Echoes of the Past (Demon Squad) Read Free

She would have taken the portal seeing how she was carrying Chatterbox. Hard to slip out unnoticed with a severed zombie head that never shuts up stuffed under your arm.
    My senses not picking up anything in or around the house, I figured the storm had blown it open. Ethan and Jonas had burnt the wards out when they’d come to collect me the first time, so I wasn’t too worried about it, but paranoia runs deep in my blood. I pushed my will out further and scanned the area. There was nothing unusual.
    I peered outside. The night was quiet, and the street empty, unlike the last time I’d answered my door. The slight wind fluttered past me and chilly water splashed against my cheeks, the rain blowing straight toward the front of the house. It felt good. I took another sip of my beer and watched the shower for a minute, standing in the doorway. Lightning crackled in the distance and lit up my front yard, drawing my attention to something reflective on the sidewalk. I stepped off the porch and went to where I’d seen the flicker.
    It was a silver-looking coin, the size of a half-dollar, lying on the ground. Picking it up, it was heavy in my hand and a little rough, as though it were made of pewter. I glanced at the coin and saw it had a design on its face. It was like one of the old Batman TV series sound effect balloons. Jagged edges in tinted red made it look like an explosion. The word Bam! was printed on it in bold, black lettering.
    I looked up to see a flash in the distance, above the rooftops of the house across the street. My mind processed it as lightning, but something more primal screamed a warning.
    A bee sting of agony screamed to life at my forehead. My legs collapsed and I was knocked backwards onto the porch, crashing hard into the ground. Stars swirled before my eyes and I couldn’t see. I tried to get up, but my arms and legs were numb. I couldn’t feel them. My thoughts stumbled all over each other as I tried to think.
    The stars winked out one by one as blackness flooded the edges of my vision. I felt my body convulse…and then I felt nothing.

Chapter Three
     
    “I told you he’d survive.”
    A strange, smooth voice filtered through my ears and slid muffled into my brain. I heard the words, but I couldn’t make much sense of them; they sounded almost foreign. Pain flitted at the edge of my senses, muted and nagging more than debilitating, but it was there. Bright dots danced across the screens of my eyelids, but I was afraid to open them. There was a slight sense of motion and pressure inside my skull. It felt like there was a worm wiggling its way out of my brain.
    “Damn. That’s some freaky shit right there,” another voice said from somewhere above me, this one rougher as though it belonged to a lifelong smoker. It sounded clearer than the first.
    Cold and dizzy, I lay there as consciousness bitchslapped me into coherence and chased the pain away. The skin at my forehead twitched and something warm and wet slid down the side of my head, bouncing off my ear and thumping to the floor beside me. Logic and reasonable thought came back, at least as much as I was capable of, and it hit me what happened.
    I’d been shot .
    “What. The. Fuck?” Fury burned my cheeks and filled my veins with adrenaline. I sat up in a rush and opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the barrel of my .45 leveled at my face. My heart stilled in my chest. You think I’d be used to it by now.
    “We both know what kind of bullets are in this, so let’s keep it civil.”
    I glared past the barrel to the hand holding it, then up the black-clad arm to the man behind it. Dressed in what closely resembled a SWAT uniform, though with no identifying markings, the man who held my gun was older, but there was no taking his age for weakness. Shaved bald, his bushy eyebrows only had a sprinkling of black amidst the gray, but they drew my attention to the swirling green of his eyes. Narrowed, they stared at me from a