Death by Cliché by Bob Defendi Read Free Book Online

description of the whores. You might get adult-onset diabetes.
    Jurkand stood up and walked through an invisible line in the room, the line between Damico and that Artifact I’m not supposed to tell you about. He stopped in shock.
    Suddenly, something inside him opened, changed. Everyone else in the room passed back and forth through this line but didn’t seem to notice. Jurkand did, though. Jurkand had the qualification of being the most perceptive person in the world.
    That wasn’t exactly ringing praise.
    Jurkand dropped the coins back into his belt pouch along with his other treasures, five paper clips, and something he couldn’t identify: the cap of a pen. He watched the whores and frowned.
    “Honey,” said one of the whores. “Are you coming?”
    Jurkand shook his head in confusion. “I’m… not in the mood.”
    “Honey, you’re always in the mood.”
    “That’s just it,” Jurkand said. “I’m not.”
    But he’d always gone with them anyway.
    Jurkand stumbled out of the door and into the street. He stared right then left, his eye drawn to the perilous dungeon that was just up the hill from the village proper. Something was happening.
    Jurkand squeezed his eyes shut and tried to examine what had changed. He could feel… passions inside him now, conflicting thoughts and desires. They pulled him one way and another. He loved his mother. He hated her as well. He loved the whores, but they disgusted him. He loved the ale, but he loathed the hold it had over him. He loved money but… no, he just loved money.
    He’d never felt like this before. No, that wasn’t true. He’d felt like this, but he’d never noticed. Before his feelings, his desires, they’d been locked off from the rest of him. They’d been there. He’d simply paid them no heed.
    He needed a word for this. Maybe a phrase. He needed to make this wonderful feeling concrete.
    And then he had it, suddenly, without any further thought. This was the thing that had been missing from his life, all along. This was the core of being, the heart of Humanity and what he needed, what he’d always needed. What he’d never had.
    “Free will,” he said.
    Something in the world changed. No matter what, he had to make sure it didn’t change back.
     

Chapter Eleven
    “ Never end a chapter with a false cliffhanger. ”
    —Bob Defendi
     
    n the distance, the sound of a door echoed through the halls. Damico headed in that direction.
    “Hmm,” Gorthander said, kicking the minotaur. “This one must have taken time to die.”
    They looted the body, and Gorthander found a pouch. Out of it, he pulled handful after handful of gold while Omar searched the bare room. Scowled at Damico.
    “You got ranks in Search?” Omar asked.
    Damico started to tell him to shove off, then he remembered his character was a thief. “Prob’ly.”
    “Then get off your fat ass,” Omar said.
    Damico shrugged and searched the room as well. He didn’t know what he was doing, but it seemed he didn’t have to. His hands caressed the walls as if they knew what to do. His eyes seemed to track the lines of the stone on their own volition. His head moved back and forth, catching cracks and crevices from different angles. It was strange, like watching a movie in his head but without the man in the sixth row chatting on a cell phone.
    “You find anything yet?” Omar asked.
    Well, not chatting on a cell phone at least.
    Damico glanced at Omar and gave him his best “don’t mess with me” glare. The kind one got from mafia hit men, hockey enforcers, and old women at bingo games. Then he went back to his searching. After exactly ten minutes, he pushed a stone, and a door next to him opened with a rumbling sound.
    It moved out of the wall slowly, connected at one edge. Still there was no visible hinge, although there should have been. In addition, no scrapes marred the floor, or the seams, no tool marks at all. Damico rolled his eyes and stepped inside.
    He found a ten by ten