Always fascinated by the macabre and the visceral, enchanted by the gracious and the grisly, Joseph Armstead has written and developed stories around horror and the occult as presented in a cool and rational scientific way.

His work is often classified as a mixture of "splatterpunk/cyberpunk/hong kong cinema" with influences as diverse as Robert Ludlum and Clive Barker, to Stephen King and William Gibson, to John Woo and Francis Ford Coppola. Inventive, violent, dark and cinematic, Mr. Armstead's writing embodies the freshest of the new wave in modern horror and suspense-thriller fiction.

Joseph Armstead has written nine novels:  
 
*  NOCTURNES AND NEON, a Novel of the Vampiric [ISBN 0-595-20173-3]
*  PAINMAKER: First Tale in the Book of Dark Memory [ISBN 0-7388-5196-5]
*  BLEEDING TWILIGHT: A Tale of Quinn & the Moon-Chosen [ISBN 1-931391-39-4]
*  DARKNESS FEARS [ISBN 0-595-26315-1]
*  THE SCREAMING SEASON [ISBN 1-59088-213-X]
*  THE DEMOGORGON AGENDA [ISBN 1-55404-137-6]
*  NIGHTFLESH, Volume 1 of The Porphyrricon [ISBN 0-595-86261-6]
*  RED BENEDICTION, A Tale from the Book of Dark Memory [ISBN 0-595-41584-9]
*  ENDLESS NOCTURNES, A Tale of Quinn & the Moon-Chosen [ISBN 0-595-45634-0]          

These books are available at Barnes & Noble Online, Amazon.com, Wings ePress Inc. Online, and at Double Dragon eBooks. 

THE DARKLINK PALLADIN:
Considered witty and bright by most people he met, LORENZ NOVEMBRE remained something of a loner and a brooder. He was a man plagued by memories of another life, a life he’d had to abandon in order to keep what was left of his family, and his sanity, alive. Tortured by doubt, he was nonetheless driven by a very personal sense of duty and obligation. Novembre was not a man who could blithely turn away from those less fortunate than he, less talented than he, less fierce than himself, who needed help --- or who needed Justice. Then, too, there were the things he’d seen, the secret knowledge he possessed as a member of The DarkLink: the secret history of a world that hid half its face from its unsuspecting populace, keeping them ignorant of their darker and more macabre heritage.

He’d been to the darkest places on the planet and back and he knew that nothing was as it seemed.

***************************************

(Excerpt begins...)

I.

Minotte was not having a good time.

She was in dimly-lit pyramidal room built into the vast attic of the manor, a very modern technological addition to the grand old house, sitting in a leather upholstered, motorized chair that slowly revolved on its base as a small group of men and women in silver-reflective tunics tended what looked to be a huge glass sphere set in an aluminum-ringed wading pool.

She was in the Scrying Room, the surveillance nerve center for the manor, and it was the heart of the internal security for the DarkLink headquarters.

Having learned back in the Middle Ages that it was a deadly business setting themselves against the arcane and often lethal powers of chaos and necromancy, the founders of the DarkLink developed a unique and indetectible all-purpose security system by which to protect their many chapter houses. Back then, the DarkLink had kept the locations of their many regional offices secret. Only members of the organization itself knew where their headquarters buildings were and how to enter them safely. Times had changed, though, and, since the DarkLink needed to become sanctioned by official law enforcement and by government intelligence-security agencies so they could cross diplomatic borders, and so their agents would not be harassed by local police, the main bases of operations had become public entitites, listed in telephone books and with local Chmabers of Commerce. They became a non-profit business. They became a known entity. Security within their own walls became an even greater imperative. They created Scrying Rooms, actual amplification chambers for prescient and telepathic mindwaves in which mutant DarkLink agents sat performing incredible feats of accurate remote viewing within the confines of their headquarters. In this way, the DarkLink executives wouldn’t have to depend on electricity nor on the diligence of poorly-paid or unmotivated sentries to protect them against unexpected assault from their non-human enemies. Of course, over the decades, modern technology had still managed to make its way into these bizarre secret chambers, but the emphasis remained on the power of the highly-evolved human minds who inhabited the rooms.

The interior of the room was a mirror-tiled triangle under a skylight, massive server computers sat in racks powered by their own UPS battery stacks, separate from the manor’s own power supply, and a pair of automated camcorders on flexible stalks arch up over the water-borne glass globe central to the room, recording the eerie ESP-induced images that would momentarily manifest themselves on the globe’s surface or within its cloudy, swirling depths.

