Mystics #1: The Seventh Sense

  MYSTICS

  * Book One *

  THE SEVENTH SENSE

  By

  KIM RICHARDSON

  The Seventh Sense, Mystics Book 1:

  Copyright © 2013 by Kim Richardson

  This ebook is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locals are used fictitiously Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook 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 person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  More books by Kim Richardson

  SOUL GUARDIANS SERIES

  Marked Book # 1

  Elemental Book # 2

  Horizon Book # 3

  Netherworld Book # 4

  Seirs Book # 5

  Mortal Book # 6

  MYSTICS SERIES

  The Seventh Sense Book # 1

  This one’s for Simba

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 - Zoey

  Chapter 2 - The Sevenths

  Chapter 3 - Hive # 416

  Chapter 4 - Management

  Chapter 5 - The Sevenths’ Academy

  Chapter 6 - Mirror-Port

  Chapter 7 - Attack of the Killer Fairies

  Chapter 8 - Dino-Fairy

  Chapter 9 - A DSM Malfunction

  Chapter 10 - Boomerang

  Chapter 11 - The Krakenite

  Chapter 12 - A Leap at Midnight

  Chapter 13 - Troll City, Louisiana

  Chapter 14 - Gangsters and Leprechauns

  Chapter 15 - Suspended

  Chapter 16 - Attack of the Fat Vampires

  Chapter 17 - Basement Level

  Chapter 18 - A Mystic Brawl

  Chapter 19 - Parrods Department Store, London

  Chapter 20 - The Alpha Nation

  Chapter 21 - Interloper

  Chapter 22 - Payback

  Chapter 23 - Resolution

  Chapter 1

  Zoey

  Zoey rounded a corner in the alley, and something moved along the wall in front of her. She could see green and red scales glinting like jewels in the soft light as the head and body of a giant snake crossed the alley behind Poo Ping Palace Thai Cuisine, blocking her way. It had a second head, instead of a tail, and both heads licked the air with their gray forked tongues and spoke together.

  “We are not going back. You can’t make us. We will rip your heart out if you try, human.”

  She had no idea what it was talking about. It was the third creature that she had seen today, and the nastiest. Foamy white venomous spit puddled on the ground below its heads.

  Zoey swallowed her fear.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered, her voice steady. She measured the alleyway for an escape and made sure no one else was watching her.

  “I’m just on my way home,” she continued, “and I don’t want any trouble, Mr. Snake—or is it Mrs. Snake? I can’t really tell since your back-end has a head—or is that the head, and your other head is your back-end? How do you even go to the—”

  “It lies!” Hatred flashed in its yellow eyes.

  Both heads opened their maws to reveal teeth like rows of kitchen knives.

  “It wants to kill us! It’s trying to trick us.”

  The heads spoke to each other, “You can never trust a human—they are all liars and tricksters! It wants to send us back! But we won’t go. No—we will never go back!”

  It turned both heads back toward Zoey, “We won’t let you!”

  Zoey wasn’t about to be squeezed to death by the Mr. and Mrs. Snake Freak Show—she had big plans for her future. She had to do something right now.

  The snake recoiled to strike.

  She didn’t even have enough time to rummage through her backpack for a weapon when the giant snake shot up in the air, just like a jack-in-the-box, and soared towards her.

  A door burst open, and a dark-skinned man in a stained apron rushed out. “Hey! What are you doing there?” he yelled angrily.

  The creature slumped to the ground and retreated into the shadows with a hateful hiss, faster than Zoey thought possible for such a large snake.

  The man tossed two large black garbage bags on the ground and waved his fist furiously at Zoey. “You’re the one who’s been spraying graffiti on my walls, aren’t you? Get out of here kid, before I call the police!”

  Zoey smiled and sprinted away down the alleyway, but not before she caught a glimpse of the giant snake disappearing through a basement window.

  With the angry man’s voice still ringing in her ears, she reached the end of the alley and turned right onto Wade Street. The old maple trees that lined the street on either side were the only visible vegetation. She ran through the orphan district and passed a series of rundown buildings and boarded up factories, relieved to have escaped.

  It would have been too good to be true—to have had an entirely uneventful day. The monsters always found her.

  Number 85 Wade Street was a ghost-gray, crumbled old house with a lopsided roof, a large, rotten wooden porch, peeling window panes, and a chipped beige door that had once been painted white. The front lawn was a mess of dandelions and knee-high straw grass. Zoey ran up the stairs, pushed through the front door, and dashed straight through to the kitchen at the opposite end of the house. She slipped her backpack off her shoulders, and it dropped to the floor with a soft plop.

  “You’re late.”

  Foster mother number 28 had a huge, purple vein that throbbed on her forehead as she spoke. She reminded Zoey of a gorilla in a tight workout outfit. She was thick and beefy, with a mess of black hair on the top of her large head and dark facial hair that sprouted from her chin like grasses. She could easily have passed for a man. Although she usually frowned like this, there was something different about her today. Her eyes were dim, as though she was in a trance.

