Dark Things Rising: Sneak Peek: Hands of the Architects, book 1

Chapter 1

Persephone Kipp hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She kept having strange dreams. They weren’t nightmares, exactly, although there were some nightmare elements strewn throughout the overall chaos that rolled through her mind like a violent storm each time she managed to nod off. More than once she’d found herself running from some horrible, murderous thing that she couldn’t quite see. And there was a particularly frightening bit about being lost in an endless darkness. But mostly the dreams were just strange and meaningless and disturbing in a way that intruded upon her waking life. It was taking a toll on her, leaving her weary and distracted. And today was the worst possible day for her to be off her game.

“Earth to Seph. Hello? Do you copy?”

She blinked and sat up. “Huh?”

Phoenix laughed. She had an annoying laugh. It was nasally, and sort of shrill. Today it was almost painful to hear. “Better snap out of it fast,” she advised, checking her watch.

Persephone took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I’m trying,” she said.

“She can’t help it,” said Alton. “She’s exhausted from celebrating all weekend.”

“Seph doesn’t celebrate anything that hard,” countered Kaitlyn, brushing aside her pink-streaked hair to give her an admonishing look. “No matter how hard I try to talk her into it.”

Alton chuckled and leaned back in his chair. His naturally dark hair had streaks of blond so bright they were practically yellow. It was long and unkempt in a way that required a considerable amount of work in the mornings to look just that way.

Phoenix laughed that annoying laugh again. Her hair was a more subtle purple, but shaved on one side, better to show off her many earrings and the stream of tattoos that started behind her left ear and ran down the side her of her neck.

Persephone was the only one at the table who preferred her hair to remain natural. She liked it just the way she grew it, raven black and fine, cut shoulder-length and simple.

“I’d love to see Seph celebrate that hard,” said Phoenix.

Almost everyone called her “Seph.” It was much less of a mouthful than “Persephone,” which she’d hated for most of her childhood. Teachers rarely pronounced it right. Kids with normal, simple names like “Ellen” and “Julie” made fun of her. But by the time she started college, she’d made peace with it, and by the time she’d earned her bachelor’s degree, she’d learned to love it. She found that she enjoyed having a name that made her different from all the boring Ellens and Julies out there.

She checked her watch. It was almost time to leave. And two espressos hadn’t helped her to find her focus at all.

“It’s a big deal,” said Alton. “I’d be too excited to sleep, too.”

It was a big deal. It was her big opportunity. A job interview with the area’s leading graphic design company. It was what she’d worked so hard for. It was what she wanted to do with her life. And it all came down to this interview.

Well…not just this interview. It was only the first of three. She’d have to make a very good impression today just to get a second one. But you only got one first interview. And if she blew it today…

She drained the last of her espresso and forced herself to focus on the menu board.

She was so nervous.

“You’ll do great,” promised Kaitlyn. “Relax.”

Seph gave her a tired smile.

“Of course she’ll do great,” agreed Phoenix.

She met Phoenix Carasik, Kaitlyn Jernam, and Alton Ripna in the art department during her first semester of college. They’d all just kind of clicked, as they said. And they’d remained friends ever since. She didn’t see them as much now that they’d all graduated and gone their separate ways, but they managed to get together every couple of months. Mostly thanks to Kaitlyn, who seemed to have made it her personal crusade to prevent them from ever drifting completely apart.

“It’s the same thing she always does,” declared Alton as he fingered the silver ring in his left eyebrow. Both of his eyebrows were pierced, as was his nose and lip. And he was always touching them. He couldn’t seem to help himself. “She can’t just do something great and show the rest of us up. She has to do it sleep deprived and jacked up on coffee, just to rub it in that much more.”

“She does!” giggled Kaitlyn. She leaned forward and poked her tongue ring out between her teeth.

“I don’t show anyone up,” returned Seph, looking down at her cup. She hated when Kaitlyn played with that thing. It was even more annoying than Alton fiddling with the ones on his face.

All three of them had piercings. Kaitlyn’s tongue and eyebrow. Phoenix’s lip and nose. It was their thing, apparently. Seph, however, didn’t have anything pierced but her ears. She had four in each ear, two at the top and two at the bottom, but that was all. And she didn’t have any tattoos, either. She liked her body like she liked her hair: Natural.

“You always show me up,” argued Alton. “Anything I can do, you can do better, and during some kind of personal crisis.”

Seph wrinkled her nose at him. “That’s not true.”

“Of course it is,” he insisted. “You could catch ebola and still give the best damn interview.”

Seph gave a snort of a laugh.

