by Jaz Primo
Bringer of Fire
Book #1 in the Logan Bringer Series
by
Jaz Primo
RUTHERFORD LITERARY GROUP
www.rutherfordliterary.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Novels by Jaz Primo
Copyrights Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
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
About Jaz Primo
Novel Teaser - Sunrise at Sunset
Novel Teaser - Gwen Reaper
Novel Teaser - A Bloody London Sunset
Novel Teaser - Summit at Sunset
Novels by Jaz Primo
The Logan Bringer Urban Fantasy Series
Bringer of Fire
Bringer Unleashed *
* Additional Titles Forthcoming
* * *
Gwen Reaper
(A Young Adult Paranormal Romance)
Winner of the Paranormal Romance Guild’s Reviewer’s
Choice Award for Best Young Adult Novel of 2012!
* * *
The Sunset Vampire Series
Sunrise at Sunset
A Bloody London Sunset
Summit at Sunset
Wicked Sunset **
Sunset Rising **
** Additional Titles Forthcoming
* * *
All titles published by Rutherford Literary Group
Published by Rutherford Literary Group
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Any trademarks mentioned herein are not authorized by the trademark owners and do not in any way mean the work is sponsored by or associated with the trademark owners. Any trademarks used are specifically in a descriptive capacity.
Published by:
Rutherford Literary Group
1205 S. Air Depot, PMB #135
Midwest City, Oklahoma 73110-4807
Cover art by Sharon Legg,
Sharon Legg Digital Art
Edited by Lea Ellen Borg,
Night Owl Editing Services
Copyright 2013 by John Primo
eBook ISBN 9780982861387
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
DEDICATION
Of the various adversities and obstacles you may face in your life, sometimes your biggest challenges are the ones found deep within you…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My love and thanks to my wife, Lori, for all of her continued love and support. Her thoughtful encouragement is truly inspiring. And thanks to Selina for interjecting her own special, and often amusing, insights regarding my countless hours of typing.
Once again, my heartfelt thanks to my creative and gifted cover artist, Sharon Legg, for the vivid, striking, and powerful cover art on this novel. As always, thank you to my talented and wonderful editor, Lea Ellen Borg, for her spot-on editing skills and keen eye for detail. As I continue to hone my writing craft and skills, Lea Ellen remains ever diligent in mentoring me.
Thank you to all of my friends and fans who continue to be wonderfully supportive of my literary endeavors. Though I’ve said this before, it bears repeating that although writing is a highly personal endeavor, it is equally rewarding to share my novels with those who experience enjoyment reading them.
Chapter 1
Brain cancer has always been an ugly disease. It’s sinister. It’s evil. At the age of twenty-eight, the diagnosis had shocked and horrified me into a near-fugue state. Then despair. By age twenty-nine, the cancer had nearly decimated me and the doctors soundly declared that I was terminal.
That’s a hell of a thing to hear from someone.
But a last-minute opportunity to receive an experimental treatment brought a sliver of hope, and early test results were encouraging.
What followed was six long, torturous months of treatment, enduring bouts of nausea, vomiting, exhaustion, and the most debilitating sense of personal fragility of my illness thus far. If not for the strength, encouragement, and support of my friends and family, particularly my mother and sister, I doubt that I would have endured it all.
However, by the end of those challenging six months, my tumor had not only shrunk, it had practically disappeared.
During the next two months, my body slowly reconstituted itself, and I embraced cautious optimism that I might not only survive, but also hope to once again thrive. To have walked through shadows of despair and come out the other side both sane and relatively intact was one of those life-changing experiences.
To say that I was ecstatic was an understatement.
However, four days ago, my euphoria gradually changed to something altogether different. Some startling and mysterious side effects had begun to promulgate.
My curiosity gave way to concern…and then to alarm.
That’s when events took a decidedly dramatic turn for the worse.
Add to that, I hated that the phone always rang at precisely the wrong time.
The shrill tone of the ringer, a sound that I kept vowing to change but never seemed to get around to, pierced through the silence of my house. The problem was I was too busy throwing up my breakfast to care.
I had been fighting a stomach virus for nearly two days.
Five minutes later as I was swishing Listerine around in my mouth, the damned phone rang again. I quickly rinsed my mouth and darted into the living room, battling a renewed queasiness in my gut.
“Hello?” I demanded.
“Logan? Are you okay?” came the anxious-sounding voice.
My sister, Lexi, mothered me even more than Mom did.
