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CHAPTER 12
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OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 13
Kira unclipped and removed the helmet, tossing it aside even as she yanked the bandanna off her face. “Nah, you’re still alive despite all the blood you got on you.” For all her attempt at a rescue, Kira looked like shit, gray-faced and shaky, with a massive black bruise on the right side of her neck where the bullet wound should have been. Knight drank in the sight, feeling almost giddy with relief that Kira had seemingly come back from the dead. For a few precious seconds, Knight basked in the fact that Kira was really alive. Kira disappeared again and Knight had a heart-clenching moment of thinking she was gone for good before the familiar sound of hands tapping away at a computer reached his ears. Then Kira swore for a few long seconds. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” Kira popped back into view, glaring tiredly at the body on the floor next to the lab table. “Xander, the damn doors are retinal locked and I blew his goddamn head off. Get them out of the cells while I get Knight off this t
OUT OF THE ASHES PROLOGUE
When I was younger, I had immersed myself in books and movies of heroic battles. The tales were always gorgeous in a way-heart-pumping and engaging, filled with quick moves and dancing blows. Heroes dashed between villains with ease, always golden, always immortal. Always confident and brave and beautiful. The Strike Force taught me that all those stories were full of shit. Real battle wasn't pretty. You trained to block and parry and dodge, yes, but you didn't think about it, didn't focus on long dancing combinations. You swung. You screamed a lot. You killed as fast as you could and didn't think about anything but the feel of flesh giving way under your hands. And if you were even a hairbreadth too slow, if today just wasn't your day, you were never, ever going to stand up again. I gritted my teeth and prayed today wasn't that day. I lunged forward, meeting the monster midleap, slicing its body right through the gut. Cold, black blood sprayed out, but I was already finished f
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 1
A FEW DAYS AGO Chicago Megacity was a humid, crowded mess on the best of days even after the Apocalypse happened and a lot of people died. Still, the place is far more crowded than other cities, probably because a lot of awakened had come to this place, so the government converted it into a safe zone. So when a Necromancer terrorist group waged war against law-abiding citizens and started wreaking havoc, the Chicago became a shitshow and immediately converted to a worst kind, not even the local normie police could handle. Which meant the best counterattack came not from local human authorities but in the form of government-backed Awakens.“Where the fuck is our cover fire?”Knight Adamson gritted his teeth and raise his hand casting a shield but flinched when magic bullets started raining down at them.He glanced over at his second-in-command and communications and infiltration specialist Sergeant Rina Abello, as she dropped down beside him, magically enhanced AKR-75 assault rifle
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 2
Knight Adamson got out of his sleek Bentley and handed the code-keys to the valet hovering outside his car door. Buttoning up his sleek black suit jacket for the walk into the restaurant, Knight bypassed the small crowd waiting in the lobby hoping to be called off the waitlist by the beautiful hostess who guarded the tables behind her with a creepy smile that he always found disturbing.“Reservation for Adamson at ten o’clock,” Knight said with a quick smile once he caught her eye, “Sorry, I’m a little late.”The woman’s gaze flicked down at the notepad she's holding and nodded. “Of course, sir. Your party is waiting for you. If you would please follow me at your table?”She smiled at him and spun on her sky-high heels, her off-the-shoulder structured dress looking as if it had come right off the runway and leaving little to the imagination by way of sheer panels in the bodice. The Terraces always employed gorgeous people as a company aesthetic, but she wasn’t his type in the least. K
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 3
Knight didn’t know the name of the bar he ended up in, only that it catered to the techie elite, business-oriented and political types, not your Average Joe or those in the military, and it had a solid selection of brand-name whiskey he’d been drinking like water for the past hour. Shame he didn’t feel anywhere close to drunk, but he rather thought he could make it to buzzed if he emptied another bottle or two of Macallan twenty-five years. As an Awakaned who specializes with his enhanced strength, he couldn’t really get drunk unless he really, really tried. At one hundred dollars a glass, price wasn’t an issue. Keeping his cover intact was the more pressing problem. He’d left Terraces wearing a suit, not a uniform, which meant he needed to steer clear of the bars he and his team usually frequented so as to not invite questions. A strange place put him on edge, but better than having to explain to people with too-knowing eyes why he was in such a shitty mood. Knight chased the last
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 4
Staff Sergeant Kira Martin slipped on her dress and tried to smooth out the wrinkles, but they were a lost cause. At least the cum stain from last night had disappeared, courtesy of a travel-sized bottle of stain remover in the toiletries basket. Fancy hotel rooms apparently came well-stocked for situations like this, and gosh.. Just thinking about last night, it make her horny again as hell. Knight, the name of her partner last night (if its really his name) had effectively ruined her for one-night stands from here on out. Actually, last night hot sex, was almost worth Kira going back on her firm rule of never trying for a relationship with anyone she picked up, no matter how much she liked them in bed. And for the first time in years, she wanted to break that rule. After a two-month-long mission in Syria, fighting behind enemy lines in several countries, and a longer deployment elsewhere before that, Kira had needed to destress. And her usual approach to that task was to fall
