Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Behind him, two men stood in identical dark polo shirts and khaki cargo pants. Both were fit and muscular, with the kinds of shoulders and biceps that testified to regular hours spent at the gym. Both wore guns in the holsters on their hips. Another man, in the same business casual uniform, waited to the side.
The man who had escorted them shut the door and stood in front of it, barring their exit. Four guards, one directly to their left, one behind them, and two by the desk. With Hester, that made five against two.
Quinn Hester leaned forward and frowned. His eyebrows came together. His mouth opened. “Kill hi—”
The walls sprouted massive blisters, three feet across and swelling like fresh burns. The one directly across from Diana ballooned, turning translucent like the membrane of some horrific amniotic sack stretched too thin, and she glimpsed something tightly coiled and moving within it. Fear slapped her, born of a deep, animal instinct.
Augustine blurred and smashed into the man to his left.
The blisters burst, releasing swirls of tentacles with suckers the size of dinner bowls. They whipped into the room, glistening, wet, contracting, and her mind shrieked at her to get away. The floor bulged, moving, as if the wood had turned into a choppy sea. Panic squirmed through her in an electric rush.
She focused on the blurry figure and took six small steps to the side.
Her shoulder hit the wall. Diana pressed her back against it.
The human blur swept to the left, leaving a limp body in his wake. He dashed by her, and she caught the faintest hint of Augustine within it, like an afterimage that instantly faded.
The blur collided with the guard by the door. Bones cracked, a guttural scream tore out, choked off in mid-note, and Augustine faded out of existence, merging with the tentacles slapping against the walls with sickening, wet thumps. The guard sprawled on the floor, unmoving.
A blister popped to her left, just inches from her head. Tentacles erupted into the room, and between them a thin tendril slithered out, a bulb on its end. The bulb turned to her and opened to reveal an eye ringed with teeth instead of eyelashes.
The guard by the door collapsed. Quinn was down to the two men by his desk. They had drawn their guns, spinning around, aiming at the revolting horrors slithering through the walls.
“Shoot!” Quinn howled and pawed at his desk.
One of the guards behind him jerked his weapon up and fired into the ceiling, where a nightmarish mouth squeezed through the fissure. It bit the air with steak-knife teeth. The other guard frantically spun around, looking around the room, trying to find Augustine among the writhing clusters of Lovecraftian flesh.
The monstrous eye continued to hover by her, watching her. Sweat drenched Diana’s face, cold and sticky, as if she was sweating out her panic. This was a nightmare. Either that or she was going insane, trapped in a hallucination.
There was no scent. These terrifying things, they should have emitted an odor, and yet there was nothing except the usual smell of human bodies. She tried to hold on to that knowledge, but her mind was flailing in revulsion.
The blur popped into existence feet away from the gun-waving guard, vaulted over the desk, and slammed into him. The weapon went flying. The man folded in half, and the blur kicked out, catching the other guard in the head. The man flew into the wall and collapsed.
Quinn finally yanked a drawer open and jerked a gun out.
The blur tore into him. Quinn screamed, an awful sound filled with pain.
Everything stopped. The tentacles, the churning floor, the blur—everything disappeared. Augustine stood by the desk, holding a stocky man in his mid-twenties in an arm lock. The man was bent over the desk, his face flat against the surface. Blood seeped through his short blond hair.
Augustine’s expensive suit was gone. He wore a black outfit somewhere at the crossroads between athletic warm-ups and tactical combat gear. The pants clung to his long legs, and the jacket had a short, stand-up collar, zipped up the front. The collar looked reinforced to protect his neck. The material was all slick, with nothing to grab, and close-fitting enough to cut through her alarm and fear to the part of herself that noted the swell of muscles across his biceps and chest.
The door burst open, and two more guards ran into the room, a middle-aged man and a young man barely eighteen or so. The younger blond man grabbed for his gun.
“I wouldn’t, Camden,” Augustine told him, his voice ice-cold.
Camden froze, his hand on his firearm.
“Place your guns on the floor.”
“Do as he says,” Quinn squeezed out.
The two men placed their weapons on the cheap carpet.
“Come and join your uncle.”
Camden crossed the room and stopped behind the desk. The middle-aged man followed him. Judging by their faces, all three were clearly related.