by L. J. Sealey
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
About The Author
A First Look AT Dark Deliverance
L.J’s Playlist
AWAKEN
Copyright © 2013 L.J. Sealey
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, business establishments or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without the express permission of the author. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Cover Art: L.J. Sealey
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the author or publisher and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, I'd like to thank my family: to my mum who encouraged me to write this book every step of the way and had to put up with me pushing it under her nose every five minutes; to my sister and brother and everyone else for their support. And to my husband, who has on times had to fend for himself and often hasn't seen me for long periods of time while I've been hidden away writing, I love you.
I'd like to thank my friends for their encouragement and enthusiasm. You really have helped me on this journey. To my ‘Breezies’ street team, you girls are awesome, and Lisa, you’ve been such a big help with everything. I'd also like to thank my editor Catherine. I really do appreciate what you've done and am grateful for your time.
And lastly, to Michael Warden. You were persistent, I'll give you that. You were determined to get out of my head and finally you did. Now here you are, about to tell your story. Thank you.
“A man plans his course, but
The Lord determines his steps...”
- Proverbs 16:9
CHAPTER ONE
October 4th, 2011.
Cambridge, Ohio.
Michael sat alone at the bar with a double whiskey, though he wasn’t drinking so much as staring into it trying to establish what it was that had brought him on this journey from Columbus.
Yesterday’s newspaper article had read that four teenagers over the space of seven days had thrown themselves from their dorm windows at State Park University. Although the authorities were treating it as some sort of suicide pact, Michael suspected otherwise. People don’t just throw themselves from buildings for the sake of it and, knowing what he did now, he wasn’t about to ignore it.
Michael Warden was an investigator.
Not your usual, ordinary type of investigator−like the ones who track down criminals or follow people suspected of having affairs and such−but an investigator of the paranormal kind. Some might say a Demon Hunter; a Ghost Buster. If only it was as simple as that.
He read the page that he’d printed out from the Daily Tribune’s website again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he folded it up and placed it back into his worn, black, double breasted coat pocket. He knocked back his whiskey and made his way out of the bar. It was early evening in Baltimore, MD, and a slight mist had started to settle in. Michael still had a little over three hours’ drive ahead of him to get to where his reservation was: a small place called The Sunshine Motel a couple of miles outside of Garrett Co. He’d planned on having an early night so he could make a start on his new investigation early the next morning, but he’d made an unscheduled stop for some food on the way.
He crossed the rush hour traffic and headed towards his car. The dusty, beige, 96 Chevy Cavalier (which had seen much better days) was parked up on the other side of the street. He reached for his keys and was about to unlock the driver’s side door when he heard a female voice cry for help behind him. He looked back to see a young woman struggling to hold on to her purse as one of three hooded youths attempted to prize it from her hands.
“Hey!” Michael shouted over the noise of the traffic, loud enough for the youths to notice him as he immediately ran back to help. Two of the hoods ran off leaving one−who had succeeded in his goal−fumbling with the woman’s purse. He looked up at Michael, dropped it in a panic onto the sidewalk, and ran like hell.
“Are you ok?” Michael asked as he passed the young woman her purse from the floor. She nodded, clearly shaken by her ordeal, but instead of staying with her and waiting while the cops were called, he decided he had something else to do. After he’d visually checked her over, he began to run after her attackers.
The group of youths made a right turn down a dimly lit alleyway between two tall office blocks. Michael followed them. A few faint street lights highlighted a row of dumpsters down one side; the heavy stench of their rotting contents filling the air. They reached the end of the alley, and faced with nothing but a high fence which split the dark space in two, they began to get visibly agitated.
“You might as well give it up boys,” Michael shouted to them after he realised they were trapped. One of them began to climb up the fence and easily managed to pull himself to the top. Then he jumped down the other side. “Come on!” He gestured for his buddies but they were bigger and heavier than he was and were having some trouble executing the climb with the same ease as their friend.
Michael caught up to them and grabbed hold of one of the boys−now half way up the fence−by his waist and pulled him down to the floor. “Get off me!” The boy shouted as Michael grappled with him before managing to pin him to the ground. Too busy batting the youth’s hands away as he tried desperately to lay one on him, Michael hadn’t noticed that the other boy−the largest of the group−had jumped back down from the fence. Suddenly a thick arm wrapped around Michael’s neck, dragging him to his feet and holding him back long enough for the other boy to jump up, grazed and bloodied. As he did, he pulled a blade from his inside pocket and held it out in front of him pointing the dangerous end right at Michael.
