Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  Her soul remembers his touch, even if she doesn’t.

  With only three days until the wraith king turns the earth into an all-you-can-eat buffet, Addison Beckett is forced to enlist brooding sentinel Asher Green’s help to unlock the Mortal Machine. According to the founder, all she has to do is find the sanctuary—the same sanctuary she can’t remember because Asher erased her memories.

  Trying to save humanity while navigating Asher’s lies is a royal pain. But the more time she and Asher spend together, the harder her soul tries to remind her what else he’s made her forget—that he loves her, wants her, needs her.

  When she’s trapped by the wraith king and forced to pick who will stand by her in the coming battle, Addison is faced with an impossible choice: the sentinel she loves who refuses to love her back, or a powerful stranger who insists they’re meant to be together. Her decision will determine the fate of humanity, and once decided, can’t be undone.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover the Mortal Machine series with Darkside Sun by Jocelyn Adams… Darkside Sun

  Discover more New Adult titles from Entangled… The Summer of Jake

  Ruined

  Forged by Fate

  The Mean Girl Apologies

  Full Measures

  Trouble Comes Knocking

  How We Lived

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Jocelyn Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Embrace is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Tracy Montoya

  Cover design by Heather Howland and Brittany Marczak

  ISBN 978-1-63375-019-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition August 2014

  For Jennifer, Amaleen, and Tracy, without whom my sanity might have checked out long before I could finish this book.

  The profound things in our lives, whether bad or good, are what shape us into what we need to be. If we can’t remember them, all they do is haunt us.

  —Addison Beckett

  Chapter One

  I hunt the dead for a living. Not the kind of dead most of us grow up worrying about, like B-movie zombies or vampires or Great-Aunt Thelma who looks like a walking skeleton. Nope, the dead that lurk beyond the stars don’t go bump in the night; they go bump inside your skull.

  My eyelids drooped with exhaustion as I hunkered down in a dark alley, having fantasies about my bed instead of concentrating on the hunt for wraiths. It was the third one I’d been on in twenty-four hours, and my tank was running on empty. My stomach rolled as the rotten stench of dumpsters in the summer heat crawled up my nose and died. Gak.

  “What do they eat in Nebraska, fish guts and Limburger cheese?” I asked Remy, one of the few sentinels—wraith hunters—who didn’t treat me like Satan’s half sister. “I’m not sure which is worse, the smell or the hillbilly rap music coming out of the Whip and Saddle over there. Who names a bar that, anyway?” I snorted. “Kat will fit right in.” She was also a sentinel, and the two of us got along about as well as a hair-trigger detonator and a truckload of C-4.

  Remy, the gentle giant I’d nicknamed King Kong, chuckled. Tribal tattoos covered one side of him from the top of his shaved head all the way down to his toes. In his black hunting gear, he looked like a Hawaiian ninja. “Yeah, stink real bad,” he said in his funky creole mix of Hawaiian and French-Canadian English, “but we finally get the wraith-infected construction worker to sit still in the bar after tracking him all over this redneck town, so we wait for Kat to work him over, get him to come outside.”

  The wraiths, half-humanoid, half-bug people, had died in a parallel reality and found a way through to this one. They liked to crawl into human beings, eat their souls, and take over their bodies, and it was the job of those of us who belonged to the Mortal Machine to destroy them, using abilities that set us apart as badass guardians of the world.

  The Mortal Machine wasn’t a literal machine, but a secret society that fought to keep the dead bugs on their own side of the thin veil that separated us. In the decades before I’d arrived, only a few managed to get through, but lately they seemed to be pouring in like roaches.

  Movement in the shadows at the end of the alley opposite the bar caught my eye. Just by his broad-shouldered shape and aggressive stance, I knew Asher Green had arrived. A thrill shot up my spine. I hadn’t seen my former sensei in days. Now that I was holding my own, we’d gone our separate ways. Although he treated me like the proverbial redheaded stepchild of the Machine, I couldn’t shake my insane fascination with him.

  Returning my attention to the bar, I slapped my cheeks to wake up. “What the hell’s taking Kat so long?” I asked Remy, stroking my hair to soothe myself. I’d always been a tactile junkie, using texture and soft things as my own personal Valium. “Her whoring skills are stellar, so she should have been able to get the infected guy to leave the bar with her by now.” Something had to be wrong, and we needed to get this done. “Screw this, I’m going in.” Before I pass out in dumpster juice.

  “Addy, may you should wait here with me, yeah?” Remy called, but I marched on. Because we needed to get the show on the road, and not because I felt a need to prove myself to Asher. Halfway to the bar’s door, I glanced over my shoulder.

