Gods of Blood and Bone (Seeds of Chaos Book 1)

by Azalea Ellis

  He frowned, hesitant but still not convinced.

  Maybe I just wasn't that good of an actor.

  "I've never seen you before. Where are you from?" he asked. But instead of staying locked on mine, his eyes began to travel over each of us thoughtfully. "I've never seen any of you before."

  "Of course not." I raised an eyebrow. "We're not stationed here. It's just a routine audit."

  His eyes stopped for a moment on China, who was staring at him intensely. He looked first at her face, then at her uniform, the only one different from ours. "Why do you have a Player in here?"

  He didn't allow me to answer the question, instead pulling back and waving to what I assumed must be his buddy, while lifting his radio wristband to his mouth to say something to someone on the other end.

  We never found out who that someone was or what he was going to say to them, because Jacky punched her hand through the door window and grabbed the wristband, snapping it off and crushing it. She swung around the door and punched him in the face, then pulled his instantly limp form into the room.

  "Don't kill him," I snapped as she reared back. Just in case.

  She grimaced, so maybe that had been a good idea on my part. Instead, she struck the back of his neck, and his eyes rolled up and back.

  That move was just as cool, every time.

  Unfortunately, she couldn't undo the guard having alerted his buddy, who kicked the door open wide, gun at the ready. She dropped like a rock, kicking both feet out in front of her and taking the second guard's legs out from under him, while I knocked up the barrel of his gun and ripped it out of his hand so that he couldn't shoot us.

  I heard the distinct crunching sound of the guard's trigger finger breaking, and grimaced. Not pleasant. But also not something I felt bad about. Anyone who was a part of NIX deserved that, and more.

  The guard flipped over and gained his feet again right away, much more of a challenge than his partner. I doubted a normal soldier could have stood against us for even as long as he did. But he was no match for both Jacky and I. I wondered if Seeds were at work in the fighting skill of the guard.

  He went down, but the radio at his wrist crackled again. "Reinforcements on the way. Report your status, Decker." When no response came, it crackled again, "Status report, Decker!"

  I turned to Adam. "You've got to hurry. We don't have much time."

  He was breathing hard by then. "We can't hurry," he snapped. "Data only transfers so fast, and if the program doesn't have time to finish properly, we might as well not have come here in the first place."

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm the piece of bubbling lava inside me that reacted to my fear and tension, and pushed my claws back into my fingers. "Jacky, China. Time to implement Plan B." Jacky nodded and ripped a storage port with built in WiFi from her back pocket and shoved it into the slot on one of the fallen guard’s ID sheaths. It would forcefully override the locks and open all the doors in this section of the compound, thereby setting off a slew of other alarms. In a few minutes, the anti-fire system would engage, drenching everything nonessential in water, and sucking the oxygen out of non-water-friendly rooms.

  "I need to know when the reinforcements get close, China, and how long we have till they get to this room."

  Plan B was to create widespread chaos, and slip around and away, undetected in the midst of it.

  She nodded silently, pale skinned and round-eyed. Her fingers were curled into white-knuckled fists, but she uncurled them deliberately and cupped them behind her ears to increase the amount of sound she could capture from the specific direction she wanted, like the ears of a dog or cat. After a few moments, she said, "Now. I hear them."

  "How long?" I asked, pulling on the steel-fingered gloves I’d brought to hide my possibly identity-revealing claws.

  "A minute?"

  I turned to Adam. "You've got thirty seconds to get out of the system. Everyone get the charge sticks ready.”

  He growled, but gave no other response, and twenty-eight seconds later he said, “Now!”

  We all pressed the charge sticks into our necks, a couple inches below the VR chips, and gave a heady jolt to the tracking devices embedded under our skins.

  The lights stopped abruptly as he disconnected his computer.

  "Did you do it?"

  "Of course," he tried to smirk, but looked too afraid and strung out to pull it off. "You know who I am, right? I always perform. Ouroboros is in motion. She’ll eat every bit of the surveillance from the last few days, along with everything for the next fifteen minutes, till she’s devoured her own existence. Along with any trace we ever existed.”

