“Not bad for a woman who spends her days buried in books.”
They embraced.
CHAPTER TWENTY
RHIANNA – NOW DR. Rhianna Sharpe, as she had completed her Ph.D. five months earlier – faced an auditorium full of students not much older than herself. The good news was that at least half of her students were awake. She was teaching Archeology 101 at Hunter College and this was her last lecture of the day. Christmas was just around the corner and everyone was dreading the upcoming finals while looking forward to a break from academic life. She knew she was.
As she addressed the room, her voice projected both confidence and passion for the subject. “There is a fine line between history and myth, fact and fiction. I want you to think about the question when you write your paper...”
She paused, having noticed a new arrival in the back row. It was none other than Artan. His hair was shorter and styled, adapted to his new world. But he still carried himself with a palpable edge. In other words, no one was going to start a bar fight with this guy.
The bell rang. Class was over. The students rose and filed out of the auditorium.
“Don’t forget. I’ll be expecting your papers in my drop-box by Friday.”
Rhianna wasn’t sure if anyone was listening. A three-hour lecture made even the biggest history buffs want to breathe some fresh air and stretch their legs.
Rhianna was still collecting her lecture materials when Artan appeared in front of her. She greeted him with a big smile and a passionate kiss. She nodded at her lecture materials.
“You know, you should be the one teaching this class.”
Artan shook his head.
“I lived it. That is enough for me.”
Rhianna nodded. In the 12 months since Balor’s resurrection in the park, nightmares had often woken her in the middle of the night. Artan’s strong hand was always there to calm her.
The first weeks had been the most difficult. Fortunately, her father had survived Cael’s attack and the doctors were able to save one of his eyes. He now wore an eye patch and once joked that he was now officially an acolyte of Balor. Rhianna didn’t laugh. They both carried scars from their traumatic clash with the ancient Celtic forces, but the worst was in the past where it belonged.
As Artan pulled her closer, she shot him a conspiratorial smile.
“I have a surprise for you.”
Rhianna rummaged through her handbag and extricated a box. Artan looked at it with curiosity.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I got this in the mail today.”
Rhianna held up a video game with a fearsome gargoyle depicted on the cover. The title was “GARGOYLE KNIGHT.” Lord Irish’s latest was blistering the charts and furthering the geek legend that had sprung up around the designer.
“Lord Irish is making millions off your life story. Think we should sue?”
Artan didn’t respond, still analyzing the game. The image of the winged beast on the cover seemed a tad too familiar.
“Gargoyle Knight? Since when is a king a knight?”
“You’ll always be my knight.”
Rhianna gave Artan a peck on the cheek and took his hand.
They walked out of the auditorium and left the University campus. New York City traffic was waiting for them, the city blanketed in snow. Rhianna felt happier than she had ever been.
As they waited for a cab, Rhianna looked up for a moment and froze. A stone gargoyle lurked on a nearby cathedral. This fearsome creature peered down at the surface world below but remained frozen in stone.
Before Rhianna could dwell on the image, she felt Artan’s strong presence beside her and he pulled her toward an arriving cab.
The taxi’s heater was going full blast and with Artan at her side, she felt warm, safe and ready to face whatever the future held in store for her. The cab pulled away from the college.
High above the city streets the gargoyle crouched on its ledge, snow slithering over its demonic features. The monster seemed to be waiting for the day it could take flight once more…
THE END
GARGOYLE KNIGHT WILL RETURN IN
GARGOYLE QUEST
FEAR THE LIGHT: WHO MURDERED DRACULA?
Over the centuries, many had tried to kill the Count. All had failed. Until now...
Eight vampires gather at Dracula's castle to solve his murder. But as the sun rises outside the chateau, a voice cries out and another creature of the night is slain. Trapped, the sun burning bright outside, the vampires realize they have met their match — a killer who plans on picking them off one by one!
As the daylight reigns and their numbers dwindle, a dark suspicion grows — could Dracula's murderer be hiding in plain sight?
A THRILLER WHERE THE MONSTERS ARE THE VICTIMS!
"All in all this was an easy read that flew by. The pacing was tight and kept the story interesting up until the last page. A satisfying ending made this a worthy read." - Nikki Howard, Ravenous Reads
"...it is fun to see vampires switch from being predator to prey. The story is essentially ten little Indians" - Taliesin meets the Vampires
"...If you loved and read Agatha Christie's - And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians then you will love this novel..." - Gadget Girl Reviews
"It is nothing like the other vampire books I have read..." - Jenny, Fabulous and Fun Blog
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CROSSING THE DARKNESS: A SCIENCE FICTION HORROR THRILLER
A SHIP OF HORRORS. A JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS.
Faith Cadena hopes to make a new life for herself on a new world far from Earth. After doing hard time for a crime committed in her youth, all she wants now is a chance at a fresh start.
Booking passage on an interstellar colony barge, Faith expects an uneventful three-year voyage spent in cryogenic stasis. But her dream of a better life becomes a nightmare when she is prematurely awakened halfway through her journey and finds herself trapped aboard a ship of horrors. The vessel is adrift in the far reaches of space, its crew brutally murdered and a ruthless killer in command.
