The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (2 page)

He landed roughly, feeling dazed, but he heard the guai round on him. Soren sprinted toward the other sword-wielding cultist, who appeared surprised Soren had gotten around his giant friend. The cultist pulled the robe from his face, revealing another guai. He grinned fiercely at Soren with sharp, green-tinted teeth, and struck up a defensive posture.

As Soren ran, he whipped the gun out of his pocket, which his opponent saw too late. Soren shot the thing several times in its eye-horns, and reached the monster just as he was falling backward, ripping the sword out of his hand.

Soren heard the first guai lumbering toward him, but he turned to the would-be sacrifice and tried to use the sword to cut through the chains. After only a couple of seconds, he realized that wasn’t going to work. Dropping the sword, he reached up and yanked the chains free from the post to which they were attached. Apparently, being a monster himself had its advantages, super strength being a key one.

Freed from the post, the girl stared at Soren in stunned shock.

“Run!” he screamed, and she fled in the direction of the exit.

Soren stooped down to pick up the sword on the ground. There was a shout behind him and he turned, hoping he could shoot the attacker. But the monster swung at Soren, who barely managed to duck in time to avoid the blade. The guai kicked Soren, a blow that caught him in the stomach and sent him sprawling backward. The gun fell out of Soren’s hand. He knocked his head against the floor, barely managing to keep hold of the sword.

He noticed that most of the remaining cultists were fleeing now. He caught a glimpse of a white dress near the door, letting him know that the girl had escaped. On the ground nearby, the guai he’d shot lay unmoving. That was good. Some monsters were extremely hard to kill—even a bullet to the head wouldn’t do it. It was nice to know the guai weren’t in that category.

Soren picked himself off the ground to see his initial attacker flanked by eleven other cultists. Given their size, they all were clearly guai. It was twelve monsters against one, but Soren liked his odds.

He rushed back into the fray, concentrating on the leader, who seemed surprised by a head-on attack. Soren moved fast, letting his instincts take over. He dodged the first two swipes of the monster’s sword, and managed to slice his attacker’s hand with his own weapon, drawing greenish ooze. The leader howled in agony, clutching his arm.

If the match had stayed one-on-one, Soren could have beaten him, but he felt a horned fist slam into him from behind. He turned to see he was surrounded. He tried to attack the leader again, moving to gut the thing across the stomach, but two other guai attacked him simultaneously.

He blocked them, moving like a blur, far faster than he’d ever been able to do before. At one point, he held up an arm and stopped a guai’s punch cold, but the creature’s horn pierced through Soren’s hand. He drew it back, revealing an ugly round hole in the center of his hand. But as he watched, the hole began closing. He barely registered any pain.

He was just starting to enjoy himself—dodging and weaving while attacking with his sword—when he heard a familiar click. One of the smarter guai had grabbed his gun. Soren turned just in time to see the monster shoot him in the head at point-blank range.

Soren fell to the ground, a perfect bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

The leader of the guai
stood over him, looking down, while the other creatures followed suit. The room fell silent for a moment, until one of them kicked Soren’s body and laughed. The others chuckled, too, sounding relieved.

“Not so tough now, are you?” the leader said, still clutching his wrist where Soren had taken his hand off. “Take off his sunglasses, one of you. I want a souvenir.”

One of the creatures bent down and reached a horned hand out, removing the sunglasses from Soren’s face. As he did so, he stared into Soren’s eyes—and drew back in horror when they blinked.

“Boo,” Soren said, and he leaped from the floor.

The other guai instinctively drew back, as much in shock as anything else. Soren could see it written all over their ugly, horned faces—how does a man like Soren Chase get shot in the head and just jump back up again?

You’re not Soren Chase.
You are the thing that murdered him.

As the guai stared at him, Soren removed the rest of his robe and let it fall to the ground. He was dressed in jeans and a black shirt, but none of the creatures around him were going to notice that. Instead, they looked at the plastic explosives Soren had strapped over his clothes. He pulled a cylindrical object from his pocket and flicked a switch. Three red lights appeared on the device.

“There now,” he said. “I’m fully armed.”

