A-Viking (Betrayed by Faith Book 3)

by Paul C. Middleton

  So they sat down to a late lunch. Over the afternoon a group of men slowly filtered into the pub’s back room. They looked a rough sort, ready for mayhem. Well out of place for the quiet country pub they were in. The barman didn’t bat an eyelid.

  Then a group of three entered the barroom. Two women, one older, gray haired, stocky but fit. Late forties maybe. The other looked to be an eighteen-year-old. Long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Slim looking, but with some muscle on her, like she’d been training recently. Building up as they say. The man was a giant, over six two and broad shouldered. Okay for here, merely tall and well built. Reddish brown hair escaping from however he usually kept it cut. Military looking. Rinzen narrowed her eyes. He also had a short sword at his hip in a wooden scabbard that was trying to avoid attention. She doubted many people noticed he had a weapon.

  The older lady raised an eyebrow at the barman who nodded. She went into the back room, leaving the other two in the barroom. As she was going into the back room, Rinzen felt Nin tense. She turned to see Nin straighten in her chair and turn. As Nin moved to get up, Rinzen had a sinking feeling in her stomach. The back door opened, and the older woman beckoned to them. Both Rinzen and Nin paused. The couple moved into the back room, and Rinzen grabbed Nin by the shoulder as she went to go forward.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this for two thousand years, Rinzen. Just try to contain any fallout. I’ll be back with him before the week is out. There were reasons I studied that grove. I can come back now.”

  Rinzen heard the steel in Nin’s voice. With a sour look and a nod she let Nin go, watching her back. She sure as hell didn’t want to be the someone between Nin and something she wanted this badly. Nin’s eyes were almost glowing. Rinzen thought something was still going on with Nin. She was moving as if possessed, not caring what was between here and her goal.

  Nin knocked at the back room door. The barman moved towards Nin, but Rinzen blocked him. When he tried to shove Rinzen aside, she grabbed his arm and threw him down onto his face. Thankfully it was a quiet afternoon. The barman, Nin, and Rinzen were the only ones in the bar room. When he struggled against her arm lock, she shoved a knee into his kidney. He groaned but stopped fighting.

  When a man answered Nin’s knock, he said, “Sorry ma’am, private meeting.” And moved a hand to push her back from the door. She grabbed the hand, broke his wrist and kicked beside the knee forcing him to the ground with a scream of pain. She jumped over his folding body and scanned the room for the tall man she’d seen. Spotting him, she charged him before anyone else in the room could react, drawing on the planes to make a tunnel to her cave. As she reached him, the blonde had grabbed his arm. All three of them went tumbling through the astral tunnel.

  Rinzen released the man she was on and started silently cursing at the chaos Nin had left in her wake. Now she had twenty or more furious people entering the room - nineteen probably out for her blood. No make that eighteen, the barman wouldn’t be fighting well with that shoulder. She crossed her hands palm forward and said, “Do you want answers or revenge? I’ll only give you a shot at one or the other.”

  One man, who looked to be a relative of the one with the broken wrist, charged her clumsily. A strike to his solar plexus and one to the back of the neck, and he was out for the count. “I’m waiting for an answer.” She settled into a defensive pose. The barman was backing off and putting the bar between her and him.

  The older lady muttered something, and two men parted to let her through. A third grabbed a chair and slid it towards Rinzen. “Answers first. If we don’t like what we hear, then m’girl, then you're up for some hurt. Both my friends disappeared with your, um, companion. So you got answers, I want ‘em first.”

  Rinzen nodded and rested one knee on the chair. Then she explained what she knew of Nin and the weeks she’d traveled with her. She also gave the timetable for her planned return.

  Tibetan Mountains, March 15, 2014.

  They tumbled awkwardly as they exited the portal, with Brianna being shaken loose, rolling across the cave. She was expecting to hit her head on loose rock when she first saw the natural looking cavern they suddenly found themselves in. As she tumbled, she found a smoothed floor. Meanwhile, Griffin was doing his best to disentangle himself from a very determined Nin. At the same time, she was trying to get into a position to kiss him. This was what Brianna rose to see when she finally stopped rolling.

  Griffin, meanwhile, was trying to pry off the woman who had come from nowhere and suddenly tackled him. With limited success. She - whoever she was - had attached herself to him as tightly as a barnacle to a ship. Which was odd since she had barged into the meeting with such violence. She was snuggling her face into his chest affectionately.

  “My love, my lifemate.” Nin kept repeating. Finally getting leverage Griffin pushed her to arm’s length. It was evident she wasn’t a threat to him, at least not physically. Quite probably a threat to his sanity, the way things were going. He looked at her face and didn’t recognize it. There was an overwhelming scent of Frangipani in the air. Odd, it was one of his favorite fragrances.

  “I believe introductions and maybe a meal are the custom before such open displays of affection,” He said wryly.

