I kissed her once again and then left the hangar with Sky, Mordred, Elaine, and Hades.
“Don’t you need to perform the ritual?” I asked Mordred as we all climbed into a Black Hawk helicopter.
“Nabu and Zamek will complete it. Anyone in there is going to be affected, so it’s best I’m not there.”
“What do you plan to do while I’m in the middle of nowhere?”
“What I’ve always done, Nate. Piss off Avalon and fuck their shit up. Only this time I’ll be doing it for the good guys.”
The rest of the journey was a chance for Hades and Elaine to explain exactly what Arthur had done since I’d been declared dead. Occasionally I turned to watch the ground fly by at high speed far below us, wondering how far Arthur’s corruption had spread across the country, until eventually we landed in the middle of a forest in Clockwork, Oregon.
We all got out of the helicopter, and an elderly Asian man left a Ford Ranger truck and greeted Hades with a hug.
“This is Dr. Kuro,” Hades said.
The doctor shook my hand. “You’re going to be our guest here.”
“I guess that’s the plan, yes.”
“Your house is ready. We have a beautiful town. You’ll like it. It’s mostly peaceful.”
“Mostly?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“We’re a small town, not a boring one,” Dr. Kuro said with a smile.
I turned back to Sky, Elaine, and Mordred. “I’ll be seeing you all soon,” I said.
“Take care, Nate,” Sky said.
“Have a nice holiday,” Mordred said. “Try not to bring attention to yourself. Be a good little human.”
“Piss off,” I said to him, and he smiled and hugged me.
“I wish this had gone better,” Elaine said. “But now we know our true enemy. We know his power and influence. One day soon there will be a reckoning for him.”
“Our world has changed,” I said. “Humans know of our existence. They know of Avalon; they know they’re not the top of the evolutionary ladder. If they don’t know now that some of Arthur’s allies consider humans nothing more than food, they soon will. Arthur is going to change the world, and we can’t stop that. There aren’t enough of us, and we’re fragmented and broken. But we won’t be. Not forever. We’ll show Arthur the kinds of people he crossed, and we’ll show him just how badly we plan on beating him and those who call him an ally.”
I watched them climb back into the helicopter, leaving me alone with Hades.
“Thank you for this,” I said.
“No thanks necessary,” he told me. “Be safe. Heal, and then we’ll deal with what comes next.”
“We fight back,” I said with complete conviction. “That’s what comes next. Rebellion.”
Chapter One
NATE GARRETT
Now
A year. I’d been told it would be a year. Gotta be honest: that hadn’t turned out so well, had it?
Clockwork was a town of just over seven thousand people, the majority of whom appeared to be quite nice. Acknowledging that being a solitary loner who never spoke to anyone was a pretty good way to screw up your mental health, I’d made sure to make a few friends in my time here. While the last two years had sucked on more than one occasion, having friends was one of the good parts.
I’d introduced myself to Clockwork as Nate Carpenter, Nate Garrett being, for all intents and purposes, officially dead. I’d used the surname of my best friend from my old life. Tommy was one of the people I missed seeing the most.
Duke’s Diner was one of three in town and the only one I visited with any frequency. This was partly due to the fact that the owner and chef, Antonio Flores, cooked the best damn food in town and partly because I liked several of the people who worked there.
I parked my blue Mercedes X-Class outside the diner, which was already busy with those who required an early-morning coffee and/or a Mexican breakfast. Antonio served more traditional American food, too, but no matter how good it was, no one came to Duke’s for the pancakes.
The snow was a few inches high and crunched under my booted feet. Despite wearing a thick green winter jacket, warm jeans, black boots, and black gloves with a matching hat, I was still cold. The heater in the pickup had spoiled me.
I pushed the glass door of the diner open and enjoyed the warmth and the sounds of eating and chatter that washed over me.
“Is that you, Nate?’” Antonio bellowed from the kitchen, sticking his head out of the serving hatch.
“No, it’s Commissioner Gordon. I’m looking for Batman,” I shouted back to Antonio.
Antonio smiled. “Are you coming tonight?”
“For the approximately one hundredth time, yes,” I said.
Antonio’s smile turned into a huge grin. Antonio had been a US Army Ranger. Having served two tours in Afghanistan without so much as a scratch, he’d gone back for a third time and hadn’t been so lucky. He’d lost the lower part of his left leg when an improvised explosive device had gone off near his team as they’d been sweeping a village that had been massacred by insurgents. That had been ten years ago, although the loss of a limb didn’t appear to have slowed Antonio down. He’d once told me he’d considered it a new challenge to overcome.
Apart from owning Duke’s—which, despite me asking, Antonio had never shown any interest in explaining the name of—he also ran the under-fifteen girls’ soccer team for the town, with the help of one of the sheriff’s deputies, Brooke Tobin.
“Football game tonight,” he shouted, using the correct name for the sport.
“I know,” I shouted back, gaining a few laughs from the three waitresses and waiter who were working in the diner.
“You are coming, though, right?” Jessica Choi asked me as she led me over to a booth at the far end of the diner. Like all of the waiting staff, the only uniform she wore was a black T-shirt with DUKE’S adorning it in big red letters.
“Yes,” I promised.
“Because Ava has been talking about you coming to a game for weeks now,” Jessica said. “It’s the cup final.”
I sat down and sighed. “I promise I’ll be there.” The match had been postponed for several weeks because of bad weather. Matches were usually played on Thursday nights at the local high school, but the snow had been so bad that playing football in it would have been a special kind of torture. I’d missed a few of Ava’s games during the season and always felt bad for doing so, but I avoided traveling to other towns for away games, just in case I got spotted by the wrong person. I was in Clockwork to keep a low profile, so running around the state of Oregon would have been a risk.
Ava was Jessica’s younger sister. They had been brought up by their grandparents, Drs. Daniel and Donna Kuro. Ava had been only three and Jessica sixteen when their parents had died in a car crash twelve years earlier.
“How goes the doctorate?” I asked Jessica after she took my order of scrambled eggs and chorizo along with a cup of English tea. An addition to the menu I knew Antonio had only included to stop me complaining about its absence.
“Good,” Jessica said. “I feel bad for dropping Simon off at my grandparents’ so often, but they don’t seem to mind. And Simon loves spending time at their place.”