"Thank you, Scout." Luc followed after them, past the cluster of assassins--and three of the students--who went abruptly quiet as they passed.
"What do you teach?" Luc asked, glad he'd found someone civil.
"I'm not part of the academy," Scout said. "Guildhall. I'm the administrator, actually."
Luc paused. "The guildhall and academy both operate from here?" He'd inferred that from when Scout mentioned the only office being for administration, but he'd hoped to be wrong.
"Of course. Academy is small enough, and guildhall is small, too. Makes sense to keep us all in one place, right? Combine bills and all. Here we are. This is the office. Not that I spend much time here. I'm usually in the living room if you need anything."
The office was tiny, all four walls lined with filing cabinets. Most of the drawers weren't even closed all the way, they were so stuffed with papers. The desk, at least, was spotless.
"Rooms are back here," Scout said after a second, starting again down a hallway.
"So... how many bodies are in this combined school/guildhall?"
"Including you, that puts our number at fifteen."
"And the breakdown of students, professors, and guildhall assassins?"
Scout's eyes rolled toward the ceiling for a moment as they mentally counted. "You, plus three teachers. Five students. The rest are field assassins, plus me."
Five students, three professors. It was a very small school. "Is, er... King Roger one of the professors?" Luc felt silly asking about the false name, but he suddenly hoped the man wouldn't be his problem. If he was part of the guildhall and not the school, that could definitely help his situation. Also, maybe Scout would tell him the man's real name. "The man who collected me from the airport," he added to clarify.
"Nah, Roger is a fielder. But his son, King Junior, is one of your students."
That statement brought Luc to a halt for two reasons. One, Scout seemed in on the king's false name joke. Unless...could King Roger really be the man's real name? If there was a King Junior...but that was the other thing that made Luc stop in his tracks. Luc had never met an assassin who had children. Not in France, not in Austria. Every single one he'd met was an orphan, and unmarried. None of them were parents--or had parents. If King Roger--seriously, was that his real name?--had a son, and that son was one of Luc's students.
He couldn't wrap his mind around it. Would the son be as bad as the father? Would the father interfere with the son's training, since they both apparently lived here?
"These last six bedrooms are free for the taking. Closet there on the left has sheets and stuff. You need anything, just ask me. I can get it for you."
"I appreciate it, Scout."
They studied Luc for a second. "You really got your work cut out for you, you know. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not sure you're up to it."
Luc considered their words. "How do you manage?" he asked.
"I lie a lot. Mostly to the main office. We get stuff done, but it's like twisting arms here. A lot of the guys here, they eat guys like you for breakfast. I hope you're as much of a badass as your file suggests."
Luc thanks Scout for all their help and chose the empty room at the end of the hall for his own. Within an hour, he had mostly settled in. He'd tackle the task of meeting his staff and students later. First, though, he had to get himself in order. By the time he was ready for bed, he had a list of things ready to give Scout in the morning. A second bedroom was about to get converted into an office.
He didn't bother with dinner. The solitude and slight pangs of hunger helped Luc clear his head as he prepared himself for the trials that would begin tomorrow.
Time to live up to being as much of a badass as his file apparently suggested.
3
At 7 A.M., Luc waited in the ECAA's lone classroom. By ten minutes after, two of his teachers had come in, assessed the furniture rearrangement, and taken chairs at the front of the room. They immediately began a conversation, but a look from Luc silenced them--once they noticed him, of course. That alone took another seven minutes. At that point, a student entered and headed for the single remaining empty chair. The student, at least, noticed Luc's disapproving look immediately and detoured to stand awkwardly in the middle of the empty floor instead.
It was nearly 7:40 before the last teacher and three other students were in the room. All were blessedly silent, though it took more glaring to accomplish the quiet than Luc liked. By 8 A.M., the last student had still not arrived.
"Um, Sir?" one of the students, a young woman with her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, said. She didn't wait for permission to continue speaking. "What are we waiting for?"
Luc considered not answering, but his patience was wearing very thin. "The full academy has not assembled. I will wait to address the whole body rather than repeat myself."
"Dude, don't waste our time. Roger's not coming. He's out with his dad on assignment. Probably, anyway. He never comes to class." That speaker was the youngest of the students, a boy with unruly dark hair who had yet to hit puberty.
"Excuse me," Luc said immediately, striding out of the classroom. He headed immediately for the administration office, but of course, Scout wasn't there. They said they weren't there much, after all. Luc found Scout in the living room. "Scout?"
The administrator glanced up from a fat paperback novel, holding their place with a finger. "Hmm? Oh, Luc. Something wrong?"
"One of my students is currently absent from the academy classroom. Roger."
"Oh, yeah. A contract came in for his dad. He always goes out on contracts with him."
"This is standard practice?"
Scout nodded. "Yup. King Senior has been King Junior's mentor since Junior started at the academy."
"King Senior isn't an approved professor of the academy, though, correct?"
"Technically, no, but--"
"When do you expect them back?"
Scout checked their wristwatch. "Probably not for another hour or two."
