Echoes (Book 1): Echoes

by Caplan, A. M.

  There was a time when Hannah would have questioned her sanity, being squeezed breathless by someone who was supposed to be dead. Not anymore. She snaked her arms around him and stood there for a moment. The man who’d raised her, the man she loved and missed and had mourned and accepted as gone forever was here. Alive.

  Hannah hugged back him so tightly her shoulders creaked, basking in the strange, unnatural warmth. But only for a moment.

  “Joel, you’d better let go,” she said. “This is one of those occasions that turns into someone getting a black eye real quick.”

  When he laughed and she felt the up and down jiggle it made, Hannah smiled against his chest.

  “Fine,” he said, “but only because I taught you how to throw a punch.” He grew serious, pushing her out to arm’s length and studying her face. “Really, kid, I’m not sure how much time we have. It’s time to head out.”

  Twisting away from him, she sat down. “Not until I get an explanation.” Hannah pulled out her phone and turned the screen toward him. “There’s no one else here. I knew someone was coming the second you crossed the first line of sensors. There hasn’t been anything else since.”

  Hannah was damn proud of the defenses she had set up. “I’ve got the entire perimeter on motion detectors from ground to tree tops,” she said, “and there are enough guns and ammo in the house to take down a small army. Even if it isn’t the normal kind.”

  Not so normal was what Hannah was expecting. The intruder she’d gone to such great lengths to detect had a lot in common with the man she was staring at. The too-perfect skin had given him away the instant she’d seen him clearly. Knowing what she knew now, Hannah had instantly recognized Joel for what he was.

  There were two types of people walking Earth: the kind that died and stayed that way, and the kind that didn’t. Hannah had learned that the hard way. What she hadn’t known until now was that Joel was part of the second group.

  Someone like Joel died, just like anyone else. But when they took their last breath and their life ended, they just vanished, disappearing without a trace. They didn’t stay gone long. They quickly found themself somewhere far away, alive again and perfect—even slightly better than before. The cycle kept repeating and repeating. Forever.

  At least it had been forever, Hannah thought, correcting herself. For the first time, there was a way to break the cycle.

  “I have a dart gun loaded with my own blood, if the standard arsenal inside doesn’t make you feel better,” she said. “There are enough loads to turn you into a regular person a couple times.”

  Joel didn’t look bothered by that; not that he needed to be. The darts weren’t meant for him. Hannah had a specific target in mind, and she had a pretty good idea that person was why Joel was here and so insistent on leaving.

  “Good girl,” Joel said. “I don’t have time to explain the details, but Amara is on her way.”

  Just hearing the name out loud yanked Hannah’s stomach up into her throat.

  Amara. Last time the two of them had met, she intended to use Hannah as a weapon to kill every other previously immortal person like herself and Joel. She needed Hannah’s blood in order to wipe out the others and make Amara one of a kind. If she’d succeeded, Hannah would probably be strapped to a table somewhere with a tube in her arm, being drained dry one drop at a time. Or dead.

  Before that could happen, Hannah had bitten her own tongue bloody and then taken a bite out of Amara’s hand. She hoped it had been enough to make Amara a regular human, the kind you could put bullets into that stayed there. She’d also been holding out hope Amara had been hit by a bus, or maybe pushed down an elevator shaft. The fact Joel was looking ready to shove her out the door made Hannah think that wasn’t the case.

  Amara’s heart stopping for good had clearly been too much to ask. Now she was coming back, and whatever her plan for Hannah was, revenge would be a big part of it.

  “Is she human?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joel said. “No one knows. Maybe not even her.”

  She looked up at him, eyes narrowed. “But you do know she’s coming here, and you think we should go to a safer location? Where exactly would that be?”

  Wasn’t Hannah safest where she was? It was secluded, protected, and she was armed to the teeth. Living like a hermit inside her little fortress had been working out so far.

  Joel looked at her and smiled and her irritation melted away. She had missed him so much, and seeing him again was like a miracle. She got up and threw her arms around him, snugging her head against his shoulder like she’d done when she was a child. So much had gone to hell when he died. Except died wasn’t the right word any more. For a moment, it didn’t matter.

  “I missed you so much,” she whispered.

  He kissed the top of her head. “I missed you too. You can’t even imagine.”

  “I’m still not going anywhere, at least not until you sit down and give me an explanation.”

  “We don’t have time. This location won’t be safe for much longer. I may have gotten here ahead of Amara, but she won’t be far behind.”

  “Inside then.” Hannah jerked her head toward the door. “The sooner you start talking, the sooner you might be able to convince me to go,” she said. “Might.”