  Zoey’s skin prickled with icy goose bumps.

  “How many times have I warned you, Zoey? Late means no supper. You’ll just have to starve until tomorrow.”

  Zoey forgot about the eerie feeling she had just felt in an instant.

  “But it’s only ten past six,” she protested as her stomach gave a rumble.

  She looked down at herself. Her shapeless sweater hung loosely over her skinny frame, and her blue jeans were two sizes too big. The only things that fit properly were her black and white Converse sneakers.

  Foster mother number 28’s upper mustache twitched as she examined Zoey.

  “It’s your own fault, rules are rules. If you’d pay more attention to them and spend less time in that library looking up God knows what on the Internet, you’d be on time like the rest of us.” Her voice rang out in the small kitchen like a bullhorn.

  “You can sit beside Thomas and watch him and the other children eat. Sit!” she ordered.

  Zoey staggered towards the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat. She knew arguing was a losing battle, so she looked around the table instead.

  Thomas was an eleven-year-old boy with large front teeth and a nervous laugh. His brown eyes widened, and he gave her a quick smile before returning to his supper. Isabelle and Andy sat across the table. Isabelle was a thirteen-year-old girl with a sponge cake of curly, brown hair and a fondness for makeup and large costume jewel
s. Andy sat beside her. Although he hid his face behind layers of black hair, Zoey could see red around his eyes. She guessed he was about ten. He had only been with them for a few days and hadn’t said a word yet.

  “How you feeling today, Andy?” whispered Zoey.

  She edged closer trying to get a better look at his face.

  “You haven’t touched your supper. Aren’t you hungry?”

  But Andy didn’t answer. Instead he stared gloomily into his bowl of stew, not really seeing it. His sad eyes were somewhere far away.

  Zoey knew that look. The foster system had that effect on children. They were lonely and abandoned, never to be found or loved again. It was a horrible prospect. They were society’s rejects, throwaways—even their own families wouldn’t take care of them. Every foster kid she had known had counted the days until their eighteenth birthday—the day when they would be considered adults, when they would be free.

  Zoey had four more years to go.

  “What were you doing in the library?” whispered Thomas, careful not to attract foster mother number 28’s attention. And when Zoey didn’t answer, he sighed heavily and went back to his stew. He seemed to be the only one interested in eating the gluey, brown clumps.

  It’s not that Zoey didn’t want to tell Thomas what she’d been reading on the net; she just couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Relentless research on the Internet about demons and the occult wasn’t a normal thing for a fourteen-year-old girl to do.

  And Zoey was far from normal.

  In fact, she was the complete opposite of normal. Instead of drooling over boy bands, makeup, and clothes—like normal teen girls—she’d use every free moment to investigate supernatural phenomena. She’d be all over anything to do with monsters and the supernatural. It was like an addiction. She was a walking supernatural Wikipedia.

  Zoey was afraid of how people would react to her if they knew that she could see monsters. She knew she wasn’t normal. And she was desperate to find the truth about who she was. She’d kept her abilities a secret and had done her best to blend in with the normal kids. The problem was, trouble always seemed to find Zoey.

  She slouched in her chair and sighed. “Well, I guess I’m not missing much. I’ve eaten so much beef stew in my life, it’s a miracle I haven’t grown a pair of hooves.”

  Isabelle looked over at Thomas, and both were suddenly overcome by fits of giggles.

  “BE QUIET!” Foster mother number 28 slammed her fist on the table, sending cups, knives, plates, and spoons spinning on to the floor.

  “I’ve had just about enough of you, you little delinquent. Think you’re above the rules, don’t ya? Well you’re not! You ain’t nothin’ but trash, Zoey; miserable leftover trash.”

  She gripped the sides of the kitchen table, and beads of sweat rolled down her fat face. “We should have left you to rot in that orphanage,” she said with a nasty smile.

  “Well, maybe you should have.”

  Zoey glanced casually at her dirty finger-nails. She picked at them and shrugged. “But I guess the government’s checks helped you make that decision. I mean—let’s be real here—it’s the only reason why we’re all here, isn’t it? All of us cramped up in one room? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t feel any love.”

  Her foster mother frowned sourly and examined Zoey as if she were contagious. “With that cheeky attitude, no one will ever want you. You’ll never belong anywhere. You’ll never have a real family. You’ll be stuck in this system forever.”

  Although Zoey felt a pain in her chest, her expression remained stone cold. “Not forever. I’ve got four more years to go, and then I’ll be kissing this system good-bye.”

  “They told us you were different back at the orphanage—”

  Her foster mother pointed her stew-coated spoon at Zoey as though it were a sword. “—but except for that awful red hair of yours that looks like a forest fire and your disregard for rules, I’ve never seen anything different or special about you. You’re just like every other foster kid that comes through here…nothin’ but garbage that won’t amount to nothin’.”

  Zoey saw the pain flash on each of the other children’s faces. She cracked her knuckles under the table and wanted nothing more than to punch the smile off the woman’s face.

