The Bones of Valhalla (Purge of Babylon, Book 9) (6 page)

She thought about detouring to Carly’s room to fill Danny in on what had transpired on the bridge, but decided to keep going to her cabin instead. Her friends needed time alone after all those days apart, and she didn’t want to ruin that reunion. They would have done the same for her if Will had come back.

But Will
did
come back, remember?

Except it wasn’t Will. Not really.

Or, at least, not anymore.

So what was he then? Something else? Yes. Exactly.

Some
thing
else.

The realization that Will had been out there all this time left an even bigger hole in the pit of her stomach than when she thought he was dead. Will coming back changed was the most terrible thing that could have happened to her, something she couldn’t have imagined in her wildest nightmares.

But here it was. Here
he
was. Down there, waiting for her, maybe wondering why she hadn’t done more than just enter the cabin and looked at the chest before fleeing. And that was exactly what she had done.

She had fled. Ran away from him.
From him.

You fucking coward.

You fucking, selfish coward. He deserves better than this.

Her door was never locked, and except for a
Captain’s Cabin
plaque (though the
Captain
had been scratched out and
Lara
scribbled over it), there was nothing to keep anyone—not even those two kids she had just walked past—from going inside. The fact that no one had yet was a minor miracle—

Something was wrong.

She couldn’t explain it, but she knew there was something different about the room as soon as she stepped inside and let the door
click
back into place behind her. It was pitch dark, with only a small pool of moonlight spilling in from the window on the far wall.

A second after she sensed it, she smelled it—sweat that didn’t come from her own skin, but from someone hiding in the shadows.

Someone’s in the room.

God, she hoped it was someone, because the only other option was some
thing
being in the room with her right now—

She reached for her gun, got her fingers around the grip, and was lifting it out of the holster when the barrel of a weapon pressed against her right temple. The cold contact of the metal against her skin sent a sliver of electricity through her body.

“Don’t,” a voice said, the sound freezing her hand—and the gun—in place.

A strangely warm (and large) hand grabbed her right wrist and yanked away the Glock. The cold of the gun barrel abandoned her temple as a tall figure shuffled in the shadows and there was a
clack!
from behind her as the door’s lock was twisted into place, followed by more movements as her cabin’s intruder traveled the short distance from her side to stand in front of her.

Despite the semidarkness, she recognized the face looking back at her. She had first seen it on the
Ocean Star.

“Phil,” she said, “what are you doing?”

He had some kind of submachine gun pointed at her face. She wished she could have said his hand and the weapon in it were shaking, but they were as calm as could be. With his other hand, he shoved her Glock into his front waistband before taking a step back and then, and only then, letting his weapon lower—slightly.

“Sit down, Lara,” he said.

“Phil—”

“Sit down,”
he said through clenched teeth.

She walked over and sat down on the side of her bed and watched Phil walk to the door and lean against the wall next to it. Now that her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, she could just make out the MP5K with the pistol grip hanging almost nonchalantly at his side. Besides her Glock stuffed into his front waistband, he had only come here with just the submachine gun as far as she could tell.

“Just the submachine gun?” That’s more than enough.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

He didn’t answer her, and instead unclipped a radio from his hip and held it in his left hand, while the right continued to clutch his weapon. A sudden spurt of footsteps from the hallway made him turn his head, but he quickly relaxed and resumed his stance when the noise faded.

“Phil,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t respond or even look back at her. Had he even heard her?

“Phil,” she said again, louder this time.

“What?” he said, sounding agitated.

You’re the one with a gun hiding in my room, asshole
, she wanted to snap back, but said instead, “What are you doing?”

He finally trained his eyes on her, and even without any real light in the room, she could make out the penetrating stare he had pointed back at her. “You know why.”

“I don’t.”

“The creature. The
ghoul
.”

Oh, goddammit. He knows. He
knows.

“I don’t understand,” she said anyway. “What ghoul?”

He smirked. “You can stop pretending. We know all about it. The creature you have locked away in a chest down in the engine room.” He sneaked a peek at the glowing neon hands of his wristwatch. “But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

“What do you mean, ‘take care of it?’”

He didn’t say anything.

“Phil…”

“You shouldn’t have brought it onboard,” he said. “You should have known better. Riley might have made that mistake, but not you. You should have
known
better.”

