Page 41

Chapter 41

With the enemy soldiers rousted, we took the time to explore the underground bunker. We started back in the computer room that we’d cleared first. Gunnar went to the tables to try to determine what the men had been building while Connor sat down at the computer to search for intel.

Sidnee and I hurriedly checked the bodies for identification or anything that would help us find out who these people were and what their agenda was before Matilda decided to cleanse this room in her dramatic fashion.

The men were wearing access badges on their uniforms, but apart from those, all their names and insignias that were usually on a military uniform were missing. They must have checked them in to keep themselves anonymous.

The badges had the words ‘Knight Stalker’. I shivered. Using the word knight had very lordly connotations. Who did these people think they were? In England a knight served their sovereign; were these black-ops personnel using it that way to suggest that they were serving a government overlord? Or were they implying that they were superior to us lowly supernats and were on a righteous crusade? Either way, at least we had a name for our shadowy splinter group. Not that it really mattered what they called themselves; I was happy to call them arseholes.

We didn’t find anything else before Matilda gleefully vaporised them. She didn’t seem to want to keep their skulls. Friends and family only.

Thomas was searching the rest of the room and Sidnee joined him, opening file cabinets and drawers and looking for anything that would tell us what they were doing and why they wanted the mine.

‘I’m going to help the air witch, Emma,’ I announced. ‘Matilda, will you come with me?’

She shrugged and turned to follow. When we reached Emma’s cell, I knocked on the door then opened it. Emma looked up as we entered and her eyes widened at the sight of Matilda. A hag: she probably hadn’t met one before.

‘This is my friend Matilda,’ I said hastily. ‘She’s a hag but she’s very nice.’ Especially if you brought her doughnuts .

Matilda waved a clawed hand in a way that probably wasn’t as reassuring as she intended. I pointed to the collar around Emma’s neck. ‘That collar is deadly. Emma can’t leave the room with it on. Can you make it go away, like you did with the mean men’s bodies?’

Matilda squinted at it then leaned in to sniff it before moving back. She flicked a metallic nail and the collar turned to dirt and crumbled to dust. The air witch reached up and felt her neck, then promptly burst into tears. Clearly panicked, Matilda looked at me wide eyed.

‘Happy tears,’ I explained. ‘Emma is glad to be free. You haven’t upset her.’

Emma nodded. ‘Happy tears. Thank you, Matilda, thank you so much! I thought I was going to die here.’

Matilda patted Emma’s arm awkwardly; the tentative nature of the touch and her screwed-up face made it look like she thought the witch had some sort of infectious disease.

Emma wiped the tears from her cheeks. ‘They don’t deserve any more of my tears. They’ve wrung enough of them from me.’

‘I think those tears were for yourself,’ I said softly. ‘We all need to cry now and again and there’s no shame in it. It’s a release, and I’d hazard a guess that you really needed it. ’

Emma took a shuddering breath. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

‘Where are you from, Emma?’ I asked. She could be from Portlock but I’d never seen her before.

‘My full name is Emma Timit. I’m from Anchorage and I work with the Alaska Minerals Commission. They…’ she sneered with true hatred, ‘came looking for information about a mine that had been abandoned for seventy-five years. When I’d given them the papers they requested, they kidnapped me! Somehow they’d found out I was a powerful air witch and they knew they could use me.’ Her voice trembled but her jaw was set firm. ‘What’s the date?’ she asked.

‘It’s New Year’s Day,’ I said.

‘God, I’ve been here for more than four months. Do you have a phone I can borrow? Helmud will be beside himself.’

I swallowed hard. Helmud. It couldn’t be! ‘Helmud Henderson?’ I asked.

Her gaze sharpened; she’d heard the dread in my tone. ‘Yes. My fiancé. You know him?’

Oh fuck sticks. ‘Was he a mine inspector?’

She nodded then froze. ‘Was?’ she whispered.

Double fuck. ‘I’m so sorry. Helmud died. He was killed by the same organisation that kidnapped you.’

Emma collapsed onto the floor with a strangled sob. ‘Helmud! Oh my God, Helmud!’

To my surprise, Matilda pulled her into a hug. I guessed the hag knew about grief.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I was. I’d bet any money that Helmud hadn’t come to Chrome by chance. He’d come a day early to look for his lost fiancée; somehow he’d known she was close by, buried in the ground in a concrete bunker he couldn’t locate. And I was also willing to bet that one of the Knight Stalkers had found him too close to the bunker for comfort.

I didn’t say any of that aloud – Emma didn’t need to pile any misguided guilt on her heart-wrenching grief – but at least now Helmud’s death made more sense to me. It hadn’t been an accident or because he’d accidentally strayed into the wrong corridor; he’d been targeted because the Knight Stalkers knew he was sniffing around.

Of the deaths, Helmud’s had always stood out. The others had been dwarves and their deaths had been used to frame the hag, to scare the dwarves into leaving the mine that the Knight Stalkers wanted for themselves. Helmud’s death hadn’t had the same scare factor – and he’d retained his head. Now I knew why: it was because his death hadn’t been planned .

They’d dosed him with a hefty dose of fisheye. We hadn’t been sure what the drug would do to a human, but now we knew it was as deadly to them as to us. No wonder it hadn’t been widely deployed.

Despite the tragic circumstances, excitement poured through me. We were making real progress. Soon we’d be the ones going after the Knight Stalkers and then we could see how they liked it.