The Death Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy Box Set: (Books 1-3) (78 page)

Jasper swung her head back and forth as though clearing it.

Blood from the blow she'd taken fell like scarlet rain beneath her position.

Ryan smiled, his hands curling into abusive fists of presumed victory.

He spoke so quietly for only her to hear, though Jeb leaned forward to try and catch his words, as did everyone.

The roar of the crowd made it impossible.

“This ends here, Jasper.”

A cruel smile overtook his face. “The Reflective doesn't have room for mongrel females.”

Jeb's eyes sharpened on her utter stillness.

Her form began to waver, shimmering on top of the bloody mat.

Jeb squinted at her, maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.

The noise of the crowd- it was disorientating.

Ryan flicked the switchblade as smoothly as they'd been trained to do. Training blades were all ceramic.

Jasper wore the scars to attest to that.

But reflective blades could still be had on the black market for the right price.

It looked like Ryan had paid.

Jeb watched the shining metal, his innate ability instantly online around a reflection and it hummed with want. His eyes met Kennet's and all went to Rachett, wondering what he would do Ryan producing an illegal weapon.

Its mirrored surface shimmered in the low lights that bathed the interior of the coliseum.

Holy fuck.

Jeb began to push through the people. This was going to get ugly.

No,
check that
, gruesome.

Ryan planned to murder Beth Jasper, maybe he always had.

Jeb could let a inductee take licks, abuse and unfairness. But death by another Reflective would not happen on his watch.

Why for the love of the Principle had Rachett not interfered?

“Hey!” a man protested as Jeb pushed him aside.

Then he saw Jeb's uniform and silently moved aside, as did everyone.

It was like the Earth's fabled Red Sea parting; Reflectives had that effect.

Jeb grabbed the ropes that surrounded the perimeter, hesitating as Rachett bellowed too late, “No blades!”

His voice was on a note of high keening fear. Jeb swung his face to his Commander's.

He had never seen or heard fear from Rachett. When all inequalities of the fight had been dismissed: Ryan's size against Beth, her gender, he finally took notice when an illegal weapon was produced.

It was beyond bizarre. None of it made sense from where Jeb stood.

Jeb saw the white's of Jasper's eyes, the inky tail of her braid wet with her blood as the blade swung so close to her face, the breeze lifted wisps of her hair. She crab walked backward in an awkward scuttle of escape.

Ryan braced himself as his commander screamed for Ryan to stop and he ignored the directive.

Rachett stepped forward too late to stop his best inductee from gutting another recruit as a justified elimination tactic and grabbed Ryan's arm.

But the knife was gone.

It sung through the air in an expert trajectory toward Beth.

The blade spun in the combustable silence of the coliseum, the crowd's collective breath held.

Jeb strode toward Jasper but she seemed unaware as her dark eyes tracked it seamlessly.

His eye's hadn't lied. One moment she was solid, the next she became opaque.

Then was gone.

Jeb had seen many jumps, but never a female's, and never into something of that size. The crowd watched as what appeared to be a glittering rope of iridescent white, like a pearl with a rainbow wash, slammed into the blade.

Jasper's body appeared to disappear, then reappear in the thin reflective ribbon of the jump as it collided with the metal.

As she meant to.

The knife landed in the mat, its tip sunk deeply into the soft surface with a twang.

The silence was deafening.

Beth Jasper had vanished. Only her blood remained as grim testimony to her presence moments before.

Rachett fisted Ryan's tunic in his hand, jerking him close.

“You dumb fuck,” he began with the quiet menace he was known for. “All you had to accomplish was keeping weapons out of it. You could have pummeled her into the mat in a fair spar.”

His eyes pegged Ryan's in blatant disgust.

“Now,” his flat eyes locked with Ryan's, “She's jumped. She
won
because you couldn't contain your shit
.
”

Jeb's eyes connected with Kennet across the ring from where he stood and he was just as stunned. Jeb glanced at the embedded blade in the mat and shook his head in disbelief.

“There's no way!” one of the Reflective recruits said quietly, “that's a six inch surface. She's a half-breed... nobody can jump that,” he scoffed.

But somebody had: Beth Jasper, female, half-breed... had just shown her hand.

It looked like aces high.

The crowd began to disperse, eyes roving for the missing Reflective female who had just made history.

There would be no jeering in her future, only jealousy.

Rachett reiterated what they'd always known, though a few had chosen to ignore.

“The Principle chooses who they will. There is no logic. That's why when we have an opponent, we do not underestimate their skills. Let this be a lesson to all who fight,” Rachett expounded, spinning in a slow, deliberate circle, his eyes falling on the inductee recruits, the Reflectives and the lesser audience who remained.

“Be ready,” he finished, landing a leaden glance on Ryan a final time before he stalked out of the coliseum. Guards moved up beside Ryan. His infraction would land him on Sector One for a certainty. A sector no Reflective wished to jump.

This was an epic clusterfuck if there had ever been one.

Jeb groaned.

The recruits filtered out, Ryan's defiant gaze challenging all that dared look his way as he was cuffed with non-reflective cuffs. One of the guards jerked the blade out of the map, giving Ryan narrow eyes.

