About Church of the Assassin:
Alexiares spends her time killing, tinkering with a car she never drives, and wondering if she’s a sociopath. This simple life is complicated by a deadly purge of her sect and she finds herself on the run, trying to make sense of the slaughter. She’s not alone: the broken-minded assassin has inherited a baby girl. But how can hands that know only how to squeeze necks and strip engines ever nurture a child? When painful revelations, betrayals, and secrets show Alexiares that her life can only cause Baby pain and suffering, she’ll have to make a difficult choice.
Across the galaxy, one seemingly natural death puts rookie Intelligence officer Ryan Blake on a collision course with Alexiares. His journey into desperation and madness will reveal a world he'll wish had stayed hidden. One full of mysteries and death. As his mentor says, there are cases to make your career and there are cases to make you look over your shoulder for the rest of your life, right up until it ends abruptly and violently.
KILL A HUNDRED TO SAVE ONE
Relentless hunters want both her and Baby, and they will tear worlds apart to get them. They are bigger, stronger, and more resourceful. But Baby is more than a newfound vulnerability to Alexiares: she is a reason to live. A reason to kill.
When you take a shot at an apex predator, do not miss.
Excerpt:
Recognition finally dawned. She resumed chewing. She was familiar with the particular kind of silence behind her.
‘Pinky,’ she said, turning.
The old man leaned against the side of the car, his seeing cane retracted and clipped to his belt. He cocked his head towards her. His way of showing that his attention was on her. ‘Kid.’
Pinky was old enough to be her grandfather, and in some ways he acted like one. But he had a heartless streak that helped train her to be as skilled as she was. Sometimes, she wondered if what seemed like the doting of a grandfather was actually the manner of a taxidermist admiring his greatest work.
Alex returned to her fiddling. She was sure there must be something in the engine that hadn’t yet been loosened and tightened again.
Pinky continued to lean and listen to the tools clinking. He fiddled with a wooden toothpick in one hand. Alex was sure she’d never seen him without it. As sure as she was that she’d never seen it anywhere near his mouth. She knew how this went. He had something to say, but he’d say it in his own time. No point talking until then.
Nobody knew how Pinky had been caught. It wasn’t likely to be something he’d talk about. But he had been, and he’d been convicted. And a convicted assassin meant the Treatment. Some convicts had their crest tattoos treated so that they glowed. Everywhere they went, their glowing faces would tell everyone that they were criminals.
An assassin was different. Sure, assassination was a Krathan tradition, but this conflicted with the desire to move forward into the future. The authorities were afraid to actively pursue assassins, but they would act if one wandered into their crosshairs. If the assassin was caught and convicted, they received special Treatment. They’d been stupid or incompetent enough to get caught, and the authorities wanted everyone to know it, to remember it. And they wanted to remind the assassin’s employers that he or she was not worth reprisals.
So assassins were given the ACT. Instead of the tattoos, the Assassin Convict Treatment injected nanites into the convict’s eyeballs, causing the irises to glow. It was difficult to skulk around in the dark with glowing eyes giving away your position and playing havoc with your night vision. The nanites were unhackable, couldn’t be extracted, and their safety protocols even prevented the convict’s eyes from being covered with anything but eyelids. That was only if they were lucky. If the Treatment administrator was sadistic enough, the nanites wouldn’t allow the convict to close their eyes for longer than a blink. These convicts would have to learn to sleep with their eyes open or be driven crazy.
Rumours naturally circulated that Pinky had taken a knife or spoon one night and taken out his eyes himself. Alex doubted it. Kind of.
‘I hear you were about Myk’s Bar some weeks back.’
Alex stopped fiddling. The cut up, beaten-about voice carried something familiar. A quality that managed to be both apprehensive and gloating. The heavy task of imparting bad news combined with something of an ‘I told you so’ nature. It carried the news of death.
‘Who did it?’
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About Ross Harrison:
Ross Harrison is the author of three novels and two short stories. Although he doesn't stray from science fiction, he has ventured into multiple sub-genres, including space opera, thriller, noir, and steampunk. He has been writing since childhood, and occasionally likes to revisit those old stories for a good cringe and nervous laugh.
Ross lives on the UK/Eire border in Ireland, where he moved from England in 2001, hoping the rain will help his hair grow back.
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