103 Results in the "Burned Cover" category
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Erika stood in a narrow alley between a pair of large garbage bins, watching the minute hand of her watch fly over the numbers. A pair of fire escapes, mounted on opposing brick buildings, now sported GoPro cameras strapped to their lowest rungs, aimed down either end of the alley. With no doors close to Erika, anyone who entered the alley and got anywhere near her current position wouldn’t be both obvious and caught on one of the cameras. With a slight mental tug, Erika bent time around her watch,…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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“Hello!” Erika called out. “Anyone home?” The aged wooden door creaked, long and squeaky, as Erika pushed it open. A darkened foyer greeted her. One musty rug sat on the floor while massive webs clung to the corners. A grandfather’s clock, frozen in time, stood just in front of a set of stairs. A heavy scent of mold hung in the air, thankfully swept away by a sharp draft that blew in from behind Erika. She stepped inside, taking in the environment. It certainly gave off a perfect spooky…
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362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
10 – Kill and Tell
Erika couldn’t help her leg thumping against the floor as she looked around at the other Hunters. A flutter of butterflies in her stomach refused to let her sit still. Some little whisper in the back of her mind told her to get away, to crash at random hotels and motels again, knowing that The Monk was out and free. “Honestly should have expected this,” Rick said, only half-paying attention as he fiddled with the command line terminal on his laptop. “When you said the archive had strange things…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
10 – i – Bounty
Noblesse Oblige. Before Sargon of Akkad united his peoples and formed his empire, before the pharaohs of old Egypt erected their monuments to their own demise, before the Romans built their roads, and before humans made the paradigm shift from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural society, man hid in caves and cowered from the monsters that lurked in the night. The apex predator, the tool-using top of the food chain… Those titles did not belong to humanity. They weren’t the dominant species. Not…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
10 – Finding Motive Force
Erika ground her teeth as she circled the motel for the fifth—no, sixth—time. The neon vacancy sign flickered, casting a sickly red light across the empty parking lot, making the entire area feel somehow more ominous. She couldn’t tell what was going on inside. Her eyes scanned every shadow, every movement, and all the people still standing about watching; the cold sent most of the people away, either back to their cars or, the more daring of them, back to the neighboring motel rooms. A squad car…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
10 – A Brief Moment of Normalcy
Erika sat in the back of her math class, phone in her lap, flicking her thumb up and up and up. Mister de Vries teemed with a lot of news about binomial theorems, but she found the subject even less interesting than she normally did. School as a whole wasn’t quite what it used to be in her mind. Before, she had thought she would live a relatively normal life, albeit one in which she had a few party tricks to show off. It was a life where she still needed connections, networking, and social skills to…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
09 – Renegade
The door exploded inward, metal shrieking as it tore free from the frame. The tattooed woman stepped through the wreckage, her face split by a malevolent grin. Her eyes, ringed with thick, bar-like tattoos, locked onto Delilah. Erika didn’t hesitate. She surged forward, bat raised, aiming for the woman’s head. The bat struck just below the woman’s eye, and Erika heard a crack of bone, but the woman stumbled slightly, and didn’t look bothered beyond that. Her eyes swiveled in her head as her hand…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
09 – Positive Outlooks
The Adjustment kicked back, feet taking up the armrest of a small couch. “Glad to be out of that,” she said with a relieved sigh. “Thought I was going to have to treat my poor carapace for burn damage again halfway through.” Erika stood at the window, looking out over Chicago and the lake with a small smile on her face. “I did see a few sparks.” “Empy really managed to restrain herself.” The Adjustment barked a laugh. “I’ll have to pat her on the head later.” Impassive…-
362.6 K • Ongoing
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Finding a hotel in Chicago, even on short notice, wasn’t much of a trial. A few hundred hotels, motels, hostels, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts were scattered throughout the city. Erika had no particular preference, as long as the place was clean and discreet. The kind of place she could get into with cash and few questions asked. Cash was the important bit. Perhaps it was paranoia, but after having been in a massive archive that seemed to catalog everything, from street light patterns to the mayor’s…
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362.6 K • Ongoing
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Erika held fast to the handrail of the subway car, watching the sparse lights outside the windows fly past. People sat around her, occupying the seats and, occasionally, standing off to the sides. They talked among themselves, listened to music with their earbuds, and generally just lived. It had been a week since that ‘gas leak’ shut down the subway, and everyone was already perfectly willing to trust that everything had been taken care of. To be fair, everything had been taken care of. Erika knew…
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362.6 K • Ongoing
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