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

something this way.” Yes, she could sense the poor man in his feces and urine stinking cell. He was a raw line of power. His soul was laid bare, open to the highest bidder, but what lay to the right was far more insidious and subtle...and dangerous.
    Ignoring her, he went left, while she, the unblooded necromancer, was drawn to the right. Metzger, wavered, not knowing which to follow. After a few seconds of looking back and forth, he chose to follow after Jack and the priests followed after him. Only Bob considered the right corridor. He stared, his filthy face open in a look of longing, but he was hustled after Jack by Father Timmons, leaving Cyn to face the insidious evil alone.
    It was an old evil. It had been the first evil perpetuated in that pit of despair, and it was an ancient evil. The dirt passage opened up into a hollowed square of a room where the ends of worms decorated the dirt walls and the floor was covered in a white sheet pulled as tight as a sail in hard gale.
    The decomposed body of a naked child lay in the middle of the sheet; it had been slit open from the throat down through its genitals. What was left of its organs was a black sludge that was rounded and bulged as swamp gasses built up inside. For all her toughness, Cyn was sure she would hurl if the bubble popped when she was in the room.
    As it was, the outrageous stench made even her stomach knot and twist.
    Around the body of the child were glyphs. For the most part they were ordinary hieroglyphs, though what they spelled out was hardly ordinary: it was a summoning spell. It was a crude spell written in a crude hand, and it shouldn’t have worked, but it had and for two reasons.
    Bob Chapman had sacrificed a child to bring forth a demon. He had offered the purest of innocent souls to bring forth his demon and it wasn’t just any demon that came into this world to possess Bob. The demon had been named Menet-rah.
    The glyph that bore his name was unlike the others. It was written in a curious poly-heiroglyphical script. The cuneiform wedges set it apart, making it not only different, it made it unique. It also made it terribly frightening.
    There was no way that glyph could have ended up in a crappy little suburb of Akron by accident and it was inconceivable that someone as insignificant as Bob Chapman would have his hands on it. He was a nobody from a nowhere town. He had likely never been to Egypt and if he had, he had gone as a tourist and these sorts of glyphs weren’t exactly lying around waiting for people to find them.
    “Jack!” she yelled, her voice flat and suppressed as if the tons of earth between her and the night sky was squeezing the air, taking the life out of it. “Jack! You have to see this.”
    There was no answer and a squirm of worry crawled into her belly. She suddenly felt very alone.
    With her hand on her sword and the wavering light leading her, she retraced her steps, hurrying down the rough-hewn passage. When she came to the bend, she finally heard something other than her own fearful breathing. It was the sound of a struggle.
    She ripped her sword out and raced almost blind in Bob’s dungeon of horrors, sprinting past short passages which ended in foul smelling pits that held the moldering bones of his victims. At the fifth of these passages was a sight that stopped her: Jack had Bob by the throat and was lifting him off the ground with just his left hand, while both priests clung to his sword arm trying to hold it from skewering the man. Captain Metzger had Jack from behind, one thick arm around Jack’s throat, the muscles bunching with all his strength.
    Jack looked as though he was just about to get really angry and that would have ended up in three more deaths.
    “Stop,” Cyn said and this time her voice was alive and it cut through the grunts of the two priests and the swearing of Captain Metzger and the odd garbled gobble that Bob was making as Jack choked the life out of him.
    All sound fell away as Jack