Summoned to Defend Read online

  I could hear sirens approaching, the sound of this world’s authorities coming to investigate. I didn’t have time to ponder my state or what had become of me.

  I turned and ran.

  Chapter 3

  I walked the streets in a kind of daze. People passed around me, turning to stare at the giant in their midst, but they barely registered on my confused mind.

  It was approaching midday and people were leaving their gleaming towers of glass for lunch, but the crowds melted away when I needed them to. They always did; I was intimidating even when I tried not to be, and I suspected the look on my face was enough to make some cross the street rather than walk near me.

  Something was wrong. Once I was summoned to defeat an army of ten thousand men that surrounded my master’s castle. I was sent out alone and without a weapon because the lunatic who owned me thought it would make a more powerful statement. He didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that there would be nobody left alive to report the statement he was making.

  When the old cleric had etched the tattoos on my skin he’d warned me that there was no way out of the bargain I’d made. The blood would bind me to the world until the end of days, even as it gave me power enough to do anything I was ordered to do. He’d allowed me to rescue my wife, as agreed, and then put me away in the locket. My existence had been an endless stream of summoning and violence since, with no change to the basic rules.

  And yet I walked the street, as powerless as any of the people surrounding me. My tattoos were barely visible and though I could feel them shifting on my skin they were powerless, the characteristic red glow gone.

  And yet the world continued. The end of days, the time I’d been waiting for when my wife returned to smite the world, clearly hadn’t happened. Humans walked the earth and their grand constructions still covered every inch of the natural world. Nothing had changed.

  I stopped beside a vehicle that dispensed food for tired workers. A line had formed as everyone waited their turn and they were scowling at me as I stood silently at the front. Nobody made a move to confront me, of course.

  “What’ll it be?” the sweaty serving man said. He looked down on most of his customers from within the truck but the additional height of the vehicle only brought him to my eye level.

  “That,” I said without conviction. I pointed to something Fletcher’s memories told me was a cheeseburger, and not a good one in my master’s opinion.

  “Ten bucks.” The man wrapped it in thin paper and handed it to me. When I took it and left without paying he didn’t say anything.

  There were hollow men on the street. I spotted one standing on the corner beside the tallest of the downtown buildings, draped in a large dark coat, which only emphasized his gaunt, dead flesh. He surveyed the people passing and made notes in a small book. What he hoped to achieve was beyond me but he seemed intent on doing it and didn’t notice when I quietly crossed the street to avoid him.

  The cheeseburger was greasy and dripping with fat, salty and in need of heating. It was glorious, the kind of thing I would actually have paid for if Fletcher had thought to give me money along with my clothes.

  Another hollow man sat in a car parked illegally before a subway station. I paused at a cross street and watched a policeman approach, only to turn back when the angel waved him away.

  I was starting to get a picture of the world I’d been summoned to but there were too many pieces missing. I had a long way to go before understanding how I could fight back.

  A thought occurred to me, drifting into my consciousness like a sweet scent on the wind. The blood-tattoos no longer had their power, and they were the only reason I had to fulfill any master’s orders. When a master told me to do something I had to do it, or the tattoos would force me to, using my body like a puppet until I did as I was ordered. I could interpret the words the men used – if a master told me to handle an enemy I could decide that “handle” meant to give the person a great weapon and point it back at my master – but I had to obey.

  I knew where Fletcher’s daughter Rebecca was. I could feel her out in the enormous city like an itch in my mind, and I knew that my apparently random wandering was taking me closer to her. Eventually I would happen upon her and fulfil my orders.

  Or would I? The thought was tantalizing, impossible. I could simply choose not to, couldn’t I? With the blood-tattoos powerless there would be nothing but the nagging need in my mind to force me to find her, and I could treat that like any other addiction I’d had in life and simply ignore it.

  I stopped at an intersection and looked to my right. Rebecca waited for me down the street, unaware that an ancient creature of violence was being sent to protect her.

  I looked to my left and felt the tingle in the back of my head objecting to my lack of focus. I would usually interpret my master’s orders to answer that need, rationalize my abandonment of their wishes by twisting their words. I would usually wrangle a moment’s reprieve before returning to my slavery.

  I decided not to bother, not to make my deceased master’s order mean something he hadn’t intended. I decided to choose my own path and to see what happened. The tattoos were dormant, their power somehow lost to the world.

  I stepped away from Rebecca and toward a different path.

  Nausea, muscle pain, as though I’d been poisoned and lay close to death. I collapsed in the street and heard a car screech to a stop beside me. Pain from the bullet wound in my side flared, washing over me and threatening to swamp my mind. I couldn’t see or hear anything, couldn’t even feel the rough road beneath my cheek.

  “I’ll go to her,” I growled through clenched teeth. The pain vanished as though it was never there.

  I stood and glared at the world, swinging from concerned bystander to concerned bystander. They flinched away from my anger but I felt no joy at their reaction. The fear they felt at my irrationality only fueled my rage.