Michael managed to break free from the large boy’s surprisingly strong grip after elbowing him right in his diaphragm. He paused for a second and looked at the knife: Nothing special, just your everyday Smith and Wesson pocket knife with a three inch blade, but Michael started to back away. There was no point getting into something he wouldn’t be able to explain to the authorities especially as he still had a long journey ahead of him. The boy obviously saw it as a weakness and lunged straight for him causing Michael
to jump back out of his reach until his back hit a wall which stopped him from going any further. “Son of a. . . ” The youth never stopped and at the last minute he lost his footing. Falling forward, his knife plunged straight into Michael’s stomach causing him to gasp. His eyes widened with surprise.
The boy looked down at what he’d done and his face instantly paled. Michael saw a moment of panic as he stared straight into the boy’s deep indigo eyes. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old if he was that. After a moment, the boy let go of the knife to leave it sticking out from Michael’s flesh. He stood frozen to the spot, his mouth working like a goldfish with no sound escaping.
“Come on dude let’s go!” the boy’s friend urged as he grabbed him by the arm. “We gotta split before anyone sees us. Leave him, come on!” That was enough to snap the boy into action and they both ran back down the alley to the street leaving Michael standing there looking at the knife as blood soaked through his gray T-shirt spreading outwards from the wound. There was no pain though. In fact, he’d hardly felt a thing which hadn’t surprised him too much.
Now all alone in the alley, with nothing but the sound of dripping water from a leaky gutter nearby and the distant traffic noise, Michael placed his hand around the black handle, held his breath and pulled it out slowly. It felt strange, not like he’d expected at all. It was almost numb with a slight scratchy, pulling sensation as the blade exited his flesh. He dropped it to the floor and lifted his T-shirt to assess the damage. There was now a deep slit right under his ribs on the left-hand side, but he felt ok. There was no panic because he knew he’d be perfectly fine.
Under different circumstances though, he knew that right about now he would be dropping to the ground and waiting to die from such a lethal wound. He’d already lost a lot of blood and was pretty sure that the knife had punctured his kidney.
That wasn’t about to happen to him though. You see. . . Michael Warden was no longer human.
The body he walked in wasn’t his. Neither was the name he now used.
Both used to belong to someone else−a young man. Someone who’d been down on his luck, who’d had no family to care about him, and his misfortunes had led him to choose a dark path. He’d had no home, no real friends and was a heavy drug user. It looked like the poor guy had been using for many years before Michael fell upon him that day when he’d taken too much. The man had been close to death, slumped under a bridge, when Michael had found him and there was nothing that could’ve been done to save him. His death had been inevitable so his body was no longer any use to him. Michael−as he was called now−was now using that body but he used to have his own.
He used to be someone else. Someone who was a far cry from what he was now. He’d had a good career and lots of good friends and family around him. He was certainly going places until one day. . . he’d woken up dead.
He’d been murdered.
With no recollection of what happened, Michael had awoken in a place he thought only existed in nightmares. A place he’d never believed existed at all until now.
Hell.
While there, he’d been nothing but a tortured soul−a demon along with the rest of the damned, even though he was not worthy of the punishment given the honest life he’d led. He had no memory of how he died, why he’d ended up being punished in the worst ways imaginable, only flashes of memories of what had come afterwards. He remembered an inferno of pain−right up until the point when he’d lost himself as though the pain of the fire and the torture had finally become too much for his body and soul to bear and he’d simply passed out.
Afterwards, he’d awoken to a different kind of nightmare: He was back on earth, no longer a prisoner, but not as he once was. His body wasn’t real: no flesh or bone, just a spectral image that was lost in a parallel world where there was no more human interaction, just ghostly beings who were as lost as he was. Spirits of the afterlife who−for whatever reason−hadn’t managed to find their peace either.
But they weren’t the only beings that Michael had had to deal with. He was now well aware that there were many other creatures that existed alongside the spirits, creatures he’d already encountered, who knew he was there but would ignore his spiritual form like he was nothing but dust blowing on the wind. But it was only then that they’d taken no notice of him. He’d had no such luck since being corporeal.
The memories of the torture and suffering he’d endured were all that he was left with. He’d tried and tried to forget but there was no way of blocking them out; so much so that they’d become the reason he hardly slept anymore, not that he needed to, but when he did those memories would become vivid enough for him to mistake the nightmares for a reality that he just couldn’t endure again.
