Bridgefinders (The Echo Worlds Book 1) Read online

  BRIDGEFINDERS

  Joshua C. Cook

  ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

  &

  DEDICATIONS

  To my Wife and Children, All that I am is yours.

  Edited by:

  Briana Morgan

  www.brianamaemorgan.com

  @brianawrites

  Cover Art by:

  S.A. Hunt

  www.sahuntbooks.com

  @authorsahunt

  “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aesop

  Bridgefinders

  Joshua Cook

  Copyright 2016 by Joshua Cook

  Amazon Edition

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  “Mark, it’s a system. Just a system, like any other system. I don’t need to understand what each part does in detail.” Cendan’s voice rose. “Just listen, do what I say, and we will be done with this call in an hour.” One hour later to the minute, Cendan hung up the phone with a loud sigh. Performance had gone up eleven percent, and he was one paycheck richer.

  Cendan yawned and stretched, forcing himself to get up and move around. He found dealing with people hard. They weren’t predictable, and they didn’t always behave in ways that made sense. Mechanical systems, electronic systems, those were easy.

  He found himself at the window of his home office, his thoughts on the garden below. Gardens were a system made up of water, earth, and sunlight. Plants were the easiest living thing to deal with for him. They didn’t throw him curveballs on wants and needs. As a result, he found gardening to be something he rather enjoyed.

  Coffee. Coffee would be good right about now. As it brewed, Cendan perused his bookshelves, remembering the stories within. His personal library was large, containing over nine thousand books on various subjects, Work and leisure related. He even had a sizable collection of fiction and books about legends and myths. He’d had most of those books since childhood, they’d been a form of escapism, he knew now. Not that his childhood had been a bad one; in fact, it had been fairly pedestrian and uneventful. People, however, he had realized early on, almost never understood his point of view on things, so instead of arguing with them, he’d ignored them and read instead.

  Cendan billed himself as a “System Management and Performance Consultant,” a fancy-sounding title that made the business types giddy. As a bonus, it was lucrative... Companies paid him to make systems, regardless of type, run well, faster, and more efficiently. He was very good at what he did, and there was always a waiting list of clients eager to pay for his services.

  His cell phone beeped to remind him of the time and the fact that he’d had no phone calls or texts in three days. He used this cell for personal things, not work, and it served as a reminder that he wasn’t getting anywhere with trying to have some sort of social or romantic life. It wasn’t that he didn’t try, he did, and hard. But there always seemed to be a disconnect between what he thought he should do and what the other person wanted him to do.

  Truthfully, he wanted to be part of something much bigger. Logic and understanding how things worked together was his living, but over time, it had become all he was. Frustration with not understanding the give and take of relationships, friendships, any of it had led him to his current state of solitude.

  His last real relationship, with a woman named Jasmine, had started well. Smart, funny, and exotically attractive, she’d started to draw him out a bit from the self-imposed shell he lived in. A few months into the relationship, however, his normal lack of understanding the give and take in any relationship had once again ended any attempt at a social life.

  Cendan shook himself and decided to go for a run to clear his head and then take a nice cold shower. Maybe then he’d have some dinner, watch a movie, and then go to sleep. He checked off in his mind the overall plan for the rest of the day. It was a plan he had made and gone through hundreds of times. There was something to be said for predictability—at least he always knew what was going to happen. A quick change later, he left his house and locked up, intent on jogging away his troubles.

  After Cendan had left, a small shape appeared on his table and grew to the size of a small dog. It was a gnarled figure with large eyes with blood-red irises and a nose too large for its face. Its most distinguishing feature was the large collection of rings and metal trinkets strung around its neck on a blackened string.

  Once it had stopped growing, the figure smelled the air, searching for what it had come to find out. A tongue, grey, pink, and long, appeared to lick the air. The creature snuffled and grunted as it jumped off the table and onto the floor. “Grellnot find another one. Grellnot find another one!” The figure danced from side to side, the necklace jangling back and forth as it moved.

  After a long sniff and a pause, the creature tapped his head. “Grellnot find one who doesn’t know, one that isn’t ready yet. No shiny treasures for Grellnot here. She will want him gone before he knows.” The figure sat and emitted a low, plaintive whine escaped it, though its heavy breathing and grunting still gave it an air of danger. “Unless she doesn’t know. If they find him, and make him know, then Grellnot gets what he wants, and she gets what she wants.” A grin split its dirty lined face, showing a row of sharp, even teeth, which it ran its tongue across.

  “Yes... If Grellnot strikes now, only she gets to be happy. Not Grellnot. So Grellnot will wait, wait ’til he knows, then Grellnot gets a shiny for Grellnots necklace.” The creature stroked the necklace, its motley assortment of rings, watches, and other even stranger metal objects softly clinking in the dark kitchen. “Grellnot loves its shiny treasures. All those Finders’ pretty toys. All those delicious meals. Grellnot remembers them all.” Grellnot sniffed the air again. A shiny was there, but it wasn’t ripe yet, wasn’t ready. Taking the shiny for Grellnots collection now wouldn’t be right, not fun.

