Prologue

It all began with a book, and the old man who owned it. I made the mistake of walking into an old antique bookstore and happened to pick up the wrong book. It was really all a matter of chance. It was a simple looking book with a brown leather exterior and a gold emblem on the front: a circle with one cross standing vertical in the center, and two others criss-crossing it. When I picked up this book with no title or author, the emblem burned my fingers. Naturally, I dropped the book, which caught the attention of the old man at the counter. He got all jittery, asked me to come to the back, and showed me what was inside the book. Pictures of monsters worse than any nightmare, descriptions, incantations, and prayers that could be used to ward off said foes filled the pages. I thought it was all some kind of joke.

I left the store feeling more than a little shaken up. I told the old man he was crazy for believing in that crap and thought I could carry on my merry way. And that was when I started seeing things.

I’d see deformed humans standing in the middle of the street, or I’d turn around and see one standing inches from my face. Some looked like humans, and some didn’t. I saw scaly creatures moving in the darkness around me at night, and sometimes I’d hear things like footsteps in the hallway behind me. And I realized I’d seen all of them somewhere else: inside the pages of that book. It didn’t take many more incidences with those things before I was running back to that store.

He told me I’d been chosen. When the book burned me, it signified that I was to be the next warrior of God. I was supposed to fight those creatures, send them back to Hell or wherever they came from, and they wouldn’t stop coming. Eventually, he said, they’d kill me if I didn’t learn to kill them first. It appeared I had no choice.

The old man trained me. I learned spells, incantations, and physical endurance. I learned to fight with the warrior’s sword and daggers. They were silvery metal instruments, and along each blade were Latin inscriptions from the first Bible, wards against evil, and so many other things that the entire blade looked cracked and scratched. He said those weapons were the only relatively manmade things that could banish them. The White spells also worked, and I could even call spirits for assistance if I needed to.

When I’d learned all I could, the old man gave in to death. My teacher had died peacefully in his sleep, finally fulfilling his destiny by passing down this Necromancy to someone else that could carry on the tradition and keep the world in motion. It seemed I had been granted a heavy task.

It also didn’t help that I was about to be a senior in high school. Apparently, fighting demons doesn’t count as extra credit, and it didn’t help that I was missing school on days when I’d had rough nights the night before. My grades dropped, my attendance record was shattered, and I nearly failed my junior year of high school. During the last month of my eleventh grade year, I was expelled for fighting on campus. Luckily, no one was hurt—except the monster I was fighting, which conveniently cannot be seen by normal mortals, leaving me with a trophy room full of broken awards and a few cuts and scrapes that I couldn’t talk my way out of.

My mother moved me to a small town in Kansas, called Hollow Rock. She was too ashamed that her son had been expelled to show her face in California anymore. I was expected to start over my life, my senior year, in a completely new state—and a small town, no less. It wasn’t big Los Angeles like before. It was…Hollow Rock.