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The Fantasy Worlds of C.G. Garcia Blog
Category:
Young Adult/Teen
Publisher: C.G. Garcia
ISBN-10: 0615966691
Type: Fiction
Pages: 338
Copyright: Feb 20, 2014
ISBN-13: 9780615966694
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Issai has had enough. For the past five thousand plus years, he has been successively reborn hundreds of times with all his previous lives’ memories intact, all the while relentlessly compelled to wander the earth in pursuit of an elusive something he has yet to even identify. Over the centuries, whispers of others similar to him began to surface, and his kind became known as Old Souls.
Unable to find answers for his seemingly endless existence and no longer willing to play in what he fears is just a game for the gods’ amusement, Issai abandons his wanderings and questions and settles in an isolated town in the kingdom of Sarim, determined to resist the strong urge to be on the move that has dictated his entire existence. However, he is attacked shortly by the Shi, hunters of Old Souls that believe they can steal their “immortality” by consuming parts of an Old Soul through various rituals.
Forced to flee, Issai soon encounters Hahri, a loud-mouthed Old Soul with the same compulsion and inhuman speed to rival Issai’s own, inadvertently triggering a painful reaction to each other that is aggravated by the distance between them. When escaping Hahri proves futile and the other offers him a hint to the mystery behind their compulsion, Issai not only reluctantly finds himself once again in pursuit of the very answers he had forsaken, but also running from a relentless enemy whose unprecedented numbers suggest that immortality may not be their only goal.
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
The child moved slowly down the empty road, unaware of the eyes that watched the small figure approach from within the shadows of an alley. Rahzon smirked. It seemed Chance had decided to be his comrade tonight after all. Only moments earlier, he had stopped beneath the eaves of a bakery for a smoke, irritated that his hunt had yet again been unsuccessful, when he had caught movement in his periphery. Had it not been for the soft footfalls, he might have thought the kid an apparition. It was almost too good to be true after the frustration of the past three days.
Squinting a bit against the darkness, practiced eyes carefully analyzed what little they could see in the moonlight as the child neared. Short hair. A boy, he decided, around six or seven years old. His clothes were well-fitted with no immediate visible holes or tears, his feet booted. Though his head was down as if he were worried of his footing across the cobblestones, the little of his face Rahzon could see was in all initial appearances clean and unmarked.
His smirk widened. He was too clean, too well dressed to be a street kid. The boy’s hands swung open at his sides, empty of the rocks or long sticks that were currently popular with the local riffraff, not to mention walking around so openly without even attempting to move unnoticed. Perhaps he had been separated from a caravan somewhere along the road or from his family in the marketplace. Not quite the noble stock he had been aiming for, but definitely better than the street trash he’d had to make do with lately. Yes, this potentially could be the prize that had eluded his group for so long.
Rahzon quickly emptied the still burning leaves from his pipe onto the ground and placed it back into his belt pouch. He then casually strolled out of the alley before the boy could walk past. He did a double-take in feigned surprise and stopped directly in the child’s path.
“Out a bit late aren’t you?” he called in what he hoped was a friendly tone. Sometimes kids spooked as easily as deer.
However, the boy didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down. He might as well have been an apparition for all he reacted.
Forcing a smile, Rahzon tried again, “Not a good time to be wandering around kid. You lost?”
His head still down, the child steadily approached and without a glance, calmly stepped around Rahzon as if he were merely a stump in the road.
“No.”
The reply was so soft that it had already been swallowed by the night air before Rahzon could fully register it.
Feeling a bit peeved, he turned and firmly caught the boy’s left arm before he could walk out of reach. The boy paused but still did not look at him, a slight tensing of his arm his only reaction. Rahzon frowned. What was wrong with the kid? Usually at this point they either struggled or screamed.
He tugged the kid’s arm irritably. “Hey, don’t ignore me!”
For the space of three breaths, the boy maddeningly did just that before slowly turning his head to finally look at him. His eyes were almost completely hidden behind dark, messy bangs the color of the surrounding night.
“Let go,” the boy said firmly, a commanding in his voice that was grossly out of place coming from such a young child.
Rahzon tightened his grip. He didn’t know why, but something in that voice, in the whole situation was beginning to make him uneasy. It was time to move things along.
“It’s too late for that.”
