***Tom Graves***

“We’re gonna be alright, son,” Grampa said over the phone. “Somebody got that bastard through the window. She’s right outside, taking care of an accomplice or something… Is that a horse?”

A horse? What?

“Umm… It’s getting a little weird over here. I’ll have to call you back.”

“No, leave the phone on—”

Click.

Damnit!

“So, they’re not dead?” Jacob asked.

“I guess,” Tom said, sitting down on the couch, the adrenaline leaving his body tingling as it dissipated.

Problem A: The most pressing problem, the one that threatened to kill him and his entire family…had solved itself.

Tom felt like sprawling out on the couch and taking a nap; the last two minutes felt like they’d taken a year off his life. Maybe there would be an ocean of paperwork after this, but that would beat a homicidal cop on a power-trip a hundredfold.

With problem A gone and problem B well in hand, life was looking up. Now he could focus on finding a way to leverage being a soulmonger to guarantee a good life for Ellie. Maybe even drop it entirely and focus on using his powers to find a mother lode, like Grampa had suggested.

That sure beat crippling soul debt and nosy neighbors thinking he was signing contracts with the devil.

Still, he had a familiar now, and after he finished paying for her, not putting her to good use would be dumb and a bit callous.

Am Familiar! Suzie’s thoughts brushed against his.

Indeed you are.

Tom let out a long, thankful sigh. Things were looking up.

“Huh,” Jacob grunted, peering through the window curtains. “That’s weird.”

“Don’t you ruin this moment for me, Jacob,” Tom said, closing his eyes.

“There’s dudes on horses coming in off the highway.”

“Okay,” Tom said, eyes still closed. He imagined two chicks in tank-tops with cowboy hats taking their horses for a health walk. Unusual, but not unheard-of.

“Like, fifty of them, and they’re wearing some fancy armor.”

Tom’s eyes snapped open.

Reese frowned, leaving the kitchen with a PB&J and joining Jacob at the window.

“You don’t see that every day,” she said, taking a bite of her sandwich.

Tom scrambled off the sofa and over to the window, joining the two gawkers.

A double line of men wearing white and gold tabards over full plate armor rode massive horses through the dirt road that led to Reese’s trailer park.

“With the way my life has been going so far,” Tom said, “I can’t help but think those guys are here for us.”

“Kinzena!” Grant whispered beside him, peering out the window. “They’ve come to take me back to Orsoth!”

“Oh, good. See you later, then,” Tom said waving at Grant.

“No, you don’t understand. They’re not En’hol. They won’t return me to my family; they will keep me prisoner for the rest of my days!”

“Didn’t your family do that?” Tom asked, raising a brow.

“Not…recently, anyway.” Grant pondered a moment. “Although, after this fiasco, I’m unlikely to enjoy much freedom regardless of who has custody of me.”

“Alright, it was nice knowing you,” Tom said. “There’s the door.” He pointed.

Grant’s face paled.

“Really, man?” Jacob asked, peering over at Tom.

“What, you wanna fight a bunch of knights to the death in the middle of a trailer park? Over a guy we’ve only known for a handful of hours?”

“If talking doesn’t work, yeah,” Jacob said, leaning over to pick up his AR-15, which was leaning against the wall.

“No, I’m with Lord Graves on this,” Grant said, looking over at Jacob. “It is not wise to force a confrontation. The Kinzena are the second royal family for a reason.”

“Grant En’hol! Come out of hiding and surrender yourself to our custody! We’re here by the request of Marida En’hol! You will be returned to your family, on my honor as Patris Kinzena!”

“How likely is that to be true?” Jacob asked.

“Eh,” Grant said, waggling his hand and shrugging.

“Alright, I’ll deal with them.”

“Jacob, no! Bad minion!” Tom hissed.

Jacob marched out the front door with his rifle cradled under his arm, vaguely pointed at them.

“Fucking idiot,” Reese muttered, stuffing her face with the rest of the PB&J before she bent down and retrieved her rifle from beneath the sofa, clicking off the safety.

“Really?” Tom demanded.

“More guns means the other party is more likely to back off.” She shrugged, taking aim at their leader. “Mutually assured destruction and all that. You should probably grab yours.”

It’s in the truck! Tom thought, his eyes flicking toward the rusted hunk of metal that the horses had already passed.

And shit, Mr. Fluffybottom is already halfway to Ellie! Tom had been caught with his pants down on an epic level.

Kinda wish I had a flamethrower right about now.

Tom’s worn-out body was once again flooded with adrenaline as Jacob sauntered toward the knights, drawing their attention to himself. He stopped about thirty feet away, rifle held lazily in their general direction.

“Grant doesn’t wanna go with you, because he, quote: ‘doesn’t wanna go back to prison’. Having a dad in the slammer, I sympathize with that, so I’ll have to ask you politely to fuck off.”

Tom heard a bird flutter off the roof as silence engulfed the trailer park. A few people gawked from their windows at the bizarre confrontation.

The leader was a somewhat smaller man without a helmet. He had a clean shave, reflective gold eyes and dark hair. He cocked a brow and unsheathed his sword, well outside the range he could do anything with it.

“Hey now, you might be new around here, but this is a ‘gun’,” Jacob said, patting his rifle. “Guuun, and a sword isn’t much—”

The leader made a lazy chopping motion, and his blade and hand were engulfed in a mirage, disappearing entirely.

The blade appeared behind Jacob, catching him in the shoulder and nearly bisecting him.

Jacob let out a stunned cough and collapsed to the ground.

Tom’s heart stopped.

“NO!” Reese shrieked before shouldering her gun.

The knight gave her an amused smirk an instant before his head exploded.

.223 rounds peppered the line of armored men, punching through gilded armor like paper. The sound of automatic fire filled the dilapidated mobile home with a wave of concussive sound, forcing Tom and Grant to clap their hands over their ears.

