Pawn (20 page)

He punched and he punched and he punched, and he could hear the sound of his fists smashing into his father’s face almost like applause, cheering him on. And no matter how hard he hit him, he had to hit him harder.

“He ruined your life.” Polemos was still standing there, telling him everything he already knew, and yet bringing it all back. The pain, the fear, and the constant put downs. The beatings, and the scorn for everything he was. So many memories, so much pain, and all of it coming back to him.

“Hit him! He tried to kill you and he will try again!” It was like it was only yesterday when his father had put him in the hospital. Each time. The pain and the hurt as he lay on the floor, bleeding. The shame and humiliation as he heard his father telling him over and over again that he was worthless. That he was ashamed of him. And his mother, there beside him as he beat him, telling him he was a mistake. It was so fresh, so raw, and he wanted them dead. He wanted them more than dead. He wanted them to suffer for what they had done to him.

“Harder!” And then there was his brother. Eight years older than him, twice his size, and encouraged to beat at him while his family looked on. The hatred was like a living thing within him. A fire-breathing dragon that was burning him up from the inside. And he liked it. He welcomed its power, he wanted more and more. And he used it, powering his arms as never before.

“More!” There was no pain any more. There was no tiredness. There was only his father, his family, needing to be beaten. Needing to be destroyed. Rufus smashed at the bag, beating it harder and harder, using his anger as a fuel, letting his rage sing. He could hear screaming, and a tiny part of him realised that it was him, losing the last shreds of his self-control. The larger part though, welcomed that loss. He didn’t want to remain in control.

“Now everything!” It was a command, and somehow Rufus knew exactly what Polemos wanted. He brought it all together in one terrible punch. All his anger and rage, his hurt and fear, his pain at the wrongness of what they had done, and then he let it loose.

There was a sound, a feeling running through the souls of his feet as the floor shook, and a terrible light, and then there was thunder. One mighty clap of it as his fist connected with the bag. And after that there was no more bag. There was nothing at all. Instead he was just standing there, gasping for breath, looking for the bag, for his father’s face to hit, and finding nothing but empty space in front of him.

For a long time he couldn’t understand that. He still wanted to hit the bag. But it just wasn’t there. He looked and looked through eyes stinging with sweat, wanting to find it, to smash it again, but the bag simply wasn’t there any more. Desperately, he rubbed the sweat out of his eyes, determined to find it so he could smash it some more and then some more. Smash it until there was nothing left. But when he finally did spot it, he suddenly realised that there was no point.

The bag was over the far side of the palaestra, at least fifty feet away from him, and it along with its solid oak frame was six feet off the ground, and embedded in the wall. Rufus stared at it in shock. Four hundred pounds of sand bag and wooden frame, punched fifty feet across a room and smashed so hard into a wooden wall that it had actually embedded itself in it. That wasn’t possible was it? Not by him.

“What happened?” He knew what had happened, but also didn’t, because it didn’t make sense. And Polemos and Alala didn’t look like they were going to be of much use answering his questions. Not when they were busy dancing around like children, hugging tightly, laughing with one another, and slapping each other heartily on the back as if they’d won the lottery. He gathered that they were pleased at least.

So he spent a while staring at the distant punching bag, and the two overgrown children embracing, and waited for the laughter to die down. It took some time.

“What happened?”

“You happened. Finally. And just when I was beginning to worry. Moirae said it would happen, and she’s always right, but still.” As explanations went it didn’t really help Rufus very much. But then Polemos was never big on them. Conversation wasn’t his thing. Dancing was, and once more he and Alala were shouting and screaming like excited children as they danced their strange jig.

“A little more detail?” Rufus held up his hands in question when they’d finally calmed down enough to listen.

“You’ve found your heart. You’ve found the core of your being, what makes you who you are. And with it you’ve finally released your power. You have found your inner warrior.”

“I don’t have an inner warrior.”

“Really?” And both of them pointed at the punching bag embedded in the far wall, while still hugging merrily like a pair of school girls. “I’d say that looks like the work of a warrior.”

“It’s about time too.” Alala took over as Polemos looked to burst into another round of crazed laughter.

“You are the consort of Aphrodite, and that at a time when she is in peril. She will need you beside her. She will need a warrior at her side. And you are that warrior.”

