The Warrior’s Assassin

Excerpt

The Warrior’s Assassin
Nikki McCoy © 2021
All Rights Reserved

Kita shook himself to clear his head, wondering what had made him think of that night so many years ago. Normally, his repressed memories came to him in dreams. Or, rather, nightmares.

At thirteen, he’d been foolish enough to desperately believe in Bergiese’s vision despite his cynicism. Later, he had learned to see the truth behind the pretty lie. There was no savior or salvation waiting for him somewhere down the path of his life. There was only misery and pain, and he was so incredibly sick of it all that his mind had begun to slip back into the state of bleak abjection he’d carried in his youth.

The future was a yawning maw empty of anything that made life worth living. What few reasons for happiness he’d found had faded quickly, leaving him raw and desolate. He knew it was time to end everything, yet he couldn’t bring himself to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger.

Funny how a person with no pride could consider suicide to be cowardly.

He drew back into the shadows of the alleyway when the door to the abandoned hotel opened. Nicolas Gordon, Nicki as he was known on the streets, walked out followed by a shorter man wearing a trench coat. The hood of Nicki’s sweatshirt was pulled down low to hide most of his face. Not that his poor attempts at anonymity over the past week had worked in his favor. He’d been found, and he would die tonight.

The two men spoke quietly, the steam of their breath curling in the frigid night air. They began to walk rapidly in the other direction. Kita slipped from his cover and entered the building, the squealing of rusted hinges on the door the only sound.

The area was mostly deserted, although not as run down as some of the neighborhoods he had seen. This small town, like so many scattered across the country, had had the misfortune of being located near a Crown Federation military base.

During the Islandar Civil War, more than a century ago, all of the bases had been targeted and summarily disabled. Some still lay in ruins from domestic terrorist attacks while others had been taken apart from the inside and left to rot in the wake of espionage and independent financial ruin.

Overall, Okasis fared decently in comparison. Its Federation base still functioned, which was a boon to the town’s economy, such as it was—struggling and on the constant verge of collapse.

He reached within himself for his power of pyrokinesis and sparked a small flame at his fingertip. With it, he searched the rooms on the first floor for Nicki’s belongings. If the reports were true, Nicki carried on him a laptop with information potentially disastrous to the Federation. Kita had been charged with confiscating the laptop and killing him.

Pinard, his keeper in the ISBF, Internal Security Branch of the Federation, had told him in no uncertain terms not to go through the laptop himself. However, the unusually avid interest in this mission had drawn his curiosity. The order had come from General Laurs, head of security, and was highly classified.

That in itself threw up a red flag.

Why would an insignificant peon on the low rung of society’s ladder be such a high‒profile target? The Federation didn’t send its dog on assassinations anyone could pull off. It just didn’t add up, even if the man was a renegade jinn.

He found the meager belongings in the last room amid layers of decay and rat droppings. In the duffel bag was a battered laptop one would hardly expect to find classified intel on. With the decryption device he’d liberated from Pinard’s desk, he easily hacked through its security. Two documents in particular stood out to him.

What he read in them made his blood run cold. It had to be some kind of mistake or propaganda to use against the Federation.

Yet, the more he read, the faster it became obvious this wasn’t a hoax. Most of the information contained in the documents correlated with events only the ISBF knew about. Critical threats against the Federation made over the past several decades that had been swept under the rug.

Briefly, he scrunched his eyes shut. He had hoped for something to hold against Pinard, but this… This was well beyond the limits of anything he could handle on his own.

Of all the endless ways this information could be used, only one outcome was certain. Their country would be plunged into another civil war. Serving these documents up to the general would only exacerbate the situation and quicken the inevitable outcome.

“Shit,” he hissed.

Footsteps and murmuring voices told him he was no longer alone. He set the laptop aside, then stood, pulling his gun from its holster at his side. Nicki was the first to enter the room carrying a flashlight that he shined directly at Kita. His dark eyes widened, his pasty white complexion paling even further.

“Hey!”

Kita calmly pointed the barrel at Nicki’s head. “You have five seconds to start telling me what you know about King Islandar.”

“Tell me who you are first.”

Kita aimed for Nicki’s foot and pulled the trigger. If he’d had any doubts as to whether his target was a trained soldier or not, they were dispelled when Nicki let out an unmanly shriek. The flashlight hit the floor and rolled to the wall, bathing the small room in its scanty light.

