Jacinta House: Book One in the Silver-Armed King Series
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The story begins in Greater Manchester. Mike Willis is an ordinary young man who works in a café, but one day he is approached by a strange old woman named Iris, who claims to know him. She gives him a small golden ornament in the shape of a pyramid, claiming it once belonged to his grandfather, Jeremy Willis. Returning home to his flat, Mike is contacted by a solicitor, who informs him that his grandfather has recently passed away from lung cancer. At the funeral a few days later, a woman named Suzanne Noble gives Mike a copy of Jeremy’s last will and testament, which details Mike’s inheritance: twenty-five per cent shares in Jeremy’s business, a bed and breakfast hotel in the Lake District named ‘Jacinta House’.
The will requests that Mike is to stay in Jacinta House for one week before officially claiming the shares, so a few weeks after the funeral he travels up to the Lake District with his two friends: Charlie Straczinski, his lazy and vulgar flatmate, and Raquel Peterson, Charlie’s ditzy and self-obsessed girlfriend.
Once they arrive at Jacinta House, Mike and his friends meet the staff: shrewd landlady Suzanne Noble, bumbling chef Joe Thompson, and overly-optimistic housekeeper Victor Maathai. The stay starts off uneventful, but one day while walking his dog in the woods outside the house, Charlie finds a strange, bat-like creature, which runs off deep into the woods. That evening, during dinner, Mike and Charlie discover the creature in the house’s patio garden, only this time accompanied by dozens more of its kind. The horde barges in and attacks the house, and while Joe and Victor fend them off Suzanne explains to Mike and his friends that the vicious little monsters are called ‘kobolds’. A kobold finds its way into the house and severely wounds Mike, but without warning Suzanne transforms into a panther-like creature and defends him from the kobold.
The next morning, waking up after falling unconscious, Mike is greeted by Victor, who gives him a healing potion and reveals he is in fact a sorcerer. He explains fantastical beasts and beings from myth and legend really do exist, and Suzanne is a werecat, but kobolds are not native to the Lake District and this type of attack has never happened before. Feeling a responsibility for Jacinta House and its staff, Mike agrees to stay and help investigate where the kobolds came from, but requests Charlie and Raquel be taken home. Later that day, Victor sets off with Charlie and Raquel back to Manchester, but along the way they are ambushed and abducted by more monsters, a clan of demonic ‘oni’. They are held hostage by a shadowy, nefarious figure named Dr McAllister, who controls the actions of both the oni and kobolds and is driven by hatred towards Jeremy Willis. As Mike and Suzanne plan to leave for a safer location, Dr McAllister leads the monsters in an assault on Jacinta House. Despite Mike and the staff’s best efforts to defend themselves, McAllister succeeds in setting the house on fire with Mike, Charlie and Raquel trapped inside. However, they are saved at the last second by Iris’ little golden pyramid, which expands into an almost indestructible suit of golden armour with a mind of its own. Encasing Mike within it, the armour fends off McAllister and the monsters with strong light magic. Once the danger is averted, a team from the Norman Price Foundation, a secret organisation which handles sorcery and mythical beasts, arrives to aid Mike, his friends and the Jacinta House staff.
The next day, Mike and his friends are taken back to Manchester by a Norman Price member named Abby Halloran, who reveals she has been assigned to be their temporary bodyguard, to protect them from any potential monster attacks in the future. On the drive back, Mike finds a tiny piece of the armour in his pocket, which expands into a gauntlet over his hand.
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Jacinta House - Russell Bowman
Jacinta House – Book one in the Silver-Armed King Series
Russell Bowman
Smashwords Edition
Copyright Russell Bowman 2014
All characters and events in this book are purely fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is dedicated to the Whitehaven Writers; Gill, Ruth, Dorothy, Mike, Pam, Doreen, and especially Susan, for all their support, encouragement and advice.
Table of Contents
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
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
‘Let’s see…a nine-letter word for ‘fight back’…includes R, T, I and E…. I’d just say fight back. That has nine letters…’
Mike never quite understood where his love of crossword puzzles came from; he knew he wasn’t really good at them, and most of the time he left them unfinished, but for some reason he found them relaxing, and they helped kill time on long days when few people came into the café where he worked.
It was mid-afternoon and Mike was due to finish his shift in just under an hour. There were only two customers in the café, a woman reading a magazine while sipping her cappuccino, and a man in a high-visibility jacket eating a bacon roll. The scent of chip fat from the fryer lingered in the air and the music playing on the stereo almost drowned out the voices of Cheryl and Becky, who were by the back door on a cigarette break. Much to Mike’s delight, everything was quiet and peaceful.
The bell above the front door made a light jingle. Mike looked up and saw an old woman in a thick green coat approaching the counter, supporting herself on a walking stick. He shoved his newspaper under the counter and stood up to greet her.
‘Yes dear?’ he asked with the welcoming smile he’d been practising for months.
‘Pot of Earl Grey please,’ the woman answered, laying a crumpled five-pound note on the counter. Mike put the transaction through the till and put a metal tea pot under the nozzle of the hot water dispenser. ‘Won’t be long,’ he smiled.
‘Also,’ the woman said, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, by any chance is your name Mike Willis?’
At first Mike was surprised that this person knew his name; so he stood back and gave her an uncertain look. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he said.
‘I thought I recognised you,’ she replied, ‘you’re Jeremy’s grandson. The last time I saw you, you were only about seven or eight. My name’s Iris, do you remember me?’
‘Err, no not really, sorry,’ Mike answered, shaking his head. His memories of his grandfather were rather limited, he hadn’t seen or heard from him in nearly fifteen years, and he certainly had no memory whatsoever of this woman.
