New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Read Online Free Page A

around her head and over her hair. Nice going, fuckers. If
she was a vanilla human and started sniffling and clogged up her nose, she
would have been dead in short order. Luckily, she seemed to be breathing
normally.
    That was crazy. Unless these guys were
bondage freaks, wrapping someone up in tape like that made no sense, unless
they were scared of her. Duct tape in those quantities might subdue one of the
less physical Neos, however, especially Type Ones and low-range Twos. Cassandra
hadn’t mentioned the girl was a Neo, only that she was important. Sometimes
Cassandra likes to be cryptic for no good reason.
    I ignored the pain in my healing knuckles
and pulled off the tape gag and blindfold as gently as I could. The girl
stirred and moaned when I pulled the tape off her head, along with a few chunks
of hair, but her eyes never opened. Probably drugged as well; these guys really
hadn’t taken any chances with her.
    Under the tape she looked ordinary
enough. Most Neos look perfectly human, though – I am one of the freakish
exceptions – so that could mean anything. Red hair, pale skin, pretty; she
looked awfully young in her current unconscious state. It took a while, but I
got her unwrapped and covered her up with a blanket I found in a closet in the
office. The chemical burns the tape had left on her skin had begun to heal even
in the few seconds since I removed it. Definitely a Neo, then; we can pretty
much fully recover from anything that doesn’t kill us outright in an indecently
short amount of time. That begged the question of what she was doing at a
hospital when she was abducted. Most Neos only need medical attention after
some serious injury, as in dismemberment serious.
    I carefully carried her down to where
Giamatti’s car awaited. I don’t own a car, being a confirmed New Yorker
Pedestrian, and Giamatti wouldn’t need a ride wherever evil assholes go when
they die. It was a nice car, too, a brand-new Tucker Raptor, all tricked up.
Too bad I wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for long. I made a little nest with
the blanket for the girl. She was sleeping peacefully, and snoring softly. She
had a cute snore.
    I’d put her somewhere safe and go get
some answers from Cassandra.
     

 
    Chapter Two
     
    Christine Dark
     
    New York City, New York, March 12, 2013
    Christine opened her eyes. She was lying
in bed in her dorm room. The last thing she remembered was falling into a dark
place shortly after experiencing the mother of all acid trips. And puking.
There had been a lot of puking involved. Had any of those things really
happened?
    “Still no signs of consciousness, but all
her vitals seem normal, except for an unusually low BP.” The voice was young,
female and competent-sounding. Christine had watched enough hospital dramas to
tell that whoever was talking was a medical professional of some sort. What she
couldn’t tell was who the heck was saying the words.
    The voice seemed to come from somewhere
above her head. She looked up, and realized she no longer was in her dorm room
but in her old room at home. Well, Mom’s home now that Christine had left for
college. It was her old room just as she remembered from high school, with the
faded Sailor Moon poster over her bed and the bookcases stuffed with paperbacks
and hardcovers and the desk with her ancient desktop PC. Except none of that
stuff was at Mom’s house anymore; she’d boxed up all the books and that PC had
gone to the great Circuit City in the sky, replaced with a neat little Dell
notebook.
    This couldn’t be real. She must be
dreaming, although she’d never been this aware she was in a dream before.
    “It is a dream, my dear, but not an
ordinary one.” A new voice, but this one was coming from somebody close by.
Christine turned and saw a tiny woman – four foot and not too many inches tall
– standing by her bedroom door. She’d never seen her before, in dreams or real
life, and she hadn’t been standing there a moment before,