by S T Branton
Rocco was right in front of me, and I didn’t even have my gun or any proper weapon. All I had was Marcus’s sword, and who knew if that would come through for me again? What seemed like a great idea twenty minutes ago now seemed delusional. I could barely wield my training sword, let alone go up against trained guards. And what if I couldn’t get the sword to work? Maybe it had rules or some shit, like it wouldn’t activate unless I was in a life or death situation. I didn’t know.
And I couldn’t risk it.
I slunk back toward Dumpster Alley, steeling my senses against the onslaught of rancid fumes. My eyes kept darting back toward the window with Rocco Durant in it, but by the second or third glance, he was gone.
Something other than my customary burning hatred of him was nagging at me, and it wasn’t until I was back on the street that I figured out the problem.
I had shot him. I knew I had shot him. Twice. The last time I saw him, he was bloody and looked like shit.
Not anymore.
He looked fine. Better than fine. He looked like he’d stepped into a time machine set for ten years ago.
I wiped the intense frown off my face as I ambled down toward the end of the block. On my way across the street, I spotted a car pulling up to the curb, depositing a couple of suits with girls on their arms. I only caught a glimpse of them before they headed toward the door on the right, but it didn’t take a genius to work out what they were going to do. A sour taste filled my mouth as I pulled open the door of the bodega on the corner.
I didn’t want to let Rocco’s building out of my sight, but there was no good place to hide, and I couldn’t just double back immediately. I had to waste some time.
Twenty minutes later, I left the store with a dollar coffee in my hand, giving the fat tabby perched in the front window a farewell scratch behind the ears. It seemed prudent to stay on the opposite side of the street from Rocco’s building as I made my way toward it, so I looked as inconspicuous as possible. I stared straight ahead, but all my attention was focused in my peripheral vision.
No sign of the goons who’d brought in their girls. No sign of Rocco, either.
The guards at each door hadn’t budged.
I had drawn almost even with them on the left when I heard the scream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was unmistakable, a silence-shattering shriek that cut through the broken window panes like a laser. It was a scream of pain and terror. I froze and then turned to stare at the worn brick façade before I could help myself. One of the guards jumped, but the other didn’t even look up. My gaze danced from window to window, trying to pick out the source of the scream.
Now, it seemed like that layer of grime served a purpose.
I gritted my teeth. The sword hilt felt like an iron weight in my bag. It still wasn’t my gun, but it was better than nothing. And clearly, whatever was happening inside Rocco Durant’s new digs, those girls were not enjoying it. The situation was now or never.
I booked it across the street without looking for traffic. Those two shitty men never saw me coming. I pushed the first one into the wall, hard enough that he crumpled up, gasping for air.
“Hey!” said the other one. “Hey! What the hell are you doing, lady?”
Up close, I saw that I’d been right about his age. Only the finest of facial hairs graced his scraggly chin, and his cheeks were a warzone of acne. No way could I kill him, but I could knock him out guilt-free.
“Sorry, bud,” I said.
He had approximately half a second to look confused before I hit him square in the head with the butt of the sword. His backward-turned cap slipped sideways as he fell.
I stepped over his unconscious body. Without a doubt, there were already cameras everywhere; surveillance was always Rocco’s first priority. It was how he’d always stayed a step ahead of me, even when I managed to get the drop on him. He’d know I was there soon enough.
And I’d already beaten on two teenaged guards, so I was fully committed to this little adventure.
I glanced behind me as I reached for the doorknob. When I turned back, my face collapsed in an expression of total dismay. Instead of a handle, the door had a keypad recessed into the metal.
“Codes,” I whispered. “Why didn’t I think of codes?”
Just for shits and giggles, I punched a few numbers into the display. My reward was a loud, accusatory beep. Maybe not the smartest idea.
I sighed, tightened my grip on Marcus’s sword, which remained bladeless, and got ready to bash the everloving hell out of the keypad. It was way too late to back out now. With any luck, I could brute force my way through the locking mechanism.
The sound of another car interrupted my downward swing. I nearly smacked myself in the face with that damn hilt as I spun around out of pure instinct to see who was coming up behind me. This car was black, too, but much nicer than the first. A luxury car, probably foreign, with its windows all blacked out.
The door opened.
I caught a glimpse of a shoe and the bottom of a black duster. Then, my eye seemed to snap right to a gaunt, sallow face. He had long, dark hair, parted in the middle with comb tracks still visible along his lean skull.
He was staring right at me.
I panicked. Why couldn’t I do anything? Why couldn’t I move? My feet might as well have been rooted to the ground. His huge, eerily pale eyes floated up toward the sword still raised in my hand, and a ghost of some emotion swarmed over his face. His own hand began to lift from his side.
Why hadn’t he said anything yet?
“Vic!”
Both of us, me and the creep in the duster, turned toward that familiar voice. Marcus charged down the middle of the street like a bull, armored up with a spear in hand. He cocked his arm and threw it so hard I heard the point whistling through the air.
The stranger’s hair flipped back at his ear as he leapt out of the way. Marcus’s spear embedded itself in the fancy car with a screaming crunch of metal. Stunned, I stared at its shaft, still vibrating as it protruded from the wrecked chassis.
