by Hunter Blain
Crack the Sky
Preternatural Chronicles Book 8
Hunter Blain
Contents
A message from Hunter Blain
Prologue
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
To Be Continued
Epilogue
Epilogue Part Two
MAKE A DIFFERENCE
ABOUT HUNTER BLAIN
BOOKS BY HUNTER BLAIN
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Hunter Blain
Crack the Sky
Preternatural Chronicles Book 8
© 2021, Hunter Blain / Argento Publishing, LLC
[email protected]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
A message from Hunter Blain
My name is Hunter, and I’m a wordaholic. I’m also about to break the fourth wall…of your mindhole. Because there is a true story behind this…well…story.
It begins with two best friends who grew up together, breaking rules and raising hell as they shaped each other’s personalities into the shameless assholes they are today. Well, at least for one of them, but I’ll get to that in a moment. These two boys—let’s call them Hunter and John—were all but inseparable. John excelled at creating music powerful enough to make angels weep and being the funniest asshole in Texas while Hunter dabbled—poorly, I might add—in his humble writings. Because they were self-declared brothers from other mothers, John respected Hunter’s humble writings as much as I—I mean Hunter (stupid third person perspective)—respected John’s musical magic. John’s tunes could have changed the world, one day…
One evening, after reading one of Hunter’s horrifically detailed short stories about a serial killer, John asked Hunter to write a story about him.
“Hell yeah, dude! What do you want to be?” Hunter asked, brimming with honor and biting back a very manly squee.
“A vampire,” John responded with a mischievous gleam in his eye. “But not one of those sparkly ones. A true bad ass!”
“Done!” Hunter crowed with a smile and an accompanying high five.
“No, dude. Promise. Promise you’ll write and finish a book about me. You are the most prolific writer of our generation!” John said. (Something like that. I might be paraphrasing a little, but you get the gist of it). “I would consider it an honor to live on for eternity with your words as my life’s blood.”
Hunter agreed, never to realize the weight of that promise until one Sunday morning when his mother called, crying incoherently.
John…had died.
Hunter was left in a cold world without his best friend and doppelgänger, and still thinks about that phone call to this day. How the morning light crept through the bedroom window while Hunter stared at the ceiling, noticing how the popcorn texture created cruel, jagged shadows. How everything started to blur as his chest was crushed beneath the weight of what he was hearing, each word stacking heavily upon the other until only fitful, ragged gasps of air could escape his throat. Only fiery tears existed, especially after the horrific realization that Hunter now had to make some of the hardest phone calls of his life to the circle of friends who orbited around John’s solar pull.
Their bright star was no more, extinguished in an instant, leaving their universe a colder and darker place.
John not only left Hunter, but a friend named Valenta as well. There was also Nathanial and Depweg. The friends were each stricken numb with the loss of such a beloved flare of life. But…
When the three found out that Hunter was keeping his promise to write the greatest story ever told—starring their dear friend, John—they demanded to be a part of the adventure. Each of them immediately knew what type of supernatural character they wanted to play in this urban fantasy eulogy. It would be a funeral pyre of words, and their fictional personas would be John’s pallbearers.
So please, as you read the following pages, feel free to laugh. Laugh at the situations John is placed in and his dickish dialogue to those around him, because John is 100% in this story without alteration (albeit he is a vampire). Laugh and let his memory live on inside the theater of your mind. Like he does in ours.
Thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my beating heart, for giving my best friend the chance to live again. You are part of this magical ritual, and that would make him the happiest man in the…well, wherever the hell he is.
Cheers,
~Hunter
Epigraph
“Spiraling up through the crack in the sky
Leaving material world behind
I see your face in constellations
The martyr is ending his life for mine”
—Mastodon, “The Czar”
From the album Crack The Skye
* * *
“Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.”
—Jim Bishop
Seal of the Council
Prologue
“You’re sure there is no other way?” Father Thomes asked the archangel standing at full height and adorned with elegant ivory armor etched with gold markings.
