Challenges (Frank Kurns Stories of the UnknownWorld Book 4)

by Natalie Grey

  “I only did what I did today because I saw clearly that there was no way to stay on Ioan’s good side, that I would only become more and more compromised, and sooner or later this game would kill me.”

  “That’s not entirely true.” Mathieu spoke for the first time. “You argued for me to stand up to him, too. You said that we knew what he was doing was wrong. You wanted to save your grandfather. We could probably just have run away, except you insisted on going and finding these people for them to set the wolves free. They wouldn’t ever have known if you hadn’t told them.”

  Ecaterina took a deep breath as she considered this.

  “My grandfather raised me to be a better man than I am now,” Andrei said. “Whatever you think of me, my actions are not his fault. He told me every day that I would regret what I was doing, and that I knew it was wrong. I never told him what I was doing, but he knew I felt guilty about it.”

  He paused in shame.

  “I don’t think he ever dreamed I would do something this bad,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I ask you not to hurt him.”

  “I won’t hurt him,” Ecaterina said, annoyed. “I am not Ioan.”

  And me? Andrei said nothing. Even his hope made him feel ashamed.

  He knew he did not deserve to feel hope. He knew she should open these cages and let the wolves tear him to shreds.

  Finally she sighed.

  “I said earlier today that I would attack Ioan and stop him, and that we would see your character from what you did,” she told him. “And you didn’t help him, you helped us. You did the right thing, so I’m going to let you go.”

  Andrei said nothing. He could hear the but in her voice.

  “But I don’t like it,” she told him bluntly. “I think you have a lot to make up for. I think you let yourself ignore far too much cruelty. I think that if someone asked me to justify why I was letting you go, I would have to acknowledge that beyond my word that I said I would there’re a lot of good reasons to punish you instead. And I want you to know that. I want you to know this isn’t something I’m sure of.”

  Andrei had expected to feel relief, but instead he felt only a sinking sense of shame.

  He had meant what he said to Mathieu earlier: he had more than enough shame to last a lifetime. Two lifetimes.

  “I’m also not sure I can make it up,” he nodded to her, “but I’ll try.” He looked at Alexi. “I hear stories about you. I know that when people do things that are wrong, you talk to them and set them straight. I will try to do the same. I will try always to do the right thing, no matter what it costs me. I hope I will balance out the bad things I have done.”

  “Go,” Ecaterina told him. “I don’t want to look at you right now.”

  He nodded and left, a silent shadow.

  She turned to Mathieu. “I trust you heard everything I said to him just now?”

  “Yes.” Mathieu looked nervous.

  “And I trust you know that it applies just as much to you as it did to him?”

  Mathieu’s shoulders slumped. “Yes.”

  “Then you get out of my sight, too. I don’t want to see you either.”

  She watched them both practically run away, and bit her lip in the sudden silence.

  “I hope I didn’t make a mistake,” she admitted.

  “Cheer up,” Nathan said, with a shrug.

  “Hmm?”

  “If you were wrong you can always kill them later, right? But you couldn’t undo killing them.” He came to loop an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get these wolves set to rights and then go home and have a nice meal. I’m famished.”

  Ecaterina smiled at him. “Yes, let’s.”

  She walked to the first cage and unlocked the door, holding out her hand to one of the wolves inside. “You’re safe now,” she told it. “We’re going to get you food and fix that nasty cut on your side, and you’re going to get to live out your days in the forest. You’re safe now.”

  QBBS Meredith Reynolds

  Marcus stared at the thermometer fixedly. It was climbing toward the temperature it should simmer at, and he adjusted the heat downward to slow its rise.

  His head was aching fiercely, but he was determined not to lose focus for a moment.

  He wasn’t using the myrcene oil, and that meant he had to do everything else perfectly.

  A timer went off and he poured the perfectly-leveled—and twice-measured—scoop of hops carefully into the wort after double-checking that they were the correct ones to add at this step.

  “You’re doing well,” Barnabas said approvingly from the side of the room. He strolled closer to Marcus. “But this is, so far, just a trial for you. Instead of a trial, instead of a test, think of it as a devotion.”

  “What?” Marcus looked over at the former monk and hoped he didn’t look as clueless as he felt.

  Barnabas smiled. “You were never in one of the religious orders—I understand this—but you enjoy drinking a fine beer, do you not? You enjoy seeing the looks on others’ faces as they relax in the bar and speak with their friends. You take pride in doing everything you do very well and to the best of your ability. Is this not so?”

  Marcus hesitated, then nodded.

  “Excellent. Well, for a monk such things would serve a larger purpose—all of them would reflect the greater glory of God. While I hope for such a thought in you, even if it is not in your heart, at least excellence and joy can still be your reasons for making this beer perfectly.” He paused. “Think of what you wish to achieve,” he said finally, “not of what might go wrong.”

  He glided away with an enigmatic smile on his face, and Marcus stared after him in bemusement.

  He turned back to the wort with a new purpose. His headache seemed to be clearing up, and as he inhaled he tried to imagine the beer finished to perfection. It would be wonderful if he could manage it.

