Summoned to Defend Read online

  Summoned to Defend

  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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Excerpt: Summoned to Destroy

  Chapter 1

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  The words brought me back to the world, lighting it up. Fire in absolute darkness.

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  I hated the words, yelled at me by countless arrogant masters over the eons. The words only ever preceded death and destruction, and kept me from the only I thing I’d ever truly wanted.

  “Agmundr, vochex.”

  I opened my new eyes to find a distorted image of the last man to hold my prison in his hand before me. Fletcher. He seemed younger, somehow, as though in the time since our last meeting he’d reversed the damage the years had done to him. He was covered in blood and had a broken bone jutting from his chest. I smiled at the sight.

  He shuffled toward me, groaning his agony as he fought his dying body. He seemed determined to complete the ritual and bind me to his service. This was normally smart – I had a habit of killing the foolish men who summoned me – but in his case it seemed pointless. I wouldn’t have to work out how to end his life; someone had apparently done it for me already.

  He continued around me in a near perfect circle, blood pumping from a severed artery and drawing a line where he passed. I held my tongue and examined him, probing the puzzle he presented.

  I’d last been summoned in the late twentieth century to kill Fletcher, and he had inherited the silver locket that was my eternal prison when my master died. He knew better than to summon me again, and yet there he was, dragging himself through the forms of the ritual even as it killed him.

  It took me a moment longer to work out what was happening. This wasn’t the Fletcher I knew, the old man who had stepped between me and his family to keep them safe. This was his son, the brave and stupid young man who had tried to kill me. He was almost the same age as his father had been that night, and he bore an uncanny resemblance to the old man.

  “Your father knew better than to call on me, boy,” I said. He arrived back at a hastily drawn chalk circle and stepped inside, ignoring me as he whispered the final binding beneath his breath.

  When he was done he looked up at me with red eyes, a haunting desperation on his face that I hadn’t been expecting. Perhaps it was the haughtiness I usually saw in the expressions of my masters, or perhaps I simply hadn’t been alive long enough yet, but it silenced me in a way nothing the humans ever said usually could.

  “I need your help,” he said, his voice barely louder now that the ritual was ended.

  With the words came the knowledge I would need to fulfill his order; details of the world I would face outside coming directly from Fletcher’s memories, everything he knew that might be pertinent to his wishes. I came from a far older world and I would need the knowledge if I were to succeed.

  “I don’t think I can do anything for you.” I stepped forward, tensing muscles in sequence as I did, testing out the body he’d selected for me. It was no different to the last one, a hulk standing seven feet tall and built to fight dragons with my bare hands. Not that different to my natural body, before I was bound to the whims of petty men.

  “They’re coming.” He bent over and coughed up blood, but he hadn’t asked me for anything specific so I held my place and let him finish. When he was done he continued. “There are clothes for you in the corner.”

  The door to our small room rocked on its hinges as someone threw themselves against the far side.

  “Who is your enemy?” I moved quickly to the garments in a pile buried in the darkness. The room looked to be some kind of storage area, filled with boxes of chemicals and cleaning devices. I pulled on the clothes as Fletcher marshalled his strength to answer me.

  “I don’t know. Mostly thugs.” He coughed again and this time I heard something hit the floor that was more solid than blood. He continued quickly, sensing his end approaching. “There’s something else as well. Something more than human.”

  I finished putting on the clothes – good boots, jeans and a shirt, with a jacket to cover a pistol in a holster under my arm – and stood before my new master. He was fading fast and the blood-tattoos covering my skin were itching urgently to do something to help him. There was nothing I could do, though, and they would have to wait.

  “What do you want, boy?” I couldn’t help him; my gift was delivering death, not life. I could no more heal his broken body than I could fly.

  “Protect my daughter,” he said, his breath coming in long, desperate gulps. “The…thing threatened her. It said she was next.”

  With these words the last of the knowledge I would need settled into place: I was in the city of Fairbridge, where his daughter owned a bar; she was rebellious and stubborn, always defying her father. Fletcher’s great wealth had done little to protect him from his own flesh and blood.

  I shoved the rest of the revelations aside for when I would need them. Someone was hammering on the door and I didn’t need Fletcher’s memories to know what would happen to them.

  The dying man tried to step forward and stumbled. I caught him before he could fall.

  “Why are they after you?”

  “I don’t know.” He was on the edge, I could see, about to start his journey to the nether. He had moments left.

  The tattoos that bound me to my life squirmed on my skin, eager to begin the bloodshed.

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes closing. I shook him and they fluttered open again, but I didn’t think he was seeing me anymore. “I don’t. Ten, twenty? They don’t matter. The thing matters.”

  “I will kill them for you.” My words weren’t meant to make him feel better, or give him a taste of the vengeance I would wreak for him. I was simply stating a fact.

