House of Dolls 2 Read online

  HOUSE OF DOLLS

  Book Two

  By Harmon Cooper

  Copyright © 2018 by Harmon Cooper

  Copyright © 2018 Boycott Books

  Edited by Allison Erin Wright

  www.harmoncooper.com

  [email protected]

  Twitter: @_HarmonCooper

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Recap

  Centralian Power Classifications

  Prologue: The Woman

  Chapter One: Almost-Exemplar

  Chapter Two: Emelia’s Surprise

  Chapter Three: Two Down, More to Go

  Chapter Four: The Man Made of Light

  Chapter Five: Pocket Protector

  Chapter Six: Surprise Visit

  Chapter Seven: Stranger Things

  Chapter Eight: The Visit

  Chapter Nine: By Any Means

  Chapter Ten: The Start of a Plan

  Chapter Eleven: Mister Fist and Necromancy

  Chapter Twelve: Dead

  Chapter Thirteen: A Lonely Telepath

  Chapter Fourteen: Brotherly Love

  Chapter Fifteen: Lighting the Way

  Chapter Sixteen: Missing

  Chapter Seventeen: Reciprocity

  Chapter Eighteen: A Much-Needed Distraction

  Chapter Nineteen: Emotional Support

  Chapter Twenty: Advancements and Limitations

  Chapter Twenty-One: Just Another Day at the Office

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Moving on Up

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Pink or Orange

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Defying All Odds

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Message from Harper

  Chapter Twenty-Six: New Actors

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Have Healer? Will Kill.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Double Down

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: All Lifeless Objects

  Chapter Thirty: This Isn’t Over Yet

  Chapter Thirty-One: Eastern Central Station and Beyond

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Deep into the Darkness

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Reindeer People

  Chapter Thirty-Four: More Evidence

  Chapter Thirty-Five: A Sinking Suspicion

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Good Roommates

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Dirty Dancing

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Love Doll

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Suicide Mission

  Chapter Forty: Going Rogue

  Chapter Forty-One: From Hunting Vampires to Hunting Kevin

  Chapter Forty-Two: Nature Walk

  Chapter Forty-Three: Brothers Apart

  Chapter Forty-Four: Basement Discovery, Sudden Recovery

  Chapter Forty-Five: Leverage or Subversion

  Chapter Forty-Six: Far from Glamping

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Face Tattoo

  Chapter Forty-Eight: What Goes Around

  Chapter Forty-Nine: No Stone Unturned

  Chapter Fifty: Future Grave

  Chapter Fifty-One: Trade Off

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Psyched

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Break Out

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Alive

  Epilogue: Bloom

  Back of the Book Content

  Recap

  This is the second book in the bestselling House of Dolls series, so if you’ve missed the first, you can find the link here:

  US -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GGSFCF6

  UK -- https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GGSFCF6

  CA -- https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07GGSFCF6

  AU -- https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07GGSFCF6

  DE -- https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07GGSFCF6

  Continue for a recap of the first book. (Spoilers!)

  The world is known as Centralia, which is also the name of its largest country. Centralia is a heavily populated country, the center of all civilization, with buildings and development as far as the eye can see.

  To the west is the aptly named Western Province, a once-popular but currently battle-torn country where proxy wars are fought. To the east is the Eastern Province, which is the poorest country in the world and the producer of the best technologies.

  To the north is the Northern Alliance, a country located in the hottest region of the world and whose people are isolationists. To the south is the Southern Alliance, the coldest country in the world, rich in history but very exclusive and backwards in many of their views.

  Exemplars and non-exemplars make up the world of Centralia. Exemplars are people with known superpowers that have been classified, and each country has its own classification system. Non-exemplars have a propensity for superpowers, but they are at best half-powered. Non-exemplars are treated differently in some of the countries, most notably the Southern Alliance.

  In the first House of Dolls, we were introduced to Roman Martin, a Centralian immigration administrator, and his two co-workers, Kevin Blackbook and Nadine Unders.

  Also a Centralian, Kevin attempts suicide and is later kidnapped from the hospital by two cat girls, Turquoise and Obsidian, who are working for a Western Province spy named Paris Renara. Intoxicated by the cat girls’ neurotoxin, Kevin eventually forms an alliance with them and begins a life of crime.

  After being attacked by a shadow-wielding man named Hazrat, Roman finds a Hero Ticket in Kevin’s former cubicle, which grants Roman the ability to animate inanimate objects. He is given a trainer named Ava to bring him up to snuff and help him sort out his new life as an exemplar. Roman gets the idea to animate sex dolls after one of his Heroes Anonymous meetings, and he eventually animates two dolls, one named Coma and the other named Celia.

  Roman has also been covering up the fact that his wife has been in a coma for two years, during which time he’s been seeing multiple women, including a waitress named Harper. This comes out after his wife’s condition takes a turn for the worse. It is then he makes an alliance with Nadine, someone he thought was a coworker but who has since turned out to be an Eastern spy.