“Holy shit!” the other man cried out, jumping away. This one had come prepared and pointed a late model revolver at Kita. “What the fuck, man? He wasn’t even armed!”

“Not my problem. Two seconds.”

“Okay, okay!” Nicki held up one hand, the other still grasping his injured foot. “I won’t argue with a man who has no honor.”

He had to suppress the urge to laugh. Honor got you killed on the streets. “Tell me everything you know, and don’t waste my time. My trigger finger gets real heavy under the pressure of bullshit.”

“How do I know you won’t kill me afterward?”

A casual shrug. “You don’t.”

The men glanced at each other as if weighing their options. Amusing, considering their predicament. While Kita’s below average size and youthful appearance made him look years younger than his target, in most cases it worked to his advantage. Not so much when he was going for intimidation.

To his surprise, though, both men slumped their shoulders in defeat.

“Might as well tell him, Nicki,” the other man said as he lowered his gun. “That information won’t go anywhere if we’re both dead.”

Nicki glanced at his laptop, and then met Kita’s steady gaze. “I’ll talk, but Jim has nothing to do with this.” He tipped his head in the other man’s direction. “He’s just an old friend I contacted for some cash.”

Kita nearly rolled his eyes at the subtle negotiation. “Again, not my problem. You’re my only target.”

Nicki flicked his tongue across his lips nervously. “You probably already know from looking at my laptop that I’m a member of Advent. Was. I didn’t really care about the glory of their objective. All that equal rights shit for fae and jinn. I just wanted to become a jinn and maybe make a name for myself. Hacking into the Federation’s database for them would put me on the radar faster than the nickel and dime jobs I was getting from small-time private businesses.”

Kita curled his upper lip. While he wasn’t a proponent of the domestic terrorist group, Advent, neither could he stand the humans who flocked to it out of some misguided desire for fame or revenge on their own government. “Go on.”

“I was with them for a year before they made me a jinn. Gaining their trust was a bitch. Everything I did was supervised until they figured I wasn’t a threat to them. Anyway, a couple days after I was turned, some fae named Bergiese gave me an access code to restricted files in Advent’s mainframe. She told me to use my hacking skills to dig deeper once I was in. Said I would know what I was looking for when I found it.”

Shock distilled the anger riding Kita over the situation he found himself in. Jim took his stunned reaction as an opportunity to dress his friend’s wound. He tore off a strip of cloth from his faded shirt then knelt to remove Nicki’s shoe and wrap his foot.

Kita swallowed thickly, disbelieving his own ears. “What?” he croaked.

Nicki hissed, in too much pain to notice the effect his admission had. “That’s what I said. Who knew Advent had secrets they didn’t broadcast to the world like they do with every other aspect of their group? Hell, even their black-market dealings are common knowledge.”

For a moment, confusion layered his thoughts before he regained his composure. “What did this fae look like? The one who called herself Bergiese.”

Nicki’s eyebrows shot up. “Her? Uh…pretty, I guess. Dark brown hair, orange eyes, kinda round in the middle. I’d only seen her twice, but she had this bearing like she was older than most of the fae in the group. Like, ancient. Not much of an important person in Advent’s ranking, though. It was almost as if she was being forced to obey the orders of the founders.”

The implications of this new information set his mind racing. Could it really be his childhood caretaker from well over a hundred years past? Had she survived the consequences of the war?

No. Most likely it was a fraud. A fae trying to pass herself off as Bergiese to gain the weight of due respect behind her name. The Bergiese he knew would never have aligned herself with a terrorist group using underhanded tactics to reach their goal.

Regardless, a small part of his heart leapt at the possibility that he might be wrong.

“Tell me what you found in Advent’s mainframe.”

Jim answered first, glancing up from his ministrations. “He found the goddamn fae responsible for the war, that’s what. The one who should be dead but oh, hey, the king’s back for round two!” he spat sarcastically.

“And those dickweeds in Advent are blindly throwing in their allegiance to the bastard. The fae and jinn have suffered more than us humans! I get their demand for equal rights, but that’s not going to happen under the rule of their king.”

It was true. The king had been mad to engage in a war with the humans after several millennia of peace. In the end, the fae had been driven to brink of extinction. Most of those who’d survived had either gone into hiding or joined Advent.

Nicki bowed his head. “I was one of those dickweeds. I swear, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have joined.”

Kita grit his teeth in impatience. “And that is?”

