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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491814062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2013 |
| Series: | Hunter Everett Chronicles |
| Pages: | 650 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.56(d) |
Read an Excerpt
LEGION OF DARKNESS
THE HUNTER EVERETT CHRONICLES II
By Andrew Guardamano
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Andrew GuardamanoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-1407-9
CHAPTER 1
Things That Never Change
"Why don't you just take a picture instead?" asked Alejandro as he leaned back against a moss-covered Spruce tree. His detached Cloak hovered above him amongst the branches, scanning a one mile radius around him as he watched over the boy he was assigned to protect. A recently emptied Blood Pod laid abandoned a few feet away. "The tablet has a camera, does it not?"
The boy shook his head, his gaze continuing on the grey vista in front of him—a picturesque mountain scenery lined with evergreens, crowned by crisscrossing streaks of silver.
"That's why they call it drawn from life," muttered the boy with raven hair. Hunter tilted his head slightly, changing the color of his stylus on the virtual color palette of his tablet from forest green to something he thought was only a darker shade.
"That's brown by the way," said Hunter's protector looking over his shoulder.
"Ughh," whispered Hunter. "Still a little colorblind I guess."
"No, that's not it," said Alejandro. "It's just something you have to learn again. No one's born with the knowledge of what to call any of the colors they see."
"So it's my perception that's still learning? Not my senses?"
"Right."
"That's ... convenient."
Looking over the upper edge of his screen, Hunter's gaze passed over a white wolf sitting at the edge of a dying stream at the bottom of the ravine.
"Zeke, you OK down there?" thought Hunter, keeping his voice inside his head. The wolf, almost by reflex, immediately spun around and looked up at him. Losing his own vision for a brief moment, Hunter saw himself inside the animal's mind as it directed its head to the piece of rock where he sat.
Alejandro straightened his stance and made his way behind Hunter, gazing at the flawless snow-colored animal.
"What is it looking at?" he asked. His own Cloak took off and landed on him just before he crossed the line where the tree's shadow ended, reshaping its body into a hooded leather jacket, blocking the weak early morning rays from reaching his exposed skin.
"Nothing. Just startled probably," lied Hunter. He never directly revealed to Alejandro the extent of his ability to communicate with Zeke. He assumed Alejandro knew about their telepathic link, but the recent visions he had been experiencing the last few days, which paralleled what his Cloak saw, was something he decided to wait out, hoping to find the cause in return. They were only short flashes—a few seconds at most, and none of them were very clear; often they were unfocused and foggy at the frame of their periphery.
"Don't you ever get tired of ... you know ... hounding me around? Hunter asked Alejandro politely after a while, changing the subject. His eyes focused on the screen. "I wasn't planning on leaving the grounds, you know. I just don't want to be a pain in the butt for you all the time."
"You're not."
"I'm not?"
"Why would you say that?"
"Does it ever ... bother you?" Hunter asked. He was somewhat relieved that he finally brought up something that felt uneasy from the moment it dawned on him not more than a couple days ago. He had been hesitating to ask, and until now, he had planned on keeping his curiosity within the confines of his own thoughts.
"What does?" replied Alejandro as he stood on the edge of the ravine, his back towards the scenery Hunter was painting.
"The fact that it'll be your job to look after me for as long as ... well, as long as I live with the you-know-what inside me."
"I volunteered for this job." Alejandro replied, the corners of his mouth curling slightly.
"Even if it's gonna be ... I dunno, maybe hundreds of years of doing the same boring thing over and over again?"
"You think this is boring?"
Hunter shrugged his shoulders.
"You look too far ahead," said Alejandro, a slight pitying smile flashing across his face. "And you're only a few yards from the starting line."
"Is that bad?" asked Hunter. He perched the stylus behind his ear and took out a large Ziploc bag from his backpack. Half-frozen inside was a dead white rat, almost a foot long, dripping in its cold, dead juices. Hunter whistled as he pulled the carcass out by the tail and tossed it into the air towards the ravine.
