To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II)

by Crichton, Edward

  And hence, its true elegance.

  Conventional time machines from the movies transported the entire entity of its user. Mind, body, spirit. All of it.

  That never made much sense to me. A time traveler would still be susceptible to the effects of time. If I’d taken my DeLorean off joyriding through the timeline for twenty five years in total, when I finally decided to return to my original point on the timeline, I would be twenty five years older than when I’d left. The body still ages at the same rate. I couldn’t come back twenty five years later from the starting point, or else there’d be a twenty five year gap where I simply didn’t exist. Unless I wanted to go the whole “fake death” route.

  But the orb only transported the consciousness of a person.

  Their memories. Their experiences.

  This thing would have been great to have back in college. Set this puppy a day before a test, go in to take it the next day, learn all the questions, sit through the damn thing, return to my dorm room, and proceed to warp myself back to the day before, all the knowledge of the test’s contents still in my head. And no physical aging to go along with it. I don’t even want to think about how well I could have done with the ladies. It wouldn’t even have been hard.

  Simply elegant.

  But how did I activate it to begin with?

  I grunted. All that thinking made my head hurt even more, but I still managed to regain consciousness before the others. And just like last time, when I opened my eyes I confirmed that everything seemed the same and everyone was in their places, ready for the final scene.

  Lights, camera, action.

  “Agrippina,” I said, hoarsely. “How’s the ass? Oh, that’s right. It is quite perfect and I of all people should know that. By the way, your face looks a lot better than the last time I saw it.”

  I almost shuddered at the memory of the faceless Agrippina, but thoughts of watching Helena die for a second time hardened me.

  No, it would be the third time this time around.

  Agrippina looked at me from her chair. She offered me a blink in recognition that she’d heard me but not much else. She directed a cool look in my direction, displaying her ever impressive poker face, but she shifted her toga over her bare legs at the same time, revealing even more skin.

  Interesting.

  I wasn’t much of a poker player myself, never was, but both Wang and Helena had showed considerable skill in it when we’d first arrived in Rome. I’d never been very good at counting cards, nor did I have a very good poker face, but I was good at reading people. Detecting subtle nuances that said someone was hiding something, or even outright lying, came pretty easy for me. I figured it must have come from trust issues with my father and past relationships, friends who I constantly schemed with or against as a kid, or maybe even from my work with the CIA.

  Whatever the origin for my talent was, when Agrippina shifted her toga, a nuance, I definitely suspected. For such a seasoned poker player, as she surely must be, she’d just given away her tell. In fact, it was a pretty obvious one. It was a testament to her obvious sex appeal that I, or anyone else for that matter, had never picked up on it.

  But her face was another matter. It remained impressively stoic as she rose from her chair, whispering something in her closest Praetorian’s ear. When he left the room, she strutted over to where I knelt and lifted my chin, just as before, recovering rather well.

  “Why do you continue to bother me, Jacob?” She asked. “Is it that you have seen me naked and you now wish for more? Is that why you brought your Amazon this time?”

  I smiled. “Now that you mention it, yes, that’s exactly what I’m here for. How nice of you to offer.” I glanced at Helena and leaned my head in closer, dropping my voice to a whisper. “It’s good that you’ve already stripped her half naked, but we should probably wait for her to regain consciousness first. Doing it while she’s just lying there seems a bit weird. Don’t you think?”

  Agrippina’s face twitched and I had a hard time suppressing the urge to mimic Santino’s goofy ass grin.

  Score one for Hunter.

  And in that moment Agrippina didn’t seem so threatening. She was just like me. We only appeared more confident than we really were because we hid our fears behind defense mechanisms. I believe the clinical term for it was Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I remember because my sister tried to diagnose me with it when I was sixteen years old. It’s basically a disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own self-importance. Generally, they used some kind of grand show to hide how fragile and low their self-esteem really was.

  But unless you knew that person suffered from the disorder, it made him very hard to read. It was obvious when some people were happy or sad, but that wasn’t the case for people like Agrippina and me. I hid behind my sarcastic wit and the idea that I could outthink just about anyone, and Agrippina covered herself with her sexual countenance. We disguised what we were truly feeling with a phony façade of self-confidence and bravado.

  At least I had before recently. I felt like I was much more open now, and it was ironic that I had Agrippina to thank for that. And in that moment, everything I felt concerning what had passed between the two of us was gone, and I felt a renewed, legitimate sense of confidence.

  “You know, Agrippina,” I said, with a shake of my head, even though it still hurt. “I think I finally understand you.”

  “You do?” She asked sternly, taking a step back and crossing her arms across her chest, the maneuver pushing up her breasts and exposing them even more. I would have laughed if I didn’t need to stall. I wondered if she even knew what she was doing.

