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Ten Plagues
by
Mary Nealy
Join the breakneck chase through Chicago for a murderous maniac. As the victims begin piling up, detective Keren Collins’s spiritual discernment is on high alert. Will she capture the killer before another body floats to the surface? Ex-cop, now mission pastor Paul Morris has seen his share of tragedy, but nothing prepared him to be a murderer’s messenger boy. Will his old ruthless cop personality take over, leading him to the brink of self-destruction? Can Keren and Paul catch the killer before the corpse count reaches a perfect ten?
Excerpt of chapter one:
Print book:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Christianbook.com
BOOKSAMILLION.COM
Ebook:
Nookbook
Kindle
Christianbook.com
by
Mary Nealy
Join the breakneck chase through Chicago for a murderous maniac. As the victims begin piling up, detective Keren Collins’s spiritual discernment is on high alert. Will she capture the killer before another body floats to the surface? Ex-cop, now mission pastor Paul Morris has seen his share of tragedy, but nothing prepared him to be a murderer’s messenger boy. Will his old ruthless cop personality take over, leading him to the brink of self-destruction? Can Keren and Paul catch the killer before the corpse count reaches a perfect ten?
Excerpt of chapter one:
Chapter One
With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood.
A cold chill of evil sleeted through Keren Collins’s veins. Wind howled like a tormented soul between the Chicago tenements. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Her hair blew across her eyes and blinded her. Being sightless made the evil more powerful, as if it cast her into the presence of a blackened soul. She felt an impending doom so powerful her hands shook as she twisted her mass of unruly curls into a messy bun and anchored it with an ugly but functional leather contraption. She had parked her Impala a half block away from the decrepit brownstone she was watching. The front stoop and the young punks gathered there were visible. She looked around, listening. Did the evil have a source? Could this feeling be coming from inside that run-down building? No way was Keren going in alone to find out. Chicago cops were about as popular in this part of the South Side as the Cubbies. She sat in her car, and waited and itched. O’Shea, why’d you pick today of all days to be late? To keep from fretting over this strange premonition, Keren pulled her notes out to reread what she had on Juanita Lopez, reported missing two days ago. Keren and O’Shea had done some
preliminary checking yesterday that had led Keren to this old hangout of Juanita’s. No one had seen the young woman for a week. Keren had read about two sentences when she snapped the little book shut and jammed it back in her blazer’s inside breast pocket. She couldn’t sit still when things felt this wrong. Pushed to action and against all common sense, she reached for her door handle.
Pounding footsteps drew her eyes to the left and behind her car. A man raced down the sidewalk on the far side of the street. The beat of his sprinting feet made Keren’s heart speed up. He raced past her, straight toward that cluster of thugs Keren figured for Juanita’s old gang.They saw the man running and straightened like wolves scenting blood.
The runner went up the brick steps right between some of the meanest scum in the city. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for air. Keren narrowed her eyes as he lifted a small piece of. . .something. . .and pressed it to the side of the door, sliding it sideways and jamming it into a crack he must have found. A sign maybe, brown wood, a foot or so long and half as high. If it had a picture or words on it she couldn’t make them out. Just as he pressed it against the wall one of the gang members slapped a hard hand on the man’s shoulder, ripped the sign out of his hand, jerked the door open, and shoved him inside.
That sense of evil grew, but Keren didn’t have to be a genius to know that the guy who’d just been shoved inside could be in big trouble.
A half-dozen Hispanic boys erupted from the brownstone and took up positions in front of the building as if they’d been assigned guard duty.
Keren slumped low in her seat, sitting on her backside while someone was being killed. But she couldn’t take on a gang
alone. Minutes ticked by. “O’Shea, where are you? C’mon.” She couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached for the door handle
and her phone at the same time. An explosion blasted bricks loose from the building’s foundation.
The kids standing guard were mowed down by shrapnel. Keren’s car rocked on its axles. Its car alarm went off and the
airbag deployed and punched her in the face. A blast of heat hit next and gritty dust enveloped the car. She
leaped from her car and charged toward the crawling, bleeding boys.
Running and stumbling, she was blinded by the billowing smoke.
Another explosion knocked her down. She could hear glass shattering to her right. Flames shot out of the windows on an upper floor, cutting through the gritty air.
Bits of pulverized brick whizzed overhead. Choking dust coated the inside of her nose and throat. She covered her face and waited until the buzzing debris from the new explosion passed. Forcing herself to her feet, she tripped and went down and realized she’d stepped on a boy.
She caught the shoulders of his jacket. “Get up!” He looked up at her, dazed. “Get up and run!” She dragged the boy. She knew she shouldn’t
move him, but another brick slashed inches from her face and she knew this was kill-or-cure time.
“You’ve got to get away.” She thrust her face close to his, hoping to penetrate his daze.
