Chains Of Darkness: The Complete Book

By Eve Hathaway

From the Publisher that brought you popular short story series Witching Call, Hostile Hearts, Earthbound Angels, The January Morrison Files Psychic Series, Ralph's Gift, Song of Teeth, Children of Time, Tropical Storms, Friend Zone and now the complete book of the Chains of Darkness Series....

There is the never-ending battle of light and darkness that symbolizes the balance of the world. This balance is threatened by one entity - a being that is both a demon and angel. It should be stopped in its quest of ultimate destruction. And one teen-age girl is chosen to do just that. Is she up for the task?

Fifteen-year-old Melinda escapes the madness of the cult she was trapped in since she became an orphan, but not without bringing with her a boy named Caleb. She has a unique ability of seeing what regular people cannot—the aura of angels and demons. Caleb has the fading aura of an angel and he was imprisoned and tortured by the Elders of the cult. With the help of Gabe, a close friend she has not seen for three years, Melinda escapes with Caleb.

Melinda and Gabe discover what Caleb really is—an evil force that will upset the balance of good and evil that has existed for millennia. He can only be subsumed by the one whose blood runs in his veins, a fallen angel named Daniel. But Daniel is in hell, being tortured for all eternity.

Angel Ariel and Demon Azgaroth attempt to use Melinda to stop Caleb, but even as she is willing, things still take a turn for the worse when they all realize it's not that simple. Their attempt to find a way to stop him will take them to the ends of the earth and to hell and back, in a journey that is beyond enemies and friends, beyond love and hope, and beyond the need to survive....

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EXCERPT

“I DON'T UNDERSTAND,” Melinda says, now. “What’s this got to do with Caleb?”

“After Daniel fell from grace, we lost track of him,” Ariel says. “A few years later, Father Pendleton informed us that he’d died in a car accident. He performed the last rites and sent us a vial of his blood, as a kind of memento, or something. I don’t know—you humans are always so sentimental.

“Anyway, after the magma worm killed Uriel, we—and by that I mean the seraphim—nullified the truce and were commanded to catch a demon. What hell did to Remiel, we would do to one of theirs, so we caught a demon, and then the archangels used Daniel’s blood to wrestle him into an angelic form, and bind him to our side. At least, that was the idea, because he escaped before he could be bound, and, well, you’ve seen what he can do.”

“So how do you stop him?” Melinda asks.

“That’s the thing. We can’t,” Azgaroth says. “Neither of us can kill our own kind. And since he’s half of each, nobody can touch him. The only one that can kill him is the one who spawned him, and Daniel is already dead.”

“But he did father a child before he died,” Ariel jumps in, before Melinda can say anything. “A daughter.”

And Melinda puts two and two together, and suddenly their interest in her makes a lot more sense. “So...you’re saying that I’m the only one who can stop him,” Melinda says, slowly.

Now she understands—or at least, she thinks she does—why Caleb didn’t destroy her and Gabe.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra Ross
• Release date: Aug 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301449729

Book preview

Chapter One

TICK TOCK.

The grandfather clock downstairs ticked off the seconds that had passed since Aunt Frances and Uncle Josiah went to bed. Melinda listened for their creaking bed -- one body, then the second. In fifteen minutes, Uncle Josiah would begin to snore. But even after three years of living with her aunt and uncle, she still had no idea if her aunt ever sleeps.

Tick tock.

She suspected that at least, she had not been sleeping deeply. Although she knew that her aunt could not read her thoughts, Melinda also knew that she suspected something.

It was the night before her fifteenth birthday -- and her wedding. Melinda had been planning her escape for three months now ever since her aunt and uncle arranged for her to become Old Man Herman's third wife. She tried not to think about the consequences if she were to get caught. The last girl to protest a marriage had been forcibly raped by her betrothed in front of the elders.

Rumor had it that she lived, still bound in chains in the basement of the man she never married, every year giving birth to a child whom she would never see. And she had merely protested. What Melinda was doing probably warranted death if she were caught.

So she had better damn well not get caught.

Tick tock.

She reached over her head to push the curtain aside so that the light of the moon could shine on the alarm clock on the dresser. Ten o'clock. She had two more hours to wait. Melinda felt the exhaustion from the day's labor creep up on her, but she had poured some of her uncle's morning coffee into a thermos earlier that morning and drank it before she went to bed.