Just being within a dozen feet of the outer door to the room usually gave Minotte a painful headache. Actually being inside the room made her head pound as though it would explode and set her entire nervous system afire. On most days she simply administrated passage of other psychics and Espers to and from the chamber from her desktop in her office on the floor below. This time was different. Praxas had wanted her in the room and at full alert, senses primed.

And for good reason… he’d known in advance, naturally about the impending visit from the Interpol team and it had seemed to him, given the story that Novembre and Styles had related, that this would be a prime opportunity for the mysterious vampire mercenary group to simply tail the unsuspecting Interpol cops and arrive at his doorstep, weapons in hand.

God, but her head hurt…! Damn psychic feedback…

And suddenly, without further preamble, there they were: the invaders Praxas had feared would appear.

Vampires. Four of them. Two descending from levitating over the eastern and western stone walls surrounding the grounds and two more emerging from inside a large luxury SUV outside the front gates…

They were dressed in full combat gear: web-belts carrying ammunition pouches, paratrooper boots, kevlar trauma vests, Armalite AR-180B assault rifles, and HP-DA Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic pistols in shoulder and hip holsters.

The way the team moved when they entered onto the masion’s grounds revealed that these men were military trained and had a knowledge of urban guerilla tactics. Probably former British SAS or Green Berets.

Four of them. This could get sticky. Vampires were tough and they were vicious. But these were cocky. They figured with their enhanced reflexes and strength, with their near-invulnerability to harm, with their invigorated superspeed healing factors, that they didn’t need more than four to deal with a mansion full of aging armchair detectives and crackpot scholars.

Minotte shook her head. Whoever had hired these mercenaries had not bothered to do their homework about the extensive expertise the DarkLink had with warring against the Moon-Chosen and Demonics and other non-human ilk. They were hardly an organization of leftovers and has-beens, or some daffy group of bumbling ghost-hunters. More fool they.

She tripped the silent intruder alarm…

* * *

“What in HELL?!”, Hugh Marks barked as he leapt up from the antique leather Chesterfield chair he’d been comfortably wrapped in. His fist was already wrapped around the butt of his pistol.

Miriam, and both Carmichael and Morelli, were caught flat-footed, frowning as they slowly looked around the mahogany den that was Praxas’ office. They recognized that the rhythmic flickering of all the lights in the room and outside in the corridor indiocated some kind of trouble and the moderately loud electroinic buzz sounded like an alarm of some kind, but, judging by Mykel Praxas’ cool demeanor and lack of movement, they were thrown as to how to react.

“What is this?”, Miriam demanded in her most direct manner.

“You were followed”, Praxas replied calmly, “by a small paramilitary incursion group. Mercenaries. And most likely non-human.”

With that he leaned over behind his massive desk and opened a drawer. When his hand next appeared over the desktop it held an IMI Micro-Uzi 9x19mm Parabellum machine pistol. Miriam froze in her seat and Marks, standing, took his fingers from off the grip of his weapon. Carmichael and Morelli both had their hands raised, palms out, their eyes wide. Marks allowed himself a small groan: obviously the duo was not quite as tough as they liked to appear. Praxas looked vaguely annoyed.

“Good heavens, this isn’t for you”, he said amicably, “this is for the force of intruders who’re invading the mansion even as I speak.”

“Non-human. You said ‘non-human’ “, Morelli stammered.

“Yes”, Praxas said, “I believe this to be a hostile group of vampires.”

“As opposed to any other kind of group of vampires?”, Marks asked wonderingly.

“There’s no need for racist generalizations”, Praxas chided. “Some of the visitors who come here are alternate species co-existors and are quite well-mannered.”

“Fuck me”, Marks muttered.

“We are surrounded by lunatics”, Miriam said in agreement.

“Hot damn”, Carmichael said, giving Morelli an enthused slap on the back, his eyes sparkling, “We’re in the deep shit now! It’s goin’ DOWN…!”

Morelli looked ill.

“Exactly what is going on here?”, Miriam demanded.

Praxas managed a rueful smile, part astonishment at the Interpol agent’s refusal to abandon her staid policeman’s viewpoint of world order, and partly because he had once been where she was now: desperately trying to hold on to some semblance of the Reality she’d come to know as it slowly slipped away.