Blood trickled down his forehead. Cinders rained down.
Keren staggered as she tried to haul the kid upright. “Run. Now. Move! Move! Move!”
He shook his head. His eyes cleared and he gained his feet and stumbled away. Keren moved forward and fell over shattered brick. This time she stayed down and crawled. The rubble on the ground cut her hands and knees. She reached another victim. This one was already trying to stand. Over the crackling flames and crashing stones, she shouted, “Run, get out of here!”
A falling brick struck Keren in the shoulder and she fell flat on her face just as someone ran out of the building.
“How many are in there?” she yelled. The kid didn’t answer as he ran past. Keren saw a dark lump off to the side, crumpled on the
ground, and she got to him and yanked at another fallen, dazed teenager. The kid’s face was shredded from brick fragments, his eyes glazed. Keren dragged him to his feet. She suspected only pure survival instinct made him move in the direction she shoved him. She saw two other boys crawling in the right direction and let them go it alone.
She was close enough to the building to see a young child hovered against the side of it. He was frozen, his eyes wide with terror. She crawled toward him.
A stream of staggering, screaming people came out of the building. The man who’d gone running up to the building right before it exploded—tall, dark-haired, commanding, covered with blood and gray soot—brought up the rear, shoving at two kids, yelling and urging them forward like a general on the battlefield. “Get out, go, go, go!”
As the man ran down the steps, the door he’d just charged out of blew off the building and whizzed inches from Keren’s head. Flames raged out of the opening.The man threw his arms around both boys and dove under the shooting flames. They skidded across the cruel pavement.
The air turned white hot from the new blaze. It was alive with glowing embers and toxic smoke. Choking, Keren struggled on toward the little boy. A blaze flared out of a broken basement window and enveloped her. She dropped to her belly and wrapped her arms over her head, afraid her hair would catch fire. The instant the burst of fire ebbed, she crawled forward on broken bricks and glass.
When she reached the child, she caught him to her. Bricks rained down. She forced the child away from his hideout. He got the idea, wrenched away from her, and ran.
She looked at the inferno that engulfed the front entrance and every window in the building.There was no way to get inside to search for survivors. Turning away, she saw the man was on his knees, beating on the flames devouring one of the boys.
The man’s face was coated. His clothes and hair were gray with ash.
Keren charged in, snagged one of the boys by the back of his sweatshirt, and jerked him to his feet. Something solid slammed the man to his knees beside her. A stream of blood cut through the grit on his face.
He staggered to his feet when Keren would have expected him to be down for good. “The whole building’s coming down.”
He tore at the boy’s burning jacket. The panicked boy fought him, but the man ripped the coat off.
Keren shoved the other boy forward then turned to help the bleeding man. Turning to her, his eyes blazed with life in the midst of death. His spirit hit her almost as hard as the bricks. His square shoulders, and the honor and compassion in his eyes, didn’t match with this soul-destroying neighborhood. What was he doing here? Besides bleeding. She reached to help him get away.
The old building howled like an angry monster. Flames reached for the heavens.The buildings on both sides were engulfed in flames and near collapse, too. The man glanced back. Keren’s gaze followed his. Through the choking grit, she saw someone lying unconscious at the corner of the building, near the alleyway.
“Chico,” the man said. “Please, God, not him.” She heard the true prayer in his voice. The whole building, now engulfed in flames, shifted forward. She turned to order the man to get away before she went back
for the boy. But he was gone, running toward the boy, right into the teeth of the fire, toward certain death.
Another boy burst through the solid wall of raging flames that blocked the front door of the condemned brownstone. He screamed and beat at fire that had turned him into a human torch. He ran down the stoop of the tenement and plowed into Keren, shrieking and writhing in pain, and she staggered back as he fell at her feet. He rolled and flailed at the merciless flames.
Ignoring the white-hot raining ash, Keren tore off her blazer and smothered the fire. She slid her arm under the boy’s shoulders. The stench of burned flesh was overwhelming.
The boy screamed, but he was conscious enough to get to his feet with her support. As she moved away from the raging fire, she looked back at the building. Her heart clutched. The man scooped up the fallen boy and turned to run, but he was out of time. Bricks rained down on his shoulders and he vanished as he was buried alive.
Then, through the smothering clouds of smoke, she saw the man rise up, with what seemed like superhuman strength, and shed the bricks on his back. He had the child’s limp body cradled in his arms.
The boy beside Keren fell. She couldn’t abandon this teenager
to go help the man. Her heart wrenched as she turned away from the man and virtually carried the wickedly burned boy toward safety.
She glanced back and saw the man run sideways down the street, trying to get past the collapsing building. Falling bricks and tortured metal clawed at him. Rocks and cinders pelted him with every step.
“God, help me. Help us save these boys. Help that man.” She looked back. Something slammed into the man. He staggered then fell against the side of a stripped car. Keren knew that last blow was one too many. The man had no strength left.
