Summoned to Destroy

by C L Walker

  There was some mingling between the hats and the warships but the racecars were always alone in their sections.

  Using what Bec had told me as a reference I guessed the racecars were the rebel vampires and the warships were Artem’s people. I could see where they were going to clash in the near future, assuming the intelligence behind the scenario was accurate.

  “The warships have the best chance of winning,” I said. “Have them ally with the hats and destroy the cars, then begin a campaign to drive a wedge between their alliance.”

  It wasn’t the best strategy; getting the witches to ally with the rebels and attack Artem would lead to the most casualties and make the cleanup easier. Also, with many of their number fallen in the fighting, sowing dissent in the ranks would be easier.

  Invehl didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, I can see it. But it would take too long to finalize, and I don’t want to be here more than I have to. This needs a deft hand at the wheel and none of my men are up to it.”

  “You asked for my advice,” I said.

  “I’m offering you the command,” he replied. He straightened and focused on me. “Join me, properly, and the war is yours. Do well, and there are great things in your future.”

  “I will never understand,” I said. This was an offer I had received a thousand times, and it never made any sense to me.

  “Why I’d be so generous?” he asked, optimistically.

  “No, why you’d think I want this. I’ve fought wars, and won them. I’ve commanded men and led them into battle. And none of it matters. None of you matter.”

  “What we do here is important,” he said.

  “You people always think it’s important.”

  “I am not ‘people’ and what I’m doing is important.”

  I turned and walked to the door. He wasn’t even my master and I wasn’t going to have the conversation with him.

  “Bring me a better heartstone next time,” he called after me. “And be quicker about it.”

  “I’m going to take a nap.”

  Erindis could order me to leave immediately, but otherwise I was going to take my time. I didn’t want to watch the end of another heaven.

  Chapter 12

  I found Erindis walking the halls, coming from an eating area and heading back to her quarters. A single guard followed behind her.

  “Hello,” I said awkwardly, falling in beside her.

  “You’re back,” she replied. I’d startled her and she looked back at the soldier as a reflex. Perhaps he was the only thing keeping the men of the base away.

  “I’ve done as you asked and retrieved the heartstone for Invehl.”

  I wasn’t expecting her to be pleased, exactly, but some recognition would have been nice. Instead she kept her eyes facing forward and her pace even.

  “I heard you attacked your escort,” she said. “I told you to obey them.”

  “You’ve said a lot of things, lately.”

  None of them had told me not to attack the soldiers, so I’d interpreted it as an order allowing me to do so. It was slim, but it convinced the tattoos and let me do what I wanted. Once the fight began it didn’t matter what they said; they were the enemy and my own preservation was more important than anything except my master’s life at that point.

  We walked in silence for a few minutes. There was a tension to her that I still didn’t understand, a reluctance to speak to me that had never been there when we were young.

  It was the guard, I realized. She didn’t want to talk in front of her jailer’s man.

  I stopped and took up the middle of the corridor, effectively blocking the soldier from advancing.

  “Please move,” the man said.

  “No. Go away. I will take care of her from here.”

  “Sir.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to find Erindis watching the situation with trepidation.

  “Go and tell your god that I’m being aggressive,” I said. “Tell him I threatened to kill you if you didn’t leave us alone. Tell him whatever you want, but get out of my face before I get angry.”

  He thought about taking it further. I saw it on his face, the flash of anger followed by the hint of shame, followed by resignation. He turned and hurried away, leaving me alone with my wife.

  “Shall we continue?” I said, gesturing in the direction she’d been walking.

  We continued in silence. I spent the minutes trying to come up with something to say and she spent it staring at the ground before her feet. Eventually we arrived the door to her quarters.

  “Thank you for accompanying me,” she said, still not looking at me. She opened the door and stepped inside. She jumped again when she turned to find me halfway through the door as well.

  “I think we should speak,” I said.

  Her quarters weren’t as bad as I’d been expecting. Invehl had made a comment about her living in a cage and I’d assumed he was being literal. Instead she had the same quarters I imagined most of the men did, with a single bunk in the corner and space for her clothes. It was empty and cold, but it was better than the alternative.

  “What do you want to talk about?” she said as she took a seat on the bed.

  “Us?” I said. “This place? Invehl? Anything?”

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said.

  They were simple, truthful words, and they crushed me. I had spent most of my life wishing for the day we could be alone in a room together. I’d thought it would happen when she returned in glory but I would have accepted anything. I had a million things to say, so many that I could have done all the talking forever. And she had nothing.

  “Perhaps start by explaining why I can’t just take you away from here. There’s nothing stopping us.”

  “There are soldiers everywhere.”

  “They wouldn’t be a problem,” I said. I could defeat anything Invehl sent my way. Even the god probably wouldn’t stop me for long.

