Fallen: The Demontouched Saga (Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Fallen

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  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

  Join the List

  Review

  Read More

  My Other Books

  Help Me Out

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  FALLEN

  The Demontouched Saga

  Book 2

  Douglas Wayne

  FALLEN

  THE DEMONTOUCHED SAGA

  BOOK 2

  Douglas Wayne

  Copyright © 2015 by Douglas Wayne. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

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  douglaswayne.com

  This book is dedicated to my wife and kids. Without your sacrifice these books would have not been possible.

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  -1-

  The door to the mansion isn’t locked, which I find amazing. I couldn’t imagine having a house like this and not keeping it locked tightly. The door opens quietly and I move inside. I take a moment to admire everything, from the nice paintings to the freshly waxed floor, before I fuck them all up. Walking into a hallway, I notice a door being shut slowly. I’m glad this piece of shit is bad at playing hide and seek. There is nothing more I want right now than to get home and start reading over Blaine’s journal.

  I walk back to the door and pull out my knife, making it float above my hand as I open the door. At first glance, the thing that gets my attention the most is a large wooden desk with several chairs in the middle of the room. I take a quick look around and then step inside.

  Once I’m past the door, I suddenly take a punch to my jaw. Falling back into one of the chairs, my knife flies back towards the wall. The guy rushes out of the door and back towards the entrance.

  I guess we aren’t going to settle this the easy way. It is fine by me, really. It takes a real piece of work to steal food and supplies from a senior center. I know times are hard, but there are plenty of places to find a decent meal without resorting to that. Honestly though, if I didn’t owe Zeke for saving my ass at the motel, I probably wouldn’t be here.

  I pull my knife back to my hand and put it in my boot, then stand up and take off down the hallway after him. When I get back to the entryway, I catch a glimpse of him moving down another hallway to my left. I follow him, though slower than he is going. This is a huge house. I know that people lived in them alone in the past, but I doubt that is the case now.

  I continue down the hall, turning the doorknob of every door I come to. Guys like this are not the smartest ones of the bunch. They will leave every door in the house unlocked, yet lock the one door they hide behind.

  I remember trying to hide from my dad as a kid. I was playing ball with the guys and managed to hit the ball right through the driver’s window of my dads brand new Monte Carlo. It never ceases to amaze me how fast we could scatter when something went wrong. I don’t know where the rest of the guys went, but I ran inside the guest house and locked myself in one of the bedrooms hoping he wouldn’t find me. I wasn’t too worried about having to use my grass cutting money to pay for a new window. What I wanted to avoid was being on the ass end of his leather belt. He didn’t pull it out often, thankfully.

  It didn’t take him long to find me, he checked the doors until he found the one that was locked. He knew I was too stupid to run away. I don’t remember much about the beating, but I do remember that I had to sit on a pillow for the next three weeks.

  Four doors down and I am at the locked door. I take a deep breath and kick the door in.

  I’m greeted by six guys pointing assault rifles at me, which is a shame because I found the holy grail of man caves.

  “The supplies are mine.” A tall blond man says from the front of the theater. “Kill him quickly and clean up the mess. I have some business to attend to.” He walks through a door on the right side of the room, leaving me with the six amigos.

  “I’ll give you a choice. Drop the guns and walk away, or keep holding them and die.”

  The sound of gunfire fills the theater. As much as I want to admire the acoustics of the room, I also don’t want to die today. I hold my hand forward and focus on the spray of bullets heading my direction. Within moments there is a wall of lead floating in the air between us. I try not to laugh and the looks on their faces.

  “Bad choice.” I pull my arm in, preparing to thrust the bullets back.

  I feel something hit me in my lower back, which drops me to my knees. Getting a kidney shot is not one of my favorite things on a good day. Its the last thing I want when I’m facing down six gunmen and a sucker punching bitch.

  Suckerpunch grabs me by the throat and lifts me in the air. “I haven’t killed a priest yet.” He lets out a laugh that smells oddly like sour milk.

  “Not going to start today, asshole.” I reach down towards my boot, pull my knife to my hand, and thrust it into his chest. He lets me go as another layer of blood sprays onto my once pristine suit. I’m going to have to actually fix the hot water heater one of these days. The other guys pull the trigger and start to fire at me again. I reach my hand out and stop the bullets a second time. I then push my fingers back, sending the bullets back at the shooters.

  I walk down to the stage as blood drips from the large projector screen. The moans of the injured men gets louder as I get closer. I pull the guns to me one at a time and unload the rounds onto the floor.

  “Don’t kill us man, we were just taking orders.”