In a blur, the wolf that was Zeke launched itself off the ground, catching the treat in midair and swallowed it whole in one move.
"Not always, but for people like us, it can drive someone to insanity; worrying too much about what can happen instead of what's happening," Alejandro explained.
Hunter quietly sighed. He had expected Alejandro to give the same categorically 'philosophical' answer for anything he brought up, and it hardly matched the hardened steely appearance that his protector carried. Alejandro was indeed a 'devilish deviant with a poet's soul,' as Ava described it. To Riley, it was worthy of an eye roll.
"Why do you ask?"
"Nothing," replied Hunter. "I was just wondering if you were planning to be the one looking after me, or if you ever wanted to do something else ..."
Alejandro sat down next to Hunter, who rolled the plastic bag into a tube and slid it back into the back pocket of his bag. "Think of it as me ... paying back."
Hunter looked at him. "For what?"
Alejandro kept his attention on Zeke, tossing a tiny twig at its direction, which the Cloak ignored. "Saving my life."
"I've, uh, never-"
"Your grandfather did—many years ago. He saved my life as a mortal but didn't try to change me. He kept me human so I could choose for myself."
"Really?" said Hunter. He didn't expect this answer, nor could he fully figure out what to think of it. If this was true, would Alejandro have offered to protect Hunter had Guillermo not saved his life? Hunter kicked himself mentally—he was doing it again, over analyzing everything that need not be, as usual.
"This was way before your time—before you were born."
"I guess you've paid back your debt now. You've saved me more times than I can remember."
"No," said Alejandro as he rose. "What your grandfather has given me, I can hardly ever pay back."
"Why not?"
"Because he didn't just give me a second chance for life. He gave me a choice—a choice to decide if I wanted to be ... this," he waved a circling motion towards his face. "Choice can be one of the hardest things to give, you'll find."
Hunter exhaled, his chest dropping slightly. Keeping a light-hearted, age-appropriate conversation with an eighty-year old man trapped in a late twenty-something body was as probable as attending Kathy Griffin's stand-up and not expecting profanities to be hurled around.
"The point is, Hunter, this job that you say I do is really way beyond you and me. Can you imagine if—well actually you don't have to. You've seen what kind of disaster everyone faced when the Source disappeared."
"Yeah."
"Bottom line—none of us can afford that ever happening again. If something—anything, happened to you, we might as well be all ... dead."
Hunter nodded. He finally understood, or at least to him, had some idea now—this was not just a job for his protector, nor was it something that he could easily dismiss as a mere baby-sitting relationship. He found it ironic how often he needed to be reminded of the whys of where he was and how he got there. The potent combination of his abundant humility and oftentimes misplaced selflessness just refused to weaken and die.
"How's your shoulder?" asked Hunter as he saved his unfinished drawing.
"Healed," Alejandro replied. "Stings once in a while, but doesn't bother me."
"That's good."
Rotating his right shoulder slightly, Hunter could hear Alejandro's ligaments gently re-align in a series of barely audible cracks.
Noticing that he was being watched, Alejandro stopped.
"Sorry," Hunter mumbled.
"It's nothing that won't heal completely in time. I should be thankful that Lamia venom is not as potent as Shifter toxin."
Hunter couldn't find himself to say or do anything except nod as he looked away.
"It's time to go back, Hunter. Finish packing."
"Killjoy," Hunter whispered as he got up and whistled a random made-up tune. Zeke scurried up the rocky incline towards his master, sending a landslide of pebbles down the slope under a cloud of freshly disturbed dust.
Alejandro looked back at the scenery Hunter was so keen to capture. "It'll all be here when you come back," he pleasantly reminded him.
"I'll race you," challenged Hunter, smiling as he looked up. The sun had disappeared into a thick layer of cloud, casting a further gloom over the entire Rocky Mountain range.
"No, I think we should just walk-"
But Hunter did not let him finish. Running towards the opposite ledge of the plateau, Hunter held on tightly to his backpack as Zeke closed in from behind, rapidly expanding his body into wings.
