This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Page 3

  Again, nothing happened. The bastard gave her a wolfish smile.

  Sedna sighed with exasperation. “No, Carmine. I meant your other true name.”

  He squinted at her.

  “The password is douchebag.”

  The briefcase exploded, but not with fire. Steam erupted out of a hundred holes concealed in the leather. Carmine, who’d left his face too close to the attaché, released a high-pitched shriek as one of the geysers sprayed him directly in the eyes.

  Within seconds, a thick fog blanketed the penthouse. Simultaneously, Vulcan worked his hacking magic and cut all the lights, plunging the room into near darkness. As a finishing touch, he piped Sedna’s favorite EDM song through the penthouse sound system.

  Sedna let her internal sonar take over from her visual senses. Each thrumming bass note from the subwoofer illuminated the room in her mind, providing a topographical map of her surroundings and the combatants springing to action around it.

  Caught off-guard, the mercenaries were initially slow to react—but not Sedna. She shrugged out of Brigid’s grasp and grabbed the half-full bottle off the table in front of her. She smashed it across Brigid’s temple, and it shattered, showering the woman’s face in a torrent of red wine. The security chief lost consciousness before her body hit the ground.

  One of the other guards charged out of the fog, roaring as he raised his pistol and searched blindly for his quarry.

  Sedna kicked the coffee table hard. It slid across the carpet and slammed into the thug’s shins. Momentum toppled him forward and he smashed face-first through the glass tabletop, where he lay tangled in the wrought iron frame. His semiautomatic landed at Sedna’s feet.

  Sedna’s sonar illuminated the last guard, taking up a defensive stance by the windows. He pointed his gun blindly in her direction but couldn’t see her through the steam.

  Sedna threw her wine goblet into the corner. The guard took the bait and opened fire in the direction of the noise, shattering one of the back windows in the process.

  With him momentarily distracted, she scooped the loose gun off the floor, flanked the guard, and pressed the weapon to the back of his head. “Drop it,” she barked.

  His pistol clattered to the floor.

  “This job pay well?” Sedna asked.

  He raised his hands. “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you even enjoy it?”

  “Not one bit.”

  “Then I’ll give you an hour to leave the state.” Sedna pointed through the mist to Brigid, who was on her hands and knees, weakly struggling to rise to her feet. “I’ll make it two hours if you kick her on the way out.”

  Without another word, the guard took three steps and drilled his foot into Brigid’s ribs. She wheezed and collapsed flat to the floor, this time falling completely still, as her former employee rushed out to the elevators.

  “All clear,” Sedna reported into her transmitter.

  As Vulcan turned the lights back on and the steam dissipated, Sedna made two disconcerting observations:

  Mercury had disappeared from the spot on the floor where he’d been clutching his blistered face.

  The katana that had previously been in the grips of the samurai armor had vanished as well.

  She didn’t have to wait long to find either.

  With a feral scream, Mercury flew through the mist, coming for her with the blade raised. The god might have superhuman speed, but he couldn’t go from standstill to supersonic in the blink of an eye like in the movies. No, he needed space to gather momentum as he accelerated toward his incredible top speed, space that was in short supply within the confines of his penthouse.

  So Sedna pressed a button on her bracelet.

  In the soles of Mercury’s reinforced Oxfords, two powerful electromagnets hummed on. His feet instantly snapped together like a soldier at attention and he squealed as he pitched forward.

  In the end, Sedna simply sidestepped the god as he went down. He yowled as his nose hit the floor first. Blood exploded from his nostrils all over the priceless carpet.

  While he writhed on his belly, Sedna kicked the sword away. “I wanted to make sure you and your quick little legs didn’t scamper away, so I paid your cobbler a visit and made some modifications to your custom shoes. You should really compensate him better. He does good work.”

  Sedna seized Mercury by the ankles and dragged him across the room, while he clawed impotently at the floor. She jerked him to his knees in front of the bookshelf and pressed his face roughly against a stone bust modeled in his own likeness. The sculpture’s eyes glowed green.

