Keeper Chronicles: Awakening Read Free

back for meals. Adding an executive chef, Mia, had helped cater to the growing foodie market. They used only local produce and meats, and each morning prepared a unique seven-course breakfast. One guest, thinking to put the claim to a lie, stayed eight nights in a row just waiting for a dish to repeat; he’d brought his wife back every summer since.
    Rebekah should be happier. Perhaps even ecstatic at the success.
    So why did she feel as though someone had taken a melon baller and scooped out her insides, leaving only a hard shell behind?
    A knock on the door startled her awake sometime later.
    Blinking, she rubbed her eyes and looked around. The fire had devoured itself into a slow simmer and the lantern’s wick was nearly consumed so that only a tiny ring of light circled its base. She glanced at her watch: 2:49 a.m. Her father had really outdone himself this time. Probably forgot his keys knowing him.
    Rebekah stood and walked over to the small table where the lantern rested, twisting the gear to lengthen the wick. Blessed light chased away the shadows. Grabbing a fuzzy, white robe out from its hiding place in the cupboard near the door, she pushed her arms through the soft sleeves and tied the sash closed around her waist. Holding the lantern in the crook of her right elbow, she threw the door open wide.
    “What were you
thinking
staying out so late, Dad...” She let the sentence die and hugged her waist with her free arm. In front of her, his hair and clothing dripping from the rain, stood the most attractive man she’d ever seen. “You’re...not my father.”
    He grinned. “I hope not.” As if realizing what he just said, he blushed and looked at his feet for a second. His eyes impaled her as he looked back up. “My car broke down back the road a ways and my phone’s dead. Can I use yours to call a tow truck?”

Chapter Two
    It’s a little known fact that demons, upon first entering the human world, are drawn to bright light. Keepers have debated many reasons for this over the centuries: that the demons are weakened by the trans-dimensional journey and so can only see very bright lights; that they mistake the bright lights for a sign of a city or other large gathering of food; that, much as a human child might, demons simply liked shiny things. Whatever the cause, it made Gabe’s job all that much easier.
    Bologna sandwich in one hand, machete in the other, he scanned the waves from beneath the porch of his dilapidated house at the base of the Willamook Light and waited for the first of them to show. The small house, nestled behind the sixty-five-foot tower, was the only patch of dry land on the tiny island off the Oregon coast. Three nights of breakers crashing over the jagged rock and incessant rain had soaked everything, but the tower took the brunt of the attack like the prow of a boat slamming into a wave, slicing it down the middle and protecting the house in its shadow. It was a good thing, too. Weakened from the constant damp, the timbers might collapse if he sneezed hard.
    Taking another bite of his sandwich, Gabe chewed mechanically. If tonight was anything like the last two, he’d need his strength. A forked tongue of lightning arched from the clouds, slamming into the ocean. So it began. He had maybe seventy to seventy-five seconds before the first one reached him. Stuffing the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, he put in a pair of ear buds, lowered the goggles over his eyes, and pulled down the hood of his sweater. Two more shots of lightning lit the sky. Thirty seconds. He took out his phone—whoever invented the life-proof case tough enough to be run over by a car or dropped in a bathtub was a genius—and set it to play his Frank Sinatra demon slaying mix.
    Twenty.
    Gabe did a final check of his weapons: crossbow and spare quivers slung over his back, second machete sheathed on his belt, one curved dagger secured to each thigh, and throwing knives lining his vest above his Green Lantern