Mark of Cain (Immortal Mercenary Book 1) Read online

  Mark Of Cain

  Immortal Mercenary: Book 1

  Conner Kressley

  Myth Machine

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  35. Want Free Stuff?

  Prologue

  Twenty Two Years Ago

  I cursed out loud as the ground fell out from under me. After all these years, I should have known better than to fall for such a run of the mill illusion.

  But I wasn’t myself right now. These witches were messing with my head, and I wasn’t thinking straight.

  My foot cracked as it hit the ground below. I rolled over, clutching it and stared up at the circle of starlight that shone into the hole I now found myself in.

  Whoever the witch was that cast this spell would pay for it soon. Sevenfold, that’s what the Big Guy promised me. She’d probably get a shattered leg out of the deal or maybe even an amputation — depending on how severe the damage to my foot was.

  You could never tell what form my comeuppance would take, or even when it would happen. The Big Guy didn’t mind taking his time, seeing as how he had so much of it to spare.

  I guess we had that in common.

  The worst part of that deal though, was that — no matter what punishment the witch who caused me harm would face — it wasn’t going to help me out of this place.

  I pulled myself up, grabbing at the jagged stones that jutted out of this cylinder and leaned against them once I was upright.

  This was a well, a dried out one that probably hadn’t seen use in a hundred years, but it was a well nonetheless.

  That would make this harder.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried not to think about the shooting pain that was — at this moment — lighting my foot on fire.

  I looked up through the top, spying the bright gold harvest moon. That had something to do with this. It had to. Witches loved all that moon cycle garbage, and had, ever since they crawled their way over here from Eastern Europe.

  The new world was mine. That was the deal. And look at me now, surrounded by people I didn’t want to see, hunted by witches with nasty ulterior motives, and not even a god to pray to.

  At least, not one who didn’t have an ax to grind with me.

  A figure popped in from the side of the opening, looking down at me with big eyes so bright and blue that they shone, even in the darkness. Whoever this was, she was pretty in the most common way imaginable. With blond curls that spilled forward and framed her heart shaped face, it would have been easy to forget that she was a filthy witch, if not for the scowl she wore the instant her eyes met mine.

  “I don’t suppose you have a ladder or a rope you’re willing to lend,” I said, letting a Southern drawl that I picked up sometime during the eighteenth century lay thick over my words.

  You’d be surprised how hard something like that is to shake.

  “A rope won’t help you where you’re going,” she said in a voice so soft and sweet that it almost made me forgive her for the actual content of her words.

  “And where’s that?” I asked, placing a palm nonchalantly against the stone. Digging my fingers in, I hoped to find even a hint of dirt. A break in these stones would make this whole thing easier. It meant things could get out, and in.

  “If you’re thinking of killing me, I think you’ll be in for a surprise,” I added, still searching for even the smallest bit of the earth that now encompassed me.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought about that whole ‘from dust you came and unto dust you shall return thing’. I never thought that would apply to me.

  Guess I was wrong.

  “We know who you are, murderer,” she hissed at me. “But it’s you who has a surprise in store.”

  Really? She was going to hit me with the ‘murderer’ thing? As if I hadn’t heard that a million times over almost as many years.

  Still, the fervor in which she said it gave me an idea. Especially, since I was coming up empty in looking for a break in this well.

  Damn, this was well built. Stones surrounded me now and, while stones were great, they weren’t alive; not like the roots that stretched out into the dirt around me.

  I could talk to those roots, reason with them, and maybe even convince them to help me out of this place before that harvest moon and whatever spell this coven of crazy ass witches placed on it went into effect.

  I’d have to come into physical contact with at least one of them first though, and that didn’t seem likely in this stone prison.

  I was going to have to go a different route, and this witch’s indignation gave me an idea of which way to go.

  “You people always get the details wrong,” I said, shaking my head.

  She leaned forward and I knew I had her. The pendant around her neck came into view, dipping forward with her hair as she stared down at me.

  A black octagon with a golden center, I first saw it two weeks ago, right when the nausea started.

  Even having it this close was making me lightheaded.

  “What lie do you speak today?” she asked, blinking those bright blue eyes. In a different place, under different circumstances, I might have let myself get lost in them.

  As it was, I’d have been satisfied to stab them out.

  “It’s the 20th century, sweetheart. You don’t have to talk like the supporting character in an Edgar Allen Poe story.” I smiled and continued. “The story you’ve heard, my story; it didn’t go the way you think it did.” I smirked. “That book’s old and the story’s even older. Certainly, you didn’t think that nothing had changed in the telling.”

  “You’re here now, eons after you should have moved on to the next life. That is your punishment, and it’s more than the proof we need to sentence you.”