"I expect my student to report to the classroom immediately after he arrives. In the future, I expect you not to assign students to go along with field assassins."
Scout blinked. "If you say so. But this is how we've done it for years."
Luc turned halfway. "And it works well? Both hall and academy are prospering?"
Scout's silence was all Luc needed. He finished turning and reentered the classroom. As he expected, at least four separate conversations were ongoing. He didn't wait for silence before saying softly, "I apologize for my absence. For those of you I haven't met yet, which is all of you, I am Luc S. Bertrand, Order of Release and your new headmaster."
"You mean principal, right?" the prepubescent boy interrupted. Luc didn't acknowledge the rudeness.
"I would ask you to please organize yourselves by order. Silently. Professors, too, if you would."
It only took a second, and while no one spoke, there wasn't silence. Shoes shuffled on the floor. Chairs scraped.
Luc stared at the result. "Are there truly only two orders represented in both students and professors?"
"Well...King Roger the Second is Rejection," one of the professors said. "So three, among the students."
"You are?"
"Heather McKenty, Destruction," the professor said. She was standing alone, the only professor of her order.
"And you two are?" Luc asked the other professors.
Renee Bardwell-Wiseman and Cliff Boand were both Order of Balance. For the students, Mandi Lynch and Dione Rose were Destruction, and Nina Falkestav and the boy, who introduced himself as Quirky McJackson, were Balance. At least he had professors to go with the students. But that meant--
"I'm going to assume the only Rejection assassin here is King Roger Senior."
The chorus of nods made Luc's gut sink. That explained a lot. He would have to find some alternative way to get Roger Junior the instruction for his order without involving the boy's father. That could only be a recipe for disaster. An
d how was he supposed to get an Order of Dread or Order of Release presence here? That, he'd have to deal with later. More problems to add to his ever-growing list.
"I will let you know, I have new expectations of this academy that are probably more strict than you have experienced before. It will seem unfair, but I am not an unjust man. Bring me concerns, and I will give you a fair ear and straight answers. From now on, I expect silent assembly, promptly at 7 every morning. Is this understood?"
The response was lackluster, from both students and professors, but at least he heard his appropriate honorific in there somewhere. It felt odd being called "father" by the professors, but it was correct.
Turning to his staff, Luc spoke quietly. "Are the students trustworthy enough to run physical drills on their own, unsupervised? I would like to speak with you alone to orient myself with this academy."
The three professors exchanged a look. "I should probably watch them," Boand said. "They'll probably just goof off otherwise."
Luc nodded. "In that case, can I speak with you two in my office?"
He headed there without waiting for a response, certain the two women would follow him. They did, and Luc gestured for them to sit as he paced on the other side of his desk. It wasn't a nervous movement, though it might have appeared that way. Luc's leg, where he'd been shot, was starting to ache, and he learned that walking it off was better than letting it stiffen.
"Clearly, the ECAA has been run differently than any organization I've been involved with in Europe," Luc began. "I suppose I should have you tell me just how things run here."
It took the two women only thirty minutes or so to give Luc the basis for the academy's usual operations. Only five minutes into it, Luc was already horrified. He took another two hours asking questions.
As much as he wanted to form a plan to overhaul everything that moment, and to put it into action the second it was done, that simply wouldn't work. Luc thanked his staff and dismissed them. For almost an hour, he pondered alone in his makeshift, poorly-equipped office. Lunchtime was approaching by then. Half a day gone. Luc's growling stomach reminded him that he had biological functions to take care of.
"Fixing this school will be a marathon, not a sprint," Luc said to himself. He already had ideas for how to start correcting the serious grievances in this school's procedures, at least. None would be easy. First, lunch, and then he'd have to observe just how broken the school really was.
4
Luc determined after about twenty minutes of observation that there was one good thing and one bad thing he could definitely say about the ECAA.
The good thing was that the student-to-teacher ratio was excellent. Three professors to five students, and that wasn't including himself.
The bad thing was that he couldn't understand how this train wreck could call itself a school at all. Though there was a classroom, and the classroom was clean, there never seemed to be anything taking place there that resembled an actual class. Coursework for the initiates seemed to consist of killing time in the living room, shooting the breeze with the assassins, until a contract came up. At that point, there was a rotation with the students. Every time one of the professors was sent out, the next student in line accompanied them on their contract. It was a makeshift mentoring system. At least none of those involved in the system seemed to mind it.
Except that King Roger the First was involved. His son appeared to be exempt from the rotation system, and he only went out when his father did. Not only that, it seemed that Roger Senior got an inordinate amount of contracts. He was out far more often than was proper or healthy for him, or for his son. In that first afternoon Luc observed, King had two contracts, and that was on top of the one he'd been out on that morning. It didn't lighten Luc's mood that Junior never reported in, either. He stayed virtually attached to his father's hip as if avoiding the orders of his headmaster.
