Broken: A Paranormal Romance Page 17

But first. Washroom. Soap.

  Lots of it.

  Not wanting to seem too eager to run back to the attic, but feeling so impatient he wanted to explode, Grim waited while his Aunt was busy in the kitchen. Aunt Patrice would soon return to her nap and Grim had no choice but to wait.

  Benny and Barny were in their room playing with some of Poppa’s gadgets, among which was a mechanical one-eyed robot. Rudy was sitting on her bed with Ellen, whispering to her while Ellen brushed the hair of the missing head from one of her dolls. Its eyes were open. Grim shook his head.

  He went back to his own room where Sam sat on the floor.

  Sam said nothing, but looked up briefly.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Grim asked.

  “Machines,” he muttered.

  It was always the same with Sam ― machines. Like Grim and Poppa, Sam was fascinated with mechanical devices. The biggest difference was that Sam was one most likely to take something apart to see how it worked where Grim was more likely to build things from out of his head. Pulleys, cogs, gears and metal pieces were strewn about the room.

  “You going to stay inside all day?” he asked. Naturally, he didn’t want his plans interrupted.

  “Maybe,” Sam said.

  Grim almost always told Sam everything, but he wasn’t quite ready to share his discovery in the attic. And he was Rudy’s brother after all. He might tell her.

  Sam then returned to his silent mangling of some device that Rudy had recently tried to build. It wasn’t bad, actually.

  “Sam!” Rudy yelled at the door. Ellen was standing behind her. “I just built that!”

  The pieces fell out of Sam’s little fingers and he hung his head.

  Rudy pointed her finger at Grim. “You told him to do it!”

  Grim shook his head. “No!”

  “Yes, you did!”

  “Get out of my room!” he yelled at her.

  “It’s Sam’s room, too. I don’t have to get out, do I, Sam?”

  Sam continued to look at his hands.

  Grim smirked at her.Score one for Grim.

  Rudy marched out of the room, her pigtails bouncing in fury. Ellen marched after her and the two headed downstairs and straight out the back door.

  He looked at Sam. “It’s okay, Sam. I’ll fix it for you.”

  Sam smiled, and then called Toby over. He, too, went outside.

  That just left the twins.

  Grim peered around the corner of their room. They were still busy with the robot. They were trying to teach it some kind of trick.

  And Aunt Patrice was snoring in the front room.

  Excellent.

  Grim decided to take the risk. He yanked on the rope and the stairs glided down once more. He leapt up the steps and ran over to the chest and whipped off his goggles.

  The colors of the stones were brilliant, but Grim was stumped as to what sort of stones they might be, especially with those creepy fingers clutching them. He had studied different types of minerals for a science project once, and these were nothing like what he had read about.

  He lost track of time as he examined them, trying to sort out if they had any value.

  Eventually, determining that they likely didn’t, he arranged them in a circle; green, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and black. Grim leaned in to have a closer look when there was a heavy thud at the front door. Aunt Patrice’s blood-curdling voice shrieked from downstairs.

  “Grimwald! Get the door!” she called in a loud clear voice. It wasn’t muffled. Which meant —

  He turned to look at the stairs.

  Gah!

  Rudy was standing there watching him. The twins, Sam, and Ellen were all with her. As Grim tried to stand, he put his hand into the circle of stones.

  There was a swirl of color and some strange symbols that circled about him.

  And he now stood in a forest of crooked, gnarled trees with black bark that stretched to the sky.

  The attic was gone.

  The chest was gone.

  And Grimwald was alone.

  More information at davidhburton.com

  Excerpt from The Second Coming

  “Beautifully written, dark and eerie vision of an apocalyptic future.”

  - Margaret Weis, New York Times Bestselling Author

  “David H. Burton is a dark new talent in the genre. This one will make you leave the lights on for a week!”

