The Reluctant King (The Star-Crossed Series) (17 page)

              The room was empty, even of clothing or signs that someone had lived here at all and so we moved to the next room, which was also empty. Each room had been cleared out and left deserted without even a runaway sock left behind. The bathrooms were also empty, but seemed to be in enough working order that I could tell people had been here not that long ago.

              We exited the dorms through the back door which led us to a shoveled out, concrete path to the next building’s back entrance. This room was just as much of a dead end. It was a training facility with an open floor plan. Heavy black mats lay littered across the floor and various weapons’ equipment was scattered throughout. Unlike the dorms, this room had not been used recently, and every surface was covered with a thick layer of dust. It was also freezing, ice plastered the inside of the windows and there was not much difference between inside and outside.

              I realized then that the dorms had felt much warmer.

              Clearly recently lived in.

              We exited the training building out of the front exit so we could walk across the courtyard to the cafeteria. This building was a bit of a mixture of the last two, where the kitchen and a few tables had been obviously used and cleaned recently, the majority of the tables set up in the cafeteria were covered in dust, as were the bathrooms and half of the storage facilities behind the stoves.

              Finding nothing in the cafeteria we walked over to the last building. Kiran explained this building as another training facility, but whereas the first training facility had been for brute strength, this one would house more of an educational type environment.

              Jericho just happened to be in front at the entrance to the last building so he was the first to walk through. His audible gasp had us rushing into the room behind him only to slam into him since he for some reason did not move forward.

              I stayed irritated with him for two seconds before I lifted my eyes and looked around.

              Holy hell.

              “Holy hell,” I echoed out loud. “What the hell was going on here?”

              We moved silently throughout the open-spaced room that maybe at one time had been a classroom, but more recently had been turned into some kind of testing facility. Tubing and monitors hung from the ceiling over stainless steel medical tables. Standing monitors were located next to each of the twenty stations, along with a prepped instrument table, including all kinds of sharp and serrated knives that I had never seen in a hospital setting before.

              On top of all of that the room smelled sterile; clearly scrubbed and bleached to hide any evidence of the death I imagined happening here. I felt it now…. the magic. It was weak and depressing, disintegrating into thin air even as we stood there. And as I walked through the room I realized the feeling came from the medical instruments and tubing. The rest of my team walked silently through the room, not touching anything but taking it all in.

              I was the first to touch something, but I was also the only one that could feel the current of magic circulating throughout the room. I reached out to touch the tubing, curiosity getting the better of me. It was clear and thick, bigger than something that a human would attach to an IV or vein, but I wasn’t convinced that wasn’t what it was used for. I took a breath before letting my fingers graze over the plastic and I was glad I did.

              Excruciating pain seared my fingers as the effect of the plastic pierced my skin. I flinched backward, sucking in a sharp breath. I was glad I didn’t put my whole hand around the tube, I wasn’t positive I would have been able to let go.

              “Don’t touch anything!” I demanded, fearing for the rest of my team. This was unlike anything I had ever seen before and I after watching Henri die, I wasn’t convinced we would heal right from whatever kind of magic this was.

              I followed the tubing with my eyes until it ended at a sharp needle point that could be injected into a person’s skin. At the other end of the tubing, the one that hung from the ceiling was a glass container that was attached to the ceiling and split down the middle with another pane of glass. It was like absolutely nothing I had seen before, but it was obviously used to either take something out or put something in.

              Or both.

              And that was disturbing.

              “Avalon, Jericho, back here!” Xander called and I recognized that we were the only ones still standing in the operating room. I shuddered when I realized I referred to this place as an “operating room.”

              I lifted my eyes to Jericho’s and acknowledged that we should go, but not before I saw the terrified expression that flashed across his face. I wondered if he saw the same thing in my eyes, so I turned around and mentally prepared myself for whatever Xander had found. I readied myself for the worst thing imaginable so that when it happened, I could be strong for my team.

              Behind the last row of metal tables were a windowed wall and a hallway. Behind the window was an observation room with a long conference table. Down the hallway were four more doors that opened away from the observation/conference room.

              Xander, Xavier and Titus each stood in the doorway of three of the rooms and Roxie had slunk down to the floor on the outside of the last room, her hands covering her face, her shoulders trembling.

              I approached Xander first, pushing in next to him and then immediately pressing a hand over my nose and mouth. The pungent smell of rotting, bitter flesh met me first and when my eyes adjusted through the painful smell I saw the piles of bodies layered on top of each other, pushed into the corner and left for us to find. I couldn’t look at their faces, or their upper bodies. I knew what I would find. I knew what I would see. And the last thing I was willing to let haunt my thoughts was dozens of ghostly, death-filled faces and the unnatural concave chests of these victims. So I stared at the feet, counting the pairs and then swallowing back the bile when the number went over twenty.

              I forced myself out of the room and into the next one, pushing Xavier out of the way. There were no dead bodies in this room, but by the stunned, horrified look on Xavier’s face I had to believe he came to the same conclusions as me. Tables had been set up in this room covered in boxes that were filled with file folders. On each file folder was a name, printed in typed script. The longer I stood in the room, the more my mind fought to understand what I saw.

              There were five tables altogether and each table had a label, a plain, white sheet of paper, taped to the edge of the table. They read: Witch, Titan, Shape-Shifter, Medium and Hybrid.

              My mind reeled at what Hybrid could mean, not wanting to investigate that further until I finished my sweep of the building. I called Xander and Jericho into this room, demanding that they shut the door to the other for now and then instructed that they start looking through the files to see what they could find out.

