Bonds That Break (The Havoc Chronicles Book 3)
Read Bonds That Break (The Havoc Chronicles Book 3) Online
Authors: Brant Williams
Bonds That Break
Brant Williams
Copyright © 2014 by Brant Williams
First Kindle edition published 2014
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Tian Mulholland
Dedication
For my wife, Caroline
who helped me find the will to write again.
and
for my children,
who keep me young at heart.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Decisions, Decisions
Chapter 3: Plastic Girl and the Barbie Mansion
Chapter 4: Council Under the Mountain
Chapter 5: The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter 7: A Meteorologist's Worst Nightmare
Chapter 9: Loyalties and Priorities
Chapter 10: Cold and Comfortless
Chapter 13: Needing a Little Space
Chapter 16: The Weight of the World
Chapter 20: The Last Berserker
Chapter 21: Voicemail From the Dead
Chapter 23: My Informant Revealed
Chapter 25: Nidhogg and Yggdrasill
Chapter 1
Hunting the Hunter
I could feel him nearby. A hot, putrid presence. A sickening darkness that made both my stomach churn and my body feel like I was running on the surface of the sun wearing thermal underwear. Margil was close.
The air in Hong Kong was warm and humid, much hotter than I was used to in Washington. There, the temperature always dropped in the evening. Here, it was after two in the morning and the night showed no sign of cooling down.
I looked over at Rhys – something I really enjoyed doing – and through the glow of his 'zerk saw an expression of strain on his face. He clearly felt Margil's presence, too.
On my other side, Shing ran along silently. Not that he was ever exactly chatty. He too was 'zerking and completely focused on the task at hand.
I couldn't blame either of them for being focused. It had taken several long months to finally track down Margil. He had been too far away by the time we could start searching for him, and the trail had been ice cold. We had tracked him across three continents and were now close enough to have a chance at binding him.
And I was the only one who could do that.
Until a year ago, my life had been about as normal and boring as possible. That had changed the day I became a Berserker. It wasn't like I volunteered for the job. It was a random draft with no chance to opt out – except for death.
There were some seriously cool things about being a Berserker. My senses were heightened, and I could see and hear things better than any regular person could. I had speed, coordination, and Hulk-like super strength. When I 'zerked, I started to glow and was pretty much invulnerable. It was like being a superhero.
The downside was the fact that people around me tended to die at an uncomfortably fast rate.
I had spent past ten months learning about my powers and training so I could help fight the Havocs. The Havocs are a group of monsters or demons, or some kind of nasty-gross creature that had been brought to our world thousands of years ago. Berserkers and Binders are the only things that can stop them. A Berserker's blood can bind and free a Havoc. The Berserker provides the blood and the super strength. The Binder casts the spell that traps them. If you want to free a Havoc, you have to sacrifice a Berserker and drain all his blood on the place where the Havoc was bound, and with our powers, let me tell you, that is not an easy feat.
Rhys raised a hand, signaling for a stop. Shing and I slowed beside him.
"I've lost him," he said. "I can't feel him anymore. Can you, Madison?" He looked at me inquiringly. His blue eyes locked on mine, causing my heart to skip a beat and my knees to feel weak. Sure, I could derail a freight train with one hand, but a single look from Rhys and I was once again a giddy high school girl madly in love with her uber-wonderful, handsome, powerful, and to be quite honest practically-perfect boyfriend.
I pushed all that aside. There were times to dwell on how I felt about Rhys and there were times to beat the crap out of monsters. This was the latter.
"I still have him," I said. We had tracked Margil outside of the main city and were now at the base of a mountain covered with a deep forest. There was a path running up the mountain and a tram above that looked like it took tourists someplace farther up. I could feel the nausea was stronger up there. I pointed in the direction of the path. "That way."
We started running again, this time up the mountain. I had to admit, running like this was one of the perks of being a Berserker. It was like flying, but on the ground. I never got tired, and I never slipped or tripped.
Margil had been freed several months ago, when another Berserker, Eric, had gone feral. Which basically means he went crazy. By the time the other Berserkers had tracked him down, it was too late. Osadyn had used his blood to free Margil, and Eric was dead. In the end we had bound Osadyn, but that had come at the cost of Mallika, Rhys' Binder's, life.
Which goes back to my point about people around me dying too quickly.
The moon was full tonight. With our enhanced senses the three of us could have easily seen where we were going with only starlight, but the moon rising over the mountain did make for a spectacular view. Not to mention the fact that it would strengthen my Binder powers.
Several dark figures stepped out of the trees ahead of us and onto the path. I recognized what they were at once. They were human, or at least they
had
been human. Now they were zombies. Yep, real zombies. One of Margil's powers was control over the dead. We had met several packs of his creation during our three-month hunt. There must be a graveyard somewhere around here.
Fortunately, real zombies are magically created, and not spawned from a mutant virus, so we didn't have to worry about a zombie plague if anyone was bitten. They were more of an inconvenience than a genuine threat. Margil liked to use them to slow us down when we got too close.
