Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure

by Peter Meredith

  He was—with one hand on the grip of his Glock. He had failed. The sirens were blaring now and there was no chance he would get Chandler to tell him how to free Amanda, which meant he couldn’t kill him, at least not yet.

  Chapter 40

  Hoboken, New Jersey

  Roan sprinted from the hotel, darted out the back and found himself in a long alley. There was nowhere to hide and with three cruisers heading for the hotel, he knew one would be heading to cover the rear entrance.

  He had seconds only to find a place to hide, and behind an overturned garbage can wouldn’t cut it. The thief in him saw a way and as if he was in Daggerland, he went racing for the side of a building. He leapt at a brick wall, planted a foot on the smallest lip of uneven brick, jammed two fingers into a crevice where the mortar had worn away with one hand, reached as high as he could with the other and managed to catch the lowest edge of an open window.

  Just as a cruiser turned down the alley, he pulled himself inside, only to be hit over the head with a frying pan. A cartoon sound of DONK exploded in his ears as weird lights shot through his vision. Everything seemed to spin and tilt around him. Instinctively, he lifted an arm just as the frying pan struck again.

  “Son of a bitch!” he seethed as the pain shot through his elbow. He pulled the Glock from his holster and aimed it at a vague human shaped being. His eyes were too out of focus to see an actual face.

  “Don’t shoot, please,” a woman said in a pleading whisper.

  He wouldn’t shoot her. If he couldn’t bring himself to kill an actual assassin, this woman was perfectly safe. “I won’t just…just don’t come near me with that frying pan. I didn’t mean to…” He paused as blood dripped into his left eye. “This is ridiculous.”

  Nothing was going right, but he couldn’t just sit there bleeding and moping. “Do you have a towel or something?” He couldn’t afford to leave DNA evidence in the form of blood drops. The woman was too afraid to turn her back on Roan and slid along the cabinets until she came to a drawer. Without taking his eyes from him, she searched it blindly and tossed him an old dishtowel; it was clean at least.

  “You tweaking?” she asked. “Cuz, I got nothing here. I got no crystal or nothing. Maybe they do down the hall. Try 208, okay?”

  “What about a healing potion?” Roan asked as he pushed himself to his feet. She looked confused, while he felt embarrassed. “Never mind. Which way’s out?” She pointed and then backed herself into a corner as he passed.

  Once in the hall, he paused looking blearily in both directions. He had to get back to Daggerland before Chandler did, which meant he didn’t have time for running from the police. That ruled out leaving the building. Finding a stairwell, he went up, passing a gang of dirty children playing games on the stairs and a woman bitching into a cell phone loudly enough for the entire building to know her business.

  He went to the fifth floor and glanced down the hall. It was empty so he began to jog down it until he came to a door that was papered with eviction notices. The last had been dated the month before. He tapped on the door but did not get a response.

  Looking both ways, he tried the old credit card trick. When that didn’t work, he hammered the flimsy door with his shoulder.

  “Whatcha doin’?” It was one of the kids from the stairwell. Roan flashed his badge.

  “Police business. Anyone live here?” The kid had his eyes glued to the badge as he shook his head. “Thanks. Go play. I don’t want you getting hurt.” Roan hit the door again, spitting the wood near the lock. One more and it came open, the lock giving way before the door came apart.

  The kid was still staring, so Roan drew his gun and waved him away. This worked and when the kid ran back to the stairwell, Roan entered the dark apartment. The place was decorated with yardsale leftovers, takeout bags, beer cans and cigarette butts. Other than the trash, it was empty.

  Shutting the front door behind him, he went to the bathroom and locked himself in. Once he was settled onto the mildewed tiles, he took out his neural coupler and clocked back to Daggerland, where his head no longer pounded. He found himself in Ghak territory in the back of a shop that sold Gnome-made furniture.

  He wasn’t safe and neither was his body back in Oberast. Here he had assassins hunting him, there it was the police…and more assassins. He had to get moving; he had to get to Tarranon as quickly as he could and hope he had some way to get to Veldai in the next hour. And he had to hope the man knew a way to lift the spell Amanda was under.

  Roan still had his shawl across his shoulders. He used it to make himself look like a high-strung commoner so that he wouldn’t look completely out of place as he sprinted to Rinely’s Cafe. The anxious look on the commoner’s face wasn’t all illusion. He could feel the time slipping away from him minute by minute.

  It was after five when he came up to the cafe with his chest heaving. The place was busy and Rinely was running from table to table. Most of the people were locals, though there was a single Ghak thug sitting alone in the back. Roan went right to him.

  “Go tell Tarranon that Roan needs to talk to him right now.” When the man didn’t react, Roan picked up the table and flung it, sending his mug of mead flying.

  The thug still did not react, at least as a low level thug should. Calmly, he passed a hand across his face and where once a thug sat there was now the drow witch. Roan had expressly forbade her presence, however that no longer seemed to matter.

  “Where’s Tarranon?”

  “Right behind you.”

