Wager's Price

by G. P. Ching

  Wager's Price

  Soulkeepers Reborn Book 1

  G. P. Ching

  Wager’s Price: Soulkeepers Reborn, Book 1

  Copyright © G. P. Ching, 2016

  Published by Carpe Luna, Ltd, PO Box 5932, Bloomington, IL 61702

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

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  Second Edition: October 2017

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  eISBN: 978-1-940675-24-4

  ISBN: 978-1-940675-33-6

  v 1.1

  Contents

  Books by G.P. Ching

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  Prologue

  1. Deviant Joe

  2. Paris, Illinois

  3. Trials and Tribulations

  4. A Distant Hope

  5. Admissions

  6. Training Day

  7. Revelations

  8. Arrival

  9. The Architect

  10. Orientation

  11. A Good Night's Rest

  12. Classes

  13. Lunch

  14. The Hanged Man

  15. Resilience

  16. After

  17. Bird

  18. Trial Period

  19. Magic

  20. Training

  21. Night

  22. Clowns

  23. Expose

  24. Above and Beyond

  25. Hope

  26. Enchanted

  27. Lost Things

  28. Questions

  29. Secrets

  30. Black Suits

  31. The Show

  32. Hope and Juliette

  33. A New Plan

  34. Map

  35. The Crimson Forest

  36. Murder Mountain

  37. Duplicity

  38. Rules, Provisos

  39. Berlin 1934

  40. Return

  41. Practice

  42. The Magician and the Enchanter

  43. Preparations

  44. Infraction

  45. The Show Must Go On

  46. Fever River

  47. Resurrection

  48. Battle

  49. Aftermath

  50. Home

  Hope’s Promise (Excerpt)

  1. Devil in the Windy City

  About the Author

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  Books by G.P. Ching

  Acknowledgments

  Books by G.P. Ching

  Soulkeepers Reborn

  Wager’s Price, Book 1

  Hope’s Promise, Book 2

  Lucifer’s Pride, Book 3

  * * *

  The Soulkeepers Series

  The Soulkeepers, Book 1

  Weaving Destiny, Book 2

  Return to Eden, Book 3

  Soul Catcher, Book 4

  Lost Eden, Book 5

  The Last Soulkeeper, Book 6

  * * *

  The Grounded Trilogy

  Grounded, Book 1

  Charged, Book 2

  Wired, Book 3

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  Prologue

  A single spotlight cut through the dark and expectant theater, centering on the purple suit and red bowler hat of Victoria Duvall, Performance Architect. In other venues, she might be called a ringmaster or monsieur loyal, but not here. The show the audience came to see required more of her than a pointed hand and reassuring voice. This performance promised a display of discipline, teamwork, and reform. Victoria was both proud and honored to showcase all three in the achievements of her students.

  She swept one red-gloved hand upward, her wild gray hair and wrinkled skin at odds with the youthful way her back arched with the gesture. Victoria might have been the oldest thing in this theater, but her body, like her wit, was supple and quick. It had to be. Nothing on stage was ever simple. Every movement was a dance, every syllable devoted to the cause of entertainment.

  Two stories above her, a boy gripped a massive iron hoop as wide as he was tall. The curved bar of the aerial apparatus was too thick for his small hands, a child’s hands. His knuckles whitened with the effort. His muscles twitched.

  Come on, boy. This is your chance, Victoria thought, sending him a reassuring smile.

  Across the stage, a young woman in a peacock-blue dress spread her arms in the deliberate, inviting way of a practiced performer. With a deep breath, she released a pristine note—as pure as sunlight—that danced across Victoria’s skin. The singer’s cheeks still held the slight pudge of youth, but the effect of her voice was timeless.

  A woman in the front row began to weep.

  On cue, the boy pushed off the platform and swung high above the stage, a monkey hanging from a hollow moon. The set below him, designed to look like a dark, forbidding forest, ignited into flames. Heat blasted over Victoria and the awestruck faces of the audience.

  Victoria beamed as the boy executed a series of acrobatic stunts above her. He lifted his body into a handstand inside the belly of the hoop as flames licked his fingers, his youthful complexion reddening in the heat. The tension in the theater was palpable, the guests tipping forward in their seats, wringing their hands. And now, the pièce de résistance.

  The boy sprang from the hoop, performed a quadruple twisting flip, and landed squarely on a burning branch in the set below. At first, the audience erupted into applause, then gasped as the inferno raged, consuming the boy, costume and all.

  Victoria brought her hands to her mouth in exaggerated concern. It was all part of the act of course. Harmless pyrotechnics.

  With a flip and a tuck, the burning boy dismounted the branch and dove, headfirst, toward the unforgiving stage. This was the test, the moment when his hard work would pay off. The moment when he would prove that a bad boy who works hard can be redeemed. That a former delinquent can accomplish the extraordinary. That miracles are possible if you believe.