“I’m fine, Lexi. Just donating breakfast to my porcelain throne. Honestly, you’d think I was a Roman as often as I’ve been purging---”
“Thank God,” she groaned.
“Lexi? What’s wrong?”
“You’re kidding. Logan, just turn on the TV,” she urged. “Honestly, you’re like the world’s worst hermit.”
I hastily searched beneath magazines, couch pillows, and a comforter for the TV remote.
“What channel?”
“Any channel!”
What had gotten into her? Had World War III started without me?
I finally found the remote underneath a rumpled pair of sweatpants. As I reached down to snatch it, the remote almost seemed to impact my palm before I actually touched it. I flinched with surprise and nearly dropped it.
“What the…”
That’s precisely what had happened three days ago, except it had been a spoon that I’d reached for at breakfast.
Had I only imagined it?
“Can you see it yet?” Lexi demanded.
I hurriedly pressed the power button.
; What I saw shocked me well beyond the scope of my former distractions.
“…have no idea how many people might be left inside the Wallace Building. Ambulances are streaming in as quickly as possible while fire engines rush to the scene. As you can see from the overhead vantage of Sky-6, police are rushing into the building alongside firemen to help remove victims and survivors. So far, only three people have been pulled from the blazing center alive.”
The high-definition camera view from the news helicopter laid bare the full desperation of the situation. A four-story professional office complex was mostly engulfed in flames. Virtually the entire large glass facade had been blown outward, and the roof was partially collapsed at one end of the building.
“Damn,” was all that I managed to say.
“Isn’t that---?” Lexi asked.
Holy crap. The Wallace Building housed the Nuclegene Cancer Treatment Center.
“Yeah, that’s where I’ve been going for my cancer treatments.”
I was supposed to have been there that very day, at this very moment, in fact. But I’d contracted a stomach virus, so I had called in at the last minute to cancel.
“Oh, Logan, it’s so horrible. I was afraid that you were there. I prayed so hard that you hadn’t gone today, and I could barely dial the phone to call you,” she managed to say through tears and sniffling.
What the hell had happened? How did an office building just blow up like that?
The images from the circling copter were surreal. I had just been there a week ago for a cancer treatment. My mind rushed with visions of the nurses and fellow patients who I had seen and talked to then.
“I was supposed to be there today.”
Suddenly, my head throbbed and my throat felt so dry that it was raw.
“I-I have to go, Sis.”
I heard my sister blow her nose. “Do you want me to come over there?”
I felt numb.
“No. Just call Mom and Dad for me, will you?”
“Sure. Sure, I will,” she said. “Logan, I’m just so glad that you weren’t there today. After everything, I don’t think I could’ve handled that.”
I wondered who else could have made it out alive from that kind of disaster. The building was completely ablaze and smoldering debris was cast all around the area. It appeared from the various camera images that the only people being recovered were being laid underneath sheets alongside waiting ambulances.
I could’ve been lying beneath one of those sheets.
“Logan?”
“Yeah, I know.”
I plopped down onto the couch and stared at the images before me.
“I’ll call Mom and Dad and then call you back in a little while, okay? Logan?”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks, Sis,” I said, staring at the televised images before me.
I put the phone down and started surfing the news channels, but the same nightmare played out before me. I couldn’t move or talk, and I could barely even breathe.
Then, after a time, I managed to rise from the couch, though only to rush to the bathroom to throw up again.
* * *
Later that day, my sister brought 7Up, homemade chicken noodle soup, and saltine crackers over to me. Thankfully, Mom and Dad were still on their cruise to the Bahamas, or I’d have Mom hovering over me, as well.
Oh, I dearly loved both of them, but when I felt sick, I mostly just wanted to be left alone. Thankfully, my sister’s aversion to bringing any germs back home with her that might infect her husband or my niece and nephew kept her from staying long.
My best friend, Travis Cooper, called to see if I was okay or if I needed anything. He even offered to stop by. I liked him too much to give him what I had, so I declined.
Travis and I had gone through high school together, including playing on the football team. After I served six years in the army, he had helped me get my job at the Anderson Tag Agency, where he also worked, as I completed my bachelor’s degree.
Then the cancer diagnosis struck, and Travis was one of the important rocks in my life that kept me grounded through everything. Just as with my family, I owed him a lot.
Hell, whom was I fooling? Travis definitely qualified as family to me. Best of all, he knew when to give me some space when I needed it.
One thing was certain; I’d experienced enough “babysitting” during the worst of my cancer treatments. For nearly eight months, I’d moved back into my parents’ house just so someone could help take care of me. I’d never felt so damned helpless in my entire life.
