by Elle Cross
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Text Copyright © 2018 Invictus Media Group, LLC
All rights reserved.
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Cover Design by:
Crimson Phoenix Creations
Edited by:
China DeSpain
Formatted by:
Gina Wynn
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This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.
Contents
Story Description
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
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Books by Elle Cross
About the Author
With the fate of humanity at stake, one girl won't stop fighting to find her missing family…
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Monsters.
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Before the world went dark, ‘monster’ was the label we used for the shifters. They weren’t really dangerous, just beings who could change into animals now and then. As long as they did no harm, no one raised a fuss.
* * *
Well, aside from my dad, a third-generation preacher and monster hunter. He spoke against true monsters, though, ones who wore human skin and plotted the end of the human race. Yet, no one listened to him. I bet they wished they had, especially when hellfire rained down from the sky and destroyed the world we once knew.
* * *
Now in this new world of darkness, the monsters who once hid under human flesh are out in the open, free to reign and conquer what is left.
* * *
As the only child in my family, my parents raised me for this very day. My name is Soleil Bishop, preacher’s daughter and fourth-generation monster hunter.
* * *
It's time for me to accept my calling and protect the last outpost from the monsters beyond our walls.
Monsters lived in everyone. That was what my dad, the local preacher and now self-appointed monster hunter, had always said.
There were, of course, the obvious kinds of monsters. The ones they had talked about on them news shows Before—as in before the world went dark. They even had some on what had been "Reality TV" for the few moments there had been reality to broadcast.
I vaguely remembered watching some of those shows and wondering what kind of reality had such fine clothes and houses, because it hadn’t been my reality, that was for damn sure.
At any rate, those kinds of monsters—the obvious kinds—had kept to themselves anyway, even after the media had gone crazy for them, and so I never had to be afraid of them.
See, Dad had always preached that the monsters we could see, they were the ones who were really humans, but just wore monster skin from time to time. Like a comfortable pair of jeans.
He used to say, “Soli? You don’t mind them folk, y’hear? They’re our kin, they just dress different once a month, is all. Like some of your trendy fashion shows. You’re more alike to them than t’other kinds of monsters.”
He’d preach like that to me and ended it with a little boop of his index finger right in the middle of my forehead. As if what he’d said would be rooted in my mind more that way or something. He had always been silly like that.
He’d been right, though, the same as he’d been right about everything. It had been the other kind of monsters that we had to be afraid of. The ones that everyone seemed to invite into the world—and into their homes—with open arms when they had arrived.
Reapers. The monsters that wore human skin. Pretty skin.
They might have looked like us, a better version of us, but they were decidedly not us. And they had proved it when they’d culled the best of us away. As for the rest of us? The Reapers unleashed the Hellfire that destroyed the cities of the world and created the After.
As in after the world went dark.
Dad’s been gone a week.
I shouldn’t be worried. Heck, I shouldn’t be a lot of things, but the words that others said about those missing and gone stuck in my mind. I knew I shouldn’t have paid attention to gossip and rumors.
My only comfort was that I didn’t have to live in town so I didn’t have to deal with the negative words on my skin or have it root inside my head and bloom like a stubborn weed. The benefits of living on a blessed farm hidden from normal sight that my parents carved into the mountainside before I was born.
I told myself I wasn’t worried, and yet here I was, out on my rooftop scoping out the edges of our property. The open fields rolled down to a gradual slope, bordered by the path Dad and I used to walk down to the town, which was barely visible in the distance. A semi-circle of trees dotted the other side of our property line before it thickened into a dense tree line that went up the mountain.
I shivered a little despite the warm day. Maybe I needed the sun to kiss my skin a little bit. I was named for it, after all. The Sun. Soleil. I loved that. Once upon a time I used to joke that I was solar powered. Funny how that was truer now than ever before.
Now we did everything during the day. Anything that needed to be done outside needed to happen when the sun was out, no matter how hot it was. I never once heard a complaint, and Lord knows that I never regretted being out in the sunshine, no matter how it blazed down on me and made me sweat through my clothes.
No one wandered outside after dark. Well, not anyone who wanted to live. Sometimes the townsfolk would discover that one of their own had gone missing in the dead of night. Not from an attack or nothing. Just…gone. As if instead of lying in bed to sleep, they had decided to walk off by themselves into the darkness.