There was a mixture of rage and confusion on the lead guai’s face. After a second, there was a slow smile.

“You’re bluffing,” he said in his gravelly voice. “If you use that, you’ll die, too.”

“Oh, my horny little friend,” Soren replied. “That’s the idea.”

He flicked the switch again and waited for an explosion, but nothing happened. Everyone stood there dumbly, looking alternately at Soren and then one another.

Soren glanced down at the device and shook it. He looked up at the leader apologetically, and then pressed the switch again.

“Sorry, I don’t know what the problem is,” Soren said. “I worked really hard on this. I thought for sure it was going to—”

The lights turned green and a large explosion rocked the former store, consuming the building, the guai, and Soren Chase.

Soren woke up in the back seat of a car.

He was naked, covered in soot, and had a pounding headache. That said, he felt pretty good for somebody who had just blown himself to pieces. He wasn’t disappointed—that would come later. At the moment, he was simply amazed. He’d actually strapped a variety of explosives to himself, detonated them, and somehow hadn’t died. Or, at least, he assumed he wasn’t dead. He supposed the afterlife
could
be the back seat of what appeared to be somebody’s Honda Accord, but he doubted it.

Soren sat up and immediately wished he hadn’t. His headache, which had been excruciating, ratcheted up to . . . well, whatever the hell was worse than excruciating. It hurt to think.

“Soren, Jesus! How the hell can you be awake?” a voice asked, and the car jerked to the side.

Soren felt a wave of nausea come over him and he leaned over to vomit, but nothing came up. After a moment, he looked at the person driving the car. Soren’s vision was fuzzy, but he could make out the red hair and gangling form of his assistant, Glen.

Soren lay back down on the seat. It was better on the seat. He stared at the ceiling, wishing he had his sunglasses, which had been blown up along with his clothes and himself. Pretenders often wore them because of their sensitivity to bright light, but Soren typically had sunglasses on all the time. He found them comforting for some reason.

If Glen was here, that meant he had been following Soren. But Soren had repeatedly fired him during the past two months. The last time Glen entered the office, Soren had to physically throw him out the door.

And yet, here Glen was, driving him . . . somewhere. Soren considered protesting, but his head was killing him and it just seemed like too much effort. Besides, it’s not like Soren had somewhere else to be. Saving the girl and blowing himself up had been his entire agenda for the evening. He’d hoped it would be his final agenda ever, but apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Sometimes, he just couldn’t catch a break.

Soren reached up a hand to massage his temple. In doing so, he noticed that two of the fingers on his right hand were missing. As he watched, his missing fingers started to regrow. Flesh bubbled up from the stumps above the knuckle, rapidly retaking the form of fingers. He flexed them slowly and stared. After a minute, they felt completely normal.

“Far out, man,” Soren said, and started to laugh.

“Soren? What the hell happened out there?” Glen called back.

Soren didn’t bother answering. He didn’t owe Glen any explanations. He felt funny, almost light-headed, like the time he and John had been hired to blow up balloons for some rinky-dink parade their hometown was having. They had been ten years old, and the idiots in charge had given them a helium pump. Naturally, they decided it would be a good idea to put their mouths directly on the pumps and inhale. They couldn’t stop laughing about how their voices sounded.

After the tenth time or so they’d done that, however, they both started to feel funny. Soren could remember watching John like he was moving in slow motion. They’d both eventually collapsed and had woken with crushing headaches, not unlike the one he was experiencing now. Despite the pain, Soren smiled at the memory.

It’s not your memory. That happened to Soren, and you’re not him. You’re the one who killed him.

“Oh shut up,” Soren mumbled. He was so tired of that voice in his head, constantly reminding him of what he was and what he’d done. It made him want to blow his brains out—not that it would help. Soren had tried that already.

“Soren? Hey! Are you okay?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” Soren snapped.

“I meant how do you feel?” Glen asked.

“Like someone who strapped plastic explosives to his chest and blew himself up.”

“Shit,” Glen said. “That’s what happened? What the hell is the matter with you?”

Soren didn’t answer, because where would he even start? His memories weren’t his real memories, and his friends weren’t his friends. Some part of him still insisted he was Soren Chase, and yet Soren Chase was long dead. At the same time, knowing he was a pretender named Falk had changed surprisingly little. He still
felt
like Soren.

