by Avell Kro
actually process what I said. It's expression changed from confusion, to realization, and then
finally, to anger. He snarled at me and reached to his side.
I figured out what he was doing about a half a millisecond before the chair started flying
toward my skull. I ducked it easily enough. There was some distance between us after all. The troll
hurled another chair at me. Finally, he let out a bellow and charged. I had been playing for time.
Every second we weren't actively fighting was a second that I was still breathing and hoping that
backup would show up soon.
Why did I agree to this again? Oh, yeah. Favor. “Damn.” I said and reflexively winced; angels, even disgraced ones aren't supposed to curse. Let me back up a second here. When I say
“disgraced”, what I really mean is “dis-GRACE-ed.” Sorry, got side-tracked again.
The troll charged and I pulled out my revolver from the leather strap it hung in inside my jacket.
I looked quickly into the cylinder and saw a light blue glow. Thumbing back the hammer I fired
into the trol 's center of mass. One thing to know about trolls, they hit like a truck and if you want
to physically hurt them, you're going to have to hit like that too.
I didn't have that kind of strength, but what little magic I maintained after my “going away
party” as I liked to call it, went into crafting several special bullets. They were my proverbial truck
and one of them flew right at that chair-throwing peabrain's chest. It pained me to use the bul et.
That round was one of only a handful I had left. They were my lifeline back into the good graces of
the lads upstairs. Once again, graces with a capital “G”.
The round, as expected, hit the brute right in the center of his heaving lungs. Immediately acid
started eating away at his flesh and sinew. One point Jonathan. The bad news is even with all the
screaming he was doing, his momentum didn't diminish.
His weight slammed me to the floor. He continued to scream and writhe on the floor of the
office. “Not good. This is very not good.” I said rapidly as I tried to push the grunt off me. That
magic acid would work on me just as much as him. I don't want it on me. No, thank you.
Peabrain sat up and the pressure on my chest lessened immensely. My diaphragm expanded to
breath again and I scrambled back on my elbows to get away from the acid. He took a nasty side
swipe with his inch-wide claws. They missed, but barely. I kicked up with my boot and it
connected with his nose. Crunch. “Yes.” I thought.
The trol howled again in agony. “C'mon acid, work faster.” I said through gritted teeth. A fist the
size of a dinner plate slammed down where my head had been. It was a blind swing through bleary
eyes and I dodged it easily. I jumped to my feet.
I was unscathed. Cool. The troll on the ground would not be getting up. That acid would bind it in
pain until it's organs were eaten away. One down. I let out a small cheer. Okay, it was more of me
turning to the beast on the ground and curb-stomping his face a few times, but hey, what's the
problem with a little celebration, right?
A malevolent snarl from the door cut my curb-stomp-fest short. Oh, yeah. There were three
trol s weren't there? Just peachy. How had I forgotten that again? I really am the worst angel ever.
The second troll was just as predicable. It charged just like the last one did, but I couldn't do
anything about it. I didn't have the time. This particular troll was more of a green booger color
than the last one, but just as strong. He grabbed me around the waist and threw me headlong into
the metal door.
My head rang like a tuning fork as I stumbled to my feet. The third troll stalked into the office. I
know that the sin that got my wings clipped was gambling. I love me some dice rolling. I love me
some dice rolling so much that I got in deep. It was as bad a run of luck as anything. “Kinda like right now” I thought.
I stepped to one side and crouched behind a cubicle wall; my face already starting to swel from
headbutting the safe room door. Oh, and by the way. . OW! The sounds of clawed feet shuffling
around the office slowly became clearer. Now what?
I still had managed to hold onto my revolver. Lucky stars. I had five more rounds in the weapon.
Only one of those was another of my special bullets. I'd loathe to fire it. They were dwindling
rapidly.
I gritted my teeth and stood back up and looked over the waist-high wall. Both trolls were very
close, but were approaching from opposite directions. Why is it they learned tactics NOW? I fired
three barks of my revolver at the troll on the left. At least two of them went straight through him
and splattered the wall of windows behind him with thick red blood. The glass was bullet-proof and
spider web cracks danced on it's surface. The troll fell back into a desk and crushed it to splinters.
I had one more round before the last-ditch effort bullet. The revolver was a special make and
fired a special caliber round. It had worked well on the beast. His green flesh stained red. It would
have probably worked well on the final one had I been able to spin around fast enough.
The claws slashed down and I felt my back split like a fillet-of-Jonathan. I crumpled to the floor
and my vision clouded up with pain. I touched the bracelet on my right wrist to my forehead and I
felt the inscription's magic knit up the gash on my back. I was just about to flip over and give this
jerk the last two pieces of my mind when a heavy fist came down and everything went dark.
***
“That's quite a story, Jonathan.” the man said. He looked down at a clipboard and wrote
something on the paper he held.
“Every bit of it's true. Doesn't that count for something?” I asked.
