Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion (9 page)

Much like I was.

“What’s wrong?”  Archer asked, and for once I didn’t have a problem with his question.

In r
esponse, Santino snapped up his left hand and held it in a halting gesture.  He had his pointer finger extended toward the sky but then slowly lowered it so that he was tracking it right to left.  I kept my eyes on his finger, waiting for more information.

“There!” Santino yelled, lowering his left hand and drawing his pistol with his right in one sm
ooth motion.  The gun lifted so effortlessly that even my trained eye had trouble keeping up with what was happening.  I tore my eyes away from Santino and finally saw what had spooked him.  A few dozen meters away were Agrippina’s ninjas, wrapped in their dark clothing and armed with swords, knives, bows, and arrows.

I
dropped to a knee, giving Helena a clear line of fire in their direction and keeping my ears away from her gun.  Taking cover, I saw Wang, Stryker, and Archer go for their weapons at about the same time as Santino and Helena started firing.  Artie dove to the ground and crawled toward my position, and I wrapped an arm around her protectively and kept her body as close to the ground as possible.

“Stay down
!” I yelled at her and she nodded vigorously.

I lifted my head and saw ninjas nocking arrows to bows and releasing them in our direction.  I pushed Artie closer to the fountain for cover and pressed myself against it as well, relying on my f
riends to handle the situation.

Helena dropped beside me and continued firing.

As I kept myself out of the way, I felt a pain in the back of my head like an intense headache pounding away at my skull.  My first thought was that I’d been hit by arrow, but that didn’t make much sense.  Instead of thinking about it, I squeezed my eyes and cringed at the pain, raising a hand to my temple in the hopes that it would somehow help, but it didn’t.  The pain inexplicably increased and stars burst into my vision as the back of my head impacted the marble fountain when I fell to the ground.

I
barely took notice of the arrows falling around us by the dozen.

I hadn’t heard the screams from someone hit by one just yet, but my head hurt so badly that I wasn’t sure such a sound would even register. 
It seemed ready to explode at the slightest touch, but then someone tugged at my sleeve and yelled for me to crawl away, but I could barely comprehend the spoken words let alone comply with them.  All I could do was fight off the pain in my skull and hope that it went away on its own.

I turned to Helena who was in the process of reloading her pistol, her head directe
d toward me, her mouth moving to form unheard words.  I shook my head and turned toward the rest of my team, noticing they’d taken up defensive positions behind trees or beneath benches, but in the next second, all I saw was blood.

Like an image flickering to life from a faulty movie projector, the entire scene before me
suddenly became clear.  One of my friends was already dead.  The body I saw was Wang’s, his chest perforated with a half dozen arrows and another through one of his eyes.  He sat against a tree almost casually, but his head hung lifelessly to the side, his pistol useless in his hands.  Seconds after realization set in, my attention was diverted to Vincent, who took an arrow to the stomach.  It hit with such force that it went clean through, not a life threatening injury, but it dropped the older man to a knee and out into the open.

Time seemed to move in slow motion now,
as it often did in combat, but never quite like this.  I felt myself trudging through reality at a pace that would have made a snail seem swift, and as time continued to unfold around me, more of my friends started going down.  Santino took an arrow to the knee, Stryker to the arm, and Brewster right in the chest.  I couldn’t believe what was happening, so I closed my eyes and forced time to pick up again, willed it to accelerate and go back to normal.

I was rewarded with another sensation, however,
when the pain in my head seemed to just disappear, and when I opened my eyes, everything had changed again.

Wang was gone, as was Santino
, Vincent, and Stryker.  Artie was no longer next to me but over by Archer and Helena, who was also no longer by my side.  Dazed, confused, and suddenly exhausted, I struggled to my feet, and continued my inspection of the area.  The scene was pristine and there was no blood, like nothing had happened at all, and I started wondering how long I had been sitting there with my eyes closed.

A moment later, Helena noticed me rising to my feet and rushed
over.  She grabbed me by the arms and helped me sit on the lip of the fountain again.

“Jacob…
Christ, are you all right?”

“I
, uh…” I started saying as I tried to think, “…I’m fine.  But what about Wang and…?”

“What about me, mate?”

I craned my neck to look behind me and saw the man who had been dead just seconds ago standing in a very non-dead like position, looking as healthy as ever.  My eyes narrowed and I looked at Wang in a state of utter shock before turning back to Helena, who looked very concerned.

“What happened?”  I asked.

“I was just going to ask you the same thing, Jacob,” she said, shifting her head from side to side gently, studying me.  “You passed out.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did.  Just when Santino spotted the scout.”

“I did?”  I asked again, unable to accept such a story.

“Sure did, buddy,” I heard Santino say.  I turned again and saw him approaching from behind Wang, perfectly fine and without a mark on him.  He and Stryker were carrying a body between them.  “But don’t worry, sweetheart, I kept you safe.”

I would have sneered
at him if I wasn’t so confused.

I turned back to Helena. 
“What happened?”

She didn’t seem eager to answer, but she did anyway.  “Santino spotted one of Agrippina’s ninjas who must have been a scout for his
Octetus
.  Cuyler took him out before any of us could react, but the rest of his group wasn’t far away, and everyone else went after them.”

“
Two got away, the squirmy bastards,” Wang said as he took a seat beside me.

“But not this guy,” Santino said as he dropped the body unceremoniously
to the ground.  The man coughed as he hit, and Santino kicked him in the side to keep him down.  “You were just
too
slow, weren’t you, guy?”