When the two Rogers were around, the general mood of the guildhall changed. It was as if everyone remained on their toes when the father-son duo was present, but Luc wondered if that might only be in reference to Senior. He was by far the largest person in the guildhall, and he had the presence to go along with his stature. Luc was taller, but Roger Senior probably weighed twice as much as Luc did. So when Luc finally approached the two Rogers that evening, it must have looked like a sapling confronting an oak tree.
It wasn't the father that Luc addressed, though. He directed his words to his student.
"Son, I cannot help but notice that you have been playing truant to your academy requirements all day. Is there a medical reason you have been absent?"
The young man blinked at Luc as if wondering why an insect was speaking to him. "Dad?"
"Father is the accepted title, but yes, what is it?" Luc asked before King Senior could respond.
"He wasn't talking to you, upstart," Senior spat. "And of course he wasn't 'in class.' He was with me on assignments."
"Ah, I see." Luc put on a thoughtful expression. "I didn't realize you were one of the professors under the ECAA roof."
The glare Roger Senior shot at Luc could have penetrated a knight's plate armor. Luc bore it easily. "I don't need to be no fucking professor. This is my son, and this is my guildhall."
"You do realize that the ECAA, while sharing a building with the D.C. guildhall, isn't actually part of the guildhall, correct?"
A heavy hand shot out, striking for Luc's shoulder. Luc saw it coming and stepped smoothly to the side, just out of its path. The man's knuckles didn't even brush the fabric of Luc's shirt. "He's my fucking son, and I'll see to it he's trained. Mind your own fucking business, frog."
"Frog? That's original. Anyway, I will be reporting this initiate's truancy to the heads of the academy division of the Assassin's Guild. His current status as an initiate is in jeopardy, and if he fails to report to class as is appropriate, I'm afraid he may be expelled from the ECAA altogether."
A glimmer of worry entered the young man's eyes. "Dad? He can't do that, can he?"
More poison seeped into King Senior's eyes. "Even if he could, he won't. Not if he knows what's good for him."
"My concern is what's best for my students. My son King deserves a proper mentor, one assigned by the academy from among the staff. I may take him on personally. I'm sure the lackluster education he's received to this point has left him ill-prepared for his exit exam. And you are how old, Son?"
With Luc's every sentence, the initiate's eyebrows furrowed more in worry. "Seventeen."
The punch came out of nowhere. Like Senior's last attack, Luc saw it coming, but he was a moment too late this time. The fist connected with his jaw, and bright spots danced before Luc's eyes. It only took him a few seconds to orient himself, though his brains felt more than a little scrambled. The man hit like a oncoming train. He would have quite a bruise on his jaw in a few hours, he was sure.
When his vision finally cleared, he was more than a little pleased to realize he hadn't lost more than a step, despite the ringing pain in his head. His legs didn't seem to want to respond when he told them to, but a moment of focus let him regain control and recover that one step he'd staggered backwards under the blow. Dimly, he was aware of whispers elsewhere in the room. The rest of the guildhall staff had witnessed the blow.
One of the voices that seemed far away seemed to be saying Luc's name. He wasn't sure how many times it had been repeated, if at all, but when he finally came to, he found the two Kings gone, and Scout Sujyot standing next to him with one of the initiates.
"Sorry to interrupt, Brother Luc," Scout said. A manila folder was in their hand. "But staff here is tight, and I have a contract for you. And it's Quentin's turn on rotation to accompany."
"Quirky," the boy corrected, brushing dark hair away from his eyes. His voice cracked when he said his name.
Still blinking away stars, wondering just when the father and son had run away from their discussion, Luc accepted the folder automatically. Work. That was normal. He could focus
on that.
His head started pounding, and as he took his first few steps away from the living room, he was baffled at the footsteps following after him.
5
"Sir? Uh, Father? Not so fast!"
Luc slowed to a halt, and the black-haired boy raced to catch up on legs far shorter than Luc's The boy huffed from his run, which Luc realized couldn't have been more than a single block long. Two things about that bothered Luc. One, that the boy was winded after a single block was discouraging. If he was in such bad shape after a single short sprint, how poor must his training be? Did he have even the basics of defense and combat down? Where was his conditioning? The boy--Quentin--was not overweight by any means, but there didn't seem to be a bit of muscle on him.
The second thing that bothered Luc was that he'd wandered out of the Spy Museum and a block away still in a daze. The spots in his vision had faded, but it hadn't restarted Luc's brain to working order. The blow to the jaw must have scrambled his mind more than he realized. Who knew how far he would have gone--or where he would have ended up--if he'd just kept walking? At least he wasn't completely lost yet. The Spy Museum was right there, after all.
Next to him, the young boy appeared to have recovered his wind. "Sorry, I'm not as fast as you."
"Sorry, Father," Luc corrected.
One of Quentin's eyebrows lifted in a skeptical question. "You're not old enough to be my dad."
"It's guild protocol, Quentin. We are family and familial titles are expected."
"Then shouldn't you call me son? Or something?"
"It's mostly for those at your level or higher up, Quentin."
The boy narrowed his eyes. "It's Quirky," he said.
"I'm aware of your nickname, just as you are aware of my title."
Luc Bertrand- American Assassin Page 2