by Azalea Ellis
Table of Contents
Title Page
Book Description
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Log of Captivity 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Log of Captivity 2
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Log of Captivity 3
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Log of Captivity 4
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Log of Captivity 5
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Log of Captivity 6
Chapter 42
Book Description
Blurb:
My name is Eve Redding. I am the new God.
I never wanted to become a Player in the Game, never intended for any of this to happen. I was content with my ordinary, invisible existence among the millions of civilians crowding my city. But the monstrous creators of the Game forced me to Play, and I'm the type to cling to life by the tips of my bloody fingernails.
At first, I was enamored by the ability to augment everything about myself−to become smarter, stronger, prettier...better. But after my teleportation to that first Trial−a death tournament held on a beautiful, vicious alien world−I would have done anything to escape the Game.
I needed power to protect myself and those I cared about from the Game and its creators, so I took it. But every deadly choice I made along the way eroded not only what once made me weak, but what also made me human.
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Gods of Blood and Bone
By Azalea Ellis
www.azaleaellis.com
Seladore Publishing
Cover image by Azalea Ellis
Book design by Azalea Ellis
Copyright © 2015 Azalea Ellis
All rights reserved, worldwide. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without author permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any actual persons, living or dead, are coincidental.
Seladore Publishing
To Jared. Be not afraid.
Chapter 1
You may know of me, but you have no idea who I am.
— Eve Redding
The electrical immobilizers clamped on my wrists and ankles caused the areas around them to burn with a strangely tingling sensation. It felt like touching my tongue to the tip of a nine-volt battery.
I tried to arch my back and kick out, and the sensation spread violently, causing my muscles to go rigid-limp against my will. I whimpered against the rubber-tasting patch covering my mouth, and tried to imbue some rage into the glare I leveled at my captors. The masked woman chuckled at me. The other one, a man, placed a large metal case on the ground and unlocked it with the hissing sound of hydraulics.
“Please, you said I’d get a Seed. Can I have it now?” the boy said, desperation lacing his voice.
I turned my glare on their sniveling accomplice. How could I have been so stupid? I should have ignored his fake distress, like everyone else. I’d almost done so, but then he met my eyes, his own pitiful and full of fear. He’d mouthed, “help” at me. So I’d walked into the alley.
And here I was now, bound and gagged by two masked people. A large transport vehicle had pulled up to oh-so-conveniently hide the mouth of the alley, and thus my current predicament, from the people on the street. They probably wouldn’t have helped, anyway. Strangers would take one look at the girl being abducted by masked, vaguely military-looking people, and scurry on with their eyes firmly pointed to the gray pavement. Gotta get to work. Lucky to be among the steadily decreasing percentage with a job. No time to deal with other people’s problems.
The boy looked away from me and snatched eagerly at something in the silent man’s outstretched hand. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled to me. “I wish I was stronger.” Then he shuddered and unclenched his fist around a little glass ball, which dropped to the ground.
“What do you think you’re doing? Pick that up!” the woman hissed. “You can’t leave stuff like that just lying around. There can’t be any evidence we were here. None.”
The boy gulped and snatched it back up, then met my eyes again. “I had to. I didn’t have a choice. You don’t know what it’s like.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and his chin quivered a bit. “But you will.”
“Shut up,” the man spoke for the first time, drawing something from his metal case and stepping ominously over to me.
At that, I tried once more to move my useless body. My muscles locked themselves into a painful half-relaxation, and though the force of my scream burned my throat, it came out of my nose weak and muffled.
The man bent over me and jammed a pen-sized piece of metal into my leg. It pierced the skin, and a second later he withdrew it and handed it to the woman, who plugged the other end into the side of a clunky link pad.
My breath heaved out of my lungs, and my eyes opened painfully wide, but every attempt at movement only forced me to lie more and more still.
The screen of the pad popped up with my face, under my name, Eve Redding, and a slew of other data.
What the hell? It was me in a white hospital gown—the same picture I’d had taken a few months before, when people had come to do a surprise, school-wide medical examination. We’d been told it was to ensure none of the students had communicable diseases. Why did they have that picture?
I swallowed. In a situation like this, there could be no good reason.
“It’s her,” the woman said. “Hurry. We don’t have much time. We’ll have to leave her here.”
That didn’t sound good, either. But if they were leaving me, at least I wasn’t being kidnapped for human trafficking or something. I’d make a bad slave to some rich foreigner. Too rebellious, and not pretty enough to make up for it.