  At the sound of a cry, the creature started, its ears springing up and quivering. “Grellnot hears a child…” Its face took on a cast of malice. “Grellnot loves children, delicious fear.” And with a pop the creature vanished, but the air of danger or malice that had surrounded it remained.

  The Slyph was bored. Nearly unlimited in power here on her world, the Echo world, she could do anything—but she wanted more. So much more. To take and control the magic of two worlds would bring her abilities to even greater heights, but to do that, she’d need to get rid of those foolish humans and the even more foolish protectors of the humans world’s magic, the Bridgefinders.

  Truthfully, there was much to admire about the humans’ world. It was teeming with life, much of it unintelligent, but life nonetheless. She had been a singular event, a wild chance. After watching that world for eons, the Slyph had been amazed at the drastic and seemingly random changes that racked it. It had taken her a great deal of time to realize that she could make her own life, create her own creatures and creations. Those early creatures had been nothing more than animals, unthinking and unknowing. But they had been hers.

  For a time, she’d been happy, creating more, no longer being alone. Time had passed until the coming of the Humans. Humans. People. Thinking, rational creatures. At first, the Slyph had loved humans. She’d found ways to watch them. And when she realized that a few of them, a primitive but powerful few, could use mag
ic, she was overjoyed. Finally, a creature she could really communicate with!

  And she had tried to communicate with them. The shock of realization that the humans’ world was powerful in magic as well, but hidden from various forms of life there, had shocked her. She’d tried so many times to help them see, only to have them turn away or use her help to take more power. She had tried to understand, had even made creatures to try to help her understand—thinking, knowing creatures. But to no avail. First had come the disillusionment, and then the anger, and finally, the hatred. If the humans couldn’t use their power wisely, they didn’t deserve to have it. All of it should be hers.

  Then the Bridgefinders had come—humans with the gift, humans who knew about her, humans who could use their powers to stop her! Her rage had been great at the time. It still was, though colder now, a harsh anger. Their long war–the Slyph and her creatures on one side, the Bridgefinders on the other—had gone on and on. The Slyph was winning slowly. It may have been a war of attrition, but it was one that she was close finally to ending.

  As Cendan ran, his mind wandered a bit, but that was good for it. His mind grabbed random objects, placed them in the system of the world, and determined how they connected to other things around him. He had once tried to explain this to his ex-girlfriend, Jasmine, who didn’t have the same mindset. She’d given him an unreadable expression in response. He’d taken it for dismissal and had dropped the matter.

  To Cendan, the main issue with the world was that the vast majority of people didn’t understand their connections to it, and how a single action could cause an elaborate chain reaction. So many people thought of themselves as an island, self-contained and not connected, not beholden to the rest of the planet for any reason. To Cendan, that was egotistic tripe, but it was an all too common viewpoint.

  With a deep sigh, he shut down his mind and lost himself in the steady rhythm of his steps as he ran. The regular beats counted out the distance he was covering. The rhythm had a hypnotic quality that calmed him when the world was so disorganized and stupid. He had lost himself to it and was turning the corner near his home when a strange sight halted him. There were several police cars and an ambulance outside his house—no, not his house—the neighbors’ house across the street.

  As he watched the scene unfold, an officer approached him. “Sir? Do you live in the area?” The man’s badge said his name was Harlan.

  “I live right over there.” Cendan gestured towards his house, running in place as he talked. “What’s going on?”

  Officer Harlan glanced over at Cendan’s house. “Your name, sir?”

  “Cendan Key,” he replied. Where was this going?

  “Mr. Key, do you have a pet? Any animals?” The officer sounded irritated. Was he annoyed because Cendan was running in place?

  “No, officer. Why?”

  “How long have you been out running, Mr. Key? An hour? Thirty minutes?” The officer’s face betrayed his annoyance. Cendan decided to stop moving. The officer relaxed somewhat.

  “One hour, officer.” Cendan wanted to ask a follow-up question, but found himself unsure if this would annoy the officer more.

  “See any wild animals? Feral dogs or cats?” The officer paused. “Little girl who lives across the street got bit by something. Something big.”

  Cendan raised an eyebrow. He didn’t interact with the family who lived across from him. They were on nodding terms, maybe some half-waves and that sort of acknowledgement, but they always kept an I-don’t-want-to-talk-to-you distance between them. He interacted with all his neighbors that way. However, the neighbors did have a little girl, no more than seven or eight. Wild animal attacks here? Unusual.

  “No, officer, I didn’t see anything like that.” Cendan paused. “Haven’t seen any wild or feral animals in this neighborhood ever, actually.”

  The doors to the house where the girl lived opened as the paramedics carried the little girl out of the house and into the ambulance. Cendan saw a bandaged right arm, blood seeping through the bandages.

  “It was a little man! Not an animal! A little scary man!” The girl yelled to her frantic mother. Cendan could not make out more as the paramedics put the girl in the ambulance, followed by her parent, and closed the doors behind them. Soon the ambulance took off with the wail of the siren fading quickly as the vehicle moved out of sight.

