Reign of Evil

Sassy spoke from behind them. “I can feel them summoning power. They’re there; we just can’t see them.”

“Can you tell me where they are?” Holmes asked.

“What do I look like? A dowsing rod?”

Holmes sighed.

Laws had the same feeling. They just loved it when they had a smart-ass helping them. It made life so pleasant and so worth surviving for.

“What are we doing here?” Yank asked.

YaYa responded, “What do you think we’re doing here?”

“No, I mean, aren’t SEALs supposed to be near water, hence all of our water training? Kneeling on a plateau in the middle of BFE seems so out of place.”

“You’re out of place,” Walker said.

Laws gritted his teeth as the tension built. The air around him felt like the skin of a balloon filled past capacity. It was only a matter of time. “We’re a different type of SEAL. We’re pasture SEALs.”

YaYa laughed. “BFE. Usually stands for ‘Bum Fuck Egypt,’ but I guess we’re in England, so it fits.”

“Do you boys always talk so much?” Sassy sounded exasperated.

Laws knew it was any second now. “Only when there’s imminent danger.”

Two hounds rushed toward them. One from the right and one from the left.

Hoover squared with the one on the left, running full out for it. They met in midair. The heavier hell hound took Hoover down, its massive jaws clamped around the dog’s back right leg. Hoover twisted around and clamped her smaller jaw on an ear, ripping it off. Then she managed to bite down on the hound’s neck.

Yank and Holmes let their rifles fall, catching and hanging on their slings as they drew the gladius machetes.

Laws wavered between joining and watching his sector of fire. Holmes stood a few feet from him, and by the way he stood, it looked as if he could take on a pack of hell hounds single-handedly. And Laws hated that. Why was it that the rest of them had to work so hard, yet everything came so easy to Holmes? It was infuriating the way he could be so lucky. Hell, his own ire was shared by half the casinos in Vegas, Holmes’s hometown. Even they thought he was too lucky.

The other hound thundered toward them from the right. Yank held his gladius in his rear hand. The creature leaped. Yank sidestepped and brought the weapon down on its spine. The hound cried out as it fell to the earth. Holmes sliced off its head. Then the two pieces of hound evaporated.

Fucking Holmes. Like he wasn’t even trying.

Laws was aware his barrel had drifted toward the other two SEALs but didn’t care. After all, it was Holmes and Yank. Boy weren’t they a pair. Different sides of the same coin. On one hand you had the impeccable Holmes, King of Cool-Ass Luck, and on the other you had Shonn Yankowski, black on the outside and white on the inside. “Hell, he might as well be a—” Laws caught himself at the last moment. He’d pressed the trigger but rode the firing into the sky.

Holmes turned on him, eyes blazing.

Yank turned to Holmes, gladius raised for a killing stroke. Laws could hear YaYa and Walker shouting at each other behind him.

Once more Sassy saved the day.

The feeling of unreasonable anger passed, but it couldn’t stop Yank’s sword.

“Holmes!”

The SEAL team leader spun, catching most of the descending blade on his own gladius. The rest of it sliced into his arm, which immediately began welling blood.

Yank dropped his blade. “Oh shit. Sorry, Boss.”

“Let me guess.” Laws glanced at Sassy Moore. “Empathetic magic?”

She nodded abruptly, then continued her thousand-yard stare. Suddenly she went down as two dozen darts pierced her body.

Laws spun and spied what looked for all the world like a Gatling gun that had appeared forty yards in front of them… except this one fired flechettes instead of rounds.

Son of a bitch.

Simultaneously, more hounds bounded onto the plateau from where they’d been hiding in the archaeological dig. A line of seven Red Grove druids also appeared. All the while, flechettes ate through the air. Laws threw himself to the deck as three flechettes bounced off his armor, one dug itself into his face near his left eye, and five of the three-inch steel slivers lodged in his unprotected legs.

“Fucking hell!” he screamed with pain.

What was going on? The witch was down. Holmes was wounded. No telling what the other men were doing. And where was Hoover?

Laws’s hand had gone to the wound in his face and was now coated with blood. Still, he found his grip on his rifle, raised up a foot, and began to fire at the guy manning the flechette cannon. This was beginning to feel like a trap. Laws wondered where King Arthur was. Was he at the dig site? Was he even here?

The entire place felt wrong.

Then came the sound of helicopters.

CHAPTER 51

CADBURY CASTLE, ENGLAND. NOW.