Tortured: Book Three of the Jason and Azazel Trilogy (27 page)

* * *

Marlena and I surveyed the Sons' headquarters from
behind some bushes. The headquarters were, indeed, an old castle. It didn't
have a mote, though. The castle was hulking, crouching in a clearing in the
woods. It sat in a valley, one large round tower surrounded by fortified walls
and several smaller turrets. Marlena and I were above the castle on a hill,
looking down. Five or six armed men guarded the entrance. Squadrons of others
marched in circles around the perimeter.
 
"Well," said Marlena, "how do you suppose we're going to get
in?"
I sighed. "I don't know."
"You think maybe a distraction of some kind?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"Well, maybe one of us could flash them."
I laughed, thinking about suggesting this very thing to Jason when we were
trying to get into the library. "I don't know," I said. "They're
celibate men. Maybe they wouldn't care."
"Celibate," she said. "Maybe they wouldn't even know what
breasts were."
I laughed again. "Seriously," I said.
"I am serious," she said.
"Distraction.
Get most of them away from the door and then one of us sneaks in."
"So what would happen to the other one?"
She considered. "Good point."
When Jason and I had been trying to get into the library, all we'd had to do
was go up to the door and ask. Of course, everyone at the school had been under
some kind of mojo, making them want to make us happy. Still, maybe . . .
"Let's try this," I said, and I explained what I was thinking to
Marlena.
After some discussion, we both leapt out of the bushes and ran to the door,
waving our arms in the air. "We surrender!" we yelled over and over
again.
The men were startled. Rather than rushing to us, they kept their distance,
staring at us like we were nuts. Marlena and I trotted up to the main door.
"We surrender," I said to the men at the door.
"So we hear," said one.
"What for,
exactly?"
"
You don't know who we are?" I asked, pretending to be
wounded.
"We're very dangerous enemies of the Sons," said Marlena.
"You'll want to take us to your superiors right away."
The men looked even more confused.
 
"Of course," I said, "if you don't accept our surrender, I
suppose we'll just leave then."
"Absolutely," said Marlena.
 
"Hold on," said one of the guards, grabbing me by the arm. He and
another guard opened the door and took us inside. The inside of the castle,
oddly enough, was all fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. Inside the door
was a man at desk, typing things into a computer. Marlena and I took a quick
look around and then both drove our elbows into the midsections of the men who
were escorting us. While they huffed and doubled over in surprise, we scampered
out of the room and down a long corridor.
 
Men were walking down the hallway, wearing suits. Marlena opened a random door,
snatched hold of my shirt, and yanked us both inside.
 
The room was an office. There was a man behind its desk, which was covered with
pictures of little children and dogs. He wore small horn rimmed glasses.
"Who are you?" he asked, horrified.
Marlena got out her gun. "We're looking for the holding cells," she
said.
"And the pregnant girls," I said. Palomino was here too somewhere.
"Pregnant girls?"
Marlena asked.
 
"My brother's girlfriend is here. They have some place where they keep
teenage mothers. Then they take their babies away from them."
"They still have places like that?" Marlena said.
The man had put his arms in the air. "D-don't hurt me," he said.
"I have a map of the castle here on my desk. You're welcome to look at it
all you want."
"Thanks," said Marlena, sidling over to him. He shrank from her gun
as she waved it in his face. With trembling hands, he gave her the map.
"In the dungeon," she said.
"Figures."
She handed me the map.
The castle had six levels. The lowest level was labeled "Dungeon" and
showed rows of small rooms. They looked like cells.
 
"Pregnant girls?"
I asked the man.
He shook his head, his eyes wide. "I d-don't know anything ab-bout that.
Really."
"
Looks like there's an elevator at the end of this hallway," I
said to Marlena. We'd go for Jason first. Once we had him, he could help us find
Mina. That is, if they hadn't gotten to him yet. I gulped. How soon could a
trial and execution take place, anyway? It had been about three days since
Jason and I had been captured from
Rome
.
They couldn't have done it already. Could they?
"Let's go," she said.
But as she opened the door to go back into the hall, a loud alarm went off. It
was an annoying beeping sound.
 
We both turned on the man. "Did you do that?" I asked.
"No," he said. "No, no. I swear."
 
