Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) (22 page)

I made my way to the bathroom, stopped in front of the toilet and leaned forward, supporting myself against the wall with my right hand until the shaking stopped. When I felt I could, I released my hold on the wall and began the complex and undignified process of manipulating my zipper, and then my anatomy, one-handed.

Note to self: next time you break a wrist, wear elastic waistbands.

The bladder’s bidding done, I shuffled back out toward the kitchen to appease the stomach, only now making its displeasure known. I must have shown weakness by giving in to the bladder.

Sarah met me in the hallway.

‘Hey, you,’ she hugged me gingerly. ‘You sure you should be up?’

‘Hard to keep a good man down,’ I grinned.

‘That’s relevant how, exactly?’ she asked. ‘You got pretty banged up, you should be in bed.’

‘I need to eat something.’

‘You can call me,’ she chided. ‘I can bring you something. You have me here, use me.’

‘Alright,’ I said, leaning in for a kiss, ‘but you’ll have to be gentle. I’m not in peak condition.’

‘I will take that as a sign that you’re getting better.’

‘I’m on the mend, but I could break every bone in my body and still lust after you.’

She blushed.

‘I want to limp right up to you, fling you clumsily onto the bed, tear your clothes off one-handed over an embarrassingly long time, and then make cautious, hesitant, painful love to you.’

‘Well, how can a girl refuse that?’ She laughed. ‘For now, why don’t we just get something to eat? You’re probably not up to cooking, and you should have your strength back before you try anything I cook. How’s pizza sound?’

‘Sounds perfect. By the way, did you find anything useful on that disk?’

‘Oh, did I ever.’ Her eyes widened with excitement. ‘That thing is the fucking Rosetta Stone! There’s some documents in this other language that have been translated, and some stuff they were translating from English. Once I work out the syntax, it’ll be easy to cobble together a quick translation patch and unlock the rest of the stuff.’

‘Glad that makes sense to somebody.’

‘You stick to cooking, medicine and fighting. Leave the technology to me. All the electronics in your place still flash midnight on the timer, do you realize that? I checked.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Is that the secret to your longevity? Do you have the DVD player of Dorian Grey?’

I laughed, which brought a fresh stab of pain from my ribs.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t be. Blame the guy who hit me. But, speaking slowly for the old man in the room, can you translate the language on that computer?’

‘I should be able to. There’s enough documentation in both English and whatever this language is that I should be able to work it out, then run the untranslated stuff through the decryption program.
Et voila!
’

‘
Tres bien,
’ I replied, lowering myself carefully into a chair. ‘Could you go get my gun from the nightstand? I’d like to be packing when the pizza guy shows up.’

‘Paranoid?’

‘Paranoid and breathing,’ I answered.

She placed the order, and when she paid the teenage driver, I held my pistol down out of sight beside the chair, just in case he decided to pull a knife or teleport into the room. He did neither, but he did look her up and down with no subtlety.

I still didn’t shoot him.

After eating, I limped back to bed. Drained, sweating and shaking. Not as badly as before the cab ride home, though.

I was healing.

Would I recover fast enough? Would Sarah find anything on that disk that I could use? Before they found me?

I shoved my fear back down. Worrying wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I’d already decided not to run, so that was settled. Whatever grievance these people had with me originally, there had been enough blood spilled in the past week that a peaceful resolution wasn’t very likely.

So, running was out, negotiation was out, that left fighting. And if I had to do that, I had to get back on my feet, which meant resting.

See? Eliminate enough options and life becomes very simple.

Chapter 23

SOME TIME LATER I WOKE to a gentle kiss on my forehead. I blinked and stifled an urge to sit up, knowing my ribs would make me pay if I did.

‘Hey, you,’ I smiled.

‘What do you remember about your childhood?’

‘Nothing, really.’ I shrugged. Winced. ‘Vague images. I’m not sure from how far back, or if they’re even real or just a mess of dreams and wishful thinking.’

‘Humor me.’ She lay down beside me, slowly and carefully, so as not to jolt my battered body. ‘What’s your earliest memory?’

I wracked my brain, searching for that memory. It’s harder than you think. Try it sometime.

Kneeling behind the low stone wall on the banks of the Mystic River, the sun hot on my back, holding my musket in hands slick with sweat as I watched the Fusiliers advance, waiting for them to pass the stake Colonel Stark had driven into the sand thirty paces away. Thinking how clearly you can see a man’s face at thirty yards, before the command and the volley and the smoke and the screams.

Watching
Henry V
at the Globe because Kate wanted to see the new play, and thinking that finally some bugger had gotten soldiers right.

That night in that old hill fort in Wales, when Gwen came to my chamber disguised as a servant. She was too young and pretty and had too much of an appetite to tolerate her husband’s neglect. To be fair, he was trying to unite the squabbling tribes of Britons to repel a Saxon invasion, but moderation in all things. He never learned that. A man ignored Gwen at his peril. Being respected as swordsman, scholar and chirurgeon at the time, I had my own private chamber. I knew it was a bad idea but, Gwen being Gwen, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else, and she was so young and curvy and enthusiastic...

Well, I certainly wasn’t telling that story.

I shook my head. ‘I can’t remember anything that you’d call childhood. Some stuff from way back, but I was already jaded and cynical.’

‘Nothing about a mother or father?’

‘Absolutely drawing a blank.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it seems that you’re the heir to a noble line. So are your buddies with the knives. In something that reads like Lewis Carroll meets Machiavelli, with a dash of Stan Lee, the various noble houses all had some supernatural talent. Marriages and alliances were built around honing and combining those talents. You hit the jackpot with healing and longevity. Both of those are recessive traits. Rare ones.’

