The Regent

by Marcus Richardson

  The Regent

  Book V of the Wildfire Saga

  Marcus Richardson

  Contents

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  THE REGENT

  1. Home Invasion

  2. A Cowboy in Edinburgh

  3. Jayne

  4. The Job

  5. The Regent

  6. First Strike

  7. Enemy Sighted

  8. Interrogation

  9. Evacuation

  10. The Arrival

  11. Brunch

  12. Ambush

  13. The Cavalry

  14. Trapped

  15. The Briefing

  16. The Vaults

  17. A Touch in the Dark

  18. Stalking Prey

  19. This Prey has Claws

  20. Roadblock

  21. Let it Rain

  22. The Cabinet

  23. Jayne’s Gift

  24. Escape

  25. A New Toy

  26. What Would You do if…

  27. Target of Opportunity

  28. Hell on Earth

  29. Time Runs Out

  30. Debriefing

  31. Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire…

  32. The Great Hall

  33. Unstoppable

  34. New Digs

  35. Missed Opportunities

  36. The Drums of War…

  37. Reunion

  38. Holy Ground

  39. Backed into a Corner

  40. Tightening the Noose

  41. Traitor

  42. To the Chapel

  43. Unfair Fight

  44. I am Shawnee

  45. Endgame

  46. Reinforcements

  47. Vengeance is Mine

  48. New Assignment

  49. Course Correction

  What’s Next?

  Author Contact

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  THE WILDFIRE SAGA

  The Source

  False Prey

  Book I: Apache Dawn

  Book II: The Shift

  Book III: Firestorm

  Book IV: Oathkeeper

  Book V: The Regent

  Book VI: Extraction

  OTHER SERIES

  The Future History of America

  Solar Storm

  Elixr Plague: A Zombie Apocalypse Serial

  For my complete catalog, please visit: marcusrichardsonauthor.com

  THE REGENT

  Book V of the Wildfire Saga

  For my Constant Reader.

  1

  Home Invasion

  Louis Halgood d’Fleur stared at the security guard in front of him, chief of his late father’s protection detail. The massive man had been one of his father’s best retainers, loyal to the core and bred for fighting. He’d never seen Roland MacTavish so much as sweat, let alone appear nervous or anxious. Yet now, the big man appeared downright scared.

  Even when on guard detail at crowded public events with his father, or at Louis’ own football matches when growing up, the man had remained steady, unshakable…a rock. His father had called the man his anchor. His mother always had a small smile for him.

  But today, MacTavish looked beyond anxious, beyond nervous. He looked scared. Louis noticed several tells: the way his security chief’s hand tightened and relaxed on the pistol’s grip, how he hunched his shoulders forward, just slightly, how the tips of his ears were bright pink, as if more blood were circulating through the man’s massive frame.

  Louis swallowed. If a man such as MacTavish was frightened, Louis knew he should be terrified. He leaned around his hulking, kilted protector and stared in disbelief once more at the bodies gracing the floor at the other end of the long, formal reception room.

  “What’s happened?” he whispered. “Are we safe here?”

  MacTavish’s voice rumbled from the depths of his wide chest. “We need to get you to the safe room, sire.”

  The ancestral De Honfleur family estate, an oddity in this part of Normandy, had remained in the family for centuries and grown little by little with each successive generation of Norman gentry. The sprawling holdings now covered several hundred prime acres and the chateau itself occupied a place of honor atop the western mount overlooking Honfleur itself and the Channel to the north. On any given day, Louis could be found riding around the estate—either by horse, as his father preferred, or by utility vehicle, as Louis preferred—marveling at the simple, idyllic beauty he’d inherited through having survived the Korean Flu.

  When the Council released the bioweapon in an attempt to place King Charles back on his hereditary throne, it had swept through Europe like a burning scourge that brought back dark memories of his youth during the Pandemic. Louis had been unceremoniously recalled from his exclusive tutelage in England.

  Several generations of his family, from his great-grandfather on down the line, had all attended England’s exclusive Eaton College, rubbing shoulders with princes and future kings of half the Houses of Europe. With the advent of the World Wars, the De Honfleur family—one of the old Norman aristocratic lines that straddled the Channel with blood and property since the days of the Conqueror himself—had finally come home to Normandy and severed its holdings and familial ties with England.

  Louis’ father had been acutely aware of their name—d’Fleur, not De Honfleur—but had made no attempt to change it, despite inheriting all the family’s wealth and power. The English d’Fleur branch of the family sprang from some long lost Norman warrior who’d set down his roots in the ancient March under the Plantagenets. Unwilling to shed the long history that went with the shortened name and extensive British holdings, the d’Fleur line remained a backwater relation to the main Norman family.

