even sure if I was asking the right questions. I was the sightless man, stumbling through a maze, given a choice - a question - at every new junction, only for that chosen path to lead to more junctions, more choices, and more questions, and the whole time being unsure if I was trying to find the exit of the maze, or if I should be trying to find the treasure at its center. Not even knowing if either one - the exit or the center - even existed.

I clenched my fist and snuffed out the balls of pulsing, furious, hungry power in my palm and stopped climbing the stairs. I took a long, deep breath.

Alright, let’s examine what I ‘know’...

One floor above me was a woman. A woman who had agreed to meet me, knowing that I was an Evo. There were no other people, no Inquisitor voids, no muted presences of blocking Evos anywhere else in the building, and there were no other footprints or sounds of other people even breathing up there; she was alone. Yes, sure, an ambush could come from outside, but there were no human thoughts directly focused on me either, and if I was the target of an ambush, there really should be some. If they weren’t humans, then that bubble of ... well, nothingness that I had felt immediately before the attack on the party wasn’t present either. That woman was responsible for passing information about war crimes on to the Partisans and had been in contact with Isabelle’s section of the real Inquisition to allow this meeting to even take place. Just because I couldn’t understand her reasons for not wanting Bob, or other forces loyal to Isabelle to be with me for this meeting, that didn’t mean that there weren’t any.

That was about it.

That was as far as my currently verifiable information went.

That, taken on its own, at least suggested that she wasn’t hostile. She may not have been friendly, but she certainly wasn’t acting like a woman who should be considered an enemy, either.

Everything else, every assumption, every thought, and a considerable amount of the questions rattling around my head were being fuelled by my own simmering anger. I wanted revenge, I wanted justice, I wanted the people responsible for the pain they had caused to pay for it. The thought that all these things had happened, all this death, and the people responsible for it all could just go back to their lives without consequence was simply too much. I couldn’t allow it; I wouldn’t allow it. That was not the way that the world was supposed to work. But therein also laid the problem. I wanted the people responsible to suffer. Hurting innocents to get me to them would make me no better than the people who did all of this

“Don’t lose yourself to this...” Charlotte’s words echoed through my mind, and I felt the ghost-like fingers of Faye’s hand lace into mine.

I wasn’t alone. Even now, even at the darkest my mind had ever been, I wasn’t alone. Perhaps for the first time in my life. I needed to be a better person; I needed to be the man that Faye and Charlotte could still love after all this was over. I needed to honor Becky’s memory, not defile it with innocent blood spilled in her name.

I needed to be me again.

I closed my eyes, took another deep, calming breath, and started to climb again.

The door - I assume there had once been a door - had long gone. The charred remains of its frame were all that remained in the concrete archway in which it probably once sat. The building had apparently once been a hotel, so I imagine you can picture those long, warmly decorated upper-floor hallways leading to the guest rooms that we have all seen a few times. This wasn’t like that.

The stairs had been blasted out of existence as they passed the fourth floor. Two of the building’s outer walls were still standing - or at least the corner at which they joined was - and had somehow managed to keep the stairs propped up this high, but supporting them any higher, or any of the upper floors for that matter, was just too much for them in their condition. But from this position, it was clear that the rest of the building had been hammered. This small corner of it was basically all that survived. The hallway ended abruptly about 30 feet further along from where I was standing, disappearing into a pile of rubble several stories beneath me where the rest of the hotel now rested. Scorch marks from the fire that must have swept through this place had left the concrete of the building blackened and sooted. That, and the archway where a door once lived, was all that remained of this floor of the hotel.

I wasn’t entirely sure of my orientation, but I think I was at the southwest corner. The eastern wall, the one on the other side of the room where I was supposed to meet this woman, was showing the telltale signs of battle. Most of the rest of the south wall was the same. It looked like some enormous creature had descended from the heavens to take huge, violent bites out of it, leaving only jagged crenellations jutting at various heights along its length like sharp, crooked, concrete teeth, rotted by the twisted remains of its reinforcing rebar that jutted out at obscene angles. Some of them stood another few stories above us; other parts looked like they ended a few levels below this floor; all of it was interspersed with shell holes that had gouged yawning voids in what had once been a proud outer edifice. The rest of it had just collapsed out into the street. The sound of masonry crumbling and falling away to the street or the rubble pile below was the only sound that rose above the soft wind.

The northern wall was just gone.

Most of the rest of the hotel had seemingly gone with it.

There was probably a pretty good metaphor in there about how my own life, like the hotel, had been blasted to pieces and was barely holding together, not even able to be viewed outside of the context of the war surrounding it anymore. But I was too focused on controlling my own breathing and the anger that wanted to bubble up with it to pay attention.

The woman was still pacing.

I rolled my neck, took another deep breath, swallowed down hard on that ball of vengeful rage that seemed to be latching onto the questions and the doubt in my mind as an excuse to unleash itself ... and stepped through the archway.

As soon as I walked into the room, I froze.

The aura, that backdrop of light that seemed to surround every single Inquisitor that I had ever seen - from the men who attacked the party and the people in the office in Malaga, from Toussant and his men to Bob, from Princess Isabelle to Reinard Montreaux - all of them had one. The more powerful they were, the brighter their aura. Isabelle and Montreaux, both being royals, were downright blinding. And just like the woman pacing around the room, her back toward me as I entered, their minds were simply invisible.

Except this woman didn’t have an Aura

At all.

There was nothing. Just a woman in Khaki-colored pants, a long dark combat jacket with camouflage print, and one of those wooly Sysow hats; you know, the ones like the Russians all wore that had long, dog-ear-like flaps that hung down over the ears and looked not only amazingly warm in the bleak Ukrainian winter but also ridiculously comfortable. I squinted at her. She was not armed, at least not on her person, but there was a heavy-duty and well-worn waxed leather backpack propped up against one of the walls. Her hair was tied up and tucked under her hat, and she seemed to be glancing nervously out across the city over the top of a chest-high section of broken wall through a set of piercing blue eyes.

Under normal circumstances, I would be more than a little intrigued by the fact that her mind, according to my senses, simply wasn’t there; this was the sort of thing that had made me so interested in Evie but a thousand times more acute. Yet, given the circumstances of our meeting and everything else happening around us, my suspicion was boiling over to the extent that it was taking a significant amount of self-control simply not to kill her there and then, just to be on the safe side.