  “Do whatever you think you need to.” He was slipping away and I knew no amount of shaking would bring him back again. “Just protect my daughter.”

  “The locket.”

  “It’s hers.”

  He slipped away, the last of his lifeblood pooling on the floor at my feet. I put my hand into his inside pocket and removed the silver locket before dropping his remains to the floor.

  My prison hung on a simple chain, often replaced over the years. The locket itself was indestructible but people never thought to protect the chain until it was too late.

  The hammering on the door grew louder as more men joined in the effort. They would be through in seconds.

  My tattoos were driving me crazy in the eagerness to act, but they hadn’t begun to glow yet. That would come later, if I needed them to bring their power into play. I probably wouldn’t need them anyway.

  I poc
keted the locket carefully and faced the door. My breathing was even and my mind was clear. Enemies awaited me beyond the doorway and I knew what I was going to do to them. I smiled at the images that crossed my mind.

  The door shattered inward. Through the glare of the light outside the little room I saw three men, guns in their hands. They hadn’t raised them, sure that they were facing a broken man on his way to death.

  The red fog fell as I leapt from the doorway.

  Chapter 2

  I passed the first man without harming him, focusing on the second and third. I grabbed one gun hand and crushed it against the warm metal he carried even as I lashed out and drove my fist into the face of the other, crushing bone and killing him.

  I turned back to the first man, spinning the man whose hand I’d broken into him and driving them both to the ground. Before either could react I stomped out their lives.

  I had a moment to check my surroundings: an empty hall with old carpets, strips of light in the ceiling. The sound of enemies fast approaching, the jingle of their guns giving them away.

  Fletcher hadn’t ordered me to kill the men. Usually my masters told me to punch and crush until their enemies were gone, but Fletcher had simply told me to go.

  I would avenge him, of course. It was in my bones to do so, even if I hated my imprisonment. It was why I had been chosen for the imprisonment in the first place; I was a man of violence long before it became my curse. Even if Fletcher hadn’t wanted me to kill these men I would.

  I walked down the hall, one of the fallen men’s guns in my hand. I would save the one my master had given me for later. I knew from my brief time in the twentieth century that they were powerful but limited. I knew not to rely on them.

  A man dressed all in black stepped around the corner before me and I put a bullet in his eye. I held to my regular pace, walking calmly toward them as the first body fell.

  “Come out, old man,” a gruff voice called out. “We won’t hurt you anymore, we swear.”

  My pulse sped up at the sound of him laughing, not because he thought he was taunting an old man but because he was doing so over the body of a fallen comrade. I was a soldier, and he wasn’t taking this seriously enough.

  A head poked out, a man trying to quickly catch a glimpse of what was coming. I sent a bullet his way and started running as he pulled back, unhurt.

  “Shit,” the gruff voice said. “There’s someone else here.”

  “Yes,” I said, loud enough that they could hear me. I was almost at the corner. “There is.”

  The man stepped out and leveled a rifle at me, but I was already firing, anticipating his action. I’d been doing this a lot longer than my enemy and guns didn’t change the situation that much. The first bullet hit him in the chest, the second in the neck.

  As he fell, blood fountaining from beneath fingers already clutching at the hole in his throat, I reached the corner and rounded it.

  Five men were bunched up in preparation for an assault. All wore the same full black outfit, some kind of flimsy armor in place to protect them.

  I slammed the first man’s head into the wall, crushing it. The second got a bullet in his face as he instinctively backed away from me. The third began to raise his rifle as though it would help him at such close quarters. I snatched it from his hands as I glared at him.

  “Idiots,” I said, raising the weapon and clubbing him to the ground with it.

  The fourth fired, his bullet tearing through my side. Pain exploded from the wound but I’d been ready for it; the damage would heal quickly once the tattoos came alive, and the pain wasn’t enough to slow me down. I kicked the man and his flimsy armor didn’t keep his chest from collapsing.

  The fifth man fell beneath the dying body of the fourth and I stepped on the hand desperately gripping his rifle, crushing it.

  I dropped into a crouch, further grinding his shattered bones beneath my boot. “How many more?”

  He began to speak, to utter some profanity I wouldn’t recognize. I punched him in the kidney and he screamed.

  “How many?” I said again.

  “No one,” he replied when he got his breath back. “Just the hollow man.”

  “Hollow man?” I said. I knew the term, knew what it used to refer to thousands of years before. But he couldn’t mean them. They were all lost, trapped in the thousand heavens and forever cut off from the world.

  The man smiled through his pain. “He’s going to make you pay.”

  I rose and kicked the side of his head, killing him.

