Chapter Eleven

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Anger and shock became evident in Ann’s face as she stared me down. “No?” she yelled, her voice echoing in the claustrophobic alley. “You seriously can’t promise me that you’re not just going to go around killing folks?”

I raised my voice in return. “You honestly want to have this conversation out in the open and in front of your would-be assassin? Fine by me, let’s address your concerns! For as much as I may want to believe otherwise, it is evident to me that you are still a child. You deal in absolutes, and what’s worse, you think you have the right to demand anything of me. You either want to live, or you don’t, but what about me? You’re willing to let me fight this battle for you, but what happens when I arrive at a moment where it is them or me, hmm? What then?”

“There’s a hell of a lot of difference between you defending yourself and what you were about to do to this man right here!”

I sighed impatiently. “Yes, there is. But that’s not what you asked me for, is it? You asked me not to kill anyone during the course of our mission. Because you didn’t think about your words. Because even now, you don’t actually know what you want. That man could have just killed you, and that would be the end of all of this, wouldn’t it? No one would else would have to be hurt. And you know that you and I are only just beginning with this. I almost died once already. You picked me up off the ground. You have to know that there is plenty of pain and suffering to come, all so that you can live, and deep down you’re okay with that. I am too. I am willing to harm and be harmed for you, willing to do whatever I have to do for you, because of how I feel about you. But creator’s mercy, Ann! What if I had said yes, just to appease you? What if you had bound me from properly defending myself? Do you have any idea of what that’s like?”

Ann turned away from me at that, refusing the answer. I strode over to her, spinning her around by her shoulders to face me and gave the answer she may or may not have known. “No, you don’t. And you likely never will, gods willing. Because you, Ann Bancroft, are stupidly, beautifully, impossibly human. Congratulations, I hope it lasts.”

“What do you want me to say, huh?” Ann shouted back. “That I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through? I am. That I want to have anyone fight this battle for me? Because I don’t. I don’t know the right answers here, but I’m not going to just go along with... whatever this is!”

Ann pointed sharply at the unconscious body as she struggled to finish her sentence. I sighed heavily, suddenly feeling tired. “Listen, I don’t have time for this, and I don’t believe you’re going to get the answer that you want. So, this is the best I can do for you. I don’t want to kill anyone, I truly don’t. And I’ll do what I can to avoid taking a life, but I’m not going to make any promises. Especially not out here in the open like this. So you can come with me, or you can go home. Your choice. But the matter is closed for the moment as far as I’m concerned. Go home if you like. In fact, that might be the for the best. I don’t know that you can handle doing what needs to be done, and I can’t worry about keeping an eye on you, so, no more distractions.”

I turned away from her as I said it, not waiting for a response, and as I walked away, I didn’t get one. It was just as well. I really thought that maybe Ann could have handled this, that the two of us together could have figured this whole thing out, but she wasn’t up to the task. Worse, she’d begun to anger me, though at least in part, I was to blame. I’ve barely started to train her, and as my student, I’d treated her too much as an equal, not enough as a student. Perhaps that’s where she found the nerve to make demands of me that she couldn’t possibly understand.

I liked Ann. I liked her enough to put my life on the line for her and betray my principles to save her life. I liked her enough to not immediately put an arrow through Alistair’s heart for her. But for reasons I couldn’t fully grasp, I was on the verge of strangling her. If I was being honest with myself, I’d been off my game from the moment Alistair appeared. In my time I’d seen many things that people would mistakenly refer to as evil. What people usually mean when they say evil is frightening or violent or something otherwise showy. A rampaging orc can be brutal and dangerous, but it isn’t always calculating. Maybe it has a thought in its head, perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, it is a product of what it knows. Big, dumb, and strong; but not truly evil.

Alistair is evil. Everything he does, he does without regard for the lives of anyone but him. He lies with more ease than it takes him to breathe. And whenever he has had the chance to hurt someone, he has done so with glee. It could be physical, or it could be otherwise, it didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t even that that he liked to see others hurt, it was that he liked knowing that he could hurt someone deeper than anyone else could. He is sadistic in the most sincere sense of the word.