At the last second, the Cloak merged with Hunter's back as he approached the ledge overlooking the canyon. Zeke held him tightly, and as the two of them catapulted into the air, two sail-like appendages lifted them rapidly with each down-stroke.
Alejandro swore under his breath. He had no choice. After checking the sky once more and ascertaining that he had at least several minutes before the sun would break through again, he formed his own wings and lifted off. He would just have to send an agent later to pick up the Jeep they had left behind the ravine.
From the ground, the two resembled two specks—large birds perhaps to the casual observer. With Hunter in the lead, both of them made an effort to fly low, staying under the cover of Armando's Psykie waiting on the rooftop of the abandoned army base not too far away. The Grand Viceroy's private residence, tucked away in the heart of the Canadian Rockies was what Hunter, for the last seven months, called home.
* * *
Ava leaned forward, causing the stern of the lifeboat to tip slightly into the pitch black Atlantic water in the middle of the night. Her movement caused a ripple, propagating softly through an otherwise still sheet of glass that reflected the stars above them.
Before her, a young woman dwarfed by her oversized life jacket laid face down and eagle spread, weakened by exhaustion. The gentle chill of the wind mocked her as she clung for her life on a large door panel. It was a broken piece of cabinet drifting slowly a few feet away—the only thing keeping her above the surface. Directly in front of her, with only his head and shoulders rising above the freezing calm, a young man held on, convulsing uncontrollably. Death, for one of them, was only a few minutes away.
"I'll never let go," the young woman whispered, her breath fogging as she quivered under her large auburn curls. Her hands, now deathly white, were locked tightly around her doomed lover. With broken handcuffs on his wrist, his breath weakened with every exhale. Splintered fragments of tiny icicles clung randomly on his dark blonde hair. His pale face was almost blue as he shook violently to keep himself warm.
Riley leaned in closer from behind, wrapping his arms around his girlfriend as he tightened his hands gently over hers. Ava shuddered slightly—his temperature was not much different than her imagined cold of the Atlantic. She exhaled involuntarily, feeling the skin of his cheek press against hers. Her breath did not fog like the two star-crossed lovers before them, nor did his—not that his would ever again, even if the cold was real.
Keeping her attention to the scene before her, she lifted her head and looked into the distance. Dots of white laid scattered in the lower half of the black horizon line, punctuated by the chorus-like moaning of survivors mixed with the intermittent blasts of rescue whistles firing in futility. The orchestral soundtrack of the film hummed on around them; a chorus of low strings and the piercing screech of a mournful bagpipe.
The more than three-hour long movie always got to her, despite having seen it a handful of times before. Ava wondered how she would have felt, had she been one of them. Granted, their presence in the midst of the movie, experiencing every piece of tangible, perceivable detail was only as real as it was ever going to get short of having lived the actual sinking. Nonetheless for her, there was still that safety net that numbed her from feeling the full extent of pity. None of it was real, she reminded herself. This was a movie, a movie which Safari brilliantly extrapolated. This was supposed to be entertainment, but she wondered whether or not the extent of how realistic the movie had become somehow diminished her ability to enjoy it—safe from a distance, outside the world of what was once, a simple film inside a metal and glass box known as television.
"We really should have finished this last year," Ava sighed, looking up. There was no point denying it—the movie did get to her. Damn 7D, she thought to herself. She hated that misty feeling that was always in danger of reaching her eyes.
"You know, If this like ... ever happened to us, it wouldn't have ended this way," whispered Riley sadly as he watched the girl finally realize that her beloved was beyond anybody's help. She finally let go, watching his body bob at first then sink, fading away into the dark shadows of the deep water.
"I would have kept you beside me," said Ava, as Riley began to kiss the side of her neck in gentle repetition, sneaking in a few lip nibbles along the way, "floating above the water ..." she added in a weakened mutter, unafraid of Riley's proximity from her neck for he had finished his last Blood Pod not more than half an hour ago.
"Well actually, that would not have made the slightest difference," said Safari in blatant boredom, popping out of nowhere behind them at the bow of the life raft. "Blondie here could soak in that freezing water for hours—nothing would happen to him."