Phoenix sat back in her seat, smiling broadly. “I’ll bet I know what it is,” she declared, her violet-lensed eyes widening with mischievous delight. “She says she hasn’t been sleeping well, but she hasn’t said whose bed she hasn’t been sleeping in.”

Seph shot her an unamused look over her cup, which only managed to make her break out into that annoying, nasally laugh again. Phoenix had a morbid fascination with the scandalous. Nothing pleased her more than the idea of people caught up in sordid mischief, especially sexual mischief.

Alton rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying,” pressed Phoenix. “The girl’s not getting any younger. She should get herself some action.”

“She’s twenty-three,” said Alton. “I think she’s still got time.”

“Seph’s a good girl,” said Kaitlyn, managing somehow to make it sound like both a defense and a reproach. “Not like someone else I know.”

Phoenix bit her lip and made an exaggerated “who me?” face.

Seph stood up. “Anyway… I’m not going to even make it to my interview if I don’t get going. I have to leave time for traffic.”

“I’ve got to go, too,” announced Alton, rising to his feet.

Phoenix shrugged. “Fine. Me, too.”

“This was fun!” said Kaitlyn. “We’ll do it again.”

Everyone agreed that it was and they would. They gathered their jackets and purses. (Alton insisted his was a satchel, but Seph knew a man purse when she saw one.)

“I’ll talk to you guys later,” said Seph as her friends headed for the door. “I have to get something to go.” She waved goodbye and then walked over to the counter and ordered an Americano.

The barista was a tall, dark-haired young man who looked a couple years younger than her. Sort of attractive, but also sort of average, with the kind of everyday face that would be hard to pick out of a crowd ten minutes from now. She barely spared him a glance as he rang up her order and took her money.

It was as he was handing her back his change that things first turned weird.

She glanced up at his face as she thanked him, actually looking at him for the first time. There, on the very top of his head, two strange, hazy shapes protruded from his thick hair.

He turned away and set about making her drink, but Seph had forgotten about the Americano. She even forgot about the interview. It took all her weary mind could manage just to try to process what it was she was seeing.

It looked like one of those stupid cat-ear headbands, like the ones you see everywhere on Halloween. But these weren’t made of plastic and fake fur. They appeared to be made of a strange, luminescent, gray mist.

He caught her staring at him and stopped. “Is something wrong?”

Seph blinked. “What?”

“Are you okay?”

She glanced around the room. No one else had strange, ghostly ears sprouting from their head. And no one else seemed to have noticed the ones on the barista. No one was staring at him like she was. A few people, however, were staring at her.

“No…” she said, blushing. “I mean, yes. I’m fine. I just…” Her eyes fixed on those ears again. They looked a little bit like fox ears, tall and triangular, pointy, but not as big in proportion to the head as a real fox’s ears. As she watched, one of them twitched to the side and then back again.

And yet they weren’t really there. They couldn’t be. She could see through them. They were faint around the edges, as if made of smoke.

“Can I get you anything else?” asked the confused barista who clearly didn’t realize that he’d sprouted an extra pair of ears.

Seph had to make a conscious effort to compose herself. “No. I’m fine.” Then, lamely, she said, “I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m sorry.”

He assured her that it was no problem and went back to work, but those strange ears seemed to rotate toward her as he turned away, as if watching her. (Listening to her?)

Needing to find something to focus on besides the top of the barista’s head, she opened her purse and dug out her keys. When she looked up again, the ears hadn’t gone away and still no one seemed to have noticed them.

She looked to see if any of her friends were still in the shop, but they’d all three left by now.

Another customer approached the counter, an older woman with a prim look about her, and Seph stepped out of the way.

This woman looked right at the barista as he assured her that he’d be right with her, and yet she completely ignored the perky, transparent ears, even though they were plainly visible and even appeared to be faintly glowing.

Was this some kind of elaborate prank? Was she on camera? Was this guy one of those street magicians or something?

Even that didn’t make sense. How would you pull off an illusion like this? The ears—or whatever they were—moved with his head, remaining in place even as he moved about behind the counter. It looked far too perfect to be any kind of holographic manipulation.

Finally, her Americano came up. She took it, thanked him and then quickly walked out of the coffee shop, somehow resisting the urge to break into a run.

She slipped behind the wheel of her truck (a full-sized Ford pickup; she might be small at only five-foot-three, but she was formidable enough on the highway) and sat there for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to make sense of what she’d seen.

It couldn’t have been real. It was too ridiculous to be real. Clearly she’d imagined the whole thing.

She hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She’d tossed and turned. She’d dreamed those strange dreams. Obviously, she was even more sleep-deprived than she thought. She was hallucinating.

