The Dragons of Styx Read online

  The Dragons of Styx

  Hit World Book Four

  By

  John E. Siers

  PUBLISHED BY: Hit World Press

  Copyright © 2021 John E. Siers

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Dedication

  To my dear wife, who – after six novels – may finally be willing to admit that I really am a writer.

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  Cover Design by Shezaad Sudar

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  Contents

  Dedication

  The Hit World Universe

  Chapter One: Missing in Action

  Chapter Two: Meet the Dragons

  Chapter Three: Loki

  Chapter Four: War Council

  Chapter Five: Sparkling House Guest

  Chapter Six: Juan Carlos

  Chapter Seven: Donna

  Chapter Eight: Family Affair

  Chapter Nine: Saturday’s a Working Day

  Chapter Ten: Welcome to the Swamp

  Chapter Eleven: Time Out and Restart

  Chapter Twelve: Wizard Smackdown

  Chapter Thirteen: Loki Redux

  Chapter Fourteen: Jennifer

  Chapter Fifteen: Send in the Dragon

  Chapter Sixteen: Dirk

  Chapter Seventeen: GITFOH

  Chapter Eighteen: The Tontine

  Chapter Nineteen: Ghost Hunt

  Chapter Twenty: Succubus

  Chapter Twenty-One: Venus

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Balance

  Epilogue

  About John E. Siers

  Excerpt from Book One of The Milesian Accords:

  Excerpt from Book One of The Fallen World:

  Excerpt from Book One of The Devil’s Gunman:

  Excerpt from Book One of The Shadow Lands:

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  The Hit World Universe

  September 11, 2001 was the blackest day in American history. A dozen hijacked airliners wiped out most of the American government and brought America to its knees. The population screamed for blood, but the government was in chaos. The senior surviving member in the line of succession was a junior senator from Oregon nobody had heard of outside his native state.

  The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians all eyed the United States to see if the time had come for military action against American interests worldwide. The new president had only just been appointed and didn’t have the political capital—or will—to risk World War Three. Indeed, he was on record as publicly blaming America for worsening relations with the Muslim world prior to the attacks. He called for restraint and refused to commit the U.S. military to go after those identified as responsible. “We brought this on ourselves,” he said in a nationwide broadcast.

  But Americans were having none of it, not even the constituency that had elected him. The wealthiest of the wealthy went to work behind the scenes, committing tens of billions of dollars to show America’s enemies what happened when you dared to attack us. The terrorists jeered and vowed more attacks, trying to provoke a response.

  It worked.

  The answer was the formation of a lavishly funded group of mercenaries hired by those wealthy private citizens. The mercenaries sped to the Middle East, set on bloody revenge. The president threatened to arrest everyone concerned, but America’s law enforcement agencies sided with the mercs, and he never pushed it beyond threats.

  Impeachment loomed.

  The money to finance the mercs was funneled through a dummy corporation called LifeEnders, Inc. They attracted the best black ops people America had, plus select others from friendly nations, with many either on detached duty from the U.S. military services, arranged by loyal officers who defied the chain of command, or who left the service altogether. The billionaires who supported them spared no expense to supply them with the best equipment available. They even lured some top-flight freelancers out of the shadows and into the fight. As always, money talked.

  Within months, most of the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks were being executed on live American pay-per-view television, along with officials from the countries who supported them. Outraged protests from enemy states, and America’s own president, fell on the deaf ears of the American public. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clarified that American military capabilities were at full strength and on high alert, but the president ordered them to stand down. Officially, the military obeyed. Privately, they defied their commander in chief, and let America’s enemies know it. Rather than risk nuclear war and worldwide Armageddon, foreign countries backed down.

  But Americans didn’t want to limp along with a rump government that was wildly unpopular and had proved unequal to the emergency. As the federal bureaucracy struggled to restore itself and fill critical positions, the population demanded power be turned over to private corporations wherever possible. These new Corpses, a derogatory name for the corporations, replaced the bureaucracy with results.

  With impeachment likely to succeed in deposing the president, and as a presidential recall petition passed 90 million signatures, America held a special election on September 11, 2003. Though challenged by the traditional parties, the Supreme Court deemed such a vote legal. Both parties nominated the usual candidates, saying all the usual things, but the mood in America remained angry and combative, and through the summer, a populist movement grew to draft Charlton Heston for president. The two political parties laughed off his efforts, but they’d misjudged the mood of the country. The actor won in a landslide write-in campaign, and with him, both houses of Congress swung toward revenge—and security-minded independent candidates. When the actor took office in January 2004, he had the strongest mandate of any president in American history.

