by C L Walker
“And one day I’m going to go back into that locket and not come out for a thousand years.” I paused to let it sink in but she started talking immediately. I spoke over her. “You will be dead. Your civilization will be gone. Nobody will even remember this city existed. That is my life.”
“By that logic the only person you can be with is the wife who wants to kill you slowly.”
“I know.”
I thought I’d gotten through to her because she stopped arguing. I shouldn’t have been that naïve.
“Why are you helping the people in the HND?”
It took me a moment to remember that she was talking about the people I was now supposed to leading.
“Because that’s why I was brought back, right?”
“But you don’t have to. You don’t have to help the vampires or talk to the witches, or any of that. Your current master doesn’t talk and has no desires of his own. You can do whatever you want. That’s the situation we designed for you.”
“Why do you think I’m helping, then?”
“Because you care about it all. This civilization, that will be dead before you, matters. The people here matter. I matter.”
I turned away again, holding my fists out of view. I wanted out of the conversation and I couldn’t think why. She was a lovesick human girl, and not the first one I’d been chased by. Normally I bedded them and moved on. This shouldn’t have been so hard for me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
“You’re thinking I’m a fangirl, some kind of yapping little dog chasing you around because I’m besotted with you.”
“You are,” I replied, still not looking at her.
“Nope, I’ve just worked out what I want from life and you’re it. For now, anyway.”
I turned back to the bar, confused and more annoyed. “For now?”
“This isn’t undying love, Agmundr. It’s an interest. And, honestly, I’ve never had to work so hard to get laid. It’s starting to get insulting.”
I had nothing to say to her, no argument that would convince her. She had made up her mind long before I’d been summoned back into her life and my thoughts on the matter weren’t important.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “We’ve got to deal with witches in the morning and—”
“They’re very tricky. I know. I’ll make you a deal.”
“What deal?”
“Go on a date with me, when all of this is done. One date. We’ll do something normal and see what happens. No exciting fights or supernatural attacks. We’ll go watch a movie and get some dinner. There may be some fooling around afterward. Then we’ll see where we are.”
“It won’t matter,” I said.
“Then you’ve got nothing to lose and perhaps some sex to gain. Agree to do this and I won’t bring it up again until things have settled down.”
I was ready to walk out and be done with her entirely, but I couldn’t work out why. She wasn’t bad looking and she wouldn’t be hurt by my actions. The fact that I worried about her being hurt by my actions was the problem: I liked her more than most people. Not in the way she wanted but more than any human who wasn’t my wife.
“When Erindis comes for me she’ll use you,” I said.
This was the final argument, the one to convince her. She was too logical to want to fight for her life for a man, too smart to think she could survive an attack from my wife because she loved me. She had made a decision without considering all the facts, and this fact would blow her resolve away.
“You’ll protect me, I’m sure.”
I grabbed the bar and tried not to tear it to pieces. “You’re so infuriating,” I said.
“In a chick flick this is where you’d realize you were wrong and take me in your arms.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. It was just an observation. Do we have a deal?”
I was shaking my head, with a thousand more arguments and no need to sleep.
“Alright,” I said anyway. It felt like I’d agreed to being stabbed because she really wanted me to be stabbed. It was strange and I didn’t like it, but then she smiled. Even knowing it was mostly fake, I smiled in return.
“Good. Now get some sleep. Roman is meeting us in a few hours. He’s arranged a meeting with the Sinclairs and we don’t want to be late.”
I didn’t know who the Sinclairs were but I knew I was free to leave, and that was good enough for me. I walked to the back room and closed the door behind me, then collapsed on the bed.
I lay still for an hour, going over the conversation and trying to find a way I could have ended it differently. I didn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve violence, and for some reason violence wasn’t an option this time.
I went to sleep thinking about how confusing Bec was. There were worse things to think about before sleep.
Chapter 11
When I walked into the bar the following morning and saw Bec waiting for me with a coffee, I felt awkward.
It was a stupid thing to feel. I had commanded armies and destroyed cities. I had been with a thousand women and one elder-god. I was the monster other monsters warned their children about.
And this young woman with no emotions had warped my mind so much that I felt awkward around her after a conversation.
I took the coffee and nodded my thanks, sitting at the bar and cradling it for a moment. She didn’t make good coffee, I discovered.
“Roman is about to pull up outside,” she said softly. It was like she was dealing with a wounded bird, like I was on the edge of death and she didn’t want to scare me over.
“Who are the Sinclairs?” I said. I had to snap out of whatever was going on with me, and the best way to do that was to move forward. I had a mission and people relying on me.
“Roman says there are two major witch families in Fairbridge, the Sinclairs and the Granthams.”
“Grantham I know,” I said. “Their name is on everything.”