With the nearest outpost millions of miles away, it’s up to Faith to face an inhuman adversary with terrifying plans for the ship’s 4000 sleeping passengers…
CHAPTER ONE
FAITH CADENA CRIED out in agony, her voice echoing inside the antiseptic hospital room. She clenched her teeth, tasting sweat as it poured down her face. Her legs were open wide and raised, her bulging belly obscuring her direct line of sight. Lights flashed above her in a blinding blur. She caught whirling glimpses of computer monitors to her left, mysterious devices of medical science designed to measure her life signs. Phosphorescent green lines spiked erratically. A doctor wearing a surgical mask sat hunched between her legs, anticipating the arrival of new life.
The searing, building pain wasn’t like anything Faith had ever experienced before in her eighteen years, and that was saying something — she had already faced a lifetime’s worth of adversity and suffering. She twisted her lips into a manic grin. This was a good pain, she told herself. This wasn’t the pain of an abusive stepfather stubbing out a burning hot cigarette butt into your arm, or the numbing throb of a broken heart after catching another loser boyfriend cheating. The pain tearing her insides out was different because it filled her with hope. After all the screw-ups and wrong moves and bad mistakes, she finally had done something good with her life, something she could be proud of.
She grimaced and her jaws tightened with the final effort. She exhaled a sharp gasp of unbridled anguish and the wails of a newborn filled the room. Everyone relaxed. Faith could see the tension easing from the medical staff. She sensed that they were smiling under those surgical masks. Her baby was alive and well.
The doctor wrapped the screaming infant in a blanket and handed it to one of the nurses. The physical contact seemed to calm the baby down a little. Faith weakly turned her head, straining to catch a closer look at her child. Her eyes found the
newborn, and the steel inside her grew brittle.
She had learned from a young age to keep her emotions in check. Emotions could be exploited as a weakness and used against you. A smile had to be earned, never given freely. But the innocent, helpless bundle before her broke down all defenses. Tears welled up and her lips quivered into a smile of pure joy. She didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, didn’t wonder what she should call the child. Those were questions for another day. Right now, what mattered the most was her overpowering need to hold her own baby. To feel that trembling ball of life next to her. She struggled to speak and was shocked at how weak her quavering voice sounded. “Can I hold her?”
The question hung in the air, greeted by a moment of inaction. There was doubt in the nurse’s eyes, duty at war with her own feminine nature. The nurse took a tentative step toward Faith when the doctor appeared. He looked down at Faith and there was resigned sympathy in his gaze. “I'm sorry. You’re not allowed contact with the baby.”
The baby. Not your baby.
She had given life to this child but, according to the state, she would be granted no further rights over her own daughter. Her body had been nothing more than a means to an end, a biological incubator denied its own creation. A door zoomed open and men wearing black-gray uniforms appeared. Faith’s breath hitched and her heart seemed to trip over its own beat. She swallowed against the lump in her throat. A perfect moment had degenerated into a nightmare.
Nooo!
Almost as if the newborn knew it was about to be separated from its mother, the baby started to scream again. Agonizing seconds stretched as the uniformed men snatched the child.
Faith stirred. Despite what she'd been through, she had to take action. Tapping into her last reserves of strength, she pushed herself out of bed. When her naked feet hit the icy floor they left a trail of blood in their wake. The nurse and doctor tried to stop her but they shrank away, scared by her intensity. A dark fire burned inside of her, a primal instinct honed by thousands of years of human evolution.
She managed to take a few weak steps before the exertion took its inevitable toll. Her legs gave out and she crumpled, head hitting the freezing tile with a dull smack. She wrenched her neck and looked up through a cloud of tears. Her words shook the room with maternal anguish as the uniformed kidnappers vanished through the door. The world slipped out of focus, growing fuzzy around the edges. “Please, don't let them take my baby. PLEAAAASE…”
***
Faith’s eyes snapped open. Her body spasmed and her lungs inhaled sharply. The scene in the hospital room had been a dream, an old memory hungry for attention. She was not sprawled on the hospital floor any longer but instead found herself suspended upright inside a metal-reinforced glass cylinder. A tangled mass of tubes extended from her body like artificial umbilical cords. She was naked except for a tank-top and shorts. Her hands came up and she realized there wasn’t enough room to shift her position. Groggy and doing her best to shake off her confusion, she stared through the glass lid of her high-tech coffin at the world beyond. The glass distorted her view and she could barely make out a cavernous maze of metal and glass and shadows.
Where was she? What was going on?
A growing physical discomfort put a halt to her questions. Each breath had become an ordeal and she gasped for air. Inside the chamber, oxygen levels must have dropped below an acceptable level.
Her arms twisted in the confined space and she pushed her hands against the cylinder's glass surface, pressing. A fierce struggle ensued but yielded little result. The tube didn’t budge. How was she going to get out of this contraption? Claustrophobia took hold, control threatening to slip away once more. She started pounding the glass. Her parched mouth couldn’t form the words echoing through her mind... LET ME OUT OF HERE!
