The Perfect Soldier Read online

  The Perfect Soldier

  B. D. Grant

  [email protected]

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  Book 1 in A Seraphim Series: A Place Worth Living

  Book 2 in A Seraphim Series: The Perfect Soldier

  Book 3 in A Seraphim Series: A Creature Apart (coming soon)

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  Dedication: For my close friends and family. Thank you for your continued support.

  Published by B. D. Grant

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright © 2018 B. D. Grant, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  The Perfect Soldier is a fictional work. Characters, places, names, and incidents are used fictitiously or are products of B. D. Grant’s imagination. Any resemblances are entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address

  Published in the U.S. by B. D. Grant, LLC

  B. D. Grant, LLC

  P O Box 1296

  Sulphur, LA 70664

  Cover Designer: Christina P. Myrvoid

  ISBN: 978-0-9973891-2-8

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  We sit patiently in the back of the ambulance as we wait for our turn to unload. Dad, strapped in the gurney, watches me as I watch him. The hospital personnel are overwhelmed with the number of Seraphim being brought in from the raid. The EMT in the back of the ambulance stays with us as the driver gets out to help bring others in. There had been more than one gurney pulled from the back of the ambulances ahead of ours carrying unresponsive patients.

  We had made it out alive, but many hadn’t. The number of deceased only seems to grow once we get inside of the hospital. I don't know how my father survived so many months at the mercy of his captors.

  I try to stay at his side the best I can throughout the division of the wounded from the healthy Seraphim being brought in to the hospital. The amount of people working outside of the hospital and inside the wing designated for us is overwhelming. Everyone is running around doing what they can, but they weren’t prepared for this. Neither were we.

  As we take Dad inside, I’m left thinking about his kidnapping. He was taken in the middle of the day along with our neighbors and their son from our neighbors’ front yard. It’s unclear if the Rogues who took them had initially brought them to the underground facility where Dad was eventually rescued or if they hold prisoners captive at other sites where he may have been taken first.

  Since making it out of the basement, Dad hasn’t directly told me anything about what they did to him. Still, I’m listening hard, even to his nonverbal responses, as the doctors and nurses talk to him as he’s being examined. I know he doesn’t want me to hear about the torture, but keeping me in the dark has my imagination playing out its own sick scenarios every time I look at his frail body. His skin is riddled with bruises and scars that tell their own stories, even if he doesn’t want to tell them. I keep having to look away in order to keep from crying. There are plenty of other people who I can hear crying in the small wing where Seraphim are being brought. I don’t need to add to it. I will have plenty of time for my own tears later. Right now, my father needs me.

  Everyone involved knew that if there were Rogues running the school, than there would be casualties on both sides as result from the raid. What we weren’t prepared for was that Rogues would attack their own students, those whom they had worked so hard to collect. Being a Rogue was their choice, but each and every one of them were Seraphim at heart, a Seraphim who was raised with the singular belief that we were to make the world a better place. Rogues had a history of viciously taking out anyone who spoke out against their group, but being Seraphim, they should have at least drawn the line at hurting innocent children.

  It was a lot, at first, finding out that I was a Seraphim after Dad and the Angelos were kidnapped. As my mom described it, Seraphim are people with abilities beyond the spectrum of normal human capabilities. We are split into five subcategories of Seraphim: Dynamar, Tempero, Veritatis, Cachelerie, and Sensaas.

  Dynamars’ ability is their unusual strength and heightened aggression. They are the Seraphim most likely to be found working as bodyguards for the rich, and the really good Dynamar are recruited into government agencies or branches of the military.

  Seraphim like me are Veritatis. We are walking lie detectors. It sounds cool knowing that no one will ever be able to pull one over on you until you walk a day in my shoes. Once you have seen how much people lie about every little thing, it’s no longer that fascinating as much as it’s annoying.

  Tempero are the Seraphim who can control people’s emotions. Sensaas have the ability to locate other Seraphim like a built-in homing device. We all have the Sensaas’ ability to some degree, but Sensaas don’t have any other abilities to go with it. I’ve found that they are also much better at using this ability than the rest of us.

  The newest of the Seraphim abilities (and by that I mean a couple hundred years new) are Cachelerie. Cachelerie are somewhat like the inverse of Sensaas in that their ability is that of invisibility from fellow Seraphim. They can hide themselves from other Seraphim, and if they are strong enough, they can even hide others.

  A Cachelerie is the reason my family and the Angelo’s family were able to stay hidden for so long. Before all this, the neighbor whose backyard butted up to ours was Mr. Thomas, a Cachelerie. The Angelos, Beth, Charles, and Jake, lived across the street from Mr. Thomas. Having him living between us and Jake’s parent’s house kept our families safe until it didn’t. He is the one who kept me from being seen on the day that the others were taken by Rogues. Like Mom and me, Mr. Thomas went on the run afterwards, knowing that if Rogues found them, it would only be a matter of time before they found the rest of us.

