Warren Masters didn’t believe in hunches, gut instincts or inklings. He believed in the power of his fist, the steadiness of his aim, and the thoroughness of his training. Regardless, this thing wringing him from the inside out demanded he do something, and it wouldn’t leave him alone.
It had started about a week ago, a woman’s voice in his dreams, calling him to come to her. At first, he’d dismissed it, but the same dream every night had shaken him. The dream got stronger each time he had it, and the gut sense that he needed to do whatever this voice wanted grew with it.
He pressed his hot face against the cool glass of his grime-smeared window.
“What?” Warren whispered into his dingy room, “What do you want?”
Outside, a gaggle of kids made their way to school, backpacks sagging as they yelled at each other.
The nagging tug at his consciousness crept around the decrepit furniture and the stench of antiseptic to fill his room. It hounded him with the searing certainty that he was in the wrong place. This morning it rampaged through him, tightening his lungs and increasing his heart rate. Sweat covered his torso and soaked into his sweatpants waistband.
“What do you want from me?”
Warren was a logical man, a soldier. Surrendering to the compulsion, he flipped on the desk light. A map he’d bought yesterday concealed the desk’s scarred and stained surface. As he leaned over the map, the desk rocked under his hands.
“Where?” Jesus, if his neighbors heard him talking to himself, they’d think he’d gone around the fucking twist. They already went out of their way to avoid him, taking the next lift rather than being in one with him, walking as far away from him as the narrow hallways would allow.
With the escalating demand tying him in knots and growing stronger with each passing day, he might have lost his mind. If insanity lurked, then let it come.
His breath rasped, his heart pounded and the knot in his belly tightened around his breakfast of sausage, egg and chips.
He pinpointed his current location on the map, east and a little south of Manchester. Jabbing his finger on the spot, he waited. He breathed. In and out.
South. Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and still his index finger slid down the map to where the yellow of the land abutted the blue sea. A tiny black dot along the coastline drew him.
Air rushed into his lungs, and he took his first proper breath in hours. Peering at where his finger had stopped, he read the name. “Greater Littleton.”
Yes. His pounding heart stilled. Deep peace flooded him. Greater Littleton, a village he’d never heard of but knew without a doubt he had to reach.
Clear as the kids shouting at each other on the street below his window, a woman’s voice spoke. “Coimhdeacht. You are called.”