by Zoe Forward
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
About the author
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Dawn of a
Dark Knight
by
Zoe Forward
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Dawn of a Dark Knight
COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Zoe Forward
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Debbie Taylor
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Black Rose Edition, 2013
Print ISBN 978-1-61217-721-2
Digital ISBN 978-1-61217-722-9
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To my mother who has always believed in me
even when I didn't believe in myself.
Foreword
Pharaoh Hotepsekhemwy was but newly seated upon his throne when his empire plunged into darkness. Terror and death covered the land in the wake of daemons summoned by zealots of dark magik. Hotepsekhemwy pleaded with the gods to intervene.
Moved by his prostration, Horus the elder himself, the exalted God of Light, selected ten of the fiercest human warriors to protect the Human Realm from evil ones. With sacred ceremony, these warriors became the Scimitar Magi. However, the gods withheld knowledge: whereas their souls were granted eternal existence, their bodies were to suffer death, the ultimate human frailty. Reentry unto physical body was nigh never immediate, but at the determination of the deities.
That be not the only condition unrevealed. When blessed with physical reincarnation, the courageous magus was burdened by a stark deficiency of previous life memory. And, thus, having no instruction to guide him with regard to his granted preternatural empowerment, he was left to struggle for significant time. So say we praise the gods for their generosity of eternal life? Or curse them for their deceptive and capricious natures?
Translated in 1710 A.D. from the Thutmose Treatise by the fifth-generation Prime Scimitar Magus Asten Hanacek
Chapter One
Ashor jolted awake with an eyes-wide holy hell as his car plowed into a telephone pole. His unsecured body did a header through the windshield onto the gravel shoulder. A side roll down the rough embankment ended with a splash land in a few inches of ditch water.
With a frustrated snort, he yanked several long, dripping, black strands from his face. The scant stars in the dark sky playfully winked at him between the clouds.
“You guys getting a kick out of watching this?” he yelled at the sky.
Some warrior for the gods he was. Reeking of ditch refuse, whacked out from lack of REM sleep, and bouncing between lunacy and sanity on a regular basis were not ideal qualities for the Prime Magus, the leader of the daemon-killing protectors of humankind. Maybe the gods would revoke his superhuman status.
Right. If they intended to release him from this hell, then he wouldn’t be lying in a ditch.
The warm wetness tickling his eyebrow and the all-too-familiar coppery smell meant he’d sprung a leak. Based on the bottle-rocket exploding in his brain, there was probably a river delta of leaks. They’d heal, and probably within hours.
Priority number one: Get out of this ditch before a Florida gator thought he’d make a good chew toy.
For a second his mind went foggy. He shook his head. Don’t pass out.
Blackout oblivion equaled disaster. That’s when crazy happened, and humans died. And that violated one of the gods’ rules: No killing humans unless in self-defense.
Waking to a bloody nightmare with dead people surrounding him was one scenario he planned to avoid tonight. He’d consumed enough caffeine pills to kill an elephant less than an hour ago. You knew they wouldn’t work. He’d pushed himself too far beyond the max. Seventy-four hours into a no-sleep bender—a point when no drug or caffeine OD had any hope of keeping him in the land of awake.
He would do anything not to kill. To have some measure of control over what happened when he conked out. In his defense, all his past victims had been the enemy, the ones that summoned daemons—the Hashishins.
He fought to sit upright. The world spun like a carnival ride with a guaranteed puke-fest ending. His visual field dimmed, but the threat of going blackout homicidal had his body surging a double shot of adrenaline. Time to call for an assist.
He pawed at his black cargo pants’ pockets, coming up empty. Damn. Cell was in the car.
Getting up the steep embankment required finger digging. Within yards of the car, he collapsed, overwhelmed by the whirling in his brain.
Move. Your. Ass. His body rejected the command. Stay awake.
He feared killing an innocent. Who knew how far he’d go when the blackout insanity hit. Time to admit to the others he needed help.
The blackout episodes were a nasty side effect of too many life-threatening battles with hellish daemons, the Orc-like caricatures of long-dead humans obsessed with dark magik that some Hashishin had summoned back into the human world. Daemons emitted a corrosive evil that slowly eroded a magus soul’s energy. When he exhausted that inner élan vital, the kem-seki—the growing id-based darkness lurking in his mind, the state that took over during blackouts—would own him. He’d Turn into a monster little better than those daemons the gods mandated he execute. That time looked to be coming soon.
Suicide?
Tried it. And failed.