She took off her glasses again and rubbed at her weary eyes. She might’ve laughed, if she wasn’t so worried about the interview. She still had to drive all the way to Cakwetak, which was practically Milwaukee. Once there, she’d have to find a way to not look like a total mess in front of the human resources director.

Returning the glasses to her face, she looked out across the parking lot. She could see several people walking around. None of them had spectral ears sprouting from their heads.

She’d be all right. It was the stress, she realized. She was so worried about this interview. Once it was over, maybe she’d be able to sleep again.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed east.

* * *

The interview went well enough, she supposed. She didn’t start hallucinating any animal parts on the human resources director and make a complete fool of herself, at least. She thought she responded with all the right answers. But she kept thinking that she looked terrible. She felt twitchy, wired, probably from too much caffeine. No matter how hard she tried to forget the strange incident at the coffee shop, her mind kept returning to it.

“He thought I was on drugs,” she said. “I know it.”

“Will you just relax already?” sighed Amethyst. “You did fine.”

Amethyst Wilhoit was Seph’s roommate. They were paired together by chance their sophomore year in the dorm and hit it off much better than did Seph and her freshman roommate. (That girl had some serious baggage.) Now they shared an apartment close to the campus, where Amethyst had moved on to graduate studies.

She was tall and slender, shapely, with long, wavy, brown hair and soft features. She had a lovely face, except for a faint, wide scar beneath her left eye, a remnant of a nasty fall when she was just a girl. She was utterly convinced that this blemish was an insurmountable flaw, but Seph thought it gave her a unique kind of character. And it’d never deterred the boys from flocking to her. In fact, it was impossible to tell if any man had ever even noticed the scar. Their eyes didn’t usually go that far up. They never made it past her huge breasts.

They were sitting at a table at a little café just a couple blocks from their apartment, waiting on their lunch. The place had become a favorite for both of them almost as soon as they moved in. It was quiet, cozy, within walking distance and the food was tasty and reasonably priced.

Seph groaned. “I totally blew it.”

“Stop it,” said Amethyst. “It’s only been two days. They probably haven’t even finished interviewing the other applicants yet.”

This was probably true, and yet Seph couldn’t help it. She was sure she’d botched it. And it wasn’t even her fault. It was those dreams. The restless nights. That bizarre hallucination at the coffee shop.

“You couldn’t fail,” Amethyst assured her. “I was sending you good energy all day.”

“I told you I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t have to.” She took a sip of her tea and stared across the table at her.

Seph didn’t bother arguing with her. There wasn’t any point in it. Amethyst was an unwavering believer in the power of positive energy. She was utterly convinced that people could affect the world around them with little more than a sickening dose of cheerful optimism.

Okay…so there was a little more to it than that. Amethyst believed in karma and in the idea that what you fed into the universe determined the quality of your life. She believed in positive and negative emotional energy, which could somehow be used to affect those around her. And which could be measured by examining a person’s aura. Apparently. Amethyst, who meditated daily and adhered to a strictly vegan diet, supposedly possessed a very clean aura. Seph, who did neither of those things, was burdened by a “muddy” aura. Or so Amethyst had informed her.

Seph’s personal opinion of the matter was that the only thing making anything “muddy” was the large quantity of bullshit, but she was polite enough not to say so.

“I’m right. You’ll see.”

Seph stared out the window at nothing in particular. “If you say so.” She was too tired to argue about this right now. She slept a little better after the interview, but only a little. She was still plagued by those weird dreams, still tossing and turning. Last night was a little better still. It seemed to finally be going away, but the damage had been done. If she’d blown this interview, she was going to be sorely disappointed in herself.

“You’re totally going to get that second interview. Just wait.”

Seph sipped her Coke and let her gaze drift across the room. Just wait. She hated the waiting. The waiting was the worst part. It could be another two weeks or more before she heard back, regardless of their decision. And if she didn’t start getting more sleep soon, it was going to be a very long wait.

She needed this job. All through college, she’d lived on her student loans and the moderately sizeable bank account that her father left her. The money would sustain her comfortably for a few more years, even after paying back the loans, but it wouldn’t last forever. If she didn’t want to end up flat broke she was going to have to find a job with some kind of future. This might be her one chance to do what she wanted with her life, instead of laboring away in some bleak factory somewhere.

But then something caught her attention that made her forget about the interview.

A television was on in the corner of the room. There was a news story. A picture of a familiar face. A sort of average face. The kind of face that was kind of attractive, but easily forgotten. Except she hadn’t forgotten the barista’s face at all. She could still picture him clearly in her mind. And although she couldn’t see any ghostly animal ears on the young man whose face was on the television, it was clearly him.

The headline announced that a body had been identified.