  “What do you want?” I called out to the sky and to the elder gods who watched over everyone in indifference. “Why must you test me?”

  People were frantically making calls and I knew what was about to happen; Fletcher’s memories let me know that soon the police would come to protect the innocent people who felt threatened by my outburst.

  For a moment I considered waiting for them, considered fighting them and ending it all by their hands. Individually they were no match for me, but in numbers and carrying firearms they would eventually win now that the power in the tattoos had abandoned me.

  I turned back toward Fletcher’s daughter and started walking instead. I told myself that I wanted to get to the bottom of the situation, that I wanted to learn what had changed in the world. In truth, I knew why I couldn’t give up and it was the same reason I’d always had: Erindis.

  As I was bound to the locket and kept a slave, so Erindis – my wife – was bound to me. Where I spent my time on earth killing, she spent it free. As long as I remained so would she, forever young; my gift to her and my reason for being.

  I left the crowd behind me and no police gave chase, though I didn’t know what I would have done if they had. I was too distracted by the shadows twitching unnaturally in every crevice and beneath every tree to focus on the mundane.

  “I thought you might end it all.” The voice was faint and barely audible, formed of the random background noise of the world and focused only on me. Seng, a god I had killed without thinking in the pursuit of a long dead master’s orders.

  “Why is it always you?” I said, keeping my head down and speaking softly. “Why don’t the others ever come to torment me?”

  “Even in death everyone needs a hobby. You are mine.”

  Seng was a minor god from a minor part of the world, a deity conjured by a single village to help against wolves and bad weather. He was nothing and had put up no fight when I’d arrived to kill him. After death, though, he’d made it his mission to try and destroy me, meager though his remaining powers were.

  “Weak and helples
s,” Seng continued when I ignored him. “I like you this way, facing the world like any other man.”

  “I am not any other man.” In my agony I had felt for the wound in my side and knew it was healing, albeit slowly. Whatever had happened to the power of the blood on my skin hadn’t changed some of the fundamental truths of my endless life.

  “Arrogance is your greatest gift. Truly, it’s the thing you excel at most.”

  I tolerated Seng as I tolerated the ghosts of others whose lives I’d ended; it seemed fair, though it hadn’t been my decision to kill them. I felt sorry for them, in a way.

  “Heading to do your master’s bidding,” Seng continued. “Like a good dog.”

  “Leave me be.”

  “I have nothing better to do.” Although I could barely hear him I knew his tone well enough to know that he was pleased, and that if a shadow could smirk he would be doing so.

  I continued down the street with my head down. I cursed Fletcher for not giving me some money so I could wave down a car, and I cursed myself for not thinking to ransack his remains for anything except the locket. I had been too eager to start fighting, with no thought to what would come next.

  “I wonder if you’ll ever be the same again.”

  “Go away,” I replied. I was nearing Fletcher’s daughter and I didn’t want her to see me talking to myself.

  “I truly thought if you could be summoned you would return with your power intact. It is a conundrum.”

  I ignored him but his words lit a fire in my mind. I lived by the words of others, and I had learned early in my life to pay very close attention to what was meant as well as what was said.

  Seng had known the blood-tattoos might be powerless, or he wouldn’t have needed to speculate on whether their power would be there. This meant he knew what had caused the problem, which also explained why he had appeared so early; normally he waited until I was in the thick of battle before appearing to try and distract me. He’d been checking to see if he was right, observing his conundrum.

  The problem with the tattoos, therefore, originated outside my summoning. For a moment I had contemplated a scenario that led from my master dying in my arms to me being powerless, but this meant it was something else.

  I was standing in the mouth of a tiny lane that led between two modest shopfronts to the bar Rebecca owned.

  “Let’s see how you deal with this, Agmundr,” Seng said before his voice faded away.

  I shook my head to clear it, ignored the ominous words of the dead god, and went to meet my new master.

  Chapter 4

  I sat at a table in the corner. The bar – ACDCs – had been empty when I arrived but was now filled with people. The sun had set and the mortals had come to find some fleeting entertainment.

  Rebecca moved about the small area efficiently, returning empty glasses and bits of trash from the few tables to the bar before going back to serving behind it. She was a small woman, fine and athletic, and I watched as the men in the room followed her progress as intently as I did.

  Why the daughter of a man like Fletcher, with access to a fortune and all the options in the world, would be working at a place as run-down as ACDCs was beyond me. Fletcher’s memories offered only the same observations – she was stubborn and headstrong, argumentative and free spirited – but gave no clue to the circumstances that had led her to her lowly position in life. I realized where the gap in my knowledge came from; Fletcher hadn’t known his daughter very well, and had struggled with the same questions. Though he’d had her followed and he’d worked out some of what she was doing besides running the bar, she had been a mystery to him.

  “When do you think you’ll talk to her?” Seng said, his voice made of the background static of all the patrons talking. “You’re going to freak her out if you just keep staring.”

  “Everyone is staring.”

