In the Darkness Falling
Copyright© 2015 by Celtic Bard
Prologue
I sometimes wonder when, exactly, my life went off the rails. I guess the easy answer would be the day, when I was five, that my mother was killed. But when I feel like being honest with myself and really look at my life, that pat answer just doesn't seem to ring true. There just seems to have always been something off about things. Some of that could be attributed to being in a military family with a father that was often gone for long periods on inexplicable duty that he was never allowed to talk about. I, of course, figured out pretty early what that was about and dad had to sit down and have a very grown-up talk with me when I was six about the dangers of being an intelligence agent and what strangers being nice to me might mean.
Even with that weirdness, there was always something more that was sort of like a shadow visible only out of the corner of your eye and no matter how hard you try you can never see it fully. That was my life and I had the sneaking suspicion that that had always been my life from the day I was born. Daddy, of course, wouldn't know, even if I could talk to him. Since we had been split up for our own safety, I couldn't. Eoin, my sort-of-foster-father/uncle, didn't know because he came into my life well after my father and I became aware of the strangeness without knowing what it was.
No, the only person in my life at the moment who I thought might know was someone who seemed to breeze in and out of my life without ever really being known. And that breeze was usually scented with blood and death. Karl, a man who I met only shortly before he had to clean up a bunch of bodies I had made dead in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was a monk in some kind of secret Order of the Church. I was assuming the Catholic Church. In the almost five years since Belfast, he has had to clean up a few more messes for me, but then that seemed to be his job. He showed up after I killed the bad guys and made the mess go away. We didn't really hang out and have long, meaningful talks about the meaning of life (my life) or the nature of good and evil or why I had to start killing at age ten. No, Karl was my cleaner and maybe, just maybe, my guardian.