Cass looked at her nails. “Yeah, I’m a bit obsessed. Zelda, too.”
“A woman after my own heart,” Mordred said. “I only recently got into playing video games. I had some things to work though, and they genuinely helped. Wind Waker was a special favorite of mine.”
“Ah, that’s a beautiful one. So, what do you do when you’re not drinking coffee or playing Nintendo games?”
“Oh, not just Nintendo,” Mordred said quickly. “Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid . . . and I just realized you weren’t asking me about my video-game habit. Sorry.”
Cass laughed. “It’s okay. You’re passionate about it.”
“That is one way to put it. As for what I do, not much of anything at the moment. I’m in New York to see a friend of mine.”
“King Arthur?”
Mordred shook his head. “I hope not.”
“Were your parents big fans of the folk story?”
He quickly understood that he was being mocked, albeit with affection. Mordred decided she was human, after all. He was certain that anyone who knew of Avalon, Arthur, and Merlin wouldn’t call it a folk story. “The Mordred thing. Yes, I’m afraid it’s my real name. My parents gave it to me and everything, although I have no idea why. You get used to it.”
“Well, you’re the first Mordred I’ve ever met.” She smiled and sat back in her chair, as if at ease in her surroundings. “And I’ve met a lot of people with unique names.”
“So, what do you do, Cass?”
“Ex-army. Left two years ago, and now I work at a charity helping people like me readjust to normal life.”
“A noble goal.”
“Thanks. Sometimes it’s hard going back to being a civilian. You see things—do things—that maybe others don’t understand. Things you don’t always want to talk about with anyone who wasn’t there.”
“No, I get that.”
“You military? You have that look.”
Mordred’s smile was tinged with sadness. “I guess you could say that, yes. I’ve certainly seen and done things that a lot of people wouldn’t understand. Done things for my government that maybe I’m not proud of but at the time I thought were the right things to do.”
“You’re from England, right?”
“Yes,” Mordred eventually said after realizing he hadn’t replied for several seconds. “Born and mostly raised. Where are you from?”
“Texas. Dallas to be exact. Dad was an army ranger, and Mom was a teacher. And there was no way I was going to follow in my mom’s footsteps. Other people’s children make me twitch.”
Mordred laughed. “Don’t they say you should never work with children and animals?”
“I think that’s for acting.”
“Yeah, it would be a bit restrictive otherwise, I guess.”
Cass chuckled. She had a nice laugh that went with her smile. Mordred hadn’t come to New York intending to meet someone, but it was always nice to have a new friend, and if he was being honest, friends weren’t something Mordred had in abundance anyway. People who knew of his past were always worried he was going to kill them.
“So, how long are you in New York for?” Cass asked after a while.
“A few weeks, maybe. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
“Would you like to get together again for another drink?” Her smile was somewhere between flirting and being coy.
“I’d like that very much.” While Cass was attractive, and more importantly interesting, romance wasn’t something Mordred had either the time or inclination to engage in. Still, it was nice to be able to talk to someone who didn’t know his background, who didn’t know exactly who he was.
Cass removed a card from her pocket and passed it over to Mordred. He stared at it intently, memorizing the phone number and email address without even thinking about it. Old habits were hard to break.
“Call me,” she said. “It was lovely meeting you, Mordred.” She stood up, and Mordred followed. He offered her a handshake, and she accepted before leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “I’ll see you soon.”
Mordred watched Cass walk toward the stairs with a mixture of sadness at being alone again and happiness at how he’d met someone like Cass. He hoped he’d be able to do it again.
He was about to settle back for a few hours of doing nothing when he noticed that she’d left her wallet behind. The small blue leather object must have fallen out of her handbag, or pocket. It shimmered slightly as he turned his head to look at it from a different angle. Mordred shook his head; he was beginning to fixate on something pointless again. He reached over and grabbed the wallet, placing it on the table beside his cup, before sending a message to Cass to inform her that he had it. Hopefully she wouldn’t be worried about it.
“Mordred,” a man said from the foot of the table.
Mordred looked up, surprised that someone would use his name in such an angry tone. The man was just over six feet tall, and thin, with a small, dark beard and shaved head. His stare was completely neutral, as if he cared neither one way nor the other about being there.
“Yes, how can I help?”
“I have a message for you.” The man had an American accent, although Mordred couldn’t quite place it with any degree of certainty. Somewhere in the South maybe—he wasn’t great at placing accents at the best of times.
“Okay, is it from Elaine?”
“It’s from My Liege.” The man tore open his shirt, releasing a mixture of glyphs painted there, before he raised his hands and shouted, “For My Liege!”
Power blasted out of him, forcing Mordred to put up a shield of magical air to stop being torn in half, and even then he was thrown back through the window behind him. Before he’d hit the ground, a second blast tore through the ground floor of the coffee shop, slamming him into a taxi with enough force to tip him up over it and into the road. He quickly rolled to the side, avoiding whatever might be coming, and pushed himself up against the side of the taxi.
The sound of the blasts had been deafening, but Mordred’s magic allowed him to heal much quicker than anything human. Within seconds he was back on his feet, wishing his hearing was still broken. Screams and cries permeated the air, people begging for help, people weeping. Mordred ignored them—forced himself to ignore them—and entered the coffee shop through what remained of the front door.
The inside of the shop was littered with the charred and broken bodies of innocent victims. The closer Mordred got to where the detonations had been, the more the bodies had been turned into piles of ash. Chairs and tables had been vaporized, and the previously blue-and-white-tiled wall had been partially melted by the magical inferno. The ceiling had been destroyed in places, with a portion of the above floor collapsing, merging the bodies and destruction into one giant mess. Mordred looked up at the holes in the ceiling and noticed that part of the roof was missing.