He roughly jerked the kid towards him and grabbed him around the waist with both arms, drawing the small back up tightly against his chest. He braced himself for the inevitable kicking and biting as he moved back towards the concealing shadows of the alleyway. However, though the boy stiffened, he otherwise gave no reaction, no cry, as he was borne farther from any hope of rescue.
Rather than feel relieved at his seemingly good fortune, Rahzon’s apprehension only doubled. This was unprecedented. Was the kid really so frightened that even his voice had frozen? Where had his earlier bravado gone?
At any rate, he had a prize to present.
Turning the corner, Rahzon stumbled and nearly fell to his knees as his right side suddenly erupted in fire. Crying out more from surprise than pain, he dropped the boy and staggered back, frantically grabbing his side. He brought his hand up to his eyes; it was wet, stained dark. Blood—his blood. His eyes widened. The brat had—impossible!
The kid stood calmly before him, expression still obscured by too-long bangs, a knife dripping a dark liquid gripped in his right hand. He was still there; he hadn’t tried to run. What in the three hells was going on?
“Walk away,” the boy said, drawing his would-be abductor’s attention from the knife back to his face as effectively as an unexpected clap of thunder, “and count yourself lucky that I don’t have the time to play with y—”
The kid whipped around mid-word, a second knife suddenly appearing in his empty hand as if birthed by the very night. In the far darkness, Rahzon could barely make out three outlines quietly advancing towards them.
The boy crouched into a guarded position, the knives held threateningly before him. “I see,” he said in that maddeningly calm, non-child voice. “Here I thought you were just some random pervert out for easy prey. Turns out you’re part of them. Maybe I do have time to play with you after all.”
The brat’s back was turned to him, his attention focused mainly on the other three. The bleeding man ground his teeth in rising fury. So he was a street kid after all. How dare the little bastard turn his back to him as if he meant nothing! The others would never let him hear the end of it, marked by a six-year-old ankle-biter, no matter that said ankle-biter was vicious and armed.
Still, here was his chance to save face. He didn’t care who the newcomers were, but he’d be damned before he let them get to the kid first. Ignoring the burning in his side, Rahzon lunged forward, intent on grinding that infuriating little face into the dirt until he choked. At the same time, the three unknowns charged the boy from the front.
Rahzon felt the slight rush of air coming at him before he saw the knife, years of fighting instincts allowing him to jump back just as the kid’s left arm swung into a wide arc towards his midsection. So fast! His feet tangled up, and he fell back, landing painfully onto his backside.
For half a beat, everything went dark as a fresh gush of warmth and fire slid down his injured side as the wound was torn wider, but the scream of one of the new arrivals distracted him from this new pain. Clutching his side tightly, Rahzon lifted his eyes in enough time to see both knives slice in a crisscross motion up to the hilts in the belly of one man. The body of another lay writhing, eerily silent but for the scraping of his body against the stones, in a rapidly spreading pool of blood at the boy’s feet.
The boy lifted a small foot and kicked the impaled body back into the third man behind him with more force than his tiny frame seemed capable of wielding, freeing both blades. The resulting wet sound brought into mind a butcher slicing into a slab of meat.
As the two bodies went down, the boy turned to him, both knives dripping. A smile that was wrong on many levels stretched across his face.
The tensing of the kid’s body was the only warning as he lunged, striking Rahzon in the chest with his knee with enough force to knock the breath from him, knocking him flat. Two knives at his throat silenced him in mid-gasp, the hands rising instinctively in defense falling limp with sudden terror to his sides.
“You little—” he rasped, then choked on the remaining words when the two blades pressed more deeply into his throat. A stream of warmth began to trickle down both sides of his neck, scalding against skin suddenly turned cold. He didn’t want to know whether the blood was his.
Eyes of an indeterminate lighter shade of darkness, now only partially obscured by bangs, filled his watery vision even in the gloom. The sounds of his erratic heartbeat and gasping seemed preternaturally loud, almost deafening.
“Take a good look behind me,” the boy said softly, his hands clenching his knives so tightly that they shook, biting into Rahzon’s neck with every quiver. His eyes narrowed to black slits. “That will be you if we ever meet again.”
Before Rahzon could blink, the stinging pressure disappeared from his neck along with the weight on his chest. The boy crouched over him, wiped both blades clean on his jerkin, and almost nonchalantly moved away to sprint off into the night.
