Wraith King Read online

  Wraith King

  Jack Porter

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Porter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  About the Author

  1

  I am Death.

  My enemies cower at my feet, awaiting the feel of my blade against their throats. A blade that will eventually slice everyone, kings and paupers, women and children, young and old—

  Wait, that’s not right. I don’t want to be Death. My name is Jon, and I’ve definitely never killed anyone.

  And for some reason, I’m dressed in rags and smell like piss and shit.

  Make that covered in something that smells like horse shit. And my head feels like someone stabbed it with a pickax.

  My thoughts were a fuzzy, gooey mess, and my vision wasn’t much better. It felt like the worst sort of hangover, but I hadn’t been drinking that much. Where the hell was I? And why did I wake up thinking I was Death?

  Slowly, the events of the night came back to me. I had been drinking at a bar near the office, and a big, beefy guy picked a fight with me over his girl. I had kicked his ass and then left before the police arrived. Next thing I remember, I had left the train station and was crossing the bridge toward my apartment. And…

  A gang jumped me. They beat me and tossed me over the bridge into freezing water. Left me for dead. Stupid punks.

  So why did I smell like horse shit? There weren’t many horses in Jersey. How far had I floated?

  Beneath the smell of dung was the smell of hay and animals. With my head pounding, I finally managed to blink away my blurry vision to see that I was in a barn stall. Warm, yellow light spilled over the top of a rough half-door, illuminating the stone wall at my back and wooden walls on the other two sides. I sat up to better take in my surroundings, which I shared with a small brown horse. It looked at me curiously, its ears cocked toward me, its mouth moving as it munched on something.

  How the hell did I get here? For that matter, where was here? At first, I thought it was a prank. That one of my buddies had hauled me out of the river and thrown me in a barn. But I didn’t know anyone with a barn.

  When I stood, the evidence of my beating became more apparent. Everything ached, and the headache tripled as I tried to maintain my balance in the straw on the floor. Once I was sure I wouldn’t fall, I gingerly tested my body for broken bones. But other than severe bruising on my ribs and stomach, I had got off relatively easy. The events were still hazy, and I leaned against the stone wall to gather my thoughts. Images of men in ski masks came to mind, dressed in black and carrying stun guns.

  Oh. So that’s how they knocked me out. A surge of anger rose up, taking the edge off some of the pain. I could have died. Was it a mugging gone wrong? A gang initiation? Had I been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was I targeted? That was ridiculous, though. I wasn’t some John Wick character. There was no reason to target me. My head swam with all the questions without answers.

  And what was that voice in my head when I woke up? It’s like it wasn’t mine but some else’s. A deeply buried part of my subconscious, perhaps, but if so, it was darker than anything I’d ever thought before.

  The horse continued to stare at me.

  “What?” I challenged.

  The animal nickered softly, then went back to munching on grain from a pail hanging on the door.

  Now that I had been leaning against the wall for several minutes, my head was much clearer. It was time to get home. Reaching for my cell phone, I realized that I wasn’t wearing my jeans, but a dress.

  A damn dress?

  2

  No, not a dress, more like one of those tunics worn in Medieval times, with pants tied up around my waist and a belt over all of it. The fabric was itchy and rough, bound to cause chafing if I were to wear it long.

  Now, I knew this had to be a prank.

  All thoughts of the strange voice vanished. I held out my hands and grinned, then winced as it stretched my swollen lip. Looking around, I said, “Okay, guys. The joke’s up. Where’s the camera?”

  At my tone, the horse jerked its head up and shifted restlessly. Watching that the animal didn’t try to kick me, I moved for the stall door and pushed it open. It creaked on old iron hinges, and I stepped out into a dirt aisle.

  My first impression was that the barn was old, but that wasn’t the right word. It was ancient. Enormous, dry timbers supported a thatched roof. Two windows up high didn’t have any glass in them but were open to the elements with wooden shutters tied back along the wall. The sky outside was dark except for a reddish hue, and the barn was lit by a single lantern next to the door.

  A poleaxe rested against the far wall, its blade sharp and gleaming. I only knew what it was because of the video games I liked to play. The weapon was a nice touch to the practical joke. My thirtieth birthday was coming up. Maybe my buddies had devised this all as a surprise. It was a bit over the top, perhaps, but if my brother had got in on the joke, then that would have explained the lavish setup. He had more money than he knew what to do with.