Now, it was all she could do to keep her body under the covers. Luckily, her cousin Lucy was nine years old and a sound sleeper, so she didn't wake when Melinda slowly eased out of the warm bed and tiptoed out the door.

Until then, though...

Tick tock.

Three years ago, her mother got ran off the road on the way to Melinda's recital. In any other state, it would have meant a hospital stay... maybe a few stitches and a cast. But in Boulder, Colorado, it was a death sentence. It wasn't until she saw her Aunt Frances at the funeral that she understood why her mother never mentioned her past.

Three years, living with these crazy Christian Knights, kneeling to pray and biting her tongue and singing the praises of the simple life -- all the while scouting for a way out, watching the timing of the patrols that circled the compound, learning which floorboards squeaked and how to move silently through the creaky clapboard house.

It all came down to this night.

And the boy who was not a boy, but an angel.

The elders said that he was possessed by the devil, but Melinda could see the truth behind his form. It was a gift of hers that she had kept secret in this dangerous place -- being able to see angels and demons as they stalked the earth.

During her first year in the compound after her mother died, she wondered if somehow the gift had died along with her freedom, because she could not see any of the glowing auras in the people they inhabited. She still did not know what to make of the fact that the cult was so isolated that neither heaven nor hell would bother with it.

But then Caleb wandered into the compound, and though she knew him for what he was, nobody else did. When they discovered he didn't know how to speak and had nothing between his legs, the elders decided he was possessed and needed to be exorcised.

Since then, he had been kept in the equipment barn, crammed into a large dog crate. Nobody quite knew what the elders have been doing to him for two years, but the screams that emanated from the barn frightened even grown men into grumbling about letting the boy go.

Still, nobody dared enter the barn to do it.

The hands of the alarm clock converged on midnight. Everybody was resolutely asleep. Melinda reached under her pillow, pulled out her old sneakers, and slipped out of the room like a shadow.

Tick tock.

She was wearing the clothes that she brought with her when they first moved her to the compound -- sweatpants, socks, Polartec fleece sweater (they allowed her to keep these because they were more useful than vain). She was carrying her sneakers -- she hadn't tried them on this floor. There was no telling if they would squeak.

Her heart was going like a trip hammer and cold sweat broke over her as she went, ever so slowly, down the stairs, each step a careful consideration of her weight on the wood.

The door to her aunt and uncle's bedroom was closed, but that didn't mean Aunt Frances was lying in bed, sleeping. For all Melinda knew, her aunt could be wide awake, just waiting to throw open the door and catch her deceitful niece who was obviously trying to escape, and then throw her upon the justice of the elders. She wanted to be out the door now.

When she was halfway down the stairs, the banister gave a squeak. The sound might as well be a shriek piercing the silence. Melinda stifled a gasp and held her breath.

Above her, there was a muffled shifting of springs; but after a minute neither her aunt nor her uncle opened the bedroom door. She let the air out of her lungs and she fought to keep her legs from collapsing. And somehow, she managed to make it down the rest of the stairs without a sound.

Then she crept through the living room and into the kitchen. It would have been faster to go through the front door, but the great lock on that door could not be opened quietly, plus the hinges squeaked. The kitchen door was quieter but the tumbling of the bolts as the knob turned seemed impossibly loud, and she wondered how her aunt could possibly not hear the grating noise of metal-on-metal, or the gunshot clarity of the click as the door opened.

Tick-tock.

But still, the house remained silent. And as the cool night air rushed past Melinda, she breathe a sigh of relief. There was a peculiar finality to the act of closing the door behind her.

Ahead of her, there was the night. Behind her, the nightmare.

And on the horizon, a new dawn.

Chapter Two

MELINDA DIDN'T THINK there were patrols within the compound but she kept her head up as she laced her sneakers anyway. Uncle Josiah had been grumbling about one of the elders making such a proposal but nothing seemed to come of it. Nevertheless, she kept to the shadows, hoping the navy blue of her clothing was close enough to black. The moon was full tonight, but the clouds were patchy so what light there was shifted, rendering even the shadows unsafe. In the dark, she was even more aware of how sharp the blades of grass were against her fingers and how loud the crickets really were.