‘I want to give you something,’ Iris continued, reaching into her coat pocket. She presented a shiny golden ornament in the shape of a pyramid and about the size of a hen’s egg.
‘It was your granddad’s,’ she explained, ‘it’s not real gold but you can have it for good luck.’
While Mike was cautious, he thought it best not to decline in case Iris took offence, so he said ‘Okay then,’ and placed the pyramid next to the till. Turning on the hot water dispenser, which hissed and let out a cloud of steam, he continued, ‘If you sit down I’ll bring your tea over to your table.’
Satisfied, Iris said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and turning to a nearby table found a seat.
Mike spent most of the bus ride home examining the little pyramid, trying to decide if it had any possible value. It certainly looked expensive; there were no scratches or imperfections and he could see his reflection clearly in it.
‘I suppose I could get a fair bit for it on Ebay,’ he thought, ‘but granddad might come looking for it one day, so I should probably hold on to it. I wonder if those cash for gold places take things like this? I’d have to find out what kind of metal it’s made of first, if it even is metal.’
The bus jostled back and forth, grumbling and whirring as it lumbered along its route, with a screaming baby in a pram and a group of loud teenagers adding to the noise. It usually took between twenty minutes to half an hour for it to reach the street Mike lived on, often a lot longer due to the heavy Manchester traffic. When the bus eventually reached his stop, Mike hurried to the exit, edging his way past a pram and saying ‘Cheers mate’ to the driver as he jumped off. He walked swiftly the entrance of his flat block, being careful not to bump into any passers-by. A young woman with red hair stood by the block’s entrance holding a blue plastic bucket with the words ‘NORMAN PRICE FOUNDATION’ and the image of a gorilla printed on it.
‘Gorillas in the Congo,’ she said in a thick Northern Irish accent, sounding rather disinterested. Mike put a fifty pence coin in the bucket without speaking.
‘God bless fella,’ she said, ‘watch out for fomorians.’ Not understanding what this meant, he took no notice.
A six-storey ride in the lift later, Mike was back at his flat, and as he opened the door he was greeted with the scent of stale lager and day-old beef vindaloo. A mound of letters lay on the floor, all of which were probably either bills or junk mail, so rather than look at any of them he carelessly kicked them out of his way. Taking a quick look in the kitchen, he found a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink and plates of half-eaten leftovers on the worktop. Charlie – his flatmate – had once again left all the washing up for him to do.
The first thing he saw as he entered the lounge was Charlie and his girlfriend Raquel, both dressed in nothing but their underwear, sleeping stretched out on the sofa in the midst of several crushed cans of lager, dirty dishes and clothes littering the floor. This wouldn’t have bothered Mike if it wasn’t exactly how he had left them at a quarter to ten that morning. It didn’t even bother him that Charlie and Raquel were both half-naked, it was nothing he hadn’t seen before. It was typical of Charlie to sleep during the day, then get drunk and lounge around in the evening.
‘Charlie!’ Mike shouted. They stirred, and Raquel let out a long yawn.
‘What the hell, Mike?’ Charlie asked groggily, stretching out one of his arms.
‘How long have you been asleep?’ Mike asked, despite having a good idea as to what the answer may be.
‘Err, I don’t know, since about twelve. I got up at half one to…’
‘Well it’s twenty to six in the afternoon now,’ Mike interrupted, and this seemed to surprise Charlie so much that he fell off the sofa and hit his head on the coffee table.
‘Shit!’ he shouted.
‘You okay babes?’ Raquel asked with no clear hint of concern in her voice. Charlie didn’t answer, instead scrambling to his feet, clutching his head and sitting down on one of the armchairs.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she muttered, sitting up and covering herself with a dressing gown that hung over the sofa. ‘I could murder a cuppa.’
‘Then make it yourself,’ Mike replied, kicking off his shoes, slumping down on the other armchair and putting his feet up on the coffee table. ‘I’ve made twenty-odd cups of tea and coffee today.’
‘Fair enough’, Raquel shrugged as she got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen, brushing back her long, strawberry blonde hair. ‘I’ll do these dishes as well while I’m here,’ she shouted through, ‘There’s a bloody pile of them, looks like they haven’t been done in weeks!’
Mike opened his newspaper and returned to the puzzle page. ‘Dare I ask where the dog is?’ he asked Charlie, ‘because I’m guessing you haven’t walked her like I told you to.’
‘Fat Steve’s got her,’ Charlie answered, picking up an uncrushed can of Fosters from the floor and taking a sip from it. ‘That’s why I got up at half one, she was scampering about the place so I rang Steve and asked him to take her out for the day.’
‘Which you could’ve easily done yourself. We were lucky to find a landlord who allows pets Charlie, so what’s the point in you having a dog if you won’t look after her properly? And besides, you’re entrusting Fat Steve with our dog after what he did to that cow?’
‘Christ, you’re in a mood today.’
Suddenly, the phone rang. ‘That’ll be Steve now,’ Charlie said. Mike went to the phone and answered, ‘Hello?’
A shrewd, upper-class-sounding voice responded, ‘Good afternoon, is it possible to speak with Mr Michael Willis?’
‘Yes, speaking,’ Mike said, expecting the caller to attempt to sell him payment protection insurance or ask for his bank account details.
‘My name is Edward Clark from Olstrom and Son’s Solicitors,’ the voice answered. ‘Regrettably, I’m calling to inform you, if you weren’t already aware of it, that your grandfather Dr Jeremy Willis passed away yesterday evening. I am deeply sorry.’
Mike gasped quietly, then said, ‘Oh err, I didn’t really know him that well. How did he die?’
‘Sadly your grandfather suffered from lung cancer and was in ill health