The Sword of Saint Michael D.C.P. Fox Contents Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Please Leave a Review! A Word From D.C.P. Fox About The Author Copyright Acknowledgments For Heidi Chapter One Day Zero The cashier was sweating profusely, her eyes sunken and her skin as pale as could be. Alexander Williams narrowed his eyes, inspecting her closely as one would a Petri dish in a lab. Her eyes were closed as if she were about to take a nap on her feet. “You look awful,” he said. “Mind your own business.” “But you’re handling my sandwich. Whether you pass on whatever you have to me is my business. Do you have a disease? Although it would be very early for the season—” “I don’t have the flu,” the cashier snapped. “Well, you clearly have something. If it’s not—” “What I have is no sick time and no money in the bank to handle the loss of a week’s worth of pay.” “Ah. I see.” She had his tuna on rye, wrapped in plastic, in her hands. Alexander wanted nothing to do with that plastic. “Put it back. I’m suddenly not hungry.” She grunted, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath. Alexander turned and walked away before she could exhale near him. Some people are so stupid. Didn’t she realize she should be in bed? He left the building and walked outside into the bright sunshine. From his vantage point atop the ski trails covered in green grass, Alexander took in the beauty of the Colorado Rockies—jagged and lush with evergreens, some bald on top. The valleys also lacked the thick evergreen forests, the mountains steep enough to cause the lift of the storms, cooling the clouds and forcing them to condense into rain. Or at least that is what he’d told the pretty, young girl that came up and talked to him. He had had to get rid of her. He may have been alone, but he was a married man. It was then that he heard the screams. Smart people typically ran away from screams. And while Alexander knew he was a brilliant man, he knew instinctively he was also very stupid in this regard. So, as people rushed out the doors of the cafeteria, Alexander went against the flow of human traffic and stopped at the wrap-around glass wall, cupped his hands, and peered inside. He saw the cashier with a visible sore on her face that wasn’t there before, bashing a customer’s skull against the corner of the counter. He stood transfixed. Blood covered the victim’s head and neck. He watched as she cracked open his skull and pulled it apart. The strength the whole process must have taken was off the charts. It was impossible. In shock, Alexander couldn’t move, couldn’t stop watching this terrible scene playing out before him. Everyone else, it seemed, was screaming and running. But not him. The crazed woman pulled the body, the head, up onto the counter, and leaned forward to put her mouth into the head cavity. It took a few seconds for Alexander to realize she was eating the person’s brain. Alexander merely stood there watching the scene, in horror, sure, but also in fascination. What could possess someone to do such a thing? The raw animalism of it shocked him and got his adrenaline pumping. Suddenly, he realized he was the only person left anywhere near the woman. But he was so mesmerized that he couldn’t move. She seemed to have finished her “meal.” Alexander was incredulous at what he witnessed next: the woman picked up the pieces of skull she had carelessly cast aside and carefully put the victim’s skull back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Of all the things she had done, this was the most bizarre. The woman was obviously completely out of her mind. The entire process, from violently attacking the customer to piecing his skull back together, must have taken less than two minutes. The mentally ill woman, after completing that task, looked around and made eye contact with Alexander. Day One Jocelyn Radomski slid down the twisting tunnel through the earth at blazing speed, her sword secured firmly in its scabbard at her side. Her personal animal spirit guide, Skunk, smiled as he perched on her chest. Skunk, by his nature and mere presence, provided balance in all things, representing the left pillar of darkness and the right pillar of light—of yin and yang. Without him, in addition to her medication, she risked falling into the black abyss—leading to despair and depression—or into the brilliant white—leading to mania and paranoid delusions. They fell through a magical door in her Inner Temple on the astral plane. Some would judge the temple a mere construct of her mind, but they would be wrong. Falling onto the balcony on the stone tiles was not painful—her temple, her rules. She could remake it at will. But she stuck with the balconies around a courtyard, and an altar area just outside the atrium, with various astral ceremonial magician tools for performing magic on the astral plane. Flat mirrors stood from floor to ceiling on the altar side, with each mirrored panel doubling as a doorway to the real world. She wouldn’t have to go far if she needed to sprint back to the material plane. “Well, that seemed . . . off. Don’t you agree, Skunk? The absence of any animal spirits in the Earth garden?” Skunk looked distracted. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe.” “Skunk, don’t be coy. What’s up?” “What? Oh, nothing’s up.” Her eyes widened. “You’re lying! You’ve never lied to me before.” Skunk sighed. “OK, it’s snowing.” “That’s it? It’s snowing?!” She looked around the garden and the temple atrium, up at the towering balconies and doors. There wasn’t any snow. He had meant on the material plane. “It is the end of August,”