And maybe that’s what was getting to me about Ann. Even with the shroud of death hovering behind her, and even with everything I was about to put myself through to prevent that untimely death, she was still making demands of me. For the most part, I was willing to blame it on her youth and inexperience, but there was another part, much smaller, that said maybe she was treating me like I was the help. Like this was the only reason I was around. I didn’t believe that, not truly, but it was hard to shake. And maybe it was all just me, that I was just not doing the job of communicating how dangerous this all was for her.

Getting away was for the best, I thought, at least for the moment. If I was being honest, I couldn’t hear and see what I needed to while I was watching her back. Ann and I should have never ended up in that alley in the first place. And for that matter, it could have gone so much worse. What if instead of just watching, someone decided to put a knife into one of us in passing? I’d like to think I would have caught it in time, but would I? Already I was making my way towards the address revealed on our map, and I’d managed to spy half a dozen of the Abbot’s lookouts who had no chance to spot me, let alone any idea of how close I was. Wandering around Venice with Ann was drawing more attention to myself than a mother with a screaming baby in a crowded theater. This was more my speed. I still wasn’t sure what would happen when I got there, but at least I would get there quietly.

The Abbot’s house wasn’t anything I needed help in finding. The moment I’d seen it on the map, I didn’t so much as need confirmation or a closer look. I’d been here before, and even if I hadn’t, all you had to say by way of direction was to keep an eye out for the biggest and most obnoxious house in Venice, and you’d find it. It was long enough that you could have fit two moderate sized homes on the lot of land that he owned, and incredulously it was three stories tall and boasted a basement and the privacy of a high walled backyard, all of which was a rarity in the area. And still, even with this total eyesore of a house, it was easily forgettable the second you turned the corner. That’s just the way it was around here. All of the homes in the area were expensive, all of them were gaudy. Some were just a bit gaudier than others.

Broad daylight on a residential street was not what I’d call the ideal conditions for surveilling undetected. But like I said, I’d been here before, and thankfully the good people of Venice loved their trees. Well, the good people north of the canals who liked to pretend they weren’t a beach community, that is. And as I sat perched in one of the lusher trees on this particular street, watching the house, it was impossible not to recall my earlier experience here. The first thing that stuck out to me was that the Abbot always had a guard out front. Always. The nature of his guard was concealed, of course. At a glance, you would merely see someone gardening, perhaps meditating or a couple of members enjoying a cigarette together. But anyone who watched them for long enough would see what I knew to be true: If you crossed their threshold uninvited and they didn’t like your reasons, you might not make it back out.

There was no guard this time. No activity from the house that I could notice at all, actually. Highly unusual, given everything I knew about this place. The last time I’d been here, there was a minimum of three people watching the front at any given time, and that was to say nothing of the activity going on in the rest of the house. Abarta had sent me to watch the house some ten years ago. A teenage runaway had been caught up with the Abbot’s cult, and he thought they might be useful to his plans. I was to extract them if he decided they were worth the effort. He did not. I insisted on saving them anyway, and I paid for my insolence. Insolence was a fancy way of saying that I should have known better than to have an opinion of my own. I didn’t want to think about how I paid, and I didn’t want to think about what happened to that child.

No, it was best to shrug off that particularly disturbing memory and focus on the task at hand. I climbed down from the tree, still unsure of what to make of the absolute absence of activity around the house. If I hadn’t known better, I would think no one was home. But I did know better. I knew that the Battle Born was inside and I knew that the Abbot wouldn’t leave his precious home unguarded unless... did the Battle Born just kill everyone inside? That doesn’t match up with my working theory that the Abbot’s people had managed to capture her, but then again, not much was adding up at the moment.

I reached the ground and crossed the street without incident. There was nothing to stop me from entering, save maybe an alarm system or wards, but as far as I could tell, there were no signs of either. There are really two types of wards. The first being physical, like the sort that I’d used in my current residence. The upshot for that sort of ward was that really anyone could use them once they’d been created. In some faiths, it can be as simple as leaving some salt in the corner. I knew a pagan once whose ritual lasted an entire day and involved a large number of specific stones, candles, symbols, and a lot that I’m probably not remembering. As far as I could tell it was sufficient. Personally, I’ve found that getting a priest to bless a bit of holly did wonders. It was an old Celtic trick, and I’ll give you three guesses where I picked it up. The simple truth was that there was no one right method, and it really came down to the faith of the person doing the warding. I don’t know that the Abbot believed in anything beyond himself, but I have no doubt he could find someone to help him out if he wanted. Maybe believing in himself was enough. The downside to these wards, however, is that they were static and really only focused on pure evil. If you knew exactly what you wanted to be kept out of your home, there were options for that, but then again, that took more effort than most people were willing to put in.