He put his hand back down and closed his eyes. All he knew was that he didn’t want to think about it anymore.

*****

Soren woke up when the car stopped. He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep until then. When he looked down, he was wearing the same jeans and T-shirt he’d had on earlier. The pain in his head had receded to a dull ache.

The backseat door by his feet opened, and Glen poked his head in.

“How the hell did you get your clothes?”

The question didn’t even appear aimed at Soren; it was just something Glen was thinking out loud. But it’s not like Soren knew the answer. His clothes, the same ones that had blown up, had reappeared. He felt his face, hoping the sunglasses had reappeared as well, but no, there was nothing.

“Can you get up?” Glen asked dubiously.

Soren raised his head and was relieved to find that the world seemed relatively stable.

“Yeah,” Soren said. “But can you tell me where we’re going?”

“To see the boss.”

“
I’m
the boss,” Soren said.

“You fired me, remember?” Glen replied. “Just give him a chance. He can help you, Soren, if you’ll let him.”

Soren nearly walked away. He didn’t owe the old man anything, and he definitely did not want his help. But there were some things he’d been dying to say, stuff that had been rattling around his brain for two months. Tonight wasn’t the ideal time to let loose, but he wasn’t sure there’d be a better one.

“Okay,” Soren said. “Let’s go see Terry.”

Soren emerged from the car to find himself on the streets of Leesburg in front of his own office. He gave Glen a withering look.

“He’s waiting for us in
my
office?” he asked.

Glen had the decency to look chagrined.

“It was his office previously, you know,” Glen said. “He gave it to you for free, remember?”

Soren stood up, ready to snap at Glen. In the streetlight, the kid could probably pass for a teenager, though he was in his midtwenties, a decade younger than Soren. Glen’s red hair was mussed, and his freckled face streaked with dirt. Soren wondered what he’d had to wade through to pull his body out of the wreckage of the explosion.

Soren looked away first. He climbed the steps to the office door, and actually raised his hand to knock. Then he reminded himself that this was his own place. Soren pushed the door open.

If he’d been hoping to catch Terry off guard, the plan was a resounding failure. Terry sat behind the desk—
his
desk—looking smugly like he’d expected Soren to barge in at just that moment.

“Well, Soren, come on in,” he said.

Terry was probably in his early seventies, but his outdated sense of style made him seem even older. Before the fiasco at Reapoke Forest, Soren had considered Terry a mentor. But that was before.

“What are you doing in
my
office?” Soren growled. Behind him, Glen had followed him in and shut the door.

Terry gave him a flat look. “I gave it to you on one condition—that you employ my nephew,” Terry said, gesturing toward Glen. “Yet, on at least four occasions over the past two months, you’ve told Glen he was fired. Therefore, the office reverts back to me.”

“That can’t possibly be legal.”

“It’s part of the contract you signed.”

Soren threw up his hands. “Okay, you want the office back? Fine. I don’t need it.”

He turned to storm out the door. To hell with this. He had a mission to complete.

“Falk,” came the soft voice behind the desk.

Soren halted. He turned and stared at Terry. He’d known that Terry and Glen knew
what
he was, but not his actual name.

“What did you say?” Soren said, but it came out as a shout.

“We have a lot of things to discuss, Soren,” Terry said calmly.

“You used my name, my
real
name!”

“I used another name,” Terry replied. His relaxed demeanor was only making Soren angrier. “We could have a debate over which is the real one.”

Soren was torn between stomping out of there, and throwing himself across the desk and ripping Terry’s head off.

“What is this?” Glen asked.

Soren turned to see Glen standing near the side table, where he’d picked up a notepad. Soren didn’t need to read it to know which list it was.

“Give it back,” Soren snarled.

“Have you seen this?” Glen asked, looking past Soren to Terry. “‘Number one: pistol shot to the head. Number two: shotgun in the mouth. Number three: hanging. Number four: electrocution in the bathtub.’ These are ways to kill people—and they’ve been crossed off.” Glen looked at Soren, horrified.