Dark Union (The Descent Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

unease crept over her.
    “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
    I nside a motel room labeled by a tin zero hanging from one nail, the Union of Kopides and Aspides was preparing to move.
    The motel was enduring renovations, and the wall between rooms zero and eleven had been knocked down to make it one large chamber. Unit B13 used the four beds to house their computers, guns, and other equipment; the actual team members slept on the softest spot on the floor they could find. Nobody complained about it. The other two units on-site had to endure the heat in the camp outside town.
    But Unit B13 hadn’t been given the best lodgings because they were unusually skilled, or because they were special. It was because they had Benjamin Flynn, and he was the most powerful precognitive alive.
    Benjamin stared at himself in the mirror of the shared bathroom. He had been in there for over an hour, but nobody dared to interrupt. They were all afraid of him.
    He couldn’t blame them. He didn’t like himself, either.
    He touched the collar on his neck. To anyone outside his unit, it probably looked like he was just some punk kid with an edgy style, but it was connected to Boyd’s computers, and it somehow recorded his visions. The quartz on the left side was Allyson’s work, and meant to suppress the small premonitions that peppered his day; the uncut, pebble-sized diamond on the other side was supposed to dampen the big hits. Both of them worked… more or less. He hadn’t gone comatose from a big vision in a few months, anyway.
    Benjamin thought a bunch of white guys sticking the Black kid in a collar was fucked up, and he told them that. They asked if he would prefer a straitjacket. He said he would rather be treated like a human, and they laughed like he was joking.
    Carefully, he wiggled a shard of glass from the broken mirror into the lock. He wanted to fry the Union’s electronics. They had built up an archive with thousands of hours of murky video of his prophecies, and written a ton of volumes interpreting them, and he was sick of it. He deserved privacy. The people he saw in his visions deserved privacy. And the collar was stupid.
    A spark of electricity flared on the wiring. It leaped to his hand and zapped him.
    “Ouch!”
    He dropped the glass into the sink.
    A fist pounded on the door. When Allyson spoke, it sounded like she had her face pressed against the other side. “What are you doing in there? Did you have a vision? I’m coming in.”
    “I’m taking a dump,” Benjamin replied. “Bad burrito.”
    “Unlock the door, Flynn.”
    “Five more minutes.”
    “You have ten seconds, and then I break the bathroom lock.”
    She meant it. The Union had done it before. He wasn’t really a team member—he was like their pet or something. The dog everyone liked to kick.
    Benjamin groaned and swept the shard of glass into the drain of the sink. He flushed the toilet with his foot, ran the faucet for a couple of seconds, and unlocked the door just as Allyson was preparing to shoot it open with her handgun.
    She glanced around the bathroom like she expected to find someone inside with him.
    “Are you okay?” Her hair was red and shoulder-length, which offset a round face that seemed pudgy even though her body fat was close to zero. She ate and trained with the Union hunters, despite being a witch; she was bulky with muscle and twice as thick as he was.
    “My rectum’s not okay,” Benjamin said.
    He was rewarded with a sound of disgust. “Get out of there.”
    The unit bustled around rooms zero and eleven, discussing summit guests as they registered in the high school gymnasium. The thirty kopides that the Union invited had been trickling in all day. They watched on wireless security cameras that they had set up around town.
    “The demons are getting almost as bad as the angels,” Boyd said, pointing to one of the monitors. “You see that? Almost all of them are staying in the Warrens. Jesus Christ, the paranoia is