Her moment of sheer terror was mercifully cut short. There was a sudden explosion of escaping gas and the lid of the cryo-tube slid open with a hiss. The cables popped off her body and retracted into the wall of the cryo-chamber.
Faith stumbled out of the open glass cylinder and collapsed on her knees. She greedily sucked in air. As the oxygen revitalized her, she hazarded a look back at the now-empty cryo-tube and realized it was just one out of many such tubes. The room was filled with hundreds of identical glass cylinders, each containing the silhouettes of men and women.
The sight brought further clarity to her jumbled thoughts, snapping her memory into sharp focus. Ten years had passed since she gave birth to her daughter. She wasn’t on Earth any more but aboard the Orion, a colony barge headed for the main belt asteroids, a 134-million-mile, one-year journey. She had chosen to leave everything she knew behind to start a new life in the outer colonies. Paul, the young man she’d dated for what seemed like a minute before she decided to sign up with the mining corporation, had frowned at her when she first brought up the idea of moving to the asteroid belt. “Why would anyone take a chance on a rock millions of miles away from home?” The answer was clear to her even if Paul might not appreciate it: maybe home had nothing to offer them.
Faith stood in the dark for another moment, eyes adjusting to the subdued lighting, reassured by her growing understanding of her situation. Taking in the maze of sleeping colonists around her, she couldn’t help but wonder why she was awake. The most likely explanation was a timer issue with her capsule. The grim alternative was an onboard emergency of some kind, but if that were the case, wouldn’t every one of the four-thousand passengers on the Orion be awake by now? Her premature return to consciousness had to be a glitch, and glitches could be fixed.
As far as Faith was aware, the ship was run by a skeleton crew — the captain and about 15 other essential personnel — while most of the colonists remained in deep hibernation. All she had to do was locate an intercom system, put in a call to the bridge and let them know what was going on. With any luck they’d be nice enough to tuck her back in and let her catch up on her beauty sleep for the remainder of their journey. Surprisingly, the gray, sterile environment of the Orion seemed more appealing than another cryo-sleep cycle. She wasn’t quite ready to face the nightmares of her past again so soon.
Faith staggered erect, her legs straining under the weight of her own body. The cryo-tube was supposed to electrically stimulate her muscles and assure they wouldn’t atrophy, but she could tell she hadn’t used her legs in quite some time. With each step, it seemed like someone was driving sharp nails into her calves and thighs.
She caught her reflection in one of the cryo-tubes and for a moment, her features seemed superimposed over the dormant person inside the cylinder. She didn’t like what she was seeing. She must’ve lost about 10 pounds since she slipped into the tube, the bones of her face outlined sharply under the skin. She looked gaunt and haunted, the mileage catching up with her beauty. She was only 29, but the last decade hadn’t been a cakewalk.
Her attention shifted from her face to the tattoos that shimmered over her body, a mixture of strange glyphs and numbers. They flickered and kept changing shape as she flexed her muscles. Each tattoo contained a series of three digital images that were randomly projected under her skin. Souvenirs of her own rough past. For a moment, she marveled at the images — a fierce dragon becoming a Chinese symbol of peace, only to make way for a police badge with a waxy death’s head at its center. Images that once meant so much to her but now didn’t seem to belong on her body. Time had made them lose their meaning.
Faith kept walking. Her footsteps echoed through the vast, cavernous chamber. The only other sound was the incessant thrumming of hyper-drive engines beneath her bare feet, the spaceship’s faint yet steady heartbeat.
She tried not to stare at the walls of dormant people as she passed them. Even though these space travelers were asleep and not dead, she couldn't shake the feeling of being inside a giant mausoleum. Surrounded by hundreds of people, yet utterly alone, she felt a crushing, almost paralyzing, sense of loneliness descend over her. The colonists looked like ghosts trapped i
n icy limbo. Faith realized she had been one of them only minutes earlier and a shiver crawled up her spine. Cryo-stasis might the cheapest way to space travel but it sure as hell wasn’t her favorite way.
Faith approached a door in the bulkhead. It whooshed open, sensors responding to her presence. She stepped into the adjoining chamber that was dominated by an observation window and stole a glance outside. For a moment she could only stare, overwhelmed by the sight that awaited her. To behold the infinity of glittering stars was to experience both awe and fear. The darkness of deep space loomed, a perfect void. In her mind’s eye she could picture the Orion, a million tons of titanium, gliding through the vast nothingness beyond the observation window, nuclear thrusters the size of football fields roaring like incandescent, plasma-powered miniature suns.
They were a long way from their final destination and, once again, Faith wondered why she was awake. Gripped by a growing sense of foreboding, she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
CHAPTER 2
FAITH STUMBLED INTO a shower area. Sensors registered her presence and steaming water engulfed her. She sighed, her body responding to the hot stream with pleasure. She basked in the sensation, the water streaming down her form washing away the residue of the various cryo gases. After 10 minutes she felt dizzy and instructed the computer to kill the furious spray. She stumbled out of the shower and a blast of hot air enveloped her body and hair.
Still a bit groggy but sporting a happy, satisfied smile, she approached a giant wall of lockers. Her personal belongings were kept in one of them.
Gargoyle Knight: A Dark Urban Fantasy Page 16
