Free 17 - A Hard Days Night Searcher.doc by Unknown Page A

Daimon."
    Sighing, Jeff crossed his arms over his chest. He shook his head in denial.
    "And what about this part here where the Night-Searchers sell their souls to the Norse goddess Freya, who is a vibrant redheaded femme fatale dressed all in white, to get revenge on whoever caused them to die?"
    "No one is going to figure out that Artemis is Freya."
    Rafael growled at him. "For the record, unlike Artemis, Freya happens to be a strawberry blonde. But you were right about one thing. She is gorgeous and highly seductive. Definitely hard to say no to her."
    "Oh." Deepening his scowl, Jeff looked up. "How do you know all that?"
    Rafael grew quiet as he remembered the night he'd met the Norse goddess and she had tempted him well. That had definitely been one hell of a day. . . . "Freya's the goddess who hand selects warriors for Valhalla. Or in the case of myself, she wanted to take me off with her to her own hall and add me to her harem."
    Jeff gaped. "And you chose to fight for Artemis instead, what kind of stupid are you?"
    There were times when the kid could be eerily astute. "Yeah, well, in retrospect it was a bad bargain on my part. But at the time Artemis was offering me vengeance on my enemies it seemed so much more appealing than being Freya's love slave . . . which gets back to Freya being Artemis in your story."
    "But you just said she's not Artemis and she comes after warriors, too. So it could happen. She could make a bargain like the one I wrote about in my story."
    And icicles could grow on the sun. Freya collected warriors, she didn't send them back to the mortal plane to fight Daimons/vampires. Artemis did that. But not willing to argue the point anymore when it was obvious Jeff didn't see it, Rafael moved on to the next similarity. "And what about this? Ralph-Jesus, boy, couldn't you come up with something better than a bodily function to name me-was a Caribbean pirate, son of an Ethiopian slave and Brazilian merchant. . . ." He glanced down to read the description: "At six six, Ralph was one to intimidate anyone who saw him. With his shaved head that was tattooed with African tribal symbols given to him by a Shaman he'd met in his travels, he walked the earth as if he owned it. But more than that, the black tattoos blended at times with his dark brown flesh, making the two of them seem indistinguishable from each other as if he bore some kind of alien skin."
    Unable to read another word of the description that was so eerily close to himself that it made him want to choke his Squire, Rafael let out a disgusted breath. "While I'm both flattered and highly offended, I can assure you, this won't win you a Hugo or Nebula nomination."
    Jeff pulled the magazine out of his hands again in a high-handed manner. "I resent that. It's a great story. And you don't exactly have those tattoos, either, now do you?"
    Rafael's right eye started twitching from the aggravation. "I have intricate scroll work tattooed up my neck to the base of my skull and like Ralph"-he growled the word-"I have them on both arms. They're close enough to what you describe. No matter how you disguise this trite bullshit, it's my life, Jeff. Penned in an awkward manner. It's things I didn't want to see in black-and-white print. You're lucky after three hundred years that I've mellowed. In my human days, I'd have slit your throat, pulled your tongue through the opening, and left you tied to a tree for the wolves to eat."
    "Ew!"
    "Yes," he said, taking a step toward the overgrown adolescent, "and effective. Trust me, no one betrayed me twice."
    "What about the guy who killed you?"
    Rafael's eyes flared as he fought his urge to kill the boy. It was a damn good thing that he liked Jeff's father and the man had served him well for over twenty years. Otherwise Jeff would be meeting with an "accident" right about. . . oh, now.
    Taking a deep breath, Rafael asked in a tone that belied his anger, "I only have one more question. What's the circulation on this