  But Victoria’s feigned fear turned to genuine horror as the boy failed to pull up as intended. His skull cracked against the stage, a bone-chilling snap emanating from the region of his neck.

  No. An icy chill crawled the length of her spine. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

  Naively, the audience applauded. They could not see what Victoria did.

  “Close the curtain,” she whispered. The stagehand obeyed as the young woman in the peacock dress finished her song. Red velvet hissed along its track behind her.

  The clowns arrived, their ever-silent, alabaster faces trained on the blood, on the odd angles of the boy’s body. Like a swarm of bees, they circled the scene in their black-and-white-striped shirts. Victoria backed away as one slid a hand into the boy’s chest, as if the skin and bones of his torso were insubstantial, and extracted something slippery and bright, a silhouette that twisted like a sheet in the wind.

  For a moment, Victoria stared, transfixed, unable to process what was happening. The clown raised the slippery thing to its black lips and inhaled. The light extinguished. A deep sense of dread overcame Victoria. She wasn’t sure what that bright slip of a thing was, but there was something wrong about what she’d just witnessed, wrong about them, about this night.

  The cl
owns rolled the boy inside a thick sheet of plastic and hoisted him onto their shoulders. What would they do with him? It was not enough to hide the incident. Parents must be notified. There were laws. Procedures.

  A familiar face appeared among them, motionless against the bustling throng of black and white. No, it couldn’t be. She’d been a fool. Of course there would be repercussions. What was seen could not be unseen.

  The clowns closed in again, this time on Victoria.

  Unlike the boy, she would not go easily. She had secrets of her own. With a flash of her red gloves and a twist of her shoulders, Victoria dissolved into a column of purple smoke. As she disappeared, her red bowler hat dropped to the stage with a dull thunk and rotated three times on its felt rim before coming to a complete stop.

  One of the clowns retrieved the hat, spun it between his white-gloved fingers, and stared into its empty belly. Without a sound, he crushed the red felt into a ball the size of his fist and cast it aside. The next act was about to begin.

  And the show must go on.

  1

  Deviant Joe

  Superheroes are lawbreakers. They lie. They’re violent. Batman’s secret identity wouldn’t be necessary if everything he did was above reproach. Good guys hurt people. That’s the nasty truth. The difference between a good guy and a bad guy has everything to do with perspective and even more to do with who gets caught.

  Finn Wager didn’t think of himself as a bad guy, even though at the moment he carried a black mask and planned to break into his school in the middle of the night. He thought of himself as a visionary, a mastermind keen on leaving his immortal mark on history, or at least the sophomore class of Beaverton High School.

  Finn’s brainchild was a group called Deviant Joe, a four-member team whose antics enjoyed a huge internet following. As Deviant Joe’s ringleader, he came up with the best pranks anyone had ever heard of and used his resources and his inconspicuous nature to make things happen. His best friend, Mike, contributed the muscle and the vehicle. He’d been held back a year in kindergarten and was one of only a few sophomores who could already drive. Jayden, on the other hand, served as gasoline on the fire. He always figured out a way to up the entertainment factor. That left Wyatt. Poor, overly educated Wyatt. He tapped the Deviant Joe brakes, and if Finn was honest, kept them from some pretty bad decisions on occasion.

  Tonight would be Deviant Joe’s last epic prank of the semester. If they could pull this one off, they’d be living legends. Finn wouldn’t think of disappointing his fans.

  “You ready to deploy, Finn Shady?” Mike asked, his brown hands still gripping the steering wheel.

  Finn Shady, Mike’s inside joke, a gangsta name for his best friend. Only, in real life, Finn wasn’t cool, dangerous, or thug-like in any way. Whatever an adult pictured in their mind when they thought of shady, Finn was the exact opposite. In fact, he was the sort of kid most adults disregarded entirely. Nondescript. Average. Forgettable. His pale hair and blue eyes made him look much younger than his fifteen years. And thanks to his ADHD meds, it was impossible for him to gain weight. His wiry and hollowed-out physique roughly resembled that of a whippet.

  But Finn used all of that to his advantage. If flying under the radar was a testable school subject, he’d have scored in the gifted range. Other than that, gifted he was not. His grades were as below average as his height and weight. Aside from being handy with a computer, being invisible remained his one and only true talent.

  Finn stared across the hood of Mike’s black pickup truck at the frosty turf of the football field behind Beaverton High. It was quiet and dark and bitterly cold. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  Mike opened the door and unfolded his legs toward the pavement. No matter how large the vehicle, his six-foot-four body looked like a grasshopper behind the wheel. He tugged his hood up over his dark hair, and his face disappeared into shadow. Finn jumped out the passenger side and strolled toward Jayden and Wyatt, who stood bundled against the cold, their backs to the chain-link fence surrounding the football field.

