The Heart of War (23 page)

Much bickering ensued once they realized they were unable to pull it off her. The men argued amongst themselves over how best to remove the protective metal from their intended victim. The argument also centered on the idea of not wanting to ruin the valuable metal as it would be worth something to them on the open market.

The decision was made to cut it. In order to preserve its value, they would cut in down the side of her hip where the band was narrowest. One of them grabbed a set of rusted bolt cutters, shoved it into the band at her waist, slicing the skin below and then applied pressure to the handles with all of his might. He grunted and his black cheeks puffed out, but the blades would not cut through. One of the other men joined in, each grabbed a handle and each gave it all he was worth, but the gold would not give.

The men went into a heated frenzy as their frustration and their bickering turned to shoving and shouting. Not wanting his men to come to blows, Jaakim said there were others things she could do for them. They took turns at her head, one by one; they dipped their filthy cocks down her throat while the others pawed at her, groping every tender inch they could grasp with one hand while they stroked themselves with the other. Most of them dumped hot loads of white goo onto her before they reached her mouth, but that did not stop them from taking their turn.

“How many men were there?” Ares asked, although he found he did not really want to know the answer.

Sha’Quanda looked up at him with her sad eyes. “A dozen or so,” she whispered. “They were drinking and snorting brown-brown.” By the look in his own tormented eyes, Sha’Quanda understood Mr. Ares did not know brown-brown. “Cocaine mixed with gunpowder. They made Maggie do it, too,” she explained and watched his upper lip curl in a sneer. A concoction like that could make a man go all night with no remorse, no regret, and no mental faculties at all for that matter, ruled only by his cock and his own darkest inner desires.

Nearing the end of her tale, she rested her head on his shoulder once more. “One of them went out and brought back a snake.” The large arm that had been so comforting around her suddenly flexed and tightened until it was hard to breathe. She heard him let out a deep grunt and felt the air from his lungs wisp past her hair before the arm relaxed and she could breathe again. “It was a baby black mamba.”

Disbelief washed over Maggie like a tidal wave when she saw the snake writhing in the man’s hands. It was small but it was poisonous; if they could not have her then they intended to kill her. They strapped her legs down tight and then did the same with her wrists before the man came forward and laid the writhing cold serpent on her belly. To her amazement but not her surprise, the men stood back and began to place bets on how long it would take the aggressive snake to kill her. With its tongue ceaselessly flicking out from between its curious lips, it looked at her with soulless eyes as it began to wind its way around her body. She tried to stay still and calm. Tried not to provoke the snake, but the men around here were loud and they were purposefully agitating the animal by yelling at it, clapping their hands together in sharp smacks, and then threatening it by jumping toward it and then quickly jumping away. The snake slithered away from them; it went up her body, through the valley between her still breasts, then upward to the warmth of her neck where it slid beneath her sweaty cum-caked hair. Maggie closed her eyes and wished the world away. The men around were silent as they stood hovering over her, watching.

The piercing of its fangs was sharp and, at first, it was nearly painless until she felt the venom inject into her veins. One brave, drunk, stoned bastard pulled her hair back so they could see it had latched onto her. Then he grabbed the snake by the head and put it on her breasts where it struck at her nipples over and over. They laughed. For as long as she lived, Sha’Quanda would never forget the sound of their laughter as they tortured Maggie. It was horridly cold and cruel.

Not happy with the sight of the deadly snake striking Maggie’s battered breast, it was Jaakim who picked it up next, again by the back of the head. With a very cold grin, he held it up as its tail wrapped around his wrist, keeping the snake in her view he made his way between those captive legs and looked at the gold with its two small holes. Seemed a perfect fit.

Maggie sucked in a hard breath when she felt the snake enter her. Sha’Quanda screamed as she watched the thing wriggle and slither its way into the woman who was her friend. Over the sound of their laughter, the young girl’s screams went unheard. “I was not brave, Mr. Ares,” the little one confessed. “They were not paying any attention to me. I ran. I ran and I ran so fast…” The air in her lungs hitched in her throat as she started to cry. “She was screaming.”

