Eternal Void (Isabella Espinoza Book 2) Read online

  I scoffed. “Not a chance. She’s not the first, is she? Back to when you said she’s different. There have been others before her. How many?”

  “You’re clever, but it won’t be enough to save your friend. We’ll find her and take her back. You can help make it nice and painless for her, or we can make it tough.”

  “Well, considering the quality of people who have gone after us so far, I’m not too scared. You know your little tracker? Some bandits came after us, and they’re all dead now. Along with one of your accomplices from that night. The one who was acting as Amari’s uncle.”

  The man took a faltering step back. “You killed Bill?”

  “Oh, is that his name? Yeah, he showed up and wanted to take Amari, but she said she didn’t have an uncle. When I refused to let him take her, he tried to do it anyway.” I smiled and moved closer to the man. “It went poorly for him.”

  The man clenched and unclenched his fists at his side. “Dammit. I can’t believe you killed him. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

  He shook his head as he looked down at the ground.

  “I can’t say I feel sorry for you.’

  He paced across the alley, and then again. “What am I going to do with you? You don’t seem the sort to back down.”

  His breathing increased, and I even heard his heartbeat accelerating. I readied myself, preparing for the moment that I knew was coming. Part of him didn’t want to fight me. Maybe he was scared after I had told him about the fight with Bill or the bandits. Maybe I could stall him until he chickened out entirely.

  “How did Bill get those pictures of Amari?” I asked. “It’s awfully creepy for some stranger to have those lying around. And why did you pick her?”

  He paused, and his shoulders relaxed a bit.

  “With these things, not just anybody will do.” He seemed eager to have the chance to delay fighting me. “We wanted someone with favorable biology, so we searched medical records and matched them up with people who we believed were still alive. The options for who would be eligible were rather thin. We found Amari, then it was pretty simple to find those pictures of her from the wreckage of her old address.”

  “But why hire me to find her? Your organization seems like it has some resources. So you found some random person to get her for you?”

  “We knew where she was, and just hoped you’d tell us what opposition we might face rather than risk scouting it ourselves. We didn’t really count on you running into an enslaver camp to bring her out yourself.”

  “Well, you should have done your homework a bit better, then,” I said. “I’m not exactly the sort of person who leaves a job half done. You hire me to find a missing person, I’m going to come back with them. I’m not a private eye. I’m a real detective, and I’m here to help people, not spy on them.”

  “Clearly. We should have found someone else.” His fingers tightened on the hilt of his knife, his knuckles turning white. “We know where Amari is. And you can help us, and her, right now. We’ll make it worth it for you.” His eyes were wide, almost begging me to make a deal.

  “And what happens to her?” I stepped toward him, fixing him with a glare. “You cut her open, study what was different, then toss her aside to get picked up by enslavers again or devoured by monsters?”

  The man didn’t respond, which was answer enough. After a bit of hesitation, he said. “Isn’t the sacrifice of one person enough for us to be able to cheat death? If we could cure all wounds and survive this long night, maybe we can stand up to what lurks out there.”

  “We’re getting along well enough without playing god.”

  “Well enough? We cower behind makeshift walls, barely scraping enough food together to avoid starving. We aren’t living, we’re surviving. Myself, along with my master and all of us, we want more than that. Not just for us, but for everyone. The Necromancer has seen what the darkness has in store for us, and he will do what it takes to defeat it.”

  “He can keep doing whatever he wants, but I’m not going to hand over Amari. You can keep struggling in the dirt, trying to raise corpses. I don’t want any part of it. Once people are dead, they should stay that way.”

  “What about people who become monsters?” He shot me a taunting grin. “You certainly have a unique look to you. But I’m tired of our debate. If you won’t help us get Amari back, then I can’t let you stand in our way either.”

  He drew a long, serrated knife from his belt and lunged toward me.

  I stepped back, light on the balls of my feet, as I drew the pistol from the holster beneath my jacket.

  “Drop it, or I’ll end this right now,” I snapped.

  He backed away a step, dangling his knife from his hand, and then launched a roundhouse kick across my pistol, sending it clattering across the alley floor.

  He came at me again, with small jabs and swipes.

  With my reflexes, I kept up just fine, but he knew how to feint and move his feet to keep me guessing. I might be fast, but I couldn’t read minds. I would have to get blended with a different monster if I wanted to pull off that trick.

  He also had the advantage that he was actually trying to kill me while I was holding myself back. I didn’t want to kill another lead. Which meant trying my best not to tear him apart or put my fist through his torso.

  As we sparred, I picked up on his pattern. The next time he feinted toward me, I stepped into it, grabbing his wrist, and tossed him over my shoulder onto the ground.

  Even before he landed, he swept his legs across mine, and I fell next to him.

  He sprang on top of me, the knife aimed toward my sternum. He stabbed down toward me, and I caught his wrist just as the tip of the knife pricked the fabric of my shirt.

  As I held his hands away from me, I kneed him in the balls, and then shoved him over onto his back. I wrenched his knife from his grip and jammed it into his left shoulder.