  LifeEnders, Inc. grew out of the mercenary group that struck back in the Middle East. The corporation found and eliminated threats to America, worldwide, with the speed and precision of a scalpel. When terrorist organizations were discovered within America, LifeEnders, Inc. found and eliminated them. Terrorists couldn’t hide from their reach, and there was no appeal on their judgment.

  As time went by, LEI, as LifeEnders, Inc. came to be known, also tried to end murder within America’s borders; killers were met with swift Old Testament justice. But that didn’t work. First, there were too many murders, and second, the regular police angrily opposed such intrusions into their areas of responsibility. So the government passed all the legislation and—more to the point—set all the corresponding fees and tax rates to finance private, legal assassinations under the quasi-governmental LEI. Non-contracted killings remained murder, with all the usual punishments, but contracted murder through LEI was the law of the land.

  The street name for this new reality was Hit World.

  Chapter One: Missing in Action

  Burch, Miller, and Wilcox stood in silence, watching Martelli pick through the clothing and other stuff in the heap on the warehouse floor. He picked up the worn pair of jeans, noting that the fly was still closed and the belt buckled. He turned them upside down, and a pair of panties fell out—wet panties. Somebody’s
bladder had let go.

  “Uh…Chief? I thought they said not to disturb anything,” Burch said.

  “Fuck them,” Martelli replied as he continued to pick up Waters’ clothing and stuff it into her canvas tote bag. “I don’t want some junior wannabe gatandi poking through her stuff. She’s gonna want this back if we find her—when we find her.”

  “She might want it laundered first.”

  Martelli arched his eyebrows. “You volunteering?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “Me neither.”

  They were dealing with a mystery. Martelli and his team of Shooters had been in pursuit of a target—a creature most people wouldn’t believe existed. Sparkling Waters had been their guide, on the team because of her special ability to sense and locate targets like this one. She’d told them the creature had crossed the alley to the building next door. That’s when things went south in a hurry.

  Martelli and Miller had been outside, covering the exits. Burch and Wilcox had ordered Waters to stay in the warehouse while they went after the target. Waters wasn’t a Shooter, and they didn’t want to risk her being in the line of fire when they took it down.

  But the creature had outwitted them. It had jumped from the roof of the other building back to the warehouse, where Waters waited, alone and unprotected. They’d rushed back to the warehouse, knowing they’d be too late to save her, but when they got there, they’d found the creature—or what was left of it—still smoking hot. And Waters gone.

  They’d found a pile of her clothing, along with her tote bag, data pad, and other gear—but no sign of the young woman herself, and no blood or other evidence that she might have come to harm.

  The whole thing smelled of magic—and of course, most people don’t believe in magic. Shooters who work for LifeEnders Special Activities Division aren’t “most people,” however. They tend to see a lot of things others don’t believe in.

  Tony Martelli worked for SAD’s Paranormal Activities group and had seen many strange things in the field, but dealing with magic was not in his job description. He had called a special number LifeEnders provided for such things, and two agents from the Arcane Arts group had arrived quickly. To his surprise and dismay, they had taken a cursory look at the scene and announced that Sparkling Waters was their chief suspect. She had torched the target and then made a hasty exit by teleportation—so hasty she’d left her clothing behind.

  And that, they declared, made her a rogue magic-user—an outlaw in their eyes. She was not properly licensed by SAD to do magic and therefore must be brought up on charges. They ordered Martelli to find her and turn her over to them for appropriate action.

  Martelli’s body language told his team he wasn’t buying it.

  “You don’t think she did this herself?” Wilcox asked.

  “Hell, no! That makes no sense at all. You think she wasted the target, then came all the way back over here, peed herself, and then teleported out? First of all, if she could smoke that thing like that, why would she pee herself? And if she did turn it into a crispy critter, why would she leave? She just did what we came here to do.”

  “I think something scared the piss out of her, grabbed her, and torched the target at the other end of the building—not necessarily in that order.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Miller agreed. “The damned gatandis are just pissed because we interrupted their social life.”

  Artemis Rousseau and Simon Webley—the response team from Arcane Arts—had arrived very quickly when Martelli put in the call.

  In fact, Martelli thought, they got here so quickly they probably arrived the same way Waters departed. Webley had been dressed in black tie and dinner jacket; Rousseau wore a black, floor-length evening gown. Obviously, they’d been at some fancy dress-up event when the call came in.

  “Right…we spoiled their evening, so they had to blame somebody. Waters was a convenient scapegoat, so why bother to do a real investigation? But that means it’s on us to find out what really happened.”

  “So how do we do that, Chief?” Burch wanted to know.

  Martelli looked around the scene one more time.

  “Don’t know yet, but there’s not much more we can do here. The good news is, we can report the target was terminated. Go home, get some sleep. We’ll regroup at the office in the morning and try to figure something out.”

  “You think Waters is…OK…somewhere?”