The bump stock worked as advertised, pushing the recoiling gun forward after each shot, which made Reese’s finger squeeze another shot off.

Reese was about two-thirds of the way through the oversized magazine when a blast of fire engulfed the window and scorched her skin. She flung herself away from the heat, a feral snarl on her melting face.

Tom didn’t see where the fire came from because he was too busy crawling away from the window and toward the back porch.

Jacob’s dead, Jacob’s dead, Jacob’s dead…. He couldn’t stop that moment from replaying over and over as he did everything he could to distance himself from the fight. Getting closer to the sword-wielding maniacs was stupid.

Just like that, the horseman had casually ended a life. Nonchalant, as if there would be no consequences.

Who does that!?

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Grant going the other direction. The hobo prophet leapt past Reese’s singed body and out the door, his hands glued to his sides.

Tom tumbled out the back of the mobile home and heard Grant shouting in some other language, possibly surrendering.

Tom spotted the supplies strewn about the backyard.

Do these people know what this is? he thought. Tom grabbed the crypts and the soul engine, kicked the spellwork-covered plywood over so the incriminating black ink was pressed into the grass, and started stumbling toward the tree line at the edge of the trailer park.

There was another burst of gunfire, and a few more people added their pained voices to the growing chaos.

Then the mobile home exploded.

A wave of pressure shoved Tom forward, sending him toppling into the brush at the edge of the park, his skin steaming from the sudden burst of heat.

“Ugh…”

Bad thing? Suzie’s ‘voice’ touched his thoughts.

“You could say that,” Tom groaned, sitting up. His brow throbbed, and he felt a drip, drip sensation where bright red blood dripped in front of his right eye and onto his cheek.

I come.

“Sure.” Tom collapsed onto his stomach and started crawling through the brush, all the fight pummeled out of his body by the explosion. “Why not?”

He was only marginally surprised when a steel gauntlet clamped down around his arm and hauled him to his feet.

He was lifted off his feet and turned around like a child by a person smaller than he was. The knight must have been five-seven, but he was strong. The faceless helmet regarded Tom for a moment before the soldier drew back a blade, aiming it at Tom’s heart.

Never would have bet on dying by knight in shining armor, Tom thought, his nerves simply too exhausted to muster much life-saving adrenaline.

“~!” Grant’s voice shouted in a foreign language. The words were meaningless gibberish, unlike any language Tom had ever heard.

Both Tom and the faceless knight glanced over, where Grant was being restrained by a pair of men in similar full plate, their faces covered by emotionless steel.

They exchanged some words before the knight lowered his sword and grabbed Tom by the shoulder, hauling him toward the rest of the metal-clad men.

“Lord Graves, I told them you were my beloved servant, and they’re planning to use you as a hostage to guarantee my good behavior,” Grant said.

“Oh,” Tom said, still processing. His mind was beginning to turn numb, still replaying the last twenty seconds…trying to make sense of it.

Grant leaned closer, forcing his way into Tom’s line of sight, and by extension, his consideration.

“I’m going to need a great deal of trust on this next part: You are very obviously a blood-relative, so in order to spare you from Kinzeth imprisonment or execution, I’m going to have to…disguise your features some more before someone observant sees you.”

What does he mean by that? Tom frowned.

His answer was a brutal slap across the face.

“~!” Grant shouted in the other language as Tom collapsed to the ground. Tom didn’t know what he was saying, but it sounded haughty and arrogant. Tom peered up at the hobo through swelling eyelids.

“Stand up quickly, I need to do the other side!” he shouted in English.

Tom struggled to his feet, aided by the iron grip of his captor. A moment later, Grant backhanded him across the other side of his face.

“Deepest apologies, Lord Graves!” he bellowed in an arrogant voice. “But a bit of swelling will save your life!”

“Dun’ fee’ ‘ike it,” Tom groaned, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

Tom scanned the scene. At least a dozen metal-clad corpses were strewn across the middle of the trailer park. All the gawkers in the windows had wisely decided to hide, barricading their doors.

Of the surviving knights, only a handful were unwounded. A few had bullet holes in their armor, but no blood loss. Tom tried not to stare at any one in particular.

They were policing the dead bodies, stacking them in the bed of Jacob’s truck and hitching a line of riderless horses to the front. They spoke with each other in the short, choppy sentences of people who were going to get their asses whipped when they got home.

Tom couldn’t understand a word of it, but he could read their body language well enough, as they constantly glanced back at their fallen leader and cursed quietly to themselves.

Jacob, they left where he’d fallen. The short man stared sightlessly at the sky. The massive bonfire that was Reese’s home singed Jacob’s hair and made his flesh start to sizzle, even ten feet away.

Tom’s numbed and possibly concussed brain finally made the leap that maybe Reese and Jacob were an item, given her unusual display of emotion upon the cokehead’s death. Huh.

The knights stooped to take some kind of box off one of the dead horsemen who’d been sitting beside their leader: a gilded wooden cube that seemed to have a needle inside it, much like a compass.

It didn’t escape Tom’s notice that the needle pointed at him and Grant.

A man came up to Grant and gave him some terse instructions before the two of them had their hands bound together, then were loaded up on separate horses like baggage.

“What’d he say?”

“We’re going to meet up with the western contingent, then return to the portals.”

Western contingent? Western!?

Tom glanced in the direction he could feel Mr. Fluffybottom. The direction the sun had gone down. West. Towards Ellie. He glanced at the fancy compass bumping against a knight’s hip. What if there’s more than one? What if Ellie’s like me? Shiiiiiiit.

“It’s been a long day. I’m gonna take a nap,” Tom said. Tom leaned down and rested his weight against the rough horse hair of the animal underneath him.

He was out like a light.