  I pinned him to the ground, all of my weight pressed into the knife embedded in his shoulder. Blood poured out from the wound as he winced, letting out a groan of agony.

  “Come on, tell me what you know,” I said with a growl. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  He grasped my hand and started to shove back at me, but I put all of my enhanced strength into keeping him pinned. He grabbed for the knife in his shoulder. With my left hand, I wrenched his wrist too far to the right, and it let out a sickening pop. He tried to pull back from the pain, but I had him stuck under me with nowhere to go.

  I drew the knife from his shoulder and pressed my hand down onto the gash. It would have the dual benefits of putting pressure on his wound, thus helping him stay alive, along with feeling like hell. The man gritted his teeth, the three scars on his cheeks reflecting the lanterns across the street.

  His groans turned into laughter. While he cackled, the blood slowed to a trickle as it dripped between my fingers. Then, it stopped. Far more quickly than I expected.

  I lifted my hands. The wound was actually knitting itself back together, just like Amari’s gunshot had done earlier.

  He could heal from severe wounds.

  In my surprise, I scrambled off him.

  “What the hell are you? How are you doing that? And what did they do to Amari?” I asked.

  He sat up, leaning against the wall of the alley. He closed his eyes as he snapped his wrist into place, letting out a grunt.

  “These are gifts from the Necromancer. He is learning to conquer death. And apparently with Amari, he has succeeded. If we can get a hold of her, we can learn why. What’s different about her? Why did this experiment succeed when so many others didn’t?”

  “So, this is all some big science experiment to you fuckers? You murdered a woman. That’s not an experiment. It’s murder.”

  “We need test subjects, and the willing ones have run out.”

  “Why not you? You can heal, right?”

  “I can heal, yes, but the gift of evading death is limited to our mutual friend, the one you
’re protecting.”

  I stood up, retrieved my gun from the ground, and aimed it right at his head. “What you’re telling me is that I could kill you now in this alley, and you wouldn’t get back up.”

  His grin fell.

  “I suppose you could. But you’re a detective. Killing someone in cold blood is murder.”

  “Maybe. But I’m also getting real tired of you taunting me and not giving me some straight answers. You should remember, there aren’t any real laws or regulations stopping me from hurting you. And I doubt Catherine will care if I kill some bandit in her camp, especially one who was complicit in the murder of one her citizens.”

  “You won’t do it.”

  I shrugged. “You can still feel pain, right? So I can keep hurting you, and you’ll feel the pain each time before you heal?”

  His frown deepened. “What are you getting at?”

  I pointed my gun at his knee and pulled the trigger. His kneecap exploded in a spray of blood, bone, and cartilage as he let out a terrible scream.

  “Heal from that,” I snapped. “And while we’re waiting, give me something useful.”

  He clutched his knee, blood dripping out between his fingers. He hissed as he winced in pain, and then he started laughing again.

  “Every minute you spend with me is one less that your friends have,” he said, his voice strained.

  I tilted my head. “Why is that?”

  “Because if my allies don’t hear from me, they know to begin the attack. And I just missed my check-in time.”

  “What attack? Here?”

  “Oh, no. We want Amari, and we will go through whatever stands in our way. I’ve heard that Cathedral Hill holds up well against small groups of night stalkers. I wonder how well it does against a horde of them? If you hurry, maybe you’ll get there in time to watch your friends get devoured.”

  I was out of time to deal with this asshole. So, I shot his other knee and ran toward the gate.

  For the first time, I would see how long I could run at my full, enhanced speed. I needed to get back to David, Rose, and Amari. They were about to be under attack.

  CHAPTER 10

  I raced toward the gates of Fort Lorraine, thinking about the carnage that was about to arrive at the doorstep of the Cathedral Hill community. They could handle some night stalkers, but too many would overwhelm them. It wasn’t something they had ever had to worry about, as night stalkers typically didn’t attack as a large group. How this Necromancer and his people had managed to get all of them to work together, I didn’t know, but I didn’t have time to figure that out now.

  When I reached the gates, Catherine raised her hand and stepped in my path.

  “Find anything new?” she asked.

  “Can’t stop,” I said in a terse voice. “I need to get back to Cathedral Hill right now.”

  She scowled but waved to the guards to let me through the gates.

  Once the sideways garage doors had opened, I dashed out at full speed, using every ounce of my enhancements to push myself to my limit. My heart thudded in my chest, and my breaths came fast and heavy. Soon, I settled into a rhythm.

  I crossed the point at which I would have had to stop sprinting before my transformation, and I felt like I had barely warmed up. But I still had a long way to go until I reached Cathedral Hill. Sprinting for four or five miles was going to be taxing, with or without superpowers.

  I hoped that the man with the scars had been bluffing. If I was staring down the barrel of a gun, I would probably say anything to get them to go away.

  Maybe he had made up this thing about the attack at the cathedral to get me to back down. And it had worked.

  At the same time, the price of ignoring such a warning, if it turned out to be real, would be astronomical. If my friends were about to be attacked by monsters, I needed to be there. And if it turned out he was lying, I’d be glad to see my friends safe and alive. Then, I could track down that bastard again.