  He turned in time to see Tarranon’s rakish smile appear, followed by the rest of him. Roan was about to blurt out everything when Tarranon lifted his chin to the witch, saying, “Bubble us.” She spoke words of magic and in an odd “grey” blink, Tarranon and Roan found themselves in a strangely muted bubble. “Go on. Where is she?”

  “A place called Veldai, She’s at a cabin near a hidden lake about eight miles due north of the town. There’s an Effigy Curse on the door’s handle and inside there’s a Greater Darner’s Hound guarding her. The only problem is Chandler’s still alive.” When Tarranon grew angry, Roan snapped, “You can blame your man, Corvo. Not only did he try to kill me, he also set the police on me before I could get Chandler to tell me how to break the spell.”

  “Relax. Now that we know where she is, we don’t need to know how to break the spell.” Roan’s temper flared a second time and once more Tarranon said, “Relax. Have you forgotten that my witch reads minds? She’s able to do it even when her victim is sleeping. We’ll get Amanda back, don’t worry.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  Tarranon laughed at the request. “No. It’s non-negotiable. I want you to go back to the real world and keep your phone on.”

  “You know my number?”

  “No, but Amanda does.”

  2—

  For the first time in days, Roan clocked back to the real world and didn’t immediately reach for his gun. He didn’t begin to sweat or fret or worry. It seemed as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He had run his race and he had lost.

  Soon he would trade his life for Amanda’s and that was a good thing. She would live. And maybe his death would not be in vain. Arching would be freed from jail, but not only would there be a permanent cloud hanging over his head, his folk hero status would fade fast when it got out how many people had been killed by his assassins.

  And how long would it be before one of his self-serving conniving assassins took him out? They weren’t fanatics, they were immature adults who were wrong to think their actions wouldn’t have consequences. Now that the FBI had one name, they would get more. There was even a chance to get Tarranon if the salon lead played out.

  Roan hoped so.

  He turned on his phone and checked his messages. There were only two. One from Wendell, who was worried about Roan; nothing unusual there. The second was from Covington. “I have the customer database from that salon. Tell me if any of these names sou
nd familiar,” she said and then went on to read the list. When she got to Linda Corvorelli, Roan’s ears pricked up.

  After listening to the rest of the message, he called her back, his hands shaking in excitement. “One of the assassins is named Corvo. I doubt Linda Corvorelli is a coincidence.”

  She clapped her hands. “Excellent, I’ll stick one of the IA guys on it. What else do you have for me?”

  He hesitated a moment because he knew what sort of headache she would give him when she found out that he was really going to trade his life for Amanda’s. Before, the idea had existed in a world of conjecture. It was getting very real now. He decided not to bother her with those details.

  “Chandler Burt is one of the assassins.”

  Covington asked, “Is or was?”

  “Is. He’s very much alive, though I hear that because of some internal squabbling among the assassins he got roughed up a bit. He need to be picked up and kept off the streets for a couple of days.”

  “Speaking of which,” Covington said, “I’m going to need you ready to go first thing Monday morning. Expect my call at nine sharp.” He lied and told her that he would before he hung up. It was doubtful that Tarranon would let him live to see the sunrise.

  Roan cleaned himself up using the bathroom mirror in the abandoned apartment. A silver crack ran in a jagged line straight up the middle, cutting his reflection in half. To make the strange view of himself even more eerie, the light was out in the bathroom and with the afternoon fading, his face was lit on only one side.

  One side of him was dark and the other light. Up until a few minutes before he had felt just like the reflection. Part of him living in one world and part in another.

  “It’ll all be dark soon enough,” he said and walked out of the apartment. He was suddenly unafraid of being caught by the police. What could they do to him that was worse than what Tarranon had in mind?

  He walked straight out into the evening and hailed a cab. Too late the man saw his ripped and dirty clothing and started to say something. Roan showed him a fifty dollar bill and climbed in. Afraid to miss his call, he had the cabbie detour north to the George Washington Bridge and they were in the middle of the span when Tarranon made contact in the form of a text—he sent a picture of Amanda lying in a bed, asleep. The text that went with the picture read: Call me.

  Only then did he realize the text had come from Amanda’s phone. He called her, saying, “Amanda?” as soon as the phone connected.

  “No, sorry she’s still sleeping,” Tarranon answered, “and she will remain sleeping until you perform one teensy little favor for me.” He expected him to say something like jump from a building or shoot himself in the head, but what he wanted was in some ways worse than death.

  “Don’t worry,” Tarranon said, when Roan just sat there in stunned silence after hearing what was being demanded of him. “I’ll keep her alive until you’re through with your little chore. I have an IV going; she’ll be fine. And when she wakes up, she won’t remember anything.”

  Roan felt gut punched. “And how do I know you’ll release her? What guarantee do I have?”

  Tarranon sighed. “Look, this entire thing was a fiasco right off the bat. I sanctioned none of it except killing you, of course. But there were those who wanted revenge for what happened to the Infinite One. They realize their mistake now. We don’t want war with the FBI and I believe my little plan will prevent one. Amanda poses no threat to us. She will wake up and not remember a thing. There’s no reason to kill her, unless you give us one.”

  His logic was spot on. “Okay. I’ll do it,” Roan said. There wasn’t anything left to say after that and he hung up.

