A cargo truck hit Hastur’s car with a crash louder than god and the world spun past in a blur then slammed to a halt so abruptly it left him winded, ears ringing while he struggled to focus on the wreckage around him.

“Give it up, Smith, and come out with your hands where I can see ‘em!”

Heart pounding and nerves taught as a wire, Hastur pushed down ruthlessly on the shock threatening to overwhelm his body and took a moment to assess the situation he’d landed in. The great war had left him intimately familiar with shell shock so he knew first hand that bottling it up would only make things worse later— but none of that mattered if he didn’t make it out of here alive now.

The front windshield of his brand new Nash Coupe was still intact but the rear and driver’s side windows had both shattered, leaving him covered in shards of glass, fresh cuts stinging his left cheek and the bridge of his nose. More immediately concerning was the smoke gushing out from under the hood, however, and Hastur coughed as the acrid scent of it caught his nose while he fumbled for his pistol.

The Colt came easily to hand but a brief check of the magazine revealed an unpleasant truth—

He had one bullet left.

“Come on, Smith! Come out or I’m filling you and that bucket of yours with daylight, got it?” the same voice repeated and Hastur scowled as he slammed the magazine home and pulled back the hammer on his pistol.

Hastur took a breath to steady himself, one hand white-knuckled on the steering wheel, the other gripped tight around his pistol, then got out of the car. He’d come way too far to die sitting down.

The passenger door was still in tact— though the same couldn’t be said of the rear panel where the delivery truck had hit him. The accident had spun the car around so the driver’s side door wound up pressed against the cement guard rail of the bridge he’d been crossing so it wouldn’t open, but that didn’t stop Hastur from squeezing out the shattered window. Anything to keep from going out the passenger door where he’d be pinned between the bulk of his car and Frank Conti’s goons.

Hastur climbed up onto the railing and balanced on its narrow edge with the confidence of a man with two feet on solid ground while he surveyed the scene before him.

It was near midnight and the bridge he’d been crossing was a decent sized one— two lanes in either direction with a thirty foot drop to sluggish, churning black water below. A stiff breeze turned the plume of thick, oily smoke coming from his car away from Hastur but couldn't mask the heady scent of gasoline as it leaked in a steady stream from the Coupe's tank.

“Things ain’t gotta play out like this, Frank. We can still both walk away,” Hastur called, one hand tucked casually into the pocket of his tailored pants, the other hanging loosely at his side, finger on the trigger of his Colt.

“Sure could, Mikey, but we both know that if only one of us does they’ll be twice as rich,” Frank countered with a vicious grin from where he leaned casually against the half-crumpled hood of the truck he and his men had hit Hastur with. The gang leader was broad in the shoulder and thick in the waist, but his expensive suit flattered his frame and gave Frank Conti a dignified air he’d done nothing to actually earn. The Contis were a crime family of the lowest order that had been squatting among the rotten foundations of Detroit for years but, like so many others, had really risen to prominence with the dawn of prohibition almost twelve years before.

Competition to provide the city with now-illegal liquor had been stiffer than the bathtub gin so many of the city’s speakeasies had been slinging and Hastur’s own gang had butted heads with the Contis more times than he could count.

Granted, Frank, and everyone else in this world, were under the impression that the man currently perched on the bridge rail, alone and at the end of his rope, was Michael Smith, only surviving leader of the notorious Smith-Harper gang.

In truth, he was Hastur Ward, bastard son to the Duke of Fane in the kingdom of Tyrov.

Tyrov wasn’t a place you’d find on any world map, though— not a map of this world, anyways. Hastur had never figured out how, but one minute he had been walking the streets of the capital, totally sloshed after a night drinking with his fellow members of the guard— and the next he was face down in the mud in the fields of Cantigny with German bullets zinging past overhead.

The learning curve of modern warfare had been steep for a man who had never heard of a rifle, let alone fired one— fortunately Hastur had the memories the real Mike Smith had left behind in his body to lean on. The guardsman had never been a particularly good student when it came to book learning, but where strife and combat were involved he was a natural.

Frank wasn’t alone by the truck— he’d brought ten of his boys with him and half of them had rifles. Bad odds, even by Hastur’s standards.

He raised his pistol and Frank grinned while he pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a practiced hand. He took a long draw and exhaled a plume of smoke almost as thick as the clouds pouring out of Hastur’s car. “Come on, Mikey, how many bullets you even got left in that pea shooter?” he asked with a laugh, looking for all the world like a cat playing with its food.

“Sometimes all you need is one,” Hastur said and lifted his pistol to aim— not at Frank or his goons, but the gas tank of his Nash Coupe where it was still hemorrhaging fuel across the pavement of the bridge.

Hastur squeezed the trigger and the world erupted in a burst of fire and fury that seared his skin and lifted the man off his feet. He arced through the air like a comet, grinning until the moment he hit the water and blacked out.

~*~

Pain erupted behind Hastur’s eyes like fireworks and for one confused moment the fetid scent of earth and blood filled his nose and the man was back on the front lines, German mortars bursting overhead.

“Worthless bastard! I never should have taken pity on you!” an unfamiliar voice roared somewhere above him.

Head spinning, Hastur forced his eyes open and found himself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling at the base of a long flight of stairs. From the pain that racked his body he suspected he’d just fallen down them, no doubt pushed by the furious looking older man still standing at their head.

“My lord, please,” a woman cried and rushed forward to grab at the man’s arm in an attempt to keep him from chasing after Hastur. With long dark hair and pale eyes, she was quite a beauty, her generous curves only barely masked by the robe she wore. Judging by the way it was only loosely tied around her waist and slipping freely from one shoulder while she struggled to hold the man in place, it was obvious she had thrown it on in a hurry.

It was only in noting the woman’s state of undress that Hastur suddenly became aware of his own. He had his breeches, thank the bright star, but his shirt, his coat, and even his boots were scattered about him on the floor of the hall, as if he had dropped them when he fell.

Had he and the woman…?

“Oh, Hastur! Hastur run!” the woman yelled when her grip failed and she stumbled backwards when the man who was apparently her husband charged head-long down the stairs towards Hastur.

Any other time the man would have been on his feet in a flash, but the sound of someone calling his name, his real name brought Hastur up short so he could only stare at the woman even as her husband charged towards him with a look of bloody murder on his weathered features.

For the second time in his life, memories that were not his own flooded Hastur’s mind and he found himself neck deep in Michael Smith’s problems. Fool had been tumbling his employer’s lady for years, apparently, and been caught in the act just in time for Hastur to catch the inevitable fall out.

“Mikey you son of a bitch,” Hastur swore bitterly under his breath. The older man, Count Tsarkaya, Mike’s memories informed him— reached the bottom of the stairs and grabbed his walking cane from a servant standing at the ready, then brought it down in a glittering arc towards Hastur’s head.

Reflex kicked in and Hastur managed to roll out of the way then planted one bare foot in the center of the older man’s chest with enough force to send him stumbling backwards. Hastur used the precious moments he’d bought himself to snatch up his scattered clothing and make a break for the door, only narrowly managing to dodge the guards that had come running at their master’s cry.

“Get him! Drag him back here like the dog he is!” the count shrieked furiously when Hastur bolted across the courtyard, bare feet slapping against the pavement as he fled the scene of Mike’s crimes.

It wasn’t until he burst through the gates and onto the street beyond to find the familiar towers of Vorslav soaring overhead— their brightly painted domes shining in the light of the late afternoon sun that the truth of it all finally hit Hastur.

He was home.