  As I ran, old signs for restaurants, stores, and car dealerships blurred past me. I didn’t pay attention to what they read. My focus was on moving forward. I knew I should slow down just a touch to conserve my energy for the fight ahead, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  Adrenaline coursed through me, driven by fear and the anticipation of a fight.

  After the third mile, my legs and lungs actually started to burn. I pushed through the pain. I would not let my friends down.

  By the fourth mile, my body wanted to quit. My muscles insisted that they had hit their limit for how long they could work at full capacity, but I knew that they could push further. They needed to.

  When I reached the final hill up to the cathedral at the end of the fifth mile, my legs felt like lead as they tried to refuse to move. My mind was stronger, though, and I kept pushing, driving myself to go the final distance.

  As I powered through the final stretch, sounds reached my ears: the shrieks of night stalkers ahead, and shouts of people inside the walls of the settlement. Orange fire blazed along the edge of Cathedral Hill, illuminating a horde of night stalkers that had assembled outside. The guards on the walls fired their guns into the crowd of monsters. Some of them fell, but not quickly enough.

  With the numbers that had assembled against the community, I hardly knew where to begin to try to help them the most. Unfortunately, my sprint across town had taken its toll on my body, even with my enhancements. I slumped next to a tree and had to give myself a minute to recover. If my body failed me in the middle of a fight, I’d be useless, and then dead.

  Within the muscles of my legs, my accelerated healing started to work as the lactic acid flushed from the tissue and microtears healed. My rush to push myself as hard as I could had apparently caused a bit of damage. It would only take a short while to recover, though.

  I took the time to look over the situation in more detail.

  The horde of night stalkers, rather than attacking as one mass along the wall, seemed to be working as small groups. Each group would charge at a section of the wall, ram into it, scratch as if trying to climb, and then pull back as guards rushed to defend that part.

  Two or three groups were just focused on the main gate.

  I had never seen this kind of coordination between groups of these monsters before. Within small packs, sure, they could coordinate and use teamwork. But they also weren’t picky about attacking each other. If a night stalker fell, they would gladly consume it as meat. And I’d seen groups fight over dead animals before.

  How had they come to work together? Possibly part of the mysteries of what this Necromancer was doing.

  I scanned the area, trying to determine how I could be the most help. If I wanted to stay alive, I should get inside the settlement and put those walls between me and the night stalkers. However, I wasn’t sure the best way to get inside. I could probably jump over the walls, but I would have to get past the night stalkers first.

  Besides, part of what made me a good fighter these days was my mobility, and being stuck inside would take that from me. My best bet might be to try to pull some of the night stalkers away from the walls and eliminate groups one at a time.

  If I had a chance to get inside, I would take it, but this would help relieve the guards a bit.

  I forced myself to stand up, even though my legs still protested. They had healed and recovered enough, though, that I thought I was ready for a fight.

  I ran toward the groups of night stalkers attacking the gate and slowed as I drew my pistol and padded close to them. The monsters still had their focus on attacking the gate in shifts, with groups pulling back to the fringe of the firelight where it would be difficult for the guards to see them.

  But not for me.

  I took cover behind an abandoned car, assumed a shooting stance, aimed at the nearest pack of stalkers, and pulled the trigger.

  One dropped from three hits before they could even respond. I killed a second as they whirled around to face me. I planted a bullet
in the shoulder of a third, and then my gun ran out of ammo. I slid the magazine out and reloaded, but by then, half of the first group and an entire second group of night stalkers was heading my way, for six in total.

  I had never faced so many of these creatures at one time. The most I had fought at once was three, and I had been able to force them to fight me one at a time.

  Any more than that, and I would typically just run away. There was no point in testing my abilities if it meant it would get me killed.

  But this time, I didn’t have the luxury of retreating. If I did, the night stalkers would just go back to attacking the settlement. If they kept going at the walls, they’d find or make a way through.

  And six night stalkers coming after me meant they weren’t attacking the gate.

  Still, if I was going to face them, I needed a better battlefield.

  Off to my right stood an abandoned house with light yellow walls and dark blue trim around the windows and doors. A spacious patio with a cute railing lined the front, connected to the overhang above with decorative poles. A handful of wicker chairs were scattered on the porch. The house had probably been adorable once. Now, the windows had been smashed, and the door knocked off its hinges. It had likely long since been looted of anything useful, maybe even by the people at the cathedral settlement.

  When the walls of the communities went up, anything on the wrong side was left out of luck.

  With the monsters pursuing me, I dashed to the house.

  I dove through the broken living room window and hurried around a corner, behind a wall that divided the kitchen from the living room.

  Shrieks sounded from the night stalkers outside as they approached the house. I hoped I had chosen well. Either the confined space of the house would cut their numbers advantage, or I’d just end up trapped and surrounded. It all depended on how clever the night stalkers were.

  A trio of them came up toward the front window and sniffed at the broken glass along the windowsill. They approached slowly. They already knew I was here, so I wasn’t sure why they were taking their time.