To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (59 page)

But that could wait.  For now, the elegant part
.

When Agrippina forced me to inspect the
orb earlier, I
had
seen something beneath the swirling white clouds that always seemed to indicate the orb was… active, for lack of a better term.  I hadn’t understood it at the time, because I thought I had only seen a reflection of myself, but it had in fact been me.  It had been me at the point in time and space when I first touched the orb in the treasure room.  An hour later, when I came into contact with it as Helena held it in her dead hand, the orb finally worked the way it was supposed to.

Instead of haphazardly transporting everything in a roo
m and replicating itself, it took its sole user on a ride back to its starting point.  My rubber band theory actually made perfect sense.  The ball was never supposed to be used by two different people.  It was meant as a transportation device for one person to travel back to a prearranged point on the timeline, taking only the users’ consciousness with it, not the body.  All the pain and wounds I’d received during the previous timeline were gone.

And hence, its true elegance
.

Conventional time machines from the movies transported the entire
entity of its user.  Mind, body, spirit.  All of it. 

That
never made much sense to me.  A time traveler would still be susceptible to the effects of time.  If I’d taken my DeLorean off joyriding through the timeline for twenty five years in total, when I finally decided to return to my original point on the timeline, I would be twenty five years older than when I’d left.  The body still ages at the same rate.  I couldn’t come back twenty five years later from the starting point, or else there’d be a twenty five year gap where I simply didn’t exist.  Unless I wanted to go the whole “fake death” route.

But the
orb only transported the consciousness of a person.

Their memories
.  Their experiences.

This thing would have been great to have back in college.  Set this puppy a day before a test, go in to take it the next day, learn all the questions, sit throu
gh the damn thing, return to my dorm room, and proceed to warp myself back to the day before, all the knowledge of the test’s contents still in my head.  And no physical aging to go along with it.  I don’t even want to think about how well I could have done with the ladies.  It wouldn’t even have been hard.

Simply e
legant.

But how did I activate it to begin with?

I grunted.  All that thinking made my head hurt even more, but I still managed to regain consciousness before the others.  And just like last time, when I opened my eyes I confirmed that everything seemed the same and everyone was in their places, ready for the final scene.

Lights, camera, action.

“Agrippina,” I said, hoarsely.  “How’s the ass?  Oh, that’s right.  It is quite perfect and I of all people should know that.  By the way, your face looks a lot better than the last time I saw it.”

I almost shuddered at the memory of the faceless Agrippina, but
thoughts of watching Helena die for a second time hardened me.

No, it would be the third time this time around
.

Agrippina looked at me from her cha
ir.  She offered me a blink in recognition that she’d heard me but not much else.  She directed a cool look in my direction, displaying her ever impressive poker face, but she shifted her toga over her bare legs at the same time, revealing even more skin.

Interesting.

I wasn’t much of a poker player myself, never was, but both Wang and Helena had showed considerable skill in it when we’d first arrived in Rome.  I’d never been very good at counting cards, nor did I have a very good poker face, but I was good at reading people.  Detecting subtle nuances that said someone was hiding something, or even outright lying, came pretty easy for me.  I figured it must have come from trust issues with my father and past relationships, friends who I constantly schemed with or against as a kid, or maybe even from my work with the CIA. 

Whatever the origin for
my talent was, when Agrippina shifted her toga, a nuance, I definitely suspected.  For such a seasoned poker player, as she surely must be, she’d just given away her tell.  In fact, it was a pretty obvious one.  It was a testament to her obvious sex appeal that I, or anyone else for that matter, had never picked up on it.

But her face was another matter.  It
remained impressively stoic as she rose from her chair, whispering something in her closest Praetorian’s ear.  When he left the room, she strutted over to where I knelt and lifted my chin, just as before, recovering rather well.

“Why do you c
ontinue to bother me, Jacob?” She asked.  “Is it that you have seen me naked and you now wish for more?  Is that why you brought your Amazon this time?”

I smiled.  “Now that you mention it, yes, that’s exactly what I’m here for.  How nice of you to offer.”  I glanced at Helena and leaned my head in closer, dropping my voice to a whisper.  “
It’s good that you’ve already stripped her half naked, but we should probably wait for her to regain consciousness first.  Doing it while she’s just lying there seems a bit weird.  Don’t you think?”

Agrippina’s face twitched
and I had a hard time suppressing the urge to mimic Santino’s goofy ass grin.

Score one for Hunter.

And in that moment Agrippina didn’t seem so threatening.  She was just like me.  We only appeared more confident than we really were because we hid our fears behind defense mechanisms.  I believe the clinical term for it was Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I remember because my sister tried to diagnose me with it when I was sixteen years old.  It’s basically a disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own self-importance.  Generally, they used some kind of grand show to hide how fragile and low their self-esteem really was.

But unless you knew that person suffered from the disorder
, it made him very hard to read.  It was obvious when some people were happy or sad, but that wasn’t the case for people like Agrippina and me.  I hid behind my sarcastic wit and the idea that I could outthink just about anyone, and Agrippina covered herself with her sexual countenance.  We disguised what we were truly feeling with a phony façade of self-confidence and bravado.

At least I had before recently.  I felt like I was much more open now, and it was ironic that I h
ad Agrippina to thank for that.  And in that moment, everything I felt concerning what had passed between the two of us was gone, and I felt a renewed, legitimate sense of confidence.