Riley groaned, Safari always popped in at the most inappropriately awkward moments, not that there were too many of those.
"Do you guys really wanna see the rest of this?" she asked, hovering where the young woman now floated alone. "I've been working on this new movie ..."
"Maybe. When we get back Safari," said Ava, tucking her hair behind her shoulders as she detached herself from Riley's embrace.
Safari straightened up as she landed gently on the surface of the fake water she mentally conjured. As she inhaled, closing her eyes, the entire ocean vanished, replaced by the cold grey concrete of the empty shipment bay. Even their little dingy vaporized into nothing.
"Where are you going?" asked Riley.
"Gonna check on Kyle," Ava replied, giving him a light peck on the cheek. "I'll catch up with you guys later. Say hi to Hunter for me."
"Can I come?"
"It's better if you didn't," said Ava. "We don't want to stress him out."
"Wait, did you pack-"
"Yup, all ready. Don't worry about me," Ava interrupted, as she headed for the entrance to the stairwell leading upstairs. "Love you, Rilester," she added in an afterthought as the door closed behind her.
Riley was not too fond of the idea of Ava using Hunter's age-old nickname on him. It already felt weird to him in a way that even he could not explain to himself, in addition to the fact that the nickname cemented the tragic non-sexual nature of his relationship with his mortal ex-ex-girlfriend. It was a consequence brought about by his untimely transformation last year and Ava's adamant refusal to turn. There was no denying that the two of them, as it stood, were physically and intimately no less platonic than two best friends who would kiss each other on the cheek, exchange "gropey" embraces, and gaze longingly at each other's eyes, drowning in hormonal lust.
"OK ..." muttered Riley. Ava's almost militaristic streak of independence was something he was still getting used to.
"She knows your routine," tisked Safari. "She's a big girl."
"Where's Hunter?"
"Upstairs. Just landed." said Safari. "Are you guys going to swim in the caves again?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LEGION OF DARKNESS by Andrew Guardamano. Copyright © 2013 Andrew Guardamano. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue: The Palace.................... xv
1 Things That Never Change.................... 1
2 Snake Skin.................... 10
3 Deliverer.................... 20
4 Departure.................... 30
5 Begotten, Not Made.................... 37
6 Partial Recall.................... 49
7 Twice Stolen.................... 60
8 The Situation.................... 67
9 Behind Closed Doors.................... 77
10 Venom.................... 90
11 Diaries of a Thief.................... 100
12 C.A.S.K.E.T.................... 114
13 The Letter.................... 122
14 First Puberty.................... 133
15 Leech.................... 141
16 First Impressions Speak the Loudest.................... 149
17 The Opening Gala.................... 163
18 The Entity.................... 173
19 The Flight of the Nosferatu.................... 185
20 The President and the Viceroy.................... 199
21 Isla Guadalupe.................... 210
22 Like Grandfather, Like Grandson.................... 228
23 The Owl's Nest.................... 235
24 Blood and Guts.................... 247
25 Cloak Diaries.................... 260
26 Homework.................... 275
27 Mother Dearest.................... 287
28 Flight Plan.................... 299
29 Death Rays.................... 312
30 Manaconda.................... 321
31 Wolfram's Lament.................... 339
32 A Game of Drones.................... 353
33 Teacher's Pets.................... 367
34 Physiological Discrimination.................... 380
35 The Legion of Darkness.................... 389
36 Secrets.................... 401
37 The Invitation.................... 421
38 The Other Grandfather.................... 431
39 Skin Deep.................... 439
40 Masquerade.................... 455
41 Private Audience.................... 466
42 Old Habits Die Hard.................... 483
43 The Last Lesson.................... 505
44 The Magic School Bus.................... 524
45 A Can of Worms.................... 538
46 Serendipity.................... 551
47 Crash of the Titan.................... 570
48 Salt.................... 591
49 Near, Far.................... 603
50 The Return of the Prodigal Daughter.................... 612
Epilogue: The Master.................... 621