Can't Look Back (War for Dominance Book 1)
Read Can't Look Back (War for Dominance Book 1) Online
Authors: Chris Kennedy
Can’t Look Back
Book One of the War for Dominance Trilogy
By
Chris Kennedy
PUBLISHED BY: Chris Kennedy
Copyright © 2014 Chris Kennedy
All Rights Reserved
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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I would like to thank Linda, Beth, Jimmy and Dan, who took the time to critically read this work and make it better. I would also like to thank my mother, without whose steadfast belief in me, I would not be where I am today. Thank you. This book is dedicated to my wife and children, who sacrificed their time with me so that I could write it.
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Cover art by Lee Dunning
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John Gatsby hurried into his hotel room and checked the hallway behind him. He wasn’t being followed. Slamming the door, he looked back through the peephole, but still couldn’t see anyone. He started breathing again.
John usually loved FanCon. “A convention dedicated to fantasy in all its forms,” it was a chance to catch up with some of the friends he hadn’t seen in a while, dress up as his favorite character and generally get to be someone that he wasn’t for a weekend.
Not this time.
John sat down on the bed and took a few more breaths to calm himself. The day had started out so well. He didn’t have any problems crossing the border into the United States or driving to his hotel in Buffalo. It wasn’t until he reached the hotel that things got weird. When the lady at the desk handed John his room key, she said that he was in luck; the hotel had been able to give him the room he asked for. He took the key the lady offered, although he didn’t remember asking for a specific room.
The room seemed normal enough when he walked into it, and he forgot all about the lady’s comment. Happy and excited, he changed into his costume and went down to give his presentation. He was responsible for three panels during the weekend, but this was his favorite: “How to appear as someone or something you’re not, using only the things in your closet.” He loved being successful, charming and witty in his presentation...all of the things he normally wasn’t. On a normal day, he was short, thin and nerdy-looking, with stringy brown hair and glasses. He had aspirations to do more than deal cards at the Niagara Falls Casino; he just hadn’t done them yet. Maybe he would next year.
He had given this presentation several times before, and it went flawlessly. Except for the weirdoes in the audience. It takes a lot to be labeled a weirdo at a fantasy convention, as everyone in attendance generally has at least a few idiosyncrasies. There were, however, three people in the audience that were obviously weird, and it wasn’t because of their costumes. The first seemed relatively normal, although he was either a midget or really young and extremely short; John couldn’t tell which it was. Regardless, the person was tiny, and his costume was nothing out of the ordinary. John routinely did better with the odds and ends in his closet.
The other two were incredible. The second person was dressed as some sort of orc or half-orc. Almost six and a half feet tall, she was pale green and had what looked like tusks sticking out from both the top and the bottom of her mouth. The makeup job was outstanding; John couldn’t see a single spot she had missed. She was also covered in coarse body hair. He didn’t know how she got it to stick straight out like it did, but it was better than anything John had ever been able to do.
The third person was dressed as a devil, and it was by far the best costume John had seen in several years of attending conventions. Not because it looked like what you’d expect, because it didn’t; the colors were way too garish. Purple eyes and purple hair? Those weren’t normal eye or hair colors; the person had to have picked them to stand out. Like the orc, the devil’s makeup was perfect. He was a uniform brick-red all over, without a smear, smudge or missed spot, but what really made the costume were the accessories. The horns were awesome; John couldn’t see the line where they joined his head, nor did they ever appear to wobble. Even better was his tail, which gave every indication of being prehensile. John had no idea how the guy (at least he thought it was a guy) controlled it. He didn’t appear to have a transmitter in either hand; the tail just seemed to move on its own. Barrel-chested and heavily muscled, the devil easily out-massed the orc by 50 pounds, even though he was almost a foot shorter.
The three watched John the whole time he was giving his presentation, and the way they stared at him made him very uncomfortable. It was almost like they were dissecting him with their eyes; they only looked away from him to talk to the others, and then they immediately looked back at him again.
As bad as it was to have them staring at him during his presentation, it was worse having them following him around the rest of the day. All afternoon, no matter where he went, he could always find at least one of them in his general vicinity. Although they glanced away when he looked at them, he could feel their eyes on him as soon as he looked away.
He didn’t think it could get any worse, but when he finally went back to his room at the end of the day, it did. Approaching the elevator, he looked back across the hotel’s open atrium and saw all three of them following him. Although they didn’t get into the elevator with him, he saw the one that looked like a devil staring up at him as he walked to the door of his room. John didn’t know whether to go past his door to keep them from finding out which room was his or to hurry in and lock the door. Having nowhere else to go, he went into his room and locked the door, figuring that he could call the front desk if he needed help. Happily, it didn’t look like they had followed him.
John checked his watch. He would have to hurry in the shower if he was going to make it to dinner with his friends. Unlike a number of the convention participants, he had a sense of cleanliness and didn’t like to smell his own stink. Some of his friends liked to play games at the convention, and they would sit at the tables for days without leaving. They reeked.
He had just taken off his pants when a large crow landed on the white molded-plastic table on the balcony. It hopped around on the table flapping its wings, almost as if it wanted his attention. The crow looked into the room, and their eyes met. John could feel an intelligence in the crow unlike anything he had ever seen in a bird. The bird hopped to the side and lifted a towel off something on the table. John knew that he hadn’t left anything on the table because he hadn’t even been on the balcony.
What could it be?
He glanced quickly out the balcony door to make sure that no one was around to see him without his pants and then opened the door. With a loud ‘
caw!
’ the bird took flight, leaving a collection of things on the table. With another furtive glance at the rooms around him, John stepped out onto the balcony, picked up the objects and brought them back into the room. Setting them on the bed, he inspected each of them.
