Airs & Graces Read Online Free PDF

was never one of my favorite places. The middle of a rainy evening was hardly London at its finest, which was part of the point, really. The setting sun was visible through a break in the clouds, but it didn’t matter much. Everything was still cloaked in its dull grays, and all the sounds were muted against the soft patter of rain. There was the occasional bit of half-alive green, but that was it. The trees didn’t help much, barely showing signs of life.
    Adelaide was still unconscious when we arrived. For the best, I figured. Within a couple of seconds, I turned her over on her stomach and counted down. I didn’t have to wait long. By the count of four, she was purging the contents of her stomach. Once the unpleasant business of a human body reacting to instant travel was handled, I worked on rousing her.
    “Adelaide, wake up.”
    “Where?” Adelaide struggled to speak as her eyes opened, and she held her hands up to fend off the soft, misty rain.
    “We’re outside of London.”
    “Where?” She asked again, waving me off as if I answered the wrong question.
    “Not here, which is what matters.”
    Still not satisfied, she asked again. “Where… the hell is my car?”
    It didn’t seem important at the time, but I answered her anyway. “At the frat house. We’ll go back for it later. Can you stand?” I offered a hand to assist her up, careful to avoid the section of grass where she’d been throwing up.
    “Oh, someone was sick,” she said, her voice soft and a little dazed, but she was getting to her feet unassisted.
    “We need to keep moving.” I urged her toward the abbey, down the road from where we arrived.
    “Where, wait! Wait! I’m not going anywhere with you until you…” She stopped cold. “Did you say outside London?” She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “What is going on? Why are we anywhere but where we were? How long was I out? How did we get here, and what the hell was that I just saw?”
    “I can’t tell you much except that the situation just got a lot more complicated. I’d hoped this was going to be simple. They’d pull the Grace out of you, and I’d whisk you away, back to normal. I’d let them sort out whatever caused the whole mess last time, and we’d all go our own ways.” I was pacing.
    “The what?” Visibly shaken, Adelaide just stood there watching me, her dark eyes following me as I paced. In this rapidly worsening situation, however, I had bigger problems at the moment than the girl’s mental well-being. Michael wasn’t an idiot; he was a trained professional who’d had a very long time to perfect his trade. It would only be a matter of moments before they figured out what had happened and what my next step was. They’d know that I’d seek help from anyone that had sheltered me in the past, worked with me, or whose purposes had ever aligned with mine, and that would lead them to my next logical stop…which meant I had to be a little illogical. I began to move in the direction of the abbey.
    “Where are you going?” Adelaide was holding tight to her word and the concept of not following me as I walked off. I didn’t have time to explain it to her: she would follow or die, and that was her choice. It would be mere moments before Michael and Uriel arrived at a dear friend of mine’s doorstep looking for me. This is why I had moved us someplace else.
    “To see an old enemy,” I called over my shoulder.
    “What? That makes no sense!” She made an exasperated sound in her throat. “You’re just going to leave me here, aren’t you?” I could almost see the progression of the thoughts through her head play out when she realized that I no longer cared whether she was following. Regardless of all the steps, it always ends in self-preservation, all except for the most extreme cases. This wasn’t one of those, and by the time I was twenty paces ahead of her, she was following, if a little hesitantly. We both arrived at the abbey, which is all that