Heavy footsteps in the hall made them all tense and Samantha moved to take up a position in the small doorway that led into the washroom. Gray remained where he was, in plain view of anyone who entered the room. The first to do so was The Axeman, who stopped in confusion at the sight of someone besides Monique. Eun reached out and gave the big man a hearty shove, pushing him further into the room. He then spun into the hallway, where he came face to face with Dinkins. A hard punch to the old man’s throat sent him to his knees and Eun finished him off with a hard driven knee to the forehead.
Muggsy, however, was not going to be so easily beaten. He raised his axe and swung it at Gray’s head. The team’s leader ducked under the blade even as Samantha moved from her hiding place. She expertly swung one of her long legs between The Axeman’s and, by timing her motion with the big man’s lumbering, caused him to lose his balance. He crashed down atop a small table, shattering it.
Gray drove the heel of his shoe against the back of The Axeman’s head but Muggsy managed to swing his axe out and the blade caught the back of Gray’s leg, drawing blood.
"Chief!" Samantha cried out as a small river of red flowed out from her employer’s pants.
"I’m fine," Gray answered, moving away from the axe-wielding brute. Gray knew that Muggsy was more resistant to pain in his current state and that there was no way to undo the mental and physical damages that had been done to him. Gray waited until The Axeman was facing him, the killer’s back toward the large window that overlooked the harbor. Gray lowered his shoulder and sprinted toward the big man, ignoring both Eun and Samantha, who uttered expressions of disbelief. Lazarus barreled into The Axeman and grunted in pain. It felt like slamming into a tree trunk. Still, his momentum was enough to force the big man backward and they slammed into the window, which shattered under their combined weight. The two men toppled out of the fifth story room, vanishing from the sight of Gray’s employees.
Eun jumped over the shattered table and arrived at the windowsill a millisecond before Samantha. Their shoes crunched on broken glass and Eun leaned out of the window, heart thudding at the possibility of seeing Lazarus broken and dead on the ground below. To his tremendous relief, that wasn’t what he laid eyes on.
The Axeman lay shattered and broken on the city street but Gray himself was hanging for dear life onto a large flag pole that jutted out from the hotel’s façade.
"Hang on, Chief!" Eun bellowed. "We’re gonna get you down from there!"
Lazarus said nothing, trusting that his aide would be as good as his word. He cast a downward glance at Muggsy’s dead body. He detested killing any living thing but The Axeman was barely human at this point. In the end, Muggsy lived for murder and could never be rehabilitated. Thus, Lazarus had done both Muggsy and society a tremendous favor by ending his existence.
It was a hard thing, being a self-appointed judge and jury. But Gray was prepared to take on the responsibility — especially given that he lived in a city where the men and women appointed to do such things could no longer be trusted.
A hard rain began to fall.
Epilogue
Morgan was back at his desk within three days’ time, much to the chagrin of Samantha, who fussed over him like she was a mama bird and he was her baby chick. Though it embarrassed him, he didn’t put up much of a complaint.
Eun was mostly out of the office during this time, as he was helping Edward move into a new apartment.
With his three aides thus engaged, Lazarus Gray busied himself by executing Monique’s Slasher and scouring the girl’s personal belongings until he found that she was in possession of several controlled substances. Thus armed, he was able to see that she was entered into the legal system appropriately. Dinkins was a far easier case — the man was wanted on a litany of crimes both great and small back in Louisiana. Gray personally transferred him over to the law enforcement agents who came from the Bayou to collect him.
When the cleanup from the Axeman case had been settled, Lazarus returned to his third floor apartment in the Assistance Unlimited headquarters. It was there that he spread out a series of papers he’d been accumulating as of late. There were photographs of men and women from around the world, as well as a detailed tracking of their movements. He was the only man alive who had been at the center of The Illuminati and had survived breaking ties with it. It was only a matter of time before they came for him again and he intended to be ready.
In fact, Lazarus intended to strike first.
THE GOD OF HATE
Chapter I
Cry Vengeance!
The rain fell steadily over Sovereign City, drenching man and beast. It had stormed for six days in a row, prompting some to joke that it was well past time to start work on an ark. The figure that strode through the puddles, his body hidden beneath a wide-brimmed fedora and a thick jacket cinched at the waist, cared nothing for the bitter cold or the freezing rain. He was known as The God of Hate to those brave enough to follow him and he ruled over an island nation with an iron fist. He was The Claw and he had come to Sovereign City on dark business.
His inhuman features were quickly turned away from any pedestrian who happened to wander too close. Though he was of the general shape and height of a man, his ears were pointed, his mouth was a gaping maw filled with razor-sharp teeth and his fingers ended in the claws from which he took his name.
The Claw came to a stop before a large structure. His eyes ran across the lettering on the brick sign that rested on a grassy knoll in front of the building: Doc Daye’s Home for Forgotten Children. The orphanage was home to nearly six-dozen little tykes, as well as the women who cared for them. It was one of the city’s most beloved institutions and Daye himself was frequently sighted at the facility.
At this hour of night, all the children were nestled tight in their warm beds, dreaming of potential new families. Unfortunately, those dreams were never going to come true.
The Claw stared at the building for a few seconds before glancing up at the full moon that hung bloated in the sky. His power waxed and waned in conjunction with the phases of the moon and tonight he was going to be near his strongest. He knew that he should be expending this energy in pursuit of Lazarus Gray but an old, bloody debt was calling to him.
"Tempus, my old friend, I only wish that you were sleeping alongside these innocents, so that their fate could be your own. The vengeance I owe your father can only be satisfied by your death." The Claw’s voice sounded oddly high-pitched for such a frightening entity. He raised both arms, exposing his sharpened nails to the light. He whispered dark words under his breath, speaking in a tongue long forgotten by civilized man. The storm clouds overhead seemed to thicken and swell, bolts of lightning tearing from their midst.
In reaction to The Claw’s commands, the lightning strikes grew ever closer to the orphanage until with stunning ferocity no less than three dozen bursts of electrical power honed in on the building, striking with all the force of a thousand pounds of TNT. The building exploded in a fireball, some of the bricks flying with such force that they knocked out windows on buildings across the street. The smell of burning flesh filled the air as dozens of young boys and girls were ripped from the world at far too early an age.
The Claw turned away from the scene, a bubble of laughter emanating from deep in his throat. This visit to Sovereign was meant to be one of business, for he was being richly paid for his work. But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t enjoy himself along the way….