  A performance was about to begin on the small stage at one end of the room. Rebecca left the bar in the hands of Mark, an unassuming young man who clearly had feelings for her, and dashed to the back of the bar and the door there with “Staff Only” emblazoned on it. She disappeared within and a moment later the lights came up on the stage.

  A man in his fifties carried a guitar up the steps and took a seat on a wooden stool before pulling the microphone closer and greeting the crowd. I stopped paying attention as he began his first song.

  Rebecca returned to the bar and yelled to Mark. “I’m going out for a smoke. Yell if you need me.”

  Mark nodded and watched her leave, ignoring a woman waving to get a drink. Another man – forties, overweight, bearded – stood in the corner of the room and followed her out.

  “Could be a coincidence,” Seng said.

  I couldn’t risk it. I rose and followed the man out. I hadn’t paid yet but I’d watched others do the same without paying for their drinks and I knew Mark would trust me.

  Night had fallen and the lane outside the bar now looked more like an alley, a place where a young woman like Rebecca shouldn’t be on her own. She sat on a crate against the wall opposite the door and stared at her phone. I took up a position closer to the main road and tried to be inconspicuous, though I was pretty sure I was failing.

  The man approached her and she looked up, a forced smile appearing immediately.

  “Mind if I hang out?” he said as he crouched beside her. He didn’t wait for an answer, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offering her one. She shook her head and went back to watching her phone.

  I knew why she was sitting outside the bar by herself, lying about going for a smoke break. It was something Fletcher had known too, after having her followed when he received the first inkling that they might be in danger: she was waiting for someone to buy something off her. Fletcher had believed her to be a drug dealer but I could feel the magic coming off her from the moment I stepped into the bar.

  She had an artifact of some kind, or a charmed item, and she was waiting for her buyer. I’d watched her do it twice already. Someone would approach her and hand her an envelope and she’d pass the item back. She would then wait a few minutes and go back inside.

  What might be illicit about the sales wasn’t obvious, but it also didn’t matter. She was my new master, though she didn’t know it, and she could do whatever she wanted. It did give me a lead on what might be threatening her though. I couldn’t see why that threat would have targeting her father first, but I had time to work it out.

  “So, do you have a boyfriend?” the man said.

  Rebecca shook her head without looking up.

  “How much do you make in this dive?”

  I could see where he was going and I didn’t think it would end well for him. I’d already seen her turn down a number of men inside who weren’t about to offer her money and I was confident that she would know how to handle this guy.

  She looked up, obviously ready to tell the man to bugger off, but her buyer arrived before she got the chance. He stepped past me, a tall man in a fine suit. I could tell what he was but the illusion he wrapped himself in was masterful.

  The vampire stood quietly while Rebecca and her admirer rose to meet him.

  “Is this man bothering you?” the vampire said eventually, a smile in his voice, if not on his face.

  “What’s your problem?” the man said. He was a little drunk and clearly thought there was competition for his affection.

  “It’s my boyfriend,” Rebecca said quickly, grabbing the vampire’s arm and pulling him further down the lane.

  The admirer sniffed and scratched his balls, then shook his head and went back inside.

  I moved closer to Rebecca and the vampire, trying to overhear what they were saying. It didn’t sound as easy as her previous clients, as though the vampire was trying to haggle and she wasn’t interested. He towered over her and the blood-tattoos began to squirm at the potential danger.

  I moved closer still. Normally I would have had no problem reaching them in time if something
went wrong, but without the tattoos powering me I wasn’t sure if I could beat a vampire’s speed.

  “I don’t care what’s going on,” Rebecca said, her voice rising enough for me to make out. “That’s your world and your problem. I have customers.”

  “Don’t,” the vampire said, all the threat he needed packed into one word.

  Rebecca looked away, glaring at a wall for a moment before turning back to him. “Do you know what will happen if I skip on my orders?”

  “That isn’t my problem. As you said, it’s your world, not mine.”

  “Bastard.”

  “I will return in a few weeks,” the vampire continued. “When things quiet down and he moves onto something else we’ll go back to our normal arrangement.”

  Rebecca didn’t respond right away. She paused as though weighing what she wanted to say next, and the vampire let her. He seemed to know what was coming and had decided to give her enough time to hang herself.

  She took a deep breath and looked up at him, mustering her confidence. “I’ll tell your boss.”

  The vampire moved, his arm a blur. His hand was suddenly on her throat and she was a foot off the ground. I was running toward her before consciously realizing what was happening, but the vampire was ready for me.

  He lashed out with his free hand, slamming it flat against my chest and sending me back to the wall I’d been leaning against, clear across the lane. I crashed into it and slid to the floor, my breath coming in short, painful gulps.

  The vampire turned from me to the next threat. Mark had emerged from the bar as if on cue. He stood five feet from the vampire, his hands balled into fists and a determined look on his face.

  The vampire tossed Rebecca at a dumpster where she crumpled to the floor, unmoving. He turned to face the young bartender and smiled.

  Chapter 5

  “I know she’s pretty,” the vampire said. “But you guys are being silly.”