“Yes. It counts for something. The young man did get away. One favor down, four more to go.
I'm sending you back.”
“Oh, C'mon! I earned at least-” I started to say, but a white flash cut me off. I woke up in pain on
the floor.
Episode 2: The Witch's Pendant
Go get a fancy pendant from a crazy old woman in her crazy old mansion. That's the job. It would
be worth one of my favors. "Must be some pendant," I muttered and took the binoculars from my
eyes. That house looked real expensive, and I'd really hate to mess it up. If everything goes
according to plan though, I won't have to.
In theory, the crazy old woman was a witch, and the pendant was a powerful talisman that she
stole from some knights. That's why returning it falls into the good deed favor category thingy, and
I still owed four of those suckers. The problem was, of course, that if she really is a witch, she
probably has a whole nasty mess of enchantments and supernatural security guards in there. I
groaned softly to myself. The stipend the holy warrior jerks gave me after the incident with the
trol only managed to top off my angelic reserve tank and give me a few more fancy bullets.
Movement up at the house caught my eye, and I looked back into the binoculars. The batty old
woman stepped out of her front door and walked over to her garden on the side away from me. I
looked at my watch. It was almost time. That's one good thing about old people, well old mortal
people. They always had another doctor's visit coming up. Even a witch is mortal, so it was game
time.
I sat back deeper in the trees and waited. God, I hate wai
ting around for no reason. Hmm, I didn't
flinch at the thought. Was that a good sign or a bad one? Eventually, and man do I mean eventually,
the cane-wielding pendant stealing harpy got in her car and left. The fake phone call from her
"doc" had worked. "Who needs magic anyway?" I said.
I felt my joints creak as I stood back up. Mortality sucks. As I crossed around the side of the
house just inside the treeline, I pulled my sunglasses out of a jacket pocket. I slipped them on and
surveyed the house again. This time, the HD vision the sunglasses gave me showed a very
different scene. Crisscrossing lines of power covered the walls. So, she really was a witch. I looked
for a pattern in the pulsing spiderweb of defenses. The nexus appeared to be coming from an
upstairs room with a cracked stone balcony. "Gotcha."
I took one more look around the premises and, satisfied that I was in the clear, darted for the
wall. Large light brown squares of stone made up the barrier to her house, and their pockmarked
faces provided enough grip for my hands and feet. I jumped and scurried up over the wall quickly
enough. It wasn't a graceful ascent, but hey, I'm dis-Graced remember. Maybe I could try a little
finesse next time, but did it really matter? It worked fine after all.
After vaulting the wall, I looked both ways before crossing the vegetable garden. I didn't want to
get run over by any bewitched onions or anything. I passed the patch and leaned up against the
side of the house. I felt it practically humming with energy from the ward lines. They were all
tangled in knots. It was powerful due to the way the strands bound together, but the knots were
work of amateurs.
I slipped out of my body like taking off a jacket. . by unzipping it. Once free, but tethered, I could touch the energies directly. It took a couple of minutes of fiddling, she had really tied those suckers
tight, I got them disentangled, and the strands hung limply safe in their places. The power holding
them together had to go somewhere though, and I knew it shot straight back to mother dearest to
go tattle on the horrible angel. Now, I was on the clock. She'd be coming back in a mad fury, but
hopefully, I'd have the time I needed to get in and out.
I flew back to my body and zipped my jacket back up so to speak. I made a silent prayer of
thanks that the same rough, easy-to-climb brick which composed the witch's wall was the same
for her house. I scaled it to the rim of the balcony with just as much elegance. Once I had a finger
hold on the balcony, I used a firmer grip to get myself the rest of the way up.
I didn't see any other external magic security do-hickeys, so I started in on the small latch to the
inside of what looked to be a study or private library. It only took a second, and it clicked open. "Oh
yeah, Jonathan. You're one amazing angel thief extraordinaire," I muttered as I opened the door.
"What in the name of. ." I said much louder than I should've and covered my nose with a hand.
"What kind of mothball cat piss and formaldehyde is this witch using." I used my other hand to fan
the air in front of my face. "Jes, uh. . Louise," I said and made a silent apology to the sky.
Moving further into the dusty library, I saw that for as much power as what came from this
room, the witch didn't come in here very often. I didn't see any disturbances in the furniture, dust
covered every surface, and the carpet looked fluffed as if it had never been trod on. I walked up to
the drawer in a desk on the far wall. It thrummed with power. I felt that talisman before.
I pulled the drawer open and stared down at it. "This is bad. This is oh so very much not good," I
said. It glowed a soft gold that reflected off my face like a treasure in an Indiana Jones flick. The
Talisman of Zeus did not belong to a group of knights, or for that matter, an old witch.