The man nodded and grabbed me by my arm, which was bound behind my back. He lifted my weight roughly. He turned me onto my stomach and lifted the hair off the nape of my neck. There was pressure, and then a sharp pain at the base of my skull.
I tried to jerk away, but I couldn’t even move an inch. Frustration, terror, and rage boiled up in me, pushing out any forced humor, and a tear slipped down my nose onto the painfully rough concrete pressed against my cheek.
Tears—the only outlet my body had. I hated crying.
Another pain, slightly lower down.
Another tear of rage.
He flipped me back over and the woman came forward, another glass ball in her hand, but this one was filled with a creamy liquid. She knelt in front of me
and pressed it to my neck. “I hope this one survives.”
Wait, what?
There was one last quick, sharp pain.
She stripped off my electrical immobilizers and tapped the back of her wrist port against the patch on my mouth, causing it to disintegrate. I drew breath to scream, and tried to jerk away from her, but my body didn’t listen. The alley walls and the woman’s back as she stepped into the transport vehicle all spun crazily. I realized it was because my eyes were rolling back into my head as I passed out.
* * *
Consciousness came lurching back to me with a wave of sickness. I rolled to my hands and knees and heaved up bitter-apple bile onto the concrete. My dark brown hair hung unrestrained around my face, and my hands got splashed a little, but I barely noticed.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, heaving once again. I retched until nothing came out, then crawled to the alley wall and used it to pull myself up. My body shuddered uncontrollably. I looked up through the smoggy air to the sky above. The sun wasn’t overhead yet, but even in the shade of the towering buildings, the early summer heat made me feel like I was baking inside the city-stench all around me.
But I didn’t have time to stand there contemplating my own misery.
I needed to move right then, or I wouldn’t be able to.
I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, causing a businesswoman to rear back and sidestep to avoid colliding with me. She curled her lip at me in disgust and clacked away in her towering heels. Scag.
I stumbled on my way, using the walls to support myself when my legs couldn’t. The other people on the sidewalk veered out of my way, avoiding my eyes or throwing me the derisive glance reserved for homeless people and half-crazed addicts.
My brain was tingling.
What the hell had they done to me? Everything spun crazily, and every time I blinked random images and sounds flashed in my head. White walls, a frowning man in a lab coat, monitors blinking and beeping, shouting in a foreign language, a chest straining against restraints, a bright light…blindingly bright.
I opened my eyes and found myself leaning back against the side of a building, hot window glass against my back, and my head tilted toward the light of the rising sun. I jerked back and closed my lids against the white-hot heat starting to throb down from the orb. When I opened my eyes again, I saw a man looking suspiciously my way.
Fear gave me temporary mental clarity and the boost of adrenaline needed to straighten up. “Stupid,” I hissed to myself. “What the heck are you doing, on the street in broad daylight?” I took a deep breath of the dirty air and propelled myself forward, off the sidewalk and into the street. I raised my hand for a taxi pod and anxiously looked at the people around me out of the corner of my eye.
My attackers had left, but what if they were coming back? What if there were others? I stood out, obvious in the stupid uniform all high school students were forced to wear. I was spaced out on the streets, looking delirious, smelling of vomit, and in serious danger. I thought of filing a report with the enforcers, the military troops that policed us civilians after the attempted air strikes seven years ago, but everyone knew they were useless when it came to actually helping the civilians, unless you had money. I didn’t have money, but whoever my attackers were, they obviously did. The enforcers weren’t an option.
A taxi stopped in front of me. I opened the door and threw myself inside, blurting out my address to the computer-operated vehicle. It pulled leisurely away from the sidewalk and hurled itself full-speed into the flow of traffic. My stomach lurched, and I heaved onto the plastine seat. The computerized voice said something about financial responsibility, but I wasn’t paying attention.
My body started to vibrate, and when I looked down, I saw my pieces coming apart. Then I blinked, and I was normal again. “Must be hallucinating,” I mumbled. When I finally looked up from the fascinating myriad lines and crags in the skin of my palms, the taxi pod was stopped outside my building.
The automated voice was loud, and I don’t think I was imagining the irritation as it asked me once again, “Valued customer, we have arrived at the specified destination. The charge is three hundred twelve credits. Please swipe your identity link over the payment center and exit the vehicle promptly.” I looked out the pod window to my building. Thanks to my single mother’s workaholic nature, we lived in an area just far enough from the unemployment slums that it was safe enough to walk to school. Or should have been.
I swiped the sheath around my left forearm over the scanner in the center of the pod and climbed out. I couldn’t feel my legs, and had to look down to ensure they were still attached to my torso, but somehow I made it inside, through the doors, into the elevator, and then into our house.