  “Good job. Let’s go.” We left the room and ran down the hall, just slowly enough for China to be able to run at the forefront and still listen at the same time.

  The holding area was in a different section of the compound, but China thought Chanelle and Blaine's remaining family would be there, judging from snippets of information she'd gotten from listening to the guards' conversations. If we could get there and take Chanelle, Blaine's niece and nephew, and some other random decoy prisoners and test subjects without being noticed, we had set up getaway motorcycles and rent-a-pods all throughout the nearby forest. Untraceable back to us, of course.

  Honestly, I would have left at that point without Chanelle and Blaine's niece and nephew. If we could just get out, we'd be off free. But I knew China wouldn't come, and I couldn't exactly leave her to be caught and tortured by NIX, likely leading them back to the rest of us.

  Adam guided us toward the lightly trafficked connecting hallway that would lead us directly to the holding area. We turned the corner into a lounge-type area. It had a large wall-to-wall window looking out over the edge of the mountain we were dug into, onto the river and forest beneath.

  Just in front of us stood a tall, thin man, cutting off our route of escape. He smiled thinly. "Well, well. What have we here?" He breathed deep. "I can smell the fear on you. Real fear, felt so often and so recently it’s become part of your blood. I haven't smelt a guard like that here. Let alone four of them, together with a Player."

  "Oh, no," China said, her voice calm, which only made her fear more plain.

  Chapter 27

  You monsters are people.

  — Jacqueline Santiago

  China grabbed me by the sleeve and tried to force me back, away from the man.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, never taking her stare off him. Her eyes were wide and filled with a kind of blank terror. “We need to run, now. He’ll crush us.”

  Jacky didn’t seem to hear her, confident in her own abilities. She rushed him. As soon as she got close, she was blown away. Literally. She smashed into the window, and spiderweb cracks spread from where her body had hit, branching outward as her body seemed to fall in slow motion to the ground.

  China whimpered. “They’re coming from behind. And up ahead. We need to run. He’s a snake…I can feel it, Eve. I can tell.”

  Jacky got up, gaining her feet again with stiff movements, and my mind struggled to comprehend this stringy man’s strength and speed.

  I could hear the pounding of feet behind us, too, even through the blaring of alarms. “What can you tell?”

  A tear slipped down her face. “We’re going to die.”

  I straightened. “We’re not going to die. We just need to get past him. There’s still time to move forward before we’re boxed in.”

  Adam rushed forward as Jacky came from the thin man’s side. He zig-zagged back and forth, trying to use his speed as a distraction, but was stopped by a bony flash to the gut, and retched bile onto the floor as he hung suspended, bent over the snake’s fist.

  Behind us, footsteps skidded to a stop, and I turned my head to see a gasping, rumpled man take the situation in. “Oh my god,” he said, meeting my eyes. “Seriously?” he asked, as if he knew me.

  What? I opened my mouth to question him, but the group of guards turni
ng the corner behind him diverted my attention. They pulled him back, behind the first line of bodies, as if to protect him. Their guns immediately lifted, but then they saw the snake-like man, and lowered them. The ones in the front line edged backward to increase their distance from him, jostling the ones behind them.

  Well, that wasn’t good. Just who was this snake?

  Sam spun in a circle, looking trapped. “What do we do?”

  “We move forward.” I gripped him by the arm to steady him. “We do whatever we can, whatever we have to.”

  He stared at me, and then shook his head. “No. I know what you mean by that. I’ll help us get past him, but I’m not going to hurt another human being. And I’m not using my Skill. Not again. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be incognito? My Skill’s pretty distinctive.”

  I grimaced, but was distracted when Adam’s back knocked into my foot as he skidded to a stop across the floor.

  The snake man smiled. “I think I’ll play with you for a while, until it’s…safe for the guards to take over.”