  “Yeah, I think I do.” Now that she’d pulled back, I started working on freeing my knife. “You use your looks and promiscuousness to get what you want, never taking no for an answer. You bat your eyes, pucker your lips, and shake your ass expecting everyone to drool all over you and do whatever you want them to do. We have a name for people like you where I come from. They’re called cheerleaders. But, just like most of those pompom waving charlatans, deep down, you wish you were something else. Something more. Someone who people actually like, not someone they fear and loath. Deep down, you’re just a child, clawing for a way out.”

  Agrippina’s eyes narrowed at my little speech. I almost thought I saw something shift in her expression, but if it did, the evil inside her quickly suppressed it. She frowned at me before turning back to her chair, speaking as she walked.

  “I think I understand you as well, Jacob Hunter,” she said as she sat back down, shifting her toga again. I smiled at her as she continued. “Men like you enjoy giving long speeches, letting your words and eloquence engage in battle for you. You are a very intelligent man, adept at reading people and determining what makes them who they are. You like to talk and you use this advantage to overcome your other… shortcomings,” she said with a small grin as she flicked her eyes downwards, but in the next second she grew very serious. “But this also makes you very dangerous, and not in the ways you may think.

  “Your mind is an infection, a disease that threatens to reduce it to a bubbling mess of sheer confusion. You lead yourself down dismal paths that you convince yourself are worth traveling, taking others with you, making the poorest of decisions as your paranoia overcomes you, crippling your ability to discern between what’s truly right and what’s truly wrong. But you are very stubborn and will forever fight against this certain eventuality. One that will ruin us all.”

  My smile drained from my face along with the color in my cheeks. Agrippina’s face grew sterner, if that were even possible, and she let her arms drop to her sides. In that moment, not a millimeter of cleavage or a sliver of skin along her thighs was showing, and my mind whirled at what that meant. And then I caught myself.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I said coldly, that old sliver of self-doubt slowly clawing its way back into my psyche.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “I know everythin
g about you. That’s why I have to kill you, Jacob; to keep you from destroying what so many have worked so hard to accomplish. Your presence is an offense to my society and my empire. I have to do what’s right by both.”

  The elation I’d felt earlier was quickly evaporating, once again replaced by what seemed like my constant companions for years now: rage and fear.

  “What do you know about what’s right and wrong?” I asked, trying to go back on the offensive. “You’re nothing but a power hungry fraud who will do anything to ensure your schemes and manipulations succeed.”

  “You know me so well, is that what you think?” She asked from her position above me. She let the question linger before leaning down and placing a hand on my shoulder. “But where does this knowledge come from, I wonder? By my count, you and I have spent very little time together. Were you so quick to judge my brother? Or my uncle?”

  Of course I had been. I’d judged them against what I’d already known about them, but… that hadn’t turned out very well. They were different when they’d died. They weren’t the men I had read about in history books. I’d always assumed it was the orb’s influence, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Claudius had been healthy and without ailment well before I arrived in Rome, a historical inaccuracy not easily lost on me.

  Did that mean I was misreading Agrippina? Perhaps I was missing something beyond her aggressive foreign policy, blatant mismanagement of client-state governments, irreprehensible murders of potential claimants to the imperial throne, or even in her zealous witch hunt of my friends and me.

  In all honesty, I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I just wanted to get out of here with our lives this time, preferably with the orbs.

  I looked up at her. “Why don’t you just kill me then?”

  She pulled back. “I am not without a cruel streak. Most would agree to that, but I tried to help you before and while you rebuked me, I need you now more than ever. This time, even more than then.”

  Because you killed Varus, you bitch.

  “Why?” I asked “So that you can have yet another powerful weapon to use against anyone who would dare stand against you?

  She brought a hand to her cheek and her eyes were furrowed in dumbfounded disbelief, an expression that couldn’t believe I could even think to utter such words. “You cannot possibly think that I feel any less suspicious of you having it!”

  She punctuated her statement by twirling around and moving back towards her chair. I barely even noticed how revealing the movement had been. My head was too busy once again, my brain on the brink of madness. I tried to get a handle on it by reminding myself I could think about it later, but it was difficult.

  Was Agrippina simply trying to do what she thought was right? Did she see me as a threat?

  Was I the threat?

  I shook my head at the thought and glanced quickly to my right. Santino and the boys were already on their knees, all shirtless just the same as last time, so I peeked left. Helena, shirtless this time too, was coming around as well, not quite as quickly as last time, but perhaps more peacefully. My conversation with Agrippina had saved her from the painful beating she’d received last time and suddenly I felt the need to ask myself why Agrippina had been so colloquial this time, far more reasonable than violent. Had my trip through time altered her sensibilities as well?

  That didn’t make sense. Did it?

  I turned back to Santino as I finally remembered what would soon happen, keeping my voice very low.

  “Tell Titus to move as far from Vincent as possible.”

  Santino looked at me questioningly.

  “Pass it on,” I insisted like a third grader.

  He narrowed his eyes but turned to do as I asked all the same.

  “Jacob?”

