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  The Beast Inside: Blood of the Forsaken

  The Second Book in The Beast Inside Series

  An Urban Fantasy Novel by David Horrocks

  The Beast Inside Series:

  The Beast Inside

  The Beast Inside: Blood of the Forsaken

  The Beast Inside: Blood Queen

  Cover Art and Design by:

  Kristyn McQuiggan of Drop Dead Designs

  Edited by: Judie Horrocks, Bob Horrocks and Jonny Horrocks

  Special Thanks to: Kate, Nils and Conor

  About the Author

  A British born author living in the United States, David Horrocks has a passion for writing, wanting nothing more than to share his ideas and stories with the world. The first novel he published was 'The Beast Inside', which he has expanded on further with other novels and short stories. The art of writing is an outlet in which he pours his heart and soul, hoping to bring the enjoyment of reading to everyone who picks up his books.

  Copyright © 2018 by David Horrocks

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book 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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Somewhere beneath the surface.

  Chapter One: To dream of drowning.

  Chapter Two: The empty grave.

  Chapter Three: The hunter or the hunted.

  Chapter Four: A little southern hospitality.

  Chapter Five: Skeletons in the closet.

  Chapter Six: The learning curve.

  Chapter Seven: A home within the chaos.

  Chapter Eight: The forsaken one.

  Chapter Nine: That sinking feeling.

  Chapter Ten: The hand that feeds.

  Chapter Eleven: Out of the woods.

  Chapter Twelve: The performance of a lifetime.

  Chapter Thirteen: A sudden reversal of fate.

  Chapter Fourteen: The show must go on.

  Chapter Fifteen: A pain long past.

  Chapter Sixteen: The hunt goes on.

  Chapter Seventeen: A most secret meeting.

  Chapter Eighteen: Nowhere to run.

  Chapter Nineteen: Judge, jury and executioner.

  Chapter Twenty: Waiting for the dawn.

  Chapter Twenty One: An army of me.

  Chapter Twenty Two: The lair of the dead.

  Chapter Twenty Three: A friend in need.

  Chapter Twenty Four: A meeting of minds.

  Chapter Twenty Five: The calm before the storm.

  Chapter Twenty Six: A flaw in the plan.

  Chapter Twenty Seven: It all came crashing down.

  Chapter Twenty Eight: Life after the fall.

  Epilogue: The queen of her castle.

  Prologue: Somewhere beneath the surface.

  "I can show you all the wonders of the world." Sam didn't recognise the woman's voice, but her words were sweet like honey. Trying his best to respond, he found that his voice wavered and his words failed him. Caught in the moment, he was completely enthralled by his companion. A warmth rushed through his veins, soothing him faster than any drug. He knew that he was dying, but it didn't matter as he had wanted to die anyway. It was his final wish. He was tired of living his life so full of regret. Weary of the world, and sick of feeling sorry for himself.

  The warmth was soon replaced with the chill of the grave as it spread out through his body. Death was something that Sam had once believed would feel a little more permanent, but the nameless woman had promised him so much more. “This isn't the end. It's the beginning of something much greater.” For some reason Sam believed everything the woman said, confident that her words weren't just full of empty promises.

  As the last of his life ebbed from his open wound, Sam no longer felt regret. Everything was sure to be better now, as he was going to have a clean slate and past mistakes were no longer of consequence. He was strangely content and free of worry. Death was a truly liberating experience. Memories were fading, making it difficult for him to remember how he got to this point. He barely even remembered the dangerous mix of pain meds and alcohol that he had consumed not all that long ago. Had the unusual woman rescued him from that, or was she there as a reaper to claim his soul as he transcended into a new plane of existence? Maybe he was just high and was hallucinating all of it, but this felt all too real.

  There was nothing now but the blackness of the void as Sam's organs ceased to function and his spirit began to float out into the ether. He had expected pain, but other than the initial shock, he felt nothing of the sort. It was a strangely peaceful experience that felt like it was meant to be, as if he was always meant to die. A second voice unexpectedly pierced through the veil of darkness that obscured his senses. It belonged to a girl that he recognised instantly. The girl who had at one time been his closest friend before he screwed everything up. Alice Delaney, the broken girl who he had once loved, but who was unable to love him in return. “Wake up, Sam! You're not dead, you're just sleeping!”

  Sam awoke with a start, gasping as he took a deep and unnatural-feeling breath of stale air. He couldn't see anything at all, causing a sense of unease to take over. His mind was clouded with confusion, making it difficult for him to focus on anything in the darkness. Either his eyes were failing him, or he was stuck somewhere without any source of light. Feeling groggy and weak, his body resisted any attempts to move. It left him with a dreadful feeling of helplessness and he hated it. He had always hated feeling vulnerable.

