Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy) Read Online Free Page A

started on cheerleading tryouts. Those had come after the ghost pack had manifested. The stuck-up witches still looked as though they wanted to cry every time they saw her.
    Invisible ghost dogs = very scary to cheerleaders.
    Johanna smiled, remembering how the pack had chased the girls around the gym after they’d made fun of her. Served them right, and besides, most of the bites were just pinches. They didn’t even break the skin.
    A cold fall wind blew across the train platform and she was reminded of where she was, and how she had again failed to find that thing to be part of.
    She had known about the Brimstone Network most of her life, never really thinking that she could somehow be a part of it. But when she’d heard about how the new Network was looking for members with an emphasis on people with unique abilities, she couldn’t set up an interview fast enough.
    Johanna really believed this was it, her opportunity to belong and to actually contribute to something.
    Sitting on the bench out in front of the train station, she scowled, kicking her booted feet as they hung over the edge of the wooden bench.
    She guessed she had been wrong.
    The ghost dogs whined, brushing up against her legs, flipping her hands to capture her attention. Johanna reached out to pet them.
    “I really screwed up today,” she muttered.
    Mostly she would blame everybody else when things went wrong—when she tried to belong—but this time she couldn’t do it. She went in to that interview with a chip on her shoulder and was just daring somebody to knock it off.
    The wolf girl was just responding to the vibes she had been sending out.
    Johanna slid to the edge of the bench and turned around. The train would be pulling in any minute.
    But she didn’t want to go back, and if she hadn’t screwed things up she wouldn’t be sitting here.
    It practically killed her to have to admit it, but she had behaved like a big jerk, and in order to make things right she was going to have to admit this not only to herself, but to thepeople back at the Brimstone Network headquarters.
    She got up from the bench and walked around to the back of the building and the parking lot.
    “Can you guys get me back to where we were this afternoon?” she asked the ghostly beasts that mingled around her.
    They panted and growled excitedly, eager to be doing something other than waiting for a train.
    “All right then,” she said, starting to walk across the nearly empty lot. “Let’s get this show started.”
    She figured she had at least a forty-five-minute walk ahead of her; plenty of time to get used to the idea that she was wrong, and that if she wanted to be a member of the Brimstone Network, she was going to have to apologize.
    Ouch.
    B ram had never thought of his father as sentimental, but the old photo album he’d uncovered in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet while trying to clean out the office seemed to prove otherwise.
    He sat down behind the desk, his desk, and reached for the book.
    Within the yellowed volume were hundreds of picturesof the Brimstone Facility in some of its earliest days—when his father had first taken command from his own father. The photographs were like small windows into the past, frozen moments in time.
    But it was the last picture in the volume that fascinated Bram the most. It was of his father, dressed in a much more official version of a Network uniform. He looked as though he might’ve been in his late twenties, or early thirties; there was little gray in his hair or beard.
    Wearing his finest uniform, Elijah Stone was approaching what appeared to be a dimensional doorway.
    Bram hefted the heavy volume, bringing it closer so that he could study the picture better. Within the doorway he thought he could make out the shapes of ghostly figures clad in ornate armor, and wondered if this could be a picture of the first time his father passed from the earthly plane to the world of the Specter to negotiate the treaty between