The Brimstone Network (Brimstone Network Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

squeeze.
    Elijah struggled in the monster’s grasp, but it was for nothing. He was exhausted, the sounds of battle around him growing softer as the pressure on his skull increased.
    But he couldn’t give up; it wasn’t the Network way.
    Digging deep into his memories, he found a simple spell, one of the first ever taught to him, and strained to utter the special words. His skull about to crack, Elijah Stone finished the incantation, feeling his right hand ignite with unnatural fire. Barely conscious, he reached out, fumbling fingers finally finding the Minotaur’s snout.
    The reaction was exactly what he’d hoped for. The air stank with the aroma of burning leather as the hurting beast hurled him away.
    Colors like the explosion of fireworks danced before his eyes as he tried to pick himself up from where he had landed. All around him were the bodies of his fallen agents,and the leering smiles of the creatures that had attacked them.
    They were waiting for him to fall—to give up—but that wasn’t going to happen.
    Focusing all his strength, he climbed to his feet as the Minotaur again came at him. Elijah smiled seeing the damage he had done to the beast’s face; it would wear the mark of their battle for the remainder of its miserable life.
    It tossed its horned head back in a bellow of fury, raising its fists, ready to bring them down and crush him.
    Elijah hoped that he had enough strength left to get out of the way. Muscles trembling, he tensed.
    The temperature in the room suddenly became shockingly cold, and he watched in awe as frost, and then an even thicker coating of ice, formed upon the shaggy body of the bull-headed monster, freezing it solid in mid-strike. But the momentum of its movement carried it forward, and the monster fell to the ground shattering like glass.
    Elijah looked across the room and wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Tobias Blaylock, both hands crackling with a cold, magickal fire.
    “Don’t you wish you had gone home when you had thechance?” the young agent asked, his clothes torn and spattered with gore.
    And the commander of the Brimstone Network smiled, feeling for a moment that they might have just the slimmest chance of survival.
    But those feelings of hope were quickly dashed. A monstrous, toadlike beast exploded up from beneath the rubble of the shattered floor behind the young Brimstone agent, its cavernous maw open wide. Tobias barely had time to react, spinning toward the threat even as it darted forward and, with one bite, consumed him.
    Elijah screamed, unleashing a flurry of magickal blasts that seemed to slide off the monster’s slimy, black flesh. It retreated, allowing the Hollow Men and the other nightmare invaders to converge on him; the final survivor of the vicious attack.
    He was tired, injured, but knew exactly what he had to do. He had long prepared for this, a secret contingency plan for when defeat seemed inevitable.
    Elijah Stone accepted his fate, gathering his strength as the monsters swarmed.
    All he had to do was take his last breath.

3.
A MAGE’S CORPSE HAD ENORMOUS VALUE.
    Just about any part of his body—head, skin, internal organs, even his hair and fingernails—could be used as special ingredients in the most powerful of magickal rituals.
    Elijah Stone’s body would have been considered priceless, which was why he made certain there would be nothing left when his life finally came to an end.
    It’s been a good life , he thought.
    The monsters were on him like ants swarming over a discarded piece of bread. The moment he felt their cold touch, smelled their foul bodies, he triggered the magickal self-destruct command that he had placed inside his mind when he’d first taken command of the Network so many years— that felt merely like days —ago.
    Elijah Stone’s body burned like the sun, a blinding flash of intense, supernatural energy that turned himself, as well as his attackers, to dust.
    And with his release a powerful signal was