knew that Harbinger, despite his ruthlessness, was not without mercy. He’d thought of that as weakness before, but now he needed that mercy. They would prove themselves, then he would avenge Lila, and the Tvar’s fury would be quenched in the blood of Harbinger’s enemies.
“First question, did you kill Van Huong?”
Nikolai did not know that name. “Who?”
“Wrong answer,” Harbinger stated. “Pull the trigger.”
When not fighting for control, his human mind was extremely analytical under stress. One in six. A seventeen percent chance. It was a reasonable sacrifice to make for peace.
CLICK
The hammer fell on an empty chamber. He slowly exhaled. His finger creeped forward, and the trigger reset.
“Van was my translator. Disappeared during your attack, was listed as MIA. Ringing any bells?”
Nikolai remembered now. They’d put together an extensive dossier on all of Special Task Force Unicorn, supernatural and normal, before the assault. “Yes. I did. I killed him myself.”
Harbinger’s eyes hardened behind the iron sights of the old Thompson. “He was a good kid.”
“If it is any consolation, I snuck up on him and snapped his neck. It was quick. He never felt a thing.”
“Neither will you. Wrong answer. Pull the trigger.”
“But that wasn’t even a question-”
“ Pull the trigger! ” Harbinger bellowed.
Two of six. Thirty-three percent. Or to look at it another way, one of five remaining chambers was loaded. Twenty percent. Nikolai held his breath.
“Pull the trigger,” Harbinger ordered. “Or I will.”
He could hear the cylinder rotate. CLICK.
Harbinger sounded grudgingly impressed. “Who betrayed us? How did you find the task force?”
It wasn’t like it was a state secret any longer. “We brought in a Kazakh orc tracker. All orcs have a specialty, and nothing could elude this one. It took him some time to acclimatize to the terrain, but once he did, he led us right to you. ”
“Orcs sure can be talented. I inherited a bunch of Uzbeks. Good folks.”
“You still gave us quite the chase.”
“That we did.” Harbinger’s lips turned up slightly, in a semblance of a smile. “It was a hell of a fight.”
“Admit it, you enjoyed the challenge.”
“A bit.” Harbinger chuckled, then he grew deadly serious. “Oh, and by the way…wrong answer.”
Third of six. Fifty percent. Even odds of death; flip a coin. Or one live round in the remaining four chambers. Only a twenty-five percent chance.
That is not helping.
Nikolai’s voice cracked a bit. It made him ashamed. “I am beginning to believe there are no right answers in this test of yours.”
Harbinger shrugged. “Maybe.”
Enough of this. This is madness. Turn it on him! Kill Harbinger! Kill them all CLICK.
He was shaking badly. His mouth was dry. His stomach ached with nervous acid. Going back was not an option. Only Harbinger or the other Alpha could defeat them, and the other Alpha had murdered Lila. Masterless, he was nothing but an animal. Death was preferable to failure. Nikolai forced himself to speak. “Next?”
The nub of Harbinger’s cigarette dangled from his lip, forgotten. “Impressive. I want you to know that. You may be an evil man, Nikolai, but you’re an impressive man. I’ve got one last question.”
Four of six. Sixty-seven percent chance that this question would bring a silver bullet. Or one in three remaining possibilities. Thirty-three percent.
“What do you regret?”
It seemed an odd question, but not to someone like Harbinger. He was, above all, a creature of moral absolutes. He pondered on the answer. Nikolai Petrov had taken so many innocent lives over the decades that numbering them seemed like an impossibility. He’d committed atrocities, followed madmen, murdered, burned, tortured, destroyed, and wrecked his way across half the world. He’d fed the gulags, hammering down the nails that stuck out. He’d killed the dissidents, ripping them from their homes and leaving the half-eaten corpses in the streets as a warning to the others. A cog in the greatest death machine ever, he had lived a life free of mercy, compassion, or accountability. And most of that had been done with the full complicity of his human mind. He couldn’t even blame it on the curse.
You named me Tvar, the word for feral beast, but which of us is the real animal?
There was only one true answer. “I regret only one thing…I regret meeting Lila. She showed me a world that I never belonged in. I tried, oh, how I tried for her. I am a corrupter, but I was loved by an innocent. How many like her did I hurt throughout the years? I do not know, but one, just one good person forgave me. Only…” Nikolai’s voice fell to a whisper. “Only, by becoming part of her life, I condemned her to death. It would have been better if she’d never known I existed, or perhaps it would have been better if I had never existed at all…”
Nikolai did not wait for Harbinger’s judgment. He pulled the trigger.
“I don’t know what Aksel was goin’ on about. I can read the first part, it’s about being in the war, but this…” Aino gestured at the section about the amulet. “This is mostly gibberish. The words seem made up. Maybe it’s a secret army code or something, eh?”
A gunshot rang out. Heather looked up from her grandfather’s journal. The noise had come from inside the Alpha’s house.
“You hear something?” Aino asked.
“Clear as day,” she answered. It was hard to believe that he hadn’t heard that, but Heather had to remind herself: she wasn’t normal anymore. “I’ll be back.”
Heather took her shotgun, got out of the truck, and slammed the door too hard behind her. The biting wind felt refreshing after the artificial warmth of the laboring heater. Quickly, she went up the icy steps three at a time, not even realizing that she did so. The others had to lumber along, lifting each leg high to clear enough snow to walk. Heather forced herself to slow down so as to not look suspicious.
She found Harbinger standing in the living room, the giant skeleton looming behind him. Nikolai Petrov was still on the couch, only slouched forward, and for just a moment she thought that nothing had changed since she’d left. But the smell of exposed brains and blood told her a different story.
How do I even know what brains smell like? Go figure. “What’re you doing?”
Harbinger walked over to the body and picked up one of his big snub-nosed revolvers from where it had fallen on the couch. “Looking for something to write with. I told you to wait outside.”
Blood was leaking out the side of Nikolai’s cracked skull, dripping down his face, and pooling on the carpet. She should have felt something-revulsion, maybe? But she didn’t. It was more habit than any real feeling that made her speak. “You’re a monster.”
“Correction. Monster Hunter.” Harbinger reloaded his revolver and stuck it back under his coat. “I’m only a monster when I have to be. You got a pen?”
The Alpha opened his eyes. He was standing in the center of the bottom level of the Shaft Six building. The walls were covered in blood. Confused, he studied his hands. They were red up to the elbow. He looked up to see Lucinda Hood standing at the top of the catwalk, her mouth agape. It must have been bad, because it took quite a bit to shock a necromancer. “What have you done?”
He looked down. Two of his pack were at his feet, so brutally mangled, more bone than flesh, that they were barely recognizable. The amulet burned even hotter against his chest. It had been fed. He had been fed. “It is time to free the vulkodlak, ” he explained.
The witch raised her artificial hand and covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear as she nodded.