I didn’t bring him onboard. Danny did. He didn’t tell me what was in the chest until after
it was already in Gage’s old room.

Of course, she didn’t tell Phil any of that. She didn’t think it was going to matter anyway. The man with the gun glaring at her from across the darkened room right now didn’t care about the truth. He had come here to do a job, and he was doing it.

But if Phil’s job was in here with her, then what was happening outside? Because she didn’t believe for a second this was a one-man job. And she had absolutely heard him say,
“But don’t worry, Lara, we’re going to take care of it for you.”

“We.” He said “we.”

“Was this Riley’s plan all along?” she asked. “Trick me into bringing you onboard with some sob story about wanting to leave Mercer’s war, then take over the boat when we let our guards down?”

Phil might have chuckled. If he did, it was very quiet and short. “Riley has nothing to do with it. He’s a good man, but he was never really meant for leadership. I could think of twenty people off the top of my head who are more qualified. Still, he got us out of Mercer’s insanity, so we owe him that much.”

Your mutineers are mutinying again, Riley. Why am I not surprised?

“What are you going to do, Phil?” she asked.

He might have answered her, but before he could the radio in his left hand squawked and a voice she didn’t recognize said, “We’ve secured the infirmary.”

Phil lifted the two-way to his lips and keyed it. “Any trouble?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” the voice on the radio said.

“Good. Because if this thing goes south, we’re going to need the leverage.”

“So we’re proceeding?”

“Yeah, we’re proceeding,” Phil said. He let go of the transmit lever for a second, seemed to take a breath, and then pressed it again. “You heard all that?”

“Yeah,” a new voice said through the radio. It sounded…hesitant?

“Do it.”

“Wish us luck.”

“Good luck,” Phil said.

He lowered the radio and stared forward. She followed his gaze, trying to see what he was looking at, but there was just the wall next to the window and nothing else except the ocean on the other side.

“Phil,” she said, “you’re making a mistake.”

“I’m fixing your mistake, Lara,” he said.

“It wasn’t a mistake. There’s a reason it’s onboard.”

“There’s no reason in this universe that justifies bringing one of those things
here. Jesus Christ, we have kids on this boat.”

“There is a reason. If you’ll let me explain—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Phil…”

“I said
shut up.
”

She sighed, and was thinking about the spare Glock she had stashed in the room—and more importantly, about how to get to it—when Phil’s form shifted alarmingly and she saw the MP5K moving at his side.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

Phil came out of the shadows and pointed the submachine gun at her. “Don’t test me. I know you’re thinking about doing that right now. I like you, Lara. I respect you. Hell, maybe even more than Riley. But I’ll shoot you if I have to. So don’t test me.”

She stared back at him, feeling the annoyance growing. And it was that, and not fear. She didn’t know why she wasn’t more afraid; maybe it was the fact someone was in her cabin—her own private space, the only place she could count on to have all to herself these days—with a gun in her face.

“Hands,” he said.

She hadn’t been aware of it, but her hands were pressed against the mattress behind her. She brought them out and put them in her lap.

“Good,” he said, and lowered the weapon and took one, then two, steps back into the shadowy parts of the room. “I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but we’re still on the same side. At the end of the day, we both want the same thing—to stay alive. Our chances are better with that thing down in the engine room dealt with.”

That “thing” used to be the man I love, asshole,
she wanted to spit back at him, but said instead, “You said Riley doesn’t know about this.”

“No. We couldn’t risk him not going along with it.”

“So who’s the ringleader?”

“You’re looking at him.” Phil shrugged. “I guess you could say I’m taking a page out of Riley’s playbook. I only recruited the guys I knew I could trust, who wouldn’t like the idea of a ghoul on the same boat as them, either. We’re going to take it too, by the way. The
Trident.
”

“And you think I’m just going to let you have it?”

“You won’t have a choice.” He tightened his fingers reflexively around the MP5K’s grip. “I didn’t want to do this, you know, but you left me no choice. That thing down there is an abomination. It needs to be killed. They all do.”

“Talk like that makes me wonder if you don’t belong with Mercer after all.”