I’d hated the sense of helplessness even more than the friggin’ cancer.
I sipped at the hot soup that Lexi had brought by.
Damn, it tasted good.
Then the reality of what had just happened washed over me again and I started to feel a little nauseous. I muted the television because the horror only continued, and the story hadn’t gotten any better as evening approached.
By the time that the fire and rescue workers had started to get the fires under some sort of control, there had been only twenty-three survivors from the estimate of over two hundred and twenty occupants. I still had no idea how many of those survivors might be people I knew from the treatment center portion of the building.
Though I wasn’t an avid churchgoer, I nevertheless said a number of prayers that afternoon.
I dispensed some ice cubes into a glass and poured a generous amount of 7Up into it. Mom had always given us 7Up or ginger ale when we had flu or stomach viruses as a kid. Come to think of it, I’d slurped down of a lot of both while I was sick from the cancer treatments. Not long ago, I had gratefully returned to just water, tea, and a little coffee once the new cancer drugs had started taking effect.
With the cancer at bay, I intended for my body to once again be my temple, just as it was during my time in the army.
I’d started working out again to build back the muscle mass that I’d lost. It felt great to weightlift once again. And despite the higher grocery costs, I’d even embraced both the whole and organic health foods movements. Mom and Sis were so proud of me, but my father had only laughed.
“I grew up on fried foods, and I’m doing just fine,” Dad had teased.
This from a man who consumed anti-cholesterol and high blood pressure medications like vitamins.
I sipped from my glass of 7Up, only to have my memory kick back into action. My heart nearly skipped a beat.
Holy crap. My treatments.
Lost in the horror of the news reports was the realization that I had no place to go for my three remaining treatments. My momentary fear was replaced by absolute guilt as I focused on the fact that so many people had died today; people who I’d sort of grown used to seeing and commiserating with.
People who I’d grown fond of.
“I’m sitting here feeling worried about my treatments when I should feel lucky just to be alive.”
Additional waves of guilt made their ugly appearance, and I went back to feeling as if I was mired in a daze. I sat on the couch sipping 7Up for the remainder of the evening.
I woke up out of a deep sleep with a start. The television was on, and I checked the time on the DVR. It was around 3 a.m.
But something was wrong.
At least, something felt different.
My mind felt completely clear, devoid of the bout of anxiety and depression that I’d felt earlier. Instead, I felt at peace.
“Strange,” I muttered.
I got up to stretch and felt only a slight degree of weakness in the pit of my stomach. Maybe the virus was finally working its way out of my system.
But I still felt a little icky and wandered into the bathroom to take a shower.
The hot water was soothing and I felt better than I had in days. While I was still somber about what had happened the previous day, I detected an absurd sense of calmness inside of me.
I hated to admit that it felt good.
After washing my hair, I reached out for the soap.
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It slapped into the palm of my hand like it had been thrown there!
My eyes darted to and fro, half-expecting someone to be standing there after having handed me the soap. I looked at the soap dish. It was nearly a foot away from me.
“No way.”
What the hell was going on?
There was nobody I could call. The office building that served as the only contact for my treatments was destroyed, and for all I knew, everybody who had worked there might be dead.
So much for a calming sense of peace.
After I got out of the shower, I looked in the mirror at the visage of a guy who was way too young to look that tired and out of sorts. I ran my fingers across the faint scar running across my chin where an enemy bullet had grazed it during my tour of duty in Afghanistan during the nation’s second invasion of that country following the collapse of the country’s formerly sectarian government.
Yet another occasion when Lady Luck had been watching over me.
I ran my fingers through my once-again healthy head of hair, grateful that it’d finally grown out again. Fortunately, the experimental treatments hadn’t caused hair loss like my previous bouts of chemotherapy and radiation had.
My mind gravitated back to the soap episode in the shower.
Had I been hallucinating?
In the absence of an explanation, I did the only thing that I thought any clueless person might do under similar circumstances—I started Googling for answers.
Hours later, I gave up on Google. It had been of little or no help. That is, unless I wanted to believe that I was spontaneously becoming a Jedi Knight.
I could almost believe there really was a test to measure something called midi-chlorians.
Geeks and nerds were so creative.
Likewise, I didn’t think that any of The X-Files episodes that had been referenced were applicable.
I’d never been part of the nerdy crowd, but I had to admit that, years ago, I’d appreciated watching The X-Files. It’d seemed much more grounded than typical science fiction.
