Amy Blankenship - Blood Bond

The eye sockets were the worst as they stared straight up… the eyes had been dug out. Part of the scalp had been ripped away and the skull punctured with brain matter still slowly oozing out of the hole. The mouth had been pulled open and left hanging and the tongue also devoured.

Large portions had been gouged out all over the body and the stomach was lying wide open. Angelica turned away from the scene and covered her mouth with a hand to avoid nausea… it wasn’t helping.

“Poor bastard,” Zachary whispered and knelt down next to the boy. This past week had flown by with a frenzy of demon activity and it didn’t look like it was slowing down. “What’s the official word?”

“The police say it was an animal attack.” Chad answered.

Angelica shook her head, “No animal did this,” she rasped and headed back to the car. “It was the grave.”

Zachary shook away the memory and looked away from the map toward Angelica. “What did you mean when you say it was the grave?”

Angelica frowned, “It’s all I could feel from the body. The wounds were almost too old for me to even feel that. I don’t know how to better describe it but to say that it was the grave that killed him.”

Zachary stepped away from the map and went to his laptop sitting on the coffee table. Linking up with PIT, he sent a message to Storm documenting the latest events… his response was immediate.

“Looks like Storm's pulling in PIT’s major players.” Zachary informed the others and paused before looking up at his teammates. “He’s brought in the fabled Ren… he’s already here.”

Trevor shivered visibly at the mention of Ren’s name. Ren had always been the phantom of the group… more of a legend than a real person because Storm was the only one who had ever met him. He’d once asked Storm who was the most powerful member of PIT and Storm hadn’t even hesitated in his response. But if Storm was sending his second in command, then that meant he was sending an army right behind him.

Zachary and Trevor both knew what that meant… the war was starting.

Chapter 3

During his teenage years, Ren had made it a habit to log into the Paranormal Investigation Team’s database so he could keep up on current events. He was also smart enough to then destroy whatever computer he had used so it couldn’t be tracked back to him. It had been a thrill to breech the firewalls set up on a division of the government that supposedly didn’t exist.

The paranormal investigation team, otherwise known as P.I.T., knew Ren was stalking their assignments and siphoning their encrypted information, but so far they had never caught up with him and they had never found a firewall thick enough to keep him out of their private system. Not only was he stealing their data, but Ren was leaving data behind from his own paranormal investigations.

After several years, the head of PIT had started leaving Rin messages behind the thickest, most encrypted firewalls Rin had ever seen. It was behind those walls that Rin had secretly joined the elusive P.I.T. group, but only on his own terms… that he worked alone.

Whoever was behind that wall not only knew his name, but also some other things about him that no one else knew… like the fact that he wasn’t entirely human. It was only after he’d taken on a level seven demon that had started a flesh eating cult in the Congo and been severely wounded that the head man of P.I.T. had finally caught up with him.

Ren was in the middle of a fight with the skin-demon and very much on the losing end when a hand had gripped his shoulder… the next thing he knew, he was on a small private island in the middle of the ocean. Rin had turned around to come face to face with the man behind the encrypted walls… Storm.

Rin shook his head at the memory of those first few moments. Storm looked like he should have been the lead singer for some 80’s rock band instead of the mastermind behind the most secretive group of people in the world.

Storm had only smiled and removed the hand that had still been gripping his shoulder. “Trying to retire from P.I.T. the hard fast way? Why don’t you stick around a while? I’d hate to lose my best friend, before we have a chance to become friends.”

“What?” Ren winced, holding his hand over his chest where the demon had tried to scratch his heart out.

“Sorry,” Storm sighed reaching for him again. They were suddenly in the half underground, half underwater facility that was hidden deep under the island. “There isn’t anyone here with the power to heal, but I can always take you to someone that can if you’d prefer.”

“No,” Ren practically growled. “If you can give me some needle and thread, I think I can handle staying in one place for a few damn minutes.” He leaned back against a counter trying to stay out of Storm’s reach, “And if you touch me again, you’re gonna lose your hand.”

Storm laughed and opened one of the upper cabinets then waved his hand at all the medical supplies. His smile vanished when Ren unbuttoned his shirt and Storm saw the deep groves the skin-demon had made. A couple more seconds and Ren would have been gone.

“I think that since you have a fetish for demons, you might need to learn a little about them before you challenge another one to a fight.” Storm looked away from the claw marks already knowing what the scars would look like. He’d known Rin for a long time… that friendship just hadn’t happened yet.

Ren reached into the open cabinet and grabbed what looked like a sterilized stitching kit then moved toward the mirror on the wall. “If you’ve met one demon then you’ve met them all… right?” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice as he tried to mentally block out the pain… it wasn’t working.

“Wrong.” Storm corrected, “You only know what I’ve allowed uploaded into the database.” He sat down on the hospital bed in the middle of the room.

Ren looked in the mirror at the man behind him. The things hidden in that database were enough to set the world on fire… enough to where just having the database was a danger. It was hard to believe there was more… but then, he knew some things that weren’t even in the database.

“I’m listening.” And listen he did… for weeks.

Storm was right to keep the information he shared out of the archives for the same reasons the Vatican held their stuff in secret vaults. If some of this information was to reach the normal population, it would be the end of the world as we know it.

Rin knew without a doubt that the man was still withholding information because whatever gods had handed him the power to jump through time and space had also made it dangerous for him to tell anyone anything beyond the present moment. He could be the best history teacher in the world… but if Storm tried to tell anyone the future, it could rip the space-time link… and the link was Storm himself.

He was also right about their friendship. They had been friends from day one, and that was saying a lot since neither of them was the type to trust anyone. Truth was… they were both a lot alike in many ways.

Storm’s little island getaway was actually somewhere in the past but Storm had given it all the comforts of a modern day mansion and a futuristic base. One side of the building made Ren feel like he was in a huge fish tank while the other side was built into the sturdy rock surrounding the island. The best part about it was the complete solitude. This was the one place Ren could come where nothing paranormal could touch him except for Storm’s time jumping ability.

At first, he’d thought Storm was only in his mid-twenties, but after knowing him for over ten years, Storm had never aged a single day so he wondered just how long Storm had been around. Rin’s own aging had even slowed down because he spent so much time near Storm and his power.