Shadow Knight Read online

  “How’d you know it was me?” she asked. “Most’d never think to suspect me.”

  “I had a hunch,” I told her, trying to catch my breath. I opened the wallet to see if she’d been true to her word—and she was. A few twenties and two hundred dollar bills remained in the fold, along with my credit cards, I.D., and the punch card I’d been saving to get a free sandwich at the shop down the street from my apartment.

  “You left the bills but kept, what, seventy five cents in change? What is that, the chasing-you-down tax?”

  She eyed me curiously, ignoring my question. I noticed that her eyes were a brilliant blue, like the ocean at dawn.

  “You’re dressed kinda funny, you know,” she said, giving me a once over. “Are you some sort of traveling bard, or something?”

  I laughed, not sure if I was supposed to be in on the joke.

  “No, but I make a pretty good druid in D&D,” I replied.

  She didn’t laugh. Apparently, this renaissance fantasy world I’d woken up in didn’t have nerds. Go figure.

  “You know, I could say the same thing about your clothes,” I added. “Are you a real nun, or is that just an outfit you wear so no one suspects you’re a pick-pocket?”

  Her brows furrowed down, and she opened her mouth to reply—but before any words could come out, a loud banging interrupted her. A door had been thrown open down the alley, and a band of obviously drunk-as-hell assholes came pouring out, joking about stealing a pig from the pen beside us.

  As soon as they saw the woman, however, they changed their tune—the largest guy nudging his friends and directing them over to us. One of them was still holding a giant wooden flagon of what I could only guess was mead. Or ale. Or piss, from how it smelled.

  “Look what we have here…” the largest man said as his friends surrounded us. The woman and I backed up into the wall. My heart began to pound—suddenly, this strange world didn’t seem so fantastical anymore.

  If I died here, would I die in real life?

  I didn’t want to find out.

  “Mind your business, ruffs, and I’ll mind mine,” the nun woman said confidently. “We don’t need knights sniffing around down this way. Move along.”

  The men laughed, and I felt my blood go cold as they each produced a weapon from their tunics. Out of the five of them, there were two pointed daggers, an actual double-bladed sword, and a real fucking iron mace. The leader alone held no weapon—but his giant stature made me hesitant to face him. He cracked his knuckles menacingly, smiling down at the nun.

  I glanced at her, expecting a damsel in some serious-ass distress, but the look on her face was one of…excitement? That couldn’t be it.

  But then she reached into the folds of her nun habit and pulled out a badass looking sai, the hilt curved and shining silver, the blade pointed and sharp.

  And she unleashed.

  All I could do was stand there and stare for a few seconds, watching in absolute awe as this nun faced off against five attackers, all gunning to kill her. In one swift motion, she stabbed the point of the sai through the nearest man’s chest, taking him down instantly as the dagger clattered from his hand and onto the ground.

  As the leader lunged at her, she kicked him hard in the stomach, making him stumble backwards while she backed into a man behind her. I thought he'd get his arms around her before I realized she’d angled her sai under her armpit at the last moment, stabbing the man in the side before he could strike.

  With two men down, she somersaulted across the dirt floor of the alley then jumped up onto the rickety wooden frame of the pig enclosure. The animals continued to eat at their trough, oblivious to the fight going on behind them.

  The man with the sword ran at her next, but the nun jumped clean over his head, flipping through the air and landing on her feet behind him while he slammed clumsily into the fence. The wood shattered on his impact, and he fell face first into the mud and shit, sending the pigs squealing. He tried to push himself up, but the nun jumped onto his back with both feet, slamming his face back down into the mud. Before he could wrestle out of her grip, she’d knelt down and slashed her sai across his neck, leaving him to bleed out in the pigsty.

  That left the hulking leader and his right-hand man, a tall, mean-looking bastard with a squinty eye and a mace. He swung the mace around, spinning it and showing off while the woman stared at him unimpressed, a splatter of blood and splotches of mud now staining the front of her habit.