“Aphrodite?” It was almost the only word he heard in Alala’s entire explanation. And strangely it was the one word that he could believe. The goddess of love. That he found he could believe. Di was Aphrodite. She was love and beauty. It might be madness, actually it was madness, but it was true. Anything and everything else he could doubt, but not that.

“For the longest time it was thought a poor choice. You were weak and slow. Fear ruled your life. And whatever spirit you had was buried so very deep that it could scarcely be seen. When the time came, it was not known if you would stand or run away. It was not even known if you could stand. Today, you have shown that you can stand.”

Her words made sense in a crazy sort of way. If he let go of all reality. But then reality had seemed to be letting go of him of late. And then there was the other part as well, finally shouting at him in his muddled brain.

“She’s in danger?” That mattered far more than the fact that she might be a goddess. She could never be allowed to come to harm.

“A battle is coming. A big one. And the gods must ready themselves. Those who are warriors like us, we must prepare. Those who aren’t, must find protectors. Aphrodite has found hers.”

“Gods? You’re gods? Ancient Greek gods?” It made as little sense as everything else including a punching bag embedded in a wall. They didn’t seem like gods. But suddenly they did.

“Of course.”

There was no flash of light, no thunderclap, no indication of anything at all unusual, and yet in the blink of an eye both of them had changed. Polemos had given away his singlet and gym shorts to suddenly be wearing a belted toga and Roman sandals, and a strange leather contraption on one shoulder. Alala had lost her tracksuit and replaced it with a more modest long white sashed robe that reached to the floor. But she had a sword belted at her hip that looked anything but feminine. And when she spoke it was the sound of a lioness that left her mouth, though he could understand her perfectly.

“Polemos, god of civil war. Of conflict between brothers. And I, Alala, goddess of the war cry. When the battle is joined I will call our side to stand.” She couldn’t be more than five feet tall, and yet when she spoke, she seemed somehow to grow in front of him. Whatever she was, Alala wasn’t normal. But then he was beginning to realise that there was no normal any more. Even he wasn’t normal any longer. Not when he could smash a four hundred pound punching bag across a room with a single punch.

“Oh crap!” Rufus tried not to bury his face in his hands. “What has she done to me?”

“Done?” The big man seemed surprised. “What has she done? She has chosen you, that is what she has done.” When he put it like that it almost seemed like a good thing. Actually it was a good thing. It was a wonderful thing. But no one had ever said anything about a war. Or about crazy old Greek gods. Or any of the rest of this drug induced nightmare.

“So now what?” Rufus decided to change the topic as he was beginning to realise that there was no future in the current one. He’d either gone mad, which was looking quite possible, or he hadn’t, which was possibly worse.

“Now we begin training proper. No more gentle workouts.” Polemos let off a guffaw of laughter that echoed around the training hall, and perfectly on cue, the far door opened and a dozen men in togas and Roman sandals entered the room. All of them Rufus noticed, were armed. Swords and shields, spears and cudgels, even whips. And with a sigh he realised that they were all there for him. It seemed that the next stage of his training was about to begin.

“To the arena.” Polemos joyously clapped him on the back, a blow that would probably have left him sprawling on the ground a short while before, and then half dragged him over to the sand, laughing madly. There was no doubt that he was enjoying this. Rufus had other thoughts though. But he didn’t have a choice. He realised that as his bare feet hit the sand and he faced his first opponent, a young man with a spear in one hand and a huge round shield in the other. If Di was in danger then he had to be there for her.

“Ah do I get a weapon?” His question was answered before the last syllable had left his mouth, in the form of a wooden staff. It didn’t look particularly effective against spears and shields, but as he bent to pick it up and his opponent charged him, he realised it was all he was getting.

He spun with the staff in his good hand to take the force of the shield charge on his shoulder, and then smashed away at the spear with his free hand. It almost worked, as he managed to grab the spear and stop himself from being impaled on it. But then his opponent did something with his feet, and Rufus found himself flying backwards through the air, to land in a tangled heap of bruised limbs outside of the arena, all to the applause of the others.

“Good! Again!” As Polemos shouted out merrily in his native Greek, clearly enjoying himself, Rufus guessed it was going to be a long day. Still he got to his feet, picked up his stick, and walked warily back on to the sand. There was only one thing that mattered.

Di was in danger.

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Chapter Twenty One.

It was a bleak gathering in the hospital. Police of all stripes were standing around looking forlorn as the bodies were taken away on stretchers by men in white coats and white gloves for the autopsies. And one of the dead was a copper. That did not sit well with any of them.