The first object was a crown. It appeared real, but it couldn’t be, or it would have been in a museum or a castle somewhere. It was incredible the way the jewels sparkled in the hotel room’s lights. Although he didn’t know much about jewelry, the gems appeared real to him, and his eyes widened in shock. If they
were
genuine, this crown was more valuable than...he couldn’t decide what. Certainly it was more valuable than anything he or his mother owned.
How could someone lose something that was obviously so valuable?
He looked at the other two objects he had brought in, a mirror and a small bag with a drawstring on top. The bag looked like the bags that gamers used to carry around their dice. He picked it up and found it to be far heavier than if it held plastic dice. It also jingled with the sound of metal as he lifted it. Metal? Coins? If it was filled with coins, there would be a lot of them.
He dumped the bag onto the bed and was amazed to see that it
was
full of coins, although they were unlike coins he had ever seen. They appeared to be gold, and there had to be at least 100 of them. If they were solid gold, they would be worth a fortune. Maybe even more than the crown. What the heck was going on?
Dropping the bag onto the pile, he picked up the last object, a mirror. Three feet square, it looked cheap compared with the other two objects. The frame was some kind of light metal that had pieces of colored plastic in the shape of small gems in it. He touched one of the plastic gems and it depressed. He didn’t get it. Why would someone make a mirror that looked so cheap, but had working pushbuttons? How did the mirror fit with the other two items?
He shook his head, not understanding where the things had come from or how they fit together. Putting the coins back into the bag, he decided to take a shower and then ask at the hotel’s information desk if someone had lost the things. He pulled one of the gold coins back out of the bag to show the hotel staff so that they’d believe him; he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. He glanced at the coin as he was about to drop it into his pants’ pocket, and then stopped himself. What the...? The words and numbers on the coin weren’t in English! They weren’t in French or Spanish, either. He had taken a couple of years of both in high school, not liking either one, and knew that both of those languages used the same letters and numbers as English. The coin had letters that were unlike anything he had ever seen. If there were numbers on it, they were as strange as the letters and equally indecipherable.
That’s it, he decided. They must be in Arabic, or whatever the Middle East used as its language. He had seen it once, and it had only looked like squiggles to him. Even some of the numbers looked like squiggles. The coins must be from the Middle East, he decided; the crown made sense then, too. Some Saudi prince must have stayed in the room before him and accidentally left the stuff on the balcony. No, a prince would have had a bigger room. It must have been one of his servants that stayed in the room...one that was going to be in HUGE trouble when the prince found out that his crown and gold coins were missing. The cheap mirror would have belonged to the servant; the rest of the things to the prince.
Having solved the mystery, John hoped that the servant didn’t get in too much trouble for leaving the prince’s valuables on the balcony. After considering it for a couple of minutes, he also hoped that there would be a big reward for the items’ return. Satisfied that it all made sense, he put the coin into the pocket of his jeans so that he wouldn’t forget it when he went downstairs. Taking off his shirt, he walked toward the bathroom, dreaming about how he would spend his reward.
As he turned on the water, he heard a knock on the door. It was too early for his friends to be coming by; they had agreed to meet in an hour. He walked to the door and looked out the peephole. There stood the creepy-looking devil and the orc from his presentation earlier. He looked down. The midget that had been with them was also outside his door. He was definitely
not
letting that group into his room. He was all for fantasy or he wouldn’t be attending the convention; however, some people didn’t know when to stop. Those three looked like they took it
way
too seriously, especially the devil, which looked like something from a freak show. Although the horns looked real, John still didn’t understand why he had purple hair. What devil has purple hair? The devil was just doing it to get attention, John decided, although he wished the devil would do it somewhere else.
“I’m busy,” he called, walking back to the shower.
The knock came again, harder this time. It was loud enough that it had to be the devil knocking, although the girl was big and could probably knock pretty hard, too. Knock as hard as you want, John thought, I’m not letting you in.
“I’m busy,” he called again, a little louder this time. He turned again for the bathroom, but was interrupted by a sustained pounding on the door.
Oh! John realized, the stuff on the balcony must be theirs. If it was his, he would want it back pretty badly, too. He would probably want it badly enough that he would follow someone around all day and then keep banging on his door until the person answered in order to get it back. He knew they wouldn’t go away empty-handed. With a sigh he went back to the door and put the chain on it.
He opened the door a crack. “Hey, I’m taking a shower,” he began, but was hurled backward as the devil slammed open the door. Although the devil wasn’t that tall, he was built like a bull and enormously strong; the force he used to push the door open tore off the chain and threw John to the floor.
Before he could move, the orc said “
Vincula!
” and something fastened him to the floor. Unable to move, he looked at his wrist and saw some sort of glowing shackle. John had no idea what it was made of; he was able to see through it, but it held him in place like it was made of steel. What the hell?
The devil spoke to him, but it was in some foreign language he didn’t understand.
“I don’t speak Arabic,” John replied. “If those are your things, go ahead and take them. They were on the balcony when I got here.”
The orc and the devil spoke to each other in their foreign language, with the midget interjecting something. From his viewpoint on the floor, he decided the smaller one was a young-looking adult midget and not a child. The group appeared to come to an agreement, as all three looked back at him. The orc said, “
Convertite!
”
“We finally have you,” the devil said in English. He pointed to the crown on the bed. “With the evidence, too.”
John shivered involuntarily. It never crossed his mind they might think that he had stolen the crown. “That’s not mine!” John replied. “I never saw it before.”
“I know it’s not yours,” the devil said with a smile; “it belongs to the queen. You stole it from her. I expect that the escape mirror sitting next to it isn’t yours, either.”
“No, none of that is mine,” John said, not understanding why they were blaming him. “Who are you people?”
“We’re here to bring you to justice,” said the orc. “I’m sure you’ll try to tell us next that you’re not the Spectre, right?”