Wanderers 4: A Tough Act to Follow (The Wanderers)

  Wanderers 4:

  A Tough Act to Follow

  Richard A. Bamberg

  Text Copyright © 2017 Richard A Bamberg

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States of America

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover art by RAVVEN (www.ravven.com)

  ISBN-13: 978-1979307826

  ISBN-10: 1979307822

  9876543210:

  DEDICATION

  For the love of my life, Joy.

  .

  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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Other WORKS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Rene’ and Robert, for their encouragement and their patience.

  Chapter 1

  Alexander

  Spring break in Cancun. I deserved a break. Since Mom’s death at the hands of the supernatural shades, my life had been five months of misery. At first, I was too busy to grieve. The motel and restaurant had to be kept running; people depended on me. I couldn’t just lay off the entire staff while I wallowed in self-pity. Grandma and Grandpa Dockerty flew in for the service and stayed the first month until I was able to get a handle on things. They’d been a big help, and I would have loved for them to stay longer, but they were getting on in years, and I knew I had to stand on my own feet. They did stretch their stay until after Christmas, but the holiday wasn’t the same without Mom.

  My Grandparents and I had jointly interviewed hotel and restaurant managers in the period before Christmas and made job offers the week before New Years. Then I drove my Grandparents to the San Antonio airport, and we had a tearful farewell before they flew back to their retirement B&B home on the Caribbean coast of Belize. I didn’t stick around to see their plane fly off into the morning sky. I had the new hotel manager arriving before lunch and the restaurant manager arriving that afternoon.

  I know my Grandparents had hoped I’d take over the business after Mom died, but I no longer had any interest in managing the operations on a daily basis. Hell, I didn’t even want to continue my studies any longer.

  The Wanderer, Raphael A. Semmes, and his beautiful and sexy Apprentice, Therese E. Sylvan had disrupted my life but had also shown me that there was more to life than running a small restaurant and motel on the Guadalupe River outside New Braunfels, Texas. Exposure to the reality of magic and the possibility of creatures that belonged more in mythology than south Texas had blown my desire of a mundane life to pieces. I had begun to learn magic! How does a teenage boy go back to hotel management after he’s seen real magic?

  Mom’s death had just been the final straw. I’d already realized that I was going to become a wizard. It sounds preposterous. Boy, don’t I know it, but whether you call magic users witches, mages, or wizards, the truth of real magic was too incredible to let slip out of my grasp.

  I leaned back in my chair and watched the gibbous moonrise over the Gulf of Mexico. I was sixteen floors above a beach lined with palm trees. Their frons swayed in the light breeze coming in off the ocean and bringing with it the scent of salt and the occasional whiff of decaying fish. Between the trees and down into the water, the beach was crowded with bikini-clad girls and a comparable number of boys. They were partying the night away, even if it was still daylight, just as they had each of my first three nights in Cancun. I’d hooked up with a couple of the ladies already and had a date with a third one tonight. I smiled and took a swig of beer. Yes, spring break in Mexico was what I needed to begin my new life.

  Sunday night, everything would change. Tess had relayed to me the name and address, outside Atlanta, of a friend of Raphael’s. He had already arranged things with Christine Ronue to have me apprentice under her while I learned magic. The brief taste of it I’d gotten while Tess and Rafe were visiting New Braunfels had not been nearly enough, but Rafe had promised he would arrange a mentor for me so I could continue my studies in the art. I had learned so little with Tess and Rafe, but it had been enough to leave me wanting more.

  The sun was baking my face, but I’d slathered on a good layer of SPF 30 and I was being reasonable about the amount of sun I got. Mom had always harped on me about not getting too much sun. The thought brought a moment of melancholy. My Corona was empty and I was considering getting another one from the fridge when I heard a grunt of pain above me. I glanced up in time to see a woman with long blonde hair hanging partially off the edge of the roof, one floor above me. Her eyes were wild, and she opened her mouth as though to scream, but a hand clamped over her mouth, and she disappeared.

  Leaping to my feet, I ran inside and picked up the bedside phone. My own phone was in my shirt pocket, but it’d take time to find the hotel’s number. I punched zero and it rang twice before the front desk answered.

  “Sí, señor?” answered a tired, but cheerful voice.

  “This is Alex Dockerty in 1620. I want to report someone being assaulted on the roof,” I said as rapidly as I could.

  The man’s voice lost its jovial tinge. “Señor? Are you on the roof?”

  “No, the woman being assaulted is. I just saw her.”

  “I don’t understand. If you aren’t on the roof, how could you have seen someone being assaulted?”

  “For Christ’s sake, she was hanging off the edge directly above my balcony.”

  “You think she was trying to commit suicide?” the desk clerk asked.