  “Taking orders?” I kneel down next to the speaker. “Too bad that I’m a man of my word.” I shove the blade of my knife right under his ribcage and into his heart before making my way through the rest of the men. I really don’t like leaving them without covering them with holy water, but I left it in the car. I’ll just have to settle for knowing that they aren’t demons.

  I walk up to the door on the right side of the stage and open it up. The door opens into a large circular foyer with a large staircase that spirals around the outside of it. Straight ahead, I notice the runner on the phone outside a large glass window. He looks back in my direction, slams the phone in his pocket, and takes off running into the woods behind the house. I set off at a sprint out of the glass doors towards the woods. Playing hide and seek in the mansion was bad enough, but playing it in the woods is a game I know I am going to lose. A quarter mile head start in terrain that I have never seen is all he would need to keep ahead of me. Times like this make me wish I had stuck with running after the Rising.

  I make my way through the woods, trying my best to listen ahead to see if he switched directions. This is hard to do when I’m constantly breaking branches under my own feet. I run around an old tree that is leaning against another and see the runner. I give my run everything I have, but end up eating a face full of mud. I push myself up and look forward, not seeing a thing. Something tells me that I’m not going to
catch this guy, so I dust myself off and turn to head back to the house. If nothing else I can reclaim the supplies and get them back to the center.

  Within moments I hear a loud scream that cuts off as fast as it starts. I turn towards the noise and take off at a jog towards it.

  I come to a clearing next to a small creek when I notice the body on the other bank facing up towards the sky. I can’t see if he is breathing, but he definitely isn’t moving. I jump across the creek and notice another man walking away. He is probably my height, but wearing a brown hoodie that is covering his head. He turns around and looks at me before walking into the tree line.

  I kneel down next to the runner and the first ting I notice is his eyes, or lack of them. Where his eyes should have been was a pool of reddish white liquid instead. I’ve seen some nasty shit in my time, but this definitely ranks near the top of that list.

  Checking for a pulse, I come up empty. Whatever that guy did to runner definitely did the trick, but what exactly did he do to him? I look around for signs of a struggle, or at least for traces of blood. finding nothing. Then I roll the body over to check his back, and see it is clean too. Whatever that guy did to him was nice and clean. I need to introduce Eunie to him,and have Hoodie show him how to kill people without massive amounts of blood and gore.

  Not wanting this guy to come back to life and attack me from behind, I pull out my knife and stab him in the chest, and get back to my feet. I scan the tree line for traces of Hoodie, but come up empty. I don’t have time to chase him down, even if I wanted to. I stop at the creek to rinse the blood from my knife and place it back in my boot. Time to load the Expedition with the stolen supplies and get them back to the senior center, but first I have to make one quick stop.

  -2-

  I pull off on the side of the road about five miles away from the community center. Zeke opens the door and sits in the passenger side of my new ride.

  “I was hoping you would get a bigger car for this. It would have taken a week in that old scrap heap.”

  “I don’t think that scrap heap would have made it to the mansion. You went far enough away on this one.”

  “Would have handled this one myself if I wasn’t trying to keep the orb safe. I don’t know what it was, but the demons want it back pretty bad.”

  I would imagine that anything that could keep a demon’s soul from going to purgatory during the war would be very valuable to them now. Angels may be more powerful, but they are outnumbered. It doesn’t help that the majority of the people left make perfect candidates for possession.

  “What could cause a person to just drop dead?”

  “You humans are frail things. One wrong look could kill some of you. What are you talking about?”

  “When I finally caught the thief in the woods he was lying on the ground motionless. No pulse. No breathing. Just dead.” I look over at him. “And his eyes. They looked like they had been melted.”

  “Melted?” He strokes his chin. “Angels have the ability to kill humans with just a touch. While it doesn’t happen every time, it does fairly often.”

  “And I thought my Magneto shit was awesome.”

  “Its not a power that we like to use.”

  “What angels do you guys have in that area?”

  “None.” He looks over at me. “If Uriel knew there was someone closer, she would have had them handle the thief. You have more pressing matters to attend to if we want to keep Michael happy.”

  “Speaking of him, is Chicago going well?”

  “Nothing new has come out of Chicago in a few months. The demons have entrenched themselves in pretty good there. Something tells me that you won’t have to worry about my brother for a while now.”

  “I hope you are right. I hear he can be a real prick.”

  “To say the least. But, he does what he is asked to do. He feels that the best way to handle the demon threat is to kill the host. Normally this would give the soul a chance, but now I’m not so sure.”