  “Uh-oh,” Mike whispered. “Unless Wyatt lost thirty pounds, grew six inches, and became white in the last three hours, that is not him.”

  “Shit,” Finn said. He couldn’t make out the face of the person next to Jayden. Not with his features hidden in the shadow of his hood. “If it’s not Wyatt, who is it?”

  The big guy gave him a tentative look and then a shrug. Finn fidgeted with the cuff of his glove. As they approached, Jayden and the mystery guest pushed off the fence and turned to face them. Clearly not Wyatt, the fourth member of Deviant Joe, but Vox Parker, Jayden’s older brother.

  “Where’s Wyatt?” Finn asked.

  Jayden chuckled. “Flu. He called me an hour ago. Fever, spewing, the works. His mom won’t let him out of the house.”

  “Why didn’t you text us?” Finn frowned.

  Jayden shrugged. “We don’t need him. We have Vox.”

  Although he exchanged glances with Finn, Mike remained strangely silent, probably having the same reservations Finn did. Vox had a reputation. He was a senior, who shared his brother’s edgy sense of humor. Only Vox was much worse. He smoked weed like it was his full-time job and had been arrested three times for petty theft and vandalism. Rumor had it, he should have graduated last year but flunked out. Stupid and risk-taker were a deadly combination. Replacing Wyatt with Vox was like replacing the brakes on a car with a turbo booster.

  “Uh, you know, I’m not feeling this without Wyatt. He’s part of Deviant Joe,” Finn said.

  Mike nodded. “Yeah. Forget it. Let’s save this one for another time.”

  But Jayden spread his hands and shook his head. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Man up, flake-tards,” Vox chimed in. “I didn’t drive out here for nothing.”

  Vox could bring out the worst in Jayden. Their friend didn’t usually push back like that. No one loved a prank more than Jay, but a leader he was not. Usually, he went along with whatever Finn and Mike wanted to do. But Vox disrupted the chemistry of the group. He was older. He didn’t have to answer to the social protocols of a bunch of sophomores.

  Before Mike or Finn could make any more excuses, Vox scaled the fence and dropped to the other side. With a glance at Finn, Jayden curled the corner of his mouth. “Come on, Finn. It’s fine.” He followed his brother’s lead.

  “I hate that guy,” Mike murmured.

  “Me too.” Finn adjusted his backpack on his shoulder.

  The light from Vox’s phone cut through the darkness. “Wave to the camera, boys!”

  Finn raised his arm to block his face. “Cut it out, Vox. Are you kidding me? You better not be recording.”

  “Come on over and delete it.” Vox slid the camera into his pocket and scratched his pockmarked face. Finn glanced at Mike. The big guy didn’t look happy, but he seemed resigned. With a guy like Vox in the mix, it was no longer an option to walk away. If they did, he and Jayden would do what they came to do, take the credit, and hold on to that video to deflect the blame. That’s how Vox operated.

  “Well, Finn Shady?” Mike sighed. “Can’t do this without you.” One slap to Finn’s shoulder and his best friend scaled the fence.

  Even as he cursed and told himself he was an idiot, Finn started climbing. He dropped to the other side and unzipped his backpack. “Don’t forget these.” Finn tugged four black masks from his pack.

  “Masks?” Vox scoffed.

  “Deviant Joe wears masks. We can’t upload our faces. Not to mention, there are cameras in the school.” The masks they always wore were Mardi Gras style, the type that only covered the top half of a face and had bulbous noses.

  “I’m not going in there with a dick on my face.”

  “It’s not…” Finn paused. Now that he thought about it, the mask did resemble a dick. He put his on anyway. So did Mike. Jayden took his from Finn but didn’t put it on. Vox wouldn’t touch Wyatt’s. Whatever. They wouldn’t get caught. But if they did? He had no pro
blem letting Vox take the heat. He shoved the unused mask into his backpack.

  “HORU, what’s the status on the security system?” Finn asked, tapping his earpiece. A hologram of a woman with cat ears and a swishing pink tail manifested in his peripheral vision. HORU stood for Holographic Omni Recognition Unit, a completely interactive artificial intelligence, the product of a childhood spent tinkering with system components most kids could never afford—fewer still would know what to do with it. Finn’s HORU resembled a cross between Katy Perry and Hello Kitty but possessed the brain of a supercomputer.

  She twitched her whiskers and sashayed her hips. “Taking a nap, Finn. It is an antiquated piece of code. No first name.”

  “Not every system can be as sophisticated as you, HORU.”

  She smiled and flicked her tail. “Will that be all?”

  “For now, but don’t shut down. I’ll need you later to record what we do.”