  Blood ran from the wound in my side and I took a moment to acknowledge the pain. It was a strange experience, one I hadn’t felt in a long time. The barely visible tattoos that covered my skin – etched into me with the dying blood of an elder god – should have healed me already. I wasn’t worried yet, but it was curious.

  I walked on, listening for the creature that had stolen the name of an ancient angel. Whatever the hollow man really was, I was looking forward to putting it down.

  The hallways remained empty as I strode forward, following the tiny green exit signs helpfully dotted around. Whatever this building was normally used for it was now devoid of activity; perhaps Fletcher had cleared it before summoning me, or perhaps his killers had done so. It didn’t matter.

  The final doorway stood before me, sunlight streaming in from outside. The sounds of the city – sounds I remembered from my last summoning and from the memories Fletcher had given me – echoed through the opening. Beyond I would find life, and potential collateral damage. I would have to be careful.

  I stepped out as soon as my eyes adjusted to the glare and surveyed the street beyond. I was on the sidewalk beside a small street, vehicles parked down its length. A large black car had stopped in the middle of the narrow space. Beside it stood two men with rifles aimed at me. Between them stood something I had never thought to see again.

  He wore a heavy coat despite the weather, his bland and lifeless features turned toward me, his eyes closed. Even at that distance I could feel what he was before he opened his mouth, but when he did it was confirmed.

  “Agmundr,” he said, his voice a spear of power that rattled my skull. “It has been a long time.”

  It couldn’t be. The hollow men were trapped, their heavens locked from the outside and nobody able – or willing – to let them out. Only the gods should have been capable, and they’d been dead a long time. I killed them myself.

  “How are you here?” I said. I walked slowly toward him, ready to activate my reluctant blood-tattoos and start the fight that was surely coming. I ignored the men and their pathetic weapons.

  “Things have changed while you’ve been away.” The angel’s voice grated on me, sending sharp pains down my spine with every syllable. “Your great work has been undone.”

  “Impossible,” I replied. I stopped five feet from him, my fists at my sides, ready. “The elder gods care nothing for your kind, and the lesser gods are dead. Your master’s ghosts haunt me still.”

  He stepped forward, no sign of humanity on his still, corpse-like face. The laugh that came from his throat was a death rattle.

  “This world is not the one you left, Agmundr. Things are moving again.”

  I took the step that would bring me within striking distance of the angel and smiled when he gave up ground, retreating to the false safety of his human defense.

  I looked down on the hollow man, the shell of a faithful man sacrificed to allow this angel to roam the earth. “However you got out, I have no quarrel with you.”

  I was done fighting gods and their minions, done sealing the thousand hells and the thousand heavens. It was a lifetime ago and it hadn’t been my idea to begin with.

  “But I killed your master.”

  I didn’t like the hint of amusement in his voice, the sound of someone with more confidence than he should have had. I had fought entire hosts of beings like him and risen victorious; he should have been cowering before me.

 
Something was wrong.

  Suddenly the lack of action from the blood-tattoos was worrying. Suddenly the thought that I had been shot went from mildly annoying to life threatening. Suddenly I found myself standing before an angel, unsure if I should be running.

  “I didn’t like him anyway,” I replied. I was backing away and I hadn’t noticed.

  “But he was your master, Agmundr.” The hollow man followed my retreat, the odd dance amusing him almost enough to bring some emotion to his stolen face. “You have a duty.”

  “What’s happening?”

  I blocked the angel’s attack, my hands rising to catch his strike with ample time to spare. But there was a strength behind the move that made my own seem like that of a child. His fist hit my face and suddenly I was staring up at the sky, the hollow man staring down at me.

  “This is so disappointing,” he said, slowly shaking his head. “I was looking forward to this reunion.”

  I shut my eyes and tried to will the tattoos to life, tried to infuse them with my rage until they took on their own life and gave me the power I needed. Ohm’s ancient blood coated me, I knew, and I could use it to face any enemy.

  But I couldn’t, and no matter how hard I tried nothing was happening. The tattoos, which had bound me for an eternity and given me the strength to defeat anyone, were now dormant.

  I opened my eyes, prepared for the end. But the angel had gone back to his car and his human soldiers were already inside, preparing to leave.

  I got to my feet while the hollow man waited, leaning on the rear passenger door.

  “Why am I still alive?” I asked. In his position I would have taken my revenge with glee, but the angel seemed disinterested in the notion.

  “You’ll die all on your own, barbarian.” He shook his head and slipped into the car, closing the door behind him. “There are a million ways to die in this world. You aren’t strong enough to survive anymore.”

  “You’ll regret this,” I said, but there was no conviction in my voice, no confidence in my threats. I was nothing compared to this being, not without the blood-tattoos.

  “I look forward to seeing how you deal with your weakness. I really do. Enjoy your life, berserker.” The window rose and blocked him from my sight, and the angel drove away.