  Ballistic glass was expensive. And really freaking heavy. The sliding glass door stuck in its track, and Hannah had to rock it back and forth, putting her weight behind it until it closed. Reaching behind the long blackout curtains, she pulled the retractable security gate across the glass, securing it to the steel plate bolted through the wall.

  Metal grids were already pulled down over the room’s two small windows; Hannah checked they were locked and yanked the blinds down over them. The front door was dead bolted—as always—and she dropped a steel bar as wide as her arm across it and pushed it into its slot, where it fell into place with a comforting, solid clunk.

  Tapping the screen of the tablet on the kitchen counter, Hannah brought up a visual rendering of the security system with rings of green, yellow, and red arranged in a concentric cylinder like a 3D bull’s eye. The black target at the center was the shape of a tiny house.

  Joel leaned over her shoulder. “How far out do the sensors go?”

  “Motion detectors start four hundred yards out in all directions. There’s a ring every hundred yards until you get to the house.” Hannah pointed to the two places where the outermost green ring was overlaid with a large dot. “There are overlapping sensors at the obvious points of entry—the lakefront and driveway. They’re programmed to disregard anything that’s obviously not human. A black bear tripped them a couple times, but otherwise it works.”

  Satisfied everything was quiet, Hannah pulled up a four-way video feed. Each quarter of the screen showed an image from one of the cameras mounted on a corner of the roof. “These are high resolution and you can see out to the hundred-yard mark, at least where there aren’t trees in the way.” She changed the view again, pointing to a screen split in two. “There are extra cameras at the same places as the redundant motion detectors.”

  The top half of the screen showed a gravel driveway with a chain stretched across it, the rusty no trespassing sign hanging from its center swaying dejectedly back and forth. On the bottom half of the screen, inky water lapped against the rocks on the shoreline. The picture was so clear she could make out individual maple leaves, white bellies showing like flags of surrender to the storm hovering somewhere over the lake.

  The security hadn’t come easy. It had taken her weeks of tree climbing and beating her head against the computer to get everything up and running. It wasn’t until then, when she was sure nobody was getting to her doorstop unannounced, that Hannah had finally stopped sleeping in a chair with a gun across her lap. She still spent plenty of nights with her hand under her pillow wrapped around the grip of a handgun, but it was an improvement.

  “Good girl,” Joel said, nodding in approval at the security camera i
mages.

  “Stop good girling me, Joel.” Hannah pulled out a barstool. “Sit down and start talking.”

  He paused, eyebrow raised. She stared pointedly until he sat.

  Propping the tablet up against the coffee pot where she could see it, Hannah stood across from him, leaning back against the counter. Joel stared at her for a moment, head tilted to the side, but didn’t speak. Fine. If that’s how he wanted do it, she’d ask the questions.

  “So who was in the can, Joel? It clearly wasn’t you.”

  That was where it all started, with the little metal urn she’d believed held his ashes. Seeing him alive now, her tight-lipped expression slipped a little. Hannah reined it in, but it wasn’t easy. Her happiness at seeing him sitting in front of her was at serious odds with the gravity of the situation and how pissed she was about his neglecting to mention not being dead.

  “No clue,” Joel said. “Did you know you can buy human cremains online? I feel especially bad now, since whoever they were got cremated twice.” The can that had held the remains had been lost—along with everything else she owned—when Amara burned down her last house.

  “It’s not funny, Joel,” Hannah said. “You faked your death, and you left me.”

  “I had to.”

  Hannah slammed a hand on the counter. The tablet slid flat with a clunk. “You had to? That never would have flown as an explanation when I was a kid, and it certainly isn’t flying now. Try again.”

  “I really did have to,” Joel said. “You’ve obviously recognized what I am. You know we don’t age. Someone was going to notice.” He was different than she remembered, and not just because she’d learned to recognize the slight differences that gave his kind away. She studied his face.

  “I know. I don’t look quite the same, do I?” Joel ruffled the front of his hair. “It was a relief to stop dyeing it. Do you know how hard it is to get a convincing fake sprinkle of salt and pepper?”

  She remembered the silver that threaded through the hair at his temples. The thick curls were all dark brown now, and his sharp, thin face didn’t look a day older than hers. His eyes at least were the same—crystalline green, the corners crinkled in amusement.

  He stroked his chin and laughed. “And you thought you hated the beard? It was so scratchy, but I was stuck with it, since it made me look a little older,” he said. “Which still wasn’t enough. I’m glad I was able to find that tattoo artist. She was an absolute wizard.”