  The sound of my name came from Agrippina, and I turned my head to face her. Her Praetorian had returned and I saw Varus’ headless body crumpled at her feet. She didn’t seem aware of its existence at the moment, and since her demeanor wasn’t nearly so cruel this time around, I suspected she wouldn’t even reference it.

  “I must know something, Jacob,” she said from her chair, her legs crossed as they always were. “If I offered to give you and your friends – even your Amazon – everything you ever wanted and needed, promising to protect you and keep you from harm, will you help me?”

  “I…” for the briefest of moments, I thought about it, but it was never an option. “I can’t do that, Agrippina. There are things about the orb that you’ll never understand.”

  “And you won’t tell me?”

  I shook my head. “I know what you’re capable of. I’ve seen the kind of cruelty you can do with your own hands. I watched it here myself.”

  I winced at the slip, but didn’t think she’d understand what I’d meant.

  But she must have because she stood again, this time with purpose. “You have been here before, haven’t you? You used the orb!”

  I almost laughed in her face. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  The control she’d exuded for the past ten minutes was gone, but instead of coming at me in a furious rage, she simply smiled, but then the insistent beep, beep, beep noise of Bordeaux’s watch sounded all around us and just like last time, confusion set in immediately.

  Agrippina looked at her Praetorians.

  “What is that noise?!” She yelled.

  They stood just as confused as she was, glancing about the room in search of the nuisance. It was at that point when I started to chuckle and she turned back to glare at me, her eyes wide and angry. My chuckles grew to a rolling laughter.

  “Boom,” I said between laughs.

  A half second later, I was flying through the air again before slamming against the back wall. The impact knocked the air out of my lungs, but I was ready for it. I kept my head against my chest and braced for it by slowly exhaling as I flew. It took me a full minute less than last time to get to my feet. I saved another twenty seconds knowing where to look for Penelope and another fifteen because the Praetorian I’d fought the first time was still completely out of it. I shot him in the head with one bullet and quickly scanned for targets.

  I had thirty rounds left and I was going to make sure I killed every last one of these fuckers before any more of my friends died.

  Again…

  I scanned left first, remembering Gaius and Marcus were here this time, each rising to their feet. Two more bodies for the fight. Titus still didn’t fare as lucky but at least the concrete hadn’t killed him, landing lower on his leg instead. He couldn’t move, but it freed up Vincent to fight from the beginning. Wang was already a blur of motion and Santino was on his feet and had his ropes torn open as well. He moved to help Helena again while Helena went in search of Agrippina, just as she had last time.

  I couldn’t forget Bordeaux. Fate my ass. That big lug was up as well, alive and fuming. After the explosion, he’d ripped open his bonds through a sheer exertion of muscle alone.

  After confirming everyone was alive, I started dropping Praetorians. Some were still struggling to their feet. These were easy kills. Others were up and moving to engage either myself or someone else. These were only slightly more troublesome. Thirty rounds, twenty five kills. Not bad.

  I looked around for Helena. Hers was the only fight I knew for sure had a bad ending.

  I found her deadlocked with Agrippina once again, only this time there was no spherical object to be used as a weapon. The two women rolled each other over and over and over again, whoever ending on top momentarily gaining the upper hand. I wasn’t wasting any time to watch this time. They were on the other side of the room, so I was already on the move.

  Helena finally managed to get Agrippina on the ground, positioning herself more on her foe’s legs than her stomach. This allowed Helena to keep more control over her desperate adversary. Agrippina tried to punch up at her, but Helena impressively caught her arm with her left hand and managed to snatch Agrippina’s other hand as well. Wit
h a quick motion, Helena jerked Agrippina into a sitting position and head butted her.

  I was ten steps away when I saw the Praetorian who almost sliced Helena in half the first time, looming in the rubble. I noticed this time that he had been buried beneath fallen concrete and wood during most of the fight, and was only just now able to extract himself. Agrippina’s head rested against the ground, stunned by Helena’s blow, and Helena looked like she was ready to choke her to death.

  The Praetorian moved closer.

  I moved as well.

  Maybe fate simply had it out for Helena. The woman had impressively escaped death on multiple occasions, after all. Perhaps Death was getting angry at her constantly snubbing him out of a pay check. It didn’t take a leap of logic to assume that Death could be a pretty ornery guy.

  But Fate, or Death, or even God, could all go to hell.

  Helena made her own fate, and so did I.

  The Praetorian had his sword in hand now, cocked and ready to plunge it through Helena’s back this time instead of slashing at her. He still had a few more steps to go, but I only had one.

  I dove at Helena, tackling her harder than a linebacker would have. I had to break her grapple with Agrippina, and the only way to do that was to really nail her. I only prayed I didn’t hurt the baby, as if my impact could do any more harm than the explosion had earlier.

  Unfortunately, even with all my momentum behind my leap, Helena’s hands stayed firmly clamped around Agrippina’s wrists. It slowed us just enough so that when the Praetorian finally came through on his stab, he didn’t just meet air like I’d originally hoped. Instead, his gladius tore right through my left flank, just below my armpit.