by Dante King
Lucifer Reborn 1
Dante King
Copyright © 2021 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
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Immortal Swordslinger
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About the Author
Chapter 1
“Turn right onto Morningstar Lane,” the GPS on my phone informed me. The digital female voice was barely audible over the sound of the clanking engine. “Then, you will arrive at your destination in point-five miles…”
I flipped the app closed with a sigh and switched over to the radio, pausing at the stop sign. My old rustbucket van steered like a bathtub at the best of times, and these weren’t the best of times. A puff of jet-black exhaust erupted from the tailpipe as the vehicle stuttered to a halt, the engine reeling. My vehicle was way overdue for some repairs. And an inspection. And registration…
“Shit,” I said, looking out the window. A peaceful street full of single-family homes greeted me. There were even streetlights. The contrast between the clean-cut, upper middle class neighborhood and my shabby repair van couldn’t have been clearer. I should take the sign off the side, I thought, glancing in the side-view mirror. Around here, it’s less likely to be taken as advertising than some kind of warning.
Normally I’d never have been out driving around this late. The computer repair business was generally a 9-to-5 kind of job: most of my clients worked in offices and start-ups, which meant they needed help with their IT stuff during business hours. But I was willing to do special work outside those hours, for an additional fee.
Seeing as most of my clients had dropped off the map recently, I wasn’t particularly choosy. The pile of bills at my computer repair shop only grew deeper every day—some of them stamped with friendly looking reminders like Final Notice! and Last Warning Before Action is Taken!
The headlights dimmed alarmingly as I turned the corner. For a moment I thought the battery had died—but a judicious application of my foot to the gas brought the high beams blazing back to life. Finding my way around this place had been difficult—all the streets and houses looked the same. Big, three-story McMansions with wraparound porches and impeccably manicured lawns. Not my kind of place, in other words.
“Alright,” I growled, flipping through my phone as I drove down the darkened street. “Which one was the client’s address? 665...666...Ah! 667 Morningstar Road. Perfect.”
The client hadn’t been terribly specific about the nature of their emergency—only that it was crippling, and needed to be dealt with fast. I could get with that. This definitely seemed like the kind of place where ‘work-from-home’ was the norm. Whoever this dude was, he probably worried about his money even more than I did.
I flipped through the dial as I counted houses. Since 667 was an odd number, that meant it would be on the right side of the street—a trick I’d learned from years of teenage pizza delivery. The ground sloped upward, the homes growing even more stately as I entered the nicest section of the neighborhood.
As I crested the top of the hill, two people appeared in my headlights. I turned the wheel, startled, as two girls in hoodies and leggings hopped back onto the sidewalk, laughing. Wisps of jet black hair peeked out from their hoods, framing faces that were coldly beautiful.
“What the fuck?” I grunted, my heart pounding. They’d almost gotten hit!
I turned and leaned out of the window, intending to yell at them. In the dim light cast by the streetlights, something swayed between the both of them as they skipped down the hill. They each had one hand on it, swinging it like a fancy purse or a bag of groceries. Only it was neither.
They had a squirrel. A dead squirrel.
I stared a moment too long, and the van descended the other side of the hill. The two girls disappeared from view, leaving me unsure as to whether I’d just seen that clearly or not. Surely they couldn’t have been playing with a dead animal like it was a toy, right?
You’re seeing shit, Luke, I told myself. Stress does that to a guy. And you’ve got plenty of it.
I felt for the radio. Only to hit the AM button instead of the FM.
“You must be wary of him at all times, brothers and sisters!” A nasally voiced preacher trilled to his congregation. “He will try to tempt you with riches, with pleasures of the flesh! With all manner of Earthly wiles, which will only rob you of your soul…”
“I could use some Earthly riches,” I grunted, reaching for the correct button. “Not to mention some pleasures of the flesh…”
It had been a while since I’d had either. I wasn’t a virgin or anything like that: I’d had my share of girlfriends. It had just...well. I was going through a rough patch, alright?
“He is real!” The preacher’s spiel reached a crescendo. “His name is Satan, Beelzebub, the great—”
Click.
“-Deceiver!” Better audio quality told me I’d gotten the right station this time. “That was ‘The Great Deceiver’ by King Crimson, part of K106’s No-Commercials Rawk Block! Next up, we’ve got Van Halen’s Running With the Devil…”
Even my shitty van’s speakers could rumble from that bassline. “That’s more like it,” I said, giving the dashboard a little slap.