That failure had nothing to do with lack of follow-through. He figured since he wasn’t quite immortal he could eventually find something that would work. But it turned out the gods put a little fuck-you into his contract, making suicide impossible. Apparently, only a daemon or fellow magus could take him out. None of his fellow magi would step up and offer him a suicide assist, at least not right now. Not until he Turned completely.
The solution? Self-imposed insomnia. The downside was shit like this. Falling asleep at the wheel was unacceptable. He loved the supercar whose front end was now wrapped around a phone pole.
Happy New Year.
Time to buck up. This was the price he paid for his life, even if it hadn’t been his choice, at least this time around. At some point millennia ago, he had vowed his eternal soul to do the daemon-kill thing. That meant every time he was nixed in the Human Realm, some god jammed his soul back into a new body to start all over again.
With a roll, he pushed up only to see sparkles light up his visual field. “Bloody hell.”
****
Ashor’s lids popped open. Above him a plastic pink flamingo went triple-count. Then back to single, and multiplied again.
Throbbing pain gripped his skull. Pain he could handle. It was nothing new.
He yanked the lawn ornament out of the ground and chucked it. With a cheek swipe, he removed the pine needles adhered to his face. The unfamiliar, poorly manicured suburban backyard belonged to a dilapidated, early-eighties doublewide—a tribute to crappy eighties engineering. A POS sedan sat cock-eyed in the drive. Its front left tire rested on an unkempt flowerbed as if the driver had been a piss-poor parker. Or rushed.
His left forearm burned. Rotating it into view showed three knife lacerations deeply bisected one of his more intricate blue hieroglyphic tats. The bleeding had long since stopped.
Great, he thought sarcastically. Blackout amnesia again.
A detailed area scan found one body a few feet away. The human lay sprawled face down at an angle that suggested a cruel death. The guy’s arms had several half-healed linear lacerations in a pattern distinctive for spell blood-letting, a common practice amongst dark-magik casters. He crawled to the guy and moved greasy hair off the back of his neck. The concentric circular symbol tattooed at the V of his neck confirmed him to be an Order of Assassins Hashishin. Not a higher-up. Not enough rings in the tat. Probably a Dais or new initiate. The body was a bloody mess of knife cuts. Not a loss to the world and definitely a relief that he hadn’t killed an innocent. But he’d fucked up again. Another black hole in his memory. Another gruesome murder.
He collapsed a few feet from the dead guy and gazed sightlessly at the now starless sky. All he wanted was out. For over a century, he’d lived by a doctrine of discipline, leadership, and cogent action. These past few months of losing control at random had been pure hell.
Fuck daydreams. They were for retirement-plan wusses who sat in high-rise offices all day, drove family sedans, and denied anything out of the norm existed. These were the ones he was supposed to protect. He had responsibilities.
His ridiculously brief indoctrination from man to magus over a century and a half ago gave him little prep for the intensity of this life. The Egyptian gods informed him his soul belonged to them. He’d vowed eternal servitude long ago. They gifted him with supernatural powers and specified a few rules. Human to super-warrior in five minutes. No instruction on how to use the new supernatural abilities came with the deal. With no memory of previous lives, he’d been a virtually immortal screw-up for decades. Now that he’d figured out how things worked, he was a master at avoiding the one thing he desired most. Death.
Retina-scalding light lit the backyard. Time to get going since someone had just hit the flood lights.
The light source moved close.
An echoing, otherworldly voice ordered, “Get off the ground, Ashor Vlahos. This pity party is over.”
“Bloody hell. Now I’m hallucinating,” Ashor mumbled, throwing an arm across his eyes. There was no change in the eye-numbing radiance.
A glowing hand clamped his wrist, prying the arm off his face. Its fingers melted into his skin with the scalding intensity of boiling oil. He jackknifed up, roaring. Futilely, he yanked against the soldering vise grip like a fish on a hook.
The glowing entity released without warning.
Ashor fell on his ass. He scrambled like an uncovered crab away from the radiant being. Momentarily he glanced at his burning wrist to watch in repulsed fascination as the divots of digit impressions filled in black and coalesced into a tattoo of a black eye.
The Eye of Horus. A sign of divine protection.
He squinted to see into the brilliant face of what was probably one of the original members of the Egyptian pantheon. One of the oldest gods in existence.
“Horus?”
“I have been called many names. That name to which you refer is pronounced Hàru. Horus sounds crass.”
“Aren’t you guys only able to enter the Human Realm if we do one of those asinine—I mean, long summoning ceremonies?” Ashor used his hand to shield his eyes against the radiance.
