Summoned to Rule Read online

  Summoned to Rule

  by

  C.L. Walker

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Authors Note

  Excerpt: Summoned to Die

  Chapter 1

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  The voice called to me, dragging me from my moment of darkness. Images of Erindis imprisoning me again flashed before my mind’s eye, but the voice I heard wasn’t hers; it was the voice of young boy.

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  The world appeared around me, blurry and indistinct. Three people waited for me, and the space we were in was large and covered.

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  Everything snapped into focus. Bec stood beside the angel who guarded the gate to heaven in Fairbridge. Before them stood a child, and in his hand was the locket, my prison.

  “Go,” the angel said softly to the boy.

  The boy stepped forward hesitantly, slowly completing the circle around me while he craned his neck to look up at me. He returned to the chalk circle on the concrete floor and lowered his head, mumbling the words that would finalize my arrival.

  We were in another large warehouse, like the one Erindis and Invehl had summoned me to. Rusting metal tanks and pipes were everywhere, and we stood in a small clearing that had once been a loading area of some kind. Metal tracks for the vehicles carrying whatever had been stored or made in the building were sunk into the floor.

  “Where is she?” I said. Erindis had betrayed me and imprisoned me, intending to use me for power. My last vision had been her in triumph, getting into a car and driving away.

  “She’s busy,” Bec said. She approached me with clothes draped over her arm. “Her guys are on their way, though. We have to hurry.”

  I examined the people who had summoned me while I got dressed. Bec looked the same, so I knew I hadn’t been gone for too long. I could spend a thousand years in the locket and not notice it, but her hair was the same length, dirty blonde and tied up, and she appeared to still be in her early twenties.

  The angel would have looked the same no matter how much time had passed. He wore an old man’s dead body and a black trench coat, his angelic power keeping both pristine.

  The third member of the group, and the one who had summoned me, was a young boy. Younger than ten, with short, dark hair, he looked at the locket in his hand with no comprehension or curiosity. His face betrayed no complex emotion.

  “Where are we?” I said when I’d pulled the coat on to ward off the chill. “How long has it been?”

  “We’re in the ass-end of Canada,” Bec said. She handed me a pistol in a holster I could clip to my belt. “And it’s been six months.”

  Six months. There had been shorter gaps in my existence, when a master needed to keep me under wraps before revealing me to some enemy, but not many. Most of the time when I was returned to my prison it was for many years or centuries. This was the third or fourth time I’d come back to the same century.

  “Where is she?” I needed to face Erindis and deal with her before she did something more than betray me. She was nothing like the woman I remembered, nor the goddess she had once been. She was bitter and hateful, ambitious and scheming. I needed to speak to her and finish what we’d started.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the angel said. “Her men will be here soon and they won’t be happy.”

  In a past life I would have laughed off his concern, but I was without the magic that normally roared through my tattoos and if I had to face anything more than a handful of armed men I would be in trouble.

  “Angel,” I said. “Why am I here?”

  “Buddy,” the angel said. He took the locket from the boy and took his hand as he started walking toward the entrance to the building.

  “I don’t understand,” I replied.

  “He said you told him to pick a name,” Bec said. She put her hand on my back and directed me to follow, which I did. “He picked Buddy.”

  “Buddy?”

  “I told him it was stupid.” Bec wasn’t smiling – she rarely felt any emotion worth smiling about – but I could tell she was as happy as she ever got. I thought she was happy to see me.

  “You wanted me to pick something outrageous.”

  “I wanted you to pick something angelic. Or at least a little bad-ass.”

  “Buddy suits me, I think. What do you think, Agmundr?”

  I didn’t know what to say, and I had no opinion on his chosen name. I was confused and I hadn’t been given orders yet, and it was making me angry.

  “What is happening here?” I said. I kept walking, watching the angel – Buddy – holding my young master’s hand and helping him maneuver around jagged, rusty metal.

  “Your delightful wife took you away,” Bec said. “We decided you belonged back home, so we fetched you.”

  “You stole the locket,” I said. “From Erindis.”

  “And her army, which is a thing she has now.”

  “Army?”

  We stepped out of the building into a biting wind. Snow had fallen recently and the fields beyond the rusting buildings and the parking lot around them were covered in fluffy white snow. There were mountains in the distance, also covered in white.

  “She inherited Invehl’s men,” Buddy said. “In the absence of a god to follow they appear to be doing whatever she says.”

  There would be more to it than that, I knew. Men of faith didn’t jump ship just because their god died; I had slaughtered entire pantheons of gods and their followers had continued to worship them for as long as their civilizations existed.

  “How did you get past them?” I said. Buddy was an angel and could take a lot of punishment, but Bec was human and the boy – whatever he was – wasn’t going to stand up to one soldier, let alone an army of them.

