The Antiheroes: The world needed heroes...It got them instead. Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Newsletter Signup

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Give me a shout!

  Newsletter Signup

  About the Author

  Note from the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Antiheroes: The Antiheroes Book 1

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Copyright © 2020 Jacob Nathaniel Peppers. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  For Norah Alaina Peppers

  Right now you’re just a bump in your mom’s belly

  And a blessing in your dad’s life

  Soon, though, you’ll be here and that’s a fine thing

  After all, Gabriel needs a partner in crime

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  CHAPTER ONE

  The ale wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good either, but Dannen knew from experience that a couple of mugs of the stuff and taste wouldn’t factor into it anymore. It was one of those little bits of magic even a normal man, without any sorcery, might experience. Like that warm, slightly-sick feeling a man got when a beautiful girl smiled at him, even if that beautiful girl also happened to work at an establishment where beautiful girls were paid good coin for such smiles. And, of course, what would follow.

  There was the sound of shouting from the other side of the common room, and Dannen glanced over. A fight, probably, but no way to tell for sure as a crowd had begun to gather, obscuring the source of the shouts. Instead of making his way over like everyone else, Dannen leaned back, propped his feet on a chair and let out a satisfied sigh. The shouting was growing louder, and men and women in the crowd were whispering excitedly to each other, but Dannen paid them no mind. The older he got, the more it seemed there was always some commotion going on, always some sort of trouble of this kind or that. The best a clever man could do was to try his best to avoid it. After all, trouble always found a man soon enough. There wasn’t any reason to go hunting for it.

  Mind your business. Avoid commotions. Preventatives for misery if ever there were any. Like those spells street wizards sometimes sold to the foolish or desperate—often one in the same—charms and tonics to make a poor man rich or a sick man well. The difference, of course, was that they actually worked. At least, most of the time. And for those times that didn’t? For those times a man couldn’t hide from trouble no matter how he tried? Well, that was why the gods had invented ale, wasn’t it? Another bit of its magic—as far as Dannen was concerned a foaming mug of the stuff was more magical than any sorcerer’s potion or healer’s prayers. If a man drank enough of it, his troubles vanished as if they’d never been. For a while, anyway, until the potion’s effects wore off. Not perfect magic, maybe, but the best on offer.

  The price of such magic—there always was one where magic was concerned—was a man got a bit loose around the midsection, and that he had to be a magician himself to fit into his trousers on some days. A price Dannen would pay and pay gladly. He’d given up what little vanity he’d started with long ago, traded it for…well, he wasn’t sure for what exactly, but he still counted it fair. After all, vanity, like so many other conceits, seemed to inevitably lead to trouble. And if he was anything, Dannen was a man who avoided trouble.

  Which was why when the commotion grew louder, when he heard a woman’s shout for help, he ignored the small, frail internal voice—not quite dead, no matter how many years he spent trying to drown it in ale—telling him he should go help. Oh, it sounded reasonable enough, that voice, sounded nice enough, but Dannen had cause to know that it was a real son of a bitch. Like one of those friends who always pushed a man forward into the fight, telling him he was bound to win, cheering him on, sure, but really just wanting to watch the fool get his ass kicked.

  Dannen had been that fool, more than once. He didn’t intend on being it again. Better to be a new kind of fool, for the variety of the thing. He sighed as the shouting continued, taking another pull from his ale. Then he noticed a young man, maybe not even in his twenties, rising from a nearby table where he’d been sitting with some of his friends. There was a determined look in his eyes, one Dannen recognized all too well, and he grunted wearily as he watched the man’s friends try to pull him back down into his chair.

  The man, however—if a youth with a mustache thinner than some women’s Dannen had seen could be called a man—knocked his friends’ hands away. He rose and gripped the handle of a sword sheathed at his side, a blade which, judging by the ornate, ridiculously-tasseled scabbard, was as useless as the man was terrified. But terrified or not the young man shouted, “Unhand her!” in a voice that might have been more intimidating if it had squeaked a little less. Dannen rubbed at his eyes. Unhand her. Who spoke like that, anyway? Nobody. Nobody except those shining, blond-headed heroes in storybooks the young man’s mother had probably read him when he was a child…like a week ago.

  Dannen took another drink of his ale, watching the boy make his way toward the crowd which began to part for him, opening up a space with indecent haste, those milling men and women eager to see the blood that would inevitably follow.

  The crowd’s parting revealed three men and one of the tavern’s serving women. The woman’s back was pressed against a table, and one of the men was pawing at her bodice, trying to undo the laces at her breasts but fumbling them in his haste. The man’s two companions, however, had turned to regard the challenger. Big men, each of them, with enough scars on their forearms and faces to show that though they might not have been the best fighters out there, they certainly had far more experience than the would-be hero.

