Hive Queen Sinclair, Grayson (best pdf ebook reader for android txt) 📖

window and ran down a white-tiled hallway with a lamp overhead that shone with bright light.

Adam stopped, turned, and tossed a small, cylindrical canister down the hallway as the monsters burst into the room.

The canister exploded with a raging inferno. A torrential fire filled the hallway and started eating through the walls and ceiling. The charging ghouls stopped in their tracks, petrified by the flames, but the skeletal grim kept their pace as they dashed through the flames after their prey.

Evelyn and the others rounded a corner as the monsters chased after them.

The room they entered was long and thin with an equally long and thin wooden table surrounded by plush chairs attached to little balls that rolled out of the way as the three of them shoved the table towards the door.

The grim ran headlong into the table and toppled over it. Adam, Nick, and Evelyn raised their weapons, and my hearing failed me.

Rapid explosions punished my ears as I fought to keep my eyes open. Bursts of blood splattered from the grim as chunks of gray flesh disappeared in seconds as whatever weapons they wielded ended the monsters’ lives.

Five shredded corpses lay strewn in pieces with muddy blood coating the doorframe and wall.

“Damn, James. These new guns of yours are something else,” Nick said, turning to Adam.

“Thanks, though I couldn’t have made them without your help.”

“Enough standing around, guys. We need to get out of this death trap. That ghoul is still outside, and if there’s one, there’s a dozen more nearby. We need to grab what we came for and get back to the lab. Sunrise is too far off for us to be out right now.”

“You’re right,” Adam said, looking down at his wrist. A circular silver object wrapped around and lit up in a bright orange color as he held it close to his face. “Edna, scan the building and show us how to get to the vault.”

“Of course, Master Bell. The door behind you leads to the elevators. The room you seek is fifteen floors down. I’ve already hacked into the system and opened the doors,” a soft-spoken woman’s voice replied.

The light from the device at his wrist faded away, and he shouldered his gun. “You heard the lady. Let’s get our asses in gear.”

My vision distorted as they left the room and the darkness crept back in.

I didn’t know what to make of what I’d seen. I didn’t understand most of it; Earth was a strange and chaotic place filled with danger and horrors beyond my understanding, but its technology was truly beyond my comprehension. I was lost in the implications of talking guide spirits and weapons that could obliterate anything in their path. It made my head spin.

And that was just the first memory. There would be two more, and I didn’t know if my mind could take it.

The second memory came slowly. I found myself in a gray room with nearly a dozen tables strewn with bits of things I had no names for, huge hunks of metal and thin copper wires wrapped in bright colors and hundreds of other similar things that piled up on the tables as they stretched around the room. Adam was seated at a chair in the middle, hunched over the only table that was remotely clean. His hands and clothes were stained with grease as he held a tube with a spout that sparked with blinding white fire.

There was a knock on the door, and Evelyn walked in. She wore a long white coat over dark pants and a thin purple shirt. She strutted across the workshop and leaned heavily on Adam as she peeked at whatever he was working on.

“No luck?” she asked.

“Not even a scratch,” he said, setting down the fire-making device and picking up a pair of metal tongs. “I even poured thermite over it, and it didn’t even get hot, so I don’t know what to make of them, but watch this.”

The tongs clacked together as he picked something up and held it away from him. Clutched at the center of the tongs was a small orange crystal. It was a deep, rich amber, rough cut, and it glowed even in the dim light of the room.

He took the amber shard over to a separate table where a nearly identical crystal sat on the bare table, waiting.

He placed the new crystal next to the one lying on the table, and before he could even move the tongs, the amber shards pulled closer to each other and melded together like liquid glass, leaving only a single larger crystal in their place.

“The hell?” Evelyn asked, taking a step back.

“Yeah, beats the hell out of me. That shouldn’t be possible, and I don’t understand how, but that’s not all that I discovered.”

“More surprises?”

Adam leaned over in his chair and grabbed a large mallet off the table next to him and whacked the large crystal. It shattered with a resounding crack, and slivers of the gem went over the table as it broke in half.

The two halves and the countless minuscule pieces shuddered, and the slivers pulled toward the larger shards. And like nothing had happened, the two crystals sat whole and unbroken.

“This is impossible,” Evelyn said, staring wide-eyed at the gems on the table.

“Yesterday I’d have said as much, but I can’t deny what’s staring me in the face.”

“What do we do with them?”

“Nothing,” Adam said, picking them up with the tongs and placing them into individual cloth bags he pulled from his pocket. “I don’t trust the Narghuul, and I’m damn sure not just going to follow along with their plans for us.

“No, we take them to the bunker. We lock them up and keep them safe until we decide to use them─if we decide to use them.”

“All right,