Free Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) by Christopher Rankin Page B

even took off his sunglasses.
    “My daughter!” the man shouted as he remembered the gun in his hands. “She disappear! You take her and make her like others!”
    Dade softly nodded as though he understood the man’s accusation.
    “She has become black eyes!” the man shouted. “Not my daughter! Black eyes! She tried to hurt her own mother!” Through his tears, he studied Dade’s face and found something that made his grip on the gun relax. “So many disappear! So many change!”
    “I know,” Dade told him. “I know something is happening. I’m sorry about your daughter but I’m not the one you’re looking for.”
    “She was so sweet, so good,” the man said before he started crying so hard that he couldn’t keep the gun pointed.
    The Sheriff and the rest of the security force started to close in. “Weapons down!” shouted Dade. “Don’t hurt him!” Dade’s voice got quiet and took on a sympathetic quality. He told the man, “The sweet, the good, that’s what it’s trying to destroy. I’m sorry that it got to your daughter.”
    “What can I do for her? I will do anything.”
    “Never go near her again,” Dade answered. “She isn’t the same.”
    “Do you know who did this to her?”
    Dade nodded to the man, saying, “I’m working on it.”
    The Sheriff came up from behind and slipped the shotgun out of the man’s hands. The crying man barely noticed and just stood there staring at Dade. “I hear bad things about you,” he said. “I heard you were demon or Brujo.”
    Dade smiled for a moment and said something that left the man shaken. He said, “I don’t think either term is appropriate. I’m just a monster.”
     
    ...
     
    After it was all over and the Sheriff let the man go, Ann Marie went upstairs to find Dade in his lab. He was at his computer, paging through electronic copies of news articles about local disappearances.
    “What the hell was that all about?” She asked him.
    “Oh. That. It’s a problem.”
    “Do you know what happened to the man’s daughter?”
    He considered the question carefully. “I’m afraid I do,” he said. “You know how I have my secret life with the tank. Well, there are others. Only these others don’t care about what we care about. They aren’t looking to the other side for answers. They’re only looking for power.”
    “Like an evil sorcerer or something?”
    “Something like that.”
    She told him, “I guess that makes you one of the good ones. A white sorcerer.”
    “Far from it,” argued Dade. “I practice neither black nor white magic. What I do is a technology that I use for my own individual purposes. I don’t strive to be a member of a club.”
    “Do you know anything about who’s behind it?”
    “It’s a group of some kind. It’s extremely rare to find a shaman powerful enough to do this all on his or her own.”
    “Like the group I saw on my first day. They had a little boy floating in the air. There were maybe a dozen of them.”
    He said, “Those are the suspects at the top of the list.”
    “The woman in the woods,” remembered Ann Marie. “She said something about a man teaching them.”
    That got Dade’s attention. “What did she say about him?” He asked with some insistence. “Did she call him by name?”
    “No,” she said. “You ask that like you have someone in mind.”
    “There’s someone that I hope it isn’t.”
    “You’re scaring me,” Ann Marie told him. “The woman also said that he was going to teach me, whatever that means.”
    Dade couldn’t hide his concern but he reassured her. “There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
    The Camel Spider
     
     
     
    Bander Al Zahrani stared at the ceiling tiles above his small, rickety cot. The grey light of morning was starting to sneak through the gaps in the wooden planks that boarded up the mosque windows. His head was spinning. He had no idea how he had ended up in the strange