Marcus reached me a second later. For an old guy, he could run like hell. He seized me around the waist and started to drag me away. I realized my quest for vengeance was about to be thwarted for the second time in a week, and both times were Marcus’s fault.
If he was so set on a war, I’d give him one.
“Let me go!” I screeched as fiercely as I could. I pushed and scratched at the arm he had locked around me, but even my sharp, ragged nails had no effect on his gauntlets. “He’s in there! Do you hear me? He’s in there!”
My protests fell on deaf ears, so I twisted around in order to shout in Marcus’s face better. I saw that his eyes were dark, and his mouth was set in a grim line. If I hadn’t been so unbelievably pissed, I might have been worried, but I was unbelievably pissed, so worry fell to the wayside.
“Put me down, asshole! Put me down!”
As a last resort, I went dead limp, hoping the task of carting my body around would prove more frustrating than it was worth.
Marcus was undeterred. He paused to adjust his grip, and then, he just kept trucking. I could scream and cry and swear at him all damn day, as far as he was concerned. We were getting out of there.
I stopped fighting eventually, and after about a half mile, he let me go. I shoved away from him with all the force and petulance of a scorned lover, making sure my displeasure was written all over my face.
He didn’t look at me, but as he dusted off his hands and pulled ahead, he said, “There are many things you do not understand, Vic.” A short pause. “I have just saved your life.”
Of all the wrong things in the world to say, that was pretty close to the top of the list. I folded my arms. “Oh, please. Tell me all about how you rescued me from those punks who were drooling on the ground when you showed up.”
He drew his brows down in a gesture of obvious exasperation that I found extremely satisfying. “I am not referring to those boys you s
o judiciously dispatched with my sword.”
“What, you mean the toothpick in the coat?” I downplayed the effect that strange guy had just had on me for bravado’s sake. I didn’t want Marcus to know he had stopped me with nothing more than a stare from those paralyzing eyes. In fact, I didn’t even want to think about that. It made me severely uncomfortable to know some scrawny nerd had effectively disarmed me without a weapon of his own.
Marcus sighed. “As I said, you do not understand.” His tone was long-suffering, like I was the one trying his patience. Yet another thing that pissed me off.
“Whatever,” I said. “Apparently, I don’t understand anything.”
He glanced at me. I wasn’t even close to looking at him, but I felt it. “Apparently, you do not, despite how I have tried to warn you. This world—your world—is no longer what it once was. The gods have arrived, and you have stared one in the face.”
***
We walked the three and a half remaining miles back to Brooklyn Heights in silence, each of us embroiled in our own thoughts. I kept my gaze stubbornly averted, lest he try to strike up another conversation. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to Marcus after he’d robbed me of my ultimate goal yet again.
The first time, I could tell myself it wasn’t his fault. This time, I wasn’t feeling quite so charitable. What pissed me off the most is that I had done exactly what he suggested. I’d went in, zero victim and all hero, and he pulled me the hell out.
I let the door slam shut behind me, and the loft’s windows rattled. Marcus went over and installed himself at the table, and I slouched my way to the bed. For several more minutes, we gave each other the silent treatment. I knew he was waiting for me to break under the pressure of not knowing anything, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
But I was only human. I couldn’t stand it forever.
“So, are you going to explain or not?” I kept my back to him, staring a hole in the wall. “How I stared a god in the face?”
Marcus shifted in his chair. His armor clanked jarringly. All of a sudden, he seemed reluctant to fill me in. “Where shall I begin?” he asked.
“Anywhere you want. I couldn’t care less.” I laid back on the mattress and closed my eyes, but the image of the guy in the duster appeared behind my eyelids with unsettling clarity. I felt almost like he could still see me. I settled for counting the hairline cracks in the ceiling.
Marcus hemmed and hawed a little while longer. I waited as patiently as possible, but my fuse was running short. He had dicked me around a hell of a lot with all his talk about supernatural bullshit, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it since he was so determined to stick around. If he was a crazy vagrant after all, I had a right to know.
“Technically, the man in the metal chariot was a demigod,” he said at last.
Great.
“Here we go again,” I retorted. “Dude, enough with this stuff about gods, okay? We all went to church as kids, and we all rebelled against it when we were teenagers. We did not all invent some insane other world where mythology is real.” It was the nicest I could possibly be, considering how worn out and frazzled I felt. “Just drop it already. Why are you really here?”
He didn’t say anything for at least five minutes. When he spoke again, his voice was low and tough, unlike anything I’d heard from him before. “Perhaps I was wrong about you, Vic. I thought you were determined, resilient, and possessed of an inner strength that was admirable, if misguided.
“But you are weak. You are too consumed with your untenable notions of vengeance to focus on what really matters.” His chair scraped against the floor as he rose to his feet. “Days ago, I told you that revenge never helps. I vowed to teach you. Now, I see that you have learned nothing.”
I sat bolt upright on the mattress, glaring daggers at him. The day’s emotions welling up inside of me. “You don’t know the first thing about me, you delusional prick.” My voice dripped with venom that I hoped was enough to conceal the harsh sting of his words. I stood up from the bed. “You think I haven’t learned anything, huh? We’ll see about that.”