“Look”, he said not unkindly, “You know what’s happening. You just don’t want to believe the evidence around you. And right now is not the time to debate it with you. Here are the facts: several paramilitary-trained heavily armed non-human species-variants, predatorial mutations who live on human blood specifically, have invaded this headquarters building because the DarkLink are NOT a bunch of rich crackpot spiritualists and ghost-hunters. We are the enemies of any species of creature that threatens humanity. They know we are interfering in one of their homicidally-inclined conspiracies and so they’re coming to take us out. Now, what do you really know about vampires that matters in this kind of a situation?”

Marks responded first, recognizing the seriousness of the situation.

“Nothing more than what Hollywood has shown us…”, he admitted.

Praxas rose from behind his desk shaking his head. He was a remarkably lean man, moderately tall, and he gave off the authoritative air of an angry funeral director.

“Pity. Very well, here goes: forget that crap about stakes and garlic, they’re not supernatural entitites, they’re as biological as you or I and they do not turn into bats. Most of the really old ones have a severe and violent allergy to ultraviolet radiation, so, yes, they do shun the daylight. However, the younger ones are much more sun-resistant. But, they’re a lot less powerful than the older wampir. Regardless, any individual wampir, male or female, is about five times stronger than any human Olympic athlete and has reflexes seven times faster. They are frighteningly fast and very vicious when they are in killing mode. They are very, very durable and can sustain a tremendous amount of bodily damage before becoming incapacitated. Yes, they can regenerate their cell structure and they can do so very quickly. They are highly-resistant to nearly every human disease and poison. If you shoot them, KEEP shooting them until they’re hamburger and then reload and shoot some more. Bullets CAN kill them, but you have to be relentless in your attack. That’s about all you need to know right now…”

Praxas stopped at the door to his office and turned around to face the Interpol crew as he said, “And do not make eye contact with them. Ever. They are ALL highly talented, very powerful telepaths and mesmerists. It takes little effort on their part to control the average psychically-unenhanced human mind. If at any point I or any DarkLink operative believes that you’ve been turned by one of them and are being puppeteered, we WILL blow your bloody heads off without hesitation. Clear?”

“Yeah, yeah, gotcha…” Marks said drawing his own weapon.

“Then let’s go. Follow my lead, and maybe we’ll survive the next ten or fifteen minutes…”, Praxas snarled as he left the office.


II.

The gunfire was music to their ears. This was Life itself to them: an enemy to battle, a goal to attain, vengeance to be had.

Donohoe, Weygand, von Bucholst, and Holt were trained experienced killers, each over two hundred and seventy years old. They were battle-hardened professional mercs, having fought in the Boer Wars, in the Boxer Rebellion, in the American Civil War riding with Quantrill, riding with Pancho Villa, and then, of course, both World Wars and Vietnam. Lately, in the last decade, their employers had been various families of the Medellin drug cartels. In one way or another and under a half dozen different identitites each, they’d worked with one another hunting and killing both humans and brethren wampir.

These were proud and angry Apollyonu, Moon-Chosen warriors cast out from their Gather-families because of their extreme views and because of their over-riding aggressiveness.

There could be no fallacy of coexistance with the Uninitiates, no dream of a Utopian world where Homo Sapiens and Homo Draeconis would walk side by side into the future. To these soldiers of the Eternal Night, there was only horrible dishonor for the Apollyonu tribes if they continud to hide themselves from the view of human society, a species-wide racial self-hatred wherein they slowly became “businessmen” and “pollsters” and “accountants” as they integrated themselves into human society. La Danse taken to its most suffocating extreme: they spent more time acting like they were humans than they did being true to their vampiric heritage.

And most of this was the fault of continued harassment and the leveraging of hidden influence by The DarkLink.

A group of seven DarkLink security specialists rounded a corner of the second floor central corridor under the manor’s bell-shaped rotunda, guns drawn, shoes scuffing on the glossy waxed floors…

They sounded like a herd of buffalo to the vampires and they smelled their approach even before the humans rounded that corner. Humans smelled of a rich aroma of panic and of raw meat.

A fifteen round figure-eight burst from the Armalite AR-180B assault rifles ripped through them, each slug striking with just under a half-ton of force, and the men spun and jerked, knocked off their feet by the impact. A couple of the security men managed to squeeze off a few answering rounds at the nightrunner mercs, but they hit nothing. Blood spurted and streamed onto the corridor walls and the floor.