“The king’s back, man. The short of it is he’s working with the leaders of Advent, only he’s got some insane new powers now. Apparently, he and the leaders are taking in new recruits on the side before the rest of Advent even know about them. I guess these are people who don’t meet their standards ’cause the king turns them into jinn immediately, absorbs their powers, and then kills them. He’s also transferring some of the powers to the fae leaders to make them stronger.”

With a frown, he murmured more to himself than Nicki, “That’s impossible. No fae can steal the power of a jinn.”

To turn a human into a jinn required a small sacrifice from the fae. A sliver of their essence cast into the human’s mind. Upon absorption, the essence would activate a certain area of human’s brain that had previously lain dormant. The most dominant trait possessed by the human would then combine with the fae’s essence.

Since the fae only had access to powers on the physical and elemental planes, the combination would manifest in the human as a weaker version of one of those. A fae could only enable in the creation of a jinn, not take away.

Nicki grimaced as Jim hefted him up and slung one of Nicki’s arms over his shoulders for support.

“I didn’t want to believe it either, but I had a few buddies I’d recommended to Advent who were on the king’s list. They disappeared without a trace the day after they joined. The other information I found, detailed plans of terrorist acts that supposedly had nothing to do with Advent, all correlated with records I discovered when I hacked into the Federation’s database. There’s no way Advent would have that kind of information unless they’d carried out the acts themselves.”

From his brief summary of the information on Nicki’s laptop, he had to admit the man wasn’t lying. Although formidable in their own right, Advent didn’t have the necessary resources to pull off half the jobs listed on their restricted files. At least not without the help of a mole with high security access in the Federation.

“So, uh…” Nicki began hesitantly, “you gonna kill me or what? That Bergiese lady told me to get the information to some guy named Kita’xenteau, a fae-terran. Said he’s the only one who can bring King Islandar down.”

Kita jerked sharply at the mention of his full name. Fuck! It had to be his old caretaker. No one else would be foolish enough to put their faith in him.

He scrambled to put together a new course of action. “Did you backup all the files onto a thumb drive?”

Nicki frowned. “Yeah.”

“Give it to me.”

He hastily dug out the device from his pants pocket and placed it in Kita’s outstretched hand.

As Kita turned his attention to the laptop, he asked, “What’s your power?”

The man seemed to pick up on his urgency and hurriedly said, “Something like echolocation but without the sound? I think I can sense the space between me and any other solid object. I didn’t really have time to ask about it or test it out before I ran.”

Kita continued speaking as he, once again, called forth his pyrokinesis and caused the laptop to erupt in fire so hot, it created a small pyre of blue and white flames. “Good enough. Use it to avoid anyone else who might be following you. Concentrate on the patterns of moving objects close to you. If you sense an object that continually traces your path, you’ve been made.”

He grabbed Nicki’s duffel bag and tossed it to Jim. “By my report, you’re dead already. Don’t rely on that, though. Eventually, the ISBF will discover the truth and send another assassin after you. If Advent doesn’t find you first. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

Nicki was the first to tear his watering eyes from the flames still melting plastic and metal on the floor. “Who are you?”

He didn’t bother to answer. Chances were his target wouldn’t last the week despite his generosity. “Get lost, now!”

The two men wasted no more time on pointless questions. Alone, he rubbed his trembling hands down his face. He was screwed on a monumental level and knew it. Yet, it was the knowledge of Bergiese’s continued association with Islandar, both of whom were supposed to be dead, that terrified him most.

Despite her affection for him when he was a child, she’d still been a loyal servant of the king. No matter how much abuse he’d been subjected to under Islandar’s orders, her fealty to him had always come first. Somehow, likely through a vision, she’d known he was alive and how to find him.

Did that mean she’d told King Islandar of his current identity? Would the king even care past Kita’s position in the ISBF? To Islandar, he had never been anything more than a slave and a whipping boy.

Still, the thought of becoming Islandar’s slave again made suicide seem like a spectacular option.

He climbed out the window, then took out the thumb drive and stared at it. For a moment, the urge to crush it was nearly overwhelming. He owed the world nothing. What did he care if the humans and fae went to war again? There would be less of them afterward to continue making his life a living hell.

And countless more deaths on his hands. The irony of having a conscience with his occupation was not lost on him.

“Damn it!” he muttered, shoving the thumb drive back into his pocket. After he saved his country from another civil war, he was going to strangle Bergiese for forcing him to play the hero in a battle he couldn’t give two shits about.