  ***

  “I’m telling you, I went over the video three times. Marcus never used it—it was just Bobcat.” William looked at Pete. “So do we add it or not?”

  Pete looked at the measurements and the bubbling wort, then stared at the video and back at the myrcene oil.

  “You said Bobcat was the one to beat,” he said finally. “If he knows something we don’t, we gotta think there’s a reason. Plus, it’s been how many hundreds of years since Barnabas brewed beer? There’s new technology now. Let’s add the oil.”

  William nodded. “Good call.” He eyeballed the bottle. “It’s just a little more than we need, so should we add all of it?”

  “Yeah, might as well.” Pete grinned.

  Out in the hallway, Barnabas lifted his ear away from the door and shook his head as he glided off down the hall.

  “Sloppy,” he murmured to himself.

  But he was smiling.

  And Tabitha, watching from the opposite side of the bay, crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. She was beginning to have a suspicion about this competition.

  “ADAM?” She considered. “Would you help me look something up?”

  Romania

  Andrei turned sideways to examine himself in the mirror. The bruises had flared from a deep purple into a riot of greens and yellows, and they were now fading away.

  His cracked ribs were, according to his doctor, healing well. He might always limp and it was likely that his nose would never be quite straight again, but he was alive.

  And he had a new purpose. On the kitchen table were spread dozens of documents regarding a new venture he was researching. If it worked, he would have started his climb back to evening the slate.

  The phone started to ring and he hurried into the main room to answer it before Mihai woke up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Andrei.” The voice was female. It was smooth and elegant … and it somehow made Andrei break out in a cold sweat. “My name is Bethany Anne.”

  “Do I… Do I know you?”

  “No, you’ve never met me.” Her tone was really quite pleasant, he refle
cted, but he was utterly terrified all of a sudden.

  “Ah, can I help you?”

  “This call isn’t really about whether you can help me, Andrei. It’s about whether you can help you.” He got the sense that this Bethany Anne person was smiling. “You see, I know what you did. I know how you earned a reprieve, but if you ever step so much as one toe out of line again… If you ever hurt any defenseless person, no matter how little you hurt them, I will find you and there will be no mercy. Do you understand me?”

  Andrei had to brace himself on the table so as not to have his knees give out. His voice didn’t seem to work when he tried to speak, and he had to clear his throat several times.

  “Yes. I understand you perfectly.”

  “Good.” The line went dead.

  EPILOGUE

  6 months later…

  Ecaterina carefully placed the tiny vial of seeds in the holding container and made a check mark next to its entry in her log.

  She waited for the microchip embedded in the lid to sync against the database and smiled. Now when anyone scanned this set of seeds, they would see what the plant looked like, what other plants its natural ecosystem involved, how best to tend it, and its uses both on its own and as an aid to the cultivation of other plants.

  Meanwhile, searches that returned any of those same results would allow people to select this seed as a good candidate for whatever program they were running.

  She was just reaching for the next vial when a crash and a shriek from the next room made her look around.

  “Tabby?”

  Tabitha popped her head around the door. Her hair had just this morning, been dyed a brilliant shade of blue, and she’d switched out one of her eyebrow piercings to match. “How did you know?”

  “Given the crash it was a good guess,” Ecaterina answered dryly. “What can I help you with?”

  “They’re going to start the brewing competition!” Tabitha danced back and forth. “Come on, let’s go taste everything!”

  “All right.” Ecaterina put the vial back in the box, made sure she hadn’t checked anything off that she shouldn’t have, and joined Tabitha.

  They walked quickly through the halls of the Meredith Reynolds to the bar, where a large crowd had assembled. People were drinking other beers made by Marcus and Bobcat and William, and they would periodically look up to the judging table to see if the competition had started yet.

  The three kegs were being wheeled out, with the brewers guarding them as worriedly as mother hens.

  At the table, Lance Reynolds sat back with a smile. He had been looking forward to this competition. It had been a very long time since he had proposed it, and he had been getting—to put things charitably—a bit impatient.

  “Now remember,” his daughter told him with a grin, “you have to be entirely impartial.”

  “The beer will be my guide,” Lance told her, and smiled. “I would never lie about something so important as the quality of beer.”

  Bethany Anne grinned and took a seat beside him. She beckoned Jennifer, Stephen, and Nathan up to the table as well. “All right, the three of you are backup judges. In the event that my dad can’t make a decision, your votes will break the tie.”

  “You are not judging?” Stephen asked curiously.

  “No, just tasting.” Bethany Anne grinned. “Queen Bitch’s right, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Most assuredly,” Nathan agreed.

  Little bowls of coffee beans were set out along with beverages designed to clear the palate between tastes, and the beers were brought to each judge in a different order, marked so as to be anonymous to all but John—who had offered to oversee the rigors of the testing process.

  In return for beer, of course.

  Everyone watched as the judges sipped their beers and made notes. Sometimes they returned to one beer, other times they continued to the next. Each judge tried each beer multiple times with multiple cleanses of the palate, then John whisked away their notes and tallied the scores.

