Awaken (Divine Hunter Series)
Read Awaken (Divine Hunter Series) Online
Authors: L.J. Sealey
Copyright © 2013 L.J. Sealey
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without the express permission of the author. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Cover Art: L.J. Sealey
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Firstly, I
'd like to thank my family: to my mum who encouraged me to write this book every step of the way and had to put up with me pushing it under her nose every five minutes; to my sister and brother and everyone else for their support. And to my husband who has, at times, had to fend for himself and often hasn't seen me for long periods of time while I've been hidden away writing, I love you.
I'd like to thank my friends for their encouragement and enthusiasm.
You really have helped me on this journey. To my ‘Breezies’ street team, you girls are awesome, and Lisa, you’ve been such a big help with everything. I'd also like to thank my editor Catherine. I really do appreciate what you've done and am grateful for your time.
And last
ly, to Michael Warden. You were persistent, I'll give you that. You were determined to get out of my head and finally you did. Now here you are, about to tell your story. Thank you.
“A man plans his course, but
The Lord determines his steps...”
- Proverbs 16:9
October 4th, 2011.
Cambridge, Ohio.
M
ichael sat alone at the bar with a double whiskey, though he wasn’t drinking so much as staring into it trying to establish what it was that had brought him on this journey from Columbus.
Yesterday
’s newspaper article had read that four teenagers over the space of seven days had thrown themselves from their dorm windows at State Park University. Although the authorities were treating it as some sort of suicide pact, Michael suspected otherwise. People don’t just throw themselves from buildings for the sake of it and, knowing what he knew now, he wasn’t about to ignore it.
Michael Warden
is an investigator.
Not your usual, ordinary type of investigator−
like the ones who track down criminals or follow people suspected of having affairs and such−but an investigator of the paranormal kind. Some might say a
Demon Hunter
; a
Ghost Buster.
If only it was as simple as that.
He read the page that
he’d printed out from the Daily Tribune’s
website again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he folded it up and placed it back into his worn, black, double breasted coat pocket. He knocked back his whiskey and made his way out of the bar. It was early evening in Baltimore, MD, and a slight mist had started to settle in. Michael still had a little over three hours’ drive ahead of him to get to where his reservation was: a small place called The Sunshine Motel a couple of miles outside of Garrett Co. He’d planned on having an early night so he could make a start on his new investigation early the next morning, but he’d made an unscheduled stop for some food on the way.
He crossed the rush hour traffic and headed towards his car
. The dusty, beige, 96 Chevy Cavalier (which had seen much better days) was parked up on the other side of the street. He reached for his keys and was about to unlock the driver’s side door when he heard a female voice cry for help behind him. He looked back to see a young woman struggling to hold on to her purse as one of three hooded youths attempted to prize it from her hands.
“
Hey!” Michael shouted over the noise of the traffic, loud enough for the youths to notice him as he immediately ran back to help. Two of the hoods ran off, leaving one−who had succeeded in his goal−fumbling with the woman’s purse. He looked up at Michael, dropped it in a panic onto the sidewalk, and ran like hell.
“
Are you okay?” Michael asked as he passed the young woman her purse from the floor. She nodded, clearly shaken by her ordeal, but instead of staying with her and waiting while the cops were called, he decided to do something about it himself. After he’d visually checked her over, he turned and ran after her attackers.
The group of youths made a right turn down a dimly lit alleyway
between two tall office blocks. Michael followed them. A few faint street lights highlighted a row of dumpsters down one side; the heavy stench of their rotting contents filling the air. They reached the end of the alley, and faced with nothing but a high fence which split the dark space in two, they began to get visibly agitated.
“You might as well give it up boys,” Michael shouted to them after he
realized they were trapped. One of them began to climb up the fence and easily managed to pull himself to the top. Then he jumped down the other side. “Come on!” He gestured for his buddies but they were bigger and heavier than he was and were having some trouble executing the climb with the same ease as their friend.
