Force

  Books in the Greystone Series:

  Valor

  Dare

  Reason

  Defiance

  Chaos

  Victor

  Force

  Force

  A Greystone Novel

  Book Seven

  ISBN 9780989278584

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Force Copyright 2015 © Taylor Longford

  www.taylorlongford.com

  Electronic Book Publication February 2015

  This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Taylor Longford.

  Warning: Any unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher's permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

  FORCE

  A GREYSTONE NOVEL

  Book Seven

  by

  Taylor Longford

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Force's Prologue

  As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a warrior. And like most impressionable young lads, I wanted to fight for a noble cause and serve with honor. My boyhood dream was to grow up and fight harpies, fight the enemy, fight bad guys. So when I wasn't working in the family business, building walls and bridges, I spent my time training for battle.

  Nothing got in the way of my training; I was driven. And I was good at fighting.

  As for lasses, I never gave them a second thought. I wasn't going to fall for a pretty smile or a gentle personality. I wasn't going to marry and spend the rest of my life in a backwater town like York, raising goats and farming a thin strip of land, or lugging huge blocks of stone around in the mud and the rain. Nay, I wanted a life of adventure. And I didn't want something as fragile as a lass slowing me down.

  Knowing my mind, my father set me up with a sword when I reached the age of marking. It was a beautiful long blade with a gold pommel and a few glittering stones, the haft wrapped in shagreen to improve the grip. I made a baldric for it from heavy horsehide and carried it on my back, wearing it pretty much everywhere, even to work, which wasn't particularly practical. But it was my sword and I couldn't be parted from it.

  And I continued to train hard, planning to join the first army I heard of that was heading for battle, even hoping that my sword might make me a knight one day. But before I had a chance to realize my dreams of honor and conquest, my entire pack got trapped in an old house built against York's ancient Roman walls.

  You're probably wondering how something like that could happen. I can only tell you that it wasn't my fault. Aye, we were attacked by a gang of harpies. And aye, we were in a tough spot. But I had my knife and sword and was ready to fight to the end.

  But I wasn't in charge and my cousins decided to go stone rather than do battle. Why did I go along with their decision? Because they were my pack. And pack lads stick together, just like battlefield companions.

  So Courage and I held the rear while the others retreated into a one-room hut built against the walls. And once inside, Victor and Valor waved us all to the back of the room while they guarded the rough opening that was the doorway. Under their watchful eyes, the rest of us used the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the windows to make the change. And when they were sure the rest of us were safely locked in our stone forms with our feet fixed to the paved floor, my two cousins joined us, turning to stone a bare instant before the harpies got there.

  What happened next can only be described as a complete cock up.

  The ugly monsters poured into the hut and milled around inside the small space, just about as angry as any living thing can get, furious that they'd been outsmarted. And to get back at us, they decided to wall us in so the sun couldn't reach us, so we'd be stuck there for most of eternity. And when their work was done they took off, leaving us to sit there for the next eight hundred years.

  What did I miss during those centuries? Only every major battle that shaped history, including the Victory at Crecy, The Battle of Agincourt, The War of the Roses and even The Seven Year's War. Discouraged doesn't begin to describe my feelings through that long span of time.

  Then came the Great War, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars…which was soon followed by the Second World War. And I have to admit that I began to doubt the long-term benefits of war and battle…but only after I'd had eight centuries to think about it.

  We might have sat there several more centuries except for the American who moved into our house and started stripping away its old fixtures to sell to collectors. When he found us between the walls, he dragged us out and packed us into wooden cases then started shipping us to his home in the New World.

  I was one of the last to go, perhaps because my wings appeared much smaller—and less impressive—than the rest of my family's, since I had overlapped them behind me to protect the sword on my back. At any rate, I was in one of the final three cases that left the house, along with my brother Courage and cousin Chaos.

  Knowing that we were on our way to America, I expected we would eventually be loaded onto a boat and I assumed the trip would take weeks. But I never heard the ocean as we traveled in what I assumed was a westerly direction.

  More than once during our voyage, we were shifted about. Sometimes we stood in the same place as we moved, the floor vibrating beneath our feet like we were traveling in a cart on a smooth road. Once or twice, we stood without moving at all. But somehow, within a few days, we found ourselves among people with American accents. Amazed, I realized that we must have traveled on a plane to get to the New World so quickly. And I wished I had seen the plane that carried us. Because, as you can imagine, flying machines are a great mystery to me.

  One time when we were being juggled from one spot to another on the American side of the Atlantic, I heard a sharp crash followed by the sound of men cursing. And a few hours later, Courage started talking when there were no men around to hear him. It turned out his crate had been damaged in the fall I'd heard, letting enough sunlight inside for him to make the change to his living form. And for the next day or so, he talked to us off-and-on as the world beneath our feet rumbled and we moved closer to our destination.