Such a regretful waste of perfectly sweet nectar…

The quartet of killers continued their lethal march through the DarkLink mansion.


* * *

Dieter-Karl Morris noticed that something was wrong at the same moment that Novembre noticed. The usual odd aura of being inside an old college university and British Gentleman’s Club was abruptly shattered as a group of gray-haired men in white lab smocks ran by carrying Heckler & Koch submachine pistols. Scientists with guns. Not good. Morris’ thin, eagle-features reflected surprise -- what he was thinking just could not be true .

The group was standing near a stairwell at the southern end of the one hundred twenty foot long, thirty foot wide, two-story central hall through the main manor. It sat under a latticed laded glass skylight and was lined with tapestries and alabaster statuary and a rectilinear hanging garden overhead, muting the glare from the crystalline skylight.

Dr. MacKenzie swore thunderously under his breath and immediately drew his own weapon as Professor Lang, standing next to him and dwarfed by the doctor’s huge frame, stated, “Something bad just happened.”

Novembre and Styles looked at one another, Styles cocked an eyebrow and motioned with his thick fist, making a sign like a fanged snake striking. Novembre nodded. Vampires.

“But it’s still daylight”, MacKenzie rumbled. “They’d dare to do this in the daylight? There are potential witnesses all over the place…”

“Why not”, Novembre remarked. “I would.”

“And there are only witnesses if you leave anyone alive”, Styles stated flatly.

Novembre was already moving down the corridor following the white-smocked science crew, the Beretta 1010 machine pistol drawn, the clip rapidly exchanged from its standard 10mm load to the special red painted clips Novembre kept for vampire warfare, and he quickly began seeking targets.

“Infiltration!”, he shouted over his shoulder as he loped away with a pantherish stride.

“What? Vampires? Here?”, Andrea remarked as she ran after him.

“Christ, she always this dim?”, Styles snapped at Morris as the two followed side-by-side.

In response, Morris grinned nastily and managed a non-committal shrug.

The investigative team had been on their way out from the Westhaven-Surrey Dark House, going to the airport after having been to Outfitting and Signals departments. Signals was the area that electronically tracked and monitored occult beings directly, a surveillance unit. Outfitting was the Dirty Tricks division and they provided weaponry and fake documentation for “special field circumstances”. All the while Andrea had bitterly complained about the degeneration of the organization into a private sector version of the CIA or MI-6. Of course, that in no way stopped her from selecting a segmented, collapsible Kevlar-vest and a pair of Detonics .45 calibre automatics and multiple clips. Preparation was everything…

The explosion of a white phosphorus incendiary grenade in the hall, the concussion deafening and the eruption splashing the walls and floor with liquid fire, the stench of the burning phosphorus and fuel mixture smelling like napalm, let them know just how badly things had gotten very quickly. A wave of intense heat quickly flashed down the hall after the explosion. Someone screamed pitiably in raw agony.

The sprinkler system activated, the water spraying down in a needle-fine torrent, and the emergency lights in the manor flashed on, tinting everything a dull blood red hue. The floors became slick with water and acrid smoke clogged the nostrils.

A hornet’s swarm of gunfire followed. Bullets ripped into wall plaster and through wood, smashed through statuary and slapped the air at mach-speed as they ripped down the hall and into targets.

Novembre threw himself to the wet floor, sliding from the force of his dive, and sighted through the smoky haze and the shower of water at two of the four advancing figures. A practiced combat marksman, Novembre had trouble locking on a target. Damn!

The nightrunners were making excellent use of their superhuman abilities and moved like living lightning.

He quickly squeezed off five rounds from the custom submachine-automatic and was rewarded by a sudden bleat of pain as two rounds slapped into one mercenary at the extreme right of the corridor. Unlike the standard NATO steel-jacketed 10mm bullets in the Beretta’s normal ammo clip, the red clips Novembre used an alternating load containing 10mm expanding head dum-dum bullets. One bullet type contained a tiny drop of nitroglycerine under a paraffin seal in the dum-dum shell’s depressed head. The bullet was essentially a small explosive shell, each one capable of creating a softball-sized hole through two inches of rebar-reinforced concrete. The other bullet type in the clip was a Teflon flat-tip with magnesium-aluminum alloy powder in a depression on the shell. It struck and ignited on impact, burning brighter and hotter with contact to any oxygenated liquid, like blood. Each red clip held fourteen bullets, alternating each type of shell, and Novembre always carried a minimum of three such clips with him at any time.