“Cuyler’s on the runners
,” Stryker reported.  “And Gaius and Marcus are covering the perimeter, but one could slip out of the city if they’re lucky.”

I nodded distractedly and look
ed at my hands, but Helena reached up and took them in her own.  She lowered her voice.  “What happened, Jacob?  I’ve never seen you just pass out before.”

I shook my head
.  “I don’t know… I really don’t.”

I hadn’t lied to her, not exactly.  I
didn’t
know what happened to me, but I wasn’t exactly keen on sharing what I’d experienced.  Everyone thought I was already on edge, and some may already suspect I was going insane, so now wasn’t the time to provide them with further evidence to support the argument.

I tried to shrug off my confusion for Helena’s benefit and to maintain my authority.  I noticed the body of Agrippina’s ninja on the ground out of the corner of my eye and pointed at him.

“He talk yet?”  I asked.

“Not yet,” Wang answered as he retrieved a scalpel from his small trauma kit. 

Santino grinned at the sight of it and kicked the man on the ground again, and I was only mostly sure the two were just putting on a show for their attacker’s benefit.  But when Santino’s kick struck the man’s body, there was no reaction.  Stryker kicked him harder, but the result was the same.  The two traded glances before Santino knelt down and rolled him over but pulled back almost instantly.

“Fuck!”  He
yelled as he jumped away, doing everything he could to avoid a spray of arterial blood gushing from the man’s neck.  The downed ninja must have had his hand clamped over the self-inflicted wound until the moment Santino rolled him over, and the blood had just come streaming out.  I wasn’t sure when the man had died, but he’d clearly killed himself to avoid interrogation.

Santino looked irritably at Wang.  “I thought you searched him!”

“I thought
you
searched him,” Wang shot back.

Both men glared
at each other before turning on Stryker jointly, who held out his hands innocently.  “Hey, I just got here.  I don’t even know who the hell this guy is.”

Wang and Santino bobbed their heads in reluctant agreement and turned back to me, so I turned to Helena, not sure what we should do.

“I think it’s time we leave,” she said coldly, and I didn’t think anyone would disagree with her.

***

An hour later, we were all back at camp.

Cuyler hadn’t reported anyone tailing us
as we returned, but we’d all mutually agreed that we had over-stayed our welcome here and that it was time to push on.  There was only one place any of us could think to go, and that was back to Caesarea where we could report in to Vespasian.

Once we arrived,
Helena and I immediately went to work collapsing our tent and preparing our gear for immediate deployment.  The atmosphere around the camp was energetic and chaotic as over a dozen people scurried around to make their preparations for egress.  The sun had recently set, and without fires for illumination, most everyone performed their tasks in the dark.  Some utilized flashlights occasionally, and I’d even used my night vision goggles as I packed our tent away into its pouch, but the darkness only served to slow the entire process.  Even so, Helena and I were among the first to finish, having performed this particular ritual a hundred million times over the years together.

W
e then shifted our attention to our gear, but we always kept most of it packed up for rapid deployment anyway, so we were ready to go.  We took our packed tent and all our spare gear to one of our large carriages and loaded everything carefully.  All of our horses were nearby, but since we didn’t have spare ones for the newcomers, we had to pack the carriages tighter than normal to leave room for them to ride along.

I passed a small box to Helena who stood in the cart
, and watched as she tied it down.  It was the last of our gear, so Helena moved to jump down from the cart.  I stopped her, and placed my hands on her hips so that I could carefully lower her to the ground myself, something I was happy I could even do with my wounded side.  Once she was back on the ground she smiled at me and flicked some hair out of her eyes.

“Thanks, Jacob,” she said and moved in to hug me.

I let her, and wrapped my good arm around her tightly.  She clung to me with powerful arms of her own, her head pressing hard against my shoulder.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about what happened earlier?”  She asked
, her voice slightly muffled against me.

I made no move to pull away.  “I don’t know what happened.  I really don’t.”  I lied, but what else could I do?  I didn’t need her worrying about me anymore than she already did.
  “I feel fine now, honest.  I was just lightheaded, I guess.  I didn’t really eat much today.”

She didn’t move or say anything, and i
t was obvious she wasn’t convinced, but she knew better than to press me.  Then again, after everything we’d been through, I wondered if she
should
press me, but neither one of us mentioned it as we embraced in the moonlight, a position I could hold forever if only life would let me.

Helena shifted
against me and I felt a sudden stiffness in my pants.  Helena noticed it too and looked at me wryly, but the source wasn’t me.  Curious, I pulled away from her and reached into a cargo pocket to discover Varus’ note that I’d left there last night.  The long roll of papyrus that had been flattened was about the length of my forearm, but I’d folded it in half again last night for safe keeping in my pocket.

Helena and I looked at it for a few heartbeats before she pulled away and patted my chest.

“Go,” she said.  “Read it.”

“I’m not sure
I want to, Helena,” I whispered.

“I know
you aren’t,” she said, her voice soothing and reassuring, “and nobody blames you for that, least of all me.  But we both know the only person he would have wanted to read it, is you.”

“You think I owe him that much?”  I asked.

“I don’t think you owe him anything, Jacob,” she said.  “I think you owe it to yourself.  You’ll never be at peace over his death unless you read it.”

I took in a long breath through my nose
at the thought, and then let it out as I looked into Helena’s eyes.  They appeared sad and worried, as they often did these days, but they were also supportive.  They were always supportive.  No matter what I did or how close to the brink I came, Helena would always be there to pull me back.