  Nadine Unders is working undercover in the Centralian immigration office trying to discover why people from her country (the Eastern Province) are being taken prisoner. She also has a rivalry with a spy from the Western Province named Paris Renara, a spy who just so happens to be trying to work Roman, too. Nadine is kidnapped by one of Paris’s henchmen, a man named Ian Turlock, who knocks her out and brings her to Paris’s warehouse.

  Unbeknownst to Nadine, Kevin, her former co-worker, is also staying at Paris’s warehouse with the two cat girls. While Paris and Ian go to give an ultimatum to Roman, Kevin and the cat girls free Nadine, but not before Kevin can steal her ring—a ring that grants the power to nullify superpowers.

  Confronted by Paris and Ian, Roman and his dolls are forced to fight them, Roman killing Ian by animating the man’s bones. He is just about to kill Paris when she tells him what she’s trying to uncover in Centralia. As it turns out, all the world’s healers have disappeared, taken by the Centralian government, and Paris is trying to understand why.

  Roman forms a shaky alliance with Paris, hoping to use his newfound power for good, even if that means he’ll have to fight against his own government.

  Centralian Power Classifications

  Prologue: The Woman

  There were signs of a struggle in the warehouse, but anyone stumbling upon them would really have to pay attention to the concrete flooring to find the treasure beneath—a treasure in the form of a towering man with red skin, a Type II Class C with the ability to grow spiked protrusions from his body—a man named Ian Turlock.

  A dead man, but a treasure to the rig
ht person.

  And the hooded woman standing over Ian Turlock’s gravesite was indeed the right person. Her eyes narrowed on the bulge in the concrete, her face twitching ever so slightly.

  It had been a hasty cover-up; had she been responsible for hiding the body, she would have sunk the big man deep enough into the concrete to make extraction all but impossible.

  The work of an amateur, someone not fully aware of their power.

  With a smirk on her face, the woman raised her hand over Ian Turlock’s resting place, the sleeve of her robe dropping open as her fingers curled.

  The concrete began to move.

  A whirlpool formed over the surface of the concrete as the red man’s crippled body was unearthed. Once Ian was out, his form floating above the ground, the concrete hardened again, creating a flat surface for the mysterious woman to rest the dead body.

  “What a pity.” The woman crouched before Ian, running her hand along the protrusions that had been turned around, used to skewer him in what had ultimately been his death.

  She started there, her unique power moving through her as she reversed the course of Ian’s protrusions, growing them back into his body and repairing his red flesh.

  Ian’s eyes flickered open, the pupils now completely black.

  It wasn’t easy to reanimate the dead, but it was something the hooded woman was entirely capable of.

  Chapter One: Almost-Exemplar

  Everything was on fire.

  The plumes raged all around Roman Martin, filled with horrifying images of agony, demonic faces, sharp teeth, clawed hands.

  A terrible inferno.

  Roman was protected by a suit of water, and he’d formed the equivalent of an air bubble around his mouth that allowed him to breathe. To avoid the heat, he actually had the air bubble dispersed throughout the entire suit of water and kept another layer of water on top of this, cycling steam.

  He had never seen Ava use this much force before, nor was he familiar with how she’d animated her flames; it was a wonder the building hadn’t entirely burned down by this point. And had he not been surrounded by the suit of water, which steamed off him and recirculated into armor with each step he took, Roman would have been toast.

  Literally.

  I have to find her, he thought as he scanned the wall of fire, knowing full well Ava was somewhere in there.

  She was a hell of a combatant, he’d give her that. Roman couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually go up against her in the field, and he had a feeling she could produce even more fire than this. More heat, more utter destruction.

  Not far from him, Coma stood with water armor twisting around her body. Her fists were at her sides, covered with metal gloves he’d created at the start of the fight.

  She wore a training outfit, her black hair in two pigtails, and her eyes beamed red as she too scanned the fire.

  Roman’s power dial showed he was doing better than he thought, but still—red is dead. He knew he’d need to keep an eye on it when manipulating multiple elements.

  With this in mind, he tried something he’d been thinking of doing since their last bout over the weekend.

  With a flick of his wrist, Roman took control of the concrete floor and the thick walls behind Ava.

  Imagining a tsunami, he began swirling the ground together beneath her wall of flames, even as she hit him with a piping-hot blast of blue fire—the hottest he’d seen her use yet.

  In the way a Venus flytrap would catch an insect, the floor lifted and swallowed the entire wall of flames, the side walls also moving outward to help with the entrapment.

  Ava’s flames disappeared as she focused on navigating away from the pit Roman had made in the concrete, and he responded by bringing ridges down from the ceiling, forcing her to dodge and switch strategies, which was exactly what he wanted. A wall of flames was hard to handle, but a melee attack would hopefully put the ball in Roman’s court.

  A fireball hit the front of his suit, and he ignored it completely as he chased the flying Ava around the room. Her hair had completely turned to fire now, long strands of it fluttering in the wind behind her as she raced toward Coma.