  I think Courage was asleep when our lives changed suddenly for the worse. The vehicle we were traveling in crashed without warning. My brother survived the initial impact but at that point things were not looking good because of the fire that sprang up around our wooden cases. Of course, Chaos and I were in no danger because we were in our stone forms but my brother was in trouble.

  A lot of trouble.

  The kind of trouble that can end your life.

  I'm not normally the type to pray but I prayed that evening. I prayed for something or someone—supernatural or otherwise—to save Courage from the flames. So I guess I must take the blame for what happened next, because something did help. Something huge, powerful, supernatural and ugly as hell.

  Harpies.

  I hadn't
been expecting to find harpies in the New World. I couldn't imagine how they'd crossed the ocean which I understood was vast. Yes, they can fly but only hundreds of miles without taking a rest. Not thousands. And I didn't know where we'd picked them up or how long they'd been following us, but the fact that Courage was in his living form had allowed them to track the scent of his venom.

  Three of the monsters smashed their way into the long vehicle we had been traveling in and pulled our smoking wooden crates from the fire. They dragged us a few yards from the growing blaze, ripped open our cases and—not unexpectedly—immediately started fighting over the contents.

  It was Courage's appearance that had triggered the squabble between the harpies. My brother was alive but badly injured, the right side of his face baked beyond recognition and half of his hair gone. And in the end, the weakest one—Nitschka—was forced to settle for my brother. Vilschka, being the strongest, insisted on claiming Chaos—perhaps the prettiest among us—while Motschka ended up with me.

  I was afraid Courage would be in shock from his injuries but he still had his wits about him. And his nerve. And while Nitschka's sisters prepared to take off with Chaos and me locked in their talons, I watched my brother make a fist and send a stream of venom into Nitschka's eyes.

  The poison momentarily blinded the monster. But even better, it made her unable to track him. She couldn't scent him with that stuff all over her face and she wouldn't be able to track him until she could clean it off. So while she lifted into the sky and searched for Courage without the aid of scent, he managed to get away.

  At that point, Chaos and I were airborne, dangling from the harpies' talons and moving again, the scene of the blaze dwindling into the twilit distance. But my captivity didn't last long. I guess maybe the fire had made me too hot to handle, because Motschka dropped me not long after we took off. I fell perhaps a hundred feet, slid down a crusty slope and tipped into a deep ditch where one of my wingtips sank several inches into the soil while the rest of my stone frame angled toward the ditch's steep wall.

  I waited for Motschka to track me down. But even though harpies are known for their keen eyesight, she couldn't find me in the deep night shadows of the ravine. The hours went by and she never showed up.

  So I'm thinking, this is good. All I have to do is wait for the sun to come up, change back into my living form and walk out of there, right? Wrong. Because I was tucked beneath the overhang of the steep ravine wall and the sun couldn't reach me where I was hidden in the shadows.

  And there I lay for the next several months while winter slowly advanced. Snow fell in layers and covered me, hiding me completely from view. Then it melted off with the spring, turning the ground beneath me to mud and causing me to sink a little deeper while a good chunk of the ravine wall slumped down to cover most of my body and all of my face.

  I was in the dark and that was discouraging even for a warrior like me, especially when I realized I might be buried there forever and never be found. To make things worse, there were no people nearby and that meant there was nothing to listen to. My single hope lay with my cousin, Chaos. Only he knew of my fate. Only he had seen me fall from Motschka's grip. But even if Chaos managed to return to his living form and escape the clutches of Vilschka, it was unlikely he'd ever find me hidden in the ditch.

  But while it seemed the entire world was unaware of my predicament, Fate herself had not forgotten me. The grand old lady gave me the chance to escape, and one day I found myself being pulled from the ditch and loaded into what I figured was a pickup truck.

  Fortunately, it was a sunny day. I soaked up the golden light and leapt from the truck the first time it stopped, ducking into a narrow space between two tall buildings. My plan was to evade capture and make my way back to my family. But I found myself alone in an unfamiliar world with no easy trail to follow.

  Generally, gargoyles are known for their unerring sense of direction. But a childhood illness with high fever and painful earache had deprived me of that gift. And unfortunately, I'd been covered with mud during the time I spent in the pickup truck so I hadn't seen any landmarks that might help guide me back to the location where I'd last seen Courage and Chaos.

  I spent some time looking for my brother and cousin, taking to the air at dusk and searching the ground in the hopes that they had left me a sign to follow. But I didn't know how far I needed to go during my nightly outings and I might not have ranged far enough in all directions. Because I never found anything.