The only reason he’d kept his sanity through all of it was the determination to find out what had happened to him and the hope of maybe catching his own killer. Haunted by vengeance, he’d begun searching and while doing so, he quickly realised that he could borrow a human’s body and use it as his own. But it wasn’t easy and there were terrible consequences: No human soul was ever the same again. Their bodies weren’t strong enough to handle the possession and it pained him to be the one responsible for breaking them. So he waited−a body-less soul−until he found a human who wasn’t going to need theirs any more. Someone he didn’t need to kill or damage, someone who was already close to death.
Eventually, that day had come.
Now, he was Michael Warden; intent on finding out what happened to him, and vengeful. He promised himself that he would hunt down every demon, spirit or monster that walked the earth in the hope that they would lead him on the right path to whoever took his life from him. For the past year that’s exactly what he’d done but he’d still found no answers. If the creatures of the underworld he was now a part of were of no use to him he would send them back to where they came from, and he had; many, and in doing so he’d saved the lives of many innocent people and would continue to do so for however long he needed to.
* * *
Forced to change his plans and find a motel room for the night−aptly named Comfort Motel−just on the edge of the city, Michael had cleaned himself up in the shower and was stood facing the bathroom mirror, naked, staring at the slice in his stomach. He already knew he felt no physical pain and was stronger than he should be, but this was the first time he’d ever been stabbed. He’d had punch-ups and clashes of course, that was almost an everyday situation for him since becoming what he was, but this was the first time anyone had gotten that close to killing him−or trying to, anyway. He hadn’t thought about what would actually happen when they did. It was ironic that a human would deliver his first fatal blow given how many monsters he’d fought in the past ten months.
He was quite used to his new, thirty-one year old body by now−even though it was still strange seeing himself with dirty blond, choppy hair and not his own black, sleek style−but he still found it hard to accept that it was indeed him that stared back from the reflection as he stood before it.
The wound had finally stopped bleeding as he examined it in the mirror. His lean, athletic body had been in quite good order anyway for someone who’d abused it in such a way but was now bigger, more muscular due to his regular steam releasing sessions at the gym. Now though, he was going to have a pretty decent sized scar.
He wrapped a towel around his waist, grabbed his laptop and powered it up at the small dresser by the window. He had quite a bit of work to do, including faking some papers for himself. The good thing about acquiring a dying human man’s body, and nobody knowing that he’d died, was the fact that he’d inherited his whole life not just his physical form. He now existed, which meant he was in the system. If he was going to find out who or what was causing the students to make like lemmings and jump to their deaths, he would need to get inside the university. He’d decided the easiest way would be to work there. That way he’d be on campus for most of the time and could have a good look around withou
t question.
In his life, he’d been a qualified computer programmer with his own successful business and now having so much time on his hands allowed him to improve on his skills which came in very handy for situations like this. He successfully hacked into the university’s database and struck lucky. There was already a transfer in place for a substitute to fill in for someone who was due for maternity leave in three days, so he changed the name and then set about faking some documentation. All he had to do after that was reach one of his contacts−who just happened to be in Kent, OH−send him to find a Mr George Cole, and persuade the guy to take a little vacation.
When he was done, he leaned back in his chair, placed both hands behind his head, and smiled with smug satisfaction that he’d just created a new career for himself in a matter of minutes without a glitch.
After finishing his research, Michael glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. It was almost midnight. He figured he’d leave for Garrett County at around six that morning so he decided to get some sleep. Not that it was necessary for him to sleep; he needed it about as much as he needed food, which was never, but it passed the time and he’d inherited a lot of that since he’d died. And as for the food thing, well, not needing it didn’t mean he didn’t want it. He could still taste food just as well as before so that was a bonus if ever there was to be one in this arcane situation. Truth was, he needed to hold on to as much of his humanity as possible if there was any chance of him remaining sane.
He climbed into the bed and pulled the musty blankets up to his waist, switched off the lamp and lay on his back staring at the ceiling.
The darkness wasn’t as dark for him anymore−another thing he’d acquired: night vision. Although the world was more insipid, almost colourless to him, when the lights went out he could still see quite clearly−which was great when he needed it−but now, in this quiet motel room, he’d give anything to have that darkness back. Sleep didn’t come to him as easy as it used to. His body or mind never tired so it was now something he had to will.
