Adam of Albion by Kim McMahon, Neil McMahon Read Free Book Online Page B

that here
at once.”
    That
did it, Adam thought—enough was enough. Even if he had gone insane,
imagining that he was in a wine cellar with a blustery little head and a girl
who looked like a satanic Alice in Wonderland, he didn’t have to be an insane
wimp.
    “Let’s
get something straight right now,” Adam said. “I’m not your servant, and we’re
going to get along a lot better if you learn to say ‘please.’”
    “Oh,
really,” Orpheus said, doing his patronizing act. “Well, I stand corrected by
your superior manners. Never mind that I’ve been around this planet since
humans were wearing skins and finding lunch under rocks. Forget that I’ve been
worshipped by kings and caused more wars than Helen of Troy. What does any of
that matter, compared to the feelings of one scrawny, uneducated boy?”
    “Go
ahead and brag about what a cool guy you are,” Adam shot back. “It’s no excuse
for being rude.”
    Orpheus
gave him a weary, condescending smile. “Then I’ll say this as courteously as I can—I can’t believe I’m wasting my time with you two! Why don’t you take
me back where you found me, and I’ll wait for an adult to come along?”
    “I’ll
be glad to—and I’ll bet you won’t have to wait long. You were tucked away in
the backpack so you might not know this, but there’s a killer out there looking
for you. I saw two people get shot.”
    They
glared at each other.
    “Did
you say—somebody got shot?” Artemis asked, with a tremor in her voice.
    Adam
nodded curtly. “I’ll explain—if we can ever get him to quit acting like a
spoiled brat at his own birthday party.”
    “So
I did hear the sound of muskets firing,” Orpheus muttered, settling back
down. “I’d only been awake a minute or two. I thought maybe it was just my
synapses reconnecting.” Muskets? Adam thought. But it made perfect sense, given
that Orpheus was coming from the French Revolution.
    Orpheus
exhaled. “Look, I am sorry. But in my defense, let me just say I’ve learned the
hard way that if you don’t have much going for you in the muscle department, it
can pay to be verbally forceful.”
    Artemis
nodded sympathetically. “He is a bit height-challenged, after all,” she
murmured to Adam. That made him feel guilty. He hadn’t even tried to put
himself in the place of someone who went through life the size of a navel
orange, without a body to carry him around.
    “We
don’t need to be forceful with each other,” Adam said. “Let’s just all be
reasonable, and maybe we can get somewhere. So which wine was it again?”
    The
light beam streaked back to the bottle of Canet Vallette. “Just lay it down in
front of me with the cork under my nose, and I can inhale the bouquet right
through it.” Orpheus paused, then added, “If you would be so kind.”
    Adam
got the bottle and positioned it on the table. Orpheus closed his eyes and
breathed in deeply for what seemed like a full minute. Then he opened his eyes
again, looking happy and slightly dazed.
    “Exquisite—much
obliged,” he said, with a slight hiccup. “Just by the way, if you think I’m grumpy, you haven’t seen anything. Take Vlad Dracula, for instance. All you had
to do was look at him wrong and next thing you knew, you’d be a human scarecrow
on a stake. Horrible breath, that chap—only had two front teeth, the rest had
rotted away. No wonder he was always in a bad mood.
    “Then
there was Ivan the Terrible. Rub him the wrong way, and he’d nail your
cap to your skull. I ought to know, I did a stint hidden inside the mallet
head. Messy work, let me tell you.
    “ Grumpy? How about Bloody Mary? One day she was this, next day she was that, and whoever
wasn’t this or that at the same time was all of a sudden on their way to their
own barbecue—”
    Just
as Adam had feared, now that Orpheus had a couple of snorts in him he seemed
prepared to ramble on all night. But Artemis interrupted tactfully.
    “Yes,
you’re an angel compared to