Shut up! she wanted to scream. She couldn't hear her own footsteps -- how would she hear if someone was coming up behind her?

It took her longer to reach the barn than she thought it would. She didn't have a watch but the skies had shifted noticeably from when it was first dark and the moon was high and white in the sky now. And this frightened her. What if she couldn't get him out in time? What if he couldn't run?

She pushed those thoughts out of her mind. He's an angel, she reminded herself. Even if they had broken him, he could heal. How she knew that... she wouldn't think about that now, because now, she had to pick a lock.

She reached into her pocket and took out the bobby pin. It was a simple operation, really -- push and slide, until the tumblers fall apart. But it took skill, and patience, and a delicate touch. And warm hands. And daylight. And luck. She was painfully aware of how clearly she could be seen against the barn door should anybody happen to glance her way. The cult members went to bed early, adhering to the old maxim of early-to-bed-early-to-rise. But even though the windows remained dark, it felt as if the houses were watching her, accusing her, sending a silent alarm to the elders. She found herself glancing up at them from time to time, the words 'Please, be quiet' on her lips.

Finally the lock gave, and she slipped into the barn. It was pitch black -- the sliver of moonlight that she let in disappeared as she closed the door. But after a moment, the glow of his aura spilled from behind the tractors. It was faint, but it was enough to keep her from running into the tractors and confines that he was housed with. She was alarmed at how silvery it was. Most angels had a golden aura.

But when she saw him, he was surprisingly whole -- and naked. She had not prepared for that. She hoped Gabe was. A few scratches marred his ghostly pale skin. He blinked at her, his eyes black with pain.

I've come to get you out, she whispered.

He said nothing. She took a slender metal file she'd filched from the foundry and lodged it into the padlock. She took a deep breath and slammed the file and padlock into the ground so that the file crunched into the lock. A bit of shimmying, and the lock sprang open.

Come with me, she whispered, wishing that the clanging as she unwound the chain from the bars of the kennel would stop. The air in the barn was still, silent -- there was no echo. Still, it would be dangerous to assume they were safe. Stay close, and stay quiet.

She led him to the back of the barn where there was a smaller emergency door. She wished she knew what time it was. They would have to go out and pray that the patrols had passed or were still far enough away that they could make it to the first cornfield without being seen. Fifteen minutes between patrols seemed like a long time, but given how much open space there was between the barn and the corn field, their window of opportunity was actually quite small.

She cracked open the emergency door -- it was chained shut. But the chain was so loose that they could both slip through the gap in the door.

There was no one in sight. And together they ran, darting for the corn.

The crash of their bodies against the stalks would have alerted any nearby patrol if there were one. She didn't take chances, didn't stop to listen and see. She grabbed Caleb's hand and led him down the narrow row and to the footpath through the field -- a narrow gap between the rows where people could walk, the easier for the farmers to get home in the middle of the day to have lunch.

They were running when, overhead, a flare burst.

They had been seen.

Shit.

Chapter Three

MELINDA HAD HOPED to at least get to the edge of the corn before they were seen. They were moving quickly, without disturbing too much of the corn, but it will be obvious which path they were on.

She turned into a bare row where they had laid down the water lines this year and followed that. They were a little noisier -- there was less room -- but the tassels overhead were still and that's what mattered.

In the distance, she heard men shouting. Keep running, keep running. Her legs burned, but she willed herself on. A stitch knotted in her side, stabbing pains shot through her with every step. Nobody ever died from pain, she told herself. Right?

Caleb managed to keep up with her as they turned onto another footpath. She didn't know the corn fields that well that it made her nervous not to follow the original path. Gabe would be expecting her to come out at one spot -- if he's there. It was the only part of her plan that she could not prepare for. It was the only part of her plan that must not go wrong.

It was too late to turn back.

They ran. The darkness carried the menacing roar of diesel engines being revved.

Oh, fuck.

And suddenly there was no more corn, just grass. They had made it out of the fields, but she could tell by the sound of the engines that they were going around the corn. They had gotten only a few minutes, at the most, before the men caught up to them.

That was when she took Uncle Josiah's Zippo lighter out of her pocket, lighted it, and waved.

And a good 300 yards away, it was answered by a flicker