  Adam groaned, and behind the man, Jacky was holding a now injured left arm close to her body.

  My claws had slipped out without conscious thought in response to the threat, luckily hidden by my gloves, and as Adam rose from the ground we all prepared to fight. I sent a reminder to the team.

  --KEEP ANY OF THOSE DISTINCTIVE SKILLS HIDDEN, JUST IN CASE--

  -Eve-

  Adam took out a collapsing baton from one of his many pockets and with a flick, sent electricity crackling through it. It wasn’t a stun baton, just normal metal he was using to disguise the origin of the electricity.

  I jumped forward this time, with Jacky coming in from the back, Adam beside me, and Sam moving around to the side. China held back, but the few throwing knives she’d managed to hide on her person were out, and ready to back us up. The guards made no move to stop us, instead watching the scene with unnatural silence.

  I thrust one gloved hand forward, aiming for his eyes. My other hand was ready to smash my claws into his gut when he instinctively protected his face, but he didn’t even blink.

  Instead, he unflinchingly grabbed my outstretched hand and whipped me around like a rag doll.

  I felt the gashes in my back rip open again as I swung around and flew into the window. More cracks spread outward, mixing with the ones Jacky’s body had created. The urge to scream in pain might have been overwhelming, if my lungs had any air with which to do so. I stood again despite that, and when the black dots cleared from my eyes, saw that the others had fared no better than me.

  Jacky was crouched on the floor, blood dripping from her head. She kept trying to get up, but as if drunk, couldn’t find the balance to stand and kept falling back to her one good hand and knees. In any other situation, it would have made a hilarious sight. This was not that situation. Our best fighter, down. And I couldn’t help but remember when the same thing had happened to Chanelle.

  Adam was trying to help Jacky up, and Sam was standing back and clutching a broken wrist.

  China threw her knives at our opponent with just enough delay to keep him focused on her, while drawing out the time for the rest of us to recoup.

  He dodged every one, weaving and bending his body like the hero of some kind of Asian martial arts movie.

  Okay, so obviously we weren’t making any headway like this. And in the meantime, things had gotten even worse. Another group of guards had come up the hallway leading away from the windowed room, and we were boxed in.

  --SAM, I KNOW YOU’VE GOT QUALMS ABOUT HURTING OTHERS, BUT WE COULD REALLY USE YOUR HELP HERE. MAYBE YOU COULD PARALYZE HIM? KINDA LIKE THE GRUB-PUG POISON YOU HEALED ME FROM?

  OR SOMETHING ELSE YOU CAN’T SEE FROM THE OUTSIDE. HIS HEART OR LUNGS…--

  -Eve-

  --WHAT!?--

  -Sam-

  --HE’S GOTTA BE A PLAYER. WE’LL KILL HIS GPS, TAKE THE BODY.—

  -Eve-

  Sam glared at me and snapped, “No.”

  I ground my teeth and snapped back, “Then at least make yourself useful!”

  “I am!” He held up his already healing wrist and laid his other hand on Jacky’s neck.

  I’d never wanted a gun quite so badly before. Ah. I eyeballed the groups of guards plugging both exits. A forced breath and a few sprinting steps later, and I was in front of them. I ripped a gun out of one of the guard’s unsuspecting fingers, and turned to shoot at the snake. I got a few rounds out before the anti-theft system recognized that I wasn’t the proper owner and locked the gun.

  The snake man flexed his fingers open wide with enough strength that they almost bent backward, and the bullets veered around him, smashing into the wall behind him, and barely missing Adam’s head.

  Adam’s eyes widened as he looked back to the hole in the wall, and then met mine for a moment that seemed to last forever.

  I felt like we both had an ‘oh crap,’ moment of understanding, and then time started moving again at a frantic pace. Time to escape while we still lived. But there was nowhere to run.

  My eyes caught on the hairline fractures running through the window, and then looked past them to the dark line of the river rushing far below. I dashed toward the window and slammed the butt of my stolen gun against it as hard as I could. The force of the impact made my hands go numb and my bones hurt, but the cracks spread, and I turned to Jacky. “Help me.”

