Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
ASHER
“Yes, Asher. It is tucked away and shall remain there until we are ready to face the horsewomen.”
“Excellent.” I turned to my murder board—well, it was more a whiteboard with all sorts of arrows and pictures attached to it, but potato potato as Rosie always said.
Finding the checklist I’d created, I went ahead and crossed Death Weapon off the list. It felt really fucking good to cross something off a list. “So that just leaves . . . everything else.”
And there went my check-off high.
“Do we even know where to start with the others?” Alek asked, his big shoulders tense as he settled a palm over Sunday’s knee.
“That we’re not sure of. With Death, we had a clear line to the location.
Lucifer was the keeper of the weapon. But here .
. . we don’t know what the trigger might have been to constitute making an item so important.
” Caleb paced as he spoke, his gaze never landing on a single one of us.
He was pondering. Trying to solve a puzzle with too many missing pieces.
“We have a couple of working theories, though,” Gavin offered.
I gestured for him to go on.
“Well, it only makes sense to use the same frame of reference for War that we did for Death.”
“Great, so we can just go through every war in existence for the last thousand years. Should be super easy,” Remi said, kicking the foot of a chair as he paced.
I frowned at the rare display of temper, doing my best to comfort him by saying, “I don’t think we have to worry about every war. Only the important ones.”
Remi looked at me, a huff of laughter escaping him. “So that narrows it down to what? Fifty? And what constitutes important? Important to who?”
“Touché.”
“We went with the first death, so maybe we look at the first war?” Dahlia suggested.
Chaos cleared his throat and stepped forward. “I might have an idea.”
The room went silent as we all stared at him. The horsemen rarely spoke during our group meetings, so having one do so now was a bit of a novelty. But also, of course he would fucking know. He’d probably participated in all of them.
“Go on,” Lilith urged. “We’re all waiting with bated breath, darling.”
Chaos nodded, brows pulling together before he spoke.
“The first war was weak and meaningless. It ended almost before it began and achieved very little. I doubt it was of enough consequence to create something so important. But the bloodiest, most destructive, and deadliest warmonger of all time? That’s a thread we should grab onto and follow. ”
“Okay. Great. I can name a few.” I began writing names on the whiteboard, but he stopped me by clearing his throat.
“Khan.”
Remi chuckled. “Like from Star Trek? Khaaaaaaan.” His face fell when no one else laughed. “Come on. You guys are no fun.”
“Genghis Khan.”
“Oh, right, that guy.” Remi sat down with a dramatic huff, drawing a small smile from Rosie, who patted his knee.
The rest of the room had gone silent, a little zing of awareness shooting through us at his clarification. If I had to guess, I think we were all struck by the rightness of his suggestion. Compared to every other theory, this one just made sense from every angle.
“Okay. Assuming you’re correct, what do we know about him?
Isn’t his tomb hidden or something?” I asked, trying to rack my brain and see what random facts I had lying around.
I vaguely remembered watching an old Deadliest Warrior episode about him, but it wasn’t like I’d made a point to memorize anything.
“It is. Whatever we need will be in there with him.”
“Great. So we have to find a hidden tomb that no one has ever found, figure out what the object even is, and hope it’s actually there in the tomb with him. Easy day. No problem.”
This was getting more complicated by the second. We were searching for a needle in a haystack. Make that seven haystacks.
“I know where it is.”
I’m pretty sure I heard a collective creak as every head snapped Chaos’s way.
“You didn’t want to lead with that?” I asked.
He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I thought it was obvious.”
“Obvious,” I repeated, blinking at him a couple of times.
These dudes were something else. I glanced around at the other horsemen, noting Sin’s feigned nonchalance as he braided Merri’s hair.
Malice had a perpetually bored expression and was sitting on her other side, while Grim—I shuddered—remained perched in the corner like our very own reaper waiting for one wrong move before swooping in and collecting our souls.
The four of them were enough to make a guy appreciate Lucifer’s grandstanding—thank God he wasn’t here right now or this meeting would last a fucking year.
I was used to narcissists, so Lucifer was easy to make sense of.
For the most part. But the horsemen? They were unlike any other group we’d come across.
Teamwork was a foreign concept to them, aside from their work with each other.
They didn’t understand something as basic as sharing information with people outside their immediate group. But the scope of our team was so much wider now, and they’d need to get up to speed ASAP if this was going to work.
“Pretend it’s not. Care to share that with the rest of us?” I asked.
“I helped bury him.”
The silence was deafening as we waited for him to elaborate further.
After a beat he glanced around and added, “I can take us there.”
Oh my God. This was like pulling teeth. “Great. That’s great. Let’s go.”
“It’s not as simple as materializing in the tomb.”
My shoulders slumped in defeat. “Continue.”
“The journey is going to be difficult. There are safety measures put in place that prevent anyone from reaching his burial site.”
“Booby traps. He means booby traps,” Remi whispered. “This has Indiana Jones written all over it.”
“Gotcha,” I said, addressing both of them before focusing back on Chaos.
“So what kind of team do you think we’re going to need for this? A small, stealthy one? Or something bigger?”
Chaos’s focus shifted from me to the remaining horsemen. “The more precise we are, the better our chances. We need strong fighters, but not an army.”
“We will go,” Alek said, sharing a meaningful look with his twin. “My brother and I are arguably the strongest fighters we have.”
That was understating it a little. The two of them were basically armies in and of themselves.
“I’ll go too,” Pan said, shocking the hell out of me with his offer.
“You want to go?” I asked.
Pan nodded. “It sounds as though we’ll be dealing with unknown forces. As we’ve recently learned, my power is nigh limitless. This gives me an opportunity to stretch my wings.”
“You don’t have wings,” I pointed out.
“It was a metaphor, brother. Please do keep up.”
I glared at him. I hoped he got stabbed.
“No, you don’t.”
I stiffened at his voice in my mind before begrudgingly agreeing. No, I didn’t.
Pan smirked and blew me a kiss. I flipped him off.
“You three with me should be enough to get through the obstacles successfully,” Chaos said.
“Are you sure you want to go without any of us by your side?” Grim asked.
War offered him a terrifying smile. “I’ve gone into plenty of battles without you three. Besides, you need to stay with our Merri. Ensure she stays safe.”
He nodded as Chaos turned toward the other two. “You both should probably start thinking on what items of significance might exist in your areas of expertise.”
“You mean they haven’t been doing that already?” Remi blurted.
It was a miracle he was still alive, really.
Doing my damnedest to keep it that way, I cleared my throat and clapped my hands, drawing attention back to me.
“Okay, sounds like we have a plan. Those four are going to go find Genghis Khan’s tomb, while the rest of us stay here and keep puzzling out the remaining missing pieces. Good luck, guys. Try not to die.”