  - Cathy Clamp, USA Today Bestseller

  Prologue

  Catherine looked at her watch. The battery had passed on to more alkaline pastures, so it read the same as it always did — quarter to eleven. Its delicate, cartoon hands were frozen in a timeless Charleston pose. It was a reminder of simpler times, of safer times.

  Groaning, she pried her backside from a faded canvas lawnchair and leaned it against the wall. She fisted her hands on her ample hips.

  “Where is my Ben?”

  The question was aimed at no one in particular. It might have been the cat she spoke to, but the cat was dead — three days gone.

  Sadie. Poor Sadie.

  She stared into the distance, beyond the edge of scotch pines and white cedars. Dark clouds hovered on the horizon.

  “He’s not usually gone this long.”

  Catherine grunted her displeasure and opened the screen door. She strode into the kitchen where she grabbed a plastic cup and dipped it into a cast-iron pot. Her lips quivered over the piss-warm liquid.

  Water.

  She hated it. She tired of boiling it every day. What she wanted was a tall glass of lemonade — pink, with three ice cubes. Yet Catherine knew there would never be lemonade again.

  She forced herself to swallow and took her cup with her to the orange sofa bed. Her reflection stared back at her from a dust covered relic on the floor. Its black plastic casing had barely a scratch.

  Catherine missed television, if only for its connection to the remainder of the world. It stopped working after the Shift, two years prior.

  Two years since the world fell apart.

  Two years since everything went to shit.

  For months she had wept, longing for everything lost to her; her parents, her friends, her brother — all gone.

  Yet Ben had helped her through it. Ben was her life now. There was only her Ben.

  Her gaze wandered to a tattered blue afghan crumpled in the corner.

  And poor Sadie.

  The cat had been snatched up by vile beasts, things she had never heard of. They crouched low to the ground, yet could stand on two feet. At first she thought wolf, but they were weightier and crooked. And they possessed a cunning no animal should. Catherine had no idea of their origins. She knew only that they were unnatural — not something of this world.

  At least, not the world Catherine knew.

  Her Ben assured her they were gone, but Catherine wasn’t convinced. Even that morning she thought she heard their hideous cackling in the distance. She pleaded with Ben to avoid hunting in the forest, yet he refused to listen. They needed more food, he said; she ate for two now. So, dressed in his khaki pants and green plaid shirt, her Benjamin Green stepped out the door with makeshift bow in hand.

  Catherine bit her lip and placed her hands over her swollen belly, a reaction she was prone to of late. He had been gone for the entire day.

  In the distance, the storm churned and a harsh rumbling shook the walls.

  Soon the winds will come.

  She wondered how their cottage still stood, battered as it was; as if their insignificant lives weren’t worthy of the storms that swept the lands. She looked back to the television, and it sat as a sedentary reminder of what once was. The man on the newscast said the Earth had shifted on its axis, aligning itself with the magnetic poles.

  She continued to stare at the lifeless screen, remembering what it had shown, as if the little black box was a window to the past. She could still see the darkened skies torched with volcanic fire, the ground splitting open to swallow cities, and land masses aris
ing from the depths of the sea. The Shift had released some kind of darkness upon the land, and brought with it creatures that had no business walking the Earth. Dead relatives could be seen in spirit form, shadowy creatures swept past windows in the night, and spirits rose even in the light of day. Then the newscasts stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  For months the storms persisted, the earthquakes continued, and life in some twisted form endured. The east and west coasts were lost, a cloud of death drifted through the land, and ordinary people manifested strange abilities.

  Catherine knew all about the latter.

  She said nothing to Ben for fear of rejection. It happened to her, sometime after she got pregnant; she was able to do things she never could before, like when she called forth a power that scared off the wolf-like beasts. She had no idea what it was or how to summon it again, but it terrified her. Her Ben called these things sorcery, witchcraft, an abomination to God.

  She rose from the sofa, passing the antique grandfather clock with its mechanical sparrow dangling over its perch. Twenty minutes before nine, it read. It still worked.