  Trying to remember how he got there, Sam did his best to recall his last few memories of that night. Yes, he had been mixing alcohol with stolen medication, and had passed out on the sidewalk. He knew that he had wanted to die, but had felt regret when his life began to fade until something else happened. His heartbeat had slowed and he convinced himself that it was the end. He remembered hearing footsteps, a woman’s voice, and then nothing. Had she taken him somewhere afterwards? There wasn't much else in his memory after that, so he couldn't be sure. At least there was nothing else of importance that he could remember. Just falling unconscious, his mysterious companion, her promises and then waking up here, wherever here was.

  Summoning all his strength, Sam tried to push himself up into a sitting position, but his head met with a hard and impassable surface, causing him to slump backwards. He struggled to reach out to the sides with his arms, and they too hit something. They were thinly padded walls of some sort, with the same above him too. He was surrounded on all sides by the same soft material covering what sounded like wooden walls beyond. The situation seemed more than a little odd.

  Gathering his thoughts Sam tried to work out what was going on. And then it struck him. He was lying in a coffin, likely deep underground. Panic set in. If he was in a coffin, then he was surely dead. But if he was dead, how was he even able to think about being dead? Sam realised that despite the stress that he felt, his pulse wasn't elevated. In fact, he had no heartbeat at all.
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br />   That confirmed it. He had died and this was either hell or some sort of purgatory. Sam discovered that he didn't appear to be breathing either. Yes, he had taken a breath before, but it hadn't felt natural to him. It had felt strained, like he had forced his lungs to take action out of habit instead of out of necessity. So he wouldn't be running out of air any time soon, but he was still trapped six feet underground in a rectangular box, with no hope of anyone coming to his rescue.

  Sam was worried that he was doomed to rot away in his wooden prison. He was almost tempted to resign himself to that fate, as he believed that he deserved it, but a voice in the back of his mind screamed for him to escape. He was hungry, so painfully hungry and he needed sustenance. The hunger was a dull ache that started in his stomach, spreading out through every inch of his body until he could think of nothing else. He may not have needed to breath any more and his heart may have been nothing more than a shrivelled, useless organ, but Sam apparently still had to eat. The intensity of his hunger gradually built up inside of him and took over his mind like a beast breaking out of its cage. He needed to feed, and he needed to do it soon.

  A burst of energy came out of nowhere, fueled by a desperation that caused Sam to claw at the lid of his coffin. He tore at the cloth, ripping it to shreds as he continued to scratch at the varnished wood beyond. It was slow going, but the voice in his head refused to let him quit, and so he scratched until the surface began to splinter. He didn't stop for a second, even when his nails began to break and his fingers bled.

  Something about the box reminded Sam of a recurring nightmare that had started at an early age and had carried on into his adulthood. Every night he had been imprisoned in a featureless wooden room and nothing he did could set him free. In the morning he would often wake up feeling more exhausted than he had been before he went to bed. It was as if the room had been real and he had never actually slept. The image of the empty room had haunted him throughout the day and tortured his very existence. As if that wasn't bad enough, Sam now found himself within an even smaller box and this time it definitely wasn't a dream.

  It took every ounce of strength that Sam had, but he managed to crack the wood. It would take some time, but he was beginning to believe that there was a real possibility of surviving the ordeal. A handful of dirt fell through the fracture in the coffin lid, and before he could react the crack began to widen, opening inwards as soil began to pour through at an exponential rate. In his desperation, Sam hadn't thought that far ahead and now was unsure whether or not he had the energy reserves to continue the dig upwards, but that didn't mean that he wouldn't give it his all. The soil was heavier than he had anticipated as it began to cover his entire body from head to toe with its crushing weight.

  It wasn't long before the lid had given way completely, collapsing in on its occupant. Sam scrambled into action, reaching upwards and doing everything he could to pull himself up through the layers of earth. Once he could no longer feel the wood of the coffin, he quickly realised that he had become disorientated and didn't know which direction to tunnel in order to reach the light of day. Clumps of dirt and stone were in his eyes, up his nostrils, and pushing in through his mouth. It was everywhere and he found that his clothes were weighed down by the soil that permeated them, tearing them at the seams as he kept on clawing through the ground in the hope that he was heading the right way.

  Sam managed to keep himself going. Not just because of the hunger that he felt now, but because his own survival instincts were kicking in. 'Just keep digging, Sam.' He would have told himself out loud, but he didn't want to have his mouth completely full of soil. 'Dig. You can do it. Just dig.' And that’s what he did. It felt like he was going upwards, but he had been turned around and there was no way of being sure. 'Don't think about it. Just keep going.'

  As there was no place for the dirt to go, Sam couldn't pull it past him. He had to push upwards, using his arms to pull himself through. It might not have been tunneling in the traditional sense but it seemed to be working. He had to be running on pure adrenaline by now, if dead people still had adrenaline. Wherever his extra energy was coming from, he sure did appreciate the boost.