  “If you’d been pretty like Isabelle here,” said foster mother number 28 as she licked the spoon, “then maybe we’d have something to work with—”

  “She can see monsters,” interrupted Isabelle innocently.

  She smiled at Zoey like she was doing her a favor and twirled her large, green necklace around her wrist. “She said there was a monster in the backyard last night. I couldn’t see anything, but she said she could. So I guess that makes her special.”

  Zoey’s secret was out.

  All eyes rested on her. She could already see them making up scenarios in their heads. She’d seen that nervous look before.

  Isabelle met Zoey’s angry stare and lost her smile. As her face paled, tears brimmed in her eyes, and Zoey immediately felt ashamed. It wasn’t Isabelle’s fault. She was just trying to help.

  Foster mother number 28 stepped forward triumphantly, as though she’d been waiting to hear this all her life. A weird noise escaped her throat, like the growling of a wild animal. Sweat dripped from her nose and onto the table.

  Zoey looked away and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Why was her foster mother staring at her like that? Usually when people learned of her ability, they avoided her.

  And then she felt the goose bumps again.

  An uncontrollable shudder rippled through her, as though thousands of ants were crawling all over her skin. She always reacted like this around demons and monsters. She had felt it when she had first stepped into the kitchen. She called it her creeps. It was like a warning, and she had no idea where it came from, but it had kept her alive.

  But why was she feeling it now?

  When she looked up, foster mother number 28’s eyes had gone completely black, like the eyes of a shark. Her clothes had become soaked in sweat, and the smell of body odor intensified. The woman started to tremble and scratched at her arms feverishly until blood oozed from the deep gashes she had made in her flesh.

  “Uh…maybe you should stop doing that,” said Zoey.

  She watched her foster mother without blinking, preparing herself for any sudden moment. A strange smell came off the woman, like rotten eggs mixed with wet earth. Then she grunted hungrily, as though something inhumane lived in her throat.

  Zoey felt a chill roll down her back.

  Great, here we go again, she said to herself. And I didn’t even get to eat anything.

  The woman leaned forward on the table, her black eyes gleaming with spite and hatred. “You thought you could hide in this place, away from the others, so we wouldn’t know who you were.”

  Her hoarse voice sounded like a different person.

  “Clever—but not clever enough. You Agents are all the same—meddlers—control freaks.”

  Zoey straightened in her seat and readied herself.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not hiding from anyone—and I’m too young to be an FBI agent. I just turned fourteen last week.”

  An evil smile materialized on the woman’s face.

  “Do you imagine that we mystics would ever obey your rules? Ha! You creatures are made of soft flesh and blood—you are not our leaders. You are too weak. We will never go back to the Nexus. We enjoy living here amongst you humans,” she hissed.

  White foam formed at the corners of her mouth like a rabid dog.

  “I will kill every last agent that tries to send me back!”

  A string of spit flew out of her mouth, landed on the table and immediately burned holes into the wood.

  Zoey jumped to her feet and turned to the others. “Get out of here! Now! Quickly!”

  The children scrambled to their feet, terrified, and started to move away from the woman. But they
froze at what they saw next.

  Foster mother number 28 howled like an animal. Her fingers and toes began to transform into gleaming black talons. Her skin cracked and broke apart like shattered eggshells. As her body shook, her skin peeled away and fell in clumps to the floor in a pool of black liquid.

  Before they had a chance to move, a seven-foot creature with dripping black sores and raw bubbling skin stood in the kitchen in front of them. Six blunt spikes protruded from its back, and long, slender arms and legs protruded from its rounded, fleshy body. It glowered at Zoey with four large, red eyes. It opened its maw as it wailed and revealed rows of jagged, glass-sharp teeth. It was about to slice her to pieces.

  Zoey recognized the creature as the one she had seen the night before. Somehow it had used foster mother number 28’s body as a host, like a giant parasite.

  “What’s happening to her?” whimpered Thomas, his blue eyes wide with fear. “She’s acting crazy, should we call 911? Maybe she needs a doctor?”

  Zoey knew that normal children couldn’t see the horrors that she saw. They didn’t see or smell the repugnant creature that stood in the kitchen—they only saw their foster mother, mad with hatred, like a deranged serial killer.

  Zoey grabbed the edges of the table.

  “Guys, you need to get out of here right now! Do as I say! Go back upstairs and lock your doors. Do it now!”

  The monster cackled in laughter and lunged at her.

  “RUN!”

  In a flash, Zoey threw the kitchen table onto the creature, pinning it against the counter for a few seconds. She leaped sideways and ran to her backpack. Isabelle, Thomas and Andy disappeared up the stairs in a mad panic.

  With a crack like thunder, the monster lashed out and split the table into an explosion of splintered wood.

  Zoey turned with a salt bag in her hand and gripped it tightly.

  “I’m going to kill you, Agent,” the demon snarled.

  Drools of acid-spit burned the floor beneath her.