  “I have no idea where she is or in what condition, but at least she didn’t get turned into a smoking pile of charcoal. There’s no blood, no sign of a struggle, so…hell, I don’t know, but we’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  “You mean later today…it’s after midnight,” Miller noted.

  “Right…later. Go home. Get some rest.”

  They were leaving when Burch held out an arm in a stopping motion. Turning his head, he touched the ear bud in his left ear.

  “What—” Martelli started to say, but Burch held up a finger.

  “E-signature,” Burch said in a low tone. He checked the graph readout on a small monitoring device attached to his belt. “VBR stream from somewhere…over there.”

  He pointed to a spot in the rafters. Martelli scanned the darkness between the metal supports and sensed more than saw movement. He never would have spotted it had he not been looking for it, hovering so high in the darkness. Even so, there could be no doubt what it was…

  “Drone!” he said, drawing his weapon. “Anybody got a shot?”

  “I can’t see it!” Wilcox said. “Where is it?”

  None of them spotted it before the machine zipped overhead and out a window, but they all heard the buzz of its tiny motor.

  “That was weird,” Wilcox said.

  Martelli grunted. “Not to whoever sent it.”

  Martelli drove toward home pretty much on autopilot, his brain picking over the details of the night’s expedition. Why would something—whatever it was—take Waters? It could have killed her; it had sure as hell proved that. It could have just left her there—there was no danger once the thing was dead. And what was up with that drone? The whole thing didn’t make sense.

  A horrible thought struck him. A vampire? Do we have one of those on the loose as well—one that steals prey from another creature and takes it home to suck it dry at leisure? But vampires can’t do incendiary spells—fire is their enemy. And they don’t teleport, so her clothes wouldn’t have been left like that. And nobody can prove they even exist…and, and, and…

  His thoughts were interrupted by an incoming call—a number he didn’t recognize, but that was on the LifeEnders private network, with a Corporate Priority code. Probably the damned wizards calling to give me more grief.

  “Martelli…” he said, taking the call reluctantly.

  “Uh…Tony Martelli?”

  “I don’t own a car, so it doesn’t need a warranty.”

  “Funny guy. This is Jay Morgan, Western Division Field Operations. Are you missing one of your people—girl by the name of Sparkling Waters?”

  “Uh…yes! Is she OK? Do you know where she is?”

  “Far as I know, she’s fine. I got a call from a friend at one of our franchise operations. Apparently she’s with them—says she lost her pad, had no way to contact you, so she asked my buddy for help. He just rousted me out of bed, and I got on the network to contact you.”

  “She’s with the franchisee, you say? A regular LEI franchise?”

  “Well, not exactly. It’s Charon’s Ferry.”

  Martelli was stunned—so much so that he pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a run-down strip mall. Charon’s Ferry! She must have been right all along…and I thought she was crazy! A dragon!

  Suddenly the night’s events made sense. It hadn’t come to take out the target—it had come to rescue her from the target. Somehow, she’d summoned it.

  “Martelli? Are you still there?” Morgan sounded concerned.

  “Uh…yes, I am. I need to think for a moment. Listen, can
you get back in touch with them? Tell Waters to just stay there…tell her not to go anywhere until I can talk to her.”

  “OK…Is that all?”

  “No, wait…you say you know them? The people at Charon’s Ferry?” Damn! Waters told me their names, but I didn’t pay attention…

  “Yeah…Mark Marshall—we served together in the Marines; I’ve known him for the better part of twenty years. The only other person at the Ferry is his partner, Lisa Woods. The two of them are pretty much a couple, and they run the place by themselves.”

  “Could you arrange a meeting with them? It’s really important that I talk to them—and Waters—as soon as possible.”

  “Probably…but it’ll have to be at their place, their offices up in Westview. They rarely leave the place—they actually live in the building, and it’s like a friggin’ fortress.”

  Right…a fortress, Martelli thought. You’re going to meet a dragon in its lair. Probably not the smartest thing you’ve ever done…

  “Yeah, okay. One more thing, did you guys sic a drone on me?”

  The line was quiet for several seconds.

  “I’ll call you back,” Morgan said. “Don’t mention that to anybody else.”

  “Do you actually know this guy?” Mark Marshall asked.

  “I know of him,” Jay Morgan replied. “I don’t have a lot of dealings with SAD, but he’s a field supervisor in Paranormal Activities.”

  “Paranormal…as in ghosts?”

  “We don’t talk about that, but yeah…and other things.”

  “OK…field supervisor…meaning?”

  “A real field guy, not a REMF,” Morgan said, using the time-honored military acronym for non-combat people, the polite version being Rear-Echelon Maternal Fornicator. “He’s a licensed Shooter, leads his team in the field, and isn’t afraid to get bloody.”