Chapter 36 #2
“Why is Hitler so desperate to have the Amulet of Amun?”
He sighs dramatically. “Not that one. Try again.”
“Your name then, at least.”
“August Wolff.”
Not familiar, but good to have on hand. He must be sure of himself to tell me within earshot of Bes and Cec.
“What does my father have to do with any of this?”
“Dumme Frau,” he swears. I assume he’s talking about Ingrid, or maybe Mara. “Can no one keep their mouths shut?”
“You were fool enough to trust in someone like Mara, whose allegiances change on a whim. How can you expect any less?”
He snorts. “She was Ingrid’s puppet, not mine. Ingrid got what she deserved, trusting someone whose loyalty is built on money and idle threats.”
I ask again: “What about my father?”
“Your father,” he starts. “Well, his expertise in the occult, especially Norse runes and myths, piqued Himmler’s interest.”
I should’ve known it had something to do with my father’s proficiency in Nordic culture.
“He’s working on something vital for the Ahnenerbe,” he continues. “However, he lacks… What is it? Motivation.”
“And you think you can use me to motivate him?” I scoff. “If you knew my father at all, you’d know I don’t mean enough to him to be any sort of motivation.”
He raises a brow. “Not from what we’ve gathered.”
I’ve run out of energy to ask this fascist any more questions. I have to focus on planning our escape—which I have. It won’t be easy, but it’s the only plan I’ve got.
Bes’s ring calls to me again. I move it around in my palm, feeling for something that might give way to the small blade he promised would be inside. I swipe my thumb along the smooth edges, stopping at the flat top of the ring. When I press it, it opens up with a whisper of a click.
I freeze, waiting to see if my captor heard it. The rain pours loud enough, though, that it went unnoticed.
“That can’t be all the questions you have, Miss Hawkins.”
At that moment, the sharp blade Bes warned me about springs up from inside and pricks my finger. A small smile tugs at my lips.
Might as well keep him talking.
“Where did you find my father?”
“In Iceland, collecting soil samples to analyze the pollen.”
Pollen in Iceland? Not that it matters, but I’ve never known my father to care about analyzing soil samples. He’s more of a glorified treasure hunter than an archaeologist or a botanist.
I pivot. “Does Hitler already have the Arma Christi?”
“It’s unlikely we’d need you or your father if he did,” he reasons.
When August turns his back to me for a moment, my attention immediately falls on Bes, begging him to look at me.
When he does, I mouth the word amulet. He nods once, barely perceptible.
I hope we’re on the same page. I slip Bes’s ring onto my pointer finger.
The hard part comes next, and there are only two ways it’ll go: either I die, or these God Men do.
My heart pounds away in my chest at the thought of getting caught. There’s a chance they might not kill me, since it seems they need me. There are worse things than dying, though. And, from all I’ve been told, the God Men are experts at them.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to reach into my pocket for the slip of paper Anders gave me. What was the incantation for the Amulet of Amun? I think back to that night, hearing Anders say the words and then me repeating them.
“Ii em hotep,” I murmur. “?m? ānkh ek.”
I must’ve said it right because the amulet glows yellow and I instantly vanish. My captor gasps. Without a second to lose, I lash out and prick him with the signet blade, catching him by surprise and breaking his hold over me.
“Scheisse!” My captor stumbles away from me, dropping my father’s switchblade to the ground. I pick it up before August can look our way.
Now that I see my captor’s aura with the amulet activated, I’m unsurprised by the color: dark brown and stark black seems about right. I glance at the other Reaper and see more of the same. It hangs over them like a cloud, snuffing out any other color.
The leader’s aura, however, is different from his underlings. The brown and black are there, yes, but bright white cuts through it. Leader of the Ahnenerbe, indeed.
“What is it now?” August asks without turning around. My previous captor’s gaze searches frantically at the place he last saw me, clutching the small spot on his arm where I cut him.
His voice trembles. “Sie verschwand.”
He clicks his tongue. “What do you mean, she’s vanished?”
Finally, August turns and, seeing I’m not there, grins.
“Ah, the amulet does work. The Führer will be pleased.”
I keep my silence and allow my anger to sharpen my focus, causing the member of the God Men behind me to become manic. He jumps to his feet and lunges wildly. He merely tackles the air in front of me instead, putting him in a vulnerable position.
With his rib cage exposed, I tighten my grip on my father’s switchblade and press the button.
Before he knows what’s happening, I shove the blade between his ribs until the hilt reaches his shirt.
I withdraw it just as quickly and he falls to his knees, holding his side, before collapsing onto his back.
Blood gurgles up from his mouth and splatters on his cheeks until he finally goes still.
My breath remains barely a whisper when I grab the dead man’s gun from his holster on the other side with trembling hands. I fight to temper the roiling in my stomach.
Bes was good enough to incapacitate his own captor, pointing his gun at August.
The man himself hasn’t moved, nor has he wiped the grin off his face. Even when I say the incantation again and reappear, pointing the end of the Luger directly at him.
He’s enjoying this.
August laughs. “You could pull that trigger, but it won’t stop the wheels that have been set in motion from turning. Change is coming, Miss Hawkins, and the world will be made better for it.”
My hand flexes on the grip. These God Men have no sense of self-preservation. It makes threatening them nearly impossible.
He continues. “However, if you don’t let me go, if you kill me, my men will kill your father. His work is important—so important that no one else understands it but me. If I’m gone, they’ll have no use for him.”
Dammit. It should be no child’s burden to hold their parent’s life in their hands. But, while he’s been a shit dad, that doesn’t mean I want him dead.