  They remained separate until ten years ago, with the onset of the Great Pandemic. The entire De Honfleur family had been wiped out, like so many families around the world, save a few minor branches. Louis’ father, an almost-forgotten cousin, became the patriarch of the tattered remains of the once mighty De Honfleur family.

  All this ran through Louis’ mind as he was half-pushed, half-dragged away from the grisly scene in the reception hall toward the bolt hole MacTavish called the safe room. He blinked and found himself in a long hallway lined with dour portraits of men and women he knew belonged to his family. They all wore the same long faces or frowned at something unseen in the distance. Behind every one of them, two symbols had been neatly interwoven in each portrait. Sometimes hidden on a flag or detailed in a tapestry, other times on a shield—when the subject of the painting wore his armor. And always the same two symbols: the castle keep surrounded by fleur de lis for the De Honfleur line, and the mailed fist holding lightning, surmounted by a crown and surrounded by olive branches, the sigil of The Council.

  “Hurry!” MacTavish said, shoving Louis toward the east wing’s library.

  Louis ran down darkened corridors, skidding around a marbled corner and, for once, ignoring the carved walnut trim that adorned everything. He loved walking down this side of the chateau, running his hands over the carvings, imagining the fantastical beasts and soldiers would come to life if only he willed it.

  A gunshot, loud as thunder, echoed somewhere behind them. Louis heard the screams over the earpiece MacTavish wore. The rest of the security detail didn’t appear to be faring any better against the onslaught that wiped out the advance team in the reception hall.

  “I don’t understand,” Louis gasped as the entered the East Library. MacTavish took up a position to the left of the door, crouched and raised his weapon, aiming back the way they’d come into the gloomy murk of the corridor. Emergency lights flick
ered in the distance, casting moving shadows over everything.

  “There’s nothing to understand, sire. Pull the book, get in the room, lock it tight. Do it!”

  Louis ran to the far corner of the dark room, squinting in the dim light from the hallway. The power had been cut to the entire chateau—that had been only ten minutes earlier. One moment, he’d been having a video chat with Isobel from her country home outside Oxford, inviting her and her surviving family to recuperate at the chateau. Then he’d been plunged into darkness. The security alarms wailed, the red lights turned on in the hallways, and MacTavish had all but broken his bedroom door in half, entering the room with pistol drawn.

  “I lost your father to the Flu, I’ll be damned if I lose you to some hairy-arsed rival,” he’d announced. “It’s one of the others from the Council, I’d bet my life on it.”

  Louis didn’t like the sound of that. He’d known about the fall of the Exiled King, of course—it’s how he came to be the new king, after all—but he wasn’t aware the international effort to root out the Council had forced the survivors to seek him out so soon. It had been MacTavish’s worry since the get-go: when the Council came under attack from the Americans and their allies, the survivors decided it was time to snap up the unclaimed power. And whoever controlled the heir, held the reins of what remained of the Council itself. The opportunity, according to MacTavish, was too good to pass up. To hell with loyalties.

  Louis found the right section after shining the light from his cellphone on the gilded bookshelf. He stared at the glittering leather spines of his father’s prized fiction collection. Every single book by Robert A. Heinlein lined three shelves, each one bound in leather and gold. He’d always scoffed at the idea that the secret to entering the safe room lay hidden among pulp fiction books from the 1950s, but his father had countered that it would be the last place any respectable person would look—they would be immediately drawn to the impressive tomes of history and prestige: Plato, Dickens, Chaucer, and the like.

  With trembling fingers, Louis reached out and pushed his father’s copy of Farnham’s Freehold and was rewarded with a soft click. The entire section, wide enough for two of him, or one of MacTavish, dropped back into a hidden recess and slid to the side on a whisper of wood kissing stone. He looked over his shoulder.

  “Go! Get in there! I can’t fight back until I know you’re safe!”

  At MacTavish’s urging, Louis stepped into the darkened space and groped until he found the latch release with his right hand. He pulled the heavy, wrought-iron ring embedded in the stone foundation behind the bookshelf, and the secret door slid back into place behind him, sealing him in darkness.

  The breath caught in Louis’ throat. For a split second, he imagined himself entombed, buried alive. He had about as much space as a coffin to turn around but it wouldn’t do any good. Without the lights, he was cloaked in a black so complete, he couldn’t even see his own hand in front of his face. He closed his eyes, remembering the ceaseless drills his father and MacTavish had forced him through during the past ten years. He knew, as the son of the heir-apparent to the Exiled King, he had a part to play in the unfolding history of the Council, but Louis had always assumed his father would take the center light and become king long before anyone thought of his son.

  I’m just Louis…I’m nobody…

  But he knew that wasn’t true. He took a deep breath and tried to calm his racing heart while he waited the interminable seconds it took the emergency generator to power up the safe room. It was always the same—nine seconds of complete, mind-searing darkness, then the safe room would be fully powered and all his comforts seen to with the push of a button. In the drills, those nine seconds passed in the blink of an eye.