  Asher had come to the edge of the shadows, the brightness of his vivid eyes—ice blue with the star of jade green that set a fully realized sentinel apart from the rest of humanity—cutting across the distance to brand me like an invisible kiss. The eyes, according to our book of knowledge, were a marker of our status. The brighter they were, the stronger the sentinel. Asher had the most dazzling eyes of us all.

  Was he worried about me? Or afraid I’d screw up the hunt?

  I reached for the rusting handle that would get me into the bar, but before I made contact, it burst open, nearly peeling me out of my skin. Twangy music spilled out, along with the ginormous guy in dusty overalls we’d been tracking for hours. Wow, he was big, standing at least a foot and a half taller than me. A white film clouded his eyes, which alwa
ys happened when a wraith had consumed enough of a person’s energy to rise up from the mind and take control of the body. He smiled.

  Well, shit.

  Overalls lunged at me. In my exhausted state, my reflexes were slow, so I dived sideways, landing hard on my side. The big guy stumbled by me and shook his head, probably disoriented in his drunk person costume. When he came at me again, I scrambled up to my feet. A short scream tore out of me when someone whipped me around. He shoved me against the brick wall by the scruff of my black tank top, almost knocking the wind out of me.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Asher glared at me, his face only inches away from mine.

  I breathed in his sweet whiskey scent, my mind quieting with his presence even though tension had my every muscle coiled like a spring.

  Before I shook off my confusion over having Asher so close, Kat emerged from the bar with a bloody lip. The wraith inside Overalls must have pegged her as a sentinel and popped her one. That was a shame. Her tight pink halter top strained over her perky boobs as she hauled off and flattened him with a fist to his scruffy jaw. He went down like a sack of shit as the Colonel and Taka rushed out of the door. Took them long enough.

  While the other sentinels wrangled Overalls, Asher let me go, glaring at the ground. “You shouldn’t even be out here. You’re walking like you’re drunk and liable to get us all killed.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I scowled at him. “You didn’t even say one civil word before the insults came out. Is that a new record for you?”

  Our eyes met briefly before he looked away, as if even the sight of me pissed him off. He wore dirty khaki fatigues and a black muscle shirt that had several tears across the chest. My inner fangirl wanted to climb him like a jungle gym made of bronzed flesh and steel, but I sent her to sit in a mental corner for being completely off her rocker.

  Worry crept in as I took in his shadow beard that had grown in when he normally kept it immaculately shaven, and his usually spiffy clothes appeared slept in and battle-worn. His Middle Eastern complexion had paled against his night-black hair. Jesus, what had happened to well-pressed Asher? Was he sick?

  He moved toward the scuffle as Remy pinned Overalls’s legs to the grungy ground. Taka had one of the construction worker’s hairy arms locked in his fists, and the Colonel had the other. Kat posed behind them, hands gripping her slender hips, offering a nasty smile that turned her ugly faster than a dent ruined a shiny Corvette.

  “Look boys, our fearless leader is limping to our rescue yet again,” she said in her Eastern European accent. When I’d arrived at the facility six months ago, it had become clear that I was the Architect, or the person who was supposed to assemble the Machine, helping others in the group find their true roles. Some sentinels, Asher among them, thought my destiny was to lead us out of this messy war with the wraiths. Others, like Kat, the Colonel, and Taka, thought I was a liar and an idiot.

  “Shut it, powder puff,” I said, trying to keep my voice from slurring with exhaustion. “When you can show me you can kill a wraith without a gun, then you can throw around all of the insults you want. Until then, close your mouth and pay attention.”

  I knelt by Overalls, who was out cold. “So, who’s going to help me?” I asked. Since Asher had dragged me into the Machine three months ago, I’d been able to use my abilities as the Architect to discover it took two sentinels combining their power to push out a wraith without killing the host body—and killing the human host along with the wraith was what they used to do before I’d come along.

  “Helping” me meant touching me, so everyone but Remy stared as if I’d asked them to pluck out their own eyes with a toothpick. They’d spent the last sixty-five years thinking touch between sentinels would kill them, so convincing them what was a lie and what I knew instinctively was truth when it came to our abilities had been challenging, to say the least.

  When nobody stepped up, I turned to Remy. “I guess it’s you and me again.”

  He shook his head, huffing from the exertion. “Sorry, Addy. Got nothin’ left.” Our power needed time to recharge, and we’d barely caught a few winks lately. Plus, certain combinations of sentinels were more powerful than others, and Remy and I didn’t generate a lot of juice together.

  “Get out of the way,” Asher barked. Taka jumped up and moved back. Asher knelt down across Overalls from me without saying another word, dark lashes rimming eyes that remained stubbornly focused on the man between us. Aside from his rigid posture, he appeared deflated, as if someone had pulled out all his stuffing and left him an empty sack of bones. I had a silly thought that I’d like to hug him. Yeah, that’d go over about as well as a kick to the nuts.