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 5
Without a backward glance, Kira took the elevator down to the dazzling lobby with its understated elegance and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Walking with the sure stride of a woman who had places to be, Kira exited the building and waited less than a minute for the doorman to summon a cab for her. Kira gave the driver an address that was practically on the other side of D.C. On a Tuesday morning before the start of rush hour traffic, it would still be an hour before she reached it. The clock on the dash said it was 7 in the morning as she got out of the cab. She had less than an hour to change into her uniform, eat something, and suffer through her adoptive older brother’s worried pestering before they needed to get on the road. Kira wasn’t surprised in the least when the door to their temporary apartment in a residence tower opened before she could even put her key in. “Do you have a good time?” Staff Sergeant Xander Reese asked, his gray eyes full of concern rather than
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 6
Wednesday found Knight leaving his luxury condo in the West End at Rina’s insistence for a late lunch get-together. Rina had as good a grasp on team dynamics as Knight did, with the single exception that she saw it as her duty to watch over Hunter like a goddamn mother hen and probably always would. “I thought you’d be in Chicago?” Knight asked as he slid into the front passenger seat of her Maserati. They’d all received major hazard and survival bonuses after Tripoli, but not enough to compensate for what they lost. Hunter had handed out his own version from his own accounts to his surviving teammates after the fact. Rina had used most of hers to buy a ridiculously fast car to help clear her mind and occasionally outrun the cops when she opened it up along the coastal seawall highways. Rina looked at him over her aviator-styled sunglasses, blonde hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, soft yellow sundress revealing the lean muscles in her arms and slim, defined shoulders. A tangle
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OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 13
Kira unclipped and removed the helmet, tossing it aside even as she yanked the bandanna off her face. “Nah, you’re still alive despite all the blood you got on you.” For all her attempt at a rescue, Kira looked like shit, gray-faced and shaky, with a massive black bruise on the right side of her neck where the bullet wound should have been. Knight drank in the sight, feeling almost giddy with relief that Kira had seemingly come back from the dead. For a few precious seconds, Knight basked in the fact that Kira was really alive. Kira disappeared again and Knight had a heart-clenching moment of thinking she was gone for good before the familiar sound of hands tapping away at a computer reached his ears. Then Kira swore for a few long seconds. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” Kira popped back into view, glaring tiredly at the body on the floor next to the lab table. “Xander, the damn doors are retinal locked and I blew his goddamn head off. Get them out of the cells while I get Knight off this t
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 12
Knight woke up half-naked and strapped to a lab table, mind reeling as if he were high. His entire body ached in a way he thought it couldn’t anymore. “Tu es réveillé. Qui est inattendu.”Knight squinted against the searing overhead lights and carefully turned his aching head to the side. He blinked slowly, trying to get his double-vision to shrink down to one. The man who’d spoken wore a lab coat over a drab gray shirt and cargo pants, most of his attention on the blood he was extracting from his right arm with a larger than normal syringe.“What?” Knight managed to get out, trying to say more but having a difficult time forming the words. His brain didn’t want to string more than a couple of words together, and none of them managed to stay long enough on his tongue for him to speak them. As for the rest of his body, it thrummed painfully with a peculiar edge of numbness that spoke of really, really strong drugs.Knight was certain that was a bad thing, but the reason why was slow t
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 11
Everything hurt.Everything always hurt when she used her powers. But at least she can feel her wounds closing. But it still hurts! Fuck!Kira had to fight to not move, to keep her breathing as slow and unnoticeable as possible as her body was jolted from the motion of a moving vehicle. She kept her closed, listening to the world around her as she tried to reorient herself. Her mind was a little sluggish in the way that spoke of major blood loss, but that was fixable, given enough time.“We should just throw the body off a cliff. Be quicker that way. No one would find it,” someone said in broken English with a broken accent of native speaker. “Someone who shouldn’t might find it and then we’d have the Americans all up our ass again. It’s not worth the risk. Better to bury it deep.”Wonderful, Kira thought tiredly. Guess I get to cross off buried alive on my Situations I Have Been In And Wished I Weren’t list.Sadly, it was a long list.Kira strained her hearing to figure out if there
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 10