No wampir short of an Elder could survive more than a couple hits from Novembre’s Beretta.

The wounded merc fell to the floor snarling, scrambling for a target as the magnesium flare bullet erupted a flaming hole in his left upper chest, through his Kevlar. He clawed frantically at the flaming wound, dropping his weapon and scooting backwards away from the firefight, overcome with the agony from the wound as the magnesium burned deeper into his body. Novembre re-sighted and then shot the ageless killer through the front of his skull, the nitroglycerine round rocketing in, flattening, detonating and blowing away the back of the wampir assassin’s skull in milliseconds.

Novembre surged lithely to his feet, firing again, as Styles ran up beside him and loosed a roaring three round burst from his .357 magnum, the cyanide capped bullets slapping into the hip and leg of another merc and the impact launching him halfway up the corridor wall.

Yet even as the nightrunner fell back to the floor, he moved with preternatural feline grace, twisting his body acrobatically in mid-air, and fired back, forcing Novembre to again drop down to the floor, chest-first.

A sudden searing stream of gunfire from behind Styles and Novembre revealed that Morris and MacKenzie had joined the battle, both men soaking wet and squinting through the haze and flames that were now reaching up towards the second floor landing.

The wounded vampire jerked as if lashed by invisible lightning as round after round struck home and he finally spasmed one last violent time and then lay still. In seconds his body decomposed into a pile of wet blackened ash…

A line of tracer slugs stitched a jagged design in the wall next to Styles as he ducked under the return fire from the vampires, a wood and plaster dust-cloud mingling with the water and smoke. He dropped to his knees and fired twice more, but to no avail –

One of the vampires loosed a flashbang grenade, the thick white cloying smoke and the brilliant retina-scarring glare momentarily stunning the DarkLink defenders. It was several long moments before the deafening concussion from the grenade blast dissipated enough for the team to again begin tracking the mercenary invaders.

By then, the remaining two Moon-Chosen attackers were already gone. They left behind the hiss of the fire sprinklers, the crackle of a few small blazes, and the bullet-riddled bodies of a few brave humans.

“Upstairs!”, Professor Lang yelled, pointing.


* * *

Hugh Marks and Mykel Praxas were standing on opposite sides of the north wing corridor on the second floor, with their backs against the wall. They heard the sounds of the grenades and gunfire from the master hall below. They could smell the sulfurous scent of smoke.

They could hear people dying.

Carmichael and Morelli were closer to the stairwell, one standing at the half-wall marking an archway entrance to the upstairs medical library and the other crouching next to a bronze statue of Hermes, messenger of the gods. Miriam Lautec was in position a dozen steps past Marks, deeper inot the second floor corridor next to a doorway leading to some offices. They were all breathing shallowly, ears straining for the slightest sound of an approaching attacker. Past her, a trio of DarkLink agents cradling military-issue M-16 assault rifles trained their aim on the stairs, nervous trigger fingers ready to empty a clip at full auto at anything that looked out of the ordinary.

Although it was quiet for less than twenty seconds, it felt like an hour as they waited for the next phase of the vampires’ assault. Miriam made eye-contact with Marks and frowned, jerking her head sideways in a nod towards Praxas. Marks shrugged. He could only guess at what she was tryingto convey. He was so deep into hunter’s mode, so in tune with a predatorial fight-or-die mindset, that he all but shut out communication with his fellow Interpol officers. Aggravated at his thick-headedness, Miriam made a face and lightly tapped her fingernails against the wall to again catch his attention. The dapper Brit looked at her with cold eyes. She pointed to the two office doors open next to where Marks and Praxas waited and motioned for him to duck inside the doorway. He understood in a flash. She wanted to set a trap, hide part of their forces so the vampires wouldn’t know how many people were in wait for them.

Marks smiled crookedly. She was an exasperating woman. It was as if she still wouldn’t accept the fact that they were dealing with super-strong, super-fast, centuries-old blood-drinking members of the legendary Undead. She was still thinking like a cop.

Marks wasn’t.

He was thinking like someone who’d realized that the human equivalent of a Great White Shark was after him with an eye towards a meal.

To hell with procedure.

When it happened, it happened so extraordinarily quickly they were all caught frozen, unprepared for what they saw.