“Some make rules to dictate their actions, like your handler, Ma’at. Now there is a goddess that loves to lay down new edicts. I do not care much for rules. The others do, though. And you have certainly broken one of those recently, have you not?” Shimmering gold eyes darted to the dead human.
“It’s not like that piece of shit is a loss to the world. If you’re here to punish, then get on with it. I’m not in the mood to kiss your ass like Ma’at requires we do.” Kill me.
Horus chuckled. “We will simply reincarnate you, if I send you from this life. I find you far too entertaining to release from your mess right now. It also matters not to me if you kill Hashishins. Their death simply means you have created a new daemon to run around in the Middle Realm.”
“Why are you here?” Ashor caught Horus’s critical look. Not good. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Retrieve the akhrian.”
“You tell me who and where our healer is and I’ll go get him.”
“You know exactly who the akhrian is. We gave you that information years ago. Waiting has weakened all of you and dwindled your number to eight. You are in danger of losing your healer. The Hashishins threaten this one. If they kill this akhrian, it will be a few decades before we can arrange another one to enter the Human Realm.”
Protective instinct surged. Ashor ground out, “She is not the akhrian.”
Horus sent him a condescending grin. “It is time for you to accept what is meant to be.” In a millisecond, the god disappeared.
Ashor sat blind in the abrupt darkness for a few seconds. He rotated his left wrist. His watch indicated he had less than an hour to make his meeting.
He fingered the still burning Eye of Horus, now a permanent resident on his forearm. That god had been real.
Gods did not do personal visitation. The honor he should feel was absent. He’d been doing this long enough to know the gods were not into altruism.
Was the sky-god’s visit only about the fact he hadn’t recruited the akhrian in a timely manner? Maybe she was in danger. His pulse picked up. Apprehension clamped his gut.
He had last laid eyes on her over a decade ago. She appeared out of nowhere to rescue his tortured carcass from an Order of Assassins prison on the eve of their coup de grace execution ceremony. Then she disappeared into obscurity. Yet he always knew where she was. With a little focus, he could find her essence. She clearly wanted nothing to do with them. For saving his ass, he’d heeded her wish to stay away, thinking her safe. But her protection was his priority.
He allowed himself to feel for her, something he’d classified as an off-limits activity years ago since it was addictive. Touching her essence was like snorting top-tier narcotics—pure, hard, and powerful.
Within a second he felt her spirit. His body jolted. She was close. An surge of exhilaration blasted through him a second before he tasted her fear. Then he felt them. Hashishins were near her, threatening her. Rage squeezed his chest.
He jumped up. More humans were going to die tonight.
As he rounded the corner of the mobile home his shitkickers skidded to a halt. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled as the smidgen of hope the others didn’t know about his hunt-and-kill episodes died.
Javen waved a hand through the busted supercar’s windshield and whistled.
“I thought Ashor loved this car. He left her running in this neighborhood?” Nate asked while kneeling to view the car’s front bumper. “He had a frontal collisio
n. Must’ve gone through the windshield.”
“I bet that sucked,” Javen replied in his crisp British accent. He twirled his favorite serrated dagger with an eerie smile. Three one-inch diagonal inked scars coursed from Javen’s forehead to chin. Another spanned the circumference of his neck, all the result of a nasty daemon strike decades ago. The relaxation in his massive frame indicated he’d given his knife a workout, something the cranky century-old Brit hadn’t been allowed since the others voted him off daemon-killing duty a few months ago.
The threat of Javen Turning, of the kem-seki taking over and changing him into an insane creature with no moral compass scared the shit out of the others. But not him. Several good magi had seen the lethal end of his blade when they Turned. Not a duty he took pride in. But this was the screwed-up way of things.
When they voted on Javen’s status Ashor had said let-him-fight, whereas the other six voted no-way. Democracy won. But none anticipated the outcome.
Javen spent most of his time when not in the gym drinking, shooting up, or smoking weed. Or everything at once. Drugs had but a dulling effect on them, which meant, on bad days when drugs and hard liquor weren’t enough to suppress Javen’s need to fight, he pounded a magus into oblivion. But not the Prime. None challenged him with that kind of bullshit.
Ashor sauntered to the car. Both magi head-swiveled with slack-jaw oh-shits. So, they hadn’t wanted to be caught tailing him.
“You guys just in the area?”
“Something like that,” Javen replied. “You look like blood-covered shite.”
“Busy night?” Ashor pointed at two SUVs parked a hundred feet up the dirt road. Blood decorated both cars like an exploded strawberry daiquiri. He estimated at least half a dozen dead bodies littered the lawn nearby. How did Javen manage to stay clean?