  A chill sat on the air, or perhaps it was just a cold notion coursing through her veins. Either way, the result was the same, and Catherine waddled over to the wood-burning stove. Her toes were cold.

  She ripped pages from an old science textbook, grabbed a small log, and shoved them in. Ben always tended the fire. Never let it go out, he said.

  The flames ravaged the paper, and the fire flared to life once more. She remained for a moment, warming her feet and hands, before shuffling back out the door.

  The storm no longer ambled in the distance, but loomed on the edge of the trees. The wind tousled her scarlet hair, and Catherine watched as destiny floated towards her with dark clouds clenched in its fists. At the edge of the woods, the great pines bowed to the wind’s might.

  “Where is my Ben?” she asked.

  There was no reply.

  She held on to her ragged yellow dress as she peered over the railing, and pellets of frigid rain pricked her skin. On the borders of the forest, mounds of creeping phlox littered the ground with their trails of blue flowers. They spread out endlessly, never dying off. Winter was no more in this part of the world; a place where snow once offered a light dusting at Christmas — rare, but beautiful nonetheless.

  Yet never again.

  The Shift had seen to that.

  The wind sighed through the leaning trees, and her nostrils caught the scent of musk. Movement skirted the shadows, and hope surged within her.

  “Ben?” she called.

  Silence.

  Then wicked laughter.

  Catherine stared into the woods, and as lightning speared the sky something caught her attention. She wobbled down the wooden staircase. Her pale hands gripped the railing. The steps groaned under her weight.

  Lightning pulsed again across the heavens, illuminating the copse of swaying trees once more.

  “No,” she breathed.

  Her heart pounded in her chest, and one of her tattered shoes fell off as she raced to the edge of the woods.

  “No,” she muttered, her worst fears being realized, “no, no, no.”

  She stooped to the ground.

  Lying among the delicate blue flowers was an arm, severed at the shoulder. The hand still clutched a makeshift arrow. She might have fooled herself were it not for the green plaid sleeve.

  “My Ben,” she sobbed, caressing the hand.

  Twigs snapped and Catherine turned. A wolf-like muzzle inched toward her face, viscous tongue licking jagged teeth.

  The child inside her stirred and thunder pounded in her chest.

  The dripping maw opened.

  Catherine clutched Ben’s arm. His blood stained her fingers.

  She called upon anything that would help her.

  At any cost.

  “Please.”

  Chapter 1

  The masses received the Lord’s blessing and confessed for transgressions against their fellow man. With strained voices, they praised the Lord with song, and begged forgiveness for the inborn sins of their self-righteous souls. And as the church bells pealed, dismissing the congregation from the stiff wooden pews that reeked of pine oil, Paine Robertson slipped out the door like the serpent out of Eden.

  He walked across the dirt road, with the late June sun scorching his tawny locks, to the freshly-swept porch of Fillmore’s Leathers. He plopped upon the wooden planks and waited for his parents to finish mingling with the rest of the Lord’s flock. Off to the side the wind dusted their horse and cart with a light layer of dry earth. The few provisions they procured, as well as the goods they failed to sell, sat as a reminder of their misfortune. It was getting worse every week, fewer and fewer of the townsfolk willing to barter with them. Paine knew why.

  How dare they judge him.

  Even his parents’ frustration was surfacing at the rumors, evident in their recent shortness of temper and talks of parting ways. A few weeks prior they spoke of Paine and his sister moving on — of starting their life elsewhere; preferably in another town. It made him feel like a dirty rag no one wanted to touch unless there was nothing left to use. He suppressed those feelings, refusing to even mention it to his sister.

  He did that a lot of late, keeping things to himself. It started when the visions in the mirrors began, two years prior. The voices taunted him, tempted him with knowledge of things unknown, and tantalized his innermost wants. He had followed their instructions, sacrificing small birds and squirrels to the blood spells they had urged him cast, but their promises were false, and amounted to nothing. As a result, he scorned them, ignored their whisperings.

