New Novel - Hades

This is an excerpt of a new novel I just started. I couldn't sleep last night because this was occupying my mind so now I'm putting it onto paper. Enjoy:

The past four years had not been good for Limbus. His mother and father had died, he’d been adopted in an odd sort of way and forcibly moved to West Virginia, and Melissa had turned eighteen and fled with a hundred thousand of his money. As for the last part, it didn’t upset him so much because he somehow knew it was coming. He traveled a lot destroying pockets of demons on the FBI dime nearly every other weekend which meant Melissa was home alone. That constant fear, constant tension, had finally gotten to her and she left saying she was going back to visit her brother who’d now graduated from college. It was supposed to just be a family get-together, but a text message from the Pittsburgh airport told him differently. Limbus accepted it, replied with a simple goodbye, and didn’t look back. Though it was days like this one when he remembered she’d once been the light of his life, innocent of the world and hanging on his arm with a joyous smile. Those days had changed and not for the better.

Today was always different for Limbus though. This was the day his parents died, the day they defeated Azazel, and the day the world was set straight, or so he believed. That honeymoon, however, didn’t last long. Life had their own set of demands on him, along with Tom Rice of the FBI, his surrogate father. With only a little respite, Limbus had been put to work. At first he thought it was a good thing. He was eradicating evil, removing demons from the face of the earth and returning them to Hell while allowing the angels to once again regain a foothold against their plans. But as weeks dragged into months, the job became a burden. For him, there were no vacations. There were only emergencies on the other side of the country and Melissa wasn’t allowed to go. It was only him and Tom or Bill, and neither of them was much good to him.

And for his service he got a text message from the airport saying goodbye.

From then on, Limbus focused himself on training his body and mind. Following his father’s routine, he worked out for hours a day, though he removed himself from sports. It was too much of a demand on his time when he didn’t know where he might be the next weekend or even the next day. When he wasn’t working out, he applied himself to school and graduated top of his class which landed him a few academic scholarships, though he wasn’t in need of any. His father had left him enough money he didn’t have to work if he didn’t want to, but then the FBI would always have their demands on him. Thankfully, after he turned eighteen, they didn’t restrict him from moving south to someplace warm so he could attend the school of his choice.

Of course his arrive in Orlando wasn’t met with fanfare which was okay with him. He wanted to keep a low profile. He wanted to exist under the radar. He wanted to just go to school, learn investment strategies in their business college, and ensure the money his father had left him never ran out. And with the stipend the FBI paid him as a specialized contractor, it ensured he didn’t have to dip into his own money unless he had too which he’d only done twice. Once to buy a house in a non-descript neighborhood just five miles from campus and another time to buy his Nissan GT-R sports car. Unfortunately, these two things set him apart from the rest of the students, but that was only after he’d already made a name for himself as the one person not to mess with on campus.

The incident was one he still regretted because he should’ve remembered his father’s words and stepped away, but he didn’t. He had pride. He was brash. He had yet to be humbled. And he had back-up no one knew about, back-up he wasn’t even supposed to know about.