Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion by Edward Crichton Page A

the man, but his very presence.  I’d hated him well before I’d ended up in Ancient Rome, even if the two of us had begun our acquaintanceship as friends.  He too had been a SEAL officer, and I’d almost considered him a brother then, especially after he’d started dating my sister.  Their relationship had even built to the point where he’d considered proposing, but then he’d cheated on her and broke her heart, and that fairy tale had crashed to a halt.
    I’ d never forgiven him for that.
    And neither had my Artie, since he’d died in North Korea on a mission not long before I’d ended up in Ancient Rome, but this Artie had, just another interesting, temporal deviation.
    And now we ha d to work together, trapped in a magical realm of treachery, despair, anger, literal insanity, and murder.  If there was one positive note I could take from Artie’s newfound friendship with Santino, it would be that he could stand up to Archer.  A few days ago, I’d gotten the feeling that Archer still felt something for my sister, and I just hoped his attitude didn’t elicit a stupid reaction from Santino that would force my friend to do something equally stupid.  They were both extraordinarily dangerous men, and I wouldn’t want to have to step into the middle of a scuffle between them – even for my sister’s sake.
    I sighed and took another sip of my wine, Helena’s body resting comfortably alongside my own, her touch a subtle reassurance.  Besides Artie’s love life, what made my mind whirl more than anything else was the fact that Archer, Artie, and their team were literally walking paradoxes.
    A simple contradiction of basic logic.
    Five years ago, I traveled two thousand years into the past and had, apparently, changed things.  Caligula and Claudius were dead years before their time.  Thousands of humans were dead who shouldn’t be, and hundreds of lives were saved that otherwise would have ended. The course of human events had changed.  That fact was clearly evident in Archer and his team.  Their gear was outdated by over seventy years, although in the grand scheme of two thousand years, that made even less sense than if nothing had changed at all.  If they were going to be different, why weren’t they still wearing plate armor and running around with swords? Why instead was their gear different, but still all too familiar?
    What I couldn’t understand was why Archer and Artie, whom I knew very well in my original timeline, were almost exactly as I remembered them in this new one.  The only major difference being that Archer had been MIA in my timeline and assumed dead, when in this new timeline he was still alive.  How could the grand scope of world history be so different, yet both these people were just as I remembered them?  Apparently, the Jacob they’d known had even fallen out of the same treehouse I had, breaking his leg just as I had.  Did that mean his college girlfriend as a freshman had been just as bitchy as mine had been?
    Why were some things so di fferent, but others so similar?
    It didn’t make any sense.
    We’d learned within minutes of meeting Archer that Helena was a major in this new timeline and that her father was a US Senator, as opposed to a newly commissioned lieutenant and her father a member of the German elite.  Archer had also spoken of a North Atlantic Federation, whatever that was, and of the Ottoman Empire still existing.  Another revelation was that both his team and ours had been sent to Syria by the President, not the Pope, and on a completely different mission that had ended with the same result: time travel.
    They hadn’t yet elaborated on the lives of Wang, Bordeaux, or Vincent, but something told me their parallel lives would be equally odd but still strangely similar as Helena’s was.
    All these contradictions simply did not add up when combined with the fact that everything about my childhood with Artie from this new timeline – Artie 2.0, for lack