That was what the townsfolk called it, too. The Long Walk. No one came back from one of those.
My dad...he had disappeared overnight, just like what I’d heard from the town rumors. I’d gone up to bed, my dad still at the table reading his scriptures like always. The next morning, I went about my day and didn’t realize anything was wrong until mid-morning.
I’d thought I’d finally caught him sleeping in, but when I’d gone to his room, it was as pristine as ever. Not one speck of dust dared touch my dad’s things. Bed tightly made, as if he hadn’t even slept in it. The only thing out of place had been my dad.
There hadn’t been many places to look. Our farmhouse was efficient, and I’d been everywhere else on our property. I’d even run down to the town, wondering if he’d been called unexpectedly. Sometimes that happened. But he wasn’t there.
If it hadn’t been for his missing gear—the worn leather satchel he carried his books and oils in—I would have been even more worried. But those were gone too, which meant he left on purpose with every intention of coming back.
He would never walk off. He woul
d never do that. Not to me.
Our number one rule was survive. Always.
The Long Walk was the exact opposite.
Crouching down to one knee on my rooftop, I rested my rifle on the perimeter railing as I peered into the scope. I hoped I could see more. The heft of the gun felt good, the scent of the blessed oils and the cool metal comforting against my cheek.
I swept along the borders, this time through the scope, and something glinted in the distance.
I looked with my naked eye and I didn’t see it, but thanks to the oils, my scope sighted it.
It had to be something blessed; I was sure of it.
Why I hadn’t thought to look for my dad this way before now, I didn’t know. But he must have done something, must have hidden something just outside of the wards.
I didn’t want to think on why he hadn’t been able to get it any closer. Heck, why he hadn’t been able to get back all the way to the house.
At least it was a relatively safe area, and I didn’t have to travel through much of the forest to get there. But it was still a ways away from the house in the opposite direction of the wards and protected glades.
I stood from my sniper’s crouch on the rooftop and glared in the direction of the marker.
It was my father’s. I was sure of it. No one else would have had the skill to make that kind of shield over whatever it was that he had wanted me to find.
But that was his skill as a word mage and preacher. He was able to create out of the word of scriptures and he had laid for me a pretty little marker. One that said simply, “Come and claim me.”
If I had doubted that my father lived, this took it away.
I slung the rifle on my back. Checked the sun. It was farther along on the horizon than I would have liked, but if I ran, I could get there and back well ahead of sunset.
I retreated back to the house.
Sometimes I hated to be so right.
The marker had been both a sign and a trap. A sign from my dad, and a trap for some of the monsters that evidently wandered into our neck of the woods.
Monsters were rare in this portion of the woods but of course, it would be my luck to attract some of them.
I had lifted the blessed cache from its ring of protection and placed the bundle hidden there into my backpack. As soon as I left the blessed circle, something large had crashed through the trees toward me. Something that charged toward me with too many paws reverberating against the earth.
I ran back the way I came, even as what I’d feared broke through the tree line up the mountain. A Skoll. Even worse, an Alpha Skoll.
Where there was an Alpha, there was a pack that followed him. And his pack was not far behind.
Skolls were designed without the capacity to feel pain and could eat the most out of any of their brethren.
Hells, an Alpha would eat his brethren if he were hungry enough. Worse, he was an unholy monster with eight legs and a body bigger than a horse.
And he was gaining on me.
I ran for the hollow created by blessed pines and bound oak; a small sanctuary of trees that my parents wove into a safe haven with their combined magic. Triumph rushed through me as I passed the border, feeling the first wave of protection tingling over my skin. Energy surged into my muscles as a renewed sense of hope filled me. I risked a glance over my shoulder.
A couple of the monsters had fallen away, but the more tenacious ones still stuck to my trail, including the Alpha.
I just needed to get to the water. Once I got there, they would fall away. No monsters had ever been able to breach that ring of protection. Just needed to get to the water.
An old spiritual from my parents' youth drifted up into my mind, sung in my mother’s soulful voice. Wade in the water...
I pushed on despite the burning in my calves and the pressure in my lungs. I was grateful that my track days got me through most of high school…when there were still such things as school. I ran hill sprints to this day out of habit, and I was glad for them.
The backpack rode high, practically on my shoulders. It was there keeping pace with me, secure as it was fastened around my waist.