For a while, all Rahzon could do was lie there and stare after the kid until he darted out of sight around the corner, shivering in a warm night that had suddenly turned cold. Slowly, he sat up, grimacing as the fire in his side was reawakened. His eyes fell to his jerkin, intent on assessing the damage, then widened.
Beside the rapidly spreading stain from his side was a thin slash in the leather across his belly running completely from one end of his side to the other. He had thought the brat had missed and he had, but not by very much. He inspected the damage with his fingers. Yes, his undershirt had even been sliced.
He looked over at the fallen men, watching as one struggled out from beneath the still body that had been practically gutted. The man retched as one of his flailing hands became entangled in the other’s spilled intestines. A third man lay unmoving in a pool of blood where he had fallen, probably dead.
Unbidden, the words of his father whispered hauntingly across his thoughts.
“You couldn’t see him. It’s like the wind had taken the shape of a boy, wafting in and out between the men that had him surrounded before they could even so much as blink, leaving death and injury to any man it touched. But that wasn’t the eeriest part. Ten men lay dead, but not a drop of blood was spilt, not a mark on ‘em. Could only be one of them.”
It was a legend of sorts among slavers. A child around four or five had supposedly single-handedly taken out a band of ten slavers during his great-grandfather’s time.
Old Soul—a child that was not a child.
He had never really believed the story. Once again his eyes fell to the slice in his clothes. He swallowed hard.
Slowly, Rahzon climbed to his feet, nearly pitching forward as the darkness around him began to swirl. Damn, he had lost more blood than he’d thought.
He staggered over to the only other survivor and said, “Was that what I think it was?”
The man started violently, hands raised instinctively in defense before his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s it to you?”
The slaver raised an eyebrow. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you around, stranger,” Rahzon commented, struggling to keep a level of cockiness to his voice that he just didn’t feel at the moment. “You do realize that the Mahze clan owns this territory and that no hunting without permission is allowed? That brat was mine, and your interference has cost me a great deal tonight. However, I did find something the kid said very interesting, as I did the kid. Tell me everything you know about the boy, and I’ll let you walk out of this city alive.”
The fallen man sneered. “Not very threatening coming from a lone, injured man.”
Good point, but Rhazon wasn’t about to admit it. If it came down to a fight he wouldn’t be worth much with his injury. The stranger did not appear to be hurt. He had hoped that the mere mention of his clan was enough to intimidate him, but the man hadn’t seemed too impressed. Either his lord was a powerful one or he had traveled a great distance in pursuit of the boy and did not know the machinations of the area. He knew next to nothing about the mythical Old Souls, so what about them could possibly make these men risk their lives in an attempt to capture one?
He mentally swore. The haze permeating his vision was becoming increasingly worse, and if the stickiness of the hand pressing against the stab wound at his side was any indication, he couldn’t afford to waste any more time here—nor could he allow that man to leave.
A flicker of movement behind the sitting man caught his eye, and lifting his gaze briefly, Rahzon almost sighed in relief as familiar figures began emerging from the darkness. Some of his comrades had arrived, likely attracted by the screams.
“Perhaps they will be more convincing,” he said with a grin, gesturing with a flick of his chin—which he instantly regretted when his neck began to burn.
At least the interloper had enough brains to know when he had lost, though he never said a word. The slump of tensed shoulders said it all as he was quickly surrounded by eight men, two more moving to stand on either side of the slaver.
“What in the three hells happened here?” the man on his right demanded, staring down at the gutted body at his feet with disgust then looking pointedly at Rahzon’s blood-soaked side.
“Later. Now this stranger has something I think we’d all be interested to hear.”
Rahzon looked down at the fallen man. “I’ll ask again,” he said calmly. “Was that boy an Old Soul?”
He could feel the jerk of momentary shock of those surrounding him, but he ignored them. Explanations could wait; for him, time was running out along a steady stream of scalding red.
“A demon, more like,” the stranger muttered resentfully.
Rahzon nodded, remembering the image of the boy smiling while another man’s life dripped from his hands. He resisted the impulsive urge to finger the wound on his neck. “Why try to capture one?”
It was a long moment before the answer came, but when it did, Rahzon was not disappointed.
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