The priest was unable to look the angel in the eyes, choosing to stare into the dwindling fire that faintly illuminated his downstairs study. Only the archangel’s armored feet could be seen in the corner of the old man’s vision.
Silence was the answer given, and Father Thomes cringed as if a pungent aroma had invaded his nostrils.
“This will devastate John,” the priest said for as much his benefit as the stoic angel’s. They both needed to hear the potential risk. “Are we su
re he can withstand losing her?”
Father Thomes heard the metallic groans as the archangel lowered its head, unsure of the upcoming test for the emotionally driven John.
Neither of them knew the outcome of what couldn’t be prevented, but both understood the necessity of what must happen…and the gravity of the resulting sacrifice.
Thomes Philseep looked up at the twelve-foot archangel, staring at him in his masked face.
“If he breaks…all of creation will be lost.”
“It must be done,” the archangel whispered coldly, voice teeming with hidden power.
Thomes Philseep lowered his eyes back to the dying fire, a scowl of concern deepening the plentiful wrinkles permanently forged into his skin.
“I’m sorry…John…”
1
Two Years Later
The building was on fire, and it was absolutely my fault.
Dusk was imminent, elongating the shadow of the sole surviving structure. If not for the long, discolored rectangles staining the concrete, you wouldn’t have been able to tell this had recently been an industrial park full of warehouses and one tall stone building.
The last of the flames from the science lab were being put out with some sort of foamy chemical that made me wrinkle my nose in mild agitation.
Without telling my hand to do so, it reached into my pocket and felt the glass vial containing the were-pire virus that Wales had given me. I could only hope he had made it out in time.
An aggressive wind kicked up, sending an eager cloud of dirt and ash into my eyes. Blinking, I brought up my free hand to wipe away the irritants, leaving a black smear on my index finger and thumb. I knew my eyes mimicked the shade of blotted ash and dirt, leaving me with a look belonging to a raccoon…or maybe Batman after he took off his cowl, revealing the original smokey eye look.
I didn’t care. Jose and I had searched for as long as we could before the mortals swarmed the site, forcing us to retreat to Depweg’s original sniping position. From this distance, it was more than a slap in the face to have ash from the burnt remains of the warehouse park fly up to attack my eyes.
“What are you thinking?” my werewolf companion, Jose, asked.
While keeping my stern, ash-smeared face toward the place where Depweg had vanished, I flicked my eyes to the left to better see Jose. I had to fight the urge to verbally berate him for talking to me, but I knew it was an angry projection of the frustration set to boil over inside my core.
Taking a deep breath and returning my eyes to the scene in the distance, I flatly said, “I’m thinking about things I shouldn’t be thinking.”
“Hmph,” Jose responded as I heard him cross his arms over his chest. “You want to kill them all…don’t you?”
My jaw audibly popped at how hard I was clenching my teeth.
Forcing my scowling face to relax, I said through tight lips, “They’ve been down there for ten…fucking…hours…”
Jose stepped away from the ledge overlooking the industrial park that now resembled a warzone, and sat against a tree with a groan that suggested he was settling in for a long wait. For a reason I couldn’t put into words, that infuriated me.
“I guess whatever those Nazis had cooking in the kitchen really liked to burn, huh?”
His casual tone grated against me like long, brittle nails on a weathered chalkboard.
Closing my eyes, I had to remind myself that being in an agitated state from losing my best friend—again—made everything seem like a pesky fly that wouldn’t leave you alone no matter where in your home you moved to. After several hours of dealing with its incessant buzzing, the idea of burning the house to the ground began to sound reasonable.
Another wind flew up the hill and tugged at my trench coat, reminding me of Da. In an instant, all my rage melted away as I thought about what he would say to me in that moment.
Turning from the scene, I pulled my hand from my coat pocket, leaving the glass vial that the spy from N.O.R.M.A.L. had given me before…
Plopping onto my butt near the tree Jose sat against, I let myself fall onto my back with a dull thud as I threw my fists toward the sky. I shook them in frustration a few times before realizing I must look like a child throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store aisle, and let my arms fall to my sides.