  The underground facility where Dad and the other captives were being held was well concealed by the large school campus positioned just above it, deep in the Louisiana woods. They called the school “The Academy.” It was an obvious derivative of the legitimate Seraphim school that my uncle is the Dean of and where I go to school now, which is called, The Southern Academy. At the Rogue school, kids were being recruited under the pretense that it being of it actually being The Southern Academy.

  His school, my school, is the only operational private school for Seraphim-only youth in the state. His students are given the opportunity to develop their individual abilities in a friendly environment. There, we are welcome to be ourselves while still receiving formal educations. The Southern Academy is fairly small considering it takes students of ages five through eighteen, but it is also fairly new.

  When my uncle first brought me to his campus, I was unimpressed with the school itself. At that point, my father had just been taken and I had only just found out that I was a Seraphim. Thanks to watching too many X-Men movies, I was expecting a large, sprawling structure with breathtaking landscape. I’m sure the lack of grandeur at The Southern Academy was a result of its destruction at the hands of Rogues over a decade prior. Why invest the time and money in something that could just be bu
rned down again? Seraphim needed a safe, accepting place to bring their children. That is what my uncle’s school provided.

  The decision to raid the Rogue compound was swiftly agreed upon the same night my uncle, William McBride, brought it up to his faculty and the parents of his students. It was agreed that not only did the raid need to happen to free the Seraphim youth who were there under false pretense, but also to prevent them from eventually making the same move against The Southern Academy. I’m not sure if Uncle Will had known about the underground facility, but there was hope that the raid would lead to farther information about where the growing number of kidnapped adults were being taken. It was dumb luck, if you ask me, that we even found the basement at all. “It was meant to be,” is what my mom would have said, in her ever optimistic assuredness if she would have been there.

  The school we raided was nothing like mine. From my short time being above ground during the raid, it was evident that the Rogue school had been around a lot longer simply by the age of the building and equipment I saw. I can’t speak for the entire campus, but the building I got to see, the welcome center, still hadn’t gotten around to changing some of the old chalk boards in its classrooms. The basement was even worse. There were long, rectangular imprints on the beige painted cinder block walls where it had held posters for decades.

  If it weren’t for my uncle’s quick action and all those who took part in the raid, my dad wouldn’t be here. If I hadn’t seen the underground prison myself, it would have been hard to believe.

  Dynamar students far outnumbered any other Seraphim subgroup. It was easy to see why Rogues preferred them during the raid. Many of the Dynamar students were loyal to the Rogue cause, and the others didn’t seem to think that we were the good guys. They fought us just as hard as the adults, making the faculty was just as much of a threat to us as the older students themselves. There was so much going on that I don’t even want to guess at how many naive students fought and died thinking that they were protecting themselves and their peers. In reality, their faculty was shooting at non-Dynamar students just as much as they were shooting at the raiders.

  From the raid I learned that Rogues are every bit as evil as my mother warned.

  Once inside the hospital, Dad is immediately hooked up to fresh bags of fluids to treat him for dehydration and malnutrition. They take x-rays of his chest, arms, and legs. No sooner has the nurse placed him in a room of his own than he passes out, but sleep does little to ease his frown of exhaustion.

  As he sleeps, I get the results from his x-rays. Two of his ribs are broken with multiple sites on his arms where fractions had occurred, but because they are all in mid or late stages of healing, he won’t have to wear casts. His hands and feet, however, are another matter. I don’t think the doctor believed me when I told him that Dad needed Dillon and me to walk on either side of him for balance as he walked out of the basement. The doctor tells me that he wouldn’t be able do anything besides pain control for these wounds at the moment until my father is in stable health.

  With the entourage of hospital staff emptying out the room, I pull the only chair over to Dad’s bed and plop down into it. It feels like the raid had taken days from beginning to end, not hours. I want to be near enough to him so that he can wake me if he comes to and needs something. He is so thin that I am able to lay my head down on the narrow hospital bed without disturbing him. Since getting to the room, it has been a struggle to stay awake now that the adrenaline has worn off.

  There is a second aspect to my personal oddities that I haven’t mentioned yet. It sets me apart from my fellow Seraphim and Veritatis. When I fall asleep, I am not alone. It was during my move to The Southern Academy that my sleep was first interrupted by a mysterious woman. I didn’t experience the anxious dreams that I expected would arise after witnessing the kidnappings and learning why my family was targeted. Instead, this woman became regular facet in my sleeping world.

  It would have been easy if she had simply been a figment of my imagination, understandable even. I had gone through so much stress in so little time it would have made sense that my subconscious had created her to take my mind off of my waking plight. They even make medication to treat voices in your head, but she was not of my making. She was a real, living woman who was in my head whenever I slept. Talk about hard to swallow.