  “They weren’t expecting us to come from inside the house,” Bec said, giggling at some reference I didn’t know.

  “House?” Buddy said, sparing a glance over his shoulder as we continued walking beside the enormous building. “We are in an abandoned metalworks, not a house.”

  “The call was coming from inside the house,” Bec said, expecting anyone there to understand what she was saying. It would be from a movie, probably. She gave up and looked at me. “Buddy found a heaven gate in their compound.”

  “Lucky,” I said.

  “No,” Buddy replied. “I believe they intend to use it for something, once they work out how to traverse it. I suggest we close it as soon as we are free.”

  My friends had rescued me. They had broken into a secure fortress – albeit one formed by a dilapidated collection of warehouses – and somehow rescued me from my wife.

  I felt something I had on
ly felt a handful of times in the thousands of years I had been alive: grateful. And happy, as though the knowledge of their fondness for me was something I had been missing in my life.

  When your life is made up of constantly punching things you don’t agree with and yelling at people who annoy you, finding anyone who actually liked you was rare. Finding people who would risk their lives for you was…it had never happened to me before.

  I felt the gate before I saw it; an itchiness behind my eyes, tempting me to close out the world and seek it out. I did so as we walked, closing my eyes and searching the darkness for the entrance to a heaven.

  It was small, smaller even than the one in Fairbridge. It spun slowly in the darkness, invisible but for infrequent flashes of mother of pearl. It was within another building, a small office on stilts above the cracked concrete.

  “Who is the boy?” I said. I had been summoned by children before – everything had happened to me at some point in my long life – but never by one so young, nor so incurious as to what he was doing.

  “That’s a longer story,” Bec said. “But it’s cool, you’ll like it.”

  “He’s an oracle,” Buddy said. Bec scowled at him but he was oblivious. “We thought it best if your new master wasn’t someone who might have an agenda that put you or others at risk.”

  “So you gave me to a child? Why not Bec again?”

  Bec answered. “James has seen the future and it scarred him, so he doesn’t talk anymore. He doesn’t do much of anything unless he’s told to. We thought it would be a perfect fit and give you some autonomy.”

  Buddy interjected at the entrance to the office with the gate in it. “And Bec refused to do it.”

  “That too,” she agreed.

  Bec and I waited while Buddy led the boy up the stairs. I still thought there was more to the story; there always was when someone summoned me. But I was happy and I was about to go to the city I’d started thinking of as home.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Bec said. She squeezed my arm and I didn’t mind her touching me.

  A bullet flew between us and buried itself in the office. I spun to face the enemy and found a man in a familiar uniform running our way, his pistol raised and firing.

  “Get inside,” I said, pushing Bec toward the office.

  “You can’t fight him,” she said, resisting me. “He’s not just a normal guy.”

  “It won’t matter,” I said. I ran toward the enemy, a battle cry breaking free.

  Chapter 2

  The soldier fired again and missed. The bullet went wide and he tossed the gun aside, realizing it was pointless now that I was on the offensive.

  He moved faster than a normal man, showing me what he was; he was one of Invehl’s super soldiers, enhanced by the god to act as his agents. It seemed Erindis had inherited them along with the rest of his men.

  Neither of us slowed down as we approached one another. He was superior to me in strength and speed, and he knew he had nothing to fear. I was just stupid, and had never backed down from a fight.

  He attacked, throwing a punch that should have taken my head off. I had seen the way he was running and I expected it, dodging to the side and punching him in the stomach.

  It was like hitting a wall, but it threw off his momentum and he veered to the side and collided with the wall. His strength threw me off as well, and I spun away and fell down.

  He was ready before I managed to rise, but he waited for me and didn’t do anything until I was up and in a fighting stance.

  “I was hoping I’d get to be the one who eventually killed you,” he said.

  “I doubt your mistress will be pleased.”

  “Then she shouldn’t have sent me.”

  He attacked, crossing the distance between us in a moment. He was right-handed and his attack was easy to predict. I rolled with the punch, grabbing his arm and trying to pull him down with me. On the ground I hoped I’d have a better a chance of beating him, taking his speed and maneuverability out of the equation.

  He didn’t go down with me. He was too strong and he let me fall, then followed up by trying to stomp on my leg. I moved in time but he was still coming, still stomping and advancing faster than I could retreat.

  Before the end of days I would have been flush with power by now, the tattoos covering my body giving me more than enough to crush the soldier. Now I was simply an exceptional human, and he was far greater than I could hope to be.

  My best chance was to be smarter, and that was going to be a problem. My fighting style wasn’t precise or well thought out; it was mad and chaotic, and it wouldn’t work against someone who could always move faster than me.