  The two met, Ava’s fist and Coma’s metal-encased knuckles, and for the first time that afternoon, Coma actually held her ground.

  Ava sprang backwards just as the concrete formed a hand that eventually swiped her out of the air.

  The enclosed concrete fist grew into a sphere to contain Ava, and try as she might to break free of it, her flames had little effect on Roman’s trap.

  “I give!” she shouted—the first time in the training session he’d heard her say these two words.

  Roman let the concrete sphere drop almost immediately.

  He took a knee, and as he did, the water armor surrounding his body fell to the ground. Coma’s fell too, a pressure suddenly leaving his chest.

  As Ava lowered, Roman cursed himself for not relinquishing control sooner.

  This was something he’d have to work on in a combat scenario: as soon as he didn’t need to control something, his best bet was to let it go to focus his power elsewhere.

  He’d done this with Celia before, focusing all his power into Coma as the first doll simply fell to the ground.

  It was sudden, but desperate times called for inventive measures.

  A smile formed on Roman’s face as he briefly thought of Celia, who was back at his apartment waiting for the delivery of the new doll.

  The more he was around her, the more she embodied the qualities of his deceased wife, whose body had gone to the cremator as of this morning.

  He sighed as he ran his hand through his white hair, which caught Ava’s attention.

  “From happy to sad that quickly, huh?” his teacher asked. “It’s not often someone at your level beats someone at my level.”

  “It was just luck,” he began to say.

  “Not at all. I let you win. I don’t need to be looking at an object to ignite it, just spatially aware of it.”

  “So you’re saying you could have struck me down even though I’d blocked your ability to see me?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. And since I was covered, I would have actually formed the fireball outside of the shell you created around me.”

  Ava’s flaming red hair settled, morphing back into her long, crimson locks, which she pulled into a ponytail and threw over her shoulder. She glanced around the gym to the western corner near the entrance. This was the only part that hadn’t been partially destroyed by either her flames or Roman’s serious rework of the concrete foundation.

  “Fair enough,” Roman finally said.

  “I was going to wrap this up, but I might as well show you,” she said, pointing at a set of kettlebells. “Bring me one of those kettlebells; then we can get cleaned up for our little date.”

  “You got it.”

  Ava had been teasing Roman about the date ever since they’d begun their training session nearly two hours ago.

  Even as Roman turned to the kettlebells, he didn’t know what to expect from the “date” with his teacher.

  The reason he’d flirted with her in the first place was out of habit, and the fact that he was now a widower and had his hands plenty full with Harper, his dolls, plus a few other females on the periphery such as Nadine and even Catherine—the Type III Class C from the Northern Alliance who specialized in air manipulation (and who had already sent him a mental message that day)—only made him more reluctant to start up anything else.

  So maybe it was best not to think of it as a date, although it certainly felt like one.

  Roman’s stomach grumbled, interrupting his train of thought. He was supposed to have his Heroes Anonymous meeting and then meet Ava after. But he was hungry now, and besides, he had attended all the meetings last week.

  Bill would be all right if he skipped one.

  “We can start our date sooner,” Roman suggested as he grabbed a kettlebell.

  “Why di
d you walk all the way over there when you could have used your power to bring the kettlebell to you?” she asked.

  “I could have gone too,” Coma offered, her stance indicating she was still ready for anything.

  “No worries.” Roman grabbed one of the lighter kettlebells.

  Ava nodded. “Good, now bring it somewhere off to my side. And seriously, Roman, you need to start thinking like an exemplar—and I’m not making social commentary here, I’m simply saying to think with your powers.”

  “I can’t in public. Not yet, anyway.”

  She beamed a fiery smile in his direction. “That’s right, you won’t be able to until I apply for approval. But don’t get ahead of yourself; we’re still some time away from that.”

  “Aware,” Roman said.

  “And what’s this about starting our date sooner? I won’t have time to get cleaned up,” she said.

  “Just go with your flaming hair. That’ll keep everyone’s attention away from whatever you’re wearing.”

  Coma chuckled at Roman’s joke. Ava, not so much.

  “Wait a minute, don’t you have your Heroes Anonymous meeting after our session?” Ava was aware he had to participate in this government-sponsored program, and she’d teased him about it a few times before.

  “Yeah, I do, but I can cancel it.”

  “No, you should go.” Her eyes lit up, the flames disappearing just as quickly as they’d appeared.

  “I’d rather not,” Roman said.

  “How’s this? I’ll go with you.”

  “But…” Roman shook his head, his free hand still holding the kettlebell. “But you’re an exemplar and they’re all non-exemplars.”

  “And you’re an almost-exemplar. No one will know; don’t worry.”

  “Bill will know.”

  “Who?”

  “The sponsor who runs the meeting.”

  Ava placed a hand over her eyes. “I can play a pretty good non-exemplar, believe me. And aside from that, I’ve always wondered what these meetings are like. Now, set the kettlebell on the ground and step back.”