“Maybe, but the difference between me and him? I don’t kill civilians. At least, not on purpose. I would never do that. Why do you think I’m here? We’re going to use you and the doc as leverage. I’ll get Riley to come around, and when he does, we’ll go to the Bengal Islands just like we planned. No more of this going back to Black Tide bullshit.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Over my dead body
, she was going to say, but she had a feeling she already knew what his response to that would be.

Instead, she kept quiet when there was another squawk. Phil tensed, because it hadn’t come from his radio, but from the one still clipped to her hip:

“Lara, this is Carrie. Come in.”

She didn’t get the chance to answer it, because there were two distant
pop-pop
from below them. They were little more than faded echoes, the noise greatly affected by the decks of the yacht, and she might not have even heard them at all if the
Trident
wasn’t currently drifting on the ocean.

“It’s started,” Phil said. “It’ll be over soon—”

There was a loud
boom!
from outside the cabin just before a big chunk of the wooden door showered the room, leaving behind a gaping hole where the doorknob
(and lock!)
once were. Bright lights splashed through the hole and over a section of the floor—

Phil was turning toward the door, raising his gun hand, when Lara took advantage of the distraction and let herself fall backward onto the bed. Even as she fell, she stuck out her right hand toward the pillows and reached underneath one of them.

She had no delusions Phil wouldn’t know what she was doing as soon as she did it. They were just too close for her to hope she could get away with it for more than a few seconds—two if she was really, really lucky. And she almost got those two seconds before Phil abandoned the door and turned back toward her.

There was a flurry of movement from the corner of her right eye as the door flung open, allowing even more light to wash across the previously darkened captain’s cabin. She ignored it—or tried to as best she could—and focused on swinging her right hand forward and up, revealing the gun in it, even as her forefinger struggled to find the trigger.

Phil’s eyes went wide just before she shot him in the chest. He seemed to stumble for a second and had just enough strength left to squeeze the trigger, sending maybe a dozen rounds into the ceiling before collapsing. Because she was still mostly lying on the bed on her back, he disappeared out of her view at about the same time a figure burst into the room, the sound of a shotgun racking like an explosion in the suddenly bright cabin.

Danny appeared in front of her like a wraith, sweeping the room with his weapon before locating Phil’s body on the floor. He looked up at her, a slight grin forming on his lips, and he was probably about to say something stupid when a torrent of gunfire filled the
Trident
.

Unlike the first two earlier shots, these kept going for some time.

“Will!” Lara shouted, even as she scrambled up from the bed. “They’re going after Will!”

T
he hasps snapped first
, then the clamps along the edges, followed by the strips of duct tape that covered up nearly every inch of the chest’s exterior. The lid flung open with ease, and it hadn’t fully raised ninety degrees before he was up and out, the cold air inside the room brushing against his skin and through the still-exposed wounds.

There were two of them. Men. Their rifles sending stabs of flame in his direction. They reacted instantly to his presence, eyes widening at the sight of him emerging.

What did they think was inside the chest, he wanted to ask them. Didn’t they already know it was him? Wasn’t that why they had come here prepared, their weapons loaded with silver bullets?

One of those rounds punched through his chest and out his back, hitting the wall behind him with an echoing
ping!
Other bullets missed their mark, and if they knew to aim for his head (all his strength and speed, and all it would take was one bullet in the right spot to end him, end his mission) they didn’t show it in the way they swung their weapons left and right, trying desperately to draw a bead on his moving form.

The room was small and the limited space made it easier (not that he really needed the advantage) to reach his targets. One of them screamed something incoherent as he scrambled to reload, reaching behind his back for a spare magazine. He smashed into the man feet first and drove him to the floor. A slight grunt of shock as the man went down, his spine snapping
on impact.

The second one dropped his rifle and stumbled back, reaching for a handgun in a hip holster. The pistol was halfway out of its housing when he twisted and snatched the man by the throat, then threw him across the room. His would-be assassin sailed over the opened lid and crashed into the wall, followed quickly by the loud
cracks!
of bones, and disappeared behind the chest.

He set his feet to both sides of the unmoving figure below him and went into a slight crouch. There was no point in attacking a second time. His victim wasn’t going to fight back. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to.

A flicker of movement—sudden scurrying—drew his attention, and he looked up and out through the open door and into the hallway.