  She nodded, for once without her cocky grin, and grabbed a sturdy looking coffee table on her way to me.

  The snake waggled a finger. “Oh, no, kids. Don’t be getting any ideas now.”

  Adam picked up two chairs and threw them at him one after the other, and the snake was distracted for a moment, long enough for Jacky to smash through the first layer of glass, and then the second. The wind whipped along the cliffside and slipped into the room, ruffling my clothes with the force of its passing.

  Then the program we'd plugged into the system kicked into the next stage, and the ceiling dropped water down on us in a distractingly heavy torrent.

  She looked at me, and I nodded, and then sent a Window to the team with barely muttered voice commands. “Down him, then get out. There’s a river below.” I focused on widening the break enough for a human to pass through it, as they turned all their energy to distracting our opponent. I could hear them fighting, even through the spraying water and screeching alarms, but I didn't turn, and tried not to imagine the loss of my fighters.

  When the opening was large enough, I turned back to the room. Sam was standing beside Jacky and clutching his arm, but hers had been healed enough that she could lift it at least.

  The snake had a huge grin across his face. It twisted his features grotesquely, as if his cheeks were made of putty. He still hadn't moved from his place.

  China crouched beside me, picking up sharp pieces of glass.

  "I'm sorry, China. I doesn't look like we're going to be getting Chanelle today," I said in a low voice, knowing her Perception was high enough to pick up my words.

  "She's strong. She'll survive until we find a way to come back for her and Blaine's family." She clenched her jaw, as if to deny the possibility of any other outcome. And then she looked at me and nodded, as if I was the one who'd suggested such an unlikely happy ending.

  I turned my attention to the others, unable to face her optimism and the reflection of that idealized version of me in her eyes.

  Jacky faced off with the snake warily, making no move to attack. Her gaze flicked to mine, and I jerked my head to the broken window.

  China threw the shards of glass at him, two at a time. Three quick volleys, quicker than even my eyes could see.

  The snake's mouth twisted in surprise, but he smashed them out of the air, actually disintegrating them into fragments that exploded away from him. The little crystal dust pieces mixed with the wind and pouring water and whipped around.

  Not a piece reached him. But they did distract him, and then China, Jacky, and Adam shot in all at
once from three different directions, moving in low to the ground and aiming for his legs, while Sam threw a decorative plant at his head. They took him down, and his forehead smashed against the edge of a splintered coffee table.

  "Hurry!" China screamed, pointing out the window.

  They didn't hesitate or try to finish him while he was down, instead running or limping toward me as quickly as they could.

  Sam made it first, jumping even before my nod and quickly disappearing into the darkness below.

  Jacky was next, though she waited a few seconds to hear Sam's splash in the water below, and jumped far out into the empty air to ensure she didn't have an unfortunate meeting with the cliff or rocks at the edge of the water below.

  China waited to jump next, but I saw that Adam was limping badly and moved to go help him.

  I'd wrapped his arm around my neck and almost made it to the window.

  China was about to jump, leaving only Adam and me in the room, but she froze, and then turned around to look behind us.

  I turned my head to see what had made her stop.

  The thin man had risen, and was walking toward us. His face seemed to almost glow from within. Not with actual light, just a terrible power.

  Behind him, the soldiers had their guns out and pointing at us, but for some reason weren't firing. Instead, there was again a general scrambling as they all tried to back up into the ones behind them.

  He raised his fingers to his forehead and took them away bloody, then looked at me.

  I flinched.

  Adam grabbed my arm, as if to protect me, and pulled me closer to the edge. "Jump, China!" he snapped.

  The snake raised a hand, and the hair on the back of my neck rose in a burning instant, screaming at me to run.

  Adam's other hand snapped out to grab China, but she'd stepped forward out of his reach, screaming, "NO!" at the top of her lungs.