Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

I’m back on my feet for only a moment before the creature charges again. But I’m ready for it. Whatever this thing is, it’s deadly, but it’s not smart enough to realize I would anticipate the same attack.

I step to the side and swing down. I feel an impact, and then a tug on my weapon as the teeth catch flesh. A sound like tearing paper fills the air and makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t see it, but I know I have just sliced open the creature’s back.

It whimpers and stops.

I step closer.

It steps away.

Some instinct I never knew I had tells me I’ve inflicted a mortal wound. The thing is dying. I see its form again as it nears the far wall—egg shaped body, tiny arms, squat legs, large eyes. And I recognize it for what it is. Not the species, the age.

It’s a baby.

I’ve just killed a baby.

As it mewls against the wall, each call weaker then the last, the jaw-weapon falls from my hand.

“No,” I whisper, falling to my knees. What kind of a sick world have I been brought to?

I want my mother.

I scream for her. “Mom!” I scream again and again, my voice growing hoarse. My face is wet with tears and snot. My body is wracked by sobs between each shout for my mother. My thoughts turn to my father. How awful he must feel now that I’m gone, knowing I disappeared while angry with him. Not only had he lied to me for thirteen years, but he also believed I was capable of hurting Aimee. He didn’t trust me. Never had. But I trusted him now. Was this what he was protecting me from? This thought strikes me like a fist and I long for my father’s presence. He could protect me. I yell for him next.

But he doesn’t come. He can’t hear me. He’ll never hear me again. How could he?

My voice fades to a whisper. Pain stabs my head with every beat of my heart. The pinpricks of light surrounding me are now blurry halos. In the quiet, I can no longer hear the ragged breathing of the young creature. Certain it’s dead, I weep again, mourning not just the death of this deformed thing that tried to eat me, but the death of something much more precious to me: my soul. As my body gives way to exhaustion, I slide down onto the stone floor, surrounded by bones and wonder, maybe that’s the point.

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DARK TRINITY: ASCENDANT by Sean Ellis



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DESCRIPTION:



Finding Atlantis is just the beginning...



Psychic ex-spy Mira Raiden's discovery of the tomb of an Atlantean king, is just the first piece in a puzzle that will launch her on a journey to find the Trinity--an ancient device with the power to remake the world.



But Mira is not alone in her search for the Trinity. Arrayed against her is an unholy alliance of evil: a team of brutish mercenaries; the beautiful but deadly daughter of Mira's former mentor; a manipulative grave robber, risen from the dead; and the heirs of the greatest evil the world has ever known.



To find the Trinity and prevent the awakening of a horror beyond comprehension, Mira will travel to the ends of the earth, and into the darkest corners of a world that existed before history.




EXCERPT:





Panama, Present Day



“?Alto!”

The laborer froze in mid-swing, the point of his machete aimed at the heavens.

Marquand Atlas rushed forward, exertion and excitement putting a dangerous strain on his already overtaxed heart. The morbidly obese billionaire panted for several seconds, bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, in order to get enough breath to finally speak. “You’ve found it!”

Mira Raiden didn’t know what she had found, didn’t know if she had in fact found anything. She only knew, with a certainty that she could not put into words, that something very bad would happen if the laborer blazing their trail through the dense undergrowth allowed his blade to fall. She gestured for the man to back away from his task. Evidently, something in her demeanor conveyed what speech could not, for the man retreated from the thicket as though it were squirming with vipers.

Mira glanced briefly at her benefactor, then behind him to meet the gaze of Curtis Lancet, Atlas’ executive bodyguard and general factotum. Lancet, a former Green Beret and decorated war hero, was everything that Atlas—for all his wealth—could never be: handsome, athletic, charismatic, and a damn good lover.

“What is it, Mira? What do you sense?” Lancet’s concern was genuine and typical of his good nature. Where his employer saw Mira and her unique abilities merely as one more resource to be exploited and discarded, Lancet had always shown a deep fascination with her as a person as well as with what she could do. Over the course of their journey she had become much more than just a working partner to him.