Read Online Arise (Book Three in The Arson Saga) by Estevan Vega - Free Book Online

enhancement—was for a purpose. Maybe it wasn’t the future he had witnessed in a vision on their ride in to reclaim the Source, but it was a future. One that did not have Saul Hoven as its leader but instead a more fit and true vessel, one who could usher superior knowledge and order into a refined species.
    “I’ll kill that freak!” Lamont’s threat derailed the doctor’s train of thought. For a moment, he had been lost in a trance, taken back or forward, depending on how one looked at a possible future, to a time he swore he’d seen clearer than the sunlight lazily spilling through the trees. No matter how hard it tried, it could not stop the frost. “I swear it…on my mother’s eyes. I swear I’ll end the puny runt for good! He’ll beg…for my mer…cy!”
    “Your blind rage will not save you, Jeb. Such p-p-petty war cries will do us no-no-n-no good. Don’t waste your breath!”
    Lamont’s eyes bloomed with fury. “You’re awfully…calm. Ain’t that curious.” He coughed, gurgling a black mixture of blood and saliva. The fallacies in the mutt’s face started to show. Every time he flared his nostrils, every splinter in those bulging cheeks, every ounce of fear sweating out meant he’d been beaten.
    “I am in control.” Krane believed his words. They were real, more real than the air that chilled his lungs, more real than his broken ankle.
    Lamont’s jaw hung open. New confusion splashed in his stare. “Nobody’s in control no more.” He hawked the remaining wad of tobacco gook from behind his fat lip, clawing at the door handle of the Mercedes with a trembling left hand, and with his right, he sponged the fresh bullet wound in his throat with three thick fingers. Two gaudy rings soaked up some of the red leaking from the puncture. It seemed the dog tended to his sickness better than expected.
    But what of your sickness? his thoughts broke in. The marks of your becoming. Yes, he already suspects a change in you.
    He doesn’t know the truth. To him, I’m just an infection. He cannot see what I see. What I have already seen.
    Just a rabid animal.
    Yes, just a rabid animal.
    Perhaps you underestimate him. Perhaps he has played for too long. How much longer should he be allowed to play?
    Krane crawled toward his glasses, which lay in the center of the street. As he slithered, his jacket scraping the blacktop, his chin already bruised, he noticed a beetle easing out of a crack in the road. It crept closer, and he studied the insect as its wings flapped once before tucking back. The beetle’s structure had a strange, lovely quality to it. Bent, syringe-like legs. An abrupt, horned nose. A black canvas body—uniquely grotesque, like modern man.
    After retrieving the glasses, Krane put the warped material on. One of the nose pads was missing, and the piece that held it now dug into the bridge on the right side. Also, the lenses were chipped and cracked in certain sections, a miniature web splintering out from the center of each cut of glass. For a second, the beetle seemed to look up at him. Did it sense what he was becoming? Did it sense a dark fate? Could it feel anything at all?
    He could barely make out the insect’s shape now. Wearing the glasses blurred his true vision. Krane adjusted them to test if anything had changed. Perhaps it was just the way they sat on his face. But he was a bit startled to find his vision still very much a blur.
    “Bizarre,” he muttered, taking off the glasses. He squinted, only to discover that his sight was, in fact, clearer without the prescription lenses. He couldn’t believe it. His sight wasn’t perfect, but it was clear enough to see. He felt anew, revived somehow. Grinning, the doctor pressed his thumb atop the beetle’s back and pushed until the insect was crushed.
    “And you didn’t even see it coming, my little friend,” he whispered to it, licking his thumb clean of the deep yellow fluids.
    “Move your carcass, Manny! The sky’s…changin’