ASCENSION by EJ Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

bartender asked.
                  Sophie finished the glass in one gulp, sighing in satisfaction. She shrugged. “All over.”
                  The bartender took her glass and refilled it. “I hear that a lot around here. Do you have any idea where you are right now?”
                  Sophie gave the bartender a curious look. “I'm at the Frozen Tush, a bar in Ontario,” she responded.
                  The bartender cackled, revealing a row of broken and rotten teeth. “This taint just a bar, girlie.”
                  “What do you mean?”
                  The bartender nodded towards a room in the back. “Why don't you go find out yourself?”
                  Sophie looked warily at the bartender, then back at the room, where uproars kept rising and falling like a tide.
                  “I'd hurry.” the bartender said with a sly smirk. “You're about to miss the main event.”
                  A cold fear sat in the pit of Sophie's stomach. There was something foreboding about that room. It held a certain energy. What she had come to know as a fate flux. A fate flux was a point of causality that was uncertain, a junction of two timelines, where they directly intersect. That was why Sophie's powers were so limited. There was no way of knowing what timeline she was witnessing, what fragment of the space-time continuum her vision brought her. So it was her certainty of the future that made it uncertain, even for her. Just by seeing the future she could be altering it, or causing it. The thought made her dizzy so often she quit considering it.
                  The visions of him, though, had come so often, so intensely. She was certain this was the timeline her mystery man was in. She could feel the weight of the fates. The god of time was kick-starting something into motion, turning the cogs of bigger machinery. She had felt it for months now. Something massive was coming, slowly but surely, like a meteorite sailing towards Earth. But there was no way of knowing if it was good or bad. Sophie only was certain that things were soon to change, and drastically. At the epicenter of it all, there her mystery man was, holding together the strands of fate. They were pulling him in all directions.
                  Then a thought struck Sophie. He was here at this very moment. She was sure of it now. Though, she had felt that feeling once before, in a diner in Michigan. She had been wrong then. Too many visions of him had obscured the timeline, making it harder to follow. The more she saw, the less she knew.
                  Finally, Sophie let out a big sigh. There was only one way to truly know what awaited her.
                  “Good luck,” the bartender said with a toothless grin.
                  As Sophie passed the threshold, the air itself got heavier. With it came the stench of sweat, and something coppery, like blood. A smell that comes from too many bodies in too small of a room. There was shouting, too, from a cluster of men in the center of the room, chanting and yammering.
                  Sophie stepped on top of a chair by the wall so she could see over the crowd. A burly, bearded man with a barrel chest and a beer belly was heaving, a trickle of blood running from his lip to his matted beard. A jolt of electricity ran through Sophie as she recognized the face. It was the murderer, the man who buries the stranger.
                  Across from the bearded man, a younger one with dark hair and a square jaw was kneeling, his lean, muscular body coated in sweat, glistening under the flickering Kerosene lanterns. That's when Sophie realized what the crowd was chanting.
                  “Kill! Kill! Kill!” the crowd roared as the bearded man approached, his eyes bulging and his fists curled.