I snatched my training sword off the floor and charged him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I heaved the sword back and let out a cry full of anger, fear, sadness, and regret. The dull wooden blade chopped through the air and was met by Marcus’s expert counter, raining chips down onto the floor. He had a perfect answer for every erratic movement I threw at him, even when I was certain there was no way for him to predict my wild flailing. The heavy thock of our sparring resonated in my body, thrumming down through my feet into the floor.
I struck out again and again. Marcus blocked again and again. He maneuvered around me on nimble feet, his eyes never leaving my chopping blade. I managed, through trial, error, and a bit of dumb luck, to weasel him back toward a corner of the apartment where my sad, makeshift punching bag still stood.
Marcus bumped his elbow against it.
Though minor, the collision threw him off enough that in order to regain his balance, he was forced to leave his side exposed. Seizing the opportunity, I lunged forward and brought my weapon solidly into what would have been his ribcage if he hadn’t twisted away at the last moment. The wooden sword bit into the edge of his back.
I let out a yell of triumph.
Instead of swiveling toward me with a swift, decisive counter, Marcus fell to a knee.
I gasped. He grunted, shielding the spot where I had hit him. Too late, I recalled the black wound he had when I found him. All the anger fled my system in favor of remorse. I couldn’t tell which felt worse.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Are you okay?”
He gestured vaguely in the direction of the table. “Flask. My flask.”
“Right.” I swiped it from the table, opened the top, and handed it to him. I could have sworn it had been much heavier the last time I held it.
He took a long draught. “Thanks.” Almost instantly, the color bled back into his skin. His hair darkened, its threads of silver disappearing. Marcus straightened and then let himself sit heavily back.
“Better?” I asked, somewhat sheepishly.
“Better.”
“The flask feels light,” I said. Vic Stratton, champion of unhelpfulness. He waved me off, and I plopped down beside him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Worry not, Vic.” A slight smile eased the severity of his features. “It just proves that I am at least not a worthless pedagogue.” He patted me gently on the shoulder. “I owe you an apology as well. Anger is no excuse for the hurtful barbs I have thrown.”
I nodded. “Hurtful, but more or less correct. I’ve got a lot to work on.”
It didn’t feel so bad admitting that to him now. The monster of rage and pain had been safely locked away.
“If it helps, I was wrong about being wrong. You are strong, you are determined, and you are certainly resilient. That is admirable.”
A lump threatened to form in my throat. “Thanks, man.” I rubbed my face to keep any tears from getting the wrong idea. “Thanks, Marcus.”
His smile widened. “It is an honor to put up with you, Vic.”
We laughed. It felt good. Great, even.
“I’m glad that stuff makes you feel better, whatever it is,” I said.
“As am I.” He fell silent then, thinking deeply. “There is one more thing for which I must offer my penitence.”
“Just one?” My grin made it clear I was joking.
“No matter what my personal feelings on the matter are, it is not my place to interfere with your mission against these foes. However, it would have been disastrous had you been killed and the Gladius Solis taken by the wrong hands. This is the reasoning I should have offered at the outset. I was erroneous in believing you would not understand. The sword is more important than me—more important than anything.”
I nodded, but said nothing as we lapsed into another silence. Then I said, “Did you find the
yogurt commercial guy?”
He snorted. “I think my quest to find a hero will have to wait. There are more immediate concerns that require my attention. The injustices befalling our two worlds have intersected at last. Perhaps in vanquishing your nemesis and learning of the gods’ new scheme on Earth, I will find my hero.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Does this have something to do with the guy at the slaughterhouse?”
Marcus paused. “Why do you call it that?” He watched me keenly, as if he thought I might be hiding something.
“What? That’s what it used to be. You know, for like, beef and stuff.”
“I see.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Are you inquiring because you have chosen to accept the facts of my presence here on Earth?”
“Hell no, but you tell a pretty good story.”
He shrugged, acknowledging the truth of it. “I suppose the trials of the gods would make for a compelling tale among humans, yes. Had I learned of it in the way you have, I might have felt the same.”
“There you go, see?” I leaned back on my hands. “And we’re all the way up to the massive, world-ending battle, so you can’t leave me hanging now. Tell me about this asshole in black. Does he know Rocco?”
I already knew the answer to that. Why else would he be showing up at Rocco’s newest hangout? I couldn’t make sense of it, though, and for the first time, I was willing to admit that maybe Marcus could clear things up.
Maybe.
“He is a demigod, as I have said.” Marcus ran his fingers over the carved pattern in the surface of his flask. “In Carcerum, we called them Apprenti. They are, for lack of a more appropriate expression, servants of the greater gods. Each greater god has many, and their term of service is infinite.”
“Shitty gig,” I remarked.
“Indeed, it would seem so. But Apprenti are powerful beings in their own right, no matter their origin. Some were human, and some were other types of creatures. Most are abominations. And all are in the thrall of their parent god. They live to carry out the greater god’s ultimate purpose, whatever it may be.”