  She shook her head, angry about something. I tried to understand what she was feeling, what she was thinking, and I came up empty. How could she want to stay in the base? How could she want to let her captor get away with it and even thrive?

  “Alright, let’s try something else,” I said. I crouched against the wall opposite her bunk so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck to look up at me. “How are you doing? Are they treating you well?”

  “Fine.”

  “And before? Where did they grab you?” I hadn’t seen what life she was leading before she appeared to steal my prison from Bec.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She was behaving as though I was her enemy. Her time with Invehl had warped her, somehow.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I said.

  “You don’t really want to know.” Her words were a whisper I could barely hear.

  “I do. Tell me, please.”

  She didn’t say anything for a time and I let her think. If I had hurt her in some way then I needed to know so I could fix it. If someone else had hurt her I needed to know that, as well.

  “How long have you been alive?” she said at last.

  “A few years more than you. Not much, given how old we are.” I had won her hand when I was ten years older than her, but ten years was nothing if you measured your life in the thousands.

  “No, you’re not.” Now she looked at me and there was something there I never thought I’d see: hate. Raw hate.

  “What…I don’t understand?”

  “You spent most of that time in your damn locket.”

  “It’s your locket,” I said weakly.

  “You came out and cursed the world when you were summoned and the rest of the time you saw nothing, felt nothing. I lived through all of it, and it’s your fault.”

  It was like she was speaking a language I didn’t know. The idea that being alive was a problem for her was alien to me, so strange that my mind couldn’t process it.

  “You were alive thanks to me,” was all I could com
e up with. The anger on her beautiful face didn’t go away.

  “Endlessly, unbearably.” She was getting louder as she let herself speak, getting angrier. “I tried to kill myself when starvation wouldn’t do it. I dragged my emaciated body up a mountain and rolled off a cliff. Do you know what good that did me?”

  “You lived.”

  “I did, only I was so broken I couldn’t fight off the buzzards. And I was aware of all of it.” She stood, looking down on me. “I was captured in a war between two kingdoms that aren’t even recorded in the history books. They realized I couldn’t die and spent years trying to work out why, cutting me and burning me and drowning me. I only escaped because one of my torturers grew too old and learned sympathy.”

  “I wanted to be there,” I said. I couldn’t take the look she was giving me. It beat down on me and made me look away. I couldn’t meet her angry gaze.

  “You weren’t, and neither was anyone else. Do you know how lonely eternity is? Do you know how many families I’ve buried, when I couldn’t help myself but fall in love?”

  “I wanted to be there,” I said again.

  “What good would that have done?”

  I looked up at her, fighting her anger with my own.

  “No, Agmundr, really. What good would it have done me if you had been there? What would have been different?”

  “I would have taken care of you. I would have made sure you were fed and looked after.” I was standing and I didn’t remember getting up. “I would have been your family. Your protector.”

  “You don’t know what living this long does to you.” She stepped back, looking up at me with red eyes. “You wouldn’t have loved me, not after this long. You wouldn’t have remembered me.”

  The implication was there and even I could see it: she didn’t love me, not after all this time. She barely remembered me.

  “That’s why I have nothing to say to you, Agmundr. I have no idea who you are, not really. I’ve seen you fight and I’ve seen you kill, and that’s it. And you don’t know me, either.”

  I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I already had, but I couldn’t control the rage inside. I couldn’t keep it bottled up, not when it was so important.

  “I did this for you.” I was yelling and I didn’t care. “I didn’t ask for this either. You were dead and I found a way to save you, to keep you alive. Don’t tell me that was a mistake. Don’t tell me everything I’ve done has been wrong.”

  She backed away from my anger and my yelling until she ran into the bed. The room was tiny and there was no escape, for either of us. We stood together, quietly seething.

  Erindis closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When she looked up at me again she was calm and collected.

  “Agmundr, just do what Invehl asks. Get what he wants and stop fighting him. Do what he wants. Or you’re going to make him hurt me and I’m done with that. I thought this world was a better one. Practically no crime or disease, peaceful and calm, and then you ruined it for me.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “Just do what he asks of you. Please.”

  I waited for her to make sense and my anger simply grew. I was finally reunited with my love and she was a stranger to me.

  I was done. I gave a curt nod and left the room, closing the door carefully behind me before stomping down the hall. Soldiers got out of my way when they saw me, jumping aside to avoid the predator stalking their building.

  I took the keys from a soldier who had just returned from somewhere and stole his car, leaving the base and heading for the city.

  Chapter 13

  I slept the day away at ACDCs. Bec told me Roman would be visiting later. I stumbled into the back room and collapsed on the bed.

  I awoke to the sounds of violence. Someone was screaming and others were laughing. Wood cracked and glass broke, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to deal with it. I wasn’t sure if it was worth getting out of bed for.