“What’s that about?”

Amethyst turned around, confused, and looked at the television. “Oh… You didn’t hear about that? It was awful. It was all over the news this morning.”

“I was trying to sleep in.”

“They found that guy in the middle of an empty parking lot. His body was all…broken.” A look of revulsion passed over her face as she recalled the gruesome details of the report. “I guess nobody saw anything, not even on security cameras. It was like he just dropped out of the sky. Super creepy.”

Seph stared at the screen, horrified. “I just saw that guy…” she breathed.

Amethyst’s eyes grew wide. “You knew him?”

She shook her head. “No. I just…saw him. He was a barista at this coffee shop where I was meeting some friends. I’d never seen him before then.”

Amethyst shuddered. “That’s creepy.”

Creepy wasn’t the half of it. She stared at the guy’s picture. His name was Coby Bilk, according to the caption on the screen. But she never got his name. She never looked at his nametag. She was too busy staring at his ghostly ears.

That this guy, of all guys, should turn up dead…

What did it mean?

The news story switched over to something else and Seph lowered her eyes as the waitress appeared with her plate. Suddenly, she’d lost her appetite. She decided to get her chicken salad to go.

* * *

Seph didn’t sleep very well again that night. She had nightmares about Coby Bilk and his strange, ghostly ears. It was late at night and even darker than it should’ve been. The streetlights were all out. Nobody was around. He was running for his life, screaming, begging for help.

But she didn’t know how to help him.

The next night was a little better. And the next night was better still. By the end of the weekend, she was feeling much more like her old self again. Better still, she was offered a second interview for the graphic design job, scheduled for Thursday afternoon. She dismissed her curious hallucination as a side-effect of stress and lack of sleep and even managed to push from her mind the strange coincidence of the barista’s terrible death.

It helped that the news story had been brushed aside in favor of an even more awful story about some kind of freak accident at a manufacturing facility in Sewart, Wisconsin. Thirty-seven people were dead. And it seemed as though no one could explain exactly how or why this tragedy happened. There were too many conflicting and confusing reports. It might have been either a disgruntled employee, a terrorist attack or some kind of insane viral outbreak, among other bizarre theories. She’d stopped paying attention to the reports. It was too disturbing. As sorry as she was to hear about all the victims and their poor families, there simply wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had her own life to lead and she needed to stay focused.

And she did stay focused. She was well-prepared and much more confident for her second interview. By the time she left, she was quite proud of herself.

In all, it was a good day for her. She walked out of the building with her head held high, confident this time that she’d be asked back for the third and final interview.

But as she walked to her truck, she looked out across the busy street and glimpsed a middle-aged man pushing his way through the crowd as if in a hurry, a cell phone pressed to his ear, wearing a suit jacket and tie.

He looked just like any other self-absorbed, inconsiderate jerk, except for the ghostly, glowing ears protruding from his graying hair.

Seph stopped and stood there, her car keys dangling from her hand, staring.

He didn’t see her looking at him. He didn’t seem to see anyone. He practically knocked an old woman over in his rush. He appeared to be having a heated conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line.

People saw him perfectly fine. They gave him dirty looks as he passed. But none of them stared at him in any way that would suggest that they saw glowing animal ears sprouting from his head.

She watched him walk, trying to blink away whatever it was that was making her eyes hallucinate this strange vision again, but they wouldn’t go. The ears stubbornly refused to disappear, no matter how hard she tried to look past them. They looked different from the ears she’d seen on Coby Bilk. They were more round than pointy. More like a bear’s ears, perhaps, although it was difficult to tell from this distance.

Then the man turned the corner and was gone.

Seph looked around. No one else had ghostly animal ears. Everyone else looked perfectly normal.

She stood there a moment, confused, and then continued on toward her car.

* * *

Seph was nervous for the next couple days. Partly because she was waiting to hear back about the interview, but also because she couldn’t stop thinking of those two, bizarre hallucinations.

What did it mean? Why was it happening to her?

She was beginning to fear that she was having some manner of mental breakdown. And this was a lousy time to have one of those. She was so close to achieving her career goal.

It had to be the stress. She was so worried about this interview process. It must have been messing with her head. And as the weekend came and went, that seemed to be precisely the case. The world went on about its business as she waited to hear back about the job. She went out several times. She even went to the mall and had lunch with her mother, who wanted to hear all about her interviews. She saw hundreds of people. Thousands, perhaps, and not one of them had a pair of weird, ghostly ears sprouting from their skulls.

She didn’t tell her mom about her hallucinations, of course. She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want anyone to know how badly her mind had unraveled itself. It was no one else’s business.

