The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic Read Free Page B

blood, demons and the dead.
    And Cyn…well, Cyn was just a girl. Barely twenty-one and could already boast about having a hand in saving the world. She could boast, though she never did. She was “just” a girl and had no more pretensions than that. The secret that only Jack knew was that she wanted to be shut of the entire fight.
    If she had her way, she would find a farm in Wales and raise geese. When they were alone in bed, with Jack trying to ignore the pain of his latest cut and the emptiness in his chest, she would talk about raising geese. The idea fascinated her and yet, when Jack, in true American fashion, asked if there was a market for goose meat, she was utterly perplexed at the question.
    She wanted only to raise the geese; she didn’t want to sell them and surely didn’t want to see them die.
    Jack loved that beautiful innocent, naive outlook. It was as precious as it was ridiculous. She would describe Hobbit burrows where the geese would live and local children who would come by in yellow rain slickers and boots, pink boots for the girls and muddy blue ones for the boys—to feed the growing squadrons of mellow-minded birds.
    He would laugh at these strange fantasies, but the laughter was usually fake. Yes, Cyn knew spells and she thought she knew what it took to cast them, but she didn’t really.
    Jack hid that part from her. It was easy. He smiled, enjoying the stretch of skin and the working of the muscles on his face; he touched her arm, relishing the million of cells involved in the simple act; he kissed her hungrily as if he had never tasted lips so wonderful.
    And he hadn’t…even if he had just kissed her a minute before. The spells drained him. They drained every part of him. They took that part of him that remembered these tactile experiences. They took the love that he and Cyn spun. And that was both good and bad.
    It was good because he was constantly falling in love with her. Every day it was a new love. Every day it was exciting…but also everyday he would wake up feeling only a fraction of what he had felt the day before. It frightened him because what would happen if he missed a day with her? Would he forget his love for her entirely? Would he wander? Would he care?
    Caring was a real issue with Jack. He looked upon Bob Chapman and wondered why they weren’t beating information out of him. It wasn’t an evil feeling, not like when he was sacrificing the blood and the souls of others; that had been horrible. This was just a lack of empathy.
    Clamping a hand over his latest cut, he struggled to his feet and went to the edge of where the Holy Oil had been poured. The proximity of it made his already squirrelly stomach flutter. For a sorcerer, the concept of God could be just as hard to deal with as that of the Devil—they both took you. They both owned you. They both demanded obedience and sacrifice.
    As Jack watched the priests exorcise the demon in Bob, Cyn pulled her medkit out of the backpack she had kept stashed behind the dumpster. She cleaned out Jack’s self-inflicted laceration, smeared it with bacitracin and then wrapped it tight; the process took all of a minute—she’d been doing this for over a year now and was quick and thorough.
    She then unzipped the light jacket she wore and pulled off the Kevlar vest that had been hidden beneath it. She was red-cheeked and sweating from the heat and with a practiced hand, she spun her thick blond hair into a bun to get it off her neck.
    “Who’s ready for sushi?” she asked, as if there wasn’t a filthy, diseased ravaged man lying on the floor of the alley, screaming his lungs out.
    “What I want are new priests,” Jack said, jumping back into his argument. He too pulled off his vest and forearm guards. “These two aren’t cutting it.”
    “I can’t fire them without cause, ” Metzger replied. In spite of the humidity and the warm night, he stayed “gear-up,” his shotgun at the ready. Akron wasn’t the same as it had