Salvaged Soul (The Ignited Series Book 3) (11 page)

I spent a large portion of the train ride writing letters to Kris and Alec, detailing everything that had been discussed with the gods, and everything I had learned about Kris. At the train stop, I dropped the letters in the mail, confident that Kris would not only be taken care of if anything happened to me, but that she would know what the gods wanted of her.

A few of the Australian guys managed to persuade a local bus driver to drive us the two hours to Ichalia. According to the driver, no one had been to the village in months, and most stayed far away from it now. Though no one knew exactly what, they suspected something peculiar was going on there. Many blamed a curse for the disappearances of those who had gone there, and never returned.

It was a long drive on a narrow and ridiculously bumpy road. On more than one occasion, I thought the bus would get stuck between two rock walls. At one point, one of the French Kala was rocketed out of her seat and onto the dirty floor. Conversation was pointless.

I was seconds from insisting on walking the rest of the way when the bus ground to a noisy halt. I looked out the window, but only saw endless rows of wheat and the road as it snaked through the brown field. The road disappeared around a bend and into a patch of trees a few miles ahead.

I lifted my eyes as Jared walked down the aisle from the front of the bus. “This is as far as the driver goes,” he announced. “We’re walking from here. Everyone grab a bag.”

By the time I disembarked the bus, someone had already removed all the equipment bags from the storage compartment and tossed them to the ground. I selected one and placed it over my shoulders. It didn’t matter which bag I took. They all contained the same—various weapons and combat gear, a water canteen, three days’ worth of food, and a change of clothes. The straps bit into my shoulder from the weight.

As the bus bounced away with a chorus of screeching metal and exhaust backfire, we began our trek. Since none of us knew exactly how much farther it was to the village, we kept off the road, and blended into the wheat fields on each side as we approached the bend in the road. We ducked into the trees and cut across at an angle until the road reappeared on the other side. There, nestled between the tree line and a steep mountain wall, lay the village of Ichalia.

I dropped my bag to the ground and rested against the broad trunk of a tree as the three leaders convened. A few of the others followed my lead, and found their own tree to rest against. Most, however, stood biting their nails or wringing their hands in anticipation.

I didn’t see the point. The mission sucked. We all knew it. Some of us were going to die. There was no way around it. No point getting anxious about it. Anxiety dulled the reflexes, and I had a feeling I would be needing them pretty sharp.

I had just shut my eyelids to block out the fidgeting when Jared dropped to a knee beside me.

“We’re going to send a scouting team,” he said.

I looked at my friend with one eye open. Scouting missions were always done by the nature specialists. I suspected that Jared had volunteered me as one of the scouts.

“I volunteered you to lead it,” he added.

Both eyes popped open. “You’ve got to stop volunteering me for shit.”

Jared grinned. “Ah, come on. You live for recon jobs. Besides, you’re the best scout we have.”

“How do you know I’m the best scout?” I returned, and pointed to a French guy propped against the tree next to mine. “How do you know he’s not the best?”

“Because I’ve met a lot of Kala,” Jared said evenly. “I’ve done a lot of missions, and I’ve seen a lot of action. I know what most of these guys are capable of, I know what you are capable of, and I know you are the best scout here.”

I dropped my argument, because he was probably right. I was a good scout. And if I were about to head into battle, I wanted to make sure the best Intel had been gathered ahead of time. The only way to ensure that was to do it myself.

Four of us sat atop a cliff overlooking the village below. Pierre and Callum, both of whom I had met the day before while climbing Mount Olympus, were sprawled out on their stomachs to my right, and a guy I had just met, named Jas, hunkered down behind us, taking notes of our observations.

So far we had counted fifty-plus Skotadi, confirmed that there was one road in and one road out of the village, and had sketched a rough map of the structures that made up the village. Ten large buildings were grouped in the center, with twenty-three small huts that littered the outskirts. We saw no villagers.

“Does anybody else find that odd?” Jas questioned in a thick Australian accent.

“They’re in there somewhere,” I said in return. “We’ll need to take precautions when we go in to make sure no villagers are injured.”

“I think the big . . .” Getting hung up on his words, Pierre pointed to what he was attempting to say.

“Building?” I smirked.

“Yes. I think they there.”