Michael caught up to them and grabbed hold of one
of the boys−now half way up the fence−by his waist and pulled him down to the floor. “Get off me!” The boy shouted as Michael grappled with him before managing to pin him to the ground. Too busy batting the youth’s hands away as he tried desperately to lay one on him, Michael hadn’t noticed that the other boy−the largest of the group−had jumped back down from the fence. Suddenly a thick arm wrapped around Michael’s neck, dragging him to his feet and holding him back long enough for the other boy to jump up, grazed and bloodied. As he did, he pulled a blade from his inside pocket and held it out in front of him pointing the dangerous end right at Michael.
Michael managed to bre
ak free from the large boy’s surprisingly strong grip after elbowing him right in his diaphragm. He paused for a second and looked at the knife: nothing special, just your everyday Smith and Wesson pocket knife with a three inch blade, but Michael started to back away. There was no point getting into something he wouldn’t be able to explain to the authorities, especially as he still had a long journey ahead of him. The boy had obviously seen it as a weakness and lunged straight for him, causing Michael to jump back out of his reach until his back hit a wall, which stopped him from going any further. “Son of a. . . ”
The youth never stopped and
at the last minute he lost his footing. Falling forward, his knife plunged straight into Michael’s stomach, causing him to gasp. His eyes widened with surprise.
The boy looked down at what he
’d done and his face instantly paled. Michael saw a moment of panic as he stared straight into the boy’s deep indigo eyes. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old if he was that. After a moment, the boy let go of the knife to leave it sticking out from Michael’s flesh. He stood frozen to the spot, his mouth working like a goldfish with no sound escaping.
“
Come on dude, let’s go!” the boy’s friend urged as he grabbed him by the arm. “We gotta split before anyone sees us. Leave him, come on!” That was enough to snap the boy into action and they both ran back down the alley to the street, leaving Michael standing there looking at the knife as blood soaked through his gray T-shirt spreading outwards from the wound. There was no pain, though. In fact, he’d hardly felt a thing which hadn’t surprised him too much.
Now all alone in the alley
, with nothing but the sound of dripping water from a leaky gutter nearby and the distant traffic noise, Michael placed his hand around the black handle, held his breath and pulled the blade out slowly. It felt strange, not like he’d expected at all. It was almost numb with a slight scratchy, pulling sensation as the cold steel exited his flesh. He dropped it to the floor and lifted his T-shirt to assess the damage. There was now a deep slit right under his ribs on the left-hand side, but he felt okay. There was no panic because he knew he’d be perfectly fine.
Under different
circumstances, though, he knew that right about now he would be dropping to the ground and waiting to die from such a lethal wound. He’d already lost a lot of blood and was pretty sure that the knife had punctured his kidney.
That wasn’t
about to happen to him though. You see. . . Michael was no longer human. The body he walked in wasn’t his. Neither was the name he now used. Both used to belong to someone else−a young man. Someone who’d been down on his luck, who’d had no family to care about him, and his misfortunes had led him to choose a dark path. Fortunately for Michael, who now inhabited it after discovering he could
borrow
a body. Which he had many times. This one, however, was more of a permanent thing. After discovering that using someone’s body could ultimately lead to their deaths, Michael had managed to find someone close to death, who wouldn’t need theirs anymore. So, that man was the reason he was standing in the alleyway at that moment instead of being hauled off in a body bag.
He assessed the dam
age to his shirt. “Shit!” he said, poking his finger through the tear. “This was my last decent goddamn T-shirt.”
* * *
F
orced to change his plans and find a motel room for the night−aptly named Comfort Motel
−
just on the edge of the city, Michael had cleaned himself up in the shower and was standing facing the bathroom mirror, naked, staring at the slice in his stomach. He already knew he felt no physical pain and was stronger than he should be, but this was the first time he’d ever been stabbed. He’d had punch-ups and clashes, of course, that had been almost an everyday situation for him since becoming what he was, but this was the first time anyone had gotten that close to killing him−or trying to, anyway. He hadn’t thought about what would actually happen when they did. It was ironic that a human would deliver his first,
fatal
blow given how many monsters he’d fought in the past ten months.