  She knew what I was thinking as I was thinking it. It was a huge put-off initially. I had spent my life keeping my ability a secret from everyone except the Angelos and Mr. Thomas, and then suddenly here comes some lady in my head hearing my every thought.

  Dream Walker, the name I have given her, is in a similarly depleted state when our minds connect. She has yet to explain to me why we started this nighttime ritual or how it is possible, but I am fairly certain that she knows. She doesn’t let me see into her head like she can in mine. The only thing I am sure about is that she hasn’t told me a lie yet. Like my family, I know that Dream Walker is a victim of the Rogue organization.

  The first time I connected with her, I saw her in a cell smaller than the one I later found my dad in during the raid. She isn’t tortured like my dad was; they run tests on her. She won’t share what the tests are for, but she is kept in much better shape than the other captives.

  I can tell that she was waiting for me to join her, but she doesn’t say anything to me. Tonight, she just lays there, allowing me to feel the worry she has carried for me all day long. She had known what little I knew about the upcoming raid from being in my head, and she knew how badly I wanted to hunt down the people who took my father. Dream Walker includes the huge relief across our connection that she feels now knowing that I survived the raid.

  She is in a dark room. Taking a deep breath, she gives me a whiff of the room she’s laying in. The smell is off. She isn’t in the same cell she had been in all this time. She opens her eyes to show me that the space is as cramped as her previous cell. She is on a cot, I determine by the stiff unyielding feel of it. Since I’m searching for answers, she is kind enough to recap her day for me. This is the most she has allowed me to see of her daily life.

  Dream Walker was moved early that morning along with a few other captives. She tried talking to the Rogues who were moving her, but a cloth bag was placed over her head. As a result, she didn’t get to see anything once she was taken out of her cell. She tried talking despite the bag, but they threatened to gag her. She resorted to simply listening to what was happening around her. From what little she understood, the prisoners deemed worthless were being left in their cells.

  She spent most of the day in a vehicle as the driver talked about how everything would be gone before anyone would ever get down there.

  Down there, catches my attention. “You were in the basement at the Rogue school?” I ask. I had never thought that she was being held below ground this whole time.

  Instead of answering me, she shows me flashes from previous perspectives from inside the basement. Now that I have been there myself, I know with certainty that she was in the same prison as my dad. The lab that I didn’t get to see during the raid is the main thing her memories show me. She must have spent a lot of time in there. Rogues had set it on fire as they fled before we got to it. We didn’t even open the door; with the amount of smoke seeping out from under it, we didn’t want it to fill the corridor while we were still trying to find and free prisoners. From what Dream Walker shows me, it is much larger than I had imagined.

  “We missed saving you by hours,” I tell her, wishing I could have freed her like we had the others.

  I am not your responsibility, she says without actually saying a thing. You would be wise to worry about your own safety as much as you worry about others… she’s falling asleep. The soft slumber enveloping her feels peaceful.

  I think about all of those people still missing even though we got so many out during the raid. From Dream Walker’s morning, it sounded like those being taken out of the basement with her numbered in the tens. I was lucky to al
so find Jake Angelo, alive and well during the raid. He still looked every ounce of the golden boy that he had been while we were growing up. He wasn’t being held prisoner like my dad was, but he was in the basement when I got down there. He was frantically freeing Seraphim along with the first group of raiders who had gotten down there before me. Dad, Jake, and Jake’s parents were all taken together, but Jake’s parents weren’t found in the basement like my dad was.

  Lena, who had been a student at the Rogue school before her indiscretions landed her in the basement where we found her, had grabbed as many files as she could out of one of the offices before the explosions sent all of us running. Those files are my hope that Uncle Will’s people will find out where Jake’s parents and Dream Walker are located now.

  If Jake’s parents aren’t where Dream Walker is being held, than there’s a good chance that there is only one other option where they could be. I don’t want to think about that. With that thought, my dream takes a dark turn as a cold room materializes. Two metal beds stand alone in the space. A body is on each bed, covered head to toe by gray sheets. I know the couple laying beneath the sheets without seeing beneath the gray. I don’t dare lift either sheet to confirm what my gut is telling me.

  “Excuse me, Miss.” I jump awake. A male nurse is standing opposite me on the other side of Dad’s bed, holding a tub full of bath essentials in the crook of his arm. “You’re Taylor Jameson, right?”

  The eerie dream lingers on my mind as I look across the bed at the nurse. I am going to have to ask Dream Walker if she knows anything about Jake’s parents, Aunt Beth and Uncle Chuck’s, whereabouts next time we connect. I rub my eyes, finally acknowledging the nurse. “Yes?”

  “I’m here to give Mr. Jameson his bath.”

  Dad opens his eyes. He carefully looks over the man standing over him. His eyes stop at the plastic tub full of sponge bath necessities, “What happened to the cute, lady nurse from earlier?”