The other option was to magically weave a ward. If you knew what you were doing and you were mean enough, you could hurt whatever you wanted with whatever you spell you fancied. Elana had recently started warding her bookstore with increasing severity against anything that was not human or elf. One day something was going to wander into her store, and it was not going to enjoy the ensuing fireworks display. From what I knew of the Abbot, he may have a bit of magical talent, but nothing close enough to weave a proper ward. A smaller percentage of people with magical talent than you’d think had the kind of power to make a ward worth taking notice of, and Elana was only able because of her rod.

So wards didn’t seem like a reasonable concern, and the only real way to find out if I was wrong was the hard way. That left a security system, and with no prep time to research if there was one active in the house or which one it was, I was left again to gamble. My best guess was that with everything that no doubt went down beyond his doors, the Abbot wouldn’t want the local police showing up for a visit. Maybe he had something that would alert him personally, but if he wasn’t already at home, where would he be?

It was at this point that I realized I’d walked right up to the front door without a thought for what to do when I got here. It was the middle of the day, not exactly ideal for breaking and entering. I could kick in the door, but I’d leave a busted door for any passerby to see. I could scale the side of the house, get a better look around, but there were a lot of windows on this street, and I’d have a hard time explaining that away. Picking the lock was an option as well, but again, I’d have to be quick about it. It was then that I considered, for just a moment, what Ann would do in this situation. And with no immediate options otherwise, I did just that.

I tried to open the front door.

Somehow, I didn’t like the fact that the door was unlocked. I felt my skin flush hot at the annoyance that I was now for the second time in as many days walking into a situation with the same person who by all rights I didn’t measure up to in a fair fight. This wasn’t how I liked to work, but Alistair had put me in this position. I knew walking into this house was a stupid idea, but what else could I do? Everything was time sensitive. Ann was dying, at least one of the other bounty hunters knew where she was, and every moment that passed meant my chances got worse. This was the same situation as the abandoned mall. I knew where the Battle Born was and I had no choice but to follow her and hope for the best. Well, not entirely the same. I knew firsthand now how strong and fast she was. I knew that she was prepared to kill me. But more importantly, I knew that I could hurt her as well.

I slipped inside before I could change my mind, quietly closing the door behind me and took a minute to study the room, now that I’d finally made it inside. The expansive living room felt and looked more like a new age spa than any kind of home. In place of any traditional furniture, the room was dotted with rolled out thick, comfortable looking mats and plump, circular meditation pillows. There was no television or any other form of entertainment, which wasn’t a surprise. There were altars against the walls, end tables with every inch of table surface covered in various crystals and the occasional odd succulent. And at the end of the room, on the other side of the tall glass door windows, was a lush green garden and an outdoor room at the far end of the yard, a wooden structure with sturdy white curtains and pillows not unlike those in the living room.

The small chirp of the radio was the first confirmation that I’d walked into a trap.

The second, of course, was the emotionless faces of the cult members revealing themselves outside in the yard, from around corners in the house, and the six-and-a-half-foot tall meat slab of a man who slammed open the front door behind me. Looking past him, I could see he had something of a twin close in tow. I set my feet and caught his wild swing, twisting my hips and rolling my shoulders as I did, sending him spinning across the room with a crash.

Here’s the thing about us elves. Or at least, the thing about me and the sort of elf that I am. Anyone who has ever seen us fight is quick to assume there must be something supernatural about us. We’re stronger, faster, and more agile than most humans. And to a certain point, that’s true, but we’re not quick to correct anyone who wants to give us more credit than we’re due. I can lift more than the average human with ease. And when it comes to running and leaping, humans just couldn’t compare. This is to say nothing of my dexterity. I was born nimble in a town where children could often cartwheel before they could speak. All of this just meant that in a fair fight with the average human, you’d do well to bet on the elf.

But it was becoming more evident by the moment that I wasn’t in a fair fight, and certainly not with one person. More faces were starting to appear by the moment, and any second now there wouldn’t be a way out.

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