Hero for Hire Read Online Free

grimy, mad-eyed boys when he’d leaped on me, teeth clinking together as he snapped for my throat.
    I’d never killed before but rage burned my heart when I’d seen the half-devoured carcass of my mother’s brother, my favorite uncle. An upward stab with the knife I'd almost forgotten I carried ended the boy's life and then another, the female who'd came at me to revenge him. I seemed to feel the stickiness of their blood again on my right hand as I reached the top of the stair. I gagged as the filthy smell reached me. Nothing else smells like a burning human being.
    I had guessed the King of Leros was already dead. But I felt a dread apart from that when I kicked open the door to the room where the king had hidden himself away from everyone.
    Long curtains flew, beckoning me through the room and out onto the enclosed balcony. My sense that I approached something vastly unclean grew stronger. Dark magic had been done here. Symbols were scrawled on the floor and ceiling, symbols that seemed to move with fetid life of their own.
    The fire smoldered in a wide copper-lined pit in the center of the tiled floor. A bundle of sacking or old clothes had fallen across it, smothering the fire even as the fire consumed it.
    Covering my nose, I thrust open the shutters, my palm landing in something sticky. Turning with the light behind me, I saw the ‘sacking’ was the body of the king. A bloody knife, the handle a leering satyr’s head, lay where it had fallen from his hand. Blood had sprayed the wall and the shutters. I didn’t need to look to know my palm was red.
    “Father?” Prince...King Temas called from the chamber beyond.
    “Here. He’s here. He’s dead.”
    Temas came through the curtains, his face the same dingy white as his chiton, and stopped short. “By the Gods...what happened to him?”
“Sacrifice, I think. But to who and why?”
    “Sacrifice,” he echoed, staring at the body.
    “What cults did your father follow?”
    “Zeus, of course, and Artemis. We have this temple. It’s famous. But for the rest...human sacrifice is abhorrent to the Gods. Everyone knows that.”
    He took a step forward and one of the symbols lifted a hooded head. Temas had all but put his foot on it. The snake hissed and bobbed its head, preparing to strike.
    Temas stood statue-like, the angle of his thigh between my knife and the snake. I took one slow, gliding step and then another. The cobra was too focused on Temas to notice me.
    Seizing it behind the hood, I lifted three feet of thrashing, twisting muscle straight up into the air. A stroke of my knife separated head from body. The long body fell, writhing. I threw the head, fangs still a-drip, into the coals. It was the largest snake I'd ever killed thus far.
    Temas paid little attention. He dropped to his knees, pushing the corpse of his father off the remains of the fire. It had devoured the king's chest, leaving it like a half-burned log on a campfire. The smell of burned human flesh arose stronger than before. I was reminded again of sacrifice. His throat was cut, open like a smiling second mouth, gleaming white and red, butcher's work.
    He lay now face-up in the shaft of sunlight. It showed clearly the two shallow cuts high on the left side, under the jaw, as well as the deep crimson cut that exposed the severed vessels in his throat. The gout of blood had stopped the fire from consuming the upper part of his clothes. They were of a style strange to me, a flowing robe with a wide embroidered collar and cuffs tight to the wrists. The symbols were soaked with red but those that escaped the deluge looked much like the ones drawn on the floor.
    I spoke my thought aloud. “This room reeks of dark magic.”
    “My father knew nothing about such things.”
    “Well, for an amateur, he's done very well.”
    “I don’t understand any of this. It isn't like him. What was he trying to do?”
    “Propitiate some god by the looks of it. Or expiate some sin. A sin big enough to