The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen

• PROLOGUE
  
  • Chapter 1
    
    • The Warning
      
• PART I
  
  • Chapter 2
    
    • Ivy
      
  • Chapter 3
    
    • The Faceman
      
  • Chapter 4
    
    • Orientation
      
  • Chapter 5
    
    • Dirk
      
  • Chapter 6
    
    • Coping
      
  • Chapter 7
    
    • The Groundskeeper
      
  • Chapter 8
    
    • Roommates
      
  • Chapter 9
    
    • The Betas
      
  • Chapter 10
    
    • No-Man’s-Land
      
  • Chapter 11
    
    • Blue Toro
      
  • Chapter 12
    
    • Pizza and Beers
      
  • Chapter 13
    
    • The Game
      
  • Chapter 14
    
    • The Groundskeeper’s Other Job
      
  • Chapter 15
    
    • Woodrow’s Room
      
  • Chapter 16
    
    • The Numbered Ones
      
  • Chapter 17
    
    • The Stalker
      
  • Chapter 18
    
    • The Ghost and St. Rose
      
  • Chapter 19
    
    • Room 444
      
  • Chapter 20
    
    • The Interview
      
  • Chapter 21
    
    • The Revolutionary
      
  • Chapter 22
    
    • The Introduction
      
  • Chapter 23
    
    • The Unveiling
      
  • Chapter 24
    
    • Breaking the Seal
      
  • Chapter 25
    
    • A Brave New World
      
• PART II
  
  • Chapter 26
    
    • Midterms
      
  • Chapter 27
    
    • The Journal
      
  • Chapter 28
    
    • Headbutts and Footsteps
      
  • Chapter 29
    
    • Validation
      
  • Chapter 30
    
    • Timetables
      
  • Chapter 31
    
    • Rain Cup on the Horizon
      
  • Chapter 32
    
    • Answers
      
  • Chapter 33
    
    • Secrets
      
  • Chapter 34
    
    • What the Cat Dragged In
      
  • Chapter 35
    
    • The Dead Campus
      
  • Chapter 36
    
    • Birthday Wishes
      
  • Chapter 37
    
    • The Report
      
  • Chapter 38
    
    • Demonstration
      
  • Chapter 39
    
    • Heaven’s on Fire
      
  • Chapter 40
    
    • Wolves
      
  • Chapter 41
    
    • Stalking Stalkers
      
  • Chapter 42
    
    • The Garrote
      
  • Chapter 43
    
    • Quinn
      
  • Chapter 44
    
    • Smoke and Lies
      
  • Chapter 45
    
    • The Ghost in the Picture
      
  • Chapter 46
    
    • Traps and Bricks
      
  • Chapter 47
    
    • Breaking News
      
  • Chapter 48
    
    • Sleuth
      
  • Chapter 49
    
    • The Presser
      
  • Chapter 50
    
    • The Elf Tree
      
  • Chapter 51
    
    • The Room
      
  • Chapter 52
    
    • Into Darkness
      
  • Chapter 53
    
    • Confession
      
  • Chapter 54
    
    • Missing
      
  • Chapter 55
    
    • Cove Rock
      
  • Chapter 56
    
    • Grandma’s House
      
  • Chapter 57
    
    • Farewells and Suspicions
      
  • Chapter 58
    
    • We Meet Again
      
  • Chapter 59
    
    • The Cliff Walk
      
  • Chapter 60
    
    • The Trunk
      
  • Chapter 61
    
    • The Unexpected Visitor
      
  • Chapter 62
    
    • The Drive
      
  • Chapter 63
    
    • The Ten-Headed Beast
      

The Felix Chronicles

Freshmen

By R.T. Lowe

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by R.T. Lowe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission of the author.

Book design by Jenny Zemanek

eBook formatting by Amy Eye:
The Eyes for Editing

For Mell

My sweetest friend.

(A.D. 336)

Hosius should have died on the day of his birth. Nature was to blame—even though it was his father who had tried to kill him. The unfortunate infant was never given a chance, as it was his father’s right—his obligation—to expose the deformed child on the foothills to the north where the elements would remedy the mistake if the birds and wild dogs didn’t do so first. Enraged at the sight of Hosius’s writhing, crippled form, his father had snatched him from his mother’s exhausted arms and dragged him out of the house by the wrist, his tiny feet staining the floor red with his mother’s blood. But before his father could consummate the act of mercy, a strange thing happened. As they emerged into the bright midday sunshine, his father was struck dead. As for the newborn Hosius, he was found unharmed a short while later and returned to the comfort of his waiting mother.

His first brush with mortality had come even before his eyes fluttered open to take in the world around him. There had been many since, but it was always the first that he pondered at times like this, when the risk of death—
a violent, painful death
—awaited him within the hour.

Hosius calmed his thoughts, centering himself in the present as he struggled up the winding path to the castle. Soon, the north entrance, and the guards manning it, came into view. They pointed in his direction, and then came the laughter, rolling over him like thunder. Not even disinterested observers failed to notice Hosius’s deformities; one leg was much shorter than the other, and his left arm ended at the elbow. No forearm, wrist, hand or fingers, and he didn’t try to conceal it; his shirt was cut to the proper length and closed up with leather ties. He was also short and slight, not much larger than a boy of twelve or thirteen. He was able to walk without an aid, but his limp was severe, and to some people, like the guards, his awkward gait was cause for merriment. And barbs: “gimp” and “cripple” greeted him as he approached.