  His first blow was controlled—he was smart enough to cover his abdomen, which was more than I could say for his friends. The nun met it expertly with her sai, however, countering the attack and spinning both weapons away from her with a loud shing. The tall man stumbled backwards, regaining his footing and circling the nun, whose footsteps were quiet and graceful, always staying on the opposite side of him.

  It was obvious the man intended to lead her right into striking distance of his leader, and she knew it too—every time he stepped too far to the left, she would meet him, angling her sai toward his chest and forcing him to retreat, keeping the now-open pig pen behind her—although the pigs seemed too scared to actually try to escape.

  Finally, the mace-man, fed up with the dance, struck first.

  Their weapons met with an echoing clang, causing the pigs to squeal and snort. Back and forth they parried, the man grunting with the effort while the nun pursed her lips in intense focus. The mace swung down over her head, and I thought he had her—until the nun somersaulted out of the way at the last moment, catching the man at the ankles and pulling him to the ground.

  She jumped on top of him, but he knocked the sai from her hand and into the pig pen before she could strike. She still had the advantage on top of him, however, and I watched as she scooped dirt from the ground and rubbed it into his eyes and mouth, temporarily disabling him while he spat and coughed and she lunged for her weapon.

  In the second she got her hands on the sai, he managed to open his eyes, jumping to his feet and throwing himself on top of her, meaning to tackle her into the mud. But she was too quick—in the last possible moment, she turned around, thrusting the sai’s blade upwards and into his stomach. He jumped straight into the blow, a strangled gargling erupting from his dirt-stained mouth as the blade sunk deep into his gut.

  With my back pressed into the stone wall, I stared at the scene with wide eyes, forgetting I was actually present and not just sitting at my laptop watching a particularly exciting medieval battle YouTube clip.

  The giant leader, faced with the death and injury of his merry band of assholes, ran at the nun with a loud growl, wrenching her up from the mud with both hands and dragging her out of the pig pen while she struggled against his grip, her sai still buried in the mace-man’s stomach.

  “You’re a fiery one, aren’t you, my lady?” the man growled, squeezing her face roughly in one giant, dirty hand. “I think I’ll take you back to my homestead and teach you some manners. A woman should really know how to please her master, don’t you agree?”

  The nun, rather than waste breath with a reply to that, bit one of the man’s fat sausage fingers, causing him to yelp with pain and flip her around so his large arm held her against his body and his other hand gripped her by the hair. They faced away from me, apparently counting me out as a threat as I’d basically just stood there like a useless idiot for the entire fight. But the disgusting words he said to her made my blood boil, and I knew I couldn’t just stand there and watch while the Less-Than-Friendly Giant dragged her back to his cave to do God knows what.

  Looking around, I saw the beat-up sword of one of the injured men lying on the ground. I stepped off the wall hesitantly. The giant man squeezed the nun tighter as she kicked her feet into the air, trying to wrench herself from his grip.

  “Hold still, darling,” the man said. “Let me get you home—I can take this fight right out of you in no time.”

  That was the last straw. Hardly thinking, I picked up the sword, the hilt still warm from its previous owner’s grip, and lunged, using all the techniques I’d practiced at battle reenactment workshops and out in the field with other nerdy sword-buying friends, except this time the blades weren’t blunted, the combat wasn’t simulated, and the swords weren’t fake. I thrust the tip of the blade into the disgusting man’s upper back, feeling the blade pierce his flesh, push through his organs and hit bone.

  He collapsed to his knees with a strangled cry. The nun ripped herself away from him, staring at me with widened eyes.

  Pulling the blade from his back, I watched in shock as blood poured out of the man, creating a large, dark red circle in his tunic. The sword I held was dipped in blood.

  “I…” I started, not sure what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it.

  I’d just killed a man. Stabbed a man to death with a sword.

  Looking down, I saw that his eyes were open, his death a swift one, as I’d aimed for his heart through his back. He looked suddenly waxen, as if he’d been a dummy used for battle reenactments this whole time.