The major bridge over the river was called Grantham Bridge. The tallest building was Grantham Tower and I wouldn’t be surprised if half the roads were called Grantham Road. You didn’t have to spend much time in the city before you realized that Grantham was an important name.
They were one of the founding families,” she explained. “They’ve been here since the beginning. I didn’t know they were witches but it doesn’t surprise me. The Sinclairs are more recent but just as powerful.”
“Why aren’t we meeting with the Granthams?”
“Because Roman didn’t teach any of their kids. He knows one of the Sinclairs though, so he had someone he could call when he knew we were going to need to speak to them.”
“Where are we meeting them?” Her coffee really was awful, but I drank it anyway in case rejecting it would hurt her feelings. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but my best guess was that I had been smited by the gods; it was the only thing that explained it.
“Near the university. Roman wanted someplace they couldn’t attack us.”
“He’s paranoid,” I said.
“You can be paranoid and they can still be out to get you,” she said. She put her hand on mine and pushed the coffee cup down onto the bar. “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t like it.”
“Thank the gods. I was trying to think of a reason to drop it on the ground.”
“That’s hurtful,” she said, smiling. She took the cup away and put it behind the bar. “I didn’t picture you as the frothy, sugar-filled coffee kind of guy.”
I shrugged. “It was the first thing I liked about your century.”
“Hopefully not the last,” she said.
I stood, ignoring her, and grabbed the clean jacket she’d found for me. My old clothes would need to be washed, or burned, but she’d expected that blood would be in my future and prepared.
“Let’s go,” I said. I wanted to get out of the bar before she started talking a
bout things I didn’t feel like talking about again. “We can get some real coffee.”
It was a pretty good excuse to leave, and I’d get good coffee out of it, too.
Roman was waiting for us on the street, staring at Bec’s red sedan.
“You’ve had an eventful twenty-four hours, I see,” he said as we approached. He wore jeans and a polo shirt, and his hair was still sticking out of his head in every direction.
“This city seems to want to kill me,” I said. I climbed into his car without waiting for him, taking the back seat so Bec would have to take the front.
“It was pretty quiet before you turned up, actually,” he said as he got in. His car was older and less flashy than Bec’s, and when he turned the key it took a while for the car to start.
“Except for the end of days,” Bec said. “That was pretty busy.”
“True, true.”
We pulled onto the road and I rested my head and closed my eyes. I had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in, and I needed to think through it all. I was going to need to find a supply of corpses that wouldn’t be missed; the dead men were few enough in number that they could take anyone and nobody would notice, but for the lost souls I would need a lot, and the authorities were probably going to be more protective of the city’s dead than they were in any other time I’d been alive.
Assuming I could find them new bodies, I had to make sure they wouldn’t just be hunted down when they arrived. Hopefully I could force the witches to consider peace, which should get me the help of the vampires. Assuming I could trust them, that would take care of the first part of my problem.
The gang was annoying and they seemed to know about me, but Artem had said he would deal with that, so at least I wasn’t going to have to waste time there. Whoever their Lord Anarchy was, the vampires could deal with him.
Once all that was done all I had left was Erindis and Bec, two women who seemed to want to cause me pain. Easy.
Roman had picked a coffee shop that served the university, and I hurried to the front of the line to place my order.
“He’s like a puppy,” Bec said.
“With a caffeine addiction,” Roman added.
I saw the witches as soon as I entered. They were hard to miss; the older one was a tall brunette in her fifties or sixties in a flowing black dress, looking like she’d been blessed by the gods so she could turn every head in the room. The younger one was also tall but blonde, in a suit that looked good on her but made her look a little stiff. She was turning plenty of heads herself, but the two of them together were almost too much for the shop. Everyone seemed to be whispering about them, though they didn’t seem to mind.
They saw me too. I was pretty hard to miss, but I got the feeling they knew what to expect before I walked in. They’d been checking up on me, which meant it wasn’t just Roman’s call that had brought them to the coffee shop.
I grabbed my latte and took a seat opposite the women. Roman seemed about to choke to death as soon as he realized I wasn’t going to wait for introductions before daring to sit with them. But then, he was a hedge mage and they were like royalty to him.
“Hi,” I said. I took a sip of my coffee. “Gods, this coffee is great.”
“It’s alright,” the older one said. “I prefer French press, myself.”
“That’s because you’re pretentious,” the blonde said.
“It isn’t pretentious if it is genuinely better,” the dark-haired one replied. She turned back to me. “I am Nikolette Sinclair and this is my daughter, Melany.”
“Agmundr,” I said. I had already finished half my coffee.
“And I’m Bec,” Bec said as she took the seat beside me. I could feel Roman’s discomfort behind me.
“You have our attention,” Nikolette said to me. “Why did you want to see us?”
“I’m surprised you were up for it,” Bec said.
Nikolette was clearly ignoring her, but Melany seemed to find her funny.