Finally, I speak. “From the smell of the gasoline, I’m assuming our car is no longer serviceable.”
He shrugs. “What can I say; I like to be thorough.”
“Not thorough enough.” I gesture with the gun toward the ground. “On your knees.”
Once he’s planted firmly in the mud, Bes comes up behind him and slams the gun into the side of his head. He slumps to the side, unconscious.
I turn on him. “What the hell, Bes? I had more questions for him.”
“We can’t be sure if anything out of his mouth has been the truth,” he reasons. “Besides, even if he wasn’t lying about your father, it’s not as if he was going to divulge where they’re holding him captive. There was nothing more we could learn from him.”
I grit my teeth, abandoning my anger. “I hate it when you’re right.”
At that, I tuck the gun into the back of my pants and throw my arms around him. He immediately anchors me to him, one arm around my waist and the other gently grasping the back of my head.
I speak softly into his chest. “I thought this was the end.”
He doesn’t say anything, only tightens his hold around me and presses his lips into my hair.
Knees trembling, I extricate myself from him and pull Cec into a hug too.
Cec squeezes me tight. “No more of that self-sacrificing shit, alright Hawkins? That’s not how we do things.”
I smile at him. “Whatever you say, old chap.”
“Hurry,” Bes says. “We don’t know how long he’ll be incapacitated for.”
“Give me the gun,” I tell him.
He glances over at me only for a second. “Why?”
“I meant what I said about Anders deserving a jar on the wall. We’re taking him back.”
Brow furrowed, Bes hands me the gun without argument. When I see him again, it’s to drag Anders’s body across the ground and toward the only working car.
All the while, I keep his gun trained on an insentient August, even as we make our way through the rain to his car. Which I now recognize to be a Mercedes-Benz. Cec gets in first and Bes hurries behind the wheel.
After rolling the window down in the backseat with my free hand, I step in slowly, keeping the gun trained on August. Everything in me wants to shoot him—I truly did learn my lesson with Ingrid—but if there’s any chance at all that he was telling the truth about my father…
I can’t have his blood on my hands. I won’t.
Bes starts the car and, with Cec’s help in shifting gears, pulls out onto the road, heading back in the direction of Italy. The rain has finally let up a bit. I still shiver at the colder air blasting in through the window.
Once we’ve rounded a bend and August’s unconscious figure moves out of sight, I roll up the window. I toss the gun onto the floor, along with the one in my waistband. I need at least a week where I don’t touch—or even see—a gun.
Trembling, I fall onto the backseat and breathe in unevenly, the smell of leather calming me despite my pulse refusing to slow. It occurs to me we’re traveling in the vehicle of the new God Men, but I’m not about to look a gift car in the grille.
It takes everything I have in me to block out what happened: two more people dead at my hand. But I’m alive because of it. Not only that, I also kept the Amulet of Amun out of Hitler’s hands once again.
Bes presses on the gas, the engine all too eager to comply. “As soon as we get back, we’ll sort all this out.”
I swallow. I don’t want to get into everything that happened just yet, but we need to talk about a few things before we get back.
“They have my father, Bes. How the hell are we going to sort that out?”
Cec turns around in his seat. “I’m sorry, Hawkins. I don’t understand what they could possibly want with him.”
“I don’t either.” I shake my head. “The only thing my father has been any good at is hunting for treasure. If Himmler’s using his expertise in Norse runes and myths for the Ahnenerbe, there must be something more.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Bes promises. “We’ll find out all we can, and then we’re going to rescue your father.”
I sit up, staring down Bes’ profile in the darkness.
“Do you truly believe that… your uncle will go for it?” I ask, speaking around my damned blood oath as it threatens to tie up my tongue.
“If he won’t, we’ll simply have to take matters into our own hands.”
Cec bangs the raven head of his cane on the dashboard. “Here, here.”
“Cec, I’m sorry.” Tears choke me “I’m so sorry about Anders. If it wasn’t for me—”
“If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have learned all that we did today,” Cec butts in, even as his voice catches. “Anders was well aware of the risks, of what he was getting into. It’s not your fault.”
Then why does it feel like it is?
I sniff, my throat thick. “I don’t deserve you two.”
“We know,” Cec agrees.
I sit back in my seat, wondering what awaits me when we get back to the stronghold beneath Castle Breno. Ansaldo won’t be happy that we went off on our own, and I fully expect him to force me into the order now that at least two members are dead and one is in the wind.
Would that be so bad, though?
Yes, it would: the Order of Cavendi is the reason why my mother is dead, why my nonna kept so many secrets of her past from me. And Ansaldo is a tyrant, who will no doubt find creative ways to punish me for this indiscretion.
And yet, I wouldn’t have met Bes or Cec without them.
Leaning forward, I rest my hand on Bes’s shoulder.
The last time I did this, we were just leaving the Temple of Seti I after I killed Claude, and I nearly caused us to get into an accident.
Back then, I thought my time out of the country was over; little did I know all that would happen in the days following.
I’m a completely different woman than the one who got angry with Bes for knowing too much about me.
And now… now, there’s magic from the Tree of Life pumping through my veins. I can almost feel it, like a small, constant surge of energy writhing beneath the surface of my skin. Even the amulet appears to be reacting to it, warming gently against my chest.
Bes removes his hand from the wheel and gently touches mine, squeezing before letting go. Things unsaid pass between us—things that I’m going to need to say before Bes and I can move past what happened in the Archives.
However, all of this—Ansaldo, my magic, my father, Bes—is tomorrow’s problem.
As we drive off into the night, I close my eyes and wonder what fresh hell tomorrow will bring.