imPerfect Blood: A Gritty Urban Fantasy Series (The imPerfect Cathar Book 7) by C.N. Rowan

Author:C.N. Rowan [Rowan, C.N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2024-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter twenty

Salzburg, 27 October, present day

Of all the prices I’ve paid for all the mistakes I’ve made? This one outclasses them all.

There’s a reason most knights had pages. Getting armour on and off on your own isn’t an easy task. Luckily I give precisely zero fucks what condition it’s in once it’s removed.

I tear it from my body, grief and fury supercharging my strength like an old lady lifting a car off their beloved dog that’s trapped under the wheels. Except it’s not a dog. And there’s nothing I can lift off, nothing I can do to save the man I may as well call Dad.

The helm’s flung across the room, half-burying into the wall, sending up a plume of plaster dust. We’ll not be getting the deposit back, but that’s the last concern on my mind right now. Then I shuck off the gauntlets. Tearing at the rest, shredding steel as I go, I pull my phone out of my etheric storage with my right hand and call Faust.

‘It didn’t work!’ I can’t keep myself under control. The words are screamed down the microphone, as though if, if I can just express all the agony of failure in this one sentence, time itself will take pity on me and rewind, giving me another shot at it.

‘Didn’t work how? What happened, Paul?’ I hear the change of sound quality, a distance added to the microphone, and I know he’s put it on speaker so Mephistopheles can hear.

‘The alp escaped. He went out through a gap in the window frame. You told me he couldn’t!’ Good God, I know I’m being unfair. I do. I just can’t help it right now. The guilt and anger are tearing me to pieces, bubbling over, and I have to lash out, or else I might just pull down this whole building on myself right now.

‘Paul, I said I didn’t think he could! The stories all say he has to leave by the way he got in. But that’s all we had to work on. Stories. You knew that, well as I did.’

I do, of course. When dealing with rare magical creatures and the strange rules they’re bound by, there’s no detailed guidelines. Just rumours and fireside tales. Doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t want to be assuaged. What I want is to have someone to blame, a way to offload some of this tsunami of guilt and despair that’s threatening to drag me under and drown me. It’s not Faust’s fault. He did his best. Doesn’t matter who’s fault it is though. We’ve failed.

‘Fuck!’ The clattering smash of the phone as it instantaneously disassembles itself on contact with the wall is as momentarily satisfying as it is unnecessary and stupid. Right now I couldn’t give a damn though. Nothing matters. Not compared to the enormity of the bill that’s just come due for that whole messed-up escapade that kicked off with me hanging from the wall in the shit-wizard’s basement seven months ago.

Though,

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