  And after my nightly searches, I usually slept through most of the day in the strange modern city with its towering buildings and crowded streets, hoping that my family might eventually find their way to me. And to help that happen, I had left some stones arranged in the shape of my rune on several high rooftops.

  But while I was waiting and hoping, I ran into an unexpected threat.

  I'd been wandering around between some unbelievably tall buildings looking for food when I sensed an incredibly evil presence heading my way. I could only assume it was another harpy stalking me. So I risked opening my wings in the daytime and flew to a deserted rooftop where I crouched against a short wall and made the change. And there I remained in my stone form for about a month…just to be safe.

  When I finally returned to my living form and resumed my search for the pack, I began to realize I would never have the life I'd once hoped for. My dream to become a warrior would never come true. For I'd awoken eight hundred years too late. No longer were there any great battles where a man could live by his sword and accomplish feats of valor and bravery. No one even used a sword anymore. Skill was no longer required in battle. All of the weapons I'd trained with had been replaced with guns and bombs and missiles and chemical weapons.

  But there were other great discoveries in store for me. And not all of them were disappointments. One of them involved lasses.

  Aye. This might sound naïve and even a little backward but it turns out lasses aren't nearly as fragile as I had imagined. So when I arrived in the twenty-first century, I proceeded to get everything wrong. But perhaps my mistakes can be excused. Because—after all—I was just a medieval guy trying to get by in the modern world.

  Camie

  Chapter One

  It's amazing what people throw away. Or give away because they don't think it's worth anything. But I'm not complaining because their lack of knowledge is gonna get me to college.

  One of my best finds was a hat mold I picked up in a thrift store. 'Course, I didn't know it was a hat mold when I bought it. But if I don't know what something is, that's usually a good sign that it might be something old…and valuable. It looked like a wooden sculpture cut into pieces like a 3D puzzle but I searched the internet and discovered it was a mold for making felt hats back in the forties or fifties. I paid $5.00 for the mold and sold it online for $498.00.

  Okay, that was a lucky find. But that's not the only time I've been lucky and I don't just look for things I don't recognize, though that strategy has worked well for me. I pick up clothes too, like name-brand coats and jackets and jeans. Even vintage T-shirts can bring good money.

  So I scour the thrift stores and garage sales and even office dumpsters where you can find some pretty good electronics if you know what you're looking for. And in the spring and summer, I usually take a few trips out to the plains to search ravines for old stuff that farmers dumped there sixty years ago. I bring home a lot of neat old kitchen stuff that sells pretty good but the car parts do even better. One time, I made over $200.00 on a hubcap I yanked off an old Ford.

  But I don't drive and don't have a car. So I get my friend, Leo, to take me out there.

  Leo's my best friend. At school, we do everything together. And in the summer, he comes to all of my softball games, even if he's late most of the time. Okay, he's late all of the time. But he's always easy to pick out in the stands because of his clothes. He has more jackets in more different styles and colors than you can imagine. Wool, sharkskin, leather, red, purple, y
ellow, gold. He even has a jacket made out of turquoise chenille. I'm not exaggerating. He finds most of them on our trips to the thrift stores. My favorite is a short green and brown tweed coat with bright orange stitching and wooden buttons. When he wears it, he looks like he belongs on an English moor, strolling through the heather with a pipe in his mouth.

  Yeah, Leo's pretty fashion-forward to say the least and is always changing his hair. Sometimes he wears it in a short Afro. Sometimes he goes with dreads. And sometimes he even straightens it and wears it hanging in his eyes in a retro fifties style. Not my favorite and I've told him so, but he doesn't pay attention to me when it comes to his hair. Personally, I wear mine natural and keep it trimmed to just above shoulder length. So it's kind of a thick jumble of black with little twists on the ends. Leo calls them twizzles.

  So one day, I answered the door to my apartment, expecting to see Leo because winter was officially over and he'd promised to take me out to scour the prairie east of Limon. I'd already searched the satellite maps online to scope out the area and I was SO ready, dressed in an old pair of jeans, a dark long-sleeved top and rubber boots, ready to dig around in the trash. And standing in Leo's place was his older brother, Morris. Big, bad, disturbingly handsome Morris Samuels. The one guy in Denver I did not want to get involved with.

  Morris isn't anything like his brother. He buzzes his hair short. His jeans aren't skinny-tight but they're definitely close-fitting enough to be sexy. And (typically) he wears a loose tank that shows off all his lean, running-back muscles. Today he was wearing a black T that clung to his six-pack.

  The guy is built.

  If I were going to be interested in a guy, it would definitely be Morris Samuels.