Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Shifter Mercenary

*Gravestone*

First impressions are important, and I was not impressed. Not by the Princess, and certainly not by the guys her father hired to test me for the job as her bodyguard.

Granted, I had never corrected the King on his misunderstanding of my usage of b*stard, so perhaps this kingdom had a warrior or three who were vastly superior and also had perfectly healthy relationships with their fathers. But I kinda doubt it.

My mind drifted back to Princess Belasarius as I effortlessly chokeheld one of the soldiers I was sparring with while pinning another to the ground with my boot on their head. In retrospect, I could have conducted myself better, but I’ve never really learned how these noble types prefer to be spoken to, because it’s always different depending on the noble. Better to treat them universally with the same “low-born” disdain that some might find funny, than try and fail to get their idiotic customs right.

However, as I was no doubt about to be working closely with the Princess for a while, I figured I should probably be a bit nicer. And if she ever got on my nerves, hey, it’s just a job. I didn’t expect us to become anything other than body and guard.

And on that note, I choked the one guard into unconsciousness, did the same to the other with my foot, and promptly scared the last poor bastard left into running for it with a hard glare. It did not take me long to piece together why the King was so quick to hire me for this job.

“Well done, sir!” declared King Dorian with a small applause as he made his way up to me from across the courtyard. Belasarius was behind him, still visibly put off by the whole situation, fixing me with a grumpy stare. “I must say, that was excellently handled. I may not know much about combat myself, but I know someone learned in his craft when I see one. Yes I think you’ll be perfect for this position.”

“Oh. Joy.” chimed in the Princess.

“Oh relax Princess,” I said. “I think you’ll find me quite gentlemanly when I set my mind to it.” Steam practically blew out of her ears like a tea kettle. And that was when I knew I was going to enjoy this job.

The rest of the day was a lot of what was to be expected from the days to come. A lot of standing around looking tough, while the Princess “got work done”. By which I mean that she spent all day sleeping in the library after about five minutes of trying to read through what, in her defense, looked like the most boring books on the face of the planet.

“Don’t you got, like, a tutor or something for this?” I asked after I woke her back up for the third time.

“Father is a proponent of self-taught education,” she replied with a yawn. Aka he doesn’t care. Which is why I’m here instead of the hundreds of men in the castle. “And I’ll have you know I’ve read just about every book in this library. It’s just…this one is proving…”

“Boring?”

“Very yes, now shush.” Princess Belasarius opened the book once more, and immediately upon making eye contact with the words, her head fell right back into the book and fell asleep. I sighed, looked to my left and right, and lifted her bridal style to return her to her room…

***

*Belasarius*

LATER THAT NIGHT

I woke up wrapped in the silk of my blankets in my bed. My face turned red when it hit me what had happened. The blankets are immediately off, and I sigh when I see that he hadn’t disrobed me before depositing me into bed. Even so, the nerve of that man! I was doing just fine, about to power through that damned boring old tome! Absolutely. Definitely…

I groan as I practically felt my shoulder loosen up after that nap. Okay, so maybe a word of thanks wouldn’t go entirely to miss. I stretched, yawned, made my way to the door, opened it, and then slipped on a loose tome on the floor and fell backward right as an arrow whizzed through where my head used to be. I landed on my a*s and immediately scrambled back as men in solid white robes step in and surround me, all of them armed with daggers, sword, and one with a bow and arrow. The one that very nearly made the killshot.

“Restrain her,” said one in a voice I did not recognize. Despite my flailing and cries for help, I was forcibly pinned to the ground with the one armed with the bow lined up for his second shot. Tears streamed violently down my face, my breath picking up speed as I begged harder and louder.

The man nocked his arrow, pulled back on the string, my fate sealed, and then Gravestone appeared from the darkness outside my room, grabbed him by the back of the head and threw him back behind him. His scream continued as he disappeared over the railing outside, down into the stairwell, where his spine met the railing on a floor below with a stomach churning CRACK!

Gravestone looked…different as he turned to my other assailants. His eyes were yellow and narrowed like a beast’s, his arms and legs were thickening and growing with fur. I recognized what he was as soon as the other assassins found their second wind and lunged at Gravestone, the fight carrying into the darkness of the stairwell outside. I dared not move to see what was out there, so all I knew of the fight was the sound of clanging steel and tearing meat and animalistic snarling. When it all quieted down, Gravestone returned to the room, his transformation complete. He was around the same height, if a bit taller, but now hunched over, his body now completely covered in fur, his jaw elongated into a hound’s snout. There was no mistaking it, Gravestone was a Shifter.

“I imagine you have questions.”

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