She looked up at me. “Thanks. I’m not sure where I’d be without you.”
“Probably not in ancient Rome, for one.”
She hit me on the arm, but it was playful. “Very funny. Anyway…” She said, glancing towards the rest of the team, none of whom were paying us any attention. “… thank you. Your confidence means a lot.”
Nervously, she leaned up on her toes, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. Her kiss lingered just long enough to seem suggestive, more than the peck a mother would offer her son. As she pulled away, she sheepishly looked at the floor, before heading back towards the rest of the team looking over her shoulder briefly to smile at me.
I reached up and rubbed my cheek, ironically, on the same side of my face she had punched weeks ago. I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond.
What was that for? She can’t actually like me. I’m not that lucky. I’m just some guy that resembled some other guy, who she probably didn’t want to think about. Still rubbing my cheek, my head shaking involuntarily, I turned to follow her. Vincent was giving some last minute orders when he noticed me.
“Hunter. Nice of you to join us. We’re about to head out, but there’s a few points I need to go over first.” He turned back towards the group. “First off, while we’re gone, Hunter’s in charge. Wang,” Vincent looked over at the man who had been brimming with confidence and cockiness just a few weeks ago, but no longer, “I’m sorry, but you’re in no shape to take over yet.”
Wang had been steadily getting better ever since McDougal’s funeral. His sense of humor had returned, and considering how many goofballs were already in the group, he slowly started fitting in again. He and Santino had formed an allied front against me and my music tastes, and their taunting made me miss my temporally lost mp3 player more and more.
But Wang knew he wasn’t fully there yet, so he accepted Vincent’s decision with a small smile.
“And Santino,” Vincent said, directing his attention to the biggest goofball of them all, “sorry, but placing you in command…”
Helena interrupted. “… would be about as responsible as giving America’s nuclear launch codes to a toddler.”
Vincent’s shoulders slumped. “Basically.”
Santino was shocked, but not out of embarrassment. “Strauss? Was that a joke? A real, honest to God joke? I can’t believe it. There may be hope for you, yet.”
She looked him square in the eyes, pausing dramatically. “It wasn’t a joke.”
Santino hesitated. A look of genuine hurt creeping onto his face this time.
Helena smiled. “Just kidding.”
Santino’s own smile returned, although slower than normal, realizing he had just been played. He offered a mock bow. “How quickly the grasshopper becomes the master.”
Everyone laughed.
I laughed alongside everyone else, secretly happy because I knew Helena’s jokes were a good sign. She’d taken my advice to heart and her confidence had reappeared.
Vincent cut off the laughter quickly. "All right people. Before we move out, there’s one last thing. Hunter, apparently one of Caligula’s closest advisers has some information regarding how we got here. I informed the emperor that I would send someone over to talk to him and try and figure this out. God knows, if anyone can, it’s you. Work on it while we’re gone. We should be back in about two weeks.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll hold down the fort,” I said, before giving our modest accommodations a sour look. I shrugged. “Good luck.”
***
A week and a half later, I was still waiting for Caligula to send for me. Within that week I learned one, very important fact of life: Santino is much more boring to be around when he doesn’t have any material to work with, and a depressed squad member and his equally sarcastic best friend doesn’t offer much material. I spent most of my time exploring the city on my own, as even after three weeks of exploration, I still had about a quarter left to map out.
I couldn’t believe how much I missed Helena.
Now, that would have sounded sappy and pathetic had we been dating, but we weren’t, so it wasn’t, making me feel only partially pathetic. I just hoped my friends in the field were all right, especially her.
I thought I was about to go insane from boredom when I was finally summoned by Caligula on the thirteenth day. I was escorted by two of the original Praetorians who led us to the Curia the day we arrived. Gaius and Marcus were their names, but I had to constantly remind myself which was which because they were practically carbon copies of one another. Even so, with Vincent’s help, I’d gotten to know them fairly well over the past month. We’d taken to each other like any group of professional military men would.
Nice fellas.
The Praetorians took me within the bounds of the pomerium to one of Rome’s numerous libraries. The exterior facade looked magnificent, but once inside I found myself in a dimly lit, dust covered room, overcrowded with information decaying from mold. It was a far cry from the snazzy library I’d worked at on my college campus, but the musty facility made my inner historian feel like a kid on Christmas morning. The place was a gold mine. Besides the hundreds of scrolls lying on what looked like modern day wine cellar shelves and tables with documents sprawled everywhere, I spotted the slinky man from the cavern I had seen almost a month ago.
Finally. Time to get some answers.
Noticing our approach, he nodded to the guards. They replied by performing an about face and marched out of the room, leaving the two of us alone. For the longest time, we just stood there measuring one another up before he started things off.
“My name is Marcus Varus. And you do not belong here.”
I stepped closer to the man, hopping my size would intimidate him to the point where he’d be too scared to screw with to me. Barely a forearm’s length away, the man held his ground and didn’t so much as blink, as he waited patiently for me to speak up.
I ground my teeth in annoyance. “You can call me Hunter, and what do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Your presence here is a mistake, and you must go home.”
I just stared at him, my patience already wearing thin. That sentence was confusing enough without the added stress of what I thought he said. Too many ablatives. Or were those datives? I always got hung up on the grammar.
Taking a deep breath, I slowly straightened my back, raised my chin up, and pulled my shoulders back. I didn’t have to do it too often these days, but pulling myself into perfect military posture gave me a sense of purpose, not to mention a few extra inches which demanded respect, something this little man did not show much of towards me.
I loomed over him with my additional inches, effectively enhancing the image that I was far larger than I really was. “I don’t have time for twenty questions,” I said grimly. “Now, how do I get home?”
The man was finally intimidated. Taking a step back, his throat visibly gulped. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, his words stammering indecisively. “What I do know is that those who opened the doorway thought they would find vast amounts of treasure. Not human beings. Especially not ones like you.”
“What do you mean, ‘the doorway’? Did it have anything to do with that sphere?” I couldn’t think of the Latin word for sphere or ball, so I just mimicked its shape with my hands. The doorway he was referring to must have meant the portal that sucked us through time. My limited vocabulary was going to make this hard enough without Vincent, and trying to determine archaic terms, and convert them into colloquialisms I could understand would be another, much harder task.
The man just nodded at my question, wandering aimlessly around the room before he settled into a chair behind a table. His eyes moved towards the floor, and he seemed lost in thought. Maybe he was just trying to bullshit his way out of this so I didn’t kill him, but then why bring me here at all?