As Keren hauled the semiconscious boy around a corner to shelter him, she risked one more look back into the blizzard of shrapnel. Hundreds of bricks hurtled straight at the man. Then he was swallowed up by the choking dust of the explosion. Buried under tons of stone. Keren cried out at the heroic man’s failure. When he vanished, the evil she’d sensed earlier swept back, and Keren could swear she heard Satan laugh in the face of the horror that surrounded her.
Trying desperately to keep functioning, she fumbled for her phone and called 911.
With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood.
A cold chill of evil sleeted through Keren Collins’s veins. Wind howled like a tormented soul between the Chicago tenements. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Her hair blew across her eyes and blinded her. Being sightless made the evil more powerful, as if it cast her into the presence of a blackened soul. She felt an impending doom so powerful her hands shook as she twisted her mass of unruly curls into a messy bun and anchored it with an ugly but functional leather contraption. She had parked her Impala a half block away from the decrepit brownstone she was watching. The front stoop and the young punks gathered there were visible. She looked around, listening. Did the evil have a source? Could this feeling be coming from inside that run-down building? No way was Keren going in alone to find out. Chicago cops were about as popular in this part of the South Side as the Cubbies. She sat in her car, and waited and itched. O’Shea, why’d you pick today of all days to be late? To keep from fretting over this strange premonition, Keren pulled her notes out to reread what she had on Juanita Lopez, reported missing two days ago. Keren and O’Shea had done some
preliminary checking yesterday that had led Keren to this old hangout of Juanita’s. No one had seen the young woman for a week. Keren had read about two sentences when she snapped the little book shut and jammed it back in her blazer’s inside breast pocket. She couldn’t sit still when things felt this wrong. Pushed to action and against all common sense, she reached for her door handle.
Pounding footsteps drew her eyes to the left and behind her car. A man raced down the sidewalk on the far side of the street. The beat of his sprinting feet made Keren’s heart speed up. He raced past her, straight toward that cluster of thugs Keren figured for Juanita’s old gang.They saw the man running and straightened like wolves scenting blood.
The runner went up the brick steps right between some of the meanest scum in the city. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for air. Keren narrowed her eyes as he lifted a small piece of. . .something. . .and pressed it to the side of the door, sliding it sideways and jamming it into a crack he must have found. A sign maybe, brown wood, a foot or so long and half as high. If it had a picture or words on it she couldn’t make them out. Just as he pressed it against the wall one of the gang members slapped a hard hand on the man’s shoulder, ripped the sign out of his hand, jerked the door open, and shoved him inside.
That sense of evil grew, but Keren didn’t have to be a genius to know that the guy who’d just been shoved inside could be in big trouble.
A half-dozen Hispanic boys erupted from the brownstone and took up positions in front of the building as if they’d been assigned guard duty.
Keren slumped low in her seat, sitting on her backside while someone was being killed. But she couldn’t take on a gang
alone. Minutes ticked by. “O’Shea, where are you? C’mon.” She couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached for the door handle
and her phone at the same time. An explosion blasted bricks loose from the building’s foundation.
The kids standing guard were mowed down by shrapnel. Keren’s car rocked on its axles. Its car alarm went off and the
airbag deployed and punched her in the face. A blast of heat hit next and gritty dust enveloped the car. She
leaped from her car and charged toward the crawling, bleeding boys.
Running and stumbling, she was blinded by the billowing smoke.
Another explosion knocked her down. She could hear glass shattering to her right. Flames shot out of the windows on an upper floor, cutting through the gritty air.
Bits of pulverized brick whizzed overhead. Choking dust coated the inside of her nose and throat. She covered her face and waited until the buzzing debris from the new explosion passed. Forcing herself to her feet, she tripped and went down and realized she’d stepped on a boy.
She caught the shoulders of his jacket. “Get up!” He looked up at her, dazed. “Get up and run!” She dragged the boy. She knew she shouldn’t
move him, but another brick slashed inches from her face and she knew this was kill-or-cure time.
“You’ve got to get away.” She thrust her face close to his, hoping to penetrate his daze.
Blood trickled down his forehead. Cinders rained down.
Keren staggered as she tried to haul the kid upright. “Run. Now. Move! Move! Move!”
He shook his head. His eyes cleared and he gained his feet and stumbled away. Keren moved forward and fell over shattered brick. This time she stayed down and crawled. The rubble on the ground cut her hands and knees. She reached another victim. This one was already trying to stand. Over the crackling flames and crashing stones, she shouted, “Run, get out of here!”
A falling brick struck Keren in the shoulder and she fell flat on her face just as someone ran out of the building.
