Villain's Assistant

by Carley Hibbert

  The Villain’s Trilogy + Book One

  CARLEY HIBBERT

  EMBER PUBLISHING

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission of the author.

  Copyright © 2017 Carley Hibbert

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design and artwork by Katrina Jorgensen

  Interior design by Keith Nerdin

  Ember Publishing

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  TWENTY TWO

  TWENTY THREE

  TWENTY FOUR

  TWENTY FIVE

  TWENTY SIX

  TWENTY SEVEN

  TWENTY EIGHT

  TWENTY NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY ONE

  THIRTY TWO

  THIRTY THREE

  THIRTY FOUR

  THIRTY FIVE

  THIRTY SIX

  THIRTY SEVEN

  THIRTY EIGHT

  THIRTY NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY ONE

  FORTY TWO

  FORTY THREE

  FORTY FOUR

  FORTY FIVE

  FORTY SIX

  FORTY SEVEN

  FORTY EIGHT

  FORTY NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY ONE

  FIFTY TWO

  FIFTY THREE

  FIFTY FOUR

  FIFTY FIVE

  FIFTY SIX

  FIFTY SEVEN

  FIFTY EIGHT

  FIFTY NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY ONE

  SIXTY TWO

  SIXTY THREE

  SIXTY FOUR

  SIXTY FIVE

  SIXTY SIX

  SIXTY SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  For all my friends and family

  that nudged me along the way,

  but especially for my husband,

  who never let me quit.

  PROLOGUE

  Benjamin bent over a shiny gold coin lying on the dusty road. His mother had already walked ahead of him to the market, impatient to talk to a vendor. No one was in sight. Benjamin picked the coin up. Sunlight glinted over King Aldo’s face as Benjamin turned the coin over and over in his small hand. Beautiful, he thought. He never had a coin of his own before. He could give it to his mother as a present the next time she got sad. He closed his hand around the coin and squeezed. He heard two girls quarrelling on the road ahead of him and he looked up, clutching the coin to his chest.

  “I must have dropped it when I pulled the string out of my pocket.”

  Two young girls, wearing tattered peasant dresses, walked from the market toward Benjamin, scanning the ground. The taller girl pulled a sweat-stained scarf from her mousy hair and began twisting it. She scowled at the younger one, who looked about Benjamin’s age. The younger one rubbed at a grease spot on her skirt and fingered her thin braid.

  “I knew this would happen,” the taller girl said. “If Mama ever lets us go to market again, I’ll hold the money.”

  The little sister wiped her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a dirt smudge on her nose. Tears welled up in her eyes, as she went back to rubbing the spot on her dress.

  “We’ve just got to find it.” The little sister sniffed and turned her empty pockets out again.

  Benjamin glanced down at his hand and felt sick. He scanned the road. A group of raggedy women approached, their dingy skirts swaying in unison as they gossiped over news from the market. They weren’t watching. He squeezed his hand around the coin until its hard edges cut into his palm. He swallowed hard against the burning in his throat as he waited for the sisters to notice him. The younger sister paused and tugged her braid as she made eye contact. Benjamin stepped forward and opened his hand, revealing his precious find for her to see. The young girl’s eyes widened as she lunged at Benjamin.

  “You found it!” The little girl wrapped both of her grimy hands around his and grinned. She was missing a tooth. “Thank you.” She turned and raised the lost coin over her head like a trophy. The older girl smirked at Benjamin as her sister dropped the coin in her hand.

  “Who gives up a free coin?” the older girl asked, shaking her head.

  The girls burst into harsh laughter and scampered past the women to spend their newly acquired coin.

  Benjamin felt something cold and heavy hit his stomach when his mother’s cold blue eyes met his. She shoved one of the gossiping women aside, her dark braid trailing behind. The women stopped to stare in silence as she grabbed his arm, nearly yanking it from its socket. She dragged him back to their home in a silent rage. Prickly shrubs cut through his thin pants and into his legs as she pulled him across country to their house. He’d spend the rest of the day picking stickers from his socks for sure.

  As soon as Benjamin’s mother slammed the front door, one of the shutters broke free of its hinges, letting light into their one-room hovel. She finally released his arm. He rubbed his throbbing arm while examining the multiple knots that kept his laces intact and began counting burrs.

  “Great Wolves! How could you have embarrassed me like that?” His mother paced back and forth, pressing her hands over her face as if trying to block out her son’s offense. “No villain ever gives up free coin! I set that whole thing up to prove to my friends that you’re pure villain like your father. Who taught you to do good deeds? Not me!” She paused to stare at Benjamin, her deep blue eyes glinting with moisture. “How will you ever be the greatest villain’s assistant on the Thieves’ Plain if you do things like give money to poor people for no good reason? I’m just glad your father isn’t around to see that! We should both be thankful that he’s dead.”

  Benjamin counted twelve burrs in his laces, but then he couldn’t remember which number came next, so he swallowed and looked at his mother. She closed her eyes and slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.