I could practically feel the Alpha’s breath on me, the fetid stink of death. The clacking of its teeth, the claws tearing through dirt…all of it filled me and threatened to overwhelm me.
I just needed to get to the water...
"Soli!" a woman’s voice cried out in anguish. It was too familiar, that voice, and one I knew to be dead.
Survive. I could hear my dad coaching me through this as if he spoke right inside my head. Don't you dare stop running. That voice ain’t real.
I heard it then. It was the keening wail of an animal. A wolf. A true wolf.
The ululating song was a contrasting mix of sorrow and rage. It spoke to me, almost as if I could understand what it said.
Odd. There weren’t wolves here, at least not anymore. They were once the protectors of the mountains Before, but now? They were gone, fading from history into mere myths and legends.
I spotted the cliff.
The woman’s cry echoed around me, devolving into a cacophony that no longer held a lure to my heart. It had been a ploy by these monsters. Even now they persisted, using my mother’s voice to plead at me. The cries squeezed my heart, even as they turned into gurgling choking sounds.
I pushed away the thought that I might have been listening to the last sounds my mother ever made on this earth.
I heard rushing water before I saw the break in the tree line. The cliff. Without a look back, I jumped off of it and plunged feet first into the river below.
Wade in the water children...
God's gonna trouble the water...
The gospel spiritual rose up in my mind, sung in my mother’s honeyed contralto, as I bobbed toward the opposite side of the river bank.
I worked against the current, my backpack still firmly secured on my back.
I finally got my waterlogged self out of the river and made my way to the tree where I had hidden my change of clothes. A quick strip later and I was moving toward that line, that barrier of safety that would separate me from the dread nightfall.
Just keep moving, Dad had always said. Just keep moving. Don't let no one catch you.
Lord, I was tired. More wolf song sounded in the distance. It blended in with the symphony of crickets, subtle as if it had always been there, though I knew that was not the case. I remembered every bit of sound that came out of these woods because it was so rare.
The monsters had taken away even that bit of comfort from us—the comfort that we weren’t alone—and left only dead silence, an emptiness that threatened to fill the rest of the Earth if we allowed it to.
The wolf song had the feel of warning. An eerie wail that ran like knives over my skin, piercing into my soul. Adrenaline rushed my body, and I found a new burst of speed, even though I didn’t notice any monsters or other threats nearby.
The cabin-turned-farmhouse was in the distance, and I rushed it without stopping until I felt the fingers of magic thrill over my skin and I was safe inside the wards of true sanctuary.
The outer rings of protection were from the earth magic, natural barriers that kept out the less powerful baddies. We didn’t need to work on the outer wards. It was the innermost ring that needed to be secure. That was the ring that kept the big bad away in the simplest way that I could manage with my dad's scripture: invisibility.
I figured if no one could see us, no one would need to be looking for us.
And it had worked. So far, at least.
I took my backpack off and shimmied the awkward bundle out of it. It was wrapped in a kind of wax paper and twine. Something that would keep any creepy crawlies off of it. I pulled the twine, my fingers shaking both from the overload of spent adrenaline and anticipation.
When the paper fell away, it revealed a familiar leather-bound book. Made sense that it had been wrapped so carefully. My dad would have wanted to make sure I would
have this book if I ever needed it. I traced the symbol of interlocking circles and triangles that was embossed in intricate detail on the cover.
This was his personal notebook, one that he had taken copious notes in about the monsters of this world…and how they could be destroyed.
My heart lurched as suddenly the book felt heavy. Too heavy. Quickly, I laid it down next to his scriptures on the dining table.
My father had once told me that his notebook was like an extension of himself, and that I should treat any of mine the same way. Countless times he would tell me that his notebook carried his hopes, dreams, and even his heart and soul.
If I had it now, it meant that he willingly parted with it, and that meant he had done the unthinkable.
He had broken his own rules.
He had chosen to die.
I paced just inside of the door, avoiding the warped slats of wood that would otherwise squeak. There was a noise outside like the crunching of bones and I knew that the sound would follow me to my dreams.
Blessedly, I saw nothing out of the peephole. I let out the breath I’d desperately clung to.
And now that I tuned in, the only sounds outside were the wind as it rustled through the trees, the dead leaves skittering over even deader earth. A silence that lingered, which was as it should be.