The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2)
Read The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Rob Blackwell
The Soren Chase Series
The Last Blog (A Soren Chase short story)
The Forest of Forever (Book One)
The Pretender
(Book Two)
The Woman in the White Mask (Book Three, coming 2016)
The Sanheim Chronicles:
A Soul to Steal
(Book One)
Band of Demons
(Book Two)
Give the Devil His Due
(Book Three)
Audiobooks
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
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For Maia, who saved this novel.
Part I
Chapter One
Soren Chase drew the hood over his head and waited for the human sacrifice to start.
He stood in the far back, craning his neck for a better view. There were at least nine or ten rows of people in front of him and many were quite tall. He considered jumping up and down so he could see better, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a cultist would do.
Besides, it was undignified.
He was Soren Chase, slayer of supernatural beasts. He would not hop up and down like a pogo stick. Nor could he part the crowd of psychotic Satan worshipers by politely asking them to step aside. He needed a different plan.
But his success in stopping the sacrifice depended on his ability to see what was going on. He looked again at the crowd of hooded cultists and frowned. He felt like he’d just left this party. Two months ago, he’d been in a forest with a bunch of crazed acolytes willing to die for their beliefs, which unfortunately included murdering innocent people. Now he was standing at the back of a crowd with a similar agenda.
At least this time, they were indoors. The sacrifice was being held in some kind of abandoned shopping center—Soren thought it had once been a Kmart. There were aisles of empty shelving, a dozen rows of checkout counters, and lots of open space. There were no lights on, but the cult members were holding candles in their hands. The glow made the former store look creepy and ominous. Or maybe that was due to the low chanting, or possibly the occasional scream from the unwilling sacrifice at the front. It was hard to be certain.
One thing he
was
pretty sure about: at least some of the figures in front of him weren’t human. The cult’s leaders, at least, were
guai
, Chinese demons whose name literally meant “freak.” Soren wasn’t sure exactly what they looked like—his books didn’t have a drawing—but he understood they were strong and had horns. They were monsters.
You’re a monster, too
, a voice in his head said.
You’re a pretender. You steal people’s faces and murder their families.
Solid point. But he wasn’t into virgin sacrifice. Or at least he didn’t think he was.
Guai, on the other hand, lured in human followers by promising them power and wealth if they helped ritually murder a young, “unsullied” woman every full moon. From the looks of it, business was booming. There were probably a few dozen human cultists inside the store, all wearing deep maroon robes.
But Soren needed a better view. It was going to be hard to stop the proceedings and save the girl if he couldn’t see.
“Brothers and sisters,” a deep voice intoned, obviously projected with some kind of sound system. “Welcome, welcome. It is time once again to feast on the powers of darkness and embrace the shadows.”
Soren had to stifle a laugh. He hadn’t been an English major, but even he knew you couldn’t “feast” on darkness, and embracing a shadow was ridiculous.
But he had an idea. While the speaker began spouting more nonsense, Soren started walking cautiously around the group. Hopefully, anyone who spotted him would assume he was part of the show.
He tugged at the hood once more to be sure nobody could see his face, or the sunglasses he was still wearing. The voice started talking about opening a river of blood, and Soren began to move faster, edging around the group. The cultists didn’t give him so much as a glance. These guys were not very security conscious—that was for sure. They were either stupid or so powerful they assumed they had nothing to fear.
He smiled underneath his hood. He thought he could give them a scare.
Finally, Soren spotted the figure standing on a small box in the front, looking down on the proceedings. He held a microphone connected to two speakers on either side of the crowd. A young woman in a low-cut and revealing white dress was chained to a post at the front. She looked young, maybe just sixteen, and too skinny. Her arms appeared to be little more than bone. Soren wondered if she’d been kept in a dungeon somewhere. He felt a wave of pity for her.
“We sacrifice purity; we sacrifice innocence,” the man with the microphone said. “We sacrifice the world as it was when it was new, so that we may gain power in the world as it is now.”