  I’d been searching for my conduit for weeks without success. Our Machine power needed to connect with another sentinel’s to reach its full potential. My guess was that there was only one match for each of us who could best conduct our energy, causing an intimate, somewhat sensual connection of mind, body, and soul. I’d been waiting for a chance to touch Asher, sure he would be my ideal conduit. I didn’t know why I was so certain—probably just because the physical connection was off the charts, at least for me. Plus, there were only a few guys left in the Machine I hadn’t shared my storm with yet, and none of the ones I had touched lit me up the way a true conduit should. But usually when I needed help booting a wraith, Asher seemed to disappear.

  I held my breath when he placed one palm on Overalls’s forehead and the other on his chest, where most people’s strongest chakra points were located. Asher finally raised his chin and stared at me with a sneer, as if daring me to have the nerve to lay a finger on him.

  My hands shook as I reached forward and hovered them over his, and I was suddenly terrified of what might happen after having imagined this moment for so long. Even though he’d been my sensei, I couldn’t remember ever touching him skin to skin, so why did I even want the guy? I guessed I’d always been a little south of crazy, which would explain my odd fascination with him.

  “What are you waiting for?” he snapped. “Get this done before you keel over. You look like shit.”

  I curled up my lip in annoyance, some of my worry over his appearance evaporating. He definitely sounded like the Asher I knew. “You’re one to talk,” I said. “You look like you’ve been sleeping under a bus.” I clamped my hands over his, bracing for the intense reaction that should come with a match. I shifted the lid on the metaphysical box in my soul where I kept my Machine energy. It rushed out of me like a summer wind, bringing such sweet relief it tore a sigh from my throat.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  He closed his eyes, his face growing slack and calm, inviting my fingers to trace the ridge of his eyebrows. Scrolling blue designs crawled up his arms like living tattoos, as they did for all of us when we let our power go.

  I felt nothing from him. Only his warmth and the tendons in his hands that flexed beneath mine. If we were compatible conduits, we’d have both gone nuclear with those patterns. Not even a faint hint of change showed in my own blue designs, powered only by my own mojo.

  My ribs seemed to shrink as realization set in. Most of the other sentinels I touched lit me up at least a little, but it was like he was a regular mortal, completely invisible to my Machine senses. We couldn’t share power—not even a trickle, like I could with Remy. Asher wasn’t my match. It repeated in my head like a sick joke, over and over until the echoes hurt my ears. Tears sprang to my eyes. I jumped up and hastily drew my arm across my cheeks to get them away. I should have been cheering, having averted the land mine of Asher Green, so why did I feel like someone stabbed me in the chest?

  He hated my guts. I’d probably have had a happier eternity trapped in a pit of pissed-off vipers than him. I’d touched almost everyone else, and no kaboom. Maybe I was just worried that I didn’t have a match. Which was stupid. The Architect had to have a powerful conduit, right?

  “Aw, better luck next time,” Kat cooed. “Did you seriously think a si
mple daddy’s girl like you could handle the force of Asher?”

  I wanted to scream at her that I had no daddy and that she was a nasty effing hag, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing her barbs had hit home.

  Overalls sprang to consciousness again, struggling enough that Asher, Remy, and the Colonel had to work to hold him. After a few seconds, Overalls stopped and stared at me with his white wraith eyes.

  “He’s coming for you, Darkside Sun,” he sang, and then burst into hair-raising laughter.

  Oh crap, oh hell, oh damn. What was he talking about? The wraiths called me that, so he had to have meant me. Their reality was dark and cold, and for some reason, they could sense my Architect energy from beyond the veil, like their own personal sun. According to what we’d figured out so far, I might be the key to sending them back to their hell dimension permanently. But if any of them crawled into me, they could also use me to open a doorway between our world and theirs, and they could use my power to regrow their bodies here on Earth. If that ever happened, they’d become immortal, and humanity would be screwed.

  The Colonel cranked his head around while pressing his knee into Overalls’s chest, his jade-star sentinel eyes pointing razor blades at me. Although he appeared twenty-something, he always talked like an old Russian politician.

  “What is he talking about, woman?” the Colonel asked. He still believed he was the highest ranking of us, but that had been another lie that wouldn’t die.

  He refused to use my title or my name, and I’d given up correcting him. As the person who could reassemble the Machine when it was broken, the Architect was a type of leader, but otherwise, there wasn’t supposed to be a ranking or caste system among the sentinels—we were all equals.

  “No idea,” I said, “but my itching spine thinks we need to haul ass and get this done just in case the dead bugman in him isn’t just screwing with our heads.”

  Remy stared at me as if considering how fast he could throw me over his shoulder and dash me out of there, so I wasn’t the only one freaked right the hell out.