“It’s almost over,” Ares soothed and kissed the top of the girl’s head. The God of War was relieved the girl’s tale stopped here because he didn’t think he could take listening to anything further without vomiting all over the floor.

Maybe that fact was what had saved Alena’s life. When the backwards thugs realized she wasn’t going to die, perhaps they began to think more seriously about her being a Witch. Their superstitions led them to let her go. Perhaps they feared that if they did not Satan would come and strike them down. How close to right they would have been. If Cernunnos knew of this, surely they would be just as dead at his hands as they were about to be at Ares’. Ares could imagine she was quite sick; Alena was only half-Fey. She had told him her father was a Mortal man and so she did not have the powers she otherwise would have. Feys were blessed with exceedingly long lives, some of them living as long as fifteen hundred years, and they were not as easy to kill as a Mortal, but easier than a God, an Olympian. “You will take me to him now. You will show me his tent and then you will run again, for the last time. You will run back here, you will close the gates and when you open them, a new life will await you. A better life, the kind Maggie would want for you.”

Just as they neared the door to the girls’ dorm, Ares zapped Alena’s little footlocker to his bedroom on his island. Neither of the children saw him do it but when the smoke finally cleared, they wondered where it had gone.

Chapter Ten

Sledgehammer

1

Ares got his first, last, and only good look at the place Alena had once called home as the children escorted him from the orphanage to the tent where Jaakim made her suffered. Ares kept one child under each arm as they walked and did not fail to meet the meek stares of those around him or hear the whispers as he passed. Word spread quickly in places like this, they knew of the man Ares killed on his way into this pit, now they were waiting to see what else he did. “That’s it,” Sha’Quanda whispered and pointed to a ragged tent. Jaakim’s tent was nearly indiscernible from the other weatherworn tents. Other than its size, which seemed to be a bit larger than the others were but not much, and the armed men standing outside, it was completely non-descript. “You go now, run, and don’t stop for anything,” Ares warned the children with him.

“Mr. Ares?”

Ares was not in the mood for any further talk. “I’ll tell Maggie you miss her, now GO!”

Dae’Jave grabbed Sha’Quanda by the hand and ran off with her, both of them looking back over their shoulders to watch him walk up to the guards. When the first one fell, they turned their heads forward and ran faster.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Ares chimed as he sauntered up to the tent, catching the two guards by surprise. One guard looked to the other for half-a-second and Ares planted his dagger into the man’s gut, slid it harshly to the right then twisted it a full 360-degrees while grabbing the semi-automatic weapon from his hand. “Beautiful day to die,” he corrected as the man’s innards spilled onto the hard-packed dusty Earth and he held the gun up slightly to fire at the guard with the stunned eyes. All around, the people who had been watching him with silent curiosity began shrieking and fleeing in panic. The flap of the tent opened and a large man with a raised semi-automatic began to emerge. Ares hit him with the butt of the gun, shattering his jaw, blood spraying from his mouth as his teeth bit off the tip of his tongue. It flopped to the ground in a pool of crimson with the guard crashing after it. A hard knee to the face, and the guard’s upper jaw shattered along with the bridge of his nose, sending shards of broken bone into his brain, leaving him flopping around on the ground like a fish next to his useless tongue.

Throwing open the flap Ares stormed inside, semi-automatic in one hand and dagger in the other.

Four men inside and a fifth in a wheelchair between them. They opened fire upon sight, guns blazing, filling the ratted tent with the acrid stench of gunpowder. Bullets that should have torn right through the intruder slowed and then stopped in mid-air before bursting into flames and falling to the dirt where they started little fires. The guns in their bewildered hands began to warm and then heat until the armed guards suddenly cried out and dropped the red hot metal from their burnt palms.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Ares chirped. “Israeli craftsmanship just isn’t what it used to be, is it boys? They overheat so easily.”

