Camp NaNoWriMo July 2013 The Present Leads The Future Into The Past Chapter One Man On A Mission
THE PRESENT LEADS THE FUTURE INTO THE PAST
CHAPTER ONE: MAN ON A MISSION
I was throwing things into a bag when I realized there was someone standing in the doorway.
Slowly I turned but I already knew who it was.
My Naserac bounty hunting senses had come into sharp focus very recently. In fact, it was so recently that I really didn’t realize I was using them and, at that moment, had forgotten I even had them.
Less than an hour before, I had watched my mentor, Francis Lovell, having sex out in a forest clearing by a river. At the climax of the act, his wife, the partner he was having sex with, stabbed him in the chest, then her minions cut his throat and dumped his body into the river.
Now she was standing in my doorway. In His home.
“I’m giving you fair warning that I am going to kill you.”
Blond and tall and beautiful, Anna Fitzhugh raised her chin defiantly. Maybe she had been threatened like that before. “Thank you for the warning, child.”
Being over five hundred years old, she could get away with condescendingly calling me a child, I guess, even though I resented it like hell. “Why did you come here? To gloat?”
“No, to give you my own warning. You’re in grave danger; a danger he put you in but never explained to you.”
“You’re the danger he never explained to me.”
“He was looking into something which he should probably not have been looking into in the first place. Then he got distracted by you and the girl. He’s always had a weak spot for younglings. I’m sure you and your friends are going to continue looking into it but have a care.”
“Because you’re going to stop us? Like you stopped him?”
She smiled at me in the way indulgent adults smile at kids who they think are endearingly precocious. “You are so like Him. No wonder Fran was so taken with you. He believes that to help the new boy will be like helping the other one.”
I’d had enough of being condescended to and put my hand to the dagger I’d put through my belt after I‘d picked it up from where she had stabbed my mentor. “I’ll give you a head start.”
This time she laughed outright after glancing at the blade, but then did an odd curtsey to me. “Thank you, sweet boy. We’ll meet again.”
“Is that a threat?”
She shrugged and with a swish of her long skirt she was gone.
I forced my tense muscles to relax and dropped to sit on the bed, trying to regulate my breathing.
Not many days past, I had been walking home from work when I had been attacked, stabbed, and killed. I was dumped in a shallow grave and reawakened as a different being called a Naserac, more commonly called Bounty Hunters. Not long after that, my friend Syn was killed and also resurrected.
The man who rescued us both had gone through his own death over five hundred years ago. He was a Master Bounty Hunter, one of the oldest still around as far as I could figure out, which was why it shocked me so much that he was tricked by his wife so that she could murder him again. I figured it was some kind of sacrifice but I have no idea about any of that.
I am an orphan.
But now I have allies, people I care about who seem to care about me. They are now my family. I just had to finish packing and get up the nerve to somehow talk them all into coming with me on my journey for both vengeance and knowledge.
I had to find out who was trying to undermine those who were trying to do good. I had to stop them.
And I had to get my revenge.
I am a man on a mission. It means following in the footsteps of the man who dug me out of the earth and into a new life. There is no doubt that he would not approve of my real mission since it’s his wife I’ve vowed to kill. She is a beautiful, powerful witch and I have been told he loved her. That’s good. He can greet her when I send her on her way after him.
But first I will fulfill my obligation. I never shirk obligation.
We need to find out who is behind all this chaos.
We will.
Then I can get my revenge.
Avenge him.
~~~~~~~~
Light Tannian Fairy Chrystania Petal set a cup of tea down in front of her new lover Sara del Sol and sat down at her own place with a cup of her own. Now that High Council Member Merc Mason had charged their former mentoring group with finding out whatever Fran had been on to, they had a path to walk down but what direction that would take was unknown. She was as fond of mysteries as the next person but not when they involved the death of someone she had known and loved for centuries. It was such a surreal concept. Francis Lovell had been so much larger than life.
“I don’t understand any of this,” murmured Sara.
“It’s going to take a while before any of us figure it all out.” Chrystania took a sip of hot tea, thinking about all the recent losses and gains. “All of this is going to take time.”
“I just want to go to bed and get up in the morning with all this bad stuff just having been a very bad dream.” Then she thought a moment and looked down at her hands, fingers splayed, as if the could be of some help in trying to figure out what to do next. “But then we wouldn’t have gotten together.”
Chrystania took Sara’s slender hands in hers. “We all have each other. That will have to be sufficient.”
~~~~~~
Fading back into her own room, newly Awakened Naserac and budding witch Synecdoche Hearne had a lot to think about. Not too many minutes before, she had put her hand in and had sworn to look into a possible takeover of The Council which made rulings over all who didn’t belong to the human world. She made the vow to virtual strangers she had just met but had been through a lot with already. The only person in the house she knew was Chris Kelley. Friends since they were children, the two of them were now bound together as newly Awakened “embodiments of justice”. Not even sure what that meant, she wasn’t entirely sure she actually wanted to be one of whatever those were. Apparently, someone high up in the High Council agreed because there had been a ruling stating that no newly Awakened Naserac was to receive the training and mentorship they ordinarily would have gotten.