  Joel saw her confusion. “Wrinkles. Inked-on crow’s feet. They were so good, I swore I was going to be able to feel them. Impressive, since I can’t imagine she’d had much practice. How many people walk into a tattoo parlor looking for wrinkles?” His grin fell away. “Even that wouldn’t have worked forever. You would have figured it out eventually, that I hadn’t really changed in twenty years.” Joel reached over and took her hand. “It was time. You were grown up and perfectly capable of taking care of yourself. You didn’t need me anymore.”

  Hannah jerked her hand away. “Easy for you to say. You have no idea what it was like after you left. You could have just told me.” Did he think she wouldn’t have believed him? It turned out his secret was well within her ability to handle.

  She hadn’t found out about Joel’s world from him, though in a small way it was because of him. So much had changed since the night she glanced away from the road to pick up the container of his ashes from where it rolled under the seat. Hannah had looked up just in time to see the man in the road before she’d ended his life. Or so she’d thought. The man had returned. And brought a whole lot of trouble with him.

  Joel opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him a chance to speak.

  “You should have told me the truth,” she said. “I knew nothing about who I am. My entire life was a lie.” A lie, and a dangerous one. Keeping the details secret about what he was—and who she was—hadn’t protected her. It made her more vulnerable, ignorant of the danger that was going to come for her. Joel hadn’t warned her about her father.

  Referring to the man as her father was distasteful, even in her mind. Michael. Hannah hadn’t known Michael existed until a year ago. She certainly hadn’t known he’d been like Joel, living over and over again.

  Unlike Joel, Michael hadn’t been interested in seeing Hannah alive; quite the opposite, in fact. She didn’t feel any remorse that Michael was dead now—permanently dead—because of her.

  “You have no idea how miraculous you are,” Joel said. “It’s hard to believe you survived at all. Whatever intuition your mother had about him saved your life. If Michael had been in the picture when you were born, you wouldn’t have made it to your first birthday.”

  Pity the intuition hadn’t saved my mother’s life as well, Hannah thought. And miraculous? There wasn’t anything miraculous about Hannah. It was sheer luck Michael hadn’t managed to kill her.

  “Did you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  “What I am. Did you know? Is that why you rescued me and raised me?” Hannah picked up the tablet and flicked back and forth between the images on the screen. She didn’t want to look at his face while he answered. He’d kept enough else from her; would it be so hard to believe he’d kept the knowledge of what her blood could do from her as well?

  He reached over and put a finger under her chin, forcing her to look him in the face. “I had no idea. None whatsoever, not until I found out Michael was dead for good. No one could’ve known.”

  Maybe that was true; Hannah wanted to believe him. And Michael had been fathering children and killing them to see if they came back like he did for hundreds of years. As far as anyone knew, she was the first of his children to survive. Could anyone have known what she was?

  Joel shook his head and smiled. “I picked you up and took you because I didn’t want to see another child die at his hands. I hid you, because I knew he’d be back to finish you off some day. I intended to erase your identity and place you with a family somewhere so he could never find you.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because after a couple days, I couldn’t bring myself to give you away.” Joel smiled at her. “You were a very cute baby.”

  A ping made them both freeze, the tone reverberating around the bulletproof box of a room. Hannah picked up the tablet.

  “We have company.”

  About the Author

  In my high school English class I was caught with a book behind the book I was supposed to be reading. Detention gave me a chance to finish them both in peace. Eventually I read so many books that they started to come back out.

  I currently reside in the major metropolis of Sayre, PA, watching the Susquehanna River roll by with my husband and our cat that sees dead people.

  You can connect with me on:

  http://amcaplan.com

  https://www.facebook.com

  Also by A. M. Caplan

  REVERBERATION

  https://www.amazon.com/Reverberation-Supernatural-Thriller-Echoes-Book-ebook/dp/B0867GFDSM

  One man raised her. Another saved her. Which one can she trust?

  When the uncle Hannah believed dead arrives to warn her an obsessed dangerous immortal knows where she is, she flees with him. Racing to safety with the crazed killer hot on her heels, she barely escapes an ambush with death in her wake.

  Holed up in her uncle’s fortified compound, Hannah starts to suspect the woman stalking her isn’t the only one after her blood. And with more immortals hunting for her unparalleled power, her only weapon might be coursing through her veins.

  Will Hannah outsmart psychopaths desperate for her grisly gift before she’s bled dry.

  Reverberation is the second novel in the breathless Echoes supernatural thriller trilogy. If you like unpredictable plot twists, dark suspense, and fast-paced action, then you’ll love A.M. Caplan’s wild rollercoaster ride.

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