The Sword of Michael - eARC by Marcus Wynne Read Free Book Online

said.
    “You’re quite insane,” I observed.
    “Takes one to know one.”
    “To know me is to love me.”
    “Yeah, whatever. Tell it to Jolene, you lucky bastard. So. When do we start?”
    “Tonight. After dark.”
    He laughed. “Isn’t it always dark when we start?”
    * * *
    I retraced my chase from the night of the zombie. Dillon trailed behind me, his head swiveling in the practiced scan of an infantry man, leaving me free to concentrate on the subtle feelings that came to me as I followed the energetic track of my encounter. Every place has a vibration and a certain energy to it. Events and living beings leave an energetic imprint on top of that vibration. Magic—more accurately, in this instance, sorcery—leaves a distinctive imprint. It’s like a foul odor, but more than anything else it’s a feeling as though the air itself had become oily and roiled with darkness that cloyed and clung.
    I wanted to backtrack to the grave where the dead man had been animated by dark will. That would be the jumping off place for a journey back along the time-line to the origin of the sorcery, to see who—or what—I was dealing with. Clearly it was something that knew me and had a connection with me. That left me with many questions: This life…or another? Human or not? Souled or unsoiled? Being or thought-form?
    And what was the connection with the human-looking thing that had driven past Jolene and I at the Ginger Hop?
    The answers were here, somewhere. In Middle World Work, the world of magic and curses and sorcery, there’s no substitute for walking the ground and sensing the energy directly, watching the movie unfold in real time with shamanic vision.
    We started where I’d ended it, in the graveyard. The energy was clear here. The presence of Michael and the Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth will clear even the worst place. But the lingering essence was enough for me to track…
    …random images and thoughts, becoming clearer…
    …past life? No, this life…but knew you before, knows the work that you’ve done and the Dark Work you’ve undone on other’s behalf…Son of the Light, Warrior of the Light…who?…
    My White Tiger appeared and whispered, “Follow me, Marius…”
    …and I follows, the journey unfolding before me, as though I were walking like an apparition through an empty movie theater up onto the screen of a sepia-tinted film, and I was following the trace of the undead, like a ragged strip of black cloth frayed and fading into a light gray, still dissipating from the brilliant white light of the Warriors of Light…back to the grave it rose from and my White Tiger stood before me and bloomed with shielding Light…I watched a Dark Portal open, not into the Void, but the Dark Void beyond that…another dimension entirely…something there, something reaching through, orchestrating, a puppet master working the way the Dark Forces worked best…find a portal in the Middle World, a human with a resonance for and with the Dark…utilize them…obsess, possess, influence—the lean, we called it, the ability to lean on someone energetically—something I’d undone…coming back, returning for vengeance…
    “Wait,” Tigre whispered. “It’s coming forward…”
    The black beyond the Darkness altered, shifted shape…like a face pressed up against a sheer sheet of black rubber, rising up out of the fabric of Darkness itself, a face carved in long obsidian plates…
    “Shaman…” it whispered.
    My White Tiger stood in front of me. A huge Black Crow settled beside her, Black and White illuminated from within with the Divine White Light of the Creator, protecting me from the chill that roiled from that face.
    “Don’t speak,” Tigre said. “Only listen…”
    There was an unspoken dialogue, telepathic…an array of images passing before my shamanic vision: beautiful tall green crystal towers toppling and shattering beneath a wall of water, a huge tidal wave; tiny figures garbed in white