The Sword of Saint Michael
D.C.P. Fox
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
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A Word From D.C.P. Fox
About The Author
Copyright
Acknowledgments
For Heidi
Chapter One
Day Zero
The cashier was sweating profusely, her eyes sunken and her skin as pale as could be.
Alexander Williams narrowed his eyes, inspecting her closely as one would a Petri dish in a lab. Her eyes were closed as if she were about to take a nap on her feet. “You look awful,” he said.
“Mind your own business.”
“But you’re handling my sandwich. Whether you pass on whatever you have to me is my business. Do you have a disease? Although it would be very early for the season—”
“I don’t have the flu,” the cashier snapped.
“Well, you clearly have something. If it’s not—”
“What I have is no sick time and no money in the bank to handle the loss of a week’s worth of pay.”
“Ah. I see.”
She had his tuna on rye, wrapped in plastic, in her hands. Alexander wanted nothing to do with that plastic.
“Put it back. I’m suddenly not hungry.”
She grunted, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath. Alexander turned and walked away before she could exhale near him.
Some people are so stupid. Didn’t she realize she should be in bed?
He left the building and walked outside into the bright sunshine. From his vantage point atop the ski trails covered in green grass, Alexander took in the beauty of the Colorado Rockies—jagged and lush with evergreens, some bald on top. The valleys also lacked the thick evergreen forests, the mountains steep enough to cause the lift of the storms, cooling the clouds and forcing them to condense into rain. Or at least that is what he’d told the pretty, young girl that came up and talked to him. He had had to get rid of her. He may have been alone, but he was a married man.
It was then that he heard the screams.
Smart people typically ran away from screams. And while Alexander knew he was a brilliant man, he knew instinctively he was also very stupid in this regard. So, as people rushed out the doors of the cafeteria, Alexander went against the flow of human traffic and stopped at the wrap-around glass wall, cupped his hands, and peered inside. He saw the cashier with a visible sore on her face that wasn’t there before, bashing a customer’s skull against the corner of the counter.
He stood transfixed. Blood covered the victim’s head and neck. He watched as she cracked open his skull and pulled it apart. The strength the whole process must have taken was off the charts. It was impossible.
In shock, Alexander couldn’t move, couldn’t stop watching this terrible scene playing out before him.
Everyone else, it seemed, was screaming and running. But not him.
The crazed woman pulled the body, the head, up onto the counter, and leaned forward to put her mouth into the head cavity. It took a few seconds for Alexander to realize she was eating the person’s brain.
Alexander merely stood there watching the scene, in horror, sure, but also in fascination. What could possess someone to do such a thing? The raw animalism of it shocked him and got his adrenaline pumping.
Suddenly, he realized he was the only person left anywhere near the woman. But he was so mesmerized that he couldn’t move.
She seemed to have finished her “meal.” Alexander was incredulous at what he witnessed next: the woman picked up the pieces of skull she had carelessly cast aside and carefully put the victim’s skull back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Of all the things she had done, this was the most bizarre. The woman was obviously completely out of her mind. The entire process, from violently attacking the customer to piecing his skull back together, must have taken less than two minutes. The mentally ill woman, after completing that task, looked around and made eye contact with Alexander.
Day One
Jocelyn Radomski slid down the twisting tunnel through the earth at blazing speed, her sword secured firmly in its scabbard at her side. Her personal animal spirit guide, Skunk, smiled as he perched on her chest. Skunk, by his nature and mere presence, provided balance in all things, representing the left pillar of darkness and the right pillar of light—of yin and yang. Without him, in addition to her medication, she risked falling into the black abyss—leading to despair and depression—or into the brilliant white—leading to mania and paranoid delusions.
They fell through a magical door in her Inner Temple on the astral plane. Some would judge the temple a mere construct of her mind, but they would be wrong.
Falling onto the balcony on the stone tiles was not painful—her temple, her rules. She could remake it at will. But she stuck with the balconies around a courtyard, and an altar area just outside the atrium, with various astral ceremonial magician tools for performing magic on the astral plane. Flat mirrors stood from floor to ceiling on the altar side, with each mirrored panel doubling as a doorway to the real world. She wouldn’t have to go far if she needed to sprint back to the material plane.
“Well, that seemed . . . off. Don’t you agree, Skunk? The absence of any animal spirits in the Earth garden?”
Skunk looked distracted. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe.”
“Skunk, don’t be coy. What’s up?”
“What? Oh, nothing’s up.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re lying! You’ve never lied to me before.”
Skunk sighed. “OK, it’s snowing.”
“That’s it? It’s snowing?!” She looked around the garden and the temple atrium, up at the towering balconies and doors. There wasn’t any snow. He had meant on the material plane.
“It is the end of August,”