I shook my head at his poor English, but he had made a good observation. I instructed Jas to make a note of the two biggest buildings in the center of the village. Both of them were good options for the location of the demigods, or villagers.

“What I want to know is . . .” Callum started, and pointed to something in the field outside the village. “What is that?”

I had been wondering the same thing, and had been contemplating what to do about the small rectangle shack in the middle of the field. It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense to be there. “Go check it out,” I said to Callum. “See if it’s anything worthwhile.”

Callum muttered something unintelligible before he slinked away.

Thirty minutes later, we had every detail of the village studied, noted, and were ready to leave. Problem was, Callum hadn’t returned yet.

I had seen him enter the shack, but hadn’t seen him since. From the small size of it, I didn’t understand how it could take him so long to inspect it. I was about to organize a search and recovery party when he plopped down in the dirt beside me.

The odor that came with him nearly made me gag, and I scooted as far away from him as the tree behind me would allow. “What in the hell is that smell?”

“Sewer.” His clothes were soaked and stained, and he smelled like he had taken a bath in it. He looked way too happy for someone who had fallen in by accident. But then, he had good reason to be happy. “The shack is an old sewage maintenance building,” Callum explained. “The tunnels run under the village.”

As Callum requested the notebook, and began drawing a map of the tunnels that ran under the village, I felt a glimmer of hope. Using the tunnels, getting into the village would be a piece of cake. While getting in wouldn’t be a problem, getting out was what worried me.

Chapter 11

{Nathan}

If there was one thing the Kala were good at, it was waging war. Kala leaders had always ensured that we had the most sophisticated combat gear when battling the Skotadi. That was especially true for this mission. There were gadgets and weapons in my bag that I had never seen or used before . . . and I was a combat instructor.

My weapons of choice for tonight’s mission were a standard assault rifle with diamond-coated bullets and a diamond-coated knife that fit into a strap on my bullet proof vest. As I glanced around at the others, identical to me in their all-black combat uniforms, night-vision goggles, heavy vests, and loaded down with enough ammo to take down the entire Skotadi fleet, I imagined that this was what the end of the world would look like.

I had a bad pseudo-psychic feeling that I couldn’t shake. Not that we weren’t prepared for this raid. We were very prepared, and we had a good group of soldiers to pull it off with, but that knowledge couldn’t drive away the strange sense of doom I felt. Once it set in, the best I could do was push through it.

We were split into six teams. I had been assigned as leader of one of the two offensive teams that would converge on the two large buildings in the center of the village. Under my command was the youngest American from the Costa Rican base, named Caleb, and three Australians: Jeremiah, Denis, and Pete. The five of us were to find and secure the two imprisoned demigods, while the defensive teams sought and eliminated Skotadi resistance. Thanks to the elaborate maps the recon team had crafted of both the village and the sewer tunnels, each team knew exactly where to go and what their objective was.

The raid had been planned out with the attention to detail I had come to expect of Kala missions. Lack of preparedness wasn’t the cause of my bad feeling. Something else was . . . something out there in the darkness beyond the village. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it.

The only thing that made me feel a little better about the unknown were the two Kala positioned a mile up the road that led to the village. Their job was to watch for any sign of Hades’ demigods. I felt a little better at knowing we had a small cushion, a window of time to potentially escape their wrath if they showed up tonight.

We approached the sewage maintenance shack under the cover of darkness, and entered the tunnels two at a time. They were wide enough to allow two to walk shoulder to shoulder, but at the first split, the teams parted into two groups. I continued down a narrow tunnel with about twenty soldiers trudging along behind me. The water level rose the farther we traveled, until we were wading through knee-high filth. Each step tested the strength of my gag reflex. Somewhere behind me, I heard someone lose their Kala-issued prepackaged meal.

“Come in, Team Loser, come in.” Jas’s Australian drawl buzzed in my ear.

All six team leaders were equipped with a headphone communication set. Jas had been put in charge of the other offensive team, and was somewhere behind me.

With a grin, I pushed the button below my jaw. “You can’t do any better than Team Loser?”

“Like Calvin is better.”

“I didn’t pick your name, remember?” The guys who came from Australia with Jas had already taken to calling him Calvin because, well, he looked like he could be a Calvin Klein model. He got a lot of shit from the guys because of his pretty boy looks.