“I-I don’t understand,” I moaned to the darkening sky. “Why can’t either of us pick up a freaking scent or a single footprint?” From my other pocket, I pulled the crystal Depweg had been wearing around his neck. “I mean, I found this damn thing. Shouldn’t we have spotted…I don’t know…at least some fur or-or-or…”
“Or blood,” Jose finished for me.
Though I heard his words, I ignored what he had said, not wanting to think about my best friend’s blood, and chose to instead stare into the crystal.
“What is that thing anyway?” Jose asked as he pulled out a long silver folding knife and began cleaning under his fingernails.
“Long story short, I went to Faerie and lost, like, thirteen years back on Earth. The king of the Fae made these crystal thingies to help with the time dilation between planes.”
“And your friend was wearing it before he disappeared?”
I slowly nodded my head, feeling the dirt crunch beneath my skull as it moved.
“What caused the explosion?” Jose asked, deep in thought.
“My buddy Locke threw this Ba-Bomb thing into a portal. Oh, and get this, he dipped it into the fourth dimension as it flew, which made a big bada boom.”
“Fourth dimension? There’s more than three?” Jose asked.
“Yeah, man. There’s like eleven or something. Fourth is time.”
“I don’t understand why time would make an explosion bigger.”
“To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how it all works either,” I admitted, resting my hands on my chest and thinking about the celestial armor that was hidden from sight. “I guess it has something to do with energy or whatever. Like, I hit this asshole, Ulric, in the face while I was in the fourth dimension, and it was as if my fist were going a fraction of the speed of light. Time is relative, as they say.”
“Who?” Jose asked.
“…who what?”
“Who says?”
“Man, I don’t know! They!”
We sat in silence for a few moments before Jose spoke again.
“Wait, you were in the fourth dimension? How?”
With my hands still resting on my chest, I thought about showing him my armor which allowed for such feats of impossible and amazing abilities, but decided against it.
“I’m just cool like that,” I finally answered.
I could see Jose from my peripheral vision as he cocked his head in confusion. Or maybe it was suspicion. I chose to segue from the conversation of my awesomeness.
“My guess is the explosion was amplified simply because it was in a higher dimension. Like, imagine a stick figure on a piece of paper. That’s the second dimension, right?”
Jose shrugged in agreement.
“Now take a simple firecracker, which is a third-dimension object, and put it in his 2D world.”
“And how would you do that?” Jose interrupted.
“Man, I don’t know. Push it through the paper or something so it’s sticking out equally on both sides. But that’s not the tricky part.”
I waited for him to say something before continuing. When he sat in silence, I went on with my thoughts.
“Okay, imagine the entire blast of the firecracker is relegated to only the flat sheet of paper. You know, no outward explosion in a sphere around the firecracker. Imagine putting all that power into a flat plane.”
Jose looked away from me as his gaze went unfocused and he nodded his head ever so slightly in understanding.
“Now, I’m no mathamagician, but I think a 3D explosion would be waaaaaaaay worse in a 2D environment.”
“Math…what now?” Jose asked, returning his gaze to me with narrowed eyes.
>
“You know, someone good at math and stuff.”
“Mathematician?” Jose said in his Americanized Spanish accent.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Mathamagician.”
Jose sucked in air in preparation for a response before I quickly interrupted.
“Say, your accent is pretty good,” I admitted, reminding myself we were still in Germany. His American accent suggested he wasn’t living in Europe, which was noteworthy. “Were you born in the States?”
Jose clamped his mouth shut and turned to face into the forest behind him.
“No,” was all he said.
“Then I guess you’ve been a were for a bit? It’s kinda a well-known fact among us supes that our accents adapt to our surroundings on a subconscious level.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. My English was always okay, but not as good as it is now.”
“So you were born in, like, Mexico or something?” A thought started to form about Mexico when Jose quickly spoke up, derailing my train of thought before it could come to a stop at the next station.