  I moved anyway, pulling on my clothes and entering the bar. Three vampires turned as one to glare at me when I did. Bec stood behind the bar, out of breath and with a gun in her hand.

  “Leave, now,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with this yet. I needed more down time before crushing someone’s skull.

  “I told you he was here,” the leader said. He wore a ridiculous outfit of patched black silk and lace, with threads hanging from every seam. He wore makeup and had greasy hair that stuck out of his head at all angles.

  “Now what, geniuses?” Bec said. She put the gun down and leaned against the bar, waiting for the fireworks.

  “I will hurt you badly if you don’t leave,” I said. I didn’t think I put enough emphasis into it, though, because they didn’t start running right away.

  “Why are you here?” the leader said. Even his voice annoyed me. “This is our town and we don’t want you sticking your nose in.”

  “My nose? What are you talking about?”

  The other two were dressed the same, a man and a woman I could barely tell the difference between. They had knives in their hands and looked apprehensive. They weren’t running, though, which was a mistake.

  “Stay out of our business. We’re not going to follow your puppet king.”

  I had enough going on in my life that I didn’t need to be dragged into some political issue that had nothing to do with me. This was all a distraction and it didn’t matter that Invehl was involved somehow.

  “Alright, I promise to stay away.” I tried to make myself sound sincere but I could see they didn’t buy it.

  “You’re not welcome here,” the leader said. He drew a gun from his odd clothes and aimed it at me. It was comically large in his hands.

  “Fine,” I said. “You win. I’ll leave.”

  They didn’t know what to do with my statement and chose to ignore it. The handgun aimed at my head remained steady.

  I allowed the tattoos to burn as I reached out faster than they could see and snatched the gun from his hand. For him there was a moment when he had the gun and the next it was in my hands and pointed at his head.

  “That won’t kill me,” he said, a little less bravado in his voice.

  “It wouldn’t have killed him either, idiot,” Bec said. “And yet here we are.”

  I crushed the gun and dropped it to the floor. “Get out. Now.”

  “You should probably make an example of one of them,” Bec said.

  The vampires started eyeing the exit.

  “They’ll just come back with more next time if you don’t,” she continued.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. I looked each of them in the eye for a second. “Which one of you has to die?”

  They moved quickly, blurring as they ran for the door. It crashed into the wall with the force used to tear it open.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” Bec said. She put the gun back in the holster she kept under the bar. “They will come back.”

  I took a seat in front of her and shook my head at the bottle she offered. I had to go back through the gate and I wanted to do it with a clear head.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said as she poured herself a drink. For someone her age I thought she drank too much. She could drink more than most of the warriors I’d known.

  “My wife is back in my life and she doesn’t like me, but I have to save her anyway because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Also I am literally her slave.”

  Bec rarely smiled but when she did it made her quite pretty. I didn’t like that she was amused by my life, though.

  “Something funny?” I said.

  “You. Big warrior man with the power of gods running through your veins and you’re having woman trouble.” She laughed, something I didn’t think she did very often. “And you’re sitting at a bar, complaining to the bartender. It’s too good.”

  I didn’t see what was funny about it but her laughter lifted my mood a little. I grabbed the bottle from behind the bar and took a dri
nk.

  “There are a lot of things in this world to get worked up over,” she said. “A love interest isn’t one of them. There are plenty of fish in the sea and it’s all a numbers game. Don’t worry about it, things will be alright. Yada, yada.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m out of sage bartender advice, so I hope that did it for you.”

  She was still smiling and I liked it. It meant I hadn’t ruined her life yet, despite getting her kidnapped, stabbed, and beaten.

  “Where’s Roman?” I said.

  “He’s coming and he sounds irritated.”

  “That’s what he sounds like, though.”

  She laughed again. “Your phone has been vibrating up a storm all day.”

  She walked to the end of the bar and pulled a small cable from the bottom of the stolen phone before handing it to me. The screen told me there were twenty missed calls from Invehl.

  “That have something to do with why you need to talk to our hedge-mage?”

  I nodded. I shouldn’t have slept all day, I knew. I should have been out doing what I was told and getting more heartstones, but it took everything I had just to contemplate doing it again.

  “Want to tell me about it?” Bec said.

  “I thought you were out of advice.”

  “I can dredge more up if I have to. It might be a little lame, but it’s something.”

  I told her the story, starting when I was summoned and ending at the fight with Erindis. I didn’t leave anything out, and I tried to tell her how destroying the heaven had felt. There was no way she could understand, but I had to try.

  “So you’re just going to go back, over and over, and take more of these heartstones?”

  “That’s the plan,” I said. “Unless Roman has some insights.”

  “Why don’t you just punch this Invehl guy in the throat, pick up your lady, and scram?”