The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic Read Online Free PDF

they were not easy to eat, and he would have tossed them away in frustration after the first. He palmed a handful of mints, shoved them into his mouth and started for the house.
    “Let the captain go first,” Cyn said, holding him back. Metzger moved ahead, shotgun in hand. The door was unlocked and the smell inside, mean.
    The priests were still so new to the team that they paled from the stink; Metzger, who had been tempered by six months of battle, only made swallowing noises in the back of his throat. Jack looked as though he were walking through a park. The smell was nothing to him and, sadly, the same was true with Cyn. She was sure the stench was horrible and yet she carried on, shining her light ahead of her, following Jack as he pressed into the house, pushing past Metzger.
    He could sense something just as she could. She hadn’t been to the edge of hell as he had, but she could still feel things that others couldn’t. It was part of her birth right. It was part of being a necromancer.
    Jack led them right through the house and down into the basement. In a back corner was a hole that went down into the earth; the smell here was three times as bad as it was in the rest of the house, and it would only get worse.
    “There’s a person down there,” Jack said. “I can feel him. He’s willing to deal.” A shiver crawled up his back, twisting his shoulders. After a second with her eyes closed and her mind focussed, Cyn understood what he was saying. She could feel him . There was a man in the pits beneath the house, though now he was only barely a man.
    His pain radiated up to them, but what was worse was his desperation. He was projecting the feeling out into the universe. He was letting everyone and everything know that he was so desperate that he was willing to make deals with his soul as currency.
    First, Timmons crossed himself and Jordan followed right behind. They could feel it as well.
    Jack opened his mouth and looked as if he were about to make some remark about them crossing themselves—when his soul was drained, he grew petulant and snappish with the priests. Once in a slurred drunken ramble, he admitted to Cyn that he thought their light exposed his darkness, throwing shadow where there shouldn’t be shadow.
    Cyn handed him more Junior Mints and he shoveled them into his mouth.
    As he ate, Captain Metzger went down an aluminum ladder that poked up out of the hole; it rattled as he went down. When he reached the bottom, Jack stuffed a double handful of mints into his mouth and followed after, the sword at his hip clanking against the ladder with every step. Father Timmons started to go next, but Cyn pulled him back by his black shirt. It wasn’t smart for anyone but her to get too close when Jack was in one of his moods—he could be dangerous.
    Drained or not, he had a reserve of power at his fingertips.
    She followed him down, her nerves rattling worse than the ladder. They had never been to the home of one of the possessed before; they had always left that particular horror to the police and the local priests. She was just beginning to think that was more of a blessing than she knew—it might have also been a mistake.
    Metzger and Jack stood in a cramped little hand-carved tunnel where the dirt trickled off the walls and the dark was absolute. There was no pause in Jack; he was pulled along by a calling he couldn’t ignore. He pushed past Metzger, and Cyn nudged past the captain as well and followed along after. She thought she was feeling the same pull as Jack, but she was wrong.
    They went down a stunted passage that ended at another hole and another ladder that went down to a third sub-level. There they walked hunched over, dirt cascading off the ceiling until they found yet another hole, going deeper still. At the very bottom was a black tunnel that went in two directions; Jack immediately turned left, while she was drawn to the right.
    “Hold on,” she hissed at Jack. “There’s