He was quite used to his new
, thirty-one year old body by now−even though it was still strange seeing himself with dirty blond, choppy hair and not his own black, sleek style−but he still found it hard to accept that it was indeed him that stared back from the reflection as he stood before it.
The wound had
finally stopped bleeding as he examined it in the mirror. His lean, athletic body had been in quite good order anyway for someone who’d abused it in such a way, but was now bigger, more muscular due to his regular steam releasing sessions at the gym. Now, though, he was going to have a pretty decent sized scar which would join the faded needle marks on the insides of his arms from his body's previous host’s drug habit.
As he ran his fingers over the small, white scars, he couldn’t help
his mind wandering back to the darkest period of his life so far: the day he’d woken up dead.
Afte
r making a success of his life—good career, lots of good friends and family around him—it was hard to adjust to being so alone now. His success had taken him to places far and wide and it was something he never took for granted. He’d finally been in a place where he’d stopped hating his life, and then one day, someone took it all away from him.
He’d been murdered.
That much he knew, though the reason, and his killer, still remained a mystery. With no recollection of what happened, Michael had awoken in a place he thought only existed in nightmares. A place he’d never believed existed at all until now.
Hell.
He leaned his hands on the sink and dropped his head, hating that his mind would throw the sordid memories up to him whenever possible. He hated remembering how much of a tortured soul he’d been down there in the pit−a demon along with the rest of the damned, even though he hadn’t been worthy of the punishment, given the honest life he’d led. He had no memory of how he’d died, and no justifiable reason as to why he’d ended up being punished in the worst ways imaginable. But he was also glad that he couldn’t remember much of what went on while he was in Hell. All he was left with were flashes of memories of what he could only describe as an excruciating inferno of pain that he’d endured right up until the point when he’d lost himself, as though the burning fire and the torture had finally become too much for his body and soul to bear and he’d simply passed out.
Afterwards, he’d awoken to
a different kind of nightmare. The visions of which were playing out right now as he stood in the dingy motel bathroom.
He was back on earth, no longer a prisoner, but not as he once was. He looked down at his body which wasn’t real anymore. There was no flesh or bone, just a spectral image that was lost in a parallel world where he had no more human interaction, just ghostly beings who were as lost as he was. Spirits of the afterlife who−for whatever reason−hadn’t managed to find their peace either. He was lost, afraid, broken. How could this have happened to him?
He shook himself, determined to push the unwanted memories away. But even when he wasn’t seeing them plain as day, they were there, always.
Ghosts and entities
weren’t the only beings that Michael had had to deal with during his time in that in-between world. He quickly learned that other creatures existed alongside the spirits, creatures he’d already encountered, who knew he was there but would ignore his spiritual form like he was nothing but dust blowing on the wind. But it was only then that they’d taken no notice of him. He’d had no such luck since being corporeal.
The
memories of the torture and suffering he’d endured were all that he was left with. He’d tried and tried to forget, but there was no way of blocking them out; so much so that they’d become the reason he hardly slept anymore, not that he needed to, but when he did those memories would become vivid enough for him to mistake the nightmares for a reality that he just couldn’t endure again.
His existence was now haunted by vengeance; had been that way every day since he’d been back on earth and t
he only reason he’d kept his sanity through all of it, was the determination to find out what had happened to him and the hope of catching his own killer someday.
Hopefully soon.
He wrapped a towel around his waist, grabbed his laptop and powered it up at the small dresser by the window. He had quite a bit of work to do, including faking some papers for himself. The best thing about acquiring a dying man’s body, and nobody knowing that the poor guy had died, was the fact that Michael had inherited the man’s whole life not just his physical form. He now existed, which meant he was in the system. If he was going to find out who or what was causing the students to make like lemmings and jump to their deaths, he would need to get inside the university. He’d decided the easiest way would be to work there. That way he’d be on campus for most of the time and could have a good look around without question.
