A Hunter and His Legion (The Praetorian Series Book 3)

by Edward Crichton

  “Fuck it!” I yelled and hurled it off into the distance.

  Felix grumbled at my outburst, but I paid him no mind as I drew my knees against my chest and wrapped my arms around them to keep warm, settling in to await Minicius’ return. I shifted my body to attain a comfortable sitting position, and for the first time in weeks, felt a sense of isolation overwhelm me. I might as well have been all alone out here, for all the companionship I’d had of late. I no longer cared that my former friends were lost to me, nor did I mind having the fate of the universe precariously balanced on my shoulders anymore, but the idea of dying out here and most likely being left to rot in a hole somewhere was not comforting.

  I shuddered at the thought and pulled my blanket around my shoulders more tightly, but was immediately interrupted by a loud trumpet sounding off in the distance. I craned my neck to the left and saw Minicius returning with his scouting unit, and with another contingent of legionnaires behind him.

  It took a concerted effort for me to rise to my feet, but when I was finally upright, I set out at a leisurely pace in their direction. The sound of hoofs crunching in snow drew my attention behind me, and I saw Vincent, Archer, and Santino riding up on their horses only to draw up short of where I stood. They eyed me cautiously and I didn’t even bother welcoming them. I turned back and continued toward Minicius, the three of them falling in behind me atop their horses.

  As our two groups grew closer, I tried to discern any details I could about the legionnaires that travelled behind Minicius and his men. Nothing seemed off about them or out of the ordinary, but because of their unexpected presence so far north, I half expected them to be some kind of parallel reality version of a Roman legion, one with horns and tails and fire discharging eyes, or at the very least, some kind of local tribe masquerading as legionnaires.

  The last thing I expected to see was just another group of legionnaires, no different than the ones in their camp behind me.

  “Hunter…”

  The voice came from behind me and sounded like Vincent’s, but I ignored him and continued walking.

  The only discernible difference between these new guys and the legionnaires behind me was that, on a whole, these newcomers seemed older and more mature than the Romans under my command.

  “Hunter…”

  This voice could have been Archer’s but it seemed farther away than Vincent’s had earlier. He was the last person I wanted to speak with right now, and I was too distracted by another odd feature of the approaching legionnaires as well. Behind their first few lines, all I could see was a shifting pattern of darkness that I couldn’t quite make out on this overcast day. My earlier thoughts of demonic alternate…

  “Hunter…”

  This voice was clearly from Santino, even though it sounded even farther away than Archer’s had, so I finally turned to see what the fuss was about.

  “What!?” I screamed, only to discover they hadn’t been marching with me for the past thirty meters or so. They’d stopped long ago, leaving me alone between them and the returning legionnaires.

  I cocked my head to the side quizzically as I looked at them. “What?”

  But they didn’t respond, so I turned back around only to find that the legionnaires had halted their forward progress as well. I looked to Minicius who marched on the right side of the approaching formation, but he didn’t even glance in my direction. His face was hard and his eyes were averted.

  I was about to start demanding answers when the formation before me split open right down the center. Half of the legionnaires stepped left, the other half right, opening up a tunnel between the two halves. The split ran about ten rows deep before a figure cut between them and strutted right toward me.

  Recognition came almost immediately, and by the time the figure was only a few steps away, I was already planting the palm of my right hand firmly against my forehead. I dragged my hand down my face, and through fingers spread across my eyes, I saw the ironically angelic looking blond woman stop little more than a few steps away, cock her hip out to the side, and place a hand on it.

  She looked me dead in the eye with a wonderfully self-righteous smile on her lips.

  I chuckled and shook my head as the woman spoke.

  “By my power as Empress of Rome,” Agrippina the Younger said commandingly, “I place you under arrest, Jacob Hunter, for the attempted abduction of my son, murder of my person, and usurpation of my empire.”

  My chuckles turned to outright laughter, but ended quickly when a dark blur out of the corner of my eye swung something heavy at my head.

  Then everything went black.

  Again.

  X

  Facepalm

  Northern Britannia

  January, 44 A.D.

  I was surprised at how much pain there was.

  Besides my slight cold, I hadn’t felt any kind of discomfort, mental or physical, in weeks, at least since my time in Anglesey. There’d been moments for such things since, of course, like when an errant tree branch would occasionally scratch my hand or when Felix accidently stepped on my toe, but I’d always been able to override and ignore the pain, fueled as I was by my determination. And I’d been hit over the head more times than I cared to remember in the past, so I knew what it felt like, and while I wasn’t sure how many more I could suffer before I started losing my mind, this one seemed particularly bad.

  My head felt heavy and clouded, and there was a rhythmic pounding in the back of my skull like the worst of hangovers. I could tell without opening my eyes that my head was dipped forward so that my chin propped it up against my chest, but I forced myself to lift it painfully, allowing it to loll and bob aimlessly around my shoulders before I could bring it to a standstill. Once I had it level and stationary, I aimed to open my eyes, a task not nearly as easy as it sounded. Failing on my first attempt, I decided to forgo eyesight for the time being to focus on my other senses.