  But then I smelled the hard iron of his blood on my blade, and I couldn’t hold onto that delusion for long. He was a corpse now, but, moments ago, he’d been a living man.

  And I’d killed him.

  “Come on,” the nun said urgently.

  I looked up, noticing a crowd had begun to gather around the scene. The owner of the pig pen had come out, his clothes caked in mud, as well as the other patrons of the bar the men had emerged from, all taking in the scene.

  “What?” I said dumbly.

  My tongue felt heavy. My face felt numb.

  “Come on,” she repeated, grabbing me by the wrist. “The knights will be here soon, and I don’t think either of us have the gold to buy our way out of thei
r protection. We have to move.”

  I wanted to move, I really did, but my feet were glued to the ground, my bones rigid and unyielding. Because this morning I’d woken up with only thoughts of a rare Magic: The Gathering card on my mind, and now I was standing in a medieval alleyway, surrounded by strangely dressed townspeople, holding a bloody sword. And I’d just killed someone.

  My breathing sounded loud and unfamiliar in my ears. The woman’s grip on my wrist tightened, and she forced herself into my line of sight.

  If it weren’t for the striking quality of her blue eyes, I don’t think I would have been able to wrench myself back to reality.

  “I’m Fleur, what’s your name?” she said.

  It was a strange time for introductions, but I could tell she was trying to pull me back into the real world, so I did my best to reply. What was my name again?

  “Dexter,” I said finally, finding the information in a far-reaching file folder in the back of my brain.

  “Hi Dexter,” Fleur said, still holding my gaze. “We really have to go now. Do you think you can do that?”

  I nodded, up and down, up and down. Then I remembered how to move my feet, then my legs, then my whole body.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She smiled tightly at me and pulled my wrist again. This time, I moved.

  And we took off.

  Chapter

  Three

  The nun pulled my body down the alley, through the back of a foul-smelling tea shop, across an abandoned stretch of market stalls and past a whorehouse where black-toothed women beckoned us to come inside and relax. And all the while, all I could think about was the feeling of my blade piercing the man’s flesh, how easy it was to take a real human being from living to dead.

  That is—if any of this was real.

  More than anything, I wanted to wake up from this dream. This strange new reality where I, Dexter O’Brien, had murdered a man.

  A disgusting, evil man. But still. A man.

  Finally, we arrived at our destination—a decrepit temple on the edge of town, thick green forest abutting it from behind. Fleur—that was her name, right?—dragged me across the dusty mosaiced floors, sitting me down on a pew while she walked ahead to a large dish of water at the center of the temple that looked like an ornate, glorified birdbath. If this woman turned into a bird before my eyes, I didn’t even think I’d be surprised anymore. I could ride her feathery wings to Never Never Land and meet the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring.

  I needed to lie down.

  While Fleur splashed water onto her face, I lay prostrate on the pew, staring up at the ceiling. The temple was clearly once very impressive, an intricate mural on the ceiling having faded into blurred colorful shapes over time. A circular skylight opened directly above the birdbath, and evidence of stained glass still hung around the edges, shattered by nature or men, who knew.

  “Here, drink this.”

  Fleur stood next to me, holding a golden chalice of water. Or at least I hoped it was water. I took it.

  “Will it help me wake up?” I asked her.

  She furrowed her blonde brows at me.

  “You’re very much awake, Dexter.”

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

  She smirked a little, studying me curiously. Then, to my shock, she pushed the habit back from around her face, revealing a head of golden blonde hair, falling in soft waves down her back. I watched as she shook it out, running her fingers through the wavy locks.

  “So, I’m guessing you aren’t really a nun,” I stated.

  “And I have to tell you I’ve never heard this word you keep using,” she replied swiftly. “I’m not sure what a nun is, but if you think I’m a Daughter of Eos, you’d be partially correct.”

  “Eos?” I questioned. “Who’s he?”