Another alarm started to go off as well. This one sounded like a school bell.
The man slid off his chair and crawled under his desk. "It's like the end
of the world," he sobbed.
Marlena and I glared at him. She opened the door a crack to look outside.
"It's pandemonium out there," she said. "There are people
running all over the place."
"
Because of us?"
I asked. I was confused.
 
"I don't know," said Marlena.
 
A loud recorded voice came over PA system. "Alert," it said.
"Lock system disengaged.
Manual lockdown pro-cedures
commencing.
All personnel to designated areas."
It repeated.
And repeated.
"Lock system disengaged?" Marlena said, yelling over the sound of the
alarms and the recorded voice.
"Jason," I said.
 
She flung open the door. We ran out into the hallway, which was filled with people
in suits and men in black outfits, running in various directions. Marlena and I
sprinted for the elevator at the end of the hall. Once inside, the door snapped
closed on us. Marlena punched the button for the ground floor. The elevator
whisked us down. When the door opened on the dungeon floor, I was astonished.
It really did look like a dungeon, complete with bars and chains. It was dank
and dark and musty. All of the cell doors were open and empty. Marlena and I
raced through the dungeon, but there was no one there.
 
Abruptly, the recorded voice changed. "Security breached," it said.
"Powering down."
It didn't make much difference in the dungeon, but when we got back to the
elevator, it wouldn't work.
 
"I think Jason shut down the electricity," I said.
"Great," she said. "Apparently, he didn't need us to rescue
him."
"We've still got to find him," I said.
"And
Palomino."
"
Stairs," said Marlena, pointing.
Inside the stairwell it was pitch black. We grasped the railing and went up
them as fast as we could. Two flights up, we heard someone clambering down the
stairs. Marlena put out her hand to stop me from moving and pulled us up
against the wall. We flattened ourselves there.
"Hello?" said a voice.
 
Dammit. Whoever it was had heard us.
 
"Jason?" said the voice. Wait. I knew that voice. I was used to
hearing it say things like, "You are forbidden to sleep in the same
bed," but it was familiar all the same.
 
"Hallam?" I called.
"Azazel?"
"
It's okay," I told Marlena. We started back up the steps
until we met Hallam.
"Were you in the dungeon?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said. "It's empty."
"Great gods," said Hallam. "I don't know where Jason is. It's a
bloodbath up there."
A bloodbath?
"What do you mean?" I asked.
 
"I mean," said Hallam, "that there are dead people
everywhere."
"You think it's Jason?"
"I don't know what to think. I came when I found out he was here. I was
able to get in, because I know the protocol from when I worked for the Sons. I
found him in the dungeon. I helped him dismantle the locks. I was supposed to
meet him back in the dungeon. But then the lights went out."
"Oh God," I muttered. "You talked to him? How did he seem?"
"That's why I told him to meet me, Azazel. I've never seen him like this.
Never.
He seemed . . ."
We both knew how he seemed. My grandmother's words came back to me as she was
describing the curse she'd laid on Jason.
 
Soon, he won't even be human
.
God.
I had to find him. I had to get to him. I didn't know
if my grandmother could actually really curse people, but she sure had done a
number on Michaela Weem. It was possible, I guessed, in a world where men went
nuts from a kiss and Jason could come back from the dead.
 
"Where do you think he went?" I said. "You think he went to
Hoyt?"
"Could be," said Hallam. "Hoyt's office is on the top floor.
It's where the Council Room is."
 
"I don't understand," said Marlena. "What's wrong with
Jason?"
"Maybe nothing," I said. "Hopefully—"
I was cut off as a door below us opened. Gray light streamed in and a woman toddled
in, holding her protruding belly. "I can't make it down these steps!"
she protested to the person who was coming in behind her. "It's
dark."
A pregnant woman?
 
"Hello?" I yelled. "Are you guys from the pregnant
teenagers
wing?"
"Who is that?" called the pregnant woman.
"Do you know Palomino?" I asked.
 