  “Guys?” I asked. More horses poked their heads over their stall doors to look at the dirty guy in weird clothes. “Where did they find this place?” I muttered. It was like an elaborate movie set, or maybe a historical reenactment setup.

  I looked for hidden cameras, certain that my buddies were laughing their asses off from a monitor somewhere. If so, this was a pretty bad prank. I could have died in that river.

  Saving me from any further searching, I heard the barn door open, and a red-headed woman in armor walked in. She was almost as tall as me, and I’m six feet three inches. Her lithe body was marked by several scars that crisscrossed her muscular bare arms, and her face looked like she was no stranger to bar fights herself. She wore plated armor braces, a chest plate that didn’t quite hold in her ample breasts, and those shoulder plate thingys that I couldn’t name. Her abs we
re bare, but her hips were adorned with an armored belt draped with a dress that was split up the length of her thigh, which was also scarred.

  The woman saw me, hesitated only a second, and then unsheathed a wicked-looking dagger at her hip.

  “What are you doing in my stable?” she demanded.

  I held up my hands to show her I was unarmed. This was turning out to be a great birthday present.

  “Answer me, peasant,” she spat.

  “I just woke up here,” I said truthfully, eyeing that blade a little more cautiously. It certainly looked real.

  She advanced on me, pointing the dagger at my throat. But I was not afraid. The night was getting better and better. If only my head didn’t ache so badly, I could enjoy it more. Next time the guys wanted to pull an elaborate joke, they should go lightly on the beating. I stood tall, though, determined to make the best of it, and took the opportunity to eye the woman up and down.

  “Prostitutes aren’t my thing,” I said, “and my brother knows that, but maybe he thought it would be funny. That’s great makeup and costume, by the way.”

  The woman’s nostrils flared, not unlike the horses’ in the stalls, and she narrowed her eyes. “What did you call me?”

  “Umm… a prostitute? Nothing wrong with that. OH,” I said, realization dawning, “you're an actress. I’m sorry. My shithead brother gets the dumbest ideas sometimes, and since the night was so weird, and with the river and the punks and the—”

  “Silence, dog!” The woman circled me. I moved with her, keeping her and that dagger in my view on instinct. “Now,” she said. “I’ll ask you once more. Why are you in my stable? And you will answer me in as few words as possible, or by the goddess, I will carve out your tongue and feed it to my pigs.”

  I shrugged. “My birthday is coming up.” She was doing a really good acting job, and I wondered how my brother was able to hire someone of her caliber. Not that I was any great judge of acting, but this woman really was scary. Or she would have been if I had believed it was real.

  “What is a birth day?” she asked, making two words out of ‘birthday.’

  I snorted in laughter, but she flicked her dagger in an unconscious gesture that made me think she really wanted to use it on me. The blade gleamed in the glow of the lantern hanging by the door, so I reined in my humor and decided to play along.

  “A birthday is the day we celebrate when someone is born. It’s a bit of a sad occasion when you think about it,” I said. “And sometimes people like my brother take their little jokes too far.”

  I said this last bit to the ceiling, wincing as more pain shot through my neck.

  The armored woman didn’t back away, but she did eye me strangely. “Here in Hell, we don’t celebrate a birth day. We only celebrate death days because those are the days when someone is truly set free.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Where did you say we were?”

  The woman raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. Her red hair practically shined like fire in the lantern’s glow. “You look a bit simple,” she said, “so I will humor you. We are in the only place that matters. In Hell.”

  3

  The armored woman led me out into a narrow, crooked street overshadowed by dark mountains. The evening was uncomfortably warm, and the hot, dry air was full of smoke and debris. An occasional glowing ember drifted down from the sky as if the clouds were on fire. The only real light came from the glow of firelight shining through the cracks of doors or shutters.

  Stone and wooden buildings rose up around us in the darkness, most of them with the same thatched roofs as the stable. I wondered how they didn’t catch fire with the embers in the air. Behind the town, the sky was lit with red clouds, and the black silhouette of those impossibly tall peaks loomed over everything.

  “Is something on fire?” I asked.

  The woman gave me a shove. “You’re funny. Keep moving.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “I don’t much care, as long as you get far away from my horses.”