Rhys and I both pulled out our varés – bone swords that unrolled from a flat disk. Shing pulled out his twin tiger hook swords – bone swords with hooked ends and spiked hand guards – and held one in each hand. It was time to fight.
Standard zombie lore had gotten most things wrong. Zombies weren't a slow shambling horde of mindless eating. With Margil in control they were quick, agile, and coordinated in their attacks.
The one thing they did get right was how you kill them – cut off the heads.
I counted over two dozen of them, hardly enough to even slow us down. We continued running toward them, weapons out and ready to attack.
It wasn't until it was too late to run around them that we saw the rest of the horde. There were at least another hundred zombies filtering through the trees.
This was more than a minor inconvenience.
We pulled up short and stood our ground. We had practiced this kind of situation before. We stood in a triangle trying to keep our backs to each other and avoid being surprised from behind.
As the first zombie came into my range, I struck out with my varé and sliced clean through its neck. I immediately focused on the next creature, not even stopping to be sure the body had crumpled. With this many attacking at once, we needed speed if we were going to keep from getting overwhelmed.
Rhys and Shing used the same tactic. Watching Rhys fight was always an awe-inspiring vision. He was so quick and graceful that all his attacks looked like a single fluid movement. I had to force myself to look away and concentrate on the zombies in front of me.
On they came, wave after wave of them. How big was this graveyard Margil had found? Again and again my varé flashed out, slicing through zombies, and I kicked them out of the way as they fell. The bodies began piling up and we had to give ground to simply have room to continue fighting and not trip over undead corpses. Unlike the bringers that Osadyn had used to fight us, these zombies didn't have the good manners to collapse into puddles of black goo once they were killed.
One zombie managed to sneak up on me and grab my leg. It opened its jaws and tried to bite my calf. While not fatal, I had learned from first-hand experience that a zombie bite really does hurt. Since teeth are bone and were once living, Berserkers are vulnerable to bites.
Before the zombie could sample my flesh, I thrust down with my varé and pierced through the creature's skull. The zombie shuddered violently and slumped to the ground. I pulled out my dripping varé and whipped it around to get most of the zombie juices off of it. Why did monsters always have to be so gross? Why couldn't we be attacked by fluffy unicorns or ponies that turned to vapor when we killed them?
I would totally love to take on Rainbow Dash.
The rest of the fight continued pretty much the same: hack, slash, decapitate, and move on to the next. Zombie killing is just a gross, messy business. I would be glad when Margil was bound and we would never see these things again.
We left the final seven zombies for Rhys to finish. This was the fun part, to see what kind of amazing moves he would pull off – kind of like watching the super finishing move in a video game.
Rhys spun around, slicing through four zombies with his first strike, then he somehow caught the final three zombies lined up in a row and drove his varé through their heads in a single thrust, like the world's most repulsive shish kebob.
I ran over and gave Rhys a huge hug. It probably says something about how messed up my life had become as a Berserker to admit that watching him kill those zombies was kind of hot.
"No one kills a zombie like you," I said with an exaggerated sigh. I looked up at him, batted my eyelashes, and pressed the back of my hand to my forehead, as if I were about to swoon.
Rhys rolled his eyes and pulled me in tighter. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard that pickup line before."
"Ahem," said Shing. He looked up the mountain in the direction of Margil. "We may want to consider moving faster if we wish to bind this Havoc."
And that was about as close to a direct request to move as we would get from the ever-polite Shing. He was older than almost all of the Berserkers I had met – which meant he was
really
old. One of the side effects of being a Berserker was that they aged at a much slower rate than regular people. Something like one year for every thirty years that passed. While Shing looked like he was in his late thirties or early forties, he was actually over seven hundred years old.
We started running up the mountain again, moving quickly because all of us wanted to finally bind Margil so we could go home and rest.
The path followed the lines the tram took and continued for several miles up the mountain slope. Before we knew it, we had emerged from the woods into what at first looked like a small village, but on closer inspection was more like a theme park. There were wide stone walkways lined with stores and lamp posts. Up above it all was the biggest statue of Buddha I had ever seen. The bronze statue sat on a giant lotus blossom that rested on top on a flat stone building. A massive staircase lined with hundreds of colorful flags led up to it. The sheer scope of it was breath-taking.
Fortunately, in the middle of the night, the place seemed to be deserted. And a good thing too, for there on the giant staircase was Margil, massive and sinister, eating what looked to be the final bits of some poor security guard.
Margil was the third Havoc I had seen. Each of the Havocs looked different from the others. The two that I had previously seen were more reptilian in nature. Margil, however, seemed to be more like a cat than a lizard. A giant cat with curved tusks, six legs, and some sort of hard spiked shell on its back – like a horrific cross between a turtle and a saber tooth tiger, mutated and blown up to the size of a bus.