  My ass told me I was seated on a hard, wooden chair and my wrists and shoulders indicated my hands were tied with a coarse rope behind my back. Interestingly, my ankles seemed unsecured to the wooden legs of the chair but I assumed that could have been because my boots blocked me from feeling the sensation. It was also freezing cold but while I could hear the wind, I couldn’t feel it, suggesting I was in an enclosed space. I could also hear the sounds of many men moving around me in all directions, indicating I was possibly in a camp. Finally, my nose was picking up the aromas of freshly baked bread and something… more pungent and flowery, and in closer proximity.

  There was something else going on inside me as well, but there was too much physical discomfort at the moment for me to understand exactly what it was.

  As I grew more aware of my surroundings, the earlier mystery of why my vision had failed solved itself, as I could now feel a blindfold tied across my eyes. I almost smiled at the scenario, but I wasn’t sure my jaw had the strength to form the gesture, although I was smiling on the inside, knowing that the upcoming torture and/or interrogation scene was going to be pretty interesting.

  “You awoke much quicker than last time,” a voice said from somewhere in the room.

  I let my head dip toward my right shoulder as I looked toward the ceiling. “I’ve had a lot of practice at it lately.”

  “It does seem to happen quite often to you,” she said, her voice sounding well humored.

  I cocked my head to the other side. “Eh, I feel like people have been unfairly judging me lately.”

  “Unfairly, is it?”

  I looked blindly at the source of the voice. “You know, it may be hard to believe, but where I come from, people actually like me.”

  Before the words were completely out of my mouth, the blindfold was ripped roughly from my head and I found that my eyes worked just fine, although slightly blurry, although my aching head didn’t help my ability to focus. But standing above me was none other than Agrippina herself, wearing more clothing than I’d ever seen her wear before, but looking just a
s lovely as always.

  I looked up at her and finally found my smile. “I miss the cleavage.”

  She stared down at me, her expression no longer amused, and leaned in. “Do friends where you come from make a habit of abandoning each other?”

  I glared at her. “What?”

  She leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Your friends. They do not seem to care about you anymore. Three simply watched as my Praetorian clubbed you unconscious and they have yet to move against me. Even your Amazon seems not to care.”

  “Haters gonna hate,” I replied, but the comment felt wrong to say.

  Why would I say something like that? I didn’t want my friends to hate me.

  “An interesting expression,” she said, “but I am curious about the source of such hate? What ever happened to the Cult of Hunter that once followed you so devoutly? Not too long ago, those people seemed willing to follow you into the depths of Tartarus itself had you asked it of them, but no longer.”

  I looked away, frustrated at myself over my lack of focus under Agrippina’s interrogation. “What does it matter anymore? You’ve caught me. Again. You have the rest of them under guard as well, I’m sure. Just kill us and get it over with.”

  “Now that isn’t like you, Jacob,” she said, lowering her arms and placing her hands on her hips. “Besides, what reasons do I have to justify such action?”

  I looked back at her. “Every time we’ve met, you’ve schemed to either have me captured or killed… including now.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “In response to you attacking me, seeking to kidnap my son, or stealing from me.”

  “Enough with your games!” I snapped. “We all know you had Caligula killed for no other reason than to further your own ambition, and you’ve been responsible for everything that’s happened to me since and you know it. Don’t act like you’re innocent in all this.”

  “And so what if I did?” She asked, turning away and tossing a hand over her shoulder. “Am I so different from anyone else with ambition who came before me? Or after? You should know.”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked away. “I suppose not, but I don’t for an instant believe that everything you’ve done to me has simply been in response to what I tried to do to you. Remember, I know all about you. I studied your entire life before you were even born. I know what kind of person you are.”

  “And what kind of person am I, Jacob?”

  “You…” I fought for an appropriate response, searching my memory for a gripping retort that would prove my point true, but nothing came to me. She’d been a bitch of a wife to her husbands, an adulteress, a diabolical schemer extraordinaire, and vengeful social climber, but she had a point that she hadn’t been very different from any other Roman that had come before her, and she always did have her Nero’s best interests at heart. Sure she’d backed herself into a corner when her son had turned out to be just as crazy as Caligula had been, but even the best laid plans weren’t so easy to pull off sometimes.

  I would know.

  “Are you still thinking, Jacob?” Agrippina asked easily, no hint of concern in her voice. “Because while I know not what I am to be tomorrow, I am quite familiar with who I am today, so please forgive me for not seeing myself as so dastardly a person.”

  “You’ve been trying to murder Helena for years!” I accused, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “I’ve been trying to kill you for years, Jacob. Torturing your Amazon has simply been an entertaining way to go about it. Besides, I owe you for this.”

  She punctuated her point by turning to the side and lifting the long, warm cloaks that covered her lower half up past her hips. Beneath was bare skin and her bare behind, where I could clearly see the wedge shaped remnants of a serious burn inflicted on her right butt cheek, right where I’d burned her when questioning her upon her barge last year.