“Exactly,” he returned. “Lack of originality, mate.”

“Hey, Dipshit, shut up!”

Jas ignored the voice of another team leader in our ears. “I just want to know what you’re going to owe me when my team finds the demigods first.”

“How about a muzzle?” A French accented voice suggested over a wave of static.

“I second that,” I chuckled.

“I was thinking something more along the lines of money,” Jas said. “Say . . . five hundred?”

I choked out a laugh. “Keep dreaming, Calvin.”

I paused at an intersection, and glanced down at a copy of the map Callum had sketched before veering to the right. One defensive team behind me would follow. Jas’s team and a second defensive team would go the left.

“Jas, make sure you go the right way at the intersection,” I said.

“Right? I thought I was going left?”

“Left is the right way.”

“You Americans make no sense,” he grumbled. “I’m going left.”

Other than the sloshing of our feet moving through the sludge, we entered the perimeter of the village in silence. Above us, moonlight filtered down through slits in the manholes, broken up by the occasional shadow cast by a building. I heard no voices from above, but that didn’t mean the Skotadi weren’t nearby.

“Five hundred might have been a little steep,” Jas continued in a hushed voice. “How about two-fifty?”

I reached a ladder and glanced down at the map for confirmation. This was it—my team’s point of entry. Using a series of hand signals, I instructed Jeremiah to climb the ladder and undo the screws securing the manhole.

“Respect,” I spoke into my device quietly. “That’s all you’ll get from me.”

Jeremiah signaled that his task was complete, and I motioned for him to climb down. One thing I insisted on, as a leader, was to be the first man to step foot onto enemy grounds. I would never ask one of my men to go first.

“I’ll guess I’ll take that bet,” Jas sighed. “In addition to bragging rights, of course.”

I climbed the ladder to the top.

The street above me was illuminated by an unusually bright light cast by the full moon. I preferred total darkness so we would have more of an advantage with our night vision goggles. With a bright moon, the Skotadi could see us just as easily as we could see them.

The unease in my gut twisted tighter.

The ladder vibrated as the rest of my team ascended beneath me, and I whispered into my radio, “Offensive team one, in position.”

Seconds, and then minutes, ticked by as the other teams announced that they were in position. Only the pounding of my pulse in my ears filled the silence between. No matter how many missions I had partaken in over the years, and how different each of them were, the underlying current of fear never changed. 

Men would die tonight, and not just the enemy. As always, there was a chance that I may not come out of this one alive. Despite that very real fear, my composure remained unshakable.

“May the best man win,” I said quietly into my radio.

Jas didn’t answer, but another voice I recognized did. With the words, “All teams, go,” Jared ordered the start of the raid.

I pushed the manhole open, and climbed into a narrow alley wedged between two buildings—it should have been
the
two primary buildings, but I waited to consult my map. As the rest of my team climbed to the surface, I squatted low to the ground and provided cover with my gun pointed at the mouth of the alley. Once all four of my men were out, we moved into shadows cast by the building.

There, I gathered my bearings with the aid of the map. Our target building was behind us; Jas’s target was the one across from us. They would be entering it from one alley over, once they found a point of entry, which was something I had to do yet.

Using hand signals, I instructed my team to fall in, and led them toward the front of the building, where I hoped to find an entrance. Quickly moving shadows darted across the intersection, and I fingered the trigger of my gun before I recognized them as one of our defensive teams.

“Alley’s clear,” I spoke into my radio.

“Copy that,” returned a voice I recognized—Jared. “Entrance of building one had two guards. It’s all clear now.”

“Copy.” I picked up the pace as Jared’s team moved out of sight.

At the intersection, I signaled for my team to stop, and glanced around the corner to the front of the building. Two small crimson spots stained the ground in front of the doorway ten yards away, but because we were all using diamond, there were no bodies left behind.

We entered the building, and my guys fanned out to secure the large entryway. It didn’t take me long to realize what kind of building we were in. The faint smell of chalk and floor polish, and the echo-inducing openness, screamed schoolhouse.

Sounds of a small scuffle spun me around in time to see Caleb hovering over a Skotadi’s body before it dissipated. He stepped back from the expanding puddle of blood left on the floor, and lifted a hand with the ‘okay’ signal.