Then Wednesday evening came around and Seph found herself sitting in front of the television, staring at another familiar face on the screen.

Baxter Winger had turned up dead alongside Interstate Ninety-Four, his mangled body left within plain sight of traffic, and yet there were no witnesses. She stared at his picture, her stomach twisting into a hot, slimy knot inside her. He didn’t have animal ears in the picture, ghostly or otherwise, but she recognized him immediately as the rude man on the far side of the street in Cakwetak.

It had happened again.

Twice she’d seen those strange ears and twice the person had ended up dead. And violently so. What was going on? Why was this happening? Were the ears some sort of death omen? And if so, why was she the only one who could see them? What the hell was she supposed to do about something like that?

It wasn’t as if she could tell anyone. They’d tell her she was crazy. She’d tell her she was crazy. It was ridiculous!

She tried to make sense of it. She must be mistaken. Maybe these weren’t the same people at all. Maybe she was only projecting the faces of these dead men onto her memory of those people her stressed brain decided to fool her into thinking had those stupid, phantom ears.

That had to be it. It didn’t make much sense, but that was the only possible explanation.

She turned off the television and went to bed. But she didn’t sleep well again that night.

* * *

Seph was offered her third and final interview. It was on Thursday, the sixth of November, about a week after Baxter Winger was reported dead, at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Overall, she was confident. She hadn’t had any more hallucinations to rattle her, and she’d been avoiding the news, just to be certain nothing else would distract her, so she felt well-composed and perfectly professional. She was even running early that morning, arriving in Cakwetak with plenty of time to spare, so she stopped at a drive-through and treated herself to a pumpkin spice latte.

That was when her luck turned sour.

As soon as she pulled out onto the main road again, she was cut off by a moving truck that changed lanes without signaling. She slammed on the Ford’s brakes and swerved, narrowly avoiding a collision and spilling the latte on her good dress pants.

She cursed at the other driver—and at the scalding pain of the hot beverage soaking into her pants leg—and merged into traffic. This was going to be a problem. She couldn’t possibly expect to be taken seriously if she showed up for this important interview in stained clothes, but it wasn’t as if she’d thought to bring a spare outfit. She did her best to mop up the spill with a napkin, but the stain wasn’t coming out. And it wasn’t subtle, either. It was huge.

She groaned, frustrated, and checked the time. She was still early. There was time to fix this.

She changed lanes and turned at the next intersection instead of going straight. The Cakwetak shopping mall was directly ahead. If she was quick, she could pop in, get a new pair of pants, change and then be on her way again. It might be cutting it close, but she was certain she could pull it off if there weren’t any more unexpected complications.

She parked near the bookstore and started inside, resisting the impatient urge to pick up her pace beyond a brisk walk. It felt like a mile to the nearest apparel store, but she still had time. She didn’t need to run. Or even jog. There was no good reason to tire herself out and show up to the interview looking like she’d just left the gym.

But that bad luck was still with her. As she was riding up the escalator to the second floor, gazing down at the storefronts below her, it happened again.

A young woman emerged from the Bath and Body Works and set off toward the food court. She was slender and pretty, wearing skinny jeans, stylish boots and a yellow, long-sleeve shirt. She had a playful, blonde ponytail and a pair of ghostly, glowing ears protruding from her head just above the neat line of her bangs.

Seph’s heart instantly sank. No. She couldn’t deal with this right now. She didn’t have time.

But the last two people she saw with those ears had turned up dead, and violently so. How long would it be before this blonde girl turned up on the news as well, her body brutally mangled?

She couldn’t let it happen again. She’d never have a good night’s sleep again if she had to deal with that kind of guilt. But what was she supposed to do? Just forget about her interview? Throw away all that she’d worked for? This was her dream. This was her chance to do what she wanted with her life.

Besides, she couldn’t just walk up to this girl and say, “Excuse me, but do you realize that you have a pair of phantom animal ears stuck to your head? No? Well it’s no surprise since I’m the only one who seems to be able to see them. The problem is that I’m pretty sure you’re going to die horribly sometime soon.”

The only thing the poor girl would be afraid of would be the crazy, bespectacled weirdo with stained pants who approached her in the middle of a crowded mall to tell her this.

No. That wouldn’t do at all. In fact, she couldn’t think of a single thing she could possibly say or do to convince the ponytailed blonde that her life might be in danger without sounding like a complete mental case.

It wasn’t an ideal situation by any means. It was downright unfair. But there simply wasn’t anything she could do. It wasn’t her duty to protect these people. She wasn’t responsible for them. She didn’t even believe in this kind of stuff.

And she had important things to do today.

Seph reached the top of the escalator and walked away from the doomed blonde.