Guns rendered useless, they reached for the knives on their belts and charged forward. Ares gave the gun in his hand a cursory glance before throwing it down and meeting them in battle. Jaakim sat in his wheelchair watching the fists and legs fly. He had no idea who the stranger was or his business here and he did not think he was going get the chance to find out. Pity.

The stranger fought like no man Jaakim had ever seen, he blocked blows that others would never see coming while finding openings others would also never see. While the stranger worked up a heavy sweat, he never came close to running out breath. The first of four of Jaakim’s men fell when Ares broke his neck. The man had the misfortune of coming into too close to the God of War and when he cocked his fist back, Ares with his extra long reach simply grabbed him by both sides of the head and gave it a good twist. His neck snapped like a chicken bone and he collapsed to the dirt.

The second went down when the God of War broke his back. The man came in at full charge; Ares waited until the last moment, sidestepped, let him pass by half a foot, then grabbed him with both hands. Shoulder in one hand, knee in the other, he dropped to the ground in the classic WWE style, brought the man up and slammed his back down on his knee. The man uttered forth a blood-curdling cry of agony as his back shattered in half. Ares left him to die in slow anguish.

The last two decided their best bet was to double-team the God of War, so they rushed in together. Ares held his arms up in front of his brawny body to block the first of their blows then dropped down and lashed out with one leg, taking theirs out from under them and bringing them to the ground. The closest one never knew what hit him when the dagger plunged into his heart and twisted vigorously. The second lay stunned on the ground and Ares looked up briefly to see the torture chair Sha’Quanda had told him so much about and suddenly knew what it was Alena had against bodybuilding.

It wasn’t a chair. It was a weightlifter’s bench, the seat caked and sticky with blood and other precious bodily fluids. How the thing got here in the middle of this godforsaken place Ares did not know, but its intended purpose had been perverted beyond belief.

The man had hit his head on the metal legs as he went down and his forehead was bleeding profusely. Pouncing on him from behind, Ares beat the man’s bleeding head into the ripped pad of the bench until it split like a melon and his brains splayed all over the seat.

With all but rage lost to him, Ares turned to the man in the chair. “You must be Jaakim. Maggie sends her regards. Now…Get up,” he demanded.

“Who are you?” Jaakim returned the same demand, trying not to show his fear or his disadvantage in the situation. The man before him was huge, a giant, and stronger than an ox. “Others are coming.”

“Let them come.” One hand planted in the slickness of blood and brain matter, he pushed his big body to his feet, looked down at the bench once more. All he could see was Alena tied there with a snake writing around inside her. “GET…UP!” Ares roared and threw the dagger at the man in the chair. It landed between his spread legs.

Jaakim grabbed the blade by its jeweled hilt, ripped it free of the leather, and looked at it. Two snakes intertwined on the hilt, one with eyes of rubies and the other with eyes of sapphires twisted around ivory. It was heavy. It was old. “Who are you?” he demanded as he tried to buy himself time. Surely the others were on their way to him. They would burst in here at any moment and bring the stranger down in a hail of gunfire.

“
I…am…Ares.”

Jaakim wasn’t unfamiliar with the name but he couldn’t say he knew a lot about it, either, other than Ares had been some type of God. Maybe even, “Maggie’s God?” he mocked. “Where were you when she needed you? When she cried below me and begged for my mercy?”

“You should be more concerned with the fact that I’m here now,” Ares warned, taking exception to the taunting tone of the man’s voice.

With no warning, the mocking grin on Jaakim’s face flattened as he flipped the dagger around and threw it back. Jaakim thought the maneuver would buy him enough milliseconds to lurch from the chair and, best case, the dagger would strike Ares, giving Jaakim enough time to finish him. As his ass left the seat and he took one step forward, Ares caught the dagger and smirked. Suddenly the blade burst into flame. Jaakim reached behind him for the handgun he kept hidden in the chair, hoping it too had not overheated. Just as his hand landed on it, the dagger cut through his flank, sinking deep into his lung and liver. The warlord went down to his knees and slumped over the wheelchair.