  It was ten minutes before he emerged from the side room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of the beer competition is…”

  ***

  Children shrieked and chased one another across their makeshift playground.

  Over the past months Ioan’s one-time hideout had become overgrown with weeds, but then it had been cleaned up using an infusion of cash that had arrived mysteriously at the mayor’s office.

  The grant had been very specific: the money was to be used to clean up the mansion and make it fit for families to live in, the surrounding land was to be kept as a nature preserve, and there was to be a new college established to teach people all sorts of skills for starting and running their own businesses.

  In short, the town was to take care of those who needed it, and give them the tools to make their way in the world—and no one was to interfere with the nearby forest. Meanwhile, the fenced-in area of the grounds had become the village children’s favorite place to play.

  Andrei smiled as one child caught another in a game of tag. He was walking in the trees very slowly to allow for his grandfather’s pace.

  “You’re not going to tell me where you got all that money, are you?” Mihai complained.

  Andrei smiled. “As I have explained many times, grandfather, that money was not mine. I have no idea where it came from.”

  The first part was true, although the second was a lie. It had taken many careful phone calls and transactions, but he had managed to empty Ioan’s illegal accounts and wind down the man’s operations, ending up with a very large sum of money.

  He still fielded the occasional call from a client, and explained that Ioan’s business was simply too dangerous in the current climate. It hadn’t survived.

  He didn’t mention that by “it” he meant Ioan, and by “dangerous” he meant ‘prone to being ripped apart by wolves.’

  Andrei, meanwhile, was making a good living working in one of the new shops in town. A few had come and gone since the money appeared, but most were staying.

  Mihai smiled. He knew from experience that his grandson was lying to him, but for once he didn’t mind. He also knew the tell-tale signs of guilt, and for the first time in years Andrei seemed to have none.

  He was grateful for that, and grateful to see the town being built up by the younger generation. He and Alexi often sat over tea or a beer and discussed the young people who were coming home, or who had decided to stay after school.

  It was beginning to look like their home was valued by others as much as they valued it themselves.

  He looked up at the sky. Whoever you were who came here and no matter why you did it, I’m grateful to you.

  ***

  John let the silence hang until someone yelled, “Just tell us already!”

  He laughed. “The winner, by a very large margin in both our chief judge’s vote and our secondary judges’ votes, is Marcus.”

  The bar exploded into whistles and stomps.

  Bobcat and William exchanged an incredulous glance and looked over to where Marcus was staring just as incredulously at the judges’ table.

  It was Bethany Anne who noticed the faintly smug smile on Barnabas’ face, and she made her way through the crowd to his side. “Would you like to explain what you did to tip the scales?”

  “I,” Barnabas said confidently, “did nothing to tip the scales.”

  There was a snort from beside them and Tabitha tucked a strand of bright blue hair behind her ear. “As usual, Barnabas is being sneaky.”

  “As I have said many times—”

  “It was sneaky, you were sneaky, the whole thing was sneaky.” Tabitha raised her eyebrow at him.

  Barnabas gave her a long-suffering look. “A matter of opinion.”

  “All right,” Bethany Anne tried to keep her mouth from twitching, “what was sneaky, Tabby?”

  “Barnabas laid a nice little trap for Bobcat and William,” Tabitha said. She crossed her arms and gave Ba
rnabas a look. “Which Marcus almost fell into, I’ll have you know.”

  “I do know,” Barnabas said. “I know you helped him almost fall into, and I know he didn’t fall into it. I know that he spent a great deal of time on his process instead, and thus ensured a far better, more balanced beer than the others were able to make. They, on the other hand, felt that because they had a way to cheat, they could be sloppy.”

  “You sabotaged their beers?” Bethany Anne asked. “Barnabas—”

  “I did no such thing.” Barnabas held up a hand. “The ingredient they used was specifically formulated to do no harm to the beer, but neither did it help. A consummate beer brewer—and a worthy competitor—would either not have used the oil, having had no chance to test it before, or they might have used it but would have taken care on the rest of the beer. William and Bobcat did not do so. Marcus did.”

  Bethany Anne laughed and let her head fall back. “Oh, man, you have got to be kidding me. So you set up a way to trick them into thinking they’d have better beers?”

  “Their choice to brew with sloppy technique was just that,” Barnabas said. “Their choice. They didn’t have to use the oil, and they didn’t have to brew sloppily.”

  Bethany Anne exchanged a look with Tabitha. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Never get in a fight with Barnabas?” Tabitha asked her.

  “Yup.”

  Barnabas smiled, then coughed discreetly. “There is…one more matter regarding this ingredient.”

  “Yes?” Bethany Anne asked with deep misgiving.

  “I seem to have created somewhat of a…thriving business.” Barnabas stared at the ceiling with a determinedly blank expression. “You see, in my attempts to establish myrcene oil as a valid substance to use, it was discovered by many other home brewers. It is now the subject of lively debate, and we find ourselves consistently sold out of it.”