“Until further notice” could potentially be such a long time.
So she and Chris were screwed.
And she was doubly screwed because she was also a witch according to the people she had met. What that entailed, she had no clue but it looked like no one was going to train her in that either.
In fact, the very one she wanted to discuss it with had just threatened her friend Chris. When she had seen his hand go down to the wicked dagger he’d put in his belt, the one they had killed their mentor with, she had wondered if this new Chris she was seeing for the first time might actually try to kill Anna.
There was no way around this. If she wanted to remain loyal to Chris and the people she had just sworn an oath to, she would remain in the dark as to what being her entailed.
For a split second, she wanted to follow Anna, even caught herself in mid-motion of heading toward the stairs, but it passed and she knew where she belonged.
Not for the first time, she realized it would be nice to be able to be two places at once.
On the bright side, maybe that would turn out to be one of her powers.
If she ever found out exactly what those were.
~~~~~~
The Harbinger, who had been born ordinary human Dirk Rassis but was now a monitor of other supernatural and preternatural creatures, had just sworn to join the others in seeking who was trying to suborn the High Council. This was so completely off the reservation for a Harbinger that he had no idea what might happen to him. Not that he cared. Always a rebel, this new assignment he had taken upon himself was an exciting notion.
Not so exciting was the fact that one of his friends had just been a victim of human sacrifice and he and these remaining friends might end up hunted by the very being they had now been tasked to hunt. He wasn’t sure of what to think about that. Not knowing who you were hunting as they hunted you was never a good time.
The Harbinger liked good times.
He would just have to make this a good time.
Grinning, he left Fran Lovell’s house, went through the Gateway, and got on his motorcycle, taking off down the winding country road. He had a couple of things to do before they started the road trip he knew they were about to go on even if the others didn’t realize it yet.
As he flew past a small side road, he saw the mysterious Rider in black leathers who had been shadowing them leaning against the sleek black bike which was nearly, but not quite, out of sight. How nice. Company for the trip already.
Laissez les bon temps rouler indeed!
~~~~~~~
Tired of being the low man on the totem pole, Temple Grey had possibly just burned all his bridges. Dived off of the blazing timbers and into the river and was going up it without a paddle.
Maybe his family had been right when they had called him a drama queen because that had been a pretty dramatic way of putting his current situation. He’d actually hung up on the person who had given him the order to come home from his assignment.
At the time, the adrenaline had been flowing like that proverbial river and he had felt more like a man than he ever had before in his twenty two years of life. Now in the cold light of three a.m. things did not look so cut and dried, so black and white.
The Gathering had broken up on the news of Fran Lovell’s death and now the grounds were nearly deserted. He couldn’t get onto the grounds of the mansion his quarry was staying at so he had hidden just outside the gates of the Lovell Holding. He had seen the group without Francis go in and then he had seen Merc Mason come out with his two creepy little kids. After that, he had waited for so long he had decided to sit down and eat some of the jerky he had in his backpack, almost choking on it when The Harbinger strolled out looking like nothing bad had ever happened.
Harbingers were like that though, he had heard, but never having seen one before this one he couldn’t really see any difference between them and Bounty Hunters. Both seemed to be annoyingly interested in keeping people in line. Temple had enough people waiting to keep him in line. He didn’t need some hulking brute on a motorcycle to do it too.
Luckily, the two Awakened Naserac were the ones who would have to put up with that particularly huge Harbinger. Smiling grimly to himself at the knowledge that the Naserac had been ordered to not train any newly Awakened, he knew they would be at a huge disadvantage in direct contrast to everyone else. They were screwed.
Now Temple had to make sure he was not screwed as well.
Going out on a limb, he guessed the Harbinger would return and he would be able to follow them all in a group. If that didn’t happen, he figured the best idea would be to follow whoever was with the male Awakened. Or should he try to protect the girl who was also a witch? As far as he knew, there had never been a witch who had come back as a Naserac. Which would get him the most acclaim? The only Naserac witch or someone who was probably going to be after their Master Witch for the sacrifice of his mentor? The newly Awakened surely couldn’t have formed that close an attachment to Francis Lovell in such a short time could they have? It had been a matter of days for the male and only hours as far as Temple could tell for the female.
What to do, what to do?
If he believed in his own good luck, he would expect to see all of them walk out, get on a bus together, and leave him with no either or choices.
Temple Grey’s grandmother had had a saying about him: If it weren’t for bad luck, boy, you’d have no luck at all.
They would probably each go in a different direction in different vehicles.
He was so screwed.