I radioed Jas as we moved down the wide hallway. I noted the smugness in his voice as he informed me that the building they were sweeping through was a type of administrative building. Of course. The demigods would more likely be found there than in a school.

At this point, I didn’t care who found the demigods. Getting everyone out alive was my priority.

Jared piped in to inform us that one defensive team had moved in on the administrative building to assist Jas’s team, while Jared’s defensive team was sweeping through the school, coming from the other side. 

“You had better not shoot my ass when we meet,” he added.

“Yes, sir,” I returned.

I slowed outside the first closed door we came to, and instructed my team to take flanking positions. I palmed the knob, found it unlocked, and pushed the door open slowly. I moved out of the way as Jeremiah and Caleb entered the room together, guns readied, then followed quickly behind them.

The smell of rotting flesh hit me like a tangible wall of death, and I nearly doubled over and threw up on my shoes. Blinking away the involuntary wetness in my eyes, I took in the sight before us. Bodies—some bagged, most not—in varying stages of decay lay in heaps on the floor between desks, on top of desks and the counter that ran parallel to the large windows along one wall. Forty, maybe fifty, bodies of all sizes filled the room—men, women, and children.

Denis spun around to retch in the corner behind me as I stooped to take a closer look at the body closest to the door.

Jeremiah squatted beside me. “They’re not hybrids,” he observed in a hushed voice.

Villagers. All of them
human
villagers. There would be no recovery as part of this mission. The villagers were all dead, and I suspected that this was only one of many rooms stuffed with bodies we would find before the raid was over.

Jared’s voice buzzed over the radio in my ear. “We’ve encountered human casualties.”

“Same here,” I returned. My voice sounded distant, faint, like it didn’t belong to me. I gathered up a blood-stained white sheet, and draped it across the body at my feet before rising.

My team stood, facing me. Grown men—hardened, seasoned Kala soldiers—with tear-rimmed eyes, looked to me for direction as I fisted my hands to keep them from shaking. I craved a steadying breath to compose myself, but didn’t dare. Not yet. Not in that room. Taking a deep breath of air polluted by death would send me running for a corner to throw up in.

I pushed past the guys, moving for the door. “Let’s keep moving,” I ordered in the best fake-composed voice I could muster. “There might be some still alive somewhere.”

The fresh air in the hallway helped alleviate the souring in my stomach, but did nothing to erase the images burned into my memory. I doubted anything ever would, but I at least had regained enough control over my emotions to trudge forward.

The other team leaders barked in my ear, distracting me from what I had just seen.

A heavy Skotadi presence had been discovered on the other side of the village; Jas’s team and their accompanying defensive assistance were moving through the administrative building, and suspected that they were closing in on the demigods based on the number of Skotadi they had encountered; Jared reported three rooms with bodies in addition to the one my team had found.

The strain in his voice hinted at his own struggle with the discovery. It seemed the school was being used as the village morgue, and we were the unlucky ones to discover it. At least we were spared from a heavy Skotadi presence in the school. I suspected my guys weren’t at the top of their game after finding that room, so the less Skotadi resistance we encountered the better.

We cleared three more rooms. Each room we found empty pushed the visions that haunted me farther away, and helped to strengthen my confidence. Each step I took replaced my lingering sadness with anger and a need for vengeance. By the time we reached the end of the first hallway, I was back in warrior-mode and ready to make every one of the Skotadi pay for the devastation they had caused this village.

My team took flanking positions as we rounded the corner into another hallway—a short one with only two doors. The one closest to us was an extra tall set of double doors, and I suspected they led to a cafeteria or gymnasium.

As we entered, it became immediately obvious that it didn’t matter what the large room was, because it could have been any room and the only thing that mattered was the bodies that filled it. Again, the stench of death hit me, though not as powerful as it had been in the smaller classroom.

Before us stretched row upon row of narrow cots, occupied by bodies.

There had to be hundreds of them …

“This one is still alive!”

I followed Caleb’s voice, and stepped closer to the cot closest to the door, and noted the slight movement of the man’s chest. Barely. I glanced around the expansive room filled with pale and wheezing villagers. Each raspy breath I heard sounded like someone’s last. By some miracle, they all hung on to life.