  The rest of the ride was spent in silence as were the next thirty hours, which he spent wearing down the carpet as he paced back and forth in a moderately priced hotel in Manhattan. He wanted to brainstorm over the case and find some way to wiggle off Tarranon’s hook that wouldn’t get Amanda killed, but he had lost hope and couldn’t concentrate. Briefly he considered going back to Daggerland and even picked up his coupler. He only stared at it, realizing that he would never go back.

  There was nothing for him there. Tarranon would have certainly moved Amanda’s elf body to a new location, one that only he, and maybe his witch, knew about. If he clocked back, Roan knew he would only blunder about uselessly until Magenlune the Seer came to collect his soul. He would fight her for it since she had clearly been wrong. Roan was an assassin and Arching couldn’t be stopped.

  He was about to toss the coupler aside when he saw the red battery warning light blinking. There was a little USB slot that led to the battery pack. For some reason it caught his attention and as he stared at it, a nasty thought crept through his conscious mind: A tiny bit of C4 and a micro blasting cap would make the coupler an excellent assassin’s tool. It would be a sure kill…but how would I detonate it? And how would I make sure Arching was wearing it when it went off?

  He fell asleep thinking about the perfect assassination and before he knew it, his hotel alarm let out a shrill beep causing him to jerk awake. “Holy crap. It’s seven already.”

  There was no time for blasting caps or any other nonsense. He jumped into the shower but when he got out he saw that his only change of clothes were the ones he’d been wearing. They wouldn’t do for court. Since he couldn’t go back to his apartment and the stores weren’t open, he decided to head in to the FBI field office. He had a change of clothes there.

  The day crew had yet to show up, so he received only a few slack-jawed stares as he made his way to his office. Once there he changed into a black suit. He kept it there in case of emergency and to wear to funerals. It was somewhat appropriate since he was about to murder his career. This would be the last time he would set foot in the office.

  He plopped down at his desk and there in front of him was the file of the case he’d been working on when all of this had started. He’d been tying up a fizzled kidnapping. A child had been taken and a ransom had been demanded but before the money could be collected, the child had escaped.

  “And now the kidnapper will, too,” he growled, thumping his fist. Wendell had been the agent in charge of the case since Roan had fled and in all that time, Wendell hadn’t once come into his office to look over his notes. Roan knew it because the micro GPS transmitter was sitting on top of them exactly where he had left it days ago. The transmitter was a tiny thing, small enough to fit into a bundle of twenties without being seen.

  Roan picked it up just as his door burst open. It was Wendell and within a blink, he was within a quarter of an inch of taking a bullet between the eyes. Very slowly Roan lowered the Glock that seemed to have magically leapt into his hand at the agent’s intrusion. The two men were both a little taken back, both by the reaction and the unholy speed Roan had displayed.

  “Sorry about that,” Roan said, standing and holstering his gun. “I guess I’m a little jumpy.”

  “A little?” Wendell asked with a weak, unconvincing laugh. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have that thing with Agent Covington?”

  Roan checked his watch. She would be calling in three minutes. He decided to save her the trouble and walked to her office, casually flipping the transmitter. He even turned it on, thinking that if Arching wanted to enact his own revenge, the transmitter would make finding his body easier.

  He had been about to say this as a joke to Wendell, but the very thought cut through the fugue-like state he’d been in. It wasn’t a funny joke. It was horrible and more than just possible, it was likely. It was something he would accept as long as he got Amanda back

  But what if they kept her? Roan paused, his heart beating in odd thumps. What if they just let her rot somewhere in an eternal slumber until her body wasted away? What if…

  “Roan! What the hell are you doing here?” It was Agent Covington and she was in a wrath.

  He had been just on the verge of panicking. He cleared his throat and said, “Trust me, it’s the last place any
one would look for me. Ask Wendell he almost got shot.” Wendell nodded vigorously in response. “Besides, I don’t think it matters anymore.”

  Her look changed quickly from anger to sympathy. “We’ll find her, I promise. There might still be time.”

  “Yeah,” was all he said. Covington began to explain where they’d be holding his cross examination. He wasn’t listening. They were just passing his office when he saw his coupler and remembered what he’d been thinking: what if they don’t let Amanda go? He would need the coupler to get back to Daggerland. He would have to find her, no matter what it took. “Hold on,” he said and jogged back to get it.

  “I doubt you’ll need that,” Covington said. “If you haven’t been able to save Amanda on the other side by now, I don’t think you ever will.”

  Was she right? Did he have any chance of saving her in Daggerland once he had given his testimony? The truth was that if Arching screwed him over, he wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever finding her. Arching was Daggerland. Still, he didn’t toss aside the coupler.

  He carried it through the building and into the black sedan which took them to a conference room on the forty-seventh floor of the Empire State Building. It was an odd location for giving testimony, but this was an odd occurrence, he supposed.

  The room was rectangular. He sat with the district attorney assigned to the case; a nervous young man who was probably two years out of law school. To their left were six sharply dress attorneys, all of whom were experts in the law. The judge’s table sat facing them and to its left was a single chair. To Roan it looked like the electric chair.