Division Zero: Lex De Mortuis, by Matthew Cox

Genre: Cyberpunk, Mystery & Detective, Paranormal, Science Fiction

Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press

Date of Publication: September 8, 2014

Cover Artist: Alexandria Thompson at Gothic Fate (http://gothicfate.com/)

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Description: 

Some soldiers don’t let anything sway them from their mission, not even death from high explosives.

Free from her troubled past, Agent Kirsten Wren finds happiness mentoring Evan, a boy with similar talents with whom she soon forms a strong bond. Her efforts to help Dorian settle his past become complicated when a team of corporate “issue resolution consultants” continue their mission to kill a man in the afterlife.

Kirsten gets involved when their postmortem grudge match spills into the realm of the living. At the scene of a surgical explosion that gutted only one floor of a residential tower, she discovers a strange arcane circle drawn in silver. There, she senses energy darker than any wraith she has yet encountered; a force that questions everything she believes about the world.

Vikram Medhi, the hacker targeted by Lyris Corporation for elimination, begs her to protect him from undead out to destroy him. With no way to track these spirits, she seeks help from an enigmatic billionaire who offers her more than a simple translation of ancient Sumerian pictographs.

Chasing down a dangerous psionic criminal in the oldest lawless zone in the city, trying to protect a man on a corporate death list, and trying to keep both of them from hurting the one person in the world she loves, Kirsten must reach deep within herself to accept her destiny.

—

About Matthew Cox:

Born in a little town known as South Amboy NJ in 1973, Matthew has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Somewhere between fifteen to eighteen of them spent developing the world in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, and The Awakened Series take place. He has several other projects in the works as well as a collaborative science fiction endeavor with author Tony Healey.

Hobbies and Interests: Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour (<- deliberate), and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it. He is also fond of cats.

Find Matthew Cox Online:

Website | Facebook  | Twitter  | Goodreads

Lex Excerpt1 – Chapter 1

As the woman assured Maia she was not in trouble, Kirsten hopped out of the van and nudged the doors closed to keep it warm inside. By the time she had walked halfway up the path to the front door, the entire house seemed to be breathing, and felt as if it stared right through her soul. Kirsten frowned and held her armband terminal up. Shimmering holographic light formed a square panel in midair above it. Her finger swiped through police records. Over the past hundred years, this property was associated with a large number of domestic violence calls and noise complaints, but no major crimes. Kirsten switched to municipal records, finding the a real estate notice almost once every two years, well below market, and had gone long stints being empty.

“Whoever it was is old. Possibly prewar.”

Dorian rubbed a finger over his mouth. “Think it’s some old crotchety bastard with a problem with nonwhites?”

Kirsten blinked. “A racist, seriously? That would make him over three hun”―she shivered―“I don’t want to think about it. Besides, according to what I’m reading here, the manifestation didn’t get along with anyone who lived here.”

Dorian edged closer to the door. “It concerns me the mother didn’t notice.”

Kirsten let her arm fall; the screen folded in on itself and vanished. “It wants her here, probably intended to get into her head and make her…”

“You don’t have to say it.” Dorian simulated a deep breath.

With the image of Maia’s delicate face and sad eyes fixed in her mind, Kirsten stomped over and shoved the door aside. The walls in the living room seethed with black flames, lapping at the ceiling and making the space feel many times colder. She glanced around; a powerful sense of evil soaked through the drywall, water after a flood. Whispers came from beneath the floor, dread from above.

Dorian moved through a dining room area to the kitchen. Kirsten followed. Ethereal vapor spewed from spectral holes around the walls; she brushed her fingers over one, feeling smooth repair.

She teased at the threads of vapor. “Bullets hit the wall here, after killing someone.”

He pointed at a flimsy white door. “Sounds like they’re still down there.”

Her hand clasped the icy, ancient doorknob. Kirsten cringed at the contact, twisting and pushing. Wooden stairs led into the basement, darkness wavering with ghostly light from an unseen source.

“This house is old. Well, at least I know how the woman got it for only four hundred grand.”

“Yeah.” Dorian touched the wall. “Everything else around here is about a million; the cost would be four times that if they extended the wall this far north.”

Kirsten shut her eyes, concentrating. When she opened them, they glowed white. Color had drained out of the world, replaced by a shifting greyscale environment where spectral copies of surfaces and objects wavered and flowed over reality. Division 0 called it Darksight, the power of astral seeing. By opening her perception to the spirit realm, she illuminated the real world with its ethereal shadow. The strongest sense of energy came from the back. She went toward it, following boot prints of blood that existed only on the other side. The trail led into the kitchen.

Dorian pointed at a small doorway in the corner by the pantry. “Basement.”

In the astral, blood and handprints smeared the bare cinderblock walls along the stairway. Kirsten descended into the damp, musty confines of a frozen basement. The unpainted concrete at the bottom rippled with a massive pool of blood. A man in a black windbreaker, emblazoned with DEA in large yellow letters, stood at the bottom with his back to her. The center of the E had a golf-ball-sized hole in it. Beyond him, a dozen Hispanic men writhed on the ground by the far wall. Hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip-ties, each had a bullet wound in the head.

In various degrees of coherence, they protested in Spanish about how they were not informants.

“Well, I can take a guess what our wraith did for a living.” Dorian chuckled.

Kirsten muttered, “Okay, so it’s not a racist old bastard, just a four-hundred-year-old criminal.”