  She lowered her clothing without embarrassment and I grew concerned at her outright admittance that she’d always had it in for me. Was she really going to do it now?

  “Listen to yourself,” I countered, perhaps a little defensively. “What kind of person says something like that?”

  Before the question was even completely out of my mouth, Agrippina surged forward and smacked my face with an open palm, her normally beautiful face obscured by a vengeful scowl. I tried to recoil from the strike but was too slow, taking the full force of it directly on the cheek. It hurt almost as much as Helena’s punches did, and I now found myself having to deal with an entirely new kind of pain.

  She pulled her hand back quickly and kneaded it with her other, her face infuriated. “I can say such things!” She screamed, her demeanor completely changed. “Because you are anything but human! You are evil! A demon sent here by the gods to ruin us all! A thing that doesn’t belong, one who took everything I held dear away from me and threatened to take even more. You are not human. Your Amazon is not human. You are nothing!”

  Oddly I didn’t feel anger at her slap despite the blood I tasted in my mouth. Only interested in the things she’d said.

  “What are you talking about? I never did anything to you,” I said, but paused a second to spit a mouthful of blood from my mouth. “What could I possibly have taken from you?”

  Her anger shifted to pure disbelief as a frown spread across her face. “How can you not know, when you already know so much? How can you not understand the very reason for why I loathe you?”

  I shook my head. “You hate me because I can use the orb and manipulate time, something you can’t do. I have power that you’ll never have.”

  Her eyes widened even further, but instead of growing even angrier, she simply looked defeated, as if coming to a sudden realization. Her head drooped and she turned away slowly, something akin to sadness in her eyes now, and I grew only more confused.

  A moment later, she flicked her eyes toward me, but kept her head angled away. “That is honestly all you believe?”

  “Of course, Agrippina,” I pleaded. “What else could there possibly be?”

  I was about to dig deeper into this most recent of mysteries, when Agrippina whirled around and rushed from the tent.

  I spit out a bit more blood from my mouth, but shifted my attention to the tent’s entrance when I heard a scuffle going on just beyond it. I could see shadows against the tent wall created by a fire behind them, and a scene of two people struggling to move a third figure toward the tent with a fourth just beside them became clear, but the shadow puppetry ended quickly when a pair of Praetorians burst into the tent dragging a struggling woman with a hood over her head between them. Agrippina followed, all serious.

  Finally, after a few seconds of struggling, the two Praetorians managed to force the woman to her knees, and it was then that I realized her to be Helena, thanks to her enlarged stomach. Unlike the last time I’d noticed how big she had become, I felt something now. I felt angry at myself for not spending every waking moment with her and our unborn child, and was infuriated at Agrippina for threatening them both. I opened my mouth to shout at her, but when Agrippina walked up to Helena quickly and put a knife to her throat, all I could think to yell was, “Don’t!”

  Agrippina snapped her head at me in what seemed like surprise at my quick response, but Helena’s reaction was still a mystery, her shrouded head jerking left, right, up, and down repeatedly in confusion.

  “Say it again,” Agrippina ordered.

  “Don’t,” I said in a manner that failed to convey the confidence I’d hoped it would.

  Agrippina turned back to Helena and moved the knife threateningly, but not dangerously, around her neck.

  “What do you see here?” She asked.

  “What?” I asked in return.

  “What do you see??” She yelled angrily.

  “I don’t under…”

  “Oh for…” Agrippina started to say, and I feared this was the moment when she would finally slit Helena’s throat, but instead she took two long a
nd imposing steps toward me and placed her knife against my groin. I jumped in my chair at the contact but she didn’t press the point.

  Literally – thank God.

  “You see the woman you love, don’t you?” Agrippina asked, her voice silky smooth.

  “Ye…” I struggled to come up with the answer, but something inside me was beginning to believe Agrippina’s announcement, and found it odd that I needed her of all people to remind me that I did in fact love Helena with all my heart. I looked up at her. “Yes, I do.”

  “You do,” she confirmed. “You put a baby in her belly, and that is proof enough for me.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked, confused.

  “You asked what you possibly could have taken from me to make me hate you,” she said before shifting to the side so that I could more clearly see Helena. Agrippina looked at me as she pointed her knife at Helena. “That’s what you took from me!”

  I looked at Helena’s hooded head again, not understanding what Agrippina was trying to say, but when I looked back at the enraged empress of Rome, I saw in her eyes such anger and hate that I immediately understood what she meant.

  “Caligula,” I said.

  Her expression went from angry to stern to disgusted confusion in a heartbeat.

  “Caligula??” She asked with disdain. “My brother Caligula?? The man I despised? How dare you even say his name!”

  I shook my head again. “I… I don’t understand. Really, I don’t.”

  Her brow was creased and her eyes blazed, and I wasn’t sure if she was angry with me or simply exasperated. Finally, her demeanor softened and all the frustration and built up ire simply melted from her face. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes, whispering just one word:

  “Claudius.”

  “Claudius?” I asked, still confused.