The boy whose voice he had heard
(“Benny,”
one of the would-be killers had called him) was sliding across the floor in the narrow passageway outside, one hand holding to a bloody red patch in his side. He was having difficulty breathing as he moved, blood oozing out between his fingers. His face was covered in a film of sweat and he grunted the entire way, until finally making it to the other side and leaning against the wall to keep himself from toppling over.

Then the boy looked up and their eyes met, and Benny might have screamed if he had the strength. Or, if he could, get up and run away. But the boy did neither of those things, either because he couldn’t or he was too terrified to try.

He didn’t so much as see Benny as he
smelled
and
heard
the blood dripping from the wound in his side. The wetness was fresh and thick and sweet, and it had been so long since he had allowed himself to taste the glory. There was such a difference between the life force that flowed through humans and those that came out of animals. He knew, without a doubt, that he would heal faster with a fresh supply.

No. Not again.

You promised. Never again.

He pried his eyes off the boy and returned it to the man on the floor. His would-be killer blinked back up at him, pale lips quivering as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. The man moved his head slightly from left to right, but that would be the full extent of his movements, now and forever.

A mechanical squawk from the hallway, before a voice that was all too familiar filled the air: “Benny, Carrie! Come in! Are you guys there? Come in!”

The boy reached for the radio on the floor, the slight movement helping the blood to
drip-drip-drip
farther out of his wound.

No. Look away.

Look away!

“This is Benny,” the boy said into the radio.

“Benny, thank God!” Lara. She was out of breath, her voice shaky from running, but somehow still in control. “We’re on our way down there now! What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’ve been shot, and I think Carrie’s… I think she’s dead, Lara.”

“We’re almost there! Hold on just a little longer!”

He stood up, and the boy’s eyes widened in response before his hand scrambled to his empty holster.

“Oh God,” the boy whispered breathlessly.

No, not God.

He took one step, then two—the boy flinching with each one—and grabbed the door and swung it shut. Relief flooded Benny’s face for the split second he was visible, just before the door closed on him.

He turned around.

You promised you wouldn’t do it again.

Don’t break your promise. Not here. Not now!

His nostrils flared at the smell of fresh blood. How long had it been? So long. He couldn’t even remember.

Lara’s coming. She’s going to see!

But he was still so weak despite the last twenty-four hours of healing. Could he afford to stay this way if more came for him?

You have a choice.

And there was so much still left to do. So, so much…

You said you wouldn’t do it again!

He focused on the precious liquid pulsing through the paralyzed man’s veins, from his arms and legs and neck.

Not here! Not now!

And behind the chest was the other one. Not quite dead, but he might as well be. Both of them. They were useless now…except to him. Except to the greater cause.

Keep your promise!

He needed it. To heal faster. To grow stronger. He needed it in the worst way.

He crouched over the man with the broken spine. The eyes—dark brown, like his own once upon a time—continued to stare up at him, and bloodied lips quivered and sounds that might have been attempts at begging came out as gibberish instead.

She’ll know what you’ve done. She’ll know.

He wished he could have said it was horrifying and the mere thought of committing the act turned his stomach, but it would have been a lie. He bathed in the man’s plasma and could feel the cells in his body reacting, mobilizing, coming even further alive to tackle his remaining wounds and mend him from the inside out.

You lied.

He made a mess, but he didn’t care.

You made a promise, and you lied.

When he finished with the first one, he got up and walked around the chest and started on the second.

So what else is new?

* * *

“
W
ill
.”

No, not Will. He hadn’t been that for a long time now.

It seemed like years ago—decades—since the last time he saw the true color of her eyes. He longed to reach out and run his fingers along the supple curves of her skin and wallow in the taste of her lips. Those lips were pale and dry tonight, as they had been for the last few weeks and months since…

I died. Ever since I died.

She looked into the room, the light from the open door behind her washing across portions of the cabin while leaving the rest shrouded in darkness. He had left the body of the first man where it lay, in front and slightly to the left of her. There was a slight shift in the air as she looked down at the dead man, accompanied by her slightly accelerating heartbeat. He could almost taste the wetness of her saliva as she forced them down her throat and did her best to orient herself to the horrors of what he had done, what he had been doing for the last—

How long had it been since the men came into the room to kill him?

Seconds? Minutes? Maybe hours.