Only ancient and mighty beings could even touch the Greek Talismans. There was just one God. I
know as I've worked for him for a while now, but the Greeks found a way to force energy into a set
of talismans which granted abilities to their wearers. Those people strong enough to withstand
their, uh, side-effects, were considered gods.
This particular talisman had one nasty bloody history. You know the German word Blitzkrieg?
Yeah, that means lightning war. Now, I wonder just how it got that name? Hmmm? "Oh, boy," I said.
"Oh boy, indeed," the witch agreed. I turned around to face the door. Well. . Shit, I thought.
"Well. . Shit," I said. "You got back rather fast."
"Yes, I tend to do that when I get all of my wards back at the same time," she replied with a
poisonous smile. I felt a series of magical shields flare up around her person. "Now, who the hell
are you and what are you doing in my study?"
"Well, that's a funny question," I said. "My name's Jonathan, and I'm actually trying to steal a pendant." Honesty is always the best policy, right?
She raised an eyebrow in surprise. "That's not a pendant." Stepping forward into the room the witch's expression soured. "You're not what you seem," she said.
"Uh, no. I'm not. Neither, it seems, are you," I said and pointed to the talisman. I knew that one of two things had happened. Option one: The knights didn't have a clue what they were getting
themselves into. Option two: They knew, and they wanted to send me into a huge fight against a
power I vastly underestimated. I don't know what it is, but something about being around for a
few millennia makes me a bit of a skeptic when it comes to mortals.
"Option two it is," I told the witch.
"What?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing. I was just figuring out if the idiots who hired me were completely ignorant, or if
they wanted us to throw down."
She closed the door behind her and sat down in a red armchair near the wall. She didn't turn her
back or even break eye contact as she took her seat. I almost suffocated on the smell of human
preservatives which plumed in the enclosed space.
"Who hired you?" she asked.
"Man, you really get right to the point don't you," I replied smirking.
She crossed her arms, and I felt the pulse of her probing energies press against my defenses. She
was much stronger than I first thought. She might even be able to wield the Talisman. "I find it
takes less time if I don't dance around the subject," she said.
"Can you use this talisman?" I asked, dancing away from her question.
She sighed and glowered at me. "Yes, I can," she replied.
"No one in the last hundred and fifty years has been able to use it without killing themselves."
"That's true," she said. I loaned it to the Germans, but when they fell, I took back what was mine.
The bodies they stacked helped power some of the more complex incantations I needed at the
time." She crossed a leg over the other and took on a closed posture. "Now, tel me who hired you
before I have to show you what those incantations gave me."
"Look, lady. I don't want a fight, but I also think that you're up to some bad juju up in this place.
The thing is, I'm kind of on probation here, so if I don't deliver, I'm looking at a lot worse than you
burning me at the stake."
"What," she paused and sighed again, "do you suggest?"
"I propose we overlook this little escapade and rig up a decoy pendant to give to them. They don't
need or deserve that level of power. Hell, they'll probably just end up blowing themselves and the
nearest populated ar
ea sky high," I offered.
She blinked. "What do I get out of this. . deal?" she asked.
Well, crap. Why did I start dealing again? "What do you want?" I asked.
"I can't simply allow someone to steal my possessions, nor can I allow them to hire others to do
the same. I want to know who hired you."
Is it wrong that I actually considered her for a moment? I did, but then my caution kicked back
in. "No dice," I replied. "What else? There's got to be something?"
She crossed her fingers and held rested her head on them contemplating. After a moment, she
said, "There is one other thing. You could recover something for me, a child."
"Woah, I'm not a babysitter, and I'm not into human trafficking."
"That's the final offer, or I will have to- how did you put it- throw down," she said.
To be fair, I can hold my own pretty well, but if she had enough power to use the Talisman of
Zeus, I didn't want to find out if I could win this fight. I had only a small portion of my strength.
Losing my grace put a lot of my magical clout locked in a safe and very far away from me.
"Fine. Who is it?" I asked.
She smiled devilishly. "Her name is Beth Rastin, and she lives in Austin."
"Alright, I'll track her down. Now, give me a decoy," I said.
She snapped her fingers, and her eyes flashed red. A second talisman appeared right next to the
original. I reached out my senses and felt a power there. It wasn't nearly as strong as the original,
but it should pass inspection. I snatched it up and put it in my pocket. I turned to leave out the
window I came through, but her voice stopped me. "One more thing," she said. "She's a half-
demon. That's not a problem is it?"
Episode 3: Austin and a Detour
"Why don't you go ahead and explain your thought process for a moment, Jonathan," the woman
asked. Her heavenly glow and grim expression didn't mix.
"Well, I just figured that the knights were up to something you know? It was a bad position to be
in," I replied.
She picked up a pen from her desk and clicked it several times. Her stern expression didn't
change. Instead of keeping her eyes, I looked out the large floor to ceiling windows. Outside, clouds
drifted by and several initiates floated through them reading. "You do realize that those knights