By the time David Lee Roth got finished warning me about living at a ‘pace that kills’, I’d pulled up in front of the client’s house. The homes on this end had an air of age and grandeur that the McMansions in the rest of it couldn’t match—built of bricks and stones instead of drywall. Six Sixty Seven was only two stories tall instead of the usual three, but it made the most of it. High, narrow windows on the second story stared down at me like interested eyes.
The engine shuddered and died as I put the van into park. Fuck. Not a good sign.
“Hope you start back up, little buddy,” I growled, stepping out of the van. I walked to the back, passing the big painted “Bell Computer Repairs” sign pasted to the vehicle’s side door, and threw open the trunk.
Normally you
wouldn’t have thought that an IT guy needed a lot of gear. The image people usually had of us involved being behind a keyboard, maybe sticking a USB drive full of hacker tools into a client’s desktop or laptop. But for house calls, I’d learned that I was just as much a cable guy as I was a computer fixer. The first time I’d had to dismantle part of a house’s plumbing to get to a router in a crawlspace, I learned the value of a good wrench.
Is anybody home? I wondered as I walked up the driveway. No car in front of the house, though there was a small, detached garage it could be hiding in. Windows dark, except for a couple on the second floor that shined with...red light? Huh. Whatever. I just needed to get paid.
I rang the doorbell, praying this wasn’t some kind of no-show. Otherwise, I’d just burned a bunch of gas and maybe killed my engine getting out here. There was still no telling until I put the key back in the ignition whether my van would start at all.
It took so long to get a response that I began to wonder if I hadn’t been pranked. Eventually, the sounds of someone coming downstairs reached my ears. “Hold on a second,” a voice yelled curtly. My ears pricked up—that voice was female. I felt like I recognized it.
The door opened and my jaw hit the floor. The woman on the side made a similar expression.
“Luke?” The woman’s eyes widened as she looked me up and down, her eyes filling with interest at the sight of my uniform. “What are you doing here?”
“Um, you called me?” Suddenly conscious of my appearance, I tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I think, anyway. This is 667 Morningstar, right? Computer trouble?”
I hadn’t known the client was female. And I damn sure hadn’t known it was Christina Herbert. Otherwise I might have showered. Not to mention borrowed a nicer car…
Christina and I knew each other, though not well. I’d admired her from afar since high school, where she’d been one of the super-popular girls on the cheerleading squad. She’d even made it to the local college on a cheer scholarship, while I’d worked part-time to pay for books and try to put a dent in my student loans. We’d had a couple of classes together—mostly math, a prerequisite for both of our majors—but she’d never really looked my way.
God, she was gorgeous. It had been maybe five years since the last time I saw her, and she’d just gotten more beautiful. She’d never gone pro with the cheerleading, but parlayed it into a gig managing the CrossFit gym all the bored, rich soccer moms in this side of town went to. She looked like she’d come from there not long ago, in form-fitting exercise clothes that hugged her sleek curves and made her look even hotter. The long blonde hair I remembered in sexy cheerleader pigtails had been wrapped into a long braid that went all the way down to her ass, and her clear blue eyes still sparkled like sapphires.
Suddenly I realized I was staring. Hell.
“I didn’t realize ‘Bell’ Computer Repair meant Luke Bell,” Christina said, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “You look good, Luke. Like, really good.”
The compliment went right to my dick. I had been working out quite a bit lately, though not at Christina’s gym. I wasn’t into CrossFit—more of a weightlifting guy. One of my friends gifted me a twelve-month membership for Christmas, and I’d fallen face-first into it as a way to relieve stress after a long day of being complained at by office drones. I’d been kind of surprised at just how much I enjoyed it; and I had the figure to match.
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”
There was a hell of a lot more I could have said, like holy shit you’re a goddess and how do you look even better than you did at twenty, but I wasn’t an idiot. Trying to play things that way was what had kept Christina out of my reach in the first place.
Her eyes lingered on me a little longer, then she stepped inside and cleared her throat. “Anyway. The problem.”
“Yeah, the problem,” I said following her into the vestibule. “From your text, it sounded...”
I trailed off. Wow. This place was even nicer on the inside than the outside—it even felt bigger, somehow. The high, vaulted ceiling above my head seemed way too high for the simple two-story structure I’d parked in front of. A roaring fireplace bathed the living room in a romantic light, with a winding staircase around the perimeter of the room leading to the second story. A shelf of leatherbound books sat above the fire: I tried to see if we had any favorites in common, but all the titles were in Latin.
I don’t remember Christina taking classes in Latin, I thought. Maybe they’re just for show?
“Nice place,” I said, meaning it.
“Thanks,” Christina said with a smile. “And yes, the problem is serious. Everything’s down: my computer, my Netflix, even my phone.”