  “Thou dost have a point,” I answered, glaring up at her with curled lips. “But, if you don’t mind, let me make another. You have no idea who I am, little girl,” I said, digging a lighter from my pocket. I hadn’t smoked in nearly thirty years, but I kept a lighter on me at all times for just such an occasion.

  I flipped it open and struck it, bringing about a flame.

  Moving the fire close to me, I let my face be bathed in it. Only then is it visible, only against firelight can anyone see the truth of who I am.

  “The mark,” she gasped as I let the fire flicker near me, illuminating the Big Guy’s branding, the one I’d carried with me every day since I murdered my brother.

  “You brought death into this world!” she roared. It was almost like, even though her damn coven had been chasing me for God knows how long, she hadn’t really believed it was me until she saw it. Now that she had, she was ready to let loose. “You killed him and ushered unspeakable horrors into this world! Every death that followed that one, from the firs
t day until now, it all falls on you.”

  “You think you’re being original?” I asked, my brother’s face flashing through my mind the way it did everyday of this damned endless life. “You think you’re telling me off, opening my eyes to something I didn’t realize before. I’ve been alive nearly as long as this rock we’re spinning on. I’ve watched empires fall and legends get lost and forgotten in time. There’s not a rock in this world I haven’t looked under. There isn’t a place on this planet where my feet haven’t fallen at least once. There isn’t anything you can teach me, little girl. Not one damn thing.”

  “We’re not going to teach you,” she spit back. “We’re going to kill you.”

  “You can’t kill me,” I sighed. “Believe me, I’ve tried. You don’t like it? Take it up with the Big Guy. Cut my head off, light me on fire, saw me in half like Harry fucking Houdini. You’ll hurt me. You’ll probably hurt me a lot, but I won’t die. You’ll just get yourselves killed in the process. And I’ve got enough blood on my hands without adding a bunch of overachieving witches.” I glared up at her. “I’m going to get out of here, but first I’m going to render your little spell useless. I’m going to stop whatever nonsense you people think you can pull off here. And, if you’re not gone by the time I’m back up to the surface-guilt or not — I am going to make you pay.” I ignored the pain in my foot and the fact that I was pretty sure my shoe was filling up with blood.

  That sort of thing really wouldn’t strike fear into anybody’s heart, not even a little girl who wanted to play witch.

  “And do you know why?” I asked without even a hint of sarcasm in my voice. “Because I am everything you say I am. I’m the murderer. I’m the marked. I’m-”

  “Cain,” she said, finishing my sentence.

  “There it is,” I muttered.

  The instant my name left her mouth, the earth began to shake. The stone cell I was sitting in began to falter, forcing divots into itself. I plunged my hand in, contacting a particularly chatty birch root.

  It didn’t take long to convince it to help me. You’d be surprised how starved for conversation some of the older trees can be. Talk to them about anything other than the weather, and they’re willing to do anything you ask.

  Roots, strong and thick, burst through the well. They twisted their way up the walls, securing themselves up on the surface

  I looked up, past the pretty witch girl with her mouth agape and up at the sky. The clouds rolled in, covering over that beautiful harvest moon, ruining the spell.

  This was over, and we both knew it.

  “H-how?” The pretty witch asked as I started climbing up toward her.

  “You said my name,” I answered, climbing with the vines with the speed and precision of someone who had journeyed up both the Great Wall and the Tower of Babel. “Bad things happen when you say my name.” I grinned, pushing past the dizziness that came with being so close to that damn pendant. “Now, if I were you, I’d run.”

  1

  I pushed through the caution tape and into the apartment. It was meant to keep people like me out, and most of the time, I would have listened. This was a crime scene after all, and I had seen more than my share of that in my life.

  I had an invitation this time though, and regardless of the fact that I could have spent this particular Sunday in a thousand more enjoyable ways, it was an invitation I was inclined to accept.

  I looked over the two bedroom as I made my way to the kitchen. Andy hadn’t told me where the body would be, but he knew he wouldn’t have to. I could sense murder from a long way off. The Big Guy said it was part of my curse. I liked to think it was part of my charm.

  This place was nice, too nice for a college student, unless, of course, she came from money.

  As I broached the entry way into the kitchen, I saw blood and stray clumps of hair staining the black and white tile. A pair of detectives — thirty, maybe thirty-five apiece — milled over the tiny body of a brunette. She seemed to be in her early twenties, and though it didn’t do her much good in the long run, she looked like she took care of herself too.

  Her throat had been slit and the blood that hadn’t spilled out and dried on the tile around her had been smeared across her face in sloppy circles. Someone had fun with this.

  The detectives looked me over, settling on my high top sneakers. Say what you want about the fashion of the day, but take it from me, footwear has never been more comfortable.