A burning sting in Knight's ears told him their comms were dead and maybe all the electronics they had. Which meant their trackers, and any last chance they’d have of the people monitoring the mission finding them. But Knight shoved all of that to the back of his mind and came up swinging.Because there's a fucking rifle aimed his face, its owner looking ready to shoot. Knight grabbed the barrel and wrenched the weapon out of the other man’s hand, the metal crunching under his fingers. He swung it like a bat, watching it make a dent in the man’s skull, the weapon itself crumpling in his grip. He kept moving, trading punches and kicks he didn’t bother pulling with half a dozen soldiers before the sound of a gun going off had him staggering backward, the body slamming into his were very familiar from long hours of holding each other through a night of passion.Knight went to his knees, Kira slumping in his arms, the bullet meant for him having found a different target. The ragged wound
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 9
Rina caught his eye, resorting to telepathy rather than words for their conversation. You’re in a mood.Telepathy was invasive and strange, as if someone had cracked open his skull to shove a microphone into the center of his brain and broadcasted a person’s voice from the end of a tunnel. Rina's mental voice was an echo of her physical one, cutting through the middle of his ears, right behind his eyes. The first few times she’d telepathically linked with him it had hurt like a motherfucker, but with practice, she got better at sending, he got better at mentally listening, and her power was their ace in the hole when comms were no longer an option in the middle of an op for whatever reason.Drop it, Rina.Reese seems worried you might have hurt Martin for whatever reason. And Martin is currently shutting him down, Rina said.Knight fought back a wince, trying not to think about how close to the mark her comment was. We talked, that’s it. I don’t think we’ll have a problem with these
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 8
Knight clipped the strap of his magically enhanced AKR-75 assault rifle to his tactical vest before attaching his individual first-aid kit to his belt and securing it in place. The last checks were done by rote, his hands cataloguing everything he’d need while in the field.“Comms checks,” Rina said from the other side of the ready room, her voice echoing over the headphones in his ears.The team voiced their names over the comms as Knight glanced over at their two newest additions as they were linked into the encrypted comms channel Alpha Team used in the field.“Xander on line,” Xander said.“Kira on the line,” Kira said, most of her attention focused on the .50 caliber gun she was bringing into the field. It wasn’t taken from the AHDF’s armory, which meant it had to be her own. She and Xander were kitted out in field ready combat uniforms, the black design different in style if not in purpose to the ones Alpha Team wore. Knight recognized the coloring and equipment Strike Force pre
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 7
“This is a bad idea,” Xander said in Italian, voice pitched low. Xander glanced at the driver’s seat where the AHDF liaison agent sat, both hands on the wheel as she chauffeured them through traffic.“Don’t you think I know that? It’s not like we had a choice,” Kira hissed in the same language. Xander just scowled at her and crossed his bulging arms over his chest. And Kira glared right back at him, jaw tight as they argued in a series of looks and hand gestures that stemmed more from growing up together as siblings than proper nonverbal military signals. They didn’t trust that the AHDF agent wasn’t fluent in ITALIAN, nor that the car was possibly bugged. They’d been living in the shadows for too long to not be suspicious of everything, even of the people on their own side.On some days, especially the people on their own side. They both had deeply valid reasons for feeling that way, none of which could be discussed in front of an audience.“We’ll figure this out,” Kyle finally said
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 6
Wednesday found Knight leaving his luxury condo in the West End at Rina’s insistence for a late lunch get-together. Rina had as good a grasp on team dynamics as Knight did, with the single exception that she saw it as her duty to watch over Hunter like a goddamn mother hen and probably always would. “I thought you’d be in Chicago?” Knight asked as he slid into the front passenger seat of her Maserati. They’d all received major hazard and survival bonuses after Tripoli, but not enough to compensate for what they lost. Hunter had handed out his own version from his own accounts to his surviving teammates after the fact. Rina had used most of hers to buy a ridiculously fast car to help clear her mind and occasionally outrun the cops when she opened it up along the coastal seawall highways. Rina looked at him over her aviator-styled sunglasses, blonde hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, soft yellow sundress revealing the lean muscles in her arms and slim, defined shoulders. A tangle
OUT OF THE ASHES CHAPTER 5
Without a backward glance, Kira took the elevator down to the dazzling lobby with its understated elegance and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Walking with the sure stride of a woman who had places to be, Kira exited the building and waited less than a minute for the doorman to summon a cab for her. Kira gave the driver an address that was practically on the other side of D.C. On a Tuesday morning before the start of rush hour traffic, it would still be an hour before she reached it. The clock on the dash said it was 7 in the morning as she got out of the cab. She had less than an hour to change into her uniform, eat something, and suffer through her adoptive older brother’s worried pestering before they needed to get on the road. Kira wasn’t surprised in the least when the door to their temporary apartment in a residence tower opened before she could even put her key in. “Do you have a good time?” Staff Sergeant Xander Reese asked, his gray eyes full of concern rather than