  Sedna laughed. “Only the worst kind of narcissist would hide a retinal scanner in a sculpture of himself, so he’d get to look lovingly into his own eyes.”

  Mercury scrunched his eyes shut like a petulant child.

  “Open them,” Sedna snapped, “or I will get that samurai sword and cut them out.”

  Still, the god resisted, so she used her free hand to pry open his eyelids. Green lasers danced over his irises and with a hiss, the bookshelf’s secret door unsealed.

  Sedna pushed the sick millionaire aside. She grabbed the heavy, reinforced door and opened it the rest of the way.

  She had thought she was prepared for what she’d find inside, but faced with the reality of it, she wasn’t prepared at all. The claustrophobic room consisted of a single toilet, a hard cot with no sheets—

  —And a blindfolded teenage girl in a tank top and pajama pants.

  She quivered on the bed, curled into the fetal position. When the light from the open door filtered through her blindfold, she screamed hoarsely into her gag. Poor girl probably thought she was about to get shipped off to gods-know-where.

  “It’s okay,” Sedna assured her in her calmest voice. “I’m a friend. Before I untie you, I need just sixty more seconds to tie up a loose end. Hang tight.”

  Dima Ra sobbed a muffled “thank you” into her gag.

  The reality of seeing a child—a child!—bound in such conditions snapped something inside Sedna. Her own daughter was only a few years older. What if it had been Cairn in this room?

  Sedna found Mercury crawling across the floor like the worm that he was, making for the private elevator up to his helipad.

  Sedna intercepted him, this time seizing him by the roots of his wispy hair and dragging him over to the now-nonexistent window where the guard’s blind gunfire had shattered the glass.

  She held his head out into the open air. As soon as the hard, upward current hit his face, he immediately stopped fighting, afraid that she might let go. An animal-like whimper escaped his lips. “Please,” he pleaded. “I could make you very rich! Name your price.”

  “I don’t want your blood money, you sick bastard,” Sedna seethed into his ear. “I want you to answer me two questions. If I don’t like your answers, I will let you splatter on Washington Street. Understood?”

  Mercury nodded frantically and moaned.

  “First question,” Sedna said. “Who put you up to this?”

  Even faced with death, Mercury let a pause pass before he stuttered, “No one put me up to this. I just thought a senator’s daughter would fetch a pretty—”

  Sedna let him drop an inch further.

  “Wait, wait, I’ll tell you!” Mercury wailed. “I … I don’t know her name. But she wears a suit of crimson armor and—she walks through walls.”

  Sedna’s stomach tightened. A memory had stirred in her, one she’d been trying half her life to forget. The face of a young girl stared sullenly back at her through the tunnel of time.

  Mercury mistook her pause for disbelief. “You have to believe me! The woman materialized right into my bedroom. Stepped out of a black cloud like some sort of wraith. She stuck the tip of her sword in my mouth and said she’d ram it down my throat if I didn’t do as she asked.”

  Sedna couldn’t believe it. She knew of only one person with the ability to teleport like that.

  And as far as she knew, that girl had bee
n presumed dead for almost twenty years.

  Sedna shook off the eerie sensation that had seized her. “And how did she want you to do it? How did you steal Dima out of the senator’s residence in the middle of the night?”

  “We didn’t kidnap—”

  Sedna made to drop him again.

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know shit!” Mercury shouted through spittle-slick teeth. “My men were told to idle in a van on the street outside and—I swear to the gods—that girl walked out through the grass like she was sleepwalking or something. Calmly climbed into the back of the vehicle without so much as a peep. She even fastened her own seatbelt, for fuck sake.”

  It was a weird story. The weirder part was that Sedna almost believed him.

  She pulled Mercury back into the building so that he rested on his knees in front of the gaping void, breathing deeply in relief.

  Sedna glanced back at the panic room, where she could hear the girl crying. “Last question,” she said. “Do you think your feet can outrun gravity?”