  “The fuck you say, boy?” one asked, grinning and revealing a mouth that was missing more teeth than it had, another indication, had one been needed, of the man’s experie
nce in brawls.

  The young man glanced back at his table as if for help, but his friends all seemed possessed of a suddenly dire need to look anywhere but at him. The hero wilted somewhat, his shoulders slumping at perhaps his first realization—certainly not his last—that the world was no storybook. Dannen had the brief hope that he would leave it. In real life, after all, most of the heroes were dead, and the villains almost always won.

  But the young man rallied, calling on what courage—and foolishness—he possessed, squaring his shoulders and meeting the grinning man’s gaze as best he could. “I-I sa—” He paused, clearing his throat. “I said, unhand her.”

  “And if we don’t?” the man asked, obviously as eager as the would-be hero was afraid.

  The boy’s fingers flittered at the hilt of his sword like a moth around a flame, wanting to draw it just as the moth wanted to touch the blaze, never mind that they’d each get burned for their trouble. Don’t, you damned fool, Dannen thought. Without the sword, the boy would probably walk away with a black eye or two, maybe a few bruises, and one priceless understanding—that he wasn’t a hero. That no one was, really. All in all, Dannen thought he’d be the better for it. But if he drew the blade, a black eye would be the least of his problems.

  He could see the boy thinking about it, weighing his options, deciding whether his pride could survive backing down. Dannen would have told him, had he asked, that it could survive far more than that. He ought to know; after all, his own pride had long since become little more than a withered husk and he the happier—and healthier—for it.

  But the boy, like so many doomed men before him, was committed or at least thought he was, and in the end, there was no difference between the two. The sword didn’t ring as it came free of its scabbard the way they did in the books. It didn’t come free at all, at least not on the first attempt. Instead, the youth botched the job somehow, only getting it halfway free before he stumbled and nearly fell. He kept his feet though, and the second tug got the blade free.

  Shit. Dannen started to take another drink from his ale only to realize that it was empty. With a sigh, he rose and started toward the bar, thinking he wasn’t anywhere near as drunk as he ought to be. In the suddenly near-silence of the tavern—save the girl’s weeping, at least—he heard the two men exchanging pleasantries as he made his way through the crowd. All common enough words, ones he’d heard thousands of times before and that amounted to little more than—“I’ll kill you this much.” “Oh, yeah? Then I’ll kill you harder.” All words, threats he’d long since become bored with and that only meant one thing—blood was on the way.

  He had to slap the counter before the bartender turned away from the spectacle. “Another ale,” Dannen said.

  The man frowned, but poured it, likely suspecting—rightly so as far as Dannen was concerned—that he would need the coin to fix the place up after the coming fight.

  “Careful, Claude, he’s got a knife!” one of the lad’s friends shouted, though he did so from the safety of his chair. Not a fool like his buddy, then, and that was something. Though, judging by the would-be hero’s tense stance, he needn’t have bothered with the warning.

  Based on his pale expression and wide eyes as he studied the bared blade—no stylish sword this, a blade to impress one’s friends with, but one nicked from hard and bloody use—Dannen doubted the young man saw anything else in the world, just then.

  Just put the blade down, Dannen thought. You’ll get a beating, sure, but one you’ll live to bitch about. The young man didn’t, though. Instead, he squared his slim shoulders, doing his best to look tough and not giving it a good go considering that what he looked like, more than anything, was getting ready to piss himself. “I s-said u-unhand her.”

  Words from a children’s story again. Words the hero spouted pompously before wreaking absolute havoc and mayhem on any unfortunate villain who dared disobey. The problem, of course, was that all of those heroes—and the villains, come to that—were fictional, men whose victory came as easy, quite literally, as the swipe of the author’s pen. In fiction the heroes always won. After all, no one wanted to hear a story where the hero was a fool who got himself cut down in a tavern to save a serving maid who’d no doubt seen far worse.

  Dannen glanced around the room, thinking surely someone would stop this one-sided nonsense before it went too far—after all the direction it was going was plain enough for anyone to see. No one did though, all of them far too excited at the spectacle to come to consider it except the serving woman, maybe, and she was too preoccupied trying to keep the tattered front of her dress over her breasts—nice ones, Dannen had to admit—to help her would-be hero.