Whatever. There was always some bullshit reason why a sacrifice had to die. Soren needed to make an entrance, and soon. He sneaked up behind the man on the box just as two hooded men approached the girl. They each held a long, curved sword. The girl pulled against her chains, and screamed for help. She begged anyone in the crowd to save her.
How many like her have you killed over the centuries?
Okay, fuck the voice in his head. Really. He was working a case and if he didn’t get his head on straight, a young girl was going to die. Soren pushed the hood off his head so he had better peripheral vision, and then grabbed the man in front of him in one swift movement.
He’d intended to take him midsentence, drawing everyone’s attention toward him, but he accidentally snagged the man when he was taking a breath. The cultists were so focused on the sacrifice that none of them appeared to notice their narrator had just disappeared.
The man struggled against him, but Soren calmly knocked him out with a blow to the head. As the man slumped to the ground, Soren plucked the microphone out of the man’s hand and stepped up onto the box, surveying the crowd. The cultists appeared to be in a kind of trance. They stood fixated, unmoving, watching as the robed figures raised their swords over their heads, and prepared to bring them down upon the woman.
“Attention Kmart shoppers,” Soren said, and his voice came out loud and booming. “There is a blue-light special on cult robes in aisle seven. Know someone who wants to join a vicious cult? You’ll find the perfect size and an arrangement of colors.”
There were audible gasps in the crowd. The two cultists with swords abruptly turned in Soren’s direction.
“Why just wear red when you can ‘feast on darkness’ and ‘embrace the shadows’ in fuchsia or golden orange?” Soren continued. “Our prices are so low you can stock up on a range of colors. Worshiping Satan doesn’t mean losing your sense of style.”
“Who dares interrupt the sacrifice?” said one of the cultists carrying a sword. The voice came out rough and gravelly, and Soren understood why this guy wasn’t the narrator.
Soren looked beyond them into the eyes of the young woman who had been marked for sacrifice. Everyone else in the place looked angry, but her expression was one of hope. However else this went down, he had to get her out of here alive.
Soren looked down at the leader who spoke to him, realizing that he was bigger than all the others. He clearly hadn’t bought his robe at Kmart, because he stood eight feet tall with a bulk to match his height. He practically seemed to be bursting from his robes. Soren couldn’t see his face, but he knew he wasn’t human.
“The name’s Soren Chase,” Soren replied. “And everyone who doesn’t leave in the next two minutes is going to die.”
There was a low chuckle from the cultist who had addressed him.
“I’ve heard of you,” the monster said. “You are nothing but a weak mortal who’s been very lucky in the creatures he’s encountered. Your luck runs out today, fool.”
“Yours has already run out,” Soren said. “The police are on their way.”
This was a lie, but it had the intended effect. It seemed to break whatever trance the people were in. Several cultists in the back began leaving. It was just a few at first, but more started to depart once they saw their brethren fleeing.
“Fools! If you leave now, the guai will remember!” the leader screamed. “We will hunt you down!”
If anything, his remarks seemed to panic more people. After a couple of minutes, at least half of the group had streamed out the door. That was fine with Soren.
“Anyone else?” Soren asked. “Then let’s get this party—”
The leader growled and pulled the robe off his head, revealing his face. The first thing Soren noticed was the horns. There were horns on top of its head, horns sprouting from its ears, a giant horn where its nose should be, and two horns that jutted out of its eye sockets. Those horns had eyeballs at the end of them. The guai pulled off the rest of its robe to reveal a similar body. He gave Soren the impression of a giant porcupine on steroids.
“—started,” Soren finished. “Wow. You are one horny demon, you know that?”
The guai
rushed toward Soren with its sword outstretched, screaming as it came. Soren responded by vaulting off the box, intending to jump over the creature’s head. But he hadn’t noticed some low-hanging lights, or maybe he just jumped higher than he meant to, and hit his head as he cleared the guai. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it interrupted his momentum, and he fell to the ground short of his destination.