Jeb's gaze squared off with Ryan until he dropped his gaze and was escorted out.

Jeb stared after his retreating back. He ran a frustrated hand through his cropped hair.

He knew what this disturbing mess meant for him.

Jeb would be tasked to locate Jasper. His primary task was retrieval. He was meant to be reassigned momentarily.

However, it seemed like it would be longer than a moment.

The crowd thinned and Jeb stared at the drying blood on the mat, the comments of those around him the same.

Awe mixed with fear. It was a bad combination. It could be a recipe for many things. The main one would be when Beth returned, what reception would she find waiting?

He knew that the people would forget the transgressions made against her by Ryan.

All they would remember was her jump.

He'd never forget it.

Jeb lifted his head at a small noise. Daphne, a beautiful Reflective, came toward him, her hips swaying so he would notice.

He did.

But even as her lush body moved toward him like water finding a crack in a stone, his mind was on another female, the newest member of The Cause.

Beth Jasper, a jumper without compare.

His new partner.

#

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Dark post-apocalyptic romantic fantasy

Book One: The Savage Series

Copyright © 2010-2011 Tamara Rose Blodgett

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved.

Prologue

1890

Samuel laid on his back, gasping for air as a fish out of the sea...
laboring
. They had done all they could, now the burden lay with their descendants. His gaze lingered on the house that he loved, now covered in ash, the sun no longer a bright orb in the sky, but shrouded in gray. A hush fell over the land, the environs a pewter wasteland of nothing, cold seeping into his marrow inch by insidious inch. Many would enter the spheres that had been constructed by the Guardians. They spoke of selective population, which rang false to Samuel, or true, as the case may be, his grandchildren safe and beyond the pale of this time,
this world that he was leaving.

He turned his head, rolling limply on its side, where his gaze captured Mae, also prone, a strange contraption with hand-hammered copper and a complex, inky black netting covering the greater part of her nose and mouth, leather thong-like straps braided and wrapped her skull, pushing strands of hair around like lost silver. She made odd, whistling noises as she breathed.

“Samuel, wear it,” Mae said, her voice distorted as she lifted the matching mask the Guardians had fashioned in the few preceding months they had been given.

“No, Mae. I wish to enjoy this fore-night without the chains of their advances.”

Samuel knew his stubbornness would cost him his life. The Guardians who were equal part savior and bearer of terrible news had made concessions for the elders. But those which survived would be the
strongest, most virile, agile, smartest and etcetera among them. Samuel and Mae understood at their advanced age of sixty and one years both, they would be excluded from the mercies of the sphere.

With blurred vision, Samuel saw a familiar dimmed figure approach. “Father! Why do you not take rest in your own bed?” Stella asked, her comely face a salve in his approaching death. Her wool skirts swirled as she knelt, setting an illuminated candle beside him, hissing steam from its seams.

Raising his hand, he cupped the loveliness of her face, knowing the time had come to enter the sphere the Guardians had constructed for the
select.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Papa, the Guardians have told you that you might survive... all is not lost.”

Samuel put a finger to her lips. “Silence now, child. This is your place now. Do not forget the things you have been taught. Take this, Dear Heart, hold it safe to your breast, guard it. It is our history.” Samuel handed her a slim leather book bound with a black silk tie.

Stella pressed it to her chest, the tears once held in check, now overflowing down unprotected cheeks. Mae's eyes met hers. “Go now Stella-girl... take the opportunity you have been given.”

Her knuckles white as she clutched the book, misery etched its path on her countenance. “It will never be the same without you both.”

A clear bell-tone pealed, reminding Stella of duty. Her duty to leave her parents behind. While the knowledge of
her
future, the safe environment of the sphere was a burden laid on her heart.

Stella's face turned to look at the sphere, shimmering in a watery iridescence as a giant cloche. But people were not plants,  their future safekeeping a promise of a life with a family, fractured by separation.

Stella bent her head to kiss Samuel and Mae goodbye. Gently unwinding the face mask the Guardians had constructed, she laid a kiss, soft as butterfly wings on the woman who had nurtured her every desire. The skin giving way like tissue-thin silk under the pressure of her lips. Turning to her father, his pale blue eyes watering, she cradled his head while she pressed a kiss to his forehead. She lowered his head and took a last, lingering look, knowing this was the final time she would view her parents in this realm.

Lifting her skirts, she pivoted away, dropping them as she walked...no,
as she ran,
brushing tears from her cheeks, the book clutched tightly in her other hand, the candle hanging from its copper loop in her squeezed finger. Approaching the doorway to the sphere, she was the last
select
to be ushered inside, casting one final glance, she saw her parents supine forms, clasped hands held tightly, her mother's mask forgotten beside her.

Stella whirled toward the entrance, losing hold of the book,  dropping it on the earth now laden with ash. She picked it up, her last gift from Father. Seeing the title, she peered closer:
Asteroid; A History of When the Rocks Fell.

Stella moved forward as the hole closed behind her, a fierce idea blooming in her consciousness to remember...
who they had been
.
As an indeterminate future stretched before her....