“Those are hashashin in there,” I said. “What are they doing with the bones of Red Knights?”
Violin made a face. “They’re superstitious,” she said. “The Shadow War created by the Red Order and their counterparts in Islam is out of balance. The Red Order is in ruins, the Knights are scattered, the goals of the Shadow War are threatened.”
“So?”
“So, they think they can resurrect the Red Knights with a blood sacrifice.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“You saw it, Joseph.”
“No, tell me that it can’t work.”
She punched me in the chest. Hard. “Don’t be an idiot. Of course it can’t work.”
I was relieved. Kind of.
“But,” she added, “I sincerely doubt that blood ritual is part of their mission objectives. That’s something the assassins might think up, something fed by their own mystical beliefs, but if they’re here, then they must have been sent by their masters who in turn must have intelligence from Red Order operatives.”
“Again…so?”
“So, they want the bones of the Red Knights.”
“Why?”
“DNA. The Red Order has no intention of letting their pet monsters become extinct. Not if they can find a way through some avenue of science to strengthen the Knights they have left or somehow create new ones. My mother thinks they are planning on using gene therapy to transform human operatives into Red Knights. A new and improved model, so to speak. They want to borrow the best genetic qualities of the Knights and graft it to humans who can otherwise be trusted. After all…the Knights did ultimately betray the Order.”
Five years ago I would have laughed at her. Gene therapy to build super soldiers was science fiction, right?
Over the last few years I’ve encountered that kind of madness in several forms. Science was growing faster than sanity or common sense.
I looked past her.
“I don’t suppose you have an Arklight strike team back there waiting for a go-order?”
She grinned. “I don’t suppose you have Echo Team locked and loaded.”
We both smiled as if this was all funny. Like it was a sunny day and we were looking at kids playing on the beach. Like the world made sense and we were ordinary people.
Except that neither of us would ever be ordinary.
And the world was totally mad.
I kissed her again.
Who knows if I’d ever get the chance again?
We crept back along the edge and moved to flank the rusted door. Quietly I asked, “Do you have a plan? ’Cause as tough as we are, darlin’, there are ten of them and two of us. I am not hugely sold on those odds, and last time I checked I did not have a big red S on my chest.”
“It’s not about being tougher than your enemies, Joseph,” she said. “After all, the Red Knights are bigger, stronger and much faster than anyone. Certainly much more powerful than my mother, and she’s personally killed thirty-one of them.”
“Christ.” I glanced at the closed door. “That still leaves ten of them, two of us, and an explosive environment, honey.”
“The reason my mother has survived this long is that in combat she was always smarter than whoever she fought. Always.” Violin placed her palm on my chest, right between the two flash-bang grenades clipped to my Hammer suit. “One of these days, ask Mr. Church how he killed his first Red Knight.”
“Huh?”
“He and my mother would have made a very good pair.”
She removed one of the flash-bangs.
“Whoa, now. Wait, we can’t,” I said. “Too much methane.”
Violin ignored me. She pulled the pin on the grenade but left the spoon in place. Then she carefully fitted the flash-bang into the space between the doorknob and the frame.
It was so simple an idea that I felt like kicking myself.
Violin stood on her toes to kiss my cheek. “Time to go.”
We stepped slowly, softly and quietly away. We didn’t start to run until we were fifty yards down the tunnel. And then we ran like hell.
It was just beginning to rain as we emerged from the darkness via a duct near the Seine. The water was stingingly cold, but it washed the filth from us.
We knew exactly when the assassins left the chamber with their stolen bones. We could tell down to the second. The blast blew manhole covers into the air for twenty blocks. Towers of flame shot a hundred feet into the air, transforming the City of Lights into a city of fiery red and gold and yellow. The earth shook beneath us. Windows exploded outward all along the avenues. People screamed and panicked and ran as if the world itself was exploding.
Violin and I sat on either side of the open duct as a fireball belched out between us. We were laughing like fools.
Like lunatics.
Like children.
I tapped my earbud and called it in. Church only said, “Good work.” Nothing else. Some instinct told me that he wanted to say more, but I knew he wouldn’t.
Bug said that he would make sure that no trace of DMS involvement hit anyone’s radar. As for the lab down in the sewers? Tomorrow someone would go in.
The fire brigades, the police.
Maybe the Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre.
Who knows, maybe even Interpol.
They’d go in looking for the source of the explosion. If the right people went in, there was a marginal chance they’d find the bones. Many bones now. Charred beyond recognition. The DNA in the marrow utterly destroyed, and all the potential for corrupt science to borrow the unnatural power there gone.
There would be nothing worth salvaging. And nothing worth learning. No secrets, no horrors, no nightmares.
And for once I’d come out of it whole.
It was a strange fact of my life that when I went to work I seldom came away with a whole skin. This time…I hadn’t so much as skinned my knee.
It felt weird.
When the flames died down, I crossed the open duct and sat down next to Violin. The night was alive with sirens and car alarms and shouts. None of that mattered. The danger was over for now, even if we were the only two people in Paris who knew it.
“Look,” she said, pointing.
Far above us a falling star carved a white line across the sky.
It was so corny that we both laughed. So poignant that I sought out her hand and when I took it she gave me a squeeze.
“Make a wish,” I said.
I expected her to laugh at that, too. But instead she turned away, and in the light of stars and moon and Paris I caught the tracery of silver tears on her cheeks. I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her against me.
“The war never ends,” she whispered. Softly, more to herself than to me.
For that I had no answer.
What response is really adequate when we both knew that, for us and those like us, the war could never really end? Ever. I thought about Lilith, the hell she lived in and the war she fought. I thought about Church, whose war was ongoing, fueled by some personal reasons I doubted I would ever fully comprehend.
Violin was a child of conflict and atrocity, bred as a slave, forged into a weapon.
I had been reshaped by horror and loss into a killer.
People like us were meant for war, and that is a tragedy I can’t look too closely at or I start to really lose it. Four people who craved peace — and who understood both its cost and its vulnerability — but who would never be allowed to share in it. Even if we somehow managed to win this unwinnable war.