  “You first year? You’re not supposed to be here.” The bigger one scoffed, peering at me from over the rim of his sunglasses; which he absolutely didn’t need, given that we were inside.

  I couldn’t blame him for thinking I was a kid. I had looked like a scrawny redheaded punk since long before anyone who could remember did remember. It had never been much of a problem until about seventy years ago. Before that, people grew up quicker. You’d never look at a guy in his early to mid-twenties back in the day and think of him as anything other than a grown ass man.

  But lately, the coddling had been going on for far too long, and my credibility had taken a hit for it.

  “This kid looks like he’s in the junior program,” the smaller guy said, chuckling at me.

  If they knew who I really was, they’d piss their pants.

  “Are you, kid?” the smaller guy asked. “You in the junior program?”

  “Not exactly,” I answered, glaring at them and reading them like a pair of really less than extraordinary books.

  Once you’ve lived as long as I have — which is to say, once you’ve basically watched the entire human race sprout up from nothing— you begin to see patterns in the populace.

  The truth is, there are only really two types of people in the world; dickbags who are ruled by fear and dickbags who are ruled by greed.

  Okay. That’s not true. Every once in a while, you see a real live, honest to God decent person, but those come so few and far between that it seems futile to even count them.

  After all, every poll has to have a margin of error.

  These two, they were fearful dickbags. They were both afraid that somebody was going to see their obvious ineptness. So, they relied on deflecting on others to keep it from happening.

  That wasn’t going to work with me.

  “Where’s the cat?” I asked, looking from one of their useless blank expressions to the next.

  “There’s no cat,” the fat guy said, pushing his sunglasses further down the bridge of his nose. Looking around, he added, “You see a litter box around here, Junior Program?”

  “What I see is strands of white fur on her sweater, probably from a British longhair. And a bunch of tiny scratches across her left index and ring fingers, indicating that the cat tried to rouse her awake after the murder. Since I don’t see the cat around and the two of you obviously had no idea it was here in the first place, I’m guessing somebody took it.” I nodded at the fat one. “Though you were right about the litter box. It should be here. Someone took it with them when they scooped the cat up.”

  They stared at me, like they were still trying to piece what I was trying to say together.

  “Why the hell would somebody take a cat?” The fat one asked.

  “No idea,” I answered. “At least, not yet.”

  “Good find,” a familiar voice said from the doorway.

  I heard footsteps behind me and relaxed a little.

  Detective Andrew Turner strode up beside me. I had known him for every one of his forty-one years and I knew his father for a hell of a lot longer before that.

  He settled beside me and the dumbass officers tensed up the way a kid might when the vice principal walks into the classroom.

  “This is C. Adams,” Andy said, motioning to me. He knew better than to say my real name out loud. “He’s a freelance advisor, and we’ll take it from here.”

  “Detective,” the fat guy started. “We found this body. It’s sort of our case.”

  “Well, I sort of don’t want you to fu
ck it up. So how about we make a deal? You get your asses out of here and go back to busting up bar fights, and I won’t tell anybody how a kid, who couldn’t drink two years ago and spends his evenings working at Sunglass Hut, schooled you.”

  The pair stared at me like they wanted to tear my skin off with their teeth. Usually, that sort of look was reserved for women I ran into after never calling them back, but I didn’t mind it today.

  They shuffled out, muttering some curse words under their breath.

  Once they’d left I turned back to Andy, giving him a real once over.

  He was a little wider than the last time I’d seem him, his hair a little grayer. Which made sense, given that that was almost seven years ago now.

  Time is a weird thing. It can get away from you, especially when you don’t have to count it.

  “Sunglass Hut?” I asked, looking over at Andy.

  “I guess I could tell them the truth; that you made your money with early General Electric stock and six different pensions, but something tells me they wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You look good,” I answered, patting him on the back.

  “Don’t lie to me, Uncle C. I look like shit and you know it.” He grinned. “Not everybody can be blessed with eternal youth. Ever if they are a ginger.”

  “I don’t remember the Big Guy calling it a blessing, Andy,” I answered, pushing thoughts of that moment — the moment — out of my head. “And I’m going by Callum now, Callum Coldwell.”

  “That’s ominous,” he answered, pulling a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lighting it.

  “It’s Irish, which makes sense with the red hair. And it’s easy to remember, which comes in handy when you’ve had as many names as I have over the years. Best of all, the whole world doesn’t end it with ‘and Abel’.”

  I didn’t say my brother’s name much, not out loud anyway. But Andy was practically family, and that made him Abel’s family too, in a way. Even if he never had and never would meet the guy.

  “I’d have figured the best part would be that the whole goddamn world didn’t wretch like it had eaten a bad burrito when you say it, but that’s just me.”