  An ache built in Benjamin’s chest. He pressed his wet face into her skirt and wrapped his arms around her legs. “I’m sorry, Mother! Please don’t cry! I’ll never do it again. Just please don’t cry,” he pleaded. His mother clutched his shoulder, pushing him away from her. She guided him to his chair in the corner, wiped the tears off her face, and clenched her jaw.

  “You’re right, no more crying,” she said, turning to stare out the window. “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”

  ONE

  From his splintery chair on the stage, Benjamin watched students, faculty, and parents settle uneasily into their assigned seats. He resisted the urge to bounce his knee up and down, since the stage creaked loudly and it would give away his nerves, but his heart pounded loudly in his chest anyway. Under the heat of the afternoon sun, family members blistered below on shaky wooden benches in the stone courtyard while the students and faculty melted on the temporary stage. Everyone scowled at their neighbors and eyed th
e exits in case the graduation ceremony turned ugly, which was a viable risk with so many villains gathered in one spot.

  Benjamin glared at the sun, wiping away an errant trickle of sweat from his temple. The sweltering heat only added to the tension among the feuding villains who came to watch future generations join their ranks. Despite the graduation pact each attendee signed before entering the Villains’ Academy grounds, some blood was always spilled. It was too tempting to settle old scores and bump off rivals. Benjamin scanned the crowd. Sweat trailed down their dusty faces, leaving clean streaks behind.

  When Headmaster Greely stood, all eyes flicked to him. Benjamin glanced over his shoulder at the boys sitting behind him. He had no intention of getting stabbed in the back. There was a very limited amount of decent employment opportunities for fresh graduates, and taking out the top graduate would open the door for a lesser villain, but they just grinned foolishly at each other and waved at their families. An ache spread through Benjamin’s chest as he gazed at the crowd below. He didn’t have any living family. In fact, he didn’t know any living person outside the academy’s walls.

  His father, the famous Black-Eyed Barnaby, had perished before Benjamin was born. His mother’s death, mere weeks before school had started, finalized Benjamin’s decision to attend the Villains’ Academy. He imagined her sitting in an aisle seat close to the back. She would have been smirking, and her indigo eyes would have glowed with plans for his future, knowing that only half his journey was done. However, instead of his mother, some jittery gentleman with a goat’s beard sat fiddling with the knives he had illegally smuggled in to the graduation ceremony under his sleeves.

  Benjamin shifted his disappointed gaze to the back of Headmaster Greely’s head as he mumbled along in a strained way at the podium. Benjamin tugged on his sleeve, his fingers brushing against his own secret knife. It was rumored that an assassination attempt on Greely’s life had been foiled just this very morning. Ah, well.

  “We would like to acknowledge the students unable to attend these ceremonies due to a truly ill-timed outbreak of influenza,” Greely said with a straight face, “and others who failed to follow the points of the graduation pact that we all signed.”

  Got caught, you mean. Benjamin smirked at the three empty seats between him and the podium. Considering it was a school intended for the most promising villains on the Thieves’ Plain, Benjamin felt his peers were fairly inept. Everyone seemed to either get caught or killed a little too easily. Most of the traps his peers set for him were tripped before Benjamin even had to worry about springing them. He had never been caught. However, he tried to stay humble about his prowess; spouting off about your successes usually got you killed.

  Benjamin surveyed the area around him. Sunlight glinted on tripwires around his chair. He glanced back over his shoulder. A few thug-sized boys glared back. Sven, the one with the biggest biceps, drew his long finger across his throat. Benjamin slid his knife out with a sigh and easily dismantled their booby traps. After all, he had expected some reprisals for being named valedictorian.

  A rare breeze brushed across Benjamin’s damp forehead. Before it could die, he slid a small envelope out of his other sleeve and drew a deep breath. He raised his hand in a mock scratch to his ear and released a fine powder on the breeze while holding his breath. Nothing serious, just something to cloud the plotting minds behind him. Everyone would be in a stupor just long enough for him to make a clean getaway after his speech. He slipped the envelope back up his sleeve and slowly exhaled.

  “Our original valedictorian is among those unable to attend,” said Headmaster Greely, barely intelligible. “We thank Benjamin Black who has graciously prepared a short last-minute address in his place. Benjamin?”

  Benjamin stood up and checked the audience and graduates behind him for sudden movements or furtive glances. His fellow graduates already seemed safely befuddled in a fog bank. The parents and other villains were too busy looking over their own shoulders to be a threat. Benjamin shook Greely’s offered hand—after checking the headmaster’s palms for poisons first, of course.

  Greely threatened him through clenched teeth, “And by short I mean short, or there may not be any survivors.”