  The men started toward the boy, and Dannen bit back a curse, rising himself and moving back toward his table with a drunken swagger that hadn’t been noticeable on his way to the bar. Mostly because he wasn’t drunk—more’s the pity—and made it a habit never to swagger. Now though, he did, stumbling into the crowd behind the boy, those who’d fought fiercely to be close to the action. Maybe even close enough, if they were lucky, to get some of the young hero’s blood on their shirt or face as he was killed, a story to tell their children, Dannen supposed.

  Dannen pushed into them, hiding the disgust he felt behind a drunken, blinking mask. Might have been he pushed them a bit harder than he needed to, but no one challenged him. They cursed and hissed, sure, but that was all. After all, why go looking for a fight when you were about to witness one and probably a killing to boot? Dannen paid them no attention, too busy being drunk and swaggering and all that, until he was finally behind the boy. “Wha’s at?” he slurred. He spun as if someone had spoken and anyone watching might have been forgiven for believing it an accident that the movement brought the thick glass of his ale mug into the back of the youth’s head.

  The boy let out a groan, the sword falling out of his fingers as he collapsed to the ground unconscious. “Aye, fella,” Dannen grumbled, turning back, “watch where you’re goin, eh?”

  The youth didn’t answer. Mostly because, just then, he was too busy being unconscious to answer. Too busy being unconscious to get killed too, though, so that was something.

  The two men, suddenly robbed of their easy prey, scowled at Dannen, and judging by the way the one in the front held the knife in a white-knuckled grip, considered whether or not to go to work on Dannen with it if for no other reason than he’d ruined their fun. The serving woman—whose harasser had paused to stare at Dannen along with the rest of the common room— hocked and spat a very un-damsel-like glob of spit at his feet. “You drunken son of a bitch.”

  Well. He’d been called far worse in his time, often by people he liked, so that didn’t bother him. He even understood her anger, in a way. After all, her hero was lying unconscious on the floor now, his sword beside him, and if he was the hero, the other men the dragon, that surely cast her as the damsel. Not that damsels went around calling people sons of bitches, at least so far as Dannen knew…but then, the world was an interesting place, that if nothing else.

  But he wasn’t paying much attention to the woman, not then. Instead, he was looking at the man with the knife, the guy trying to decide if maybe he wanted to cut somebody up so bad that anybody would do, Dannen hoping he would just let it go. But as always, hope was no more than makeup on a cheap whore, pretty enough to look at maybe, but hiding inevitable disappointment underneath.

  Dannen watched the man start forward and gave a heavy sigh. No doubt, the man would have been hard pressed, if asked, to explain why he wanted Dannen dead, all of a sudden. The others, too, who’d forgotten all about the serving woman. But if anyone in the common room save Dannen himself had any doubts about their motive, none voiced it, everyone making space around him, eager for the bloodshed that he would have denied them.

  “Don’t want any trouble,” Dannen said, backing away, and holding up his hands, one of which still held the mug of ale.

  “Maybe not,” the closest man, the one wit
h the knife agreed, “but you got it anyway.”

  A line that belonged in a play, one uttered by the villain. It seemed to Dannen, now as always, that most people made of themselves actors, not being who they were, not really, but playing a part, their part as they saw it. And Dannen’s part, most certainly, was not one of hero. It was, in fact, one of the assholes who was going to try his level best—and by pretty much any means necessary—not to end the day with a few more holes than when he’d started it.

  “I’m just going to leave and—”

  But the man with the knife was done talking, charging at him with a shout.

  Most people, in such a situation, might have grabbed the unconscious youth’s sword lying on the floor in easy reach, but not Dannen. He’d learned long ago that swords were as much a danger to the one wielding them as to those they were wielded against. He had promised himself, had promised Val, never to pick one up again. And though he’d broken many promises over the years, that one he had kept. So instead of grasping the blade, he pivoted to the side as the man rushed him.

  Years ago, it would have been an easy enough thing to do, but Dannen was older than he’d once been with the first gray hairs of middle age showing in his beard. More to the point, he was fatter, slower, and he didn’t manage to get entirely out of the man’s way. Instead, the thug’s shoulder struck him a glancing blow, hurling Dannen into a table. He tried to catch his balance but stumbled backward, sprawling over the wooden, beer-drenched surface, his face striking an ale mug.

  There was a burst of pain in his nose where it hit the hard mug. And there it was. Blood, shining bright red in the lantern light. The best reward a man could hope for when he played at being a hero. He’d thought himself past such arrogant, and almost always fatal notions, thought he’d changed, but life and time loved nothing more than making fools of men. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. It wasn’t the first time he’d had his nose bloodied. Truth was, he’d had far worse. Of course, such a thing didn’t stop it from hurting like a bastard.