Praetorian Series [4] All Roads Lead to Rome Read Online Free Page B

realization of what was happening there finally setting in as well.  After losing my nephew, watching Jacob succumb to addiction and madness, and witnessing the torrent of grief that had overcome Helena moments ago, I couldn’t bear to lose John, too.
    He was… an interesting person.
    From the moment I’d met him, I’d known there was something… special about him.
    It was difficult to describe, just as he was difficult to describe.  He was as much of a walking paradox as a time traveler living through a grandfather paradox.  While he was perhaps the most arrogant, self-centered, macho, chauvinistic man I’d ever met, he could also be the most humble, unselfish, caring, and understanding one as well. 
    He’d reminded me so much of Jacob that I’d quickly become comfortable around him, and it didn’t hurt that he was more than just a little attractive.  I’d always loved a man with scars, especially when he owned them.  I still didn’t know whether he actually liked me at all, although I suspected that if he did it was just a part of his endless ploy to annoy Jacob.  But there seemed to be something there, although he seemed about as outwardly interested in me as a thirteen year old boy.
    Perhaps one day it would be more.
    Suddenly, the sound of a man slumping to the ground shook me from my thoughts, and I turned to see James on ground beside John’s table. Every single thought in my mind evaporated as he fell, my concern for John’s condition taking priority over everything else. Even so, I rushed to check on James first, and while I certainly didn’t have a background in medicine, I was able to find his pulse and heard rhythmic breathing.
    Relieved, but not placated, I stood up and turned my attention to John, but my all my concerns were gone when I found him lying shirtless on the table, a neat bandage covering a small wound in his lower, right abdomen.  I checked for a pulse, and finding it steady and consistent, I let out a long sigh of relief.  I used the back of my knuckles to lightly brush John’s cheek and smiled, but didn’t linger; fatigue was already setting in at a drastic rate.  Moving to Helena’s table, I grabbed two extra blankets Jeanne had brought and covered John with one, James with the other.  Since he was too heavy for me to lift on my own, I left him as he was on the ground.
    Everyone seemed comfortable except me, but with no additional blankets available and John’s table too small for me to lay on with him, I huddled in a corner of the tent, pulled my parka around myself tightly, and waited.  I closed my eyes and rested my head on my shoulder, but instead of feeling a strong desire to fall asleep, all I wanted to do was cry again.
    None of this was supposed to have happened.
    I shouldn’t even be here and Jacob and Helena and all the others shouldn’t have had to suffer as they had in recent months.  All this could have been avoided had we simply left well enough alone.  Everything could have been different if I hadn’t agreed to participate in a rescue mission to defy all rescue missions.
    It didn’t seem like all that long ago when Jacob and his team had disappeared completely – that is, the Jacob and his team that had existed back home, in my version of the year 2021 – and a team had been sent to find them.
    All they’d found was a cargo container, a notebook, the orb, and… his body.
    Jacob’s body. 
    All evidentiary procedures had confirmed it, even my own when I’d confirmed the broken leg Jacob had suffered when he’d fallen out of a tree when we were kids.  But it hadn’t been Jacob, not my Jacob, not the Jacob I’d known and the one I’d grown up with.  Everything in the journal from the prose style, the handwriting, and the ridiculously-Jacob sense of humor had indicated it had been him, but the carbon dating had put the body at just around two thousand years old and the context of his story hadn’t made any sense.
    It had been Jacob.  A