It was always difficult to tell time when he fed, and it had been such a long time that he might have lost himself in the act.

Exhilaration overwhelmed him, and he was as alive now
(Ha!)
as he had ever been since the transformation. The bones were healing, the skin reforming, and every inch of him bristled with new flesh.

He stayed in the shadowed back part of the room, with his second would-be killer lying nearby, the man’s blood forming a jagged circle at his feet. If he wasn’t already bloated from his feeding, he would have lapped up the precious fluids no matter how uncivilized it might have looked. What did civilization have to do with it anyway? He was no longer human. It didn’t matter how much he held on, because he could never go back. He could never have her back.

Never…

“Will,” she said again, his name
(No, not your name now, your name
then
)
almost painful as she forced it between her lips.

Her legs were unsteady and her arms were tense at her sides. There was blood on her clothes, but it wasn’t hers.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. Or hissed. He hated the sound that came out, reminding him of the abomination he had become and how far he had drifted from himself, from her.

They were alone down here, in the lower bowels of the boat. She had sent the others away with the body of the woman and the wounded boy.
(Benny. His name’s Benny.)
She had the radio on her hip, but he’d heard the
click
as she turned it off.

It was just the two of them now. Here, in this room, with two bodies between them and blood everywhere.

God, he really did make a mess.

“No?” she said.

“Not Will,” he hissed. “Not anymore.”

“What should I call you, then?”

He didn’t answer.

“What should I call you, then?”
It was a good question. He had been asking himself that ever since Kate transformed him outside that nothing gas station in Louisiana.

He remembered a little girl in a rotting barn back in Texas asking him the exact same question:
“What
are
you, mister?”

I don’t know
,
he had thought then, and he thought it again now:
I don’t know.

When he didn’t answer, Lara said, “I have to call you something.”

“Frank,” he said.

“Frank,” she repeated. Then something that looked like recognition sparkled in her eyes. “Frank,” she said again.

She tried to peer into the shadows, to get a better look at him. It would have been difficult without light, and he imagined her fighting the urge to reach back and hit the light switch. But even if she couldn’t really see him, she would have no trouble seeing the blue of his eyes. Their glow were beacons in the darkness, at once bright and unnatural.

“Keo,” she said. “He once told me he had someone he wanted me to meet. Someone who knew how to defeat the ghouls.” She paused, then, “That was you.”

“Yes…”

“But you left him before we could meet.”

“I had no choice.”

“Why?”

“Danny and Gaby were in trouble.”

She seemed to think about it. “When they were trapped in Starch?”

“Before…”

“Larkin. In the airport.”

“Yes.”

“Mercer.”

“Yes…”

Her shoulders drooped slightly, releasing some of the tension she had come into the room with and held onto until now.

“Can I turn on the light?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Not yet…”

“I know what you look like.”

“You don’t…know.”

“Don’t I?”

Why did she want him to explain it? Didn’t she understand why he didn’t want her to see him like this? This…
monster?

“Not yet,” he said.

“But soon.”

Maybe
,
he thought, but said, “Yes.”

“You fed on them.”

She was staring at the feet of the dead man sticking out from behind the bullet-riddled chest. Splintered pieces of the furniture were scattered in and out of the shadows, sprinkled among the puddles of blood.

“I had to,” he said.

“Because they tried to kill you…”

“No.”

“No?”

“I was too badly injured. The injuries weren’t healing fast enough.”

“And feeding on them…helped?”

“Yes.”

“They were Riley’s people,” she said, and glanced back at the open door as if afraid of being overheard. “I don’t know how they knew about you, but they came down here to kill you. There was another one in my room. I had to kill him.” A look of sorrow, there and gone in a flash, replaced by steely determination. “They killed one of us. Carrie.” She returned her gaze to him. “But you never met her, did you? She came to the island while you were gone.”

“No,” he said.
Hissed.
He hated the sound.

“What about Benny? Do you remember him?”

Maybe. He knew the name, because one of the assassins had said it. He dug into his memory reservoirs, but he couldn’t find the boy in there.

“No,” he said.

“Danny told me you have trouble remembering them. Names and places. But you remember the important things. Like him, and Gaby…and me.”

I’ll always remember you.

“Yes,” he said.