Hosius chuckled along stupidly with the bored guards, pretending to enjoy the same insults that had callused his ears as a child. When one of the heavily-armed brutes gave him a stiff shove, he toppled right over (necessary for the gaping onlookers to appreciate the full effect of the gag) and burst out in squalls of laughter as if he derived great joy from the man’s stunted sense of humor. When they were done with him—after the usual jokes had run their tired course and they’d resorted to making light of his tattered clothes and his old man’s tangled white beard—he heaped thanks on them for letting him enter the castle in the same way a slave thanks his master for not beating him when his master catches him eating scraps off the floor. But in the back of his mind, Hosius was planning for their next meeting. If he survived to see nightfall he would return. And when he did, he would pay the men his compliments in a much different manner. Hosius had never been the forgiving type.

The courtyard was chaotic, a place where sights, sounds and smells all came together to overwhelm the senses in an intoxicating (and slightly nauseating) rush. Hosius blended in with the sea of shuffling feet, allowing the waves of mayhem to wash over him. Merchants, money changers and peddlers of every good imaginable competed for the attention of soldiers, travelers, toilers from the countryside and haggard waifs uprooted by war and famine. Loud disgruntled animals—horses, fat-uddered goats, unshorn sheep, and chickens—huddled together in cramped enclosures in the shade of the towering stone walls.

He made his way to the west side of the ancient castle where the distant dull blue waters of Lake Iznik were visible in the distance and the sickly-sweet odor of animal dung mingling with flowering plants and cooking meats no longer permeated the air. The people gathered here were very different than those in the courtyard. Servants carrying wine and serving plates piled with savory herb breads and luscious figs dripping with honey scampered among clusters of finely dressed foreign dignitaries and lords great and small. The important people paid no attention to Hosius, although one held out an empty chalice at him and said something in an unfamiliar language that most likely meant “more wine.”

The crowds thinned. The voices dimmed, and then faded away, and he was left alone with the cold stare of the lake and the punishing weight of a blazing sun. The heat was unbearable. Hosius could tolerate just about anything—even the flashing pain that streaked up and down his bad leg—but he wasn’t immune to the conditions, and pinpricks of sweat clung to his olive skin like a swarm of blood-starved ticks as he arrived at an arched doorway carved out of a stone wall set well within the outer fortifications.

He stopped to catch his breath, and nearly gagged on the incense and perfumes saturating the air. It may have been tantalizing to some, but Hosius, whose tastes were simple (
unrefined
some might say), found it cloying and self-indulgent. His eyes scoured the room before him, assimilating everything in an instant. It was cavernous. And opulently appointed—
to frivolous excess,
Hosius would argue, if anyone sought his opinion on the matter. Mosaics, bold and bright, splashed across the floor. Vivid frescos and gold-framed paintings adorned the walls. On one side of the room, just off the entrance, a pair of marble busts, one of Venus, the other of Apollo, flanked a dining table and lounging couch. Eight square backless stools, each made of bronze, and ornamented with silver and gold leaf, surrounded the table. On top, a large hammered silver tray overflowed with fresh fruit. And in the back of the room, a giant marble bust of Emperor Constantine dominated the space from its perch atop a tall pedestal. Oil lamps—perfumed oil, which contributed to the throat-clenching muskiness—burned on stands that lined the walls, lighting the room.

He found the governor of Caesarea—the man he was looking for—standing beside the bust of Apollo embroiled in a heated discussion with six men wearing identical tunics, dusty brown and bejeweled. He was easy to spot. The governor—Eusebius—was a giant. And the men he was speaking with were cut from the same cloth: soft, pale and plump with an air of self-entitled contentment. That meant they could only be bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats
.

It took some effort for Hosius to resist a smile because his chances of survival had just increased a hundredfold.

But Eusebius was no bureaucrat. His proportions were immense. A head taller than the next tallest man in the room, he was wide at the waist and shoulders and slightly hunchbacked, his features frighteningly hawk-like: a large hooked nose, leather-colored skin, and an Adam’s apple the size of a child’s fist. He wore an intricately decorated dark-blue tunic and an elaborate headdress that heightened the impression that he was an enormous bird of prey.

Hosius’s arrival didn’t elicit a reaction. He cleared his throat. Nothing. He did it again. This time louder, yet still no response from the governor, though one man—fat, purple-faced, and sweating through his tunic as he struggled to catch his breath—cast a haughty glance toward the doorway as if to say
go find someone else to throw you a moldy piece of bread, you filthy beggar
!

“
Lord
Eusebius,” Hosius said, with emphasis on
Lord
, which the governor could construe as a show of respect, or sarcastic baiting. Hosius hoped for the latter.

Eusebius kept his eyes on the bureaucrats, his thin lips barely moving when he spoke. “Hosius. It’s so good to see you.” His clipped tone indicated otherwise. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. What brings you to Nicea?”