“Hello, witch-lady?” Bec said. “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, child,” she said, sparing her an arched eyebrow. “I’m not here to speak to you, though. I’m here to speak to the man that keeps breaking things in my city.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “They were going to break whether I was there or not.”
“Unlikely. Tell me why you called us here.”
“I’d like you to stop interfering with the vampires,” I said. The surprise on her face told me what her response was going to be without her having to laugh in my face. “They will play nice and stop making a mess. In exchange all they ask is that you don’t try to run them out of town.”
“They kill people for food,” Melany said.
“Sure,” I replied. “But that isn’t something you’ve been concerned with in the past. Or they wouldn’t be in the city, would they? You’ve become concerned since their little civil war broke out.”
“And what if that is true?” Nikolette said.
“Then I can assure you that the war is over and all is well.”
“And what if we still don’t want them in the city?”
“Tough,” Bec said. I turned to her and she shrugged her shoulders. “What? It’s true. They are here to stay and it’ll take a war to remove them. I don’t know what fancy-pants here thinks is going to happen if she tries to kick them out.”
“Your friend needs to be quiet,” Nikolette said. I decided I didn’t like her, but I was acutely aware that she was one of the most powerful witches in the city and I was low on energy.
“She has a point, though,” I said. My coffee was finished and I knew I was going to need another one, but it didn’t seem appropriate to get up just then.
“They have been run out of the city before, Mr. Agmundr.” Nikolette pronounced my name perfectly, which told me all I still needed to know about her knowledge of me.
She was there purely to talk to me, I was sure. Anything else – like discussing the vampires – was pretense.
“You’re not going to go after the vampires unless they make a mess, are you?” I said. “No, I don’t think so. You’re not that stupid. You’re just making noise to ensure they stay in line.”
“That is very astute,” she said. “Then tell me, why am I here?”
“You want me out of the city. You’re here to threaten me.”
“He’s smarter than I thought,” Melany said. She got the same look from her mother that Bec had gotten from me. It worked better on her though, and she kept quiet.
“You have brought danger to our streets,” Nikolette began. “I cannot allow that to—”
“Let me stop you,” I said. “I need another coffee before I tell you to shut up.” I turned back to Roman and waved my empty cup at him. He scowled at me, but he went back to the register to order it.
“You were saying?” Nikolette seemed amused by my antics, which was a good place to start.
“I’m not here to discuss this with you,” I said. “I’ll try to keep as quiet as I can, as long as I can. If something comes up that makes me noisy I’ll be noisy. That’s the best I can offer you.”
“Then I suspect we will come to blows, Mr. Agmundr.”
“I have another idea,” Bec said. She had her hand up like Nikolette was a teacher. “Professor Roman thinks he can cure Agmundr of his…situation, and he’d like to speak to you about it.”
I turned to her, ready to start yelling.
“Surprise,” she said.
Chapter 12
I pulled her out of her seat and walked her to the other side of the shop.
“What the hell are you doing?” I was gripping her arm tight enough for her to wince, and in the moment I didn’t care that I was hurting her.
“Roman thinks he can break your bond to the locket. He thinks he can undo all of it, actually. He can take the tattoos off, if you want.”
“That isn’t possible. I’ve had arch-mages try, and they failed. I’ve had high disciples try, and
they failed. One hedge-mage who works more in theory than practice isn’t going to do it.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to lose by listening to him.” She tried to pull away from me and I tightened my grip. “That hurts, and if you don’t stop doing it I’m going to punch you in the face.”
I let go, more out of surprise than anything. Bec had found a way of pushing me around with her words, and it was working more effectively than any master’s threats or orders ever did.
“I don’t want you bringing them into it,” I said, pointing toward the witches.
“That’s already done,” Bec said as she nodded toward the table.
Roman was sitting opposite them with my coffee clasped in his hand. He looked nervous but determined, like every time he’d opposed me on something. He was scared of them, or respected them, but he had a mission and he was going to see it through.
I left Bec and went back to the table, sliding in beside Roman. When he saw the look on my face he seemed to shrink into his chair.
“The professor was telling us that you aren’t just called Agmundr,” Nikolette said. “He says you’re actually the Agmundr.”
“Roman shouldn’t be saying anything.” I was still glaring at him and it was starting to make me feel bad. Roman wasn’t a fighter, he was an academic, and he didn’t respond well to the obvious threat of violence my demeanor promised.
“Listen,” he said to me. “I don’t know how to weave the great powers like they do but I know blood magic. I’ve studied it, through and through. And I’ve studied you, probably more than any modern scholar.”
“You all seem pretty convinced he’s the real Agmundr,” Nikolette said.
“Who is the real Agmundr?” Melany asked.
“Ancient boogeyman,” Nikolette replied. “The man who killed the gods and sealed the heavens.”
“Let me talk to them,” Roman said. “Please. If you don’t like what you hear you can kill them.”