  I took a second to stare at the handpiece in shock. Was this fool messing with me or was he just stupid?

  “No, damnit, someone was assaulting her. Send hotel security to the roof, I’m going up to see if I can help.”

  “Señor, the roof is off limits to guests.”

  I slammed the phone down and started toward the door. Realizing I had no weapon of any kind, I stopped and stared around the small room. There wasn’t a kitchen in this unit, so no knives. The desk lamp? No, too light. Damn it! There had to be…

  I opened the closet door, grabbed the thick wood rod that held up my hanging clothes and yanked it down. The hangers and my clothes fe
ll to the floor as I raked a hand down its seven feet of length. I hefted the weapon. It didn’t have the right feel to it, but it would be a damned sight better than my bare hands.

  Throwing open the door, I burst into the hallway, turned left and ran the ten feet to the entrance to the stairwell. If there’s anything an hotelier knows it is to check out all of the fire exits as soon as your arrive and to make sure your room is near one.

  Hitting the crash bar, I glanced at the sign that said, “Acceso al techo.”

  My Spanish wasn’t great, but I had installed similar signs in our own stairwells when I was sixteen. Except ours were bi-lingual.

  I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and hit the crash bar on the roof exit a few seconds later.

  The hotel was one of the taller ones on the beach and the view from its roof was amazing, but I didn’t have time for sightseeing. The roof was flat. It looked like the old style liner with gravel and tar covering the waterproof layer. An assortment of air stacks poked through the liner to various heights, depending on whatever the local code was for hotels. A massive air handler took up a quarter of the roof to my right. To my left was the three-foot high safety wall that circled the roof. There was no sign of the woman or the man whose arm I’d seen dragging her out of sight.

  I raised my improvised weapon and took a quick look to either side of the door. Nothing there.

  Then I heard a muffled scream somewhere to my right. I let the door close behind me and moved in that direction. I was nearly to the air handler when I caught a glimpse of the blonde struggling with a man who was nearly my six-foot-two but had to outweigh me by at least fifty pounds. He was attempting to drag the bikini-clad girl–she looked to be no more than fifteen–toward the entrance to another stairwell on the far side of the roof.

  “Let her go!” I hollered as I hurried toward them.

  The man, probably a Mexican from his dark skin and hair, was in his late thirties. He looked back at me when I yelled but kept dragging the girl toward the door.

  When I was ten feet from them, I slid to a stop in the gravel. Not an easy trick in flip-flops. The strap on the left one snapped, and my toes dug into the hot gravel. I gritted my teeth against the sudden pain in my toes and raised the wooden rod in both hands as though I was waiting for a pitch.

  “I said let her go.”

  The man glared at me over the girl’s head. The girl’s eyes were brown, unusual for a blonde unless she was a bottle blonde, and her skin’s dark color didn’t look like a suntan, but a natural color. It didn’t matter. There was no way I was letting some brute drag the girl off. I kicked off my remaining flip-flop and set my feet shoulder width apart in the hot gravel. I took another step closer and drew back the rod. It was not as heavy as I would have liked, but it was long enough that I thought I could handle this bastard.

  Hefting the rod, I moved closer. The man was considerably taller than the blonde–what was she doing on the roof in a bikini?–and if I moved fast, I could pop him between the eyes with a lunge. That should make him let go of her and then I could beat him about the head and shoulders until…

  I heard feet scraping through the gravel behind me.

  Sidestepping, I brought my weapon around in an arc at head height, swinging it as hard as I could.

  The eyes of the man behind me went wide, and the rod vibrated in my hands as it struck him just above his left ear. He’d tried to duck under my swing, but I’d allowed for that, and the light weight of the rod made it easy to alter its course an inch or two.

  While he was falling to the roof, I got a good look at his three friends. Unfortunately, the man I’d just laid out was the runt of the pack. His friends looked like they belonged more at a biker reunion than a resort hotel on the beach of Cancun. Two of the three were bald, and the third had long gray and black hair that was tied off in a pigtail. All had beards that needed trimming. In the warm Mexican springtime, they wore denim jackets, with patches of some kind of club insignia, and T-shirts over loose fitting jeans. All of them had heavy black leather riding boots that rose to mid-calf.

  Hell and damnation. What had Laura Dockerty’s only boy gotten his young ass into?

  I turned enough to be able to see the man with the girl while still keeping my eyes on the biker dudes and was chagrinned to see the blonde running off toward the stairway entrance on the farther side of the roof. Well, maybe she was running to get help. I’m an incurable optimist. The girl’s previous captor was drawing a hunting knife from a sheath behind his back. I backed up a couple of feet and brought my weapon low into a stabbing position.