  Time had lost all meaning within the confines of the earth. Minutes could have been hours for all that mattered. Sam had no concept of such things as he struggled on through the never ending wall of dirt. It had to be further than six feet to the surface, or maybe he was digging horizontally. Every time he tried to stop and find his bearings, the soil around him seemed to tighten its grip, and so he couldn't take a break or rest even for a second. He had to keep going. He had to keep on pushing through.

  Sam's arms hurt and his legs threatened to expire, but he wouldn't let them. He would only give them a break when he could see the sky with his own dirt clogged eyes. For a moment he wondered if he was in a marked grave and whether or not it said the words 'rest in peace’ upon the epitaph. If it did, this was certainly not what they had in mind. He wasn't resting and he felt anything but peaceful. Instead it felt the planet itself was trying to keep him down there. It was Sam versus the world, and he was going to fight tooth and nail until the very end. There was no giving up, not now. Not ever.

  There was no telling how long it had taken him. No knowing how long he had been within the earth's grasp. It could have been a lifetime for all Sam knew, but just when things seemed like they couldn't be more dire, his fingers breached the surface. He could feel the cool air brushing his fingertips as they protruded out through what must have been the grass beyond. He was close to obtaining the freedom that he had fought so hard for that he could almost taste it. Just a little bit more work and he would be free of his own grave.

  Sam placed his hands on the flat ground above him before pulling up with all that was left of his might. Weary arms were closely followed by his head, eyes opening slowly as he could finally smell something other than the soil in his nostrils. It took a second for his vision to clear, but all he saw around him was yet more darkness. Sam wasn't greeted by daylight, rather the stars of the night sky. As he suspected, he was buried in a graveyard and it was one that he recognised too. He wasn't in Seattle anymore, the city in which he had given up all hope. Instead he now found himself in his hometown of Birchfield, Kansas. A place more familiar to him than any other.

  Sam clambered up through the grass, grabbing at its blades in an attempt to drag the rest of his body into the open. It was a struggle to pull his legs up, but after one last ditch effort he was finally free of his prison. His body had never been so beaten up or exhausted, and he couldn't tell if he was bleeding or if he was just damp from water in the soil, but he didn't care. Freedom tasted so sweet.

  Somehow managing to roll on to his back, Sam peered up at the moon, its crescent shape relaxing him in his moment of triumph. Tilting his head backwards, he could see that he had dug his way straight up as he was lying by a large and relatively new gravestone that bore his name. There were dead flowers decorating the floor in its immediate vicinity, having likely dried up some time ago. The engraving on the stone was upside down from his perspective, but Sam still managed to read it out loud, his voice sounding tired and gravelly. “Here lies Samuel Isaac Mitchell. Our beloved son, missed dearly. Life is not forever, love is.” It was an odd feeling, reading his own epitaph, and one that he would likely never forget.

  Sam wondered where to go from there, but decided that he was in no rush to do anything else. His stomach grumbled in protest, sending shooting pains through his already sore limbs. He was still starving and would have to deal with his hunger soon, but before that he wanted to see his parents. He wanted to let them know that they hadn't lost him and that he was okay. Well, he might be dead, but at least he wasn't completely gone. Sam was sure that he wasn't a ghost as he had a corporeal form, but if he wasn't a spirit, what was he? Something told him that he would have plenty of time to find out. Perhaps his mom and dad would have some answers. With that thought in his mind, he clambered to his feet and made a v
ague attempt at dusting himself down, although his effort was in vain as the dirt clung to his clothing and refused to be dislodged.

  Sighing loudly, Sam shakily made his way out of the cemetery with weary legs, past rows of crumbling, unkempt gravestones and between the creaking old trees that bordered the unnervingly open area. He squeezed between the rusted railings that led towards an old short cut that he remembered from his childhood and made his way down the familiar streets in search of home. Sam hoped that his parents would be happy to see him and felt nervous at the thought of seeing them again. He had a nagging feeling that it had been quite some time since they had last laid their eyes upon him. Unfortunately for him, it had been much longer than he could have ever guessed.

  Chapter One: To dream of drowning.

  Aaron knew this place. It had haunted him for longer than he could remember, as if nothing had existed before it. It was a place that had changed him and there was never a chance of going back to being the kid that he was before it all happened. Twenty years had gone by and yet he could never shake the feeling of fear that had overwhelmed him in that little suburban house, nestled between the trees of Edison Heights, New Hampshire.

  Barely turning nine years old when it began, Aaron had hated living in that house ever since the day his family had moved into town. It never felt like home to him, and he sorely missed his friends back in Michigan, but his parents had to go where the work was, something that was difficult for him to understand at the time.

  The house had been built in the sixties and still had the old, tobacco smoke stained wallpaper that his mom plastered over with new coats of paint. However, no matter how much she tried to modernise the decor, it still somehow managed to smell damp and musty. It didn't help that the scented candles and air freshener that Aaron's mom used did a far better job at making him feel sick than actually masking the dank odour.