With a nod, I looked around the room. “That’s what I’m here for,” I said with a smile, gesturing at the bag at my side. “Hopefully it’s something I can fix right on the spot. Where’s your modem?”
Her brows furrowed together. “My what?”
Oh boy. “It’s a box,” I said, holding my hands a short distance apart. “About this big, with a lot of blinking lights on it. It’s how the Internet gets into your house.”
“Oh, that!” Christina’s eyes lit up. “It’s in my bedroom.”
I swallowed hard. Bedroom? Play it cool, Luke.
“I’ll need you to show me to it,” I said, looking up at the second floor. “That’s not a problem, I hope?”
“That we’ve only reconnected for five minutes and you’re already asking to see my bedroom?” She gave me a lascivious grin. “Not at all. We’re definitely going to have to do some catching up, Luke. It’s been a long time. How did you end up running your own business? Back in college, you seemed like such a…”
Loser, I thought ruefully. I’d learned not to take it personally. If there was one ironclad rule in the world, it was this: the way people treated you depended on how you looked, and first impressions were hard to shake. It was why Christina had never given me a second glance back at college—while now, with some muscle on my arms and a business underneath me, she sounded half-ready to jump my bones.
“...slacker,” she finished, too polite to say the actual word. “But, I mean, clearly you’ve gone through some changes.”
“Clearly,” I agreed. “And I guess we both ended up as business owners, huh? Small world.”
“Getting smaller all the time,” Christina said, leading me up the stairs. “It’s right over here…”
The second floor of Christina’s home was less imposing than the entrance. More carpets, more homey touches—there was even a bathroom mat in the shape of a cute kitty cat next to the master bedroom. There were enough women’s touches to shake off the weird feeling I’d gotten from the home’s appearance and the too-large living room.
“Nice pics,” I said, admiring the walls. “Looks like you’ve had an interesting few years.” Like most people, Christina had framed photos adorning the walls: one of her college graduation, an old photo of her doing a kick atop a human pyramid during a halftime cheer, her on a jetski in the Caribbean with her family. The kind of shots you’d use for a dating profile, or as your curated top pics on Instagram.
All except for one. I almost missed a step at the sight of it—Christina in the woods with four other beautiful women, gathered around what I first took as a smoldering campfire. Only instead of flames, a large burlap sack sat in the middle of the coals. An aura of foreboding stole over me as I stopped to examine it further. The girls all looked like they were having fun, though whoever took the photo had given them all a serious case of red-eye. If not for that one, strange little detail…
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing at the picture.
“Camping trip,” Christina said, as if it were an ordinary photo. “Me and the girls go out every now and then—drink pinot, gossip, you know the deal. One of my besties is totally into this whole ‘solstice’ thing? I don’t really get it myself, but it’s fun…”
Don’t ask, I told myself. I
didn’t want to screw up a good thing. “It’s good to hang out with friends,” I said, turning away. “People drift apart too easily when they grow up, yeah?”
A knowing smile spread across Christina’s face. “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
I found the modem almost immediately—it was tucked beneath Christina’s big king-sized bed, along with an ancient-looking router. Lights on the side flashed, though two of them that would normally be green blinked a deep red. There’s the problem, I thought reaching for both.
I unslung my messenger bag and slipped a small black laptop out of a pouch. Its plastic was scuffed, and it certainly wasn’t a top-of-the-line device—but it would let me dial into the router and diagnose the problem. I booted it up, fishing in the bag for an Ethernet cable as I focused on my work.
A little noise snapped me back to reality. Christina stood on the other side of the bed, her long braid curled around her waist. The headboard next to her had a strange symbol like a star carved into the mahogany—probably some kind of good luck thing, I figured.
“Can I get you something while you work?” Christina asked. “You’re probably not supposed to drink on your shift, but it’s already so late. I’m sure I’m your last client for the night, right?”
“You are,” I said with a grateful smile. “And seeing as I’m the boss, there’s no rules against drinking on the job. Whatever you’ve got open is fine, thanks.”
“Wine?” Christina arched an eyebrow.
Hell yes, I thought. Getting drunk with my old college crush? What could be better than that?
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll just be working on this while you do that.”
She left me to it. I glanced up and stared at her ass as she left the room, every curve of her pert behind visible in those tight leggings. God damn, Luke, you’ve hit the jackpot tonight, I told myself, hooking one end of the Ethernet cable into the port on my laptop. If you fix this girl’s problem, she’s going to be very, very happy…
She would. But I had to fix the damn thing first. Fail, and I had no doubt all this new interest Christina had in me would quickly dissipate.