  “Kids. It’ll be hard to find this animal if we can’t even get a good description of it.” Officer Harlan shook his head. “Okay, Mr. Key, if you do see a wild animal, just let us handle it. Call us or animal control, okay? Don’t try to interact with it or capture it yourself. We don’t need anyone else getting bit.”

  Cendan nodded. He had no interest in interacting with a wild animal. “No, sir, I have no interest in being attacked, clawed, or bitten.”

  But why had that girl been screaming about the attacker being a little man?

  “Officer? Where was the girl when she got bit?” Cendan asked. “Just so I can stay away from there.”

  The officer paused. “That’s the weird thing—she was apparently in her house. We searched it high and low, but we couldn’t find anything. It must have escaped somehow.”

  Cendan contemplated the house in question. How could that happen? It made the most sense of course, logically. But something bothered him on a deeper level, and he would be running through this over and over in his mind to try to find the pattern.

  Grellnot wiped his face. Tasty screams, tasty blood. It would not give him what he needed—the magic of this world. It had been a good snack, and the fear had been truly delicious. Watching from the upper branch of a tree, Grellnot smiled. “Stupid men, not looking up. Stupid men thinking Grellnot is an animal. Grellnot is far more than an animal.”

  Grellnot tracked the one he had found as the man entered his own house. Soon they would find him and make him ready. Grellnot would feast then, and she would get one step closer to freeing them all.

  The closer Cendan came to his own house across the street, the more his sense of foreboding grew. He didn’t like unusual branches like this, changes from the routine. Goosebumps formed on his arms as the words of the little girl echoed in his head. Scary little man? What had she meant? Maybe the animal had been hiding in the girl’s stuffed animals, assuming she had any.

  His house seemed normal, at least until he got to the kitchen table. He paused then, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck raising an aura of pure malice and almost hunger enveloped him. Cendan shuddered and found himself gripping his keys so tightly that his hands were left with multiple impressions of the metal. The emotions vanished as fast as they had appeared, but Cendan still felt uneasy.

  What in the world had that been? He gripped the back of a chair to steady himself. This day was getting very strange, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Cendan decided to calm himself down with a little mental exercise. And he understood just what he wanted to do.

  Many years ago, he had been in a thrift shop searching for a cheap telescope. He’d wanted to get into astronomy at the time. He hadn’t found a telescope, but on his way out, he’d run across this old large black iron key, and he’d picked it up for cheap. Several months after owning it, Cendan had discovered that the key was actually pretty old—at least six hundred years, probably more. How it had ended up where he had found it, he couldn’t guess.

  However, Cendan found that if he held the key and did a little mental exercise, meditating on it and what he knew of its history, he would relax and gain a great deal of clarity and focus. He wasn’t sure why, really, and he never told anyone about it. He knew it was childish, a security blanket of a sort. Not logical. But it helped him, and right now, he needed clarity more than normalcy.

  He found the key in its usual spot. In spite of its age, there wasn’t the slightest hint of rust or metal decay. The object felt solid in his hand and cool, but not cold, to the touch. It was–though Cendan would never say this out loud—real. It was almost as though it connected t
o the world in ways he couldn’t perceive.

  Cendan took a seat at the kitchen table where only minutes before there had been an overwhelming sense of danger. He held the key and felt grounded, safe. His shoulders and back released the tension they held as the feeling of malice ebbed around him.

  Normally Cendan would put the key back on his desk where he kept it, and Cendan headed that way. But at the desk, he hesitated. A sudden urge to just put the key into his pocket—for safekeeping—came over him. A rare smile crossed his face, and he shook his head, what a strange day this had turned out to be. After a cold shower and a change of clothes, he’d feel much better and could get back to work.

  Forty minutes later, Cendan felt much more like his usual self. He chalked up his earlier unease to the animal attack at the neighbor’s house. Changes in the normal always threw him off a bit. Without thinking, he slipped the key into the pocket of the jeans he had put on. Back at his desk, work consumed him, and he forgot the key in his pocket and the oddities of the early part of the day.

  The rest of the workday continued as normal. He had a few conference calls with clients on the stages of projects, one call to a collection agency there was a contract with—all that unpleasantness of hounding people for payment he farmed out to someone else to deal with. Cendan just wanted to get the money they had agreed to pay him.

  It was evening before he finally pushed away from the desk and stood. Hunger raised its head at him. He’d barely eaten today. The branch the day had taken had messed up his pattern, and he’d been thrown off his schedule.

  Cendan knew there wasn’t a lot of food in the house, so going out to get something was going to be his best bet, but what could he eat? He wandered through the kitchen trying to decide when his eyes fell on a small pile of menus.

  Jasmine had put them there as part of her mission to break him out of his need for routine. Cendan even had a routine for eating out, at least in terms of what he would eat. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate other foods—he just wouldn’t try them since he already knew he liked certain things. Why risk paying for something and then not liking it? His girlfriend at the time hadn’t agreed with his logic.