  Point taken. Benjamin swallowed dryly as he examined the dart that had just struck the side of podium. It was most likely poisoned. Looking up, he locked eyes, as it were, with a one-eyed man sitting dead center in the front row. The man’s eye patch glistened in the shadow of his hood while iron hair drizzled down his pale face to his shoulders. Unsettled by such straightforward attention, Benjamin choked over his introduction and skipped straight to the end line. “If we survive today, we can conquer tomorrow!”

  This was met with general cheers from the audience and a few slurred outbursts from the graduates behind him. One dazed boy fell onto his neighbor and was then reflexively shoved to the floor, sparking a scuffle on the stage.

  Benjamin took advantage of the confusion and slinked past the graduates, sidestepping a few poorly aimed fists and knives. Some graduates were crawling under chairs. Benjamin crouched at the back of the stage to cast a cautious glance behind him. The cloaked man watched Benjamin as families scrambled to the exits. An assassin? A knot tightened in Benjamin’s chest, but the man did not move. The idea of an assassin coming after him was incredibly unlikely; no one else knew who his father was, not even Greely.

  Benjamin slid down the back side of the stage, scraping his spine on the exposed wood. He winced as he checked under the stage, his back still throbbing. He saw no one lurking among the wooden supports. All was clear. Benjamin staggered through the cobbled courtyard where the students had gathered earlier to mount the stage. There were a few grubby packs tucked away in the corners, but days before, Benjamin had stashed his pack outside the walls of the academy. No sense in taking chances now. Benjamin sneaked through the gates just as a scream sent a chill through him.

  TWO

  A few days later, Benjamin sprang out of bed, too restless to stay in bed any longer, though the sun had barely come up. He fumbled with his crisp, new black suit as he wadded it up, wrapped it in the dusty rug from the floor, and jumped on it. He dressed in the now-rumpled suit and rubbed chalk strategically on his elbows and knees. No one wanted to hire someone who was afraid to get dirty. He closed the wardrobe door and glanced into the mirror. Benjamin looked small for his sixteen years, and therefore, people often underestimated him. Their mistake.

  Benjamin wished once more that his warm, brown eyes held just a speck of the cold intensity of his mother’s stormy blue eyes. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I can do this. I will do this! He shook the tension out of his hands. His interview today was just another step on the path to becoming the greatest villain’s assistant the Thieves’ Plain had ever known, just like his father, Black-Eyed Barnaby.

  His late father had assisted the archvillain Shreb the First to tame the lesser villains of the plain. No one stole a turnip without Shreb the First’s permission, because Black-Eyed Barnaby made sure there were consequences otherwise. That kind of order had not existed on the Thieves’ Plain before or since Benjamin’s father reigned beside the archvillain First. Now it was up to Benjamin to continue his father’s work.

  He shoved an apple into the pocket of his jacket for his breakfast later; for once he wasn’t hungry. He plucked a sleek black eye patch off the kitchen table and hesitated. Eye patches could look pathetic if they weren’t done right; he’d seen obvious fakes before. So he shoved it in his pocket and headed outside.

  Benjamin locked the door to his hideout and tucked the key into a knothole above the door. He then stepped back and surveyed the small house where he spent his early days with his mother. A broken shutter leaned from the front window. It was as sun-bleached and shabby as the rest of the shack. He turned to hurry past the front gate that lay broken to the side, nearly grown over with crisp weeds. This place had always been more of a hideout than a home, but it was his. It was somepla
ce he could return if things got bad.

  Benjamin’s heart pounded in his throat as he picked his way through the overgrown path to the road. Branches pricked at his jacket and scraped his scalp. He rarely used this path anymore. He’d resided at the Villains’ Academy for the last five years, except on holidays when he returned here to eat toast and hard cheese alone. And now he was going to a job interview with Shreb II, the son of the archvillain his own father had worked for.

  He was now well on the way to following in his father’s dark footsteps, like his mother had always wished. No one seemed to know much about Black-Eyed Barnaby besides his exploits for the great archvillain Shreb the First, including Benjamin’s mother. She seemed unable or unwilling to answer even simple questions like what his favorite cheese had been. That won’t help you become a better villain, she would say.

  “I can’t believe I’m finally going,” Benjamin said, smiling to himself.

  Benjamin’s excitement fell as his feet hit the dust of the main road. A man with gray streaks in his dark hair stood in the road, staring at the Sunrise Mountains that marked the boundary of the Thieves’ Plain from the rest of the kingdom of Lam. The boundary had been made by King Aldo’s father, King Zavier, in order to dispel the corruption and filth that had infected his kingdom and threatened his crown. Usurpers and villains were pushed to the Thieves’ Plain and left to the mercy of the archvillain’s rule. The plain began drying into a dustbowl the day after Lam was split in half, so life was hard, and people had to steal and kill just to survive.

  “Interview with Shreb?” the old man asked over his shoulder.

  “Uh, the Mighty Shreb? Yes.” Benjamin glanced quickly around. There was no one else on the road. “He doesn’t like to be…” He stopped himself. Why should he be handing out free advice? Let the nosy old man find out the hard way how Shreb II liked to be addressed.