None of that sounded the least bit familiar. It must have shown on my face, because she leaned in and began to rhythmically stroke my brow.

‘You upset some people during a military expedition. The kingdom put together a group of nobles to lead their army. A guy who could teleport, a guy who could ‘slow time’, if my translation is right, a guy who could make fire, and so on.’

‘So how did I disappoint the Dream Team?’

‘Treason, desertion, or just being a decent human being. Depends on how you want to read it.’

‘Let’s read it the way where I’m just a decent human being,’ I suggested.

‘Well, you were recruited to go along, since you could patch up anyone who got hurt, and you could handle yourself as a swordsman, which was unusual for a healer. I guess healing generally manifests in females, and they didn’t let girls play with swords back then.’

‘The more fools them.’

‘Anyway, there was an invasion, and your countrymen captured some of the home team. You were called to assist in the interrogations. To assist the royal torturers. Like: talk or we’ll break your fingers, then he’ll fix your fingers, then we’ll ask you again and see how long you can keep being evasive.’

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘I’ve done a few things I’m not proud of, but that’s nasty.’

‘You refused. One of the others got in a fight with you over it, words came to blows and you killed him. You were accused of treason, and sentenced to banishment with your memories erased.’

‘They can do that?’

‘Oh, yes. That and more.’ She smiled at me. ‘You know how to pick your enemies.’

‘If it’s worth doing,’ I said, ‘it’s worth doing right.’

‘One of the other nobles could manipulate memories. Which explains why you don’t recall important events from back then. It could also explain why none of this stuff ever showed up in a history book. People who know too much can be eliminated or just have their memories erased or changed. Anyway, the invasion collapsed, since they were short two important members. The family that pushed for invasion, whose patriarch you ran through, lost prestige and took a big hit in the hierarchy of imperial politics. They thought you got off easy. They wanted you executed, but you were from a powerful family yourself, and that family had the healing bloodline. Lots of pull there. Plus, you killed the other guy in a straight-up fight, and witnesses couldn’t agree on who started it. The other clan swore a blood oath against you. Now, it looks like their descendants still care enough to fulfill it.’

She paused. ‘How are you doing?’

‘OK I guess, for a guy who just heard that his past sounds like something Jules Verne couldn’t sell to his publisher. How did you get all this stuff?’

‘A lot of this is me piecing stuff together from old letters. Most of the stuff is pretty slanted against you, but there are a few official documents that they scanned into the records. Your official sentencing is there, and the complaint from the Doors clan and the defense from yours. Nobles think this stuff is important.’

I spent a long moment digesting this information. I didn’t actually remember any specifics about this, and her info was the handed-down version of guys who wanted me dead, so who knew how accurate it was? I was happy at least that at one time I seemed to have some principles.

I found that comforting, considering how my standards seemed to have eroded down to “don’t steal anything you can afford to pay for or don’t really need” and “don’t hurt anybody more than he deserves”.

‘So where are they—we, I guess—from?’

She shrugged ‘Ruritania, as far as I can tell.’

I shook my head.

‘You disappoint me,’ she smiled. ‘Anthony Hope.
The Prisoner of Zenda.
Never read it?’

‘Saw the movie,’ I replied.

‘If you say the Stewart Granger version, you’re sleeping on the couch.’

‘Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks, Aubrey Smith, David Niven.’

‘OK, that lets you off for not doing the reading,’ she said. ‘Ruritania is a fictional kingdom somewhere in Eastern Europe. It shows up from time to time as shorthand for a backward country with remote castles, trackless forests, superstitious peasants and a powerful, mysterious nobility.’

‘Is that where Boris and Natasha were from?’

‘That’s Potsylvania and you know it. Anyway, I’m just working from some hints, linguistic cues, no hard names in any language but theirs, which isn’t exactly Slavic or German or Russian but has elements of all of them. It has to be east of Austria, maybe Hungary or former Yugoslavia. Maybe we can get some maps, plot some likely points, see if they make sense.’

‘So, what are they doing here?’ I asked. ‘They can’t have this whole organization just to find little old me, can they?’

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t seem like anyone was looking for you at all. At least not in the recent past. There’s no mention of any leads about you. I’m guessing Doors recognized the fact that you healed him, and started thinking.’

‘So what do they do when they aren’t looking to avenge ancient wrongs or brutalizing unarmed women?’

‘They’re in the smuggling business. The shipping company is a front. They bring in a lot of heroin. Easy to dodge customs when you can teleport.’

Well, that was true. And where better to smuggle than Philips Mills, famed distribution hub for drugs, and a town nobody much cared about? A good place to lay low, or so I’d thought.

Probably explained why they’d been so bad at finding me, and so sloppy at security. They weren’t running a counterintelligence unit, just pushing drugs. I was a target of opportunity.

‘Is this just Doors and his organization, or are all the gang of supermen after me?’

‘Just Doors, as far as I can tell. His ancestors swore the oath. It looks like the family business is smuggling now. Actual blood relative would be able to teleport, the rest may be retainers or just hired muscle. The other families may or may not have wanted to see you punished, but nobody seems to have taken it quite as personally.’

‘Doors is just a descendant of this guy I killed, right? No chance he remembers it himself?’

She shook her head. ‘Iosef Toren is thirty-four. He’s the direct male heir, but he’s not like you.’ She touched my hand. ‘Not like you at all.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I just took her hand and kissed it.

‘One thing I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘The guys at the warehouse had guns, but none of the guys who attacked you on the street, or the ones who came to my apartment, carried anything but knives.’