  The trio who were now on my left drew similar knives of various designs from sheaths of their own.

  “You’ve butted into the wrong party, pretty boy. Now you’ll have to be taught a lesson,” the first man stated.

  I chuckled nervously. “Well, I certainly didn’t intend to interrupt a party. That’s what I came down here for, a party. Now that I think of it, I’m probably late. What say we agree to not bother each other again and get back to partying?”

  Two of the newcomers chuckled, but not in the nervous manner I’d been doing.

  “I think Paul may not like it if we just let you walk away, gringo,” the first man said.

  All four had been spreading out, forming a semi-circle in front of me that was just outside the lunge distance of my weapon.

  I backed up another step and felt my foot hit the safety wall at the edge of the roof. Damn, what were the odds that there was a fire escape below me?

  I wondered if I could cast a shield spell before they rushed me. Probably not, I decided quickly, my last casting of a shield had taken a half minute. If I started speaking gibberish and waving my fingers in the required pattern, they’d probably just toss me off the roof.

  “Wait a minute, amigos. We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I don’t have a beef with any of you. Is Paul that gentleman there?” I asked indicating their fallen comrade.

  The man on my far left actually turned his head to look at Paul.

  I swirled my rod at eye level as I stepped toward the quartet. Each man moved back to stay out of my weapon’s reach, except for the one looking down at Paul. I extended my step into a run toward him, and as he realized his mistake and turned back, my staff caught him beside his left eye. His head snapped back, and blood surged out of torn flesh. He staggered backward, and I followed. I drew the staff back and shoved its blunt tip into his torso, just beneath his rib cage.

  The air left his lungs in a whoosh.

  I kept shoving, pushing him down onto his back, and then I leapt over him.

  I broke into a run toward the distant stairwell. The one I’d arrived by to my deepening regret.

  Something caught my foot, and I sprawled lengthwise into the gravel. Bits of sharp rock imbedded themselves in my knees and the meat of my hands.

  Damn, that hurt! I scrambled to my feet and automatically swung my staff around to keep them off me.

  They were expecting that move, and one of the men caught the end in his hand and yanked on it. I staggered toward him before I could get my balance and brace against his pull. While I spent a couple of seconds trying to dislodge my only weapon, the other two men moved forward on either side of me.

  Paul, the one who’d tripped me, was also rising to his feet. He was holding the side of his head and blood dribbled down his cheek, but he held a knife in his right hand.

  I shifted tactics and shoved forward on the staff, sending the man who’d been pulling on it, sprawling to the roof.

  Stepping right, I swung my left fist at the nearest man’s head. He jerked back as I expected, but then he sliced across the back of my forearm with his knife.

  Pain shot through my arm and the only thing that had stopped his steel was my arm’s radius.

  I jerked my hand in and broke once more for the stairwell door.

  One of the men threw something, and I tried to duck, but the hilt of his large knife slammed into my temple and stagg
ered me. Dropping to my knees again in the rough gravel, I caught the gleam of the fading sun on the knife that had hit me. I closed my hand on the hilt and tried to rise.

  Stabbing pain burst in my lower back.

  I’d been too slow.

  I dropped back to my knees and stabbed my confiscated knife backward toward whoever had his own blade in my back. Luckily, for me, his blade had caught on my vertebra and jammed. I could feel it grating against the bone. When I dropped to my knees, his refusal to let go of his knife had pulled him down, and his chest was within my reach. My own blade went in beneath his ribcage and hot blood flooded my fist.

  I gave the knife a twist as I pulled it free and turned, getting one foot under me as I did. Another blade came out of nowhere and stabbed into my right side, just below my collarbone. I groaned in pain and clasped my left hand over the man’s wrist, holding him still while I shoved my bloody blade into his exposed armpit. He grunted in shock as the steel penetrated his jacket, shirt, and flesh.

  Pulling the edge of the knife toward me dragged the sharp edge across his armpit, I was rewarded by another gush of blood when the blade sliced through his axillary artery.

  Something, a boot maybe, slammed into the back of my head and I released the man’s arm and my newly acquired knife.

  I collapsed; face down, to the hot gravel.

  Fireworks blasted across my vision. Getting my hands under me, I pushed up. I coughed, and frothy blood hit the rocks beneath me.

  Someone grabbed the blade still in my back and pulled it free.

  It hurt almost as much coming out as it had going in.

  I rolled onto my back as a shadow covered the low sun. I squinted at the men standing around me. One was glaring down from near my feet. What do you know? It was Paul. He raised a foot to stomp on me, and I drew back my own leg and kicked out with all the strength I had left. My bare foot contacted the knee supporting his weight, and I heard a soft pop as the kneecap went.