“You know, Agrippina,” I said, with a shake of my head, even though it still hurt.  “I think I finally understand you.”

“You do?”  She asked sternly, taking a step back and crossing her arms across her chest, the maneuver pushing up her breasts and exposing them even more.  I would have laughed if I didn’t need to stall.  I wondered if she even knew what she was doing.

“Yeah, I think I do.”  Now that she’d pulled back, I started working on freeing my knife.  “You use your looks and promiscuousness to get what you want, never taking no for an answer.  You bat your eyes, pucker your lips, and shake your ass expecting everyone
to drool all over you and do whatever you want them to do.  We have a name for people like you where I come from.  They’re called cheerleaders.  But, just like most of those pompom waving charlatans, deep down, you wish you were something else.  Something more.  Someone who people actually like, not someone they fear and loath.  Deep down, you’re just a child, clawing for a way out.”

Agrippina’s eyes narrowed at my little speech.  I almost thought I saw something shift in her expression, but if it did, the evil inside her quickly suppressed it.  She frowned at me before turning back to her chair, speaking as she walked.

“I think I understand you as well, Jacob Hunter,” she said as she sat back down, shifting her toga again.  I smiled at her as she continued.  “Men like you enjoy giving long speeches, letting your words and eloquence engage in battle for you.  You are a very intelligent man, adept at reading people and determining what makes them who they are.  You like to talk and you use this advantage to overcome your other… shortcomings,” she said with a small grin as she flicked her eyes downwards, but in the next second she grew very serious.  “But this also makes you very dangerous, and not in the ways you may think.

“Your mind is an infection,
a disease that threatens to reduce it to a bubbling mess of sheer confusion.  You lead yourself down dismal paths that you convince yourself are worth traveling, taking others with you, making the poorest of decisions as your paranoia overcomes you, crippling your ability to discern between what’s truly right and what’s truly wrong.  But you are very stubborn and will forever fight against this certain eventuality.  One that will ruin us all.”

My smile drained from my face
along with the color in my cheeks.  Agrippina’s face grew sterner, if that were even possible, and she let her arms drop to her sides.  In that moment, not a millimeter of cleavage or a sliver of skin along her thighs was showing, and my mind whirled at what that meant.  And then I caught myself.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said coldly, that old sliver of self-doubt slowly clawing its way back into my psyche.

“You’re wrong,” she said.  “I know everything about you.  That’s why I have to kill you, Jacob; to keep you from destroying what so many have worked so hard to accomplish.  Your presence is an offense to my society and my empire.  I have to do what’s right by both.”

The elation I’d felt earlier was quickly evaporating, once again replaced by what seemed like my constant companion
s for years now: rage and fear.

“What do you know about what’s right and wrong?
” I asked, trying to go back on the offensive.  “You’re nothing but a power hungry fraud who will do anything to ensure your schemes and manipulations succeed.”

“You know me so well, is that what you think?”  She asked from her position above me.  She let the question linger before leaning down and placing a hand on my shou
lder.  “But where does this knowledge come from, I wonder?  By my count, you and I have spent very little time together.  Were you so quick to judge my brother?  Or my uncle?”

Of course I had been. 
I’d judged them against what I’d already known about them, but… that hadn’t turned out very well.  They were different when they’d died.  They weren’t the men I had read about in history books.  I’d always assumed it was the orb’s influence, but that wasn’t necessarily the case.  Claudius had been healthy and without ailment well before I arrived in Rome, a historical inaccuracy not easily lost on me.

Did that mean I was misreading Agrippina?  Perhaps I
was missing something beyond her aggressive foreign policy, blatant mismanagement of client-state governments, irreprehensible murders of potential claimants to the imperial throne, or even in her zealous witch hunt of my friends and me.

In all honesty, I didn’t want to think about it anymore.  I just wanted to get out of
here with our lives this time, preferably with the orbs.

I looked up at her.  “Why don’t you just kill me then?”

She pulled back.  “I am not without a cruel streak.  Most would agree to that, but I tried to help you before and while you rebuked me, I need you now more than ever.  This time, even more than then.”

Because you killed Varus, you bitch.

“Why?”  I asked  “So that you can have yet another powerful weapon to use against anyone who would dare stand against you?

She brought a hand to her cheek and her eyes were furrowed in dumbfounded
disbelief, an expression that couldn’t believe I could even
think
to utter such words.  “You cannot possibly think that I feel any less suspicious of you having it!”

She punctuated her statement by twirling around and moving back towards her chair.  I barely even noticed how revealing the movement had been.  My head was too busy once again, my brain on the brink of madness.  I tried to get a handle on it by reminding myself I could think about it later, but it was difficult.

Was Agrippina simply trying to do what she thought was right?  Did she see me as a threat?

Was
I the threat?

I shook my head at the thought and
glanced quickly to my right.  Santino and the boys were already on their knees, all shirtless just the same as last time, so I peeked left.  Helena, shirtless this time too, was coming around as well, not quite as quickly as last time, but perhaps more peacefully.  My conversation with Agrippina had saved her from the painful beating she’d received last time and suddenly I felt the need to ask myself why Agrippina had been so colloquial this time, far more reasonable than violent.  Had my trip through time altered her sensibilities as well?

That didn’t make
sense.  Did it?

I turned back to
Santino as I finally remembered what would soon happen, keeping my voice very low.

“Tell Titus
to move as far from Vincent as possible.”