Free Immortal and the Madman (The Immortal Chronicles Book 3) by Gene Doucette Page A

forearm across the swordsman’s wrist, which jarred loose the sword.  As the blade fell to the floor, John stepped away from the now-crumpling attacker and kicked the weapon in exactly the right way, catching the flat of the blade just past the cross-guard.  It flew over the heads of the men who were seconds from removing many parts of my body.  I caught it mid-air with enough time to parry the first attack.
    “Thank you, John!” I shouted.
    “You’re welcome.”
    I went to work fighting off the three men, which even with a sword was not at all an easy thing.  They had some skills, and while I had quite a few talents of my own I couldn’t see what they were going to do before they did it like my friend could.
    I was holding my own, in other words, but that was about all.  John was doing something else completely.  It seemed that being able to see a short way into the future, while making it extremely difficult to hold a conversation, really was an extraordinarily good talent in combat. 
    After dropping the man whose sword I was using he danced his way around the next three men confronting him, had managed to get two of them to mortally wound each other, and still hadn’t bothered to get a sword for himself.  He was always right where they wanted him to be up until they reached him, and then he was somewhere else.  It wasn’t even that he was moving quickly, only that when he did move, it was in the exact right way, every single time.  Sometimes it seemed as if he wasn’t even looking at them.  He was looking at where they were going to be, or at something else entirely.  Two or three times, he was looking at me.
    “Reggie, on my mark,” he said at one point. 
    “On your mark what?” I asked.  I was getting pinned by the men on me and didn’t have time to catch any more things he felt like throwing my way.
    “Drop!  Now!”
    I fell to my knees.  A sword swing that would have been a killing blow whistled just above my head.  It was a fourth man I didn’t know was there, and he would have done me in.  Instead his blow killed one of the other men and left his underside exposed, so when I stood again it was with my sword slid under his ribcage.
    “Thanks again, John,” I said, pulling out my sword.  To the men before me I asked, “Now who’s next?”
    The fighting continued, to the enormous frustration of the attacking parties—including no doubt Mr. Sinclair, although I couldn’t see him.  I had the two men at my feet, and John had three, plus one wounded man that was mostly just getting in the way of everyone else. We’d likely ruined the floor with blood, none of which was ours.  We had also damaged a few of the chairs, and the table had a knife sticking out of it for some reason.  I didn’t know where it had come from, but I wasn’t watching John all that closely, for obvious reasons.  Maybe someone had tried to use it on him.
    The most important detail, aside from neither of us dying, was that nobody had gotten past.
    “Enough!” came a shout from the back of the hallway.  The men in front of us fell back.  I was nearly exhausted, and thankful to whomever had decided to call a halt to the attack.  But then the men parted and I saw Sinclair in the center of the main hall, holding a crossbow.
    A crossbow was bad, yet if it was going to come down to projectile weaponry I was a little glad not to see a rifle in his hands.  As I said before, guns didn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you had a lot of them and an infantry, but they still represented a new and mysterious threat.  I could understand a crossbow; I’d been seeing them for centuries.  Guns were smelly and terrifying.  Also, firing one indoors was a great way to deafen everybody there. 
    In short, I was glad Sinclair had stuck with something reliable with which to murder us.
    “Reginald,” John said, very calmly.  “You’re going to have to stand behind me now, please.”
    “John,