  She blinked and said bemusedly, “Oh, I’m sorry. I am Nin-hur-sag. Eldest and only daughter of Jove.” She bent and kissed his hand then kissed up his arm. She found his very presence intoxicating. It was as if she had no sense of what was going on around her. It even felt like her body was changing. Perhaps it was. After all, he was her lifemate. Being near him may be hastening her puberty through to completion. She blinked and tried to focus on that thought, but was washed away on the feelings flowing through her from his mere presence.

  At first, Griffin thought she must be high. But when he glanced in Brianna’s direction she was squinting at them as if facing a bright light. The kissing disturbed him. She was probably the most powerful Godsborn that he’d encountered, and she was behaving like a besotted teenager. He had no idea of how powerful she was, although if the overpowering Frangipani smell was a sign, she was drawing more power than anyone he’d ever encountered. It made him very cautious. This was not the woman he wanted to fight. If she was able to pull that much power, how old was she and what skills did she have? He had no way of knowing.

  He gently extricated his arm and asked, “Can we sit and talk, please? I’m not really one to rush into things like this. I understand that you like me and are attracted to me, but can we tone it down a little? Besides, we have company, and I’m no exhibitionist.” At that, she spoke a terse sentence in Tibetan. “I do not understand what you said, but the company isn’t whomever you thought. She’s my apprentice, Brianna. Besides, remember what I said about not rushing. Hell, other than the obvious affection, I’m not even sure what you want.”

  Nin pouted at this, an expression that to the other two had obvious teenage petulance in it. That made Griffin very nervous. “Um, so what do you want to know about me?” He volunteered. For all he knew, this ‘Nin’ going off at him could cause the destruction of the local region. He was also confused as to where all the energy she was drawing in was going. Surely it had to be going somewhere. It didn’t seem likely from his admittedly limited experience. Every time he’d drawn on the planes, he’d felt a need to push the energy out.

  “Well, how about you start with your background and life? It was hard to pin down who you were until that older woman wasn’t present,” Nin said, a note of frustration on the last point. “I didn’t want to do something as public as I did, but I couldn’t let you disappear on me either.”

  Griffin drew in a deep breath and walked Nin through his history. Starting with his abandonment at a Ritan convent as a baby and moving through his years of service to the Order. He didn’t hide the deaths and violence he was responsible for. Strangely, in her presence, he didn’t feel the overwhelming guilt over the deaths he was responsible for. She nodded calmly through the whole explanation. When he
was finished, she walked up to him, tears in her eyes and hugged him more gently.

  Brianna spoke up then. “I think you owe us an explanation. Starting with where the hell are we, who you are, and why you seem to feel the need to be in constant physical contact with my teacher, Griffin.” Her tone on the last was possessive and sharp. Nin realized she was upsetting the young woman somehow. She finally remembered that Rinzen had described a woman who was attracted to her lifemate, this Griffin. Not wanting antipathy between them, she waved the girl over. She couldn’t have been over forty years old, Nin judged, and young people could be so conservative in some ways.

  Once Brianna was nearby, Nin split her hugs between the two. She explained. “I never meant to impose, but I was driven by imperatives natural to the women of my Father’s race. It’s not even something purely emotional. We are driven to find a lifemate that we sense through one plane or another. Father never really explained it. My father’s race is, for whatever reason, closer to the Astral and mental planes than any other for whom I have seen records.” While she was talking, Griffin noticed that her hair was not only growing, but its color was shifting. Becoming a deep lustrous red, with a metallic glint to it. It was increasing at a rate that was actually noticeable too. It was as if her body was aging right there.

  “But we need to be near our lifemates. Think twinned souls or something, although my Father believed it was more a sensing of a compatible psychic energy.” She smiled at that, remembering her father had been an atheist with no belief in Gods. Ironic considering he portrayed himself as a God to the humans. She finally felt herself come down from the massive burst of joy at meeting her lifemate in person. “But I didn’t start to mature until something occurred in your life a month ago. I can see that the Order is responsible for many wrongs.” At that Griffin slumped, the black dog of depression biting him again. She waved her hand in negation at his reaction.

  “No, Griffin, not you. The organization that deceived you and probably many others. I think I may have run into one of the other former members of the Order. It took quite some time to put her back together. Very efficient work on your part, from what I saw of her, but not enough to kill a descendant of Osiris.”

  “She was even more confused than you have been. I think she mentioned her name as Xandrie.”

  Griffin’s face took on a look of rage, and he growled “What do you mean you put that psychotic bitch back together? I thought the world was finally free of her malignant behavior.”

  Nin answered calmly, “She would have been whole in a week on the outside. She was an Osiran, and you hadn’t done enough to kill her. You would have needed to cut her into twelve pieces and burn the pieces in separate fires. All I did was help her back together so I could get information out of her.”

  “I doubt she’ll be a problem, though. Once I explained what she was, she seemed to lose… something. I’m not sure what.” Griffin grunted at that. He was fairly sure exactly what Xandrie had felt. He hadn’t felt the same until Agatha used her abilities to pin him against a wall.