  I turned to face her. “But—”

  She kept her dagger pointed at me. “I don’t give empty threats, man, now do as you’re told and get the fuck away from me.”

  I expected her to spin on her heel and march away, but she stared me down until I was forced to back slowly away. When I was safely out of reach of that dagger, I turned left and walked down the street. Still throbbing from the beating, my head reeled, and the smoke didn’t do much to clear it. Realizing how dry my throat was, I looked for a way to quench my thirst. If this was a village, there would be a pub, right?

  Had I been stuck in a fancy new RPG game? If so, the technology was far beyond anything I’d experienced or read about. And if something this immersive existed, my brother wouldn’t have had access to it. He made decent money, enough to have me kidnapped and dumped in a barn, perhaps. But enough to transport me to a new town that was on fire?

  Probably not.

  I glanced back. The woman had stopped watching me and gone back inside. She had said we were in Hell. But we couldn’t be, right? Hell wasn’t real, was it? It was a horror tale used to scare people into behaving themselves. My throat burned with thirst now, and I began examining each building as I passed it, looking for signs that I might be welcome or find something to drink. At this point, I didn’t care if it was beer or soda or water, as long as it was wet and preferably cold.

  The buildings, which varied from three-story stone structures to no better than mud huts, all looked closed up for the night. No one walked around. No one had a door open. And the narrow street I walked on looked to be the only one in town, with no side streets branching off.

  The longer I walked, the hotter I became. Sweat dripped down my head and back, soaking my already putrid hair and clothes. The smoke was drying out my eyes, though, and I blinked to wet them. Damn, this place was hot. Who would build in an environment like this? Looking back up at the sky, I wondered if we were situated near an active volcano. That would explain the heat, smoke, and embers, but it only made the town’s location even more curious. Why settle so near the base of a smoking volcano?

  Finally drained and weary with thirst, I sat to rest on a doorstep of one of the stone houses near the end of town. Here, the mountains had begun closing in around the edge of the village, and rocky crags jutted up behind, dark and looming. Beyond, down the road, all was darkness except for that red sky.

  Shuddering, I looked back down the street from where I had come. I no longer felt like shouting or calling out to my buddies. This couldn’t be a hoax, nor could it be a simulation of some kind. There were only two options.

  Either I was hallucinating, dreaming of a terrible place.

  Or I had really died and gone to Hell.

  4

  I should have felt a modicum of despair, at least, but all I could sense was my urgent thirst. It became the thing which drove all other thoughts and emotions away. Not wishing to travel further down the road and into the darkness, I huddled there on the doorstep, shivering despite the heat.

  I’d never been plagued with indecision. Often, in the past, my snap decisions made people think I was hasty and reckless. But I usually didn’t waffle back and forth over things. Tonight, though, in this foreign world, I hesitated. In any other circumstances, I would search for water. But if I really was dreaming, it wouldn’t matter if I found water or not, would it? And, if I had died and gone to Hell, would there be any water for me?

  Feeling simple, as the stable woman had put it, I realized that no matter where I was, those horses had needed to survive on something. They looked like ordinary animals, and they had been eating hay and grain, which grew in soil and needed to be watered. And the creatures themselves would need plenty of water to survive in this environment.

  With the return of rational thought, I left my temporary hiding place and went back down the road. The stable woman had threatened to carve out my tongue, but if I was quiet, I bet I could find water right there at the b
arn.

  The thought that water was nearby only made me thirstier, and I jogged down the eerie, quiet road until the stable was once again in sight.

  Slipping into the darkest shadows I could find, I stole my way along the buildings and around the side of the barn. A small paddock led out the back, and there, near a door to a stone house, were the stones of a circular well. It even had a bucket tied to a rope and sitting on top of the short stone wall.

  The paddock stood between me and the well, but it was empty.

  With thirst driving me forward, I climbed the rough fence and landed on the balls of my feet inside the paddock. Inside the stable was quiet, but I paused to make sure I hadn’t disturbed the horses. When I could no longer wait, I threw caution to the wind and ran to the other side, climbed that fence too, and hurried to the well.

  The wooden bucket was empty, so I grabbed the rope attached to it and lowered it down into the depths. I lowered it and lowered it, fearing that there was no water down there and that this was my Hell, to constantly lower this bucket into the ground and come up with nothing.