  Mercury’s face twisted in confusion before exploding into panic. “Wait—”

  Sedna kicked him in the sternum and reveled in his scream as he tumbled five hundred feet off the side of the skyscraper. The hostile winds outside quickly drowned out his cries.

  After a moment, Sedna touched her earpiece. “Vulcan, you set up the nets on the north side of the building, right?”

  “Yes,” Vulcan replied, then added incredulously, “Did you just confirm that after kicking that creep out the window?”

  Sedna poked her head outside, watching as an ant-sized figure squirmed around in the snare that had captured him forty stories below. “I’m no gambler, but I think one-out-of-four odds were better than he deserved.”

  Vulcan started to chastise her, but Sedna muted him and wandered over to the open door of the panic room. As soon as she’d removed the blindfold and gag and untied the girl’s wrists, Dima threw her arms around Sedna.

  Sedna patted her back. “Everything is going to be okay. You’ll be home before you know it.”

  Dima stiffened. She pulled away, her eyes suddenly stricken with terror. And her next five words chilled Sedna to the bone:

  “Please don’t send me back.”

  Part One

  The Godslayer

  The Ice Lair

  November

  Cairn woke to the sound of glass shattering somewhere in the house. Her first panicked thought was that someone had broken in, but then she distantly heard her father muttering—drunk again, for the countless consecutive night.

  She let her head drop back to the pillow with a heavy sigh, willing her heart rate to slow. The crash had interrupted a dreamless sleep, and dreamless sleeps were a prized commodity these days. It had been more than two months now since the Coast Guard divers retrieved her mother’s lifeless body from the Atlantic, and while the nightmares about it were painful, it was the happy dreams, the ones in which her mother was alive again, that proved most devastating. Sometimes the fantasy bled into reality, a few torturous moments of false hope when Cairn opened her eyes in the morning, her mother’s presence so palpable that she swore she could smell her making pancakes downstairs.

  And then the icy tendrils of truth would wrap around Cairn, squeezing, suffocating, until all that hope was gone, and she was left with nothing but the jagged chasm her mother had left behind.

  Squall stirred at the foot of the bed, where he insisted on nestling in the gap between Cairn’s outstretched feet. Though still technically a kitten, the lynx had already outgrown most adult house cats. He padded onto her chest and began to lick her face.

  Cairn let his rough tongue exfoliate her chin for a minute before she ruffled his tufted ears and grudgingly rose from bed. “Come on, elephant paws,” she said. “Let’s investigate.”

  She found her father passed out in the library with only half his body on the couch, one hard twitch away from completely rolling off onto the floor. Even as the antique grandfather clock bonged three times to announce the ungodly hour, Emile Delacroix snored sonorously with his cheek pressed into the sofa cushion. A wine goblet lay in ruins on the floor. The Malbec it once contained soaked into the fibers of the carpet in an indelible burgundy stain.

  Cairn stepped over the shards, and with a groan, hoisted her father’s unwieldy limbs back onto the sofa. As far as she knew, he hadn’t slept in the queen-size bed he once shared with Ahna since her death. Cairn tucked the quilt around him tightly enough to immobilize him and used the corner to dab at the drool on his cheek. In the past two months, Emile Delacroix had devolved into a shell of his former self. He had taken an early sabbatical from the university and spent his nights raiding the impressive wine cellar he’d furnished with Ahna, as if by drinking every last bottle, he would purge the painful memory of her someday. Even the gray streaks at his temple, which once lent him a debonair allure, had proliferated, aging him ten years in ten weeks.

  Cairn planted a kiss on his forehead and through the haze of sleep, he mumbled, “I love you.” She couldn’t be sure if the words were intended for her or the ghost of her mother.

  She wandered off to find a broom to sweep up the shattered glass. Squall dutifully trailed behind her, but as they passed the dungeon-like door down to the wine cellar, Cairn noticed too late that her father had left it ajar. The mischievous lynx darted through the opening into the off-limits basement before she could slam it shut.