  “Her attitude changed immensely over the conversation. Especially when I explained the next part.” Her face took on a look of shame. On the other hand, Griffin felt an odd relief that she didn’t lump him in with the Order. “You see, the religions of Christianity and Islam were, for lack of a better term, catalyzed by one of my brothers, Enki. After he killed my other brother, Enlil. He portrayed himself as Jesus using his abilities before he killed his brother in an argument over assisting the growth of that religion. Then when it was not the tool to his hand he thought it would be, he became Muhammad. One of the reasons no one was supposed to make a representation of his face was because he feared that some might notice a similarity between images of him as Jesus and him as Muhammad.”

  Brianna started at this. She’d always wondered why there were no descendants of the Babylonian and Assyrian God. Now it seemed she was getting answers. Something clicked in her head. Nintut and Belet-ili were more common variants, but Nin-hur-sag was considered the ‘Mother Goddess’ of the Babylonian pantheon. Which didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to Brianna, if she was claiming she didn’t have children.

  Nin continued. “After centuries of watching the various groups of Travelers manipulate humans using technology and their ability to access the planes, I left the world.” She sighed. “After the death of my brother, the others left for Atlantis, but I had already been in the Dreaming here,” She waved her hand to indicate the cave, “for centuries. I’d given up hope of ever finding my lifemate. So I tried escaping the world. I didn’t want to interact or interfere with Humanity. I need nothing while I walk the Astral. My body goes into a form of stasis. I see now I abrogated my responsibility to try to repair some of the damage my brother did before his death.”

  A tear slowly trickled down her cheek. Both Nin and Griffin were surprised when Brianna moved to wipe it from Nin’s face. “Griffin, I could have stopped Islam and Christianity from being so dominant. I felt that enough damage had been done, but didn’t think of trying to repair the damage that was there. I am as responsible, or more responsible than you for the acts you’ve committed.” She sighed and then leaned into his shoulder. He found a satisfaction and a feeling of warmth that she took comfort in him. “If I had accepted the leadership of the Travelers when they offered it to me, after Enlil’s death, then maybe your life would have been completely different.” She shrugged. “Better or worse I cannot tell you. So now I must act with you. I need to know your plans to see how I can fit into them, or how we might improve them with my presence.”

  Brianna cleared her throat and started, “First off, from what I’ve heard of both of you, neither one of you is responsible for what happened. Sure, you could have done something differently, Nin. You had reasonable fears that whatever you did might cause more damage. Griffin, you were caught up in something that had been brewing, from what Nin says, for millennia. So, you were entangled in a web of lies literally older than the organization you were a part of. What I don’t get, is why there aren’t descendants of Enki and Enlil running around. I can see if you weren’t, um, ‘fully mature,' how you could have no kids. But what about theirs?”

  Nin looked up to the cave’s ceiling. Then she sighed and answered, somewhat awkwardly, “Humanity is a nexus race. They can interbreed with all the Travelers. For some reason, my father’s male children were mules. That is--”

  “They couldn’t have offspring,” Brianna interrupted. “Yeah, okay, I can see that. But how come there were so many gods in the Babylonian and Akkadian pantheons then?”

  “Some of that was us impersonating other Gods and Goddesses. For instance, I also took the role of Ishtar. The rest was my Father, Brothers and I adopting first generation descendants from other Traveler groups that wanted to go somewhere else.”

  Griffin had been silent through all this. When he finally spoke up, he looked at Nin and asked, “Where do these Travelers initially come from then? An alternate realm? Another planet?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Nin answered. “It was something they never talked about. Like Atlantis. Both subjects were taboo to talk to part-Humans. Even though we were Jove’s children, neither my brothers nor I ever saw Atlantis. I can’t even see it in the Astral. We should move on to the present and your plans for the future.”

  For now, she would have to just help him. Although she was numbing his emotional pains, he couldn’t feel her like she could him. Hopefully helping him would change that. She had a level of inner peace with her history he had not reached.

  Cave in the Tibetan Mountains, March 15, 2014.

  Griffin, Brianna, and Nin discussed their plan to assault the Order of St. Michael Monastery at Blackheath.

  Throughout the discussion, Nin insisted on snuggling into Griffin’s chest. Griffin tensed at this unwarranted, and unwelcome affection. He was trying to plan at least a battle, if not a campaign here. Not that her actions made him feel aroused, rather they made him
feel incredibly uncomfortable. His ambiguous emotions kept telling him he would be the last to deserve this kind of affection.

  When Nin asked their goals in this attack, she was surprised to find they expected it would make an organization like the Order feel off balance, under threat. From what she had learned of the Order while in the Dreaming, and from Griffin and Brianna themselves, she did not feel this was a likely outcome. The Order was too large for such an effort to have the effect they desired. The attack on a small support facility such as that monastery represented was unlikely to achieve the goals they wanted. Rather, they needed to attack near simultaneously at several locations, preferably as widely spaced geographically as possible.

  When she explained this to them, Griffin responded, "But we don't have the resources or allies for the series of attacks you're proposing. I'm merely trying to find the best way with the resources I have on hand to achieve a delay in the Orders actions."

  "If you had a week,” Nin asked, “do you know what resources you could gather here, in the U.S., and from Europe?"