  With the gates to the heavens and hells all closed, all souls now go to purgatory. I don’t bother to ask, but I assume that the souls are one of the spoils to be won. I know how lazy I was if I dropped a dime on the ground. Unless I had a pressing need for that dime at the time, I never bothered to bend over and pick it up. I can just imagine having to find the dimes in a sea of other crap. Sure, you may find a lot more than the one dime you lost, but you would have one hell of a headache when you got done.

  “Why do you guys bother?” I stop the car and put it in park. “I mean, you guys got all of the good ones out of here before all this shit started. The ones that are left are either the ones that either hate you or didn’t give a shit enough to care.”

  “We do it because we believe that there are still plenty of good ones left. They just need a little guidance.”

  “Where was your guidance when my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer? Where was it when she couldn’t walk more than two steps without coughing blood all over the place? Where was it when our son sat in his bed crying for days knowing that he could lose his mother at any moment?” I clench the steering wheel tight, trying to hold back the tears. “Where were you when I traded a part of my soul to remove the cancer from her body?” I punch the dashboard and look over at him. “And why didn’t you assholes bother to tell me that I was just going to lose her anyway?” My head collapses into the steering wheel.

  “Mitch, I’m sorry.” He places his hand on my back. “We don’t get to call the shots. We have to roll with the punches just like you do.”

  I don’t regret my deal. It did give us two extra years with her. What I feel is more like buyers remorse. I knew the deal was bad the moment I made it, but I would make that same decision if it was put in front of me again.

  “Let me drive.” Zeke says. “Take a few to clear your head.”

  I spend the rest of the trip looking out of the window. Part of me wants to just deck Zeke right here. The other part wants me to take my knife out and just end it all here. I don’t want to be a pawn. I didn’t sign up for this bullshit. Sometimes you don’t realize the value of the blue pill until you have taken the red one.

  A few minutes later, we pull up to the gate of the senior center. I was expecting a single building that was part hospital and part nursing home, instead we are sitting in front of a large gated community. On each side of the gate there is a man holding a rifle.

  A large man wearing a black suit motions Zeke to roll down his window and shines a flashlight in the cab. “What business do you have here?”

  “Lot of security for a senior center, don’t you think?” I lean over towards the man. “We have your missing shit in the back. Unless you don’t want it anymore.”

  “My name is Ezekiel. Tell Uriel that Mitch and I are back with the supplies.”

  “Wait here.” He walks a few feet away and pulls out a phone. Within moments he is signaling the guards at the gate and we are being waved in. The sight inside is more amazing than the one outside. There are a few dozen armed Hummers sitting in a parking lot right outside of the gate. All around there are dozens of armed men wearing varied outfits, though many wearing military apparel.

  “Tell me how the hell that asshole got out of here with a truck load of supplies.”

  “He was stationed here. He was suppose to be taking a truck out on a run for supplies, but he never came back.”

  “That makes more sense than him getting a truck of shit out of here unless he had help.”

  “He definitely had help. We lost about a dozen men to that.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel better, I only killed seven of them. Eight if you count the thief.”

  “Wish it did.” We come up to one of the larger duplexes and Zeke pulls into a driveway.

  Out front there are a few dozen more soldiers with their guns trained on my car. Zeke steps out and the men relax a bit.

  “This Uriel’s house?”

  Zeke walks ahead and opens the door. “One
of the many.”

  The interior is decorated the way you would expect in a senior center, which is to say it is nothing like I expected Uriel to keep it. I pull down one of the teddy bear figurines. “I would have expected angels.”

  “They don’t make a figurine that looks anything close to one of us. Their hearts were in the right place, but that doesn’t make us like them any more.”

  I stifle a laugh, take a seat on the couch, and close my eyes. Its been a while since I had a chance to just relax. Within moments sleep takes me and the nightmares begin.

  I open my eyes and scan the room. I immediately notice Uriel sitting in a chair across the room. She smiles at me as I sit up on the couch.

  “I been out long?”

  “Oh, about twelve hours. You looked like you could use some rest.”

  She was right about that. I haven’t had much time to think, let alone get some sleep, the last few days. “Have anything to drink?”

  Zeke walks into the room and hands me a cup of coffee. “Figured that was coming.” He sits down next to me.

  “Ezekiel tells me that someone else killed our deserter. He said something about his eyeballs being melted.”

  I fill her in with all the details of my raid and give her my best description of the guy who did it.

  “I agree with Ezekiel. The thing you saw was an angel. But why would he kill the deserter, yet leave you alone?”

  “Maybe he was as pissed about the supplies as you were.”

  “If that was true, why would he just lurk in the shadows?” Zeke says.

  “I will have a few of the men patrol the area. See if they come up with anything.”

  It sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think they will find anything. If I was causing some shit from the shadows I would do my best to stay in the shadows.

  “Anything new on the orb?”