Chad offered. “And what about the body we found earlier today?”
They all shivered remembering the scene. They had received a call from the police about the body of a young man being found and thought they needed to see it. The man had been about twenty years of age and was wearing the remnants of a tee shirt with the local college name on it.
When they got there, the police had taped off the entire area and about one hundred yards all around it. Chad had thought that odd and went to talk with a couple of his buddies on the force, when he came back his tan was noticeably paler.
“What is it?” Zachary asked.
“They said we need to see for ourselves… it’s just as bad as what you described about the bus the other day.”
As the four of them approached, Trevor had to breathe through his mouth in order to keep the smell from making him sick. The worst part of it was he could taste the acrid odor and that was just as bad. Zach gave him a surgical mask from his jacket pocket… he always kept a few on hand for situations like this. When they saw the body, even Zachary had to turn away and take a few deep breaths.
The body had been literally ripped apart and everything that had been inside was on the outside. The worst part was they could all see where something had actually eaten parts out as whole chunks were gone. Long claw marks covered what little bit of flesh was left and the bones were visible, some of them broken and poking out.
The eye sockets were the worst as they stared straight up… the eyes had been dug out. Part of the scalp had been ripped away and the skull punctured with brain matter still slowly oozing out of the hole. The mouth had been pulled open and left hanging and the tongue also devoured.
Large portions had been gouged out all over the body and the stomach was lying wide open. Angelica turned away from the scene and covered her mouth with a hand to avoid nausea… it wasn’t helping.
“Poor bastard,” Zachary whispered and knelt down next to the boy. This past week had flown by with a frenzy of demon activity and it didn’t look like it was slowing down. “What’s the official word?”
“The police say it was an animal attack.” Chad answered.
Angelica shook her head, “No animal did this,” she rasped and headed back to the car. “It was the grave.”
Zachary shook away the memory and looked away from the map toward Angelica. “What did you mean when you say it was the grave?”
Angelica frowned, “It’s all I could feel from the body. The wounds were almost too old for me to even feel that. I don’t know how to better describe it but to say that it was the grave that killed him.”
Zachary stepped away from the map and went to his laptop sitting on the coffee table. Linking up with PIT, he sent a message to Storm documenting the latest events… his response was immediate.
“Looks like Storm's pulling in PIT’s major players.” Zachary informed the others and paused before looking up at his teammates. “He’s brought in the fabled Ren… he’s already here.”
Trevor shivered visibly at the mention of Ren’s name. Ren had always been the phantom of the group… more of a legend than a real person because Storm was the only one who had ever met him. He’d once asked Storm who was the most powerful member of PIT and Storm hadn’t even hesitated in his response. But if Storm was sending his second in command, then that meant he was sending an army right behind him.
Zachary and Trevor both knew what that meant… the war was starting.
Chapter 3
During his teenage years, Ren had made it a habit to log into the Paranormal Investigation Team’s database so he could keep up on current events. He was also smart enough to then destroy whatever computer he had used so it couldn’t be tracked back to him. It had been a thrill to breech the firewalls set up on a division of the government that supposedly didn’t exist.
The paranormal investigation team, otherwise known as P.I.T., knew Ren was stalking their assignments and siphoning their encrypted information, but so far they had never caught up with him and they had never found a firewall thick enough to keep him out of their private system. Not only was he stealing their data, but Ren was leaving data behind from his own paranormal investigations.
After several years, the head of PIT had started leaving Rin messages behind the thickest, most encrypted firewalls Rin had ever seen. It was behind those walls that Rin had secretly joined the elusive P.I.T. group, but only on his own terms… that he worked alone.
Whoever was behind that wall not only knew his name, but also some other things about him that no one else knew… like the fact that he wasn’t entirely human. It was only after he’d taken on a level seven demon that had started a flesh eating cult in the Congo and been severely wounded that the head man of P.I.T. had finally caught up with him.
Ren was in the middle of a fight with the skin-demon and very much on the losing end when a hand had gripped his shoulder… the next thing he knew, he was on a small private island in the middle of the ocean. Rin had turned around to come face to face with the man behind the encrypted walls… Storm.
Rin shook his head at the memory of those first few moments. Storm looked like he should have been the lead singer for some 80’s rock band instead of the mastermind behind the most secretive group of people in the world.
Storm had only smiled and removed the hand that had still been gripping his shoulder. “Trying to retire from P.I.T. the hard fast way? Why don’t you stick around a while? I’d hate to lose my best friend, before we have a chance to become friends.”
“What?” Ren winced, holding his hand over his chest where the demon had tried to scratch his heart out.
“Sorry,” Storm sighed reaching for him again. They were suddenly in the half underground, half underwater facility that was hidden deep under the island. “There isn’t anyone here with the power to heal, but I can always take you to someone that can if you’d prefer.”
“No,” Ren practically growled. “If you can give me some needle and thread, I think I can handle staying in one place for a few damn minutes.” He leaned back against a counter trying to stay out of Storm’s reach, “And if you touch me again, you’re gonna lose your hand.”
Storm laughed and opened one of the upper cabinets then waved his hand at all the medical supplies. His smile vanished when Ren unbuttoned his shirt and Storm saw the deep groves the skin-demon had made. A couple more seconds and Ren would have been gone.
“I think that since you have a fetish for demons, you might need to learn a little about them before you challenge another one to a fight.” Storm looked away from the claw marks already knowing what the scars would look like. He’d known Rin for a long time… that friendship just hadn’t happened yet.
Ren reached into the open cabinet and grabbed what looked like a sterilized stitching kit then moved toward the mirror on the wall. “If you’ve met one demon then you’ve met them all… right?” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice as he tried to mentally block out the pain… it wasn’t working.
“Wrong.” Storm corrected, “You only know what I’ve allowed uploaded into the database.” He sat down on the hospital bed in the middle of the room.
Ren looked
