I motioned to Owen and the others that we needed to take our shot. We had one chance at this; the more gunfire that erupted, the sooner other men could come in, and the more easily we’d get overwhelmed. In truth, I really wanted us to just kill them with our hands, the better for silence, but that was something we just weren’t going to have the chance to do.
I signaled I would take the Saint by the stairs, while Owen and Tomahawk aimed for the two on top of the patio. The others formed a sort of front line facing the back of the house, ready to provide cover fire if reinforcements came in. I counted down from five, stopping at three to aim.
We fired.
And all three men dropped.
It was of great fortune that the firefight was still going on at the front of the house; though the men in the back would surely hear us, they would also have to decide where to divert resources or if they needed to stay in the back for a possible rear attack. The fog of war very much played to our advantage here.
“Let’s go!” I hissed.
We all made it to the porch with minimal resistance. A couple of Saints saw us and opened fire, but we suffered no casualties, eliminated the threat quickly, and got into the room and were well-positioned.
“Let me…”
I froze.
This was Lilly’s room.
And there was someone who had been in here just moments before.
Fuck…
I could... as ridiculous as it sounded, I could smell her presence. Her perfume lingered. She had…
Maybe I was too quick to give her a pass as I had in the planning phase of everything; maybe, actually, she had betrayed me, given her father the location of my apartment, and nearly gotten me killed.
But I just knew that wasn’t the case. Lilly and I had been too close for her to sell me out. At most, she may have hated the Reapers, but she didn’t hate me.
And now she was gone.
And my anger began to boil over. Because there was only one person who could have pulled her away, taken her away from this room and put her somewhere else.
“Lucius!” I roared.
The monster that had haunted my family for years, though, was nowhere to be found. It was time to search the rest of this house.
“Lucius! Show yourself and fight me!”
All of the images of hell as a place of fire and brimstone, of demons and devils, of nightmare and hellfire had it wrong. Hell was not those things. Hell, as it meant to me, was this very house, with its bare white walls, blank canvases on which I could project the worst of the Fallen Saints.
And somewhere, deep within the heart of this house, laid the devil himself. Lucius Sartor was here.
And so, too, if I could find her and protect her, was Lilly.
“Lucius!” I screamed, stretching out the word and straining my voice in the process.
I went door by door, looking inside every room in this monstrously sized mansion. I saw rooms dedicated to family and Fallen Saints, rooms full of bikes, rooms full of exercise equipment, rooms full of memorabilia, but no rooms with anyone inside. Lucius, true to his cowardly form, had avoided the battle, probably in the confines of a panic room.Probably with Lilly.
If this was the true form of the leader of the Fallen Saints, hiding while gunfire erupted outside his home and at his clubhouse, then I could only hope the rank-and-file members would realize the devil was not a leader on the front lines, but a being that fed them to the jaws of machine gun fire. Perhaps this cowardice, not us, would be the end of the Fallen Saints.
“Cole!” I heard Lane scream from the front. “We’re coming in!”
“Stop!”
Lilly.
“Don’t, don’t—”