  And then one evening he had made the singular mistake of revealing their presence to his parents. His mother immediately set about destroying all the mirrors in the house and then turned on her son and beat the evil out of him.

  After that, and threats to send him off as a laborer, Paine censored what he revealed. He held his tongue and took his beatings with a quiet resolve because despite their firmness of discipline, he needed the elderly couple that had raised him.

  At least for now.

  Things had even been calm for awhile; pleasant, in fact. Yet over the last few weeks matters worsened. The change in his mother’s attitude was noticeable. Slow was the indoctrination, but evident enough. The beatings were becoming more frequent. Something was changing her, and that something was connected to the arrival of the Reverend Chapman.

  It sat like a bad apple within him.

  Paine winced as he leaned against the post; the strap marks had not yet completely healed.

  He watched his parents as they waited, like bleating lambs lining up in front of the slaughterhouse. Many of the parishioners waited to speak with the good Reverend, thanking him for his eloquent sermon about the evils of witchcraft. It was a message Paine thought typical of the new Church of the Ascension and the man who came all the way from the Confederation to lead it. Schooled at Ascension College he was; a son of aristocrats; learned.

  Arrogant was more like it.

  The Church was in service four weeks now, replacing the battered chapel that had been used for centuries. The relic sat like a forgotten silhouette to the white, stone splendor that rose above the willows with a single, shining pinnacle. Although he never enjoyed Sunday sermons, Paine possessed a fondness for the old chapel, with its ancient smell and creaking floors. Its stone foundation was from the old world, from the time before the Shift ripped the Earth apart. That made it over five hundred years old.

  Paine’s parents passed through the line at a lagging pace as they spoke to all and sundry before finally reaching the good Reverend. The three spoke at length. Gwen would raise her aged hands to the air as she spoke, her words slow and precise. Due to her stutter Paine’s mother spoke little, but when she did her arguments were deliberate and sure. Charles, with his gray wisps of hair combed over the bald spot on his head, paused to look at Paine. He
gave a slight nod and a smirk before Gwen pulled his face towards her and thrust the open pages of her newly-minted Confederation bible in the Reverend’s face. The Reverend nodded to her line of reasoning, yet his gaunt face remained puckered.

  Paine pricked his ears to catch what words might flit across the road but two young men stepped in front of him; Billy Chapman, son of the good Reverend — seventeen and built like the blacksmith’s outhouse, and Jake Notman, same age, same size, but more eager for trouble.

  Billy sucked on a stick of Confederation tobacco and exhaled through the corner of his lips — something Paine once thought sexy.

  Now it was just plain ridiculous.

  Jake squeezed his own between his thick fingers and then flicked it away. “Good sermon, huh Robertson?”

  “I wasn’t impressed.” Paine looked Billy in the eyes. The boy averted his gaze.

  Jake scowled. “Why do ya think that is?”

  Paine said nothing.

  The fool could think what he wanted.

  Jake leaned over. The smell of his breath was like ash. “I saw your sister light a fire with her bare hands. I know she’s a witch.”

  “Prove it,” Paine replied. He let his gaze slide over to Billy once more. The boy stared at his dust-covered boots.

  Paine couldn’t help but wonder how much Billy had revealed of their encounter. There were too many rumors lately, ones that would not have cropped up unless Billy had been squawking like an old hen.

  Jake’s lips curved into an unctuous grin. “I won’t have to. The Confederation is planning to annex Fairfax and the surrounding farms. The Witch Hunters are coming with them. And they’re ridding the land of filth like you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking ab-”

  “Hello, boys.”

  The two boys jumped and turned to the voice. Paine did not. He knew she was there, lurking. Like some hidden shadow upon his heart, he could sense her presence. She was always there, and when she wasn’t, he could barely stand her absence.

  From the corner of his eye he watched his twin, Lya, saunter towards them in her black gown. She always wore that outfit on Sundays, despite protests from Gwen to wear something less suited for a funeral.