              Titus stood in a nearly empty room, hovering over a long table with a huge map of the world pinned to the edges of the table. Little metal pins with red tipped ends were stuck all over the map, covering the globe. Some of the pins were clustered together in large clumps and some were spread farther out as if isolated in that particular part of the world. As I stepped closer to the map, I noticed a handful of green tipped pins that distinguished some of the more important parts of the world to Immortals; Peru, Morocco, London and a few others were marked with green.

              I chewed at my thumbnail, trying to make sense of the map. Were the red markers for where Immortals lived around the globe? Or were they places that were somehow crossed out and negated? Or tried out and failed? What did the green mean? Were they going to those places next? Or what?

              What did it mean?

              I let out a sound I almost didn’t recognize as my own, a low growl that built into a guttural scream. I turned around filled with a fury I had never felt before, not even for Lucan and I punched my hand through the weak dry wall, wishing it were stronger…. wishing it had put up a fight, because I needed to feel pain. I
needed
to feel like I fought for something, instead of letting these people suffer and die under my ignorant rule.

              “Roxie, what’s in that room?” I shouted, breaking up our silence with a rough, furious voice.

              “Nothing Avalon, it’s empty,” she called back immediately. “Whatever was in here was cleaned out and taken with them.” Her voice was still weak, and I could tell she was crying, but there was more to her emotion than just sadness, there was vengeful intent and I echoed that very sentiment.

              “Jericho,” I called, pulling my hand from the wall and brushing off the dust and drywall on my flexible snow pants. When he entered the room I didn’t hesitate to give him orders. “Get Talbott on the phone now. Fill him in on this…. this…. situation. And then have him send a team of twenty or more Titans to come clean up this disaster. I want those bodies identified, their families notified and I want funerals held for them. I’ll pay for it all. Just make sure it happens.”

              “Xander, Xavier, get in here,” I called next and they immediately responded while Jericho dialed Talbott’s number and then left the room to talk someplace more private. “Roxie, you too.”

              When everyone was assembled around the table I pushed the anger, resentment and fear down, deep, deep down into the locked box in my soul that I would sort through later and turned my trained eye to the table.

              “Whatever this is,” I started in a choked voice and then paused to clear my throat before I continued. “Whatever this is…. has to be stopped. We have to end this. I cannot allow one more Immortal to suffer what’s happened here.” I paused again to look each person in the eye, making sure they felt the complete weight of the task and responsibility ahead of us. “Let’s dissect this map, find out where they went and what they have planned. We leave in twenty minutes and we better know where to go next, because we cannot afford to pick the wrong place.”

              I got four solid nods in response before suggestions started being thrown around and hypothesis made.

              We were determined.

              And we were desperate.

              But most of all, we were vetted in this arena. Terletov would not get away with this again.

Chapter Sixteen

              Two weeks. Two f-ing weeks. And nothing. We checked out every single one of those green pinpoints, and sent teams of Titans to scour the red pinpointed areas too. And nothing.

              No leads, no more incidents, no more anything.

              The only thing we had learned was that the dead Immortals were from some of the cities pinpointed, but they were from both the red ones and the green ones. We had also learned that the dead Immortals were all Shape-Shifters that had left the hidden colonies that had survived under Lucan’s reign and joined human society.

              But those facts didn’t require very deep investigation, and because the dead were still from both the red pinpointed cities and the green, it didn’t narrow anything down at all. If anything, it made the whole situation even more confusing.

              I ran my hands over my face in frustration and then settled into ripping my thumb nail off with my teeth. A grumbled sigh of desperation vibrated my body and I used all of my will power to stop myself from shouting out obscenities. I glanced around the deserted farm anxiously, hoping that bringing everyone back to Terletov’s Latvian estate would bring us some answers.

              “There’s going to be something here,” Jericho said from the driver’s seat. I glanced over at him and nodded in approval. Jericho was as fiercely determined as I was, and there was something in that…. something in sharing our common goal of retribution.

              “Who’s meeting us here?” Roxie asked from the backseat. Her foot tapped frantically on the carpeted floor and she kept fidgeting with her hands. We were all feeling the symptoms of two long weeks of constant travel and no results. If we didn’t catch a break soon, I knew from experience we were going to start getting really short with each other.

              And violent.

              And nobody wanted that.

              “Uh,” I muttered while I pulled out my phone to look at the text Talbott had sent me earlier in the day. “Andre, Christi, Anton and Mitica….. four Titans that participated in Eden’s rescue mission three years ago. They also were part of the group that arrested Terletov and escorted him back to the Citadel.”

              “I’ve heard of Mitica, I thought he was a huge Lucan supporter?” Roxie questioned, her hands never staying still.

              “He was…. is, he still is. Most of these guys have been relieved of their duties, but they agreed to meet us here. I think they understand what’s at stake,” I explained, but I felt my entire body tense with the realization that these guys were not going to be easy to work with. Luckily I had access to Eden’s memories, so I knew her side of the story.

              “What did Talbott tell them? Are you announcing all of this to the rest of the Kingdom?” Roxie pressed, and I knew she was just trying to keep her mind off what could be considered a dismal failure so far.

              “No, I’m not announcing this, at least not yet. I want this as under wraps as I can keep it. I don’t want anyone panicking, or questioning the fragile state of our Kingdom. We need a strong front, otherwise I’m afraid Terletov won’t be the only Rebellion we’re fighting,” I paused, thinking over my words and fearing I sounded like a dictator as I explained. “I’m fine with the Kingdom wanting new leadership if they are unsatisfied with my job, but I refuse to hand it over unless I’m sure that’s what the majority of the people want. But as far as these Titans go, we’re desperate, and I am hoping these guys can give us some insight into what happened to Terletov after he was arrested. They’ve been briefed on everything Talbott knows, and from there I hope they can help.”