The two Moon-Chosen mercenaries were coming at them from opposite sides of the mezzanine corridor, at opposite sides of the stairway, and they were running along thee walls, perpendicular to the floor. The wampir warriors had leapt straight up sixteen feet from the firefight with Novembre in the main hall below and were using their telekinetic control over gravity to realign their bodies to a new gravitic axis. They were moving like human spiders and they were simultaneously firing short deadly accurate bursts from their weapons as they came at the Interpol team and Praxas from both sides.

“Oh shit!”, Carmichael exclaimed as he fell backwards, just under a three-round burst from the vampire’s assault rifle, and fired his own pistol four times.

The potted plants in their ceramic vases, the gilt-edged mirrors in their ornate wooden frames and the sextet of small Victorian oval marble-topped tables sitting along the wall, erupted into an explosion of splinters as bullets raked the corridor. The waist-high railing of the mezzanine area disintegrated under the withering gunfire.

Morelli and Marks unleashed a fusillade of shots at the approaching Apollyonu and Miriam spun on her heel, firing at the wampir approaching from behind her, her eyes wide and disbelieving as the creature defied gravity and ran along the wall as if it were the floor.

One of the DarkLink agents screamed as he was stitched from stomach to chin by a swarm of bullets and he flew backwards to crash through the partially open office door next to him. One of the other agents ran shrieking at the mercenary, a gun in each fist, firing wildly eyes wide with terror. The merc barked in fierce laughter as his next salvo caught that agent in the chest and knocked him off the mezzanine corridor to fall to the hall below.

Praxas calmly walked out into the center of the corridor and took aim and the vampire nearest Miriam and the other DarkLink agent and he fired four tmes in rapid succession, the concussve force and recoil from his gun making his extended arms jump.

The vampire was blown off the wall, howling, and he fell heavily onto the floor, shoulder first, scrambling to get up. His weapon fell out from his fists and clattered across the slick floor. The merc had been hit in both shoulders and in the neck, near the clavicle. Blood was spraying across the floor. Praxas lightly jogged over to the nightrunner and stood over it as it swiftly rose, whipping out a serrated edged ten-inch blade knife in a motion so smooth and so fast it was a blur. It ripped across Praxas’ waist even as the experienced occult investigator quickly danced backwards. It sliced through his suit’s vest and shirt and left a bleeding shallow rut across his abdomen. Praxas fired again and again, hitting the killer in the forehead each time. The vampire was jerked to its feet by the gunblasts and then tossed dead onto its back. It twitched once and then began to quake as time caught up to it and the body quickly dessicated, decayed and then crumbled to an unrecognizable sawdust-like pile. Praxas made a disgusted face and flicked his hand despairingly at his ruined clothing.

The final vampire, still running along the wall, had grabbed Morelli around his chest and was carrying the two hundred-plus pound man in a crushing grip like he was a child’s doll. Marks holstered his gun, not wanting to catch Morelli with a stray shot, and dove at the merc, grabbing his legs and pulling. He couldn’t dislodge the wampir from the wall and the creature was pulling him along behind him as if he were weightless.

Three shots rang out, like thundercracks, the sound coming from the floor below…

Novembre’s bullets rocketed through the wampir’s body, blowing out chunks of flesh that withered and died, as his special load projectiles slapped 1200-degree chemical flame and the explosive force of a quarter stick of dynamite into the merc’s exposed hip, shoulder and jaw. The DarkLink Palladin was standing spread-legged with his arms extended, both fists clasped around the modified Beretta, downstairs.

The vampire dropped the blood-spattered Morelli, the wheezing man’s ribcage a splintered mess, and then launched himself off from the wall and down the two-story drop towards Novembre.

The Palladin didn’t flinch, never changed his posture, as he fired just once more.

The merc’s head disappeared in a blossom of red mist and the body flopped onto the floor only a foot from where Novembre stood.

In a few seconds the corpse was only a memory of soggy ash.

Marks sank to his knees and breathed a ragged sigh. Miriam walked unsteadily over next to him and let her hand rest on his shoulder. Praxas waved down to Novembre with the approving pride of a proud military commander. Novembre, soaked and irritable in blood and water-soaked clothes, shrugged and turned away to check with his team, immediately accessing the aftermath of the situation and the damage.

Praxas walked over to the two Interpol agents as they tended their hurt comrade and said, “Welcome to the world of crackpots and armchair detectives.”


........... END OF EXCERPT .............