"Yeah, we know Mina. Who are you?"
I turned to Marlena and Hallam. "Go with them," I said.
"Find Palomino.
Get her out of here. Get all of those
girls out of here."
"Where are you going?" asked Marlena.
"To get Jason," I said, starting up the steps.
"I'm coming with you!" Marlena protested. "I don't even know
this Mina person!"
Hallam caught her arm. "Let her go," he said. "When Jason's like
this, she's really the only person who can do anything. Come on."
The stairs went on forever. At first I ran, but I started to sweat and gasp for
breath. I slowed to a walk. I couldn't tell where I was. It was so dark. All I
could do was take a step at a time and climb higher into the castle. Once I
paused at one of the floors, so I could see where I was. I was on the fourth
floor. The fourth floor was littered with about twenty bodies. Some of them had
just been shot, but a few were worse. One man's entrails spilled out of his
stomach, dragging out onto the floor. Another man's jaw hung loose from his
body, torn away from his face. I slammed the door and kept going.
As I reached the sixth floor, I heard screams and gunshots. There's nothing
like the sounds of men screaming. It's eerie, because it's high pitched but
throaty. And, somehow, it's scarier. Maybe it's sexist, but you don't expect
men to scream.
At least, not like that, you don't.
 
I pushed open the door to the sixth floor. The same gray light greeted me.
There was no light, so the only illum-ination came from small windows. I
stepped over the bodies at the door, trying not to look at them. And I walked
in the direction of the screams.
On this level, the castle didn't resemble an office. There was a plush carpet
on the floor. The original stone walls were showing. Paintings of women and
horses and strange mythological creatures decorated the walls. It reminded me
of the ceiling in the library at the
Sol
Solis
School
.
A man pushed by me, hobbling away. His leg had been shot, and there was blood
smeared all over his suit. I kept moving forward, a feeling of dread knotting
in my stomach.
I was going to find Jason, I told myself. I loved Jason. I tried not to remind
myself of the time that Jason had cut off his own mother's finger and left it
for his brother with a note. I tried not to remind myself of Jason stumbling
into our apartment in
Bradenton
,
covered in blood. I tried not to remind myself of the matter-of-fact way Jason
had talked about killing Jude.
Soon, he won't even be human.
What would he be, then?
I rounded a corner, and there he was. He was standing in front of a closed door
which had Ian Hoyt's name on it. There were two men lying on the floor near
him, wearing suits. They weren't dead. They had shots in both of their legs,
and they were trying to crawl away from him. Jason was standing over a third
man, his foot on the man's hand. He was shooting the fingers on the man's hand.
The man was screaming each time one of his fingers exploded into gore. There
was huge, leering smile on Jason's face.
I shuddered. "Jason?" I said.
Jason didn't even look up. He just leveled his gun in the direction of my voice
and pulled the trigger.
 

Chapter Sixteen

April 30, 1991
He was so small the first time I saw
him.
So little.
And even though it had been an
agonizing ten hours trying to push him out of my body, I didn't hate him. I
know I should. I have seen in my visions what he will be capable of. I have
seen him standing tall while the bodies lie around him dead. I have seen him
turn on everything and everyone that ever loved him. But when I held him and
looked into his tiny bright eyes and his arms batted at the air in front of me
like he was trying to grab at something only he could see, I felt this burst of
. . .
Maybe it was love.
 
I can't do it. I can't kill him. He's
just a baby.
 
I hit the floor. The bullet sailed over my head. "Jason, it's me!" I
shrieked.
He did turn then. He looked at me.
Sort of.
His eyes
were dull, the way they had been when he'd come back from doing whatever he'd
done to Sutherland that night in Bradenton. They looked through me.
Expressionless, he kicked the man he was torturing away from him. The man
screamed again. Almost as an afterthought, Jason turned and put a bullet neatly
in the man's head, right between his eyes. The screaming stopped.
Jason walked to me. He was still holding his gun.
Aiming it
at me.
 
I started to push myself to my feet, but Jason knelt down in front of me. He
put the gun to my forehead. I stopped breathing.
"Jason," I gasped. "It's
 
me
."
A flit of something went across his eyes.
Recognition, maybe?
I took the opportunity to grab the barrel of the gun. I tried to wrest it away
from him, but he held onto it. I managed to twist it, so that it wasn't facing
me anymore. I drew my own gun.
I was scared now. Jason didn't recognize me. He seemed to have gone completely
and totally crazy. And I didn't know what he was doing to these men or what he
planned to do to me. Michaela Weem's words echoed back to me, from months ago.
You will lie dead while he feasts on
your guts.
Had I been wrong, all those months ago, when so many people had urged me to
kill Jason? Was he really the monster they'd painted him to be?
 