Tempers were short, frustration was mounting, and the questions were once more growing. And no one was more frustrated than Detective Chief Inspector Barns. Just when things were coming together they took another turn into the unexplained. He should have expected it. He shouldn’t have been piling in to everyone, but he just couldn’t help himself.

“He was dying you said! Not expected to live until the morning!” The inspector was angry and with good reason as the impossible once more rose up from out of nowhere to destroy his case and claim more lives. “I mean bloody hell, do we have to chain the dying down to their death beds?”

But it wasn’t Hopkins’ fault, even though he was including him in his tirade. It wasn’t even the doctors’ fault, though surely more theirs than his sergeant’s. They should have known. But they hadn’t. And maybe it actually was the guard’s fault, he had been lax as he sat in his chair outside the room, reading his paper instead of watching the prisoner. But he had paid for that mistake with his life and try as he might Barns couldn’t find it within himself to blame a dead man. Aidan Hennassy had simply snapped his neck along with that of the nurse attending him, before walking out of the hospital, unseen. A dead man walking.

But Barns knew that it was more than just human incompetence and greed at work. He’d seen the x-rays, read the reports, and while he wasn’t a doctor he knew that there was no possible way that Aidan Hennassy could simply have got up out of his death bed and walked away. His injuries were far too severe for that. It would have been a miracle if he’d survived at all. A dark miracle. And with a broken spine, he would never have walked. But then they said that the devil looked after his own, and maybe this was proof of that.

Still this was a time for action not recrimination, and at least he knew where to start. He started blasting out orders at his growing team of officers. As the case grew larger, so too did the number of men he had assigned to him. He was half expecting by then that sooner or later someone from the Met would come and replace him. But not yet. Not when the case was so bizarre that no one could get a handle on it. For now he had the hot seat. And when it all went wrong again, he would be the one who’s butt was kicked.

“Hopkins, the cameras. I want all of the recordings, even the blank ones in our techs’ hands within the hour. Johnson, everyone who had access to them. Access to the machines, to the feeds, anyone who watched the screens or even knew about them. All of them down at the station in the next two hours, and every detail of their lives, their bank accounts, their activities taken down in triplicate. Interrogate them all and no one is to be released until the law finally demands it. I don’t care how loud their lawyers scream. One of them at least is dirty.” It might be pushing it, but he was reaching the point of desperation.

“Darius, the same for all the nurses and doctors on duty last night. Some of them have to be dirty as well. Brunt and James, the external cameras. Everything outside of the hospital. Money machines, street cameras, shop surveillance, even bloody tourists. All of them. Hennassy may have got past the hospital system, but he can’t have got around them all.”

“Watkins, the room is sealed from now until hell freezes over. I want forensics over every square inch of it. And most of all I want to know who visited Hennassy before his miraculous resurrection.” And he knew there was someone. He had no proof, but people didn’t just recover from life threatening injuries in a matter of hours by themselves. Someone had helped him. And deep in his gut Barns had a fair idea who. How was another matter, but as to the who it had to be Venner. But proving it was going to be a problem, especially when the bastard could probably buy all the lawyers and judges in the land.

But if he had done this, he was going to pay. No one murdered a good British bobby and expected to get away with it. No one.

“The rest of you, continue with your investigations from the supermarket, the beach and the hotel. Interview, re-interview and then interview again if you have to. Every detail is to be logged, and there will be no more mistakes.”

“Oh and Hopkins, when you’ve done with the tapes, get back on tracking those art guys. Venner won’t be able to sell the painting without at least a couple of experts to confirm that it is authentic, and the same painting that they checked before. The instant one steps foot on British soil, I want to know about it.”

“Do I make myself clear?” Of course he did, and there was a mumbled chorus of agreement and head nodding as they set off on their duties. All of which left Barns standing there alone, and for the first time in a very long time, feeling his advancing years. Once more the case was heading into the Twilight Zone, and he didn’t know where to turn. With the dead walking again and killing people, four hundred year old goddesses showing up to confuse witnesses and perform strange miracles, and unbelievable coincidences piling up on more of the same, this was not going the way it should.

He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, unsurprised when a few more greying strands came away in them. It was going to be a race he guessed. Between solving this case and putting the bad guys away, or losing his hair.

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