The dark interior of my house was comfortably familiar. Safe.
“I hope this one survives,” rang through my head again. Perhaps not so safe after all.
“Please,” I whispered to the air. What was wrong with me? I was sick. Much too sick.
Before I could contemplate it any longer, my body was swept with a wave of heat. As soon as that passed, a wave of bone-creaking cold spread through me. My brain seemed to be tingling again, along with my spine, and when I took a step toward my room, my vision went dark and blurry. Then the cold floor smashed hard into the side of my head.
* * *
Voices seeped through my ears, as if from very far away.
“Got a call from the school saying she was absent…Can’t believe her!”
Some mumbling, and then louder, “Well, I don’t work to send her to school so she can become some delinquent and put us on the enforcers’ radar! Live quietly, I say…”
The door opened, and I tried to talk, to ask for help, but I couldn’t muster the strength to push the air out of my lungs.
“Oh my god. Eve, are you okay?” My mother shook my shoulder.
“Something’s wrong. Go get the medbot, Mom!” my brother said.
Someone rolled me over onto my back, and then the medbot’s cold sensors were being pushed into my armpits and mouth.
They were saying something else, but speaking in a man’s deep voice, and once again it wasn’t English. What? I didn’t remember them being bilingual. But in any case, the sound was quite soothing, and I found I didn’t care where it came from.
“Evaluation complete. Diagnosis unknown. Treatment unknown. Patient has fever of 105.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Please contact a medical professional immediately.” The robotic voice sounded next to my ear, loud enough to scramble my brains.
My mom’s voice on the phone, rapid-fire and shaking, grating, loud.
Hands on my skin, picking me up and pressing so hard the pain made me black out again. I woke up for a few seconds, in my own bed and staring up at Zed’s worried face.
He just barely squeezed my hand and it felt like my bones would disintegrate, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk.
“You’re gonna be fine. The doctor’s on his way.”
I closed my eyes and drifted off to the sound of the other man’s voice, murmuring gently.
Log of Captivity 1
Mental Log of Captivity-Estimated Day: Two thousand, five hundred eighty-four.
I felt the initiation of a blood-covenant today. It was unlike the others, not another sordid violation. She is a Matrix, perhaps brought here in the exodus. I did not understand what was happening, at first, when I felt her. I fear that the stunted two-leg-maggots have captured her, and are using her for experimentation, like me. But if they are the cause of my blood covenant being initiated, it shows only how ignorant they are. For the first time in many cycles, I feel hope.
Chapter 2
He that dies pays all debts.
— William Shakespeare
I was dreaming. In my dream, I was a thousand little sparks of light, of life, of energy. I was sinking into the flowing expanse. As I settled, I started to reach out and connect to the other pieces of myself. Vibrations traveled through us, and I felt as if I was on the
cusp, about to fall over the edge into understanding. Then I woke up.
I sat straight up in bed, gasping. My mind was reeling, dizzy, as if it had snapped back with the force of a once-taut rubberband. I found myself listening for something that wasn’t there.
I let some of the tension go and looked around. I was in my room, tucked under the covers of my bed, and wearing my favorite pajama set. My brother sat in a chair beside my bed, asleep. The room was still dark, just starting to gray with the approaching dawn.
I shivered and wrinkled my nose. My clothing was damp and my skin grungy from sweat. I really needed a shower. Badly. I peeled back the covers and sheets and crawled out of bed, careful not to wake Zed.
My knees almost buckled when I tried to stand. By the time I’d made it to the bathroom, just around the corner from my room, I was panting, dizzy, and completely exhausted.
I turned on the sink and leaned against the counter for support while scooping water into my desert-dry mouth. I slurped too hard and started to cough, violently enough to hawk up a loogie. I spit the glob of dried blood into the sink, and the water carried it down the drain.
I looked at the bedraggled girl in the mirror. My dark, straight hair floated around my head in a tangled halo, my lips were dry and cracked in bloody lines, skin deathly pale, and the bags underneath my eyes looked bruised. Literally. My jaw was sharper, my cheekbones more defined, and I must have lost ten pounds. Just what I’d always wanted. Except not.
I met my pale blue eyes in the mirror. “You look like crap,” I croaked out, and then started coughing again.
The exertion drained me, and I sat down on the toilet for a few minutes of rest. My body felt strange in a way that I’d never felt before, even after being sick. Something was…different. And my hands and feet ached around the faint scars that still remained from having my extra fingers and toes removed as a baby. I rubbed at the skin where my sixth finger had been absentmindedly.