Jason was tugging on his gun. He was stronger than me, and with one heave, he
pulled it away from my grasp. I leveled my gun at him, struggling to my feet.
We surveyed each other, guns trained on each other. Jason's finger tensed on
his trigger.
"It's Azazel," I said again.
Jason cocked his head. The huge grin on his face was fading.
"Azazel," he whispered.
 
His gun dropped to his side. He rubbed his face with his hand, squeezing his
eyes shut, and when he opened them, he could see me. He looked around himself,
at the bodies, at the men who were mangled by gunfire, and he
 
screamed
.
The gun fell out of his hand, landing softly on the carpet. Jason dropped to
his knees, suddenly sobbing.
I went to him, kneeling next to him, gathering him in my arms. He took my hand,
the one still holding a gun, and pulled it up to his face. He rested the barrel
against his cheek. "She said,"
he
whispered,
"that you were the only one who could kill me. So you have to do it. You
have to do it or God knows what else I'll do."
I dropped the gun like it burned me. It fell between us. I put my forehead
against his, kissing his cheeks and his nose. "I would never do
that," I said. "I could never do that."
"You don't understand," he said, pulling back. "I've been lying
to you. All this time, I've been lying to you. I tried to tell you, that first
night in
Rome
,
but I couldn't. I tried again in the hotel, but I—I couldn't tell you. I
thought I'd lose you, but you should have known."
"Jason, shh," I said. "Let's just get out of here."
And go where? I wondered.
More running?
After what
we'd done here, the Sons would hunt us down like dogs. But I needed to get
Jason away. I needed to—
"Listen," he said.
"After the sorority house.
They sent me on missions. Not with Hallam. Not always with Hallam.
Sometimes by myself.
I did things. Things like . . ."
He gestured around himself. "Things like this. I don't always remember all
the details. They're fuzzy and . . ." He sucked air in through his nose.
"Your brothers.
Those things they showed you. They were
all true." And then he really started sobbing, like his heart was going to
break.
That fucking bastard Edgar Weem.
I would never forgive
him for this. "It's not your fault, Jason."
This wasn't a curse. This wasn't my grandmother's twisted idea of revenge. This
was a cold, calculated way of bringing up Jason to make damned sure he could do
something like this.
 
He didn't look at me. "Because of prophecies or fate?" he asked.
"Because I'm made of evil and I'm meant to destroy?"
"No," I said.
"Because your father is an
absolutely horrible man."
I put my finger under his chin and turned
him to look at me. "If it didn't bother you, I'd be scared. Then you'd be
evil."
I was sure. Agnes had said that I need to trust myself. Well, I did. I knew
this was right. I knew Jason better than anyone on earth. If there was evil in
him, I'd know about it. "You were abused," I said. "And we've
both been through a really hellish year. But since we've come this far, we
might as well finish the job."
"
The job?"
 
There was so much he didn't know. "The Sons are trying to blow up the
world in 2012," I said. "So, we should probably go kill Ian
Hoyt."
"No more," he said. "No more killing."
"Okay," I said. "I'll do it." I bent my face to his, which
was wet with tears. And I brushed my lips gently against his.
 
And a crescendo of explosions underscored our kiss.
I pulled back. "What was that?" I said.
Jason shook his head. I got up. Ian Hoyt's office was right behind Jason. I
tried the door, but it was locked. Picking up my gun, I put two bullets in the
knob. The door swung open. There were about fifteen men crowded in Ian Hoyt's
office, all wearing suits. They'd probably cowered in here when they'd
discovered Jason was loose. That wasn't the strange thing, though. The strange
thing was that they were all dead. They were all holding guns, and their heads
were slumped forward or to the side. It looked like they'd all just shot
themselves. And from the smell of smoke in the room, they must have just done
it.
You put that suggestion in those men's
heads. You planted their insanity.
 
Oops. Had I just made a whole castle of men shoot
themselves
?