  I rolled to the side, pulling the pistol free as I did. I stopped on my back and fired without aiming. The bullet took him in the side and stopped his advance, but it didn’t seem to hurt him. Blood slowly leaked from the hole but he was still standing and now had a slight smile on his face.

  “You think you’re going to get some of my blood, don’t you?” he said. He stepped back and took up a fighting stance. “Come and get it.”

  If I could touch his blood I could take some of the strength in it, some of his enhanced life-force. It would power my otherwise dormant tattoos and give me a fighting chance. He knew that, though, which would make it more difficult.

  I got to my feet, still aiming the gun at his head. He didn’t seem concerned, and I wondered just how fast he could move. The other super soldiers had been as fast as me at my best, which meant at any moment he could move so quickly that I wouldn’t even be able to see him. Why he wasn’t already doing that was a mystery, but it meant unless I caught him by surprise I wasn’t going to hit him again.

  This time he waited for me to attack. I was fine with that because it gave Bec, Buddy, and the kid more of a chance to escape through the gate. At least they would be safe and the locket would be out of enemy hands. There were worse outcomes to losing a fight. I put the pointless gun away and prepared to die.

  “Agmundr,” Bec said, running toward us. The soldier didn’t bother to look in her direction. He wasn’t afraid of her; he had no reason to be.

  “Get through the gate,” I said, keeping my eyes on the enemy. She didn’t slow down, let alone stop and turn around. “Run away.”

  “I think she wants to help you,” the soldier said. “I think she has a present for you.”

  I risked a glance and saw that Bec did have something for me: in her hand she held a vial of blood. She was bringing it to empower me and give me a fighting chance, but she wasn’t going to reach me if the soldier thought she was a threat.

  “Throw it and run,” I said, pleading with her to listen to reason.

  For once she did as I told her, winding up and throwing the vial in my direction. Her aim was off but it was close enough that I could reach it before the super soldier.

  Or so I thought. He was suddenly in its path, his hand up and waiting for it. He snatched it out of the air and crushed it in his fist.

  “Oh well,” he said. “Guess you’ll just have to do this the old fashioned way.”

  Bec hadn’t retreated, and now she was a lot closer to danger. I had to do something before he turned on her.

  I attacked, running at the man before he could think of a plan. I faked a right hook while preparing to kick his shin and break it.

  He didn’t dodge. My fists smashed into his face and he didn’t move. My shin kick landed and did nothing.

  His forehead slammed into the bridge of my nose and pain shut me down for a moment. All I could see or feel was the agony of the attack; something important was damaged and I couldn’t think for a moment.

  When the fog lifted I was on my back and he was standing over me. He reached down and grabbed me by my shirt, lifting me into the air and tearing the material.

  “Why is everyone so scared of you?” he said.

  I tried to scratch the hand that supported me but his skin was unbreakable. His other hand was held behind him,
keeping the blood covering it away from me.

  “Pathetic,” he said, echoing a comment I had made more times than I could recall. He was me, at one point in my life; brash and confident, with enough power to make sure nobody showed him the error of his ways.

  I kicked him between the legs and it didn’t hurt him, but it made him look down despite himself. I used the distraction to draw the gun again and put it against his face.

  He moved faster than I could see, grabbing my hand and pointing it and the gun away from his face. He squeezed as he did it, intending to crush my hand.

  The blood coating his skin was now smeared across mine, and the tattoos fed on the angelic power quickly and began to glow red.

  I slammed my forehead into the bridge of his nose, returning the favor. His face caved in and his blood covered my face. The tattoos fed again, their glow brightening. The look on the soldier’s face was now a mix of pain and the first stirrings of fear. That was the right response to facing me.

  I tore my gun hand free of him and slammed the weapon into his already damaged face. He let me go and tried to back away, but I wrapped my hand around his throat and kept hitting him, driving the pistol into the mess that had been his face over and over. He was fast and he strong, but I was seven feet tall and I had longer arms; no matter how much he tried to grab my free hand and the punishing gun, or tried to strike at my face in desperation, all he did was wave harmlessly as I kept attacking him.

  I dropped the twisted and broken gun as I dropped the twisted and broken soldier, both crashing to the concrete and remaining still. The tattoos healed me as I turned to find Bec still standing where she’d been before.

  “I told you to run,” I said. I wanted to be angry with her, and I would have been had the fight gone another way, but I couldn’t.

  “That’s the second time in an hour I’ve saved your life,” she said as I approached. “You should be really nice to me from now on or I might not turn up the next time you’re about to get your ass handed to you.”

  The soldier groaned as he started to heal. I knew from experience that the healing process could hurt almost as much as getting hurt in the first place.