Wraith (Debt Collector 10)

Wraith
(Debt Collector 10)

Copyright © 2014 by Susan Kaye Quinn

October 2014 Edition

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For information visit:

www.DebtCollectorSeries.com

Cover by
Steven Novak

The Debt Collector Serial

Wraith
- Episode 10
 

NOTE: This is the
Second Season
. 

Recommended: 
start with the
First Season.

(available in ebook, print, and audio)

Contains mature content and themes.

Summary

What’s your life worth on the open market? 

A debt collector can tell you precisely. 

Wraith is a shadow in the night, haunting the bedrooms of the rich “high potentials” who have stolen life energy from the desperate and dying. The justice and the sweet mercy hit that follow keep her from falling into her own personal abyss. Her secret nighttime work also keeps her on level for her real mission: carrying on her father’s legacy of attempting to bring an end to debt collection as a whole. But when a mysterious debt collector interrupts her in the act and discovers her secret, everything Wraith loves may be destroyed by the one thing she can never fix—the original sin of being a debt collector herself. 

Wraith
is approximately 17,000 words or 68 pages, and is the first of nine episodes in the second season of The Debt Collector serial.
This dark and gritty future-noir is about a world where your life-worth is tabulated on the open market and going into debt risks a lot more than your credit rating. 

Love the Debt Collector series?

Join the
Debt Collector Facebook Group
for all the skinny while Season Two is being written.

It is recommended that you start with the first season,
but each season is a complete story for that debt collector and can serve as an entry point to the series. There are five planned seasons in the Debt Collector series, the first four each from the perspective of a different debt collector with the fifth season bringing all four together. 

PRE-ORDER

Complete 
Season Two

releases 12.15

READING ORDER 

Season One
– Lirium 

(Episodes 1-9:
Delirium, Agony, Ecstasy, Broken, Driven, Fallen, Promise, Ruthless, Passion
) 

Season Two
– Wr
aith 

10 –
Wraith
(10.20)

11 –
Specter
 (10.27)

12 –
Menace
(11.3)

13 –
Temptation
(11.10)

14 –
Shattered
(11.17)

15 – Untitled (11.24)

16 – Untitled (12.1)

17 – Untitled (12.8)

18 – Untitled (12.15)

BOX SET (Vol 10-18)
 – (12.15)

“The street-smart science of LOOPER meets the cold, just-the-facts voice of DOUBLE INDEMNITY in this edgy, future-noir thriller that will have you holding your breath, looking over your shoulder, and begging for more.” —Leigh Talbert Moore, author of The Truth About Faking, The Truth About Letting Go, and Rouge

My new collection suit weighs less than a shadow on my skin, and my soft-soled boots don’t even whisper as I creep across the thick, yielding carpet of my target’s apartment. With the best bullet-resistant synthetics money can buy, the black curve-hugging suit makes me look more like female-special-forces than someone’s hot date for the night. It raised the bellman’s eyebrows, but an untraceable debit card got me waved through the lobby, no problem. Money buys a lot of things. Access to one of the highest-security luxury buildings in LA. A ninety-fifth-floor apartment high above the smog-soaked city, complete with all the clean air you can breathe. And the no-doubt illegal collection of ivory-handled daggers I passed on the way in. It’s too bad for data-mining mogul Adrien Odel that money can’t buy your way out of a blackened soul.

I know.

I’ve tried.

And tonight I’ve come to collect a debt he doesn’t even think he owes.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of Odel’s apartment, the city is lit up with a nighttime electric haze, the kind that makes it look seedy even in the high-rent district. It’s the perfect backdrop for a collection, and my suit is a black silhouette against it, a hole of death punched in the city’s twinkling lights. The high-tech fabric clings to me like the original sin I can never expiate, the one every debt collector is born with: the ability to deliver death with the slightest touch. We traffic in it, surround ourselves with it, and can never escape it.

Not that I haven’t tried that, too.

But even a short three-week dry spell away from collecting has me needy as all hell. The craving for a life energy hit claws at my back, and every step across the carpet amps up the desire. Even the possibility of Odel pulling a gun and shooting me dead hypes the thrill a little. My palm aches in anticipation—for the justice and the high that comes with it—but I take it slow, watching the placement of my feet and checking the windows. Along one edge, next to a mile-wide screen and some pretentious artwork, there’s a control panel. Only the rich want windows that open in the city, but it’s a bonus for me, especially given the windows face the broad expanse of the skyline and not the high-rise next door.

As I check out the control panel, the high-rise becomes a peep show. A woman’s naked body is pressed against the glass, exposed to the city’s onlookers as a man clutches her bare skin and makes love to her. I’m transfixed by the way they move, skin against skin, without care for the contact or the watchers. In a moment, they’re gone. Maybe reason broke through the passion. Maybe the glass was cold, in spite of the perpetual heat of LA.

Regardless, the image holds me hostage.

Having a lover isn’t something that’s part of my future. Or my present, for that matter. But that doesn’t stop the base need from surging up, usually at the least convenient of times. Then a different image—a cold, pale specter from my past—crawls out of the dark corners of my mind and reminds me I’m not the kind of woman who gets to have a normal life. I’m the kind who takes life and then gives it away. And the ecstasy of
that
is the closest I’ll ever get to the normal kind again—so it had better be good enough.

I couldn’t stomach even that pleasure for a while, not after what the debt collectors did to my father. I managed a whole three weeks without a single collection. But in the end, it’s the only thing that keeps me stable. And I’ve had a severe lack of
stable
ever since my father’s death nearly tore down the teetering scaffold of lies that comprises my life. That’s when the abyss reared up and stared me full in the face. Will-power alone wasn’t enough to stop it—the darkness just opened its maw and threatened to swallow me whole. At least that would have put an end the torment… but I couldn’t let the sin of who I am destroy everything my father had worked for. That we had
both
worked for. So here I am, dressed like a phantom, stalking the rich to give to the poor. With a tremor in my hands that’s more than a little unsettling. For better and worse, it’s the one thing that keeps me out of that dark place and gives me hope that one day I might redeem everything I am and everything I’ve done.

I stalk, heel-to-toe, past the windows, through a long hallway tastefully decorated with more pretentious art, and toward the back bedroom where Odel is supposed to be sleeping. I buy information just like I buy access. My source tells me Odel is in bed every night at ten, like clockwork, occasionally with companions, but mostly not. Tonight, his companion will be a darkness-clad nightmare who will leave him in a cold sweat, instead of a hot one.

When I reach his room, it’s vast—there’s a ridiculous round bed that’s so large, it’s practically a playground; several lacquered pieces of furniture that form glistening shadow-lumps around the perimeter; and more windows, the kind with wide vertical slats that leave shadowed stripes across Odel’s room. A giant aquarium is built into the wall behind the bed, and bioluminescent creatures undulate through the clouded water. They cast a blood-red glow that oozes in between the slices of darkness. I have no idea how the man sleeps in this room, but his barely audible breaths are the slow, steady rhythm of the unconscious.

There’s a lot of floor to cover before I can reach him, so I keep my footfalls muted. I give silent thanks that he’s alone in his bed—I could handle two at a time, but his companions are probably innocent of any real crime, with the exception of their bad taste in men. I slowly tug off my gloves on the way and tuck them in the back of my suit. The less DNA I leave behind, the better. Not that my targets are eager to call the police—too much scrutiny in their lives might turn up the source of those ill-gotten hits. And the mob doesn’t like it when a bright light shines on their bustling life energy trade business. The mob cutting Odel off from his supplier would be the best he could hope for. The worst would involve caskets and weepy nighttime companions. At least with me, he only stands to lose the years of life he’s stolen.