“How many are in there?” she yelled. The kid didn’t answer as he ran past. Keren saw a dark lump off to the side, crumpled on the
ground, and she got to him and yanked at another fallen, dazed teenager. The kid’s face was shredded from brick fragments, his eyes glazed. Keren dragged him to his feet. She suspected only pure survival instinct made him move in the direction she shoved him. She saw two other boys crawling in the right direction and let them go it alone.
She was close enough to the building to see a young child hovered against the side of it. He was frozen, his eyes wide with terror. She crawled toward him.
A stream of staggering, screaming people came out of the building. The man who’d gone running up to the building right before it exploded—tall, dark-haired, commanding, covered with blood and gray soot—brought up the rear, shoving at two kids, yelling and urging them forward like a general on the battlefield. “Get out, go, go, go!”
As the man ran down the steps, the door he’d just charged out of blew off the building and whizzed inches from Keren’s head. Flames raged out of the opening.The man threw his arms around both boys and dove under the shooting flames. They skidded across the cruel pavement.
The air turned white hot from the new blaze. It was alive with glowing embers and toxic smoke. Choking, Keren struggled on toward the little boy. A blaze flared out of a broken basement window and enveloped her. She dropped to her belly and wrapped her arms over her head, afraid her hair would catch fire. The instant the burst of fire ebbed, she crawled forward on broken bricks and glass.
When she reached the child, she caught him to her. Bricks rained down. She forced the child away from his hideout. He got the idea, wrenched away from her, and ran.
She looked at the inferno that engulfed the front entrance and every window in the building.There was no way to get inside to search for survivors. Turning away, she saw the man was on his knees, beating on the flames devouring one of the boys.
The man’s face was coated. His clothes and hair were gray with ash.
Keren charged in, snagged one of the boys by the back of his sweatshirt, and jerked him to his feet. Something solid slammed the man to his knees beside her. A stream of blood cut through the grit on his face.
He staggered to his feet when Keren would have expected him to be down for good. “The whole building’s coming down.”
He tore at the boy’s burning jacket. The panicked boy fought him, but the man ripped the coat off.
Keren shoved the other boy forward then turned to help the bleeding man. Turning to her, his eyes blazed with life in the midst of death. His spirit hit her almost as hard as the bricks. His square shoulders, and the honor and compassion in his eyes, didn’t match with this soul-destroying neighborhood. What was he doing here? Besides bleeding. She reached to help him get away.
The old building howled like an angry monster. Flames reached for the heavens.The buildings on both sides were engulfed in flames and near collapse, too. The man glanced back. Keren’s gaze followed his. Through the choking grit, she saw someone lying unconscious at the corner of the building, near the alleyway.
“Chico,” the man said. “Please, God, not him.” She heard the true prayer in his voice. The whole building, now engulfed in flames, shifted forward. She turned to order the man to get away before she went back
for the boy. But he was gone, running toward the boy, right into the teeth of the fire, toward certain death.
Another boy burst through the solid wall of raging flames that blocked the front door of the condemned brownstone. He screamed and beat at fire that had turned him into a human torch. He ran down the stoop of the tenement and plowed into Keren, shrieking and writhing in pain, and she staggered back as he fell at her feet. He rolled and flailed at the merciless flames.
Ignoring the white-hot raining ash, Keren tore off her blazer and smothered the fire. She slid her arm under the boy’s shoulders. The stench of burned flesh was overwhelming.
The boy screamed, but he was conscious enough to get to his feet with her support. As she moved away from the raging fire, she looked back at the building. Her heart clutched. The man scooped up the fallen boy and turned to run, but he was out of time. Bricks rained down on his shoulders and he vanished as he was buried alive.
Then, through the smothering clouds of smoke, she saw the man rise up, with what seemed like superhuman strength, and shed the bricks on his back. He had the child’s limp body cradled in his arms.
The boy beside Keren fell. She couldn’t abandon this teenager
to go help the man. Her heart wrenched as she turned away from the man and virtually carried the wickedly burned boy toward safety.
She glanced back and saw the man run sideways down the street, trying to get past the collapsing building. Falling bricks and tortured metal clawed at him. Rocks and cinders pelted him with every step.
“God, help me. Help us save these boys. Help that man.” She looked back. Something slammed into the man. He staggered then fell against the side of a stripped car. Keren knew that last blow was one too many. The man had no strength left.
As Keren hauled the semiconscious boy around a corner to shelter him, she risked one more look back into the blizzard of shrapnel. Hundreds of bricks hurtled straight at the man. Then he was swallowed up by the choking dust of the explosion. Buried under tons of stone. Keren cried out at the heroic man’s failure. When he vanished, the evil she’d sensed earlier swept back, and Keren could swear she heard Satan laugh in the face of the horror that surrounded her.
Trying desperately to keep functioning, she fumbled for her phone and called 911.
Print book:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Christianbook.com
BOOKSAMILLION.COM
Ebook:
Nookbook
Kindle
Christianbook.com
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