  Now that it mattered, now that his very life was on the line…those nine seconds ticked by with the span of a century. A cold sweat formed a sheen on Louis’ forehead. How bloody long does it take to turn on the lights?

  And then, like when he was told his father had ascended to the family seat and became The Heir, the world rushed at him in a blur. His heart thudded once more, and the lights snapped on with an audible pop, lancing pain into his dark-adapted eyes. Louis blinked back the sudden moisture in his blurred vision and staggered forward into the technological cave of last resort. A solid steel door, perhaps eight inches thick, swished shut behind him, closing with the snap-hiss of a hermetic seal.

  He rushed to the communication station and powered up the bank of monitors that gave him access to every security feed on the estate. On the left-hand monitors were the exterior views; on the right, the interior. He noticed straightaway, more than half the interior cameras were offline. The exterior views were hardly any better. Black smoke roiled and curled through every view except two—the pair of cameras at the far end of the main drive that looked back at the stately chateau. Most of the outbuildings were on fire.

  “The stable!” he gasped. He was never overly fond of the horses his father kept, but the recent loss of his parents made his heart clench at the sight of his father’s longtime passion going up in smoke. He hoped the horses escaped at least.

  Shifting his eyes back to the view of the East Library, he saw MacTavish still in position by the door. He picked up the waiting headset from its golden stand and clipped it into place over his head. “I’m in, MacTavish.”

  “Sealed?” his protector said, without moving his attention from the corridor.

  Louis turned to face the steel blast door and looked at the caged light above the graceful arch that mimicked the stonework prevalent throughout the chateau. “The light’s green.”

  “Good,” MacTavish said. He stood and slipped out of the library and into the shadows, disappearing before Louis’ eyes.

  “Where are you going?” Louis cried, scanning the monitors, looking for MacTavish. “I don’t see anyone else!”

  “Nor will you, if they’re doing their fucking jobs.”

  Louis patched into the security net, just like MacTavish had shown him. Voices, hushed or gasping, cascaded over each other. Louis shook his head as he tried to decipher the cacophony. There were too many voices, yet every screen showed empty rooms or unmoving bodies.

  “Let me know if you see anything,” MacTavish called, his voice trembling in time with his pace as he sprinted down some unseen walkway. “Clear the net! I want only team leaders speaking!” He waited a moment for the background noise to die down, then took a deep breath. “Now—how many are there? What are we dealing with?”

  Negative reports cycled in and the chatter started to organize itself now that MacTavish had taken command of the situation. From what Louis could discern, no one had seen more than a few ghostly figures, clad in all black and moving with the swift surety of highly trained soldiers. Everyone who’d stood to block their way had fallen in a bloody heap.

  Only three? Louis frowned at the monitors. It couldn’t be that few. Most the household guard had been wiped out; three men—no matter how well trained—couldn’t take on fifty and walk away unscathed. There had to be more, and he said as much.

  “Stay quiet, my lord—let me think.”

  Louis crossed his arms. Right. ’Cause I’m just a kid. One of his mates at Eaton was an honest-to-God prince royal from Saudi Arabia. I bet he wouldn’t be told to shut up and hide.

  Movement on the monitor tuned toward the chateau’s kitchens caught Louis’ eye. He watched a door swing open, and a man dressed in the family livery staggered in, leaning on racks of pots and pans for balance. He barely noticed when a half-dozen skillets clattered to the floor as he moved through the kitchen.

  “I’ve got noise in the kitchen,” MacTavish whispered over the net. “Sebastian, get your squad over here, dammit.”

  “Moving now,” was the terse, Gallic response.

  “I think he’s one of ours,” Louis warned. “He looks injured.”

  “Sebastian, cover the exits; I’ll check it out,” MacTavish advised.

  “Copy that.”
>
  Louis watched, heart in his throat, as MacTavish appeared at the bottom of the monitor and slipped silent as a shadow behind the counters and cooking surfaces, between the ovens and the refrigerators, inching closer to the man in the center of the room. He paused just around the corner from the stranger and aimed his massive black pistol.

  “Don’t move!” he roared.

  The man lifted his head as if he’d had too much to drink and took one halting step toward MacTavish. His right arm slid along the clean countertop next to him, trailing a streak of wine dark blood in his wake.

  MacTavish swore. “Hold your fire!” He lowered his pistol and raced forward, catching Jean Broussard, one of the surviving stewards. “Christ, man, what happened?”

  Louis heard muttered French over MacTavish’s link. “Did he say a woman?”

  MacTavish swore again. “Aye, and you know what that means.”

  A string of French coursed over the security net. Why are they so scared of this woman?

  Louis tapped the transmit button. “Is she with the Council?”