  Cairn silently cursed her father as she descended the creaky stairs into the cool stone cellar and faced the veritable labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling wine racks. This room represented two decades of marriage, hundreds of bottles from every fertile corner of the globe. Portugal, Japan, Chile, New Zealand—every coastline Ahna had traveled for a marine biology expedition, every remote mountain town where Emile had sampled the geological record. They always returned with cases of wine, port, or sake from any vineyard they could find.

  Now their prized cellar had become an accelerant for her father’s downward spiral into alcoholism, and as of two minutes ago, a playground for one mischievous kitten.

  Cairn wandered the aisles, listening for the telltale whisper of Squall’s oversized paws on the dusty stone floor. Finally, she caught the fleeting sight of his tail vanishing around a corner, a plume of dust drifting in his wake. “Now you’re going to need a bath tomorrow,” she called out, “so the joke is on you, my filthy friend.”

  She found the little Arctic tiger playing with a rogue bottle in the basement’s deepest alcove. Squall would swat it and watch, mesmerized, as it spun in lazy circles, before repeating the process all over again. He momentarily froze when he saw Cairn, whiskers drooping with guilt—then carried right along with his game as if she weren’t there.

  As Cairn reached down to retrieve the troublemaker, she noticed a curious thing: Squall’s fur was bristling. His fluffy mane billowed around him as though caught in a light breeze. Sure enough, when she extended her hand, she felt a cool current originating, impossibly, from the cellar wall.

  When Cairn lowered herself to the ground, she found air circulating through a three-foot section where the stone wall met the floor. Then the current turned abruptly vertical, as she traced it up through a nearly invisible gap in the mortar between the stones.

  “What the …?” Cairn whispered.

  Then it hit her.

  She was standing in front of a secret door.

  There was no visible handle, and Cairn slapped the stones surrounding it in vain, hoping to depress a hidden switch.

  In the end, she stepped back and stared at the wall with arms crossed, demoralized. Squall nuzzled against her shins to provide moral support.

  On a whim, Cairn picked up the bottle of Chenin blanc the lynx had been toying with. Her parents had attached tags to each bottle, identifying when and where they’d been acquired. As fate would have it, this particular bottle was dated July 9, 2002—Cairn’s birthday—and the tag listed its place of origin as the Loire Va
lley. She had been born there while her father was on an extended study of the French cave systems.

  Cairn smiled softly. Maybe one day her father would share a glass of this special vintage with her. For now, she found the only empty spot in the nearby wine rack and deposited it back into its wooden cradle.

  As she released the bottle, its weight triggered an unseen mechanism with a sharp hiss.

  A blast of cool air enveloped her as the hidden door swung open. An eerie blue glow trickled out from within.

  Cairn stepped into a small room that had been designed to look like an ice cave. Colorful fish darted past the glass of a long aquarium embedded in the frozen walls. The room was mostly unfurnished, except for a desk with a computer and a landline phone—bizarre since the Delacroix family hadn’t used a household line since the advent of cell phones.

  Cairn collapsed into the desk chair, beginning to realize what she’d stumbled upon.

  Her mother had built a lair.

  Desperate for answers, she scrolled through the landline’s outgoing calls. There were hundreds of them—all to a single number.

  Cairn’s finger hovered over the call button, but she hesitated. Presuming the mystery number’s owner knew of her mother’s passing, they would understandably be spooked if they received a call from beyond the grave, in the dead of night no less. She keyed the number into her phone instead, only to discover that she had no service in this underground bunker. That explained the landline at least, but not why her mother needed this level of privacy. Had she been having an affair? If she called this number, would she find herself talking to Ahna’s lover?

  No matter the outcome, Cairn faced a chilling realization:

  She hadn’t known her mother half as well as she thought she had.

  Squall joined her in the room, batting at the glass every time a fish swam by. Her mother must have designed the aquarium to be self-sustaining for its inhabitants to have survived this long in her absence.