Page 1 of Pride
Prologue
Julius Allcott siftedthrough ash on his desk. In his haste to spill his wife and daughter from their urns, they sifted into the cracks and crevices of his keyboard. No matter, all he needed was one strand of hair. One follicle for each of them.
And then he could bring them back as promised, despite Despair having swallowed their original strands of hair in an act of feeble defiance. He’d tried to cut the strands out of her stomach, but the bitch had digested them.
Julius raked his fingers through his family, his heart kicking in his chest. There had to be something…anything. He needed them with every fiber of his being. Everything he’d done for the Syndicate had been in their name—the cleansing of the world’s sin, the destruction of society, the changes he put his body through.
For them.
I need them.
He ignored thepingof an incoming call request on his computer. It was only the other Syndicate leaders demanding reparation for the recent failure at their harvesting plant.
Fuck them.
This wasn’t about them. It was about his family. His real one, not the one born of test tubes. Even they had been a means to an end.
Baring his teeth into the darkness, he struggled to gain composure. His loves. He needed their hair, the follicles at the end. But they weren’t there. His loves weren’t there.
With a growl, he swiped the keyboard out of the way, his chest heaving with panicked breaths. His vision blurred as he knocked the desk caddy over, spilling its contents. Scissors slid across the dirty surface, spinning a circle in the ash. He wasn’t sure how many minutes passed with him staring at those scissors, wishing to go back in time and keep those strands of hair safe in the locket on a chain around his neck.
The computer pinged again, forcing his attention. And he hated it. He wanted nothing to take his focus from his loves. The locket had been a constant reminder; a cool metal casing that dangled between his shirt and chest. He needed a new reminder.
He slapped a palm over them and brought the sharp ends to his own pale hair—snip—and then tied the lock around the base of his pointer finger. A physical and visual reminder. He thumbed the bristles, thinking about how this had all gone wrong in the first place.
Despair, his “darling,” the only one of the original sin-sensing soldiers who’d fallen in line had betrayed him. No… further back than that. The attack on the warehouse. No… further. The Hildegard Sisterhood Sinners, poking their heads into his business.
Further.
The first Sinner—Mary Lazarus—had infiltrated his lab all those years ago. Mary was going to kill them all, but she’d adopted them instead.
He snarled. The Sisterhood should be eradicated. They’d been foiling his plans long before the Deadly Seven had. If it weren’t for them, the Lazarus brood would be inhiscontrol. If it weren’t for them, he would never had needed further investors. He would still be in control of this entire operation.
The computer pinged again. He shoved the screen onto the floor, then stomped on it until the pinging stopped. The Syndicate leaders would find a way to contact him. They always did.
Bitterness threatened to overwhelm him, but the bristles of his hair around his finger calmed him, reminding him of the end goal. The only goal.
“I will find a way to bring you back, my loves.” And if he couldn’t, then he would go to them and take the rest of the world along for the ride.
“We are rarely proud when we are alone.”
Voltaire
1
AIMI’s corpsespread out before him on the dining table. Parker Lazarus plucked out her vein—a wire—and inspected the fried end before discarding it. The CPU was her brain. The motherboard, her central nervous system. She had no face, no body nor skin, yet this digital construct had been as real to Parker as any human.
She’d been the invincible backbone of their crime-fighting unit.
Or so he’d thought.
He glanced at his left arm, recently amputated from beneath the shoulder and now covered in electrodes. An ache lodged in his chest. He’d thoughthewas invincible. For a brief moment, his mind traveled back to the night everything changed.
The Sinner’s masked face peeked over the roof, staring at him dangling from the edge. Rain pattered her hooded head, leaving a halo of mist that glowed under the moonlight. A puff of white cloud escaped her red face mask.
“You stubborn mule,” she chided, and reached down. “Take my hand.”
“Fuck you,” he growled—