  Fleur stared at me like I’d just asked who Darth Vader was.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re really not from around here. Are you one of those missionaries from the Cascadian Seas?”

  “Not exactly,” I replied, not sure where to even begin with where I was from. “So you’re not a…religious follower?”

  Fleur cocked her head. “Well, like I said, partially. I once trained to be a Daughter of Eos—she is the goddess of benevolence, and her followers are called her Daughters. I entered the temple as soon as I was of age…I wanted to get out of my father’s house, and I had always loved attending the Eosian Temple services for equinoxes and Days of Goodwill. The Daughters were kind hearted, charitable, and spread love and benevolence across these lands—something we so desperately needed. I was a Daughter in training for almost half of one year before…”

  She trailed off, her blue eyes lost in some distant, painful memory.

  “Before what?”

  Fleur sat down beside me on the pew, staring out at the dusty, abandoned temple. I could imagine it through her eyes—bustling, sunlit, and full of people back in its heyday, when she had been a faithful follower.

  “Before Mammon.”

  Even the sound of the name seemed to send a chill through the air. I could have sworn the wind picked up because she said it, sending dust and tattered bits of leaves and parchment skittering across the floor.

  “Who’s—”

  “We shouldn’t say his name again,” Fleur interrupted, standing up quickly. “Not here. Eos forgive me.”

  I followed her as she strode from the temple and into the sunlight, sitting down on the last, crumbling step of the front stoop. In the blinding day, the spooky scary name didn’t seem so spooky scary anymore.

  “Okay, who is this Mammon asshole then?” I asked, plopping down beside Fleur on the step.

  She scowled at me, apparently not a fan of my making light of the situation. Whoops.

  “He is a powerful demon of greed,” she stated plainly, as if that was just a normal thing to say to a person. “Three years ago, he attacked this temple, scattering the Daughters. Unlike Eos, who values truth and goodness above all else, Mammon uses trickery and deceit to amass his wealth. He is an insatiable being who craves only more, more, more. No amount of gold will sate him, no amount of jewels or treasure will quench his thirst. And yet he enslaves the people of this kingdom for his own greed.”

  “He sounds like a real stand-up guy,” I deadpanned.

  “He is evil incarnate,” she declared, which made me feel like a real asshole. “And he’s also my boss.”

  This made me pause.

  “What?”

  Fleur closed her eyes, the sunlight reflecting gold off her eyelids. She took a deep breath.

  “You asked me before why I dressed like this, if I did it so no one suspected me as a pickpocket. You weren’t wrong. Two years ago I made a deal with…with what I thought was a higher being. Turns out it was Mammon in disguise—his trickery knows no bounds, and I was foolish, and desperate. Now I am bound to steal for him, to gather treasures in his stead, and I am ashamed to say that wearing the robes of a Daughter of Eos allows me a certain level of presumed innocence. It’s shameful, I know. But I have to do it.”

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, no offense, but, can’t you break off this deal? How could that possibly be worth it?”

  Fleur opened her eyes finally, laughing mirthlessly at my suggestion.

  “If only it were that simple,” she declared.

  At that moment, a beggar wandered down the empty street, limping in tattered clothes resembling a burlap sack. He reached out to us, but Fleur shook her head, no. I thought about giving him money from my wallet, but, apparently, hundred dollar bills were about as useful as napkins around here.

  The beggar hobbled on, singing a strangled sort of song as he went.

  “When I first joined the Daughters of Eos,” Fleur told me, watching him leave, “a girl named Amber took me on as her charge. Daughters require a mentor to pass the first stage of initiation, and she was kind enough to select me. We became best friends quite quickly, developing a bond of sisterhood that could not be broken.”

  Fleur exhaled shakily, clenching her jaw.

  “Shortly after the Temple was destroyed, she came down with an incurable illness. We call